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“Looking Through the Lens” is a show that succeeds even as it fails. The exhibition, which closes Sunday, is the Baltimore Museum of Art’s first major, long-term photographic survey, covering roughly the first half of the twentieth century.

Any survey of this kind should be understood primarily as an educational tool. There’s no radical re-interpretation of photographic history here, which is fine. “Looking” begins with the influences of pictorialism and Stieglitz’s Camera Work, then proceeds through modernism, surrealism, FSA documentary work–the usual suspects. Only to describe “Looking” that way is to give it a cohesiveness and narrative thread that the show lacks.

Image © the Estate of Paul Outerbridge.

The BMA’s description refers to the guiding principal of arrangement as “thematic,” an ambiguous term that in this case means a more or less traditional, chronological organization. As a whole, though, the layout of the show obscures the canonical narrative with a combination of ill-considered placards and unfortunate juxtapositions. Each room of the expansive four-room show contains one or two large placards, all in the same font, designed to shed some light on larger phenomena–or so I thought. The first room consisted of extended descriptions of pictorialism and Camera Work, fine beginning points for any tutorial on early 20th-century photography. The next room discussed modernism. But as the show went on, the placards began to include diverse subjects of widely varying importance, all in equally oversize font. Here’s the full list:

Pictorialism
Camera Work
Modernism
New York Photo League
Paul Outerbridge
LIFE
Edward Weston
FSA
New York School
Institute of Design

Huh? I’m a passionate admirer of Paul Outerbridge, but to pretend that his status in the history of photography should be larger than LIFE is totally absurd. (Pun intended.) Surely the BMA’s curators know better, and never intended to imply such a thing. But the show’s design leaves the average or even somewhat educated observer in doubt about how much each of these cultural influences mattered. It’s useless to argue that the BMA was trying to somehow subvert the canonical norms of photo history–this show bears too strong a resemblance to the “right” story to claim any revisionist agenda.

Add to this confusion the unexplained visual run-ons that occur throughout the show. The first room discusses Camera Work and includes an entire wall of beautiful photogravures and prints taken from the original magazine. Wow. But this wall abuts another that contains some “Equivalents” and other gelatin prints by Stieglitz, then a wall of early documentary work and portraiture by Sander, Hine, Van Der Zee, and Bellocq. While many of these pictures–like numerous prints in every room–are accompanied by accessible, well-researched descriptions, the transition between these three (four?) genres is never justified. To the untutored eye, it would appear that Van Der Zee was part of the Camera Work crowd. This kind of sloppiness is disturbing in an educational exhibit, and it occurs more than once, as when Brassaï, Roman Vishniac, and Henri Cartier-Bresson are bizarrely sandwiched between Outerbridge and the Photo League.

Still, “Looking” is hardly an unqualified failure. It’s a wonderful showcase of the surprising quality and breadth of the collection the BMA has accumulated over the years. As a Baltimore native, I felt proud. Highlights include several of the works I’ve already mentioned–a complete set of Camera Work and several jaw-dropping Color Carbro prints by the master of early color/notorious nude fetishist Paul Outerbridge–as well as a number of other great works: the Surrealist photobook Mr. Knife, Miss Fork; vintage prints by Meatyard, Weston, and many others; a panoramic view of Calvert Street after the devastating Baltimore fire in 1904; and a breathtaking album of Great Chebeague Island made by Charles Norman Sladen. (It was this last that drew me back to the exhibit after an initial walk-through a month ago…thanks to MAN for the recent reminder.) The descriptive panels next to individual photographs contain wonderful little tidbits and anecdotes for the amateur and the professional photo lover alike. Take for example this little note, transcribed by the curators from the back of a vintage Weston Pepper:

–As you like it–
–but this is a pepper–
–nothing else–
–to the impure all things
are impure–Peter dear–
xxxEdward

“Looking” closes this weekend, with a farewell party tonight (Friday). The individual books and photographs stand as proof of the relatively untouted strength of the BMA, but the show as a whole suggests that more of the wisdom spent building the collection should be directed toward the way the works are presented to the public.