Climate Change and the Image ? 

David Campany

None of us doubt how vital images have been for raising awareness around climate change. There is no doubt, either, how important images have been for climate-related protest and activism.

What we do have doubts about, however, is exactly what kinds of image are effective. If we knew, we’d just get on with it and make them, right? But the way images “work” (if that’s even the right word) is not so straightforward. Here, I’ll try to break down why this is, what it might mean for us, and what we can do about it.

First of all, visual culture is never constant. It is always mutating – at different rhythms, in many directions. What resonates with some audiences at some moments, can be lost on others. Context is not everything – but it’s a lot.

Secondly, images do not carry meaning the way a truck carries coal. They can certainly feel more immediate than words, and even jump language barriers, but at root they are ambiguous things. They can show, or even provoke, but they cannot explain. They are imprecise, for better or worse.

Thirdly, there is really no metric for the effect or impact of images. True, the mass media likes to venerate certain images for having changed mass opinion, but most of the time those media outlets are doing self-promotion, patting themselves on the back for being important. In the previous century, when media were dominated by fewer outlets, certain images could be elevated through repetition to the status of “icons”. Today, our media landscape is much more fractured, and it may be no bad thing that an issue both as simple and as complex as climate change has produced no iconic images, certainly not in that older 20^th century sense.

Fourthly, images ‘behave’ unexpectedly. They can take on unforeseen significance and effects. This can be quite unsettling, particularly for image-makers who feel they ought to be able to control and predict the outcome of their efforts.

I think of the poet Diane di Prima:

NO ONE WAY WORKS. It will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. (‘Revolutionary Poem #8’)

In other words, the collective spirit is in the shoving, not in the sides, and exactly when or how things will be brought down will be unpredictable.

Shoving from all sides means being creative in our thinking and in our imagery.  Not for the sake of being “arty”, but because there is no clear path. No tried and tested way. No everlasting methods to follow. Knowing one’s audience and context can help, but do not rule out not knowing. “There’s a crack, a crack in everything,” sung Leonard Cohen, “that’s how the light gets in.”

I am the Creative Director of the International Center of Photography, here in New York. Our current exhibition is Edward Burtynsky: the Great Acceleration, a survey of over four decades of photography by one of the great chroniclers of the late industrial era. Oil use. Water use. Mining and quarrying. Food production. Manufacturing, waste and recycling. Farm and forest management. With many exhibitions, books and documentaries about his work, it is hard to think of a photographer with a greater reach or influence. And yet, what strikes me most about his photographs is not any campaigning spirit, but their clear-sighted and level-headed observation. Burtynsky thinks more in terms of revelation than accusation, and understands that his photography does not stand alone but will be fitted, haphazardly, into broad and wide conversations about geopolitics, consumer-capitalism, labor markets and, yes – climate activism.

An exhibition might get great reviews, great attendance, and positive public feedback, but change can also come from inviting those one or two policy makers with more surgical influence. This is something I learned working with the British photographer Mark Neville.  He had made an incredible book – half photos and half science reporting – titled Deeds Not Words. It’s about a small English town where the hasty clear-up of toxic steel industry land led to dust in the air, causing a large cluster of birth defects in new-born babies. Neville distributed the book to hundreds of local environmental health agencies, hoping to change the way such land is cleared. Nothing happened. Zero response. I then helped Neville make an exhibition in London, presenting the images and scientific information. The public loved it, but crucially we organised a meeting in the galleries for health officers and a key politician. The politician took their findings to the government and national policy was changed. A win!

But what can we learn for this? Make a book that fails, rescue it with a show, and then hope that the one person with influence sees it and does the right thing? Make just one book and get it into the right hands?

As I’ve said, there are no formulas to what we do. We have to be idealistic and hopeful, but we also have to be pragmatic, responsive, adaptable and speculative. Mass influence can be important and effective but so can quiet, focused influence. I suspect “awareness” of climate change has reached a high plateau with the general public. While we need to be extremely vigilant in order to keep it there, it is policy change that is going to make the difference.

Commissioned by Climate Week NYC and first published here.

Double Feature

Edited by Mark Alice Durant

Hardcover / 9.5 x 7.5 inches / 388 Pages / $40

Over 200 vernacular images from the collection of artist Patrick Pound accompanied by ekphrastic texts from 44 writers exploring ideas of  doubling / layering / twinning / mimicked gestures / simultaneous realties / blurring boundaries evoked by the photographs.

Texts: Kim Beil, Rebecca Bengal, Susan Bright, David Campany, Tim Carpenter, Melissa Catanese, Clément Chéroux, Kelli Connell, Danielle Dutton, Danielle Ezzo, Cherine Fahd, Gem Fletcher, Sophie Haigney, Jane Ursula Harris, Vanessa Holyoak, Christine Hume, Emmanuel Iduma, Jenny Irish, Kristin Keane, Brad Kessler, E.J. Koh, Jennifer Krasinski, Laura Larson, Ayden LeRoux, Jonathan Lethem, Nate Lippens, Klea McKenna, Lucy McKeon, Qiana Mestrich, Daniel Palmer, Ahndraya Parlato, Miranda Ramírez, Margaret Rhee, Margaret Sartor, Christina Seely, Jessica Shearer, Brea Souders, Danika Stegeman, David Levi Strauss, Shannon Taggart, Lynne Tillman, Genya Turovskaya, Jeannie Vanasco, Orin Zahra

Intricate botanical forms, Baroque one moment and science fiction the next, appear to sprout and multiply. Drained of greens and the colours of flowers, the forms intensify and estrange our expectations of plant life. This is the work of British artist Phoebe Cummings. Her material is raw clay, the most primal of all substances. Give a lump of clay to a child, watch them transform it in their hands, and you can sense how connected we all are to its essential properties.

