Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun

Recent contemporary photography, particularly examples frequenting the walls of major museums, often seems drained of political poignancy, given over instead to aesthetic and commercial concerns: epic scale, vivid color, and the elastic potential of digital manipulations. But if the traditional—and vital—imperatives of documentary photography have been superseded by the tropes of high art, a compelling show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rethinks the terms of this transformation.

Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949) Walking Gun, 1991 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998 (1998.440) © Laurie Simmons

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection is on view in the Met’s dedicated space for modern photography, a short walk from the snaking lines of viewers patiently waiting for a turn in the dramatically presented Alexander McQueen exhibition. As Associate Curator Douglas Eklund writes in the introductory text, the 25 pictures gathered together represent the first time this space has engaged directly with the state of the world, our ‘culture at large’. But this is a show as much about the state of the medium, and about the commitment of the museum to represent the diversity of photographic practices. All of the pictures here have been made in the last three decades, and many of them are recent acquisitions.

Hans Haacke (German, born 1936) Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979 Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 (2010.416a, b) © Hans Haacke

The show juxtaposes more obviously politically potent work from the era of the culture wars with more recent conceptual work. The appropriated and re-configured text and images from a corporate annual report in Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979, points to the absurdly feeble attempts of corporate America to sooth its collective conscience, and the constructed, surreal violence of Laurie Simmon’s Walking Gun, 1991, calls up an active resistance to gender inequality that is strikingly powerful if somehow also nostalgic for a time when such imagery felt more like a loaded gun.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid, 1990, anchors the room, ten neat rows showing the decaying surfaces of American pennies, an elegy for the economy.

Adjacent to it, an early Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986, sits casting its signature glow in the corner. Despite its contextual relevance here—it shows a group of Vancouver’s down and out gathered by a looming overpass—it is still a kind of elephant in the room, edging out some of the work around it by sheer girth, and foretelling the waning of the artist’s own political interest and the general shift in tone his brand of ‘museum’ photography has led.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But the show also offers the possibility of a sea change, or at least a subtly altered, more socially engaged institutional perspective on recent work.

The state of war and US military strategy is the subject of two very different pieces. Trevor Paglen’s work uses sophisticated technology to track covert American military activity, often resulting in abstractions of captured light—in this case, KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186), 2008, shows a streaking satellite purportedly on a reconnaissance mission somewhere above Yosemite. A recent work by An My Lê, in contrast, shows detailed images of its titled subject, Suez Canal Transit, U.S.S. Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt, 2009, that invite close examination. Sequence and perspective, however, are intentionally confused, destabilizing any feeling of a fixed point of view.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the wall opposite, one of James Casebere’s meticulously photographed cardboard constructions has never seemed so fragile or so perfectly chosen a subject. In this model, Landscape with Houses (Duchess County, NY) #1, 2009, shows a complex of suburban dream-houses, the likes of which we have seen vanished in the recent housing market collapse.

James Casebere (American, born 1953) Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, 2009 Chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011 © James Casebere

Like the repetition of Davey’s pennies and these rows and rows of houses, and despite the inevitable encroaching visual power of each piece on one another, the pictures in this room undeniably gather force together. The gallery space is occupied by their collective energy: violence, decay, suspicion, and the slow-burning failure of late capitalism.

A constellation of images by Wolfgang Tillmans (who was involved in their arrangement), including a sleeping baby and Shanghai’s TV tower, ends the show in a glittering attempt at restoring some meaningful connection to the alienated world pictured in the surrounding room.

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Oriental Pearl, 2009 Inkjet print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York © Wolfgang Tillmans

As in the three-verse Neil Young song it invokes, the idyllic past and dystopian present conjures an irrevocable passage that leaves space only for a dream of a possible future.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection also includes work by Gretchen Bender, Philip-Lorca diCorica, Robert Gober, Katy Grannan, Curtis Mann, Adrian Piper, and Christopher Williams. It is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 2, 2012.

Roe Ethridge, "Butts," 2010 Chromogenic print 3 parts: 51 3/8 x 34 7/8 inches each (130.5 x 88.6 cm) Ed. of 5. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Rarely do I smell cigarettes in public these days. If they smoke at all, people close to me tend to bring out lighters only on occasions involving heavy drinking.  This shift is a surprising testament to common sense.  Occasionally, it seems, we can do what’s best for us.

