| Abstract: | Asserting that photographic education is an understudied area of photographic historiography, this article makes a case study of the entry of creative photography into US higher education in the post-Second World War period as a means to extend Stephen Bann’s notion of “photographic exceptionalism” beyond the historiography of nineteenth-century visual culture. Charting the trajectories in post-war America of two creative photographic pedagogies, the integrated model identified with Moholy-Nagy and the medium-specific one identified with the proponents of what is here called “Aspen modernism” (Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams and Minor White), it is argued that there is an Other to mid-twentieth-century photographic exceptionalism that signals its vulnerability. According to Bann, photographic exceptionalism still substantially informs thinking and writing on photography: so how did it survive postmodernism? The final section of the article looks at the legacies of the separatist model for what is now called “art photography” in relation to the institutional landscape of the art world. It is argued that the Photo Boom of the 1970s set in motion a new, institutional medium-specificity for photography and that this too has its vulnerabilities. |