Very often, Cummings does not fire or glaze her clay to make it permanent. As it dries it becomes brittle, cracking and shedding in response to the atmosphere and vibrations. In art galleries, it lasts as long as the exhibition. Out in nature, wind and rain can reclaim it in minutes. All her artistic labour collapses and the clay returns to the base matter from which it came, leaving no trace but its documentation.

On the page here is a photographic image of a work Cummings made on the occasion of a music festival in the Nordic town of Risør in 2023. Walking to the town’s venues, the audiences might have come across it by chance. She recalls, “I was interested in the work as a performance between clay and the weather, and the way in which, like music, it belongs ultimately to the air.”

So much of the art we experience today comes to us as photographic reproduction. Books, catalogues, magazines, websites. Artworks must pass through a lens, mutating in the process. In being so temporary, Cummings’ art both relies upon and escapes the camera’s capture in particular ways. Yes, the image allows us to see what might have otherwise appeared and disappeared unseen. Yes, the camera’s attention to light and detail gives us a sense of Cummings’ craft. Each clay stem, leaf, root, and petal bear the impression of her own body – the lines on the palm of her hand, the smoothness of her inner arm, even the curve of her jawline. But does photography betray art of this kind? An image cannot allow us to walk around a sculpture, or feel it occupying its place. Still and mute, a photograph cannot capture the changes over time that are so characteristic of Cummings’ work. Temperature, humidity, odour, and texture all escape the image. We can feel we have experienced what in fact we have not.

Phoebe Cummings is careful with her camera. After immersing herself in the soft, wet materiality she cleans up and makes photographs. She knows the camera can compromise even as it idealises. It is easy to make an impressive photograph that makes us believe its vision is total. It is more difficult to make one that hints at what cannot be shown. Photography is an art unto itself, and how this art transforms the other arts is a delicate matter.

Italian version:

Grovigli botanici tra Barocco e fantascienza sembrano germogliare, moltiplicarsi. Private del verde e delle tinte dei petali, queste forme espandono e stravolgono le nostre aspettative sul mondo vegetale. Ogni stelo, foglia o radice reca l’impronta del corpo dell’artista che li ha realizzati: le linee del palmo della mano, la morbidezza del braccio, persino la curva della mascella. Per il suo lavoro, la britannica Phoebe Cummings usa un materiale primordiale, l’argilla grezza. Datene un pezzo a un bambino osservatelo mentre lo trasforma tra le mani e percepirete quanto siamo tutti legati alle sue proprietà elementari. Cummings non la cuoce né la smalta per renderla resistente. Man mano che si asciuga diventa fragile, si screpola e si sbriciola in risposta ad atmosfera e vibrazioni. Nelle gallerie le opere durano quanto la mostra. All’aperto, il vento e la pioggia possono riappropriarsi della materia in pochi minuti. Tutti gli sforzi dell’artista collassano, e l’argilla ritorna allo stato originario, senza che le sculture lascino traccia se non la loro documentazione.

In questa pagina si vede la fotografia di Between Heaven and Earth, realizzata da Cummings in occasione di un festival musicale nella città norvegese di Risør nel 2023. Il pubblico potrebbe essersi imbattuto nel lavoro per caso, camminando da un evento all’altro. “Mi interessava creare una performance tra gli agenti atmosferici e l’argilla”, ricorda l’artista; “in fondo anche questa appartiene all’aria, come la musica”.

Ormai gran parte dell’arte viene fruita come riproduzione fotografica. Libri, cataloghi, riviste, siti web. Le opere attraversano una lente e subiscono una mutazione. Nell’essere così effimere, quelle di Cummings dipendono dall’obiettivo e allo stesso tempo, in modo singolare, gli sfuggono. Certo, l’immagine ci permette di vedere ciò che altrimenti sarebbe apparso per poi scomparire senza essere visto. E la sensibilità della camera alla luce e ai dettagli ci dà un’idea della maestria dell’artista. Ma questa non è una forma di tradimento della sua disciplina? Un’immagine non ci permette di camminare attorno a una scultura né di percepire il modo in cui occupa lo spazio. Immobile e muta, non può catturare i mutamenti nel tempo, così caratteristici dei lavori di Cummings. La temperatura, l’umidità, l’odore e la matericità sfuggono alla fotografia. Potremmo avere la sensazione ingannevole di aver vissuto qualcosa, ma non è così.

Phoebe Cummings è accorta: dopo essersi immersa nella materia morbida e umida, pulisce tutto e scatta. Sa bene che quel mezzo distorce idealizzando. È facile ottenere un’immagine suggestiva con una parvenza di completezza. È più difficile realizzarne una che accenni a ciò che non può essere mostrato. La fotografia è un’arte a sé, e il modo in cui trasforma le altre è una questione delicata.

