Abstract

Photography

There has been much comment upon what the U.S. photography, aspire to, in the way of aesthetic impulse, as people grapple with the common experience in an anti-establishment context. But it is essential to see in a certain mutual iconography, Hell's Angels, campy, jewel-laden men and women, a fetishism of the skin, visceral or glutinous glances at fruit and meat, social estrangement, not so much a revelation of actuality as a harboring of special inclination, stereotypes masquerading as protest. On the one hand, these can be farfetched and erotic, but there is a whole school that tends, rather, to elevate the commonplace, the isolated, the transient, the trivial, the incidental, as if these were the real components that made up the American scene. Above all, the themes of abstracted faces in the crowd, of vacant, highly reflective or mirrored surfaces, provide much of the material to which ambitious young photographers have addressed themselves.