PDF VERSION

YALE UNIVERSITY ART PRESS For Immediate Release GALLERY RELEASE July 2008

SPECIAL EXHIBITION TAKES A NEW LOOK AT THE UNIQUE THEME OF OPTICAL CONFUSION IN PHOTOGRAPHY, OCTOBER 7, 2008–JANUARY 4, 2009

First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography

Many photographers have been intrigued by the baffling

distortions—both subtle and disquieting—that can resultwhen the camera “captures” the real world. First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography explores thisfascinating yet seldom discussed undercurrent in themedium’s history. The exhibition features approximatelyone hundred photographs taken by a diverse array oftwentieth-century photographers, including ImogenCunningham, Lee Friedlander, and Florence Henri andBrassaï, drawn from the collection of Allan Chasanoff, b.a. 1961, as well as from the Gallery’s permanent collection.First Doubt challenges the common notion that a photograph is an easily understood representation of what stands beforea camera’s lens. By employing unexpected juxtapositions,novel vantage points, and unusual patterns of light, shadow,and texture, the photographs on viewdestabilize the viewer’s eye, causing it to question what it isseeing.

During the medium’s infancy, many early photographers, expecting their cameras to offer clearand coherent views of the world, were often frustrated by how their images seemed to render the world unfamiliar and ambiguous. In the modern era, a range of image makers began to embrace theseambiguities as unique and valued attributes of camera vision. From the playful experiments of Bauhausartists to the disquieting images of those working out of a Surrealist tradition, many of the photographs in First Doubt were made expressly to disorient or startle the viewer. In other photographs in the exhibition, the artists seem to have stumbled across scenes of confusion quite accidentally.

The exhibition, however, is not one focused on how photographs are made but rather on how they are perceived. As Joshua Chuang, Assistant Curator of Photographs and the organizer of this exhibition,explains, “Neither the strategies, intentions, and serendipity of the photographers nor how their pictures function to confuse remain as critical as the fact that they do confuse—if only for a moment.” In KarinRosenthal’s Belly Landscape (1980), for example, dramatic shadows and the reflection of sunlight on water seem to form a picturesque desert landscape. A closer investigation of the photograph reveals the dunes tobe a human body, upending the initial illusion of the picture. Chuang adds, “The pictures themselves contain a paradox: they confuse because they holdstill these particular incidents of confusion, yet itis this stillness that allows viewers the opportunityto resolve the optical problem.” Rosenthal’s image,along with the other photographs in the exhibition,urges the viewer to confront and decipher theconfusions within the frame.

In the current digital era, ubiquitous image-editing software has made it easy to manipulatephotographs so that they appear too good—orstrange—to be true. Well before “Photoshop”became a verb in our visual vocabulary, however,photographs such as those included in First Doubt

resisted the notion that the world could be satisfactorily seen and known through the lens. Collectively, these pictures remind us that the camera is at best an imperfect surrogate for human vision.