As I was beginning to gather my thoughts for this essay, I showed an earlier publication of Beatrice Helg’s work to an artist friend. She looked at it slowly. “These are extraordinary sculptures and installations, and they have been documented so beautifully,” she exhaled, with a mix of admiration, wonder and curiosity. I was on the cusp of pointing out that Helg’s photographs are the art, not the documentation of the art, but hesitated. Perhaps my friend’s response was led by being a sculptor and installation artist herself. Or perhaps it was the manner in which I shared the work, passing her a book, which somehow opened up the pleasurable confusion rather more than seeing Helg’s photographs in an exhibition might have done. Clearly, there is a sense in which Helg is a sculptor and an installation artist, as well as a photographic artist, and this would be so whether or not she was responsible for creating whatever was in front of her camera, or merely encountering it. It is her sensibility, for want of a better word, that is sculptural, installational, and photographic.

Making things or arranging environments and then photographing them has a long history. It was there in the 1920s in the work of Florence Henri and Man Ray, for example. It is there in the conceptual and post-conceptual work of Barbara Kasten, Robert Cumming, John Divola, David Haxton, and James Casebere. It is there in the expanded idea of the studio still life that we find in the work of Lucas Blalock, Jo Dennis and Anastasia Samoylova, among younger artists. Indeed, in the mid-to-late 1970s, when Helg was a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and then at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, fabricating things to be photographed was a rich and excitingly open field. Many artists, particularly on the west coast of the USA, were exploring it. There was a free casting aside of the weighty dogma of modernist purity and medium specificity, to enter instead those once forbidden areas where the different arts overlap and intersect. How could photography not have a relation to sculpture and installation (or indeed to painting, architecture, cinema, theatre, and literature)? More to the point, how could the specific qualities of photography not reveal themselves through those overlaps and intersections?

I do not know for sure if Helg was shaped by that moment in Californian art. She certainly would not need to have been. Plenty of artists arrive at what they are doing quite without knowledge of precedents or parallels. Photography lets an artist dive right in, and finding that others have worked in a similar vein can be more of an affirmation than an influence. Whatever the case, it is clear that making work in this way has been enormously generative for Helg and for the many admirers of her work over a number of decades.

As with the work of Giorgio Morandi, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd or Vija Celmins, what seems at first to be a small and defined artistic territory slowly expands to become its own universe. Helg has her own universe: something about the movement between making, photographing, and making exhibitions – from environments to photographic objects, to photo-architectural spaces – is specific enough and expansive enough to make it so.

Of course, we were not there, so we cannot know exactly what was on front of Helg’s camera. We can only surmise on the basis of these ambiguous photographs, so already we must proceed with care. What do we see? Geometric forms – circles, squares, rectangles, rhomboids, trapezoids – evoking something ancient and even Platonic, but also something twentieth century modern (Cubism, Minimalism). There are traces of images of architecture, again ancient and modern. Elemental staircases. Soaring skyscrapers. There is solidity and monumentality, opacity and reflection, fragility and translucence. The aesthetic could be Western or Eastern, and possibly both. Secular or spiritual, and possible both. And throughout, there is attention to patina and the light that reveals it. Oxidation, rust, dust, staining, weathering, aging.

Then there is the image itself. In a profound way, photography turns things into signs. Not obvious signs, but signs nonetheless. Photography theatricalizes what it appears to show us. The ‘objectness’ of objects. The ‘surfaceness’ of surfaces. The ‘spatiality’ of space. This is not the representation of drama, but rather the drama of representation, so to speak, and it is something Helg seems attuned to in quite acute ways. Photography’s attention to the surfaces of the world is at its most intense, and most illusionistic when it is deflecting attention away from its own industrially smooth surface. We do not exactly look ‘through’ a photograph to a world beyond, as if through a window, but we do not look ‘at’ the photograph either, since there is so little surface character to hold onto. Does the eye slip through the surface? No, it cannot, since there is only flatness. So where does the eye dwell, exactly? Not in any material space, but in a psychical space. Perhaps.

In 1992, the photographic artist Craigie Horsfield wrote:

The surface of a photograph, the invisible place of a photograph, tangible and constantly deferred, uncompleted and unacknowledged, is the place of its evasion. Yet it was not inevitable that it should become so. At the beginning, photographs declared the surface; the techniques of manufacture were various and in the process of discovery, and the models were painting and printmaking, where the surface was clearly articulated. In photography, whether the support was of paper, metal, glass, or cloth, the different methods necessitated a degree of manipulation of the surface. Most significantly of all, the idea of surface was engaged. However, as the convention of the world catalogues and recorded evidence became the principal motive of photography, the presence, the fact of the photograph, became increasingly insignificant, no longer looked at but looked through, as though to a world apart.

Part of the bargain struck by modernist photography in the 1920s concerned its relation to surface. If it gave up its own surface and accepted its smooth, glassy, almost invisible condition, it would be better placed to attend to the surfaces of the world. But this ‘evasion’, as Horsfield calls it, plunges photography into other paradoxes, where it lacks what we might call a sovereign relationship to its own materiality and its own scale. There is image capture (the photographic negative, positive or digital file), and then there is output (the size of print, the choice of paper, the support, and so on). A painter does not paint their painting and then decide what size it will be. A painter does not paint their painting and then decide what materials it will be made from. Scale and materiality are sovereign to painting in the way they are barely sovereign at all to photography.

While Helg has clearly developed thoughtful, elegant and rigorous ways of arriving at appropriate scales and materials for her work, that lack of sovereignty is not, and cannot be overcome. Clearly this is not a failing, especially not in Helg’s deftly considered her work. Whatever sense of physicality and scale a photographic print and its support may have, as an image it always invokes an elsewhere. That is to say, an encounter with a photograph is always an encounter with its specifics as an object in the ‘here and now’ and a latent encounter with whatever its pictorial illusion suggests.

