Carleton Watkins, one of the great photographic talents rediscovered by Sam Wagstaff's revolutionary eye

"(Susan) Sontag observed: "photography is a promiscuous form of seeing." Indiscriminately visual, casual in what it picks up, it is always on the make for what it doesn't have. Quotations from Wagstaff in the exhibition's wall text boldly announced the sexiness of looking, specifically of looking at photographs: "Death fascinates me less than sex in photographs," or, even more pointedly, "[some] images allow you to linger, allow you to return again and again to a special mind-place that is sexy in the best sense of the word - emotional, intellectual, and sensual." In photography, Wagstaff discerned cruising's residue, "zeroing in on bodies and parts of bodies as sculpture, even in death, even phrenologically,"

Bruce Hainley

View original post