The day I sat down to write this opinion piece, I was moved to do so by a feature in The New York Times that both irritated and alarmed me. “Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust” the headline read, and the text informed me that the Louvre, our National Gallery in Washington, the Courtauld Institute in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York were putting their collections online. The Times scoffed at the idea that it is “dangerous” for the Met to offer this “ambitious digitization initiative . . . [of] more than 400,000 high-resolution, free-to-download images from the collection.” It’s not dangerous in the sense that the Met will lose its control of all the artworks in its collection. But it does blur the line between a work of art as unique and as just another commodity like something ordered from Amazon.

This sort of thing distresses me most when photographs are reproduced online. Before moving to LA, I was a curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago from the mid-1980s until 2003. And after moving to LA, I wrote a weekly column on photography for the LA Times in 2006 and 2007, periodically taught photographic history as either a lecture course or graduate seminar at both UCLA and USC from early 2004 until mid-2008, and was the director of the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside from fall 2008 through 2011. So my self-righteousness about how photographs are reproduced, especially online, comes with some oomph behind it.

That said, I also have to admit (to myself, anyway) that my self-righteousness is somewhat hypocritical. I look at photographs all the time on my computer, where the reproductions are equally, if more subtly, untrue to the originals. Online, both color and black-and-white photographs are, like everything else, back-lit, whereas originals printed on opaque photo-sensitive paper can only be viewed properly when lit from the front. I don’t deny that photography which is transparent, like movie film, forms a significant part of the medium’s recent history—images in the form of a video clip, for instance, and stills lit from behind that are mounted in lightboxes hung on gallery walls. But the vast majority of the history of photography, dating from the early 19^th century, still lies in prints meant to be collected in albums or hung front-lit on a wall.

My frustration now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, is that there is almost nowhere except online that you can go to see photography. The most important exhibition this spring was to be Vera Lutter’s “Museum in the Camera,” a two-year project commissioned by Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan that is now installed in the museum’s Resnick Pavilion. But it is listed on the museum’s website simply as “Postponed,” without any indication whether it will open at all.

Vera Lutter, “Rodin Garden, 1: February 22, 2017”

A couple of years ago I visited Lutter in her New York studio, where she happened to have out one of the key pieces made for the LACMA project. All of the prints are negative for positive; that is, everything that was brightly lit in each view she made of the museum is black in the print, and vice versa. She and I talked about how this would be appropriate because the entire museum as it stood then was to be in the process of being torn down in 2020, before the new museum is to be built. But now, between the increasingly discouraging press the design for the new museum has been getting and the uncertainty of all timelines for its construction, Lutter’s dark vision is taking on a grimly pessimistic significance neither she nor Govan ever anticipated.

And now more than ever, I feel the need to go and see photographs in their full, attention-grabbing scale and in the hushed, focused confines of a museum gallery. But n0w especially, the pall of having to look at diminished, evanescently back-lit ghosts of photographs on my computer is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Whether it is, in reality, an 8×4-foot Polaroid by Chuck Close or a 19^th-century daguerreotype no bigger than 8×6 inches, every image is the same size on a computer screen (as in a book or exhibition catalog, for that matter). In the last decade, I’ve published five books on photography, three of which required extensive research looking at hundreds and hundreds of photographs in order to select a fraction for an exhibition or book or both. Doing so by looking at all the available prints is painstaking work compared to the time-saving option of doing the editing electronically. But only in one case—a book on Vivian Maier’s color photography—was doing the editing on my computer obligatory.

The subject was the only body of work the nanny-photographer Maier did that hadn’t already been examined and viewed ad nauseam. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Maier took up color photography in the form of slides, but once she did she was incredibly prolific. Before I could write my essay on this color work, my first chore required by my contract with the publisher, Harper Collins, was to select 130 slides from her total output of …140,000! In this case, mercifully, there were no prints, only box after box after box of slides she had had processed at the drugstore; some of those boxes she obviously never opened because the seal on them was still intact. The contents of every box had been scanned, electronically put back in the boxes in chronological order, and sent to me on an external hard drive. A labor-intensive month and a half later, I sent back to Harper Collins my selections, the hard drive, and the essay I had written. That was the only time it has been satisfying, rather than frustrating, to work in this way.

Now, I can’t wait until this tragic pandemic is brought under control, so I can get back to museums, their exhibitions and their study rooms where one can see the genuine article.