Let us return for a moment to my artist friend’s encounter with Helg’s work in book form, in which she was encouraged to look through the photographs to the art beyond. In the early decades of the medium – the 1830s and 1840s – making images of artworks (particularly classical sculpture) was an important genre in the newly forming art of photography. It was seen as practice of refined attention. A photograph of a sculpture can only be a partial and specific account of it: a chosen angle, framing, lighting, tonality and so on makes the photograph an interpretation, not a copy or facsimile, or reproduction. Photographing artworks was thus a way for this newest artform to ingratiate itself with the established ones. Over time, however, the confusion grew and the photographic page had a lot to do with this (what Horsfield called the “world catalogues and recorded evidence”). Books of painting, sculpture and architecture came to rely on photography as form of documentation and dissemination. Meanwhile photography was still struggling to become a recognised art in its own right, and its two roles would forever be at odds. As Walter Benjamin noted back in 1931, whatever impact photography might have as art would be dwarfed by the cultural impact of the photographic reproduction of all art.

Nevertheless, that separation between photography as art and photography as the supposedly artless documentation of art, can never be absolute. Every photograph is potentially an artwork and a document, with all the tension that involves. Moreover, photography’s embrace of the world in front of the camera is an embrace of the world’s own tensions between the artfully made and the not made. The camera’s encounter with and rendering of the built world is a pertinent example, and notably so in the work of Beatrice Helg since its dialogue with modernist architecture is so complex.

As the historian Beatrice Colomina recounts in her book Privacy and Publicity, modernist architecture was really the first moment in which built form and the photographic image became inseparable. Not only did people around the world learn of architectural modernism through illustrated magazines and books of the 1920s and 30s, it was a form of architecture that had somehow internalised the image. It was ‘camera conscious,’ to use a contemporary phrase. In important ways, modernist architecture and modernist photography developed symbiotically. In general, however, they saw something pristine in each other, something unblemished and resistant to the passing of time. Modernist architecture was happy to be idolised and idealised by the camera’s immaculate image, to the point that it either mistook itself for its own image, or relied upon its image to help perpetuate its timeless fantasy of itself.

As the photographer Jeff Wall put it in relation to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist Barcelona Pavilion (erected in 1929, reconstructed on the basis of photographs in 1986):

These buildings require an especially scrupulous level of maintenance. In more traditional spaces a little dirt and grime is not such a shocking contrast to the whole concept. It can even become patina, but these Miesian buildings resist patina as much as they can.

Of course, cameras find the presence of patina just as seductive, just as photogenic, as scrupulous cleanliness. In 1924, the American artist Edward Weston, high priest of photographed surfaces, declared: ‘The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh. The same year, the artist and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy spoke of photography’s rendering of ‘the precise magic of the finest texture: in the framework of steel buildings just as much as in the foam of the sea.’ The inorganic and the organic offer themselves to the camera, which flatters them in return.

Beyond modernism then, Helg’s embrace of patina, weathering and degradation (sealed off behind her pristine prints), recalls older practices of architecture that are more accepting of the passage and ravages of time. This brings us to Le Musée Reattu, and Helg’s major exhibition in its spaces. The constellation of buildings dates back to 1562, becoming a museum in 1868 (when photography was on the cusp of cultural dominance if not artistic confidence). There were major renovations in 1956, 1964 and 1991. The historic character of the architecture is clearly present, still, as are the mutations over time. There is evidence of the buildings previous functions (especially as a priory), but there is also an engagement with the white-walled purity that was the founding context and presentational default of twentieth century modern and contemporary art.

It almost goes without saying that this nuanced and idiosyncratic blend of ancient and modern is a perfect setting for Beatrice Helg. Not only do her works embody and embrace the palimpsest of time that we see in the building, but her spatial and architectural sensibility has led her to develop and unfolding sequences of rooms in which the form and character of photographic works are in dialogue with the form and character of the building. The gallery spaces do not simply present the work; rather, the gallery spaces and the photographs are the work.

And yet, are photographs ever entirely at one with the spaces in which they are presented, indivisible from them? Do photographs not present their own spaces too, however ambiguous and uncertain they may be? Photography never quite achieves architectural or installational integration. It brings with it some memory or projection of other locations. A visitor to Beatrice Helg’s exhibition at the Musée Reattu is gifted the experience two complimentary sets of spaces, histories and sensibilities – part real, part imaginary. It is not an experience this book in your hands can gift, although a book will have its own pleasures.

David Campany, 2025

Sebastião Salgado, who died earlier this year, stands among the most significant photographers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There was an unmistakable power to his imagery and the moral force that underscored it. The photographs were an insistence that human life, labour, conflict and the natural world demand both representation and attention. To appreciate Salgado’s life and work is to recognize his unique position: he was a witness to some of the most wrenching transformations of the modern era, a campaigning activist, and an artist who sought a difficult beauty and sense of hope.

Born in 1944 in Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Salgado grew up in a rural environment. His early life was marked by landscapes of pastures, rivers, and forests. He trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree and undertaking work in international development. This sharpened his sensitivity to systems of inequality and the forces shaping labour and migration. Economics also gave him a framework for understanding the large structures behind poverty, displacement, war, and land management. He soon realized that photography offered a more visceral and immediate means of communication, but also something more complex and contemplative.