Of course, that common sense has yet to spread to all nooks and crannies. Twice last week, for instance, I was asked, “do you mind if I smoke?” I hardly ever mind. I’m young enough that the cultural mystique of smoking never overpowered the glare of the Surgeon General’s warnings, but cigarettes still smell like a social life to me. Growing up, I equated their scent with a world beyond the one I shared with my parents, also both non-smokers. My grandparents all smoked, as did an aunt, an uncle and a great aunt, who kept at it well past 90. Imprinted in my memory are the first strong women I admired, all with cigarettes in hand: Virginia Woolf, contemplative and cavalier with her long-stemmed cigarette holder, looked fragile otherwise, and Katharine Hepburn, smoking while dangling her legs over an armchair, was cool and in charge.

That heedless smoking hearkens back to a golden, mid-century moment (Mad Men, anyone?) has been said before.  And I’m not interested in that breed of nostalgia. What I am interested in is why cigarettes, whether in human hands or not, remain such a constant subject for contemporary photographers.

Paul Graham, from "New Europe," 1986-92.

Photographer Roe Ethridge’s current exhibition, Le Luxe BHGG, at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills includes a triptych of cigarette butts all jumbled together in a pile of ashes on stone slabs. Le Luxe features the artist’s characteristic pairings of like and unlike imagery—essayist Eileen Myles might call it “browser art”, a simple recording of “stuff a hand or an eye might alight on.” A tall, porcelain-skinned blond stands in a sunset-colored, one-piece swimsuit, and a battered concrete pourer fills a whole frame; Abercrombie and Fitch-style sexiness meets the sensuality of weathered industrialism. This show is more a record of seductive moods and styles than anything else.

Then there are the cigarette photos. At first, the butts look discarded, but Ethridge has arranged them specifically, placing the stone slabs on strangely delicate black grates. The photographs pay tribute to nostalgia and leisure but approach tribute-making flippantly enough to keep their cool.

Within the first few decades of the 20th century, cigarettes had established a constant, casual presence in photographs. In shots by Brassai or Lee Friedlander, you see them hanging loosely between someone’s fingers. Or, sometimes, they’d add flair, like when Noel Coward wore a suit, stood in the desert and regally wielded a cigarette for Loomis Dean’s iconic 1955 shot. Through the 1960s and ‘70s, cigarettes remained a vice present in photojournalism and fine art alike, shared by hippies, soldiers and grandfathers.

In the late 1970s and ‘80s, following the slew of public health campaigns and Nixon’s banning of cigarette ads on TV, cigarettes in photographs began to look more indulgent, more punk. Shirtless boys lit them in bed for Nan Goldin and, later, Wolfgang Tillmans. Finally, in the 1990s, we saw cigarettes sitting all by themselves, laid out in installations by artist Jack Pierson, or abandoned in a public restroom in a photograph by Paul Graham.

Roe Ethridge, "Apple and cigarettes," 2004/2006, Chromogenic prin,t 41 x 32-3/4 inches. Ed. of 5. Courtesy Gagosian.

These shifts in art weren’t a direct reaction to tobacco’s growing menace, of course. They had more to do with a growing aversion to presenting “a whole story.” Better to pick apart the image and zoom in on its elements than to act like a camera gives you privileged insight into the human condition. When I was in high school, I painted a portrait of my grandfather based on a photo. He sat in a pink-winged armchair, wearing plaid and holding a cigarette. He died only weeks after I finished it, of complications from emphysema, and I brought the painting when we drove cross-country to his funeral. No one wanted it around; the cigarette jumped out at my grandmother, aunts and uncles right away, though I had simply painted him that way because that’s how he was. Omitting the cigarette seemed dishonest.

Images like those by Roe Ethridge, that let burnt butts stand alone, don’t feel honest or dishonest. Symbols of cultural indulgence, they’ve abstracted themselves from imminent consequences and turned the trappings of human behavior into pure style.  This makes them more disarming and unnerving than any photo of Katharine Hepburn or Noel Coward blowing smoke rings could ever be.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view, March 12 - April 9, 2011. Photography by Brian Forrest. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

There’s a video—one of many—that’s been circulating the web since last Friday. It’s called “Tsunami Hitting City of Kamaishi” and it lasts for a grueling four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The first thirty seconds show a view of the Pacific coast that’s relatively calm, though overcast. Ships float by distantly and you can hear the inquisitive voice of a child in the background. No one sounds too disturbed. Then, by second thirty-nine, you see sudsy water foam up and pull boats from where they’ve been docked into the city. The becomes violent but slowly—it takes a few more drawn out seconds to register that something really, really bad is happening. By minute number two, the water’s roof high. By minute four, the city’s barely there, and that kid who sounded inquisitive and chipper a few minutes ago has started whimpering. Devastation, literally. Yet the weirdest part is that the video feels rhythmic, as if what’s happening makes intuitive sense.

