Sight unseen

By career and convention, curators are not allowed the simple expediency of showing works of art alphabetically. Convention dictates that a person both knowledgeable and wise must assemble art according to a theme so new, it opens vistas and visions to the viewer.

It is almost as if the art itself were not enough. Just as symphony orchestras don’t start off with Koechel No. 1 and run through the canon of Mozart numerically through to Koechel No. 6262b, so do curators need to mix things up a bit to maintain our interest.

Witness, then, the daunting task facing Katherine Ware, curator of photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is part of the department of prints, drawings and photographs, whose holdings comprise more than 150,000 works of art. The museum shows photographs in the Alfred Stieglitz Center, in galleries named for Berman, Eglin and Levy, plus the permanent collection galleries. Often, they show up in the Director’s Gallery as well, even though it’s really a long hallway.

All this is by way of introducing "The Faceless Figure: Photographs from the Collection," on display in the Levy Gallery through June 13. The concept is that while portraiture has long been a favorite genre for photographers, these pictures show the figure but purposefully block out the face through various techniques — some more genuine than others.

The show is superbly worthwhile, with more than 60 images from the permanent collection. The artistic styles are widely varied and the artists include such marquee names as Edward Weston, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Minor White, Sebastiao Salgado, Martin Munkacsi, Lee Friedlander, Burk Uzzle, Mark Cohen and Sol Mednick. It’s questionable whether a gimmick was needed to display the photographers. It could easily have been called "Photographs from the Attic" and had the same impact.

But there are two sides and Ms. Ware is eloquent: "With the face removed from a portrait, the viewer’s eye observes the figure in a different way and the elegance and expressiveness of the whole human body is revealed. In some images, the anonymity of the figure is used to suggest Everyman, while others teach us that it is not just our faces that make us individuals."

Since the common thread is the unseen face, the artists are forced together by viewers going from one to the other, thinking, how did this one do it? The fact is that none of the photographers was in concert with the other, nor was there a planned effect. Rather, each of the artists’ work deserves to be seen in the context of that photographer’s vision. This is a case where the viewer must disregard the curator’s concept and look at each work as a single expression of that particular artist.

Some of the most stunning images are from the 1930s. One photograph of Martha Graham’s torso by Barbara Morgan shows remarkable movement combined with lightness and solidity. The other is a 1931 shot of boys playing in Lake Tanganyika by Munkacsi. The Munkacsi image is said to have inspired Henri Cartier-Bresson to become a professional photographer.

The oldest image in the show is Water Carrier, Cairo, taken by Felix Bonfils in 1870. Bonfils was in the French army in Lebanon in 1860 and later moved to Beirut with his family to establish a photographic studio. He specialized in figures in regional costume such as this one.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art clearly has a vast and wonderful trove of photographs and there has been an active program of exhibiting them to their best effect. Still, one wonders what the impact would be of going through the collection alphabetically and showing all the A’s together and so on, to once and for all get all of the holdings out of the vault.

The Faceless Figure: Photographs from the Collection
Through June 13
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway
215-684-7500
www.philamuseum.org
Adults, $10; seniors (62+), $7; students with valid ID, $7; ages 13-18, $7; 12 and under, free; Sundays, pay what you wish