In 1967 Salgado married Lélia Wanick. It was she who first gave him a camera, and she who would remain intimately involved with his work in the decades to come. When the political situation in Brazil grew intolerable the couple moved to Paris. Around 1973, Salgado began to devote himself seriously to a life as a photojournalist and his career developed rapidly. He joined the photo agencies Sygma and Gamma, and by 1979 he was a member of the prestigious cooperative Magnum Photos. His affiliation with Magnum connected him to the tradition of socially engaged documentary photography exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. Meanwhile, Wanick established the important magazines Photo Revue and Longue Vue, as well as a gallery space for Magnum Photos. She remained the great editor, curator and champion of Salgado’s work, eventually receiving an Oscar nomination as the producer of Salt of The Earth, the 2014 documentary about him, co-directed by Wim Wenders and the son of Salgado and Wanich, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.

Right from the start, Salgado’s images were distinguished by their classical framing and deep chiaroscuro. In some ways, he seemed a man out of time, or at least a little late. The mid-century heyday of photojournalism, when the mass circulation illustrated magazines dominated visual culture, had clearly passed. Nevertheless, here was a photographer, working in black and white, composing his shots and printing his images to wring every ounce of pictorially coded emotion from every square inch of their surfaces. If Salgado’s visual sensibilityechoed anything it was the landmark Life magazine photo essays of W. Eugene Smith. Both men were staunchly independent, almost maniacally driven perfectionists whose commitment to their chosen themes and subjects seemed to stop at nothing. Life ceased publication in 1972, just asSalgado was getting going.

In the 1980s many documentarists, Martin Parr among them, switched to colour, while also switching from photographing the world of work and production to the world of leisure and consumerism. Salgado remained the rear guard, upholding that older set of concerns, and with an aesthetic that upheld the history of heroic photojournalism that was now being packaged as books, sold as prints, and taught in the expanding world of photo education.

Salgado’s first major publication, edited by Wanick, was Other Americas, 1986. Made over a period of seven years in rural Latin America, it was gentle and lyrical work, chronicling marginalized lives with both empathy and aesthetic rigor. It was his meditation on the persistence of traditional ways of life amid modernization and political upheaval. Indigenous peoples and rural workers are not relics but living communities negotiating transition. His compositions often recalled biblical scenes (groups on hilltops, central figures surrounded by a supporting cast, often bathed in unearthly light). Quite how conscious Salgado was of these ancient pictorial strategies is a moot point, but he continued to refine and even exaggerate them, often to the ire of his critics. Couldn’t he just photograph what he saw without turning it all into a history painting?

If Other Americas represented Salgado’s lyric humanism, his photographs of the Kuwaiti oilfields in 1991 showcased his capacity to capture apocalyptic devastation. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, retreating Iraqi forces set fire to hundreds of oil wells in Kuwait, creating one of the largest man-made environmental catastrophes in history. The sky darkened with smoke, the desert became slick with oil, and firefighters battled infernos under nightmarish conditions. In retrospect, it is clear that this was a moment in which war reportage was morphing into environmentalist photography. Salgado was making depictions not of war’s immediate carnage—dead bodies or combat—but rather of its ecological and existential aftermath. Destruction lingers long after battles end. This was photography almost as allegory: a vision of geopolitics at war with the planet. It also signalled Salgado’s growing preoccupation with global issues that transcend national borders—environmental catastrophe, industrial exploitation, and the consequences of modern economies dependent on extractive industries. Oil is a problem even when its wells are not being sabotaged.

Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age was Salgado’s magnum opus on labour in the modern world. Published in 1993 after six years of work, it spanned continents and industries, presenting a vast visual archive of manual work. Miners in Brazil, ship breakers in Bangladesh, steel workers in China, coffee pickers in Central America, and countless others. The unifying theme was the dignity and intensity of human physical labour. At a time when automation and globalization were already transforming economies, Workers can be read as both celebration and elegy. It reveals the immense energy and sacrifice of workers whose toil built the contemporary world, while also suggesting that such forms of work were vanishing in the electronic age. Salgado framed labour not simply as an economic activity but as a cultural and historical phenomenon, something that deserves serious documentation.

Critics sometimes accused Salgado of aestheticizing suffering, of making exploitation look beautiful. Defenders argued that his commitment to form was inseparable from his grounded and engaged humanism. Seen as ‘iconic’ photographs alone on a gallery wall or the in white expanse of a coffee-table book, it can be hard to disagree with the critics. But that’s what happens when photographs are plucked from the bodies of work, and from the captions and stories from which they come. It seems churlish to blame Salgado for making sustained bodies of work that contained so many striking photographs.  

In 1998, Salgado and Wanick founded the Instituto Terra, a non-profit organization focused on environmental restorationand research, and reforestation in the Vale do Rio Doce region of Brazil. The area was a former cattle farm of utterly degraded land. Meanwhile Salgado was turning his cameraincreasingly toward environmental subjects, culminating in his project Amazônia 2021. Over several years he travelledthrough the Brazilian Amazon, working with Indigenous communities. The photographs present lush forests, sweeping rivers, and portraits, emphasizing ecological balance and cultural continuity. Indigenous peoples are understood as stewards of the environment, guardians of a knowledge that modern society is in danger of destroying. Amazônia also carried a strong activist dimension with a call to preserve the planet’s ‘lungs’.

It is worth noting that by this point Salgado had fully embraced digital photography, while still adhering to a black and white aesthetic rooted in the traditional photographic darkroom. He had found a way to manipulate his image files and then make prints that mimicked the highly wrought look of his analogue work. Many assumed he had simply ignored the digital realm altogether, rather than bending it to his own aesthetic will.    

