A Decade of Discovery

I was looking for something to support my bedtime reading habit.  Not finding anything interesting at the local library website, I turned to openlibrary.org and entered "photography criticism" in the search box.  That got me to Light Readings: a photography critic's writings, 1968-1978 by Allan D. Coleman.

The decade of articles collected in the book were first published in The New York Times, the Village Voice and Popular Photography. Coleman seemed a familiar name and it seems like I must have seen some of the columns as I was in New York in the late 1960s.  I don't recall any of the dozen pieces I've read so far.  

My lack of good familiarity with Coleman is a symptom of my general failure to take advantage of the great photographic resources which were available at the time.  There was really no end of museum and gallery exhibits on photography.  I can really only recall going often to the Museum of Modern Art, and I took no advantage at all of the opportunities for learning from the great people who were teaching courses in New York in those days.

I have since gotten familiar with a lot of the artists in photography that Coleman's columns discuss.  It is great fun to read about many of those people in Coleman's interviews and critiques. His style is spare and perceptive and there a lot of good stories I had not seen before about the New York photography scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

Coleman's historical and social comments are mostly right on.  One instance in which he misses the mark is in a discussion of holography.  I do recall the hype about that 3D imaging technology, but Coleman's prediction that it would be the art form of the future really didn't pan out.

I imagine that Coleman's columns were accompanied by examples of the photographic work he was discussing, but they did not make it into the scanned copy of the openlibrary book.  It is easy enough to supplement the reading with quick online searches for the images.  I also have books by some of the photographers.

I was particularly pleased to find that one of Coleman's articles dealt with the career of Roy DeCarava, whose work I have always admired, mostly through the collection illustrated in the Friends of Photography book edited by James Alinder and with a lengthy introduction by Sherry Turner DeCarava. Coleman's article provides a good overview of DeCarava's style and the difficulties he encountered in obtaining appropriate recognition as a Black artist.