GLENS FALLS, NY.- The history of photography, like all histories, is a simplified and usually agendadriven version of what and how things actually took place. The study of art history encourages the understanding of photography’s past in terms of technologies and movements, but a more arbitrary historical division can also be instructive. The 1960s constitute a slice of the George Eastman House archive that shows us disparate movements existing side by side. In retrospect, we can see high modernism at its apogee, happily co-existing with some of the postmodernist practices that would follow. In the 1960s, these oppositional threads would not have appeared together, nor would the viewer appreciate the degree of influence each would have on succeeding generations. It’s not surprising that the mid-century so embodies generational change and conflict. The 50s, an earnest dream of the post-war greatest generation, show little connection to the hedonistic iconoclastic 70s until we consider the decade that bridges them. Even within the decade itself we see conflicting paradigms. The 60s embrace Jackie Kennedy and Janis Joplin, crew cuts and Afros, Mad Men and Deadheads, Father Knows Best and The Feminine Mystique.

In the 1960s Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan were at the peak of careers begun in the 1930s. Siskind’s earliest efforts included the straight and socially conscious images of Harlem Document, but his later work places him firmly within the context of abstract expressionism. The Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, presented here, is clearly transitional. While this work is as concerned with subject as the documentation and interpretation of architecture that preceded it, its strong graphic qualities point to the striking painterly photographs of road tar he would undertake some two decades later. Siskind’s longtime colleague Harry Callahan similarly inhabited the space where description meets the formal and abstract, using his camera to transform the quotidian—a building, a street, or his wife and daughter—into almost unrecognizable shapes and patterns. Both Siskind and Callahan were profoundly important as teachers, first at the New Bauhaus/ Institute of Design, Chicago, and later at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The straight documentary style from which Callahan and Siskind emerged in the 1930s persisted into the 1960s in the form of photojournalism and commercial photography, the best of which was featured in celebrated picture weeklies. The 60s were the triumphant last decade of these magazines, since Look would fold in 1971, followed by the demise of LIFE in 1972. Arnold Newman began his photographic career in the less rarified world of the commercial portrait studio. He quickly developed his seminal environmental approach, depicting and interpreting the faces and milieux of the famous, and disseminating the work widely in the pages of LIFE, Fortune, and Newsweek. Similarly, Garry Winogrand’s photographic work first appeared on the pages of publications such as Collier’s and Sports Illustrated. In the 60s, his personal work took a turn away from the commercial as he began to develop a “street photography” style, aggressively documenting the people and places that surrounded him.

The dramatic events of the decade and the public’s apparently unquenchable appetite for pictures encouraged the development of young photographers such as Benedict J. Fernandez and Mary Ellen Mark. Both were drawn to the vibrant scenarios of the streets of New York and, in the decade that concerns us, both captured the energy of the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and the burgeoning of women’s liberation. Fernandez’s work remains, for the most part, solidly domestic, most notably, his lengthy study of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. including his 1968 funeral, while Mark has long been associated with the exotic, beginning with her 1965 Fulbright Fellowship to photograph in Turkey and Europe.

At the same time, and far from the mainstream channels of picture magazines and art museums, a new generation of MFA-educated artists, coming of age in the 60s, directed the generally iconoclastic and questioning attitude of their generation toward photography. In a rapidly growing photographic universe, Robert Heinecken, Hollis Frampton, and Betty Hahn represent three separate strands of the conversation about the medium that persist today. Heinecken was not a photographer in the sense that Callahan and Siskind, or Mark and Fernandez for that matter, would have recognized. Rather, he treated the images of our increasingly noisy visual environment as cultural artifacts, appropriating and manipulating them as a form of interpretation in work that would later be labeled postmodern. Similarly, Frampton ignored the boundaries between artistic media, combining photography, literary endeavor, filmmaking, sculpture, and performance in work that was as intelligent as it was seminal. Hahn, on the other hand, drew her inspiration not from the downtown art scene but from photography’s legacy of 19th-century processes, taking the women’s movement’s emphasis on craft, traditionally women’s work, and turning it into a personal art form. Like Frampton, Hahn ignored disciplinary boundaries to embrace not only a variety of photographies but printmaking techniques as well. The 60s were the decade in which she moved beyond her roots in the black and white tradition to the kind of color work shown in this exhibition.

Perhaps no photographer embodies both the legacy and the potential of the 60s more than Roger Mertin. Comparatively little-known today, Mertin, before his untimely death, was a groundbreaker of major influence. He combined the skill of fine printing with an intellectual self-reflexivity inspiring not just the technical innovations for which he was well known in his time, but the conceptual approaches that seem so relevant today. Mertin’s work in series—trees, basketball hoops, Christmas decorations and Carnegie libraries— prefigures postmodernism’s embrace of the taxonomic. His earlier emotionally expressive work of the 60s was superseded by the clarity and calm enabled by the 8x10 camera. Influenced by the technology collection at George Eastman House, Mertin pioneered the return of artists to this format. The acquisition of the entire Mertin archive—some 47,000 objects—by George Eastman House in 2009 ensures that, going forward, the story of photography in the 1960s will include this master.