It was around the time of the publication of Amazônia that I first met Salgado, hosting an online conversation with him for the International Center of Photography (ICP), where I am Creative Director. We were joined by an audience of over two thousand people from around the world – a testament to Salgado’s passionate global following. ICP has been particularly important for the reception and recognition of his work in the US. Founded by Cornell Capa in 1974, it has long championed ‘concerned photography’ that is committed to social engagement and justice, an ethos well aligned with Salgado’s own, and we have hosted major exhibitions of hiswork, including Workers and Migrations.

I last saw Sebastião at his busy studio and office in Paris, in 2023. Gracious and welcoming, we sat and talked as he explained the incredible progress of the Instituto Terra and the reception of the Amazônia project. His public image was always of a man looking forward, embattled but optimistic, with a love of detail but an understanding wide enough to get big, visionary things done. In conversation however, a certain melancholy crept in, and with a moist eye. He never seemed to me a man of regret, but there was a sense that life – human life, and his own particular life, had taken a wrong turn with no path back, only forward. I wondered whether his attraction to photography, and Lélia’s inspired hunch that it would be his medium, were somehow connected with the camera’sapparent stopping of time, pausing the world between an irrecoverable past and a future both foreseen and unforeseen. “Come downstairs!”, he announced with a clap of his hands. In the basement, a dedicated team was embarked upon the gargantuan task of organizing and digitally archiving his life’s work. Half a century of intense photographic observation on every continent. Many extraordinary images, overlooked when they were first taken, were being discovered on his contact sheets.

When a major photographer dies, there is usually a period of a few years, perhaps half a decade, in which they are reduced to a media friendly set of ‘greatest hits.’ Undoubtedly, SebastiãoSalgado’s hits are as great as anyone’s. After a while, however, curiosity and the corrective nature of history revisits the work. Salgado left us as one of the most famous and influential photographers there has ever been, but I suspect we have yet to see the full scope of his achievement, and the full value of his legacy. No doubt Lélia Wanick will play a role in this, while the exemplary work of the Instituto Terra will continue.

In 1989, Hiroshi Sugimoto looked out over the Mediterranean Sea from Cassis to make one of his now-familiar seascape photographs. Shot from an elevated vantage point, the picture is half occupied by featureless water, below an equally featureless sky. No culture, no politics, no people, no land, no aircraft, no boats. Uncannily calm and eventless, the image evokes an almost-primordial past. It also invites any projections we may have of the very real facts of the sea’s present. It is hardly as if nothing happens in the Mediterranean.

Sugimoto’s photograph could hang in an exhibition about minimalism or about the cosmic spirituality of water or the fraught politics of the region. For a photograph, context is not everything but it is a lot, since the photographic image has no way of explaining what it visually describes, no way of asserting particular meanings, and no way of accounting for what might have motivated its creation. This is why photographers – and writers on photography – are often so keen to supply the missing intentions and back stories, speaking over and on behalf of that stubborn muteness, which is also a kind of radical openness. Seas are somewhat like this, too.

Even the name ‘Mediterranean’ is at once specific and elusive. Derived from the Latin mer mediterraneum (sea in the middle of the land), it carries a distant echo of the geological fact that it was once a sea which dried up completely six million years ago, only to flood again. Its present-day complexity becomes more apparent on a map. Trace your finger anticlockwise from the clenched jaw of the Mediterranean Sea, eastward along the north African coast, and back westward around the meandering southern edge of Europe to that anomalous British territory at Spain’s southern tip, and you lasso the impossible. Tangier, Oran, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Alexandria, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Mersin, Antalya, Rhodes, Athens, Valletta, Palermo, Marseille, Barcelona, Gibraltar. The rush of ideas and mental impressions held in this circumference is incommensurable, and the subject risks losing all useful meaning to lean instead on vague romances of the sea.

The artist and writer Allan Sekula picked up on this tendency to gloss over the politics of the sea with comforting poetics. In 1990 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez, which had spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska a year earlier, was undergoing post-repair tests in San Diego harbour, California. To erase its notoriety, it was being renamed Exxon Mediterranean. Evoking a mythic sea 11,000 kilometres from the catastrophe was never going to be enough, especially with ‘Exxon’ still in its name. In Sekula’s gloomily un-Californian photograph, the vessel hulks like a paroled criminal hoping for a new identity in the far-off sun. Good weather has long been at the core of North American and Northern European idealizations of the Mediterranean. Vacations. Warm waters. Relaxation. The image was included in Sekula’s book and exhibition ‘Fish Story’ (1995). 30 years on, this photo-text epic of the sea stands as something of a stubborn prophecy, with its cautionary tales of trade wars, dangerous voyages of migration and ecological damage. While the myths of the Mediterranean persist in tourist propaganda, the region’s condition as a space of extraction, exploitation, difficult labour and geopolitical instability is now much more difficult to ignore.

Anastasia Samoylova, a resident of Miami Beach, depicts trouble in various wealthy paradises around the world. In 2022, sponsored by the high-end camera manufacturer Leica, she was in the monied playground of Monaco, that sovereign state on the riviera of fortress Europe. At the sea’s edge, she photographed downwards through lush vegetation as if from an overgrown castle. We see the azure water and the prow of a pleasure boat. The framing is pretty and the palette gorgeous, but the precipitous angle is just a little unsettling. An active mind will know the water that laps here also laps far less pampered parts of the Mediterranean. It’s the way a sea connects disparate places that gives it an unstable and disruptive power. It can sweep you away. Samoylova’s View from a Cliff, Monaco could be idyllic or nightmarish. She has made her name of late with knowing and calculated imagery benign enough to hang comfortably on the walls of those whose values she might just be criticising. Without captions her photographs permit one reading, then another. The word ‘Monaco’ in the title here could be enough to seduce her clientele into buying a print, while signalling something more damning to the rest of us. In these days of art as activism, the idea that ambiguity – unemphatic, risky, prone to complicity – could make for effective critique does not sit well with politically minded audiences wanting a clear position. But ambiguity is, in many ways, art’s most subversive if overlooked quality. It is also photography’s root condition.

