I occasionally make interesting little discoveries pressed between the sheets of old photography books that I purchase and collect. Notes from long-ago workshops, course syllabi, newspaper or magazine clippings, even the occasional test strip. But this one was a particular gem: a 1975 edition of Photographers Forum, typewritten, featuring the transcript of a debate about the meaning and purpose of photography between participants such as Ralph Gibson, Louis Stettner, Roy deCarava, Walter Rosenblum, Duane Michals and Eva Rubinstein .
Incidentally, Stettner's point - that the "establishment" seeks to promote a certain type of photography that is self-indulgent and out of touch with "reality" - has a certain validity in retrospect. Frances Stonor Saunders, who wrote The Cultural Cold War, the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, documents how the CIA got MOMA to promote "non-figurative and politically silent" abstract expressionism as the antithesis to Soviet socialist realism. The CIA went as far as to orchestrate a Life magazine profile of Jackson Pollack as "the greatest living artist."
[PS: I'm not sure if this publication had any relationship to the extant Photographer's Forum, which was established in 1977.]
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