The same friend who sent me the Kamaishi video also told me about how Japan had moved 13 feet closer to the U.S. since last Friday. He brought this up just after we left the March 12^th opening of Wolfgang Tillmans’ new exhibition at Regen Projects in West Hollywood, which is why I now see Tillmans’ Iguazu whenever I think “Tsunami.”

It feels too obvious—an image of gushing brownish water, falling downward in a gorgeous triangle, standing in for a disaster that manifested in a tidal wave. I’d rather have one of Tillmans’ t-shirt or jean photos, with wearable, human swells and rifts lodged in my mind. But I wouldn’t want it to be the work of any other artist  (what if one of Tomory Dodge’s post-apocalyptic eruptions, or Doug Aitken’s smooth-as-molasses, foreboding-as-hell videos had become synonymous with Tsunami?).

Wolfgang Tillmans, Iguazu, 2010, Ink jet print on paper, 54 1/2 x 81 5/8 inches, Edition 1/1, 1 AP. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

When you push aside the fixations on “slacker” images, the fashion-art collide, and rave culture that has trailed Tillmans through his career (a career that, somehow, has gotten quite long), what you’re left with is an artist who understands time and speed far better than most—probably because he refuses to conform to the constructs of either, while at the same time refusing (or just showing little interest in) non-conformity.

Tillmans’ current exhibition at Regen Projects, his sixth with the gallery and the only one since 1995 to feature camera-based work exclusively, at first glance appears atypically linear. The images, all large, with the itinerant feel of travel photographs, hang on a single level. They’re not  staggered and stacked like previous Tillmans installations have been. Yet, seen as a body, they’re just as intermittent and tangential as anything in the artist’s oeuvre. You walk from to Times Square to a hotel room to an airport terminal to a fountain to a photocopier, then past egg cartons to an Argentinian vista. These scenes look like they’ve been caught and honed by someone, a globetrotter, with a sophisticated sense of space who happens to stop for a minute while moving through the other life he leads. (Lecturing at LACMA two weeks ago, Tillmans said that, in the 90s, he’d been hailed as photographing his generation, while really, he was just  photographing his life, but not his life–not exactly.)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view, March 12 - April 9, 2011. Photography by Brian Forrest. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Tillmans began making work with the help of a company photocopier just before the Berlin Wall fell. He started publishing images in magazines like i.D. soon after and then exhibiting in galleries. He continued through a decade of relative warlessness, at least in Western Europe and the U.S. (one of his books, Soldiers: The Nineties, chronicled the amorphous roles of men in uniform during this time), but endless technological revolutions (when he started, Tillmans used to promise collectors reprints of his digitally processed images should they fade, and they inevitably did; now, they rarely do), and through a subsequent decade of drawn-out international tensions (soldiers have definite jobs again). Through it all, he’s been remarkably good at staying themeless, never working serially. Working in “series is serious,” Tillmans joked during his recent “feature length” (his wording) lecture at LACMA.

Japanese novelist Kazumi Saeki, who experienced the March 11th earthquake from near Sakunami, likes series and published an op-ed in the New York Times this week in which he tries to make sense of disaster. Near the end, he remembers the ten years he spent as an electrician.  “My main job was to travel around Tokyo, repairing lights, including street lamps and the hallway and stairway lights in apartment buildings,” he writes. “For this reason, the sight of the well-ordered, unbroken expanse of the city’s lights always brought me a great sense of relief. Will I ever again experience such peace?”

If series is serious it’s also safe—and calming, like a line of city lights. Tillmans’ work has never been like that. At Regen Projects, each photograph is, on it’s own, a well-ordered thing. Iguazu, for instance, is stunningly composed, but, in a room of images, it has no real partner. The pictures don’t give the satisfaction of continuity or cohesion. They’re not safe in that way. And, unlike the Tokyo lights, they can’t be repaired because they’ve already been perfected.