It is 1,500 kilometres from Monaco to Sicily, the Italian island at the heart of Daniel Castro Garcia’s decade-long project, ‘I Peri N’Tera’. In 2015, the photographer was shocked at the BBC’s unsympathetic and racially stereotyping news coverage of two boats that overturned in waters between Libya and Italy, leaving hundreds dead. It prompted Castro Garcia’s layered account of migration and the lives it impacts. His project title is a Sicilian colloquialism meaning, ‘Keep your feet on the ground.’ He got to know 12 boys who had been rescued during dangerous sea crossings from north Africa, and were living in the Zingale-Aquino Reception Centre for Unaccompanied Minors in Enna, Sicily, where they awaited relocation. Castro Garcia’s photographs and short films move between documentary realism and metaphor, but he is always alert to what Walter Benjamin called the ‘dialectical image’, in which the paradoxes of a situation become startlingly clear. In his video Ibra and the Rescue Mission(2017), Castro Garcia collaborates with a young man named Ibra, originally from Gambia. He films Ibra as he watches on his phone a YouTube clip of a search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean, much like the one that brought him to Sicily. Ibra would view this footage over and over. It helped him to work through his trauma, allowing him to focus on his dream of joining Médecins Sans Frontières and aiding in the rescue of others. Castro Garcia invites us to watch Ibra watching this harrowing imagery with its unexpectedly cathartic purpose.

There is a similar double register in Alex Majoli’s trans-national project, SCENE (2011–19). Majoli takes his cue from Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, first performed in 1921. Its plot concerns a theatre director and actors who, while rehearsing, are interrupted by strangers. The presence of these strangers, with their complicated relationships and difficult pasts, forces the director to rewrite the script to accommodate them. The play is more than a theatrical game: Pirandello is interested in our relation to the demands of strangers and the adjustments we are obliged to make. How do we reset the ‘plot’ of our life, our society? The play within a play opens up an unexpected space to consider these issues.

A large part of Majoli’s SCENE concerns migration and, in 2015, he was based on the Greek island of Lesbos, which for reasons to do with European Union policy had become an eastern gateway for those wishing to enter Europe from Turkey. With a background in photojournalism, Majoli was searching for ways to balance the medium’s supposedly privileged access to actuality with something more theatrical that might counter the default visualizations of migrant and refugee experience. He took to using incredibly bright, off-camera flash in daylight, exposing for the highlights, and letting the rest of the scene fall into soupy darkness. His black and white images, some of which show people scrambling ashore from small boats, temper the evident urgency with something between crepuscular moonlight and an indoor stage. Yes, this approach runs the risk of inflecting real tragedy with art, but we’d do well to ask ourselves what kind of light is acceptable in photographs of such situations, if Majoli’s is not. Flash is part of most photojournalists’ tool kits, although generally it is used to fill in shadows, not transform the entire picture.

 

Photographs by the Palestinian-American Adam Rouhana also aim to resist familiar representations, although they could not look more naturalistic and easy going, but that’s precisely their point. His primary subject is everyday life in contemporary Palestine: its pleasures, its moments of imaginative freedom, the unlikely joys and bursts of good humour that are hard-won and cherished amid the ongoing brutalities. We have all seen images of Palestinian death and devastation. Rouhana’s photographs often show scenes of light relief, which in itself seems a determinedly political act of resistance and hope. Against the constant demonizing and dehumanizing, what could be more openhearted and human than joy and play? Some of Rouhana’s most ebullient images are of children and young adults having fun in the sea. Gaza has 40 kilometres of Mediterranean coastline. The sea here is itself an intensely militarized zone, with boat traffic and fishing constantly in the cross hairs.

Several years in the making, Rouhana’s project, titled ‘Before Freedom’ (2022–ongoing) and due to be published as a photobook soon, also includes scenes of occupation, colonization and the daily infringements that have made Palestinian life intolerable for so long now. What does it mean to make a book in the midst of such horror? Books carry with them a sense of posterity, of unknown audiences yet to be. That’s why we want to make them. And while we may own books, there is an implicit sense that they will not be destroyed, but will outlive us. We cannot say the same of magazines, websites or exhibitions, all of which feel more like finite events in time that come and go. As the photographer Dayanita Singh once put it, ‘A book is a conversation with a stranger in the future’.

