I subscribe to a blog written by Wendy Constantine a photographer/printmaker I know. Her writing resonated with me and so with her permission I am posting here on The Lyceum Blog. Having a guest author has long been an interest of mine, I am happy to begin with Wendy. The photograph is hers as well. Lisbon(photogravure) Wendy Constantine
I recently picked up a well-loved copy of John Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, and I couldn’t help but think of the impossibility of imagining in 1978 how photography would change in the decades that followed. The exhibition was organized around a framework that has been used in photo education ever since: the idea that photographs could be metaphorically described as “mirrors” that reflect the interior sensibility of their maker, or “windows” that record more objectively a specific place and time. Some critics thought Szarkowski’s argument naïve and biased by Cold War American culture. I believe photographic intent should not be simplified to a binary axis from subjective to objective, today or 50 years ago.
On my first reading of the essay, I wondered why so few of the works included were made by women (11%), and saw my own work on the “mirror” side of the continuum along with Linda Connor, Paul Caponigro, Jerry Uelsmann, Emmet Gowin, and Robert Rauschenberg. Personally, I am more interested in abstraction, simplicity and evoking emotion than describing the world with a socially intelligent point of view as Diane Arbus, Ed Ruscha and Garry Winogrand so eloquently have.
It was there, in Szarkowski’s definition of these two poles, that I understood how my education in the late 1980s to early 90s has shaped my art practice. Robert Heinecken, included in Part one, the “mirror” section of the exhibit, advised Szarkowski on the current state of photography on the west coast in the late 70’s. Heinecken was formally trained as a printmaker and painter, and in the early 60’s, he founded the photography department at UCLA where I did my undergraduate degree in art.
Even today, photography is taught at UCLA as an integrated part of the studio curriculum. In the early 90s, a bachelor’s degree in art required classes in drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, aesthetics, art history and what was then called “new genre” or video/performance-based installation art. The boundaries between the disciplines were porous, and artists were encouraged to explore and borrow freely across mediums. I have always considered myself a photographer and printmaker as I refuse to choose one label to define my work.
Much like Robert Rauschenberg, my photography became absorbed by printmaking. Today, I can hardly separate the hands-on work I make into distinct categories. I experiment with ink, paint and chemistry, on glass, paper and metal, mostly to expand my personal visual language with the unique syntax each brings. This is the artistic legacy of my training at UCLA, and it was never this clear to me where it had evolved from.
I attended college nearly a dozen years after the publication of Mirrors and Window*, and I lived first-hand Szarkowski’s assertion “as the making of photographs became easy, and as this fact came to be understood, attention slowly drifted from craft to content.” The focus of arts education at UCLA had already shifted from the craft of making images towards the conceptual construction of meaning. UCLA had an academic bias, and the undergraduate arts program was not designed to create professional artists or commerc
Last year, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the same publisher of Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows, brought together a global collective of artists for an exhibition as part of the 40th anniversary of the New Photography program. New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging focused on interconnectedness and the “slowness, persistence, and care as an antidote to the viral, profit-driven speed of contemporary image consumption, metadata technologies, and artificial intelligence.”
From my perspective, mirrors and windows are no longer adequate to describe modes of photography. Every photograph is a self-portrait of it’s maker and simultaneously a documentation of it’s time, with or without the aid of machines. While AI is another tool artists can use to conjure up doors to new worlds, I personally believe that analog photography is as John Szarkowski said “a skill close to magic,” and I choose to return to the tactile and slow process of seeing through a camera’s lens in a way only I can see.
ial photographers. We explored ideas of the day, personal and political, analyzed images in their historic context, and pushed boundaries of what might be considered art and why. In short, it mattered more what was in front of the camera (or appropriated from the media) than how it was made.
Fast-forward to today, the creation of digital content is ubiquitous and effortless. Enrollment in photography programs have transitioned to digital arts, and darkrooms are disappearing as many colleges can no longer justify their expense. There is no guarantee that a human was behind the camera, or that a photo depicts real things that exist in the world. Images can be digitally synthesized with AI and diffusion models, and “photograph” has become a visual style or surface quality in an AI prompt. One might say that technologies of today have introduced a door to imagined worlds, extending Szarkowski’s mirror and window metaphor.
By Wendy Constantine