Documentary form had reengaged its experimental roots over the last generation or so, coming close to British filmmaker John Grierson’s founding definition from 1928: ‘The creative treatment of actuality with a social purpose.’ Form is no longer a given, and this seems particularly so in contemporary representations of the Mediterranean. Exactly how it is to be pictured is by no means clear, or obvious. If there is a recurring motif across the great range of attempts to come to terms with the subject, it is the boat or ship. From overloaded crafts carrying migrants, to tankers, container ships, fishing vessels, tourist liners and military boats, nothing else seems capable of registering the movements – local and global, physical and economic – that make the region such a flashpoint. The late Jean Luc-Godard shot the first third of his drama documentary feature Film Socialisme (2010) on a real Mediterranean cruise liner, the Costa Concordia. A sort of seafaring Las Vegas, the ship – a limbo of unreal luxury – allowed Godard to string together observational and fictional material in a shifting film essay. The passengers included a United Nations official, a Russian detective, a war criminal and the bourgeoisie’s go-to bohemian poet-musician, Patti Smith. The ship docked in various ports but the consumer experience was fleeting, disconnected and bleakly alienated. Upon its initial release, this was also what I thought of Film Socialisme itself. It teases with occasionally profound insights into the complex determinations of modern life, while tipping into an incoherent cacophony of references and allusions. Two years later, I saw news footage of the Costa Concordia on its side in shallow waters off Italy’s Isola del Giglio. Its captain was soon prosecuted for manslaughter. Amid the geopolitical turmoil that was leading to the awful deaths at sea of so many migrants, 32 people lost their lives on a capsized luxury cruise ship. Suddenly, the mess of Godard’s movie made much more sense. A decade on, Film Socialisme seems to be undergoing something of a reappraisal as one of the more telling accounts of the multiple and conflicting determinants of the Mediterranean today.

 

One of the instabilities of lens-based images that we seem to take for granted is their loose way with scale. Not only do they show us things reduced (and sometimes enlarged), but the image itself can be scaled according to use. One moment it’s an Instagram post, then a billboard, then a page of a book or a magazine. Such promiscuity seems so normal that it takes a special kind of presentation to make us think about it. In 2001, Paola Pivi made Alicudi Project, a 1:1 sized photograph of a volcanic island north of Sicily. Although Alicudi is small, at about three kilometres wide, only a fraction of the complete image – which would require 3,750 scrolls, measuring a total of 500 x 1822.5 metres – can be exhibited at any one time. It’s an absurdist work but, like all good absurdism, there is something profound about it. In 2022, as curator of the exhibition ‘Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale’ at the International Center of Photography in New York, I presented two scrolls from Pivi’s Alicudi Project on the double-height wall of the main gallery – one of the few venues large enough to take them. Although pixelated, the image clearly showed a section of the island’s steep, rocky cliffside. One day, I brought a friend to see it. She looked it up and down and said: ‘Imagine coming all the way across the Mediterranean by boat and having to climb that.’

‘Black & White & Color’

by David Campany for True Photo Journal n. 11

Black-and-white and/or color? It’s a perennial question. Forty-five years ago, the cultural critic Roland Barthes wrote of color as “a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph […] an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses).” That’s a vivid and strange idea, and to a large degree it was generational. Born in 1915, Barthes would have seen color arrive and replace black-and-white on the cinema screen, in the illustrated magazines, family snapshots, and television. Even so, he was onto something quite profound. On your smartphone, if you switch a color photo to black-and-white you do sense a kind of coating being removed. Switch it back to color and, for a second at least, it will feel like over-painting, an excess being applied.

That notion of truth being black-and-white might also be generational. Color came first to the advertising and fashion cultures of distraction and fantasy. Documentary and photojournalism embraced it much later. Clearly, the world is not black-and-white, and a color photograph is richer in information and more realistic. But if black-and-white is thought of as beneath a color coating, it is understandable how this might play into the idea of truth underlying what is superficial.

In the analogue days, one had to choose black-and-white or color film. Some photographers worked with two cameras, shooting both. On my desk as I write, I have a copy of Life magazine from 1958 with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s mix of color and black-and-white pictures of China, and a Sunday Times Magazine from 1968 with Don McCullin’s equally mixed work from the Vietnam war. In the digital era, choosing between the two could not be simpler, technically at least, but it is noticeable how few contemporary photographers actively combine black-and-white and color.

Anastasia Samoylova is known for her sunny palettes that are a fairly accurate rendition of the sunny geographies she prefers to look at (tropical Florida and the American south). She has photographed more drab worlds – New York, Paris, London, Moscow – but she tends to include advertising billboards or store fronts within her frames, importing the full-spectrum dazzle of consumerism. Nevertheless, her main bodies of work, notably FloodZone, Floridas, Image Cities and the forthcoming Atlantic Coast all contain small but important numbers of black-and-white images. Sometimes they set the scene (the aerial views in FloodZone, her study of life at the forefront of climate change). Sometimes, they evoke classic documentary photography. Sometimes, they riff on the work of photographers in the modern canon Samoylova so admires (Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Berenice Abbott). But always the black-and-white amid the color unsettles, keeping us thinking about what color and its absence can mean and do.

Over a number of years, I came to know Samoylova’s work well through editing her books. From time to time I would suggest an image might be more effective in black-and-white, for itself and amid the color, as a kind of jolt or counterpoint. Initially this came as a surprise to her: editors do not usually suggest such a dramatic transformation of the work. But black-and-white soon became an important part of Samoylova’s fast-evolving practice. Last year I edited Adaptation, an overview of her work to date. At one point in the process, I assembled of folder of all her black-and-white pictures, and began to think of them as a body of work in their own right. Yes, there is certainly more restraint here than in her work overall, although that’s bound to come with draining out the luxuriant pinks, blues and greens. There is also a less contingent sense of time. Some of these photos and subjects look as if they could be decades old. Or shot yesterday. What you see here comes from that folder I put together, although I include one color picture to keep us on our toes, and within the fold of Samoylova’s way mixing things up.

I doubt there is much we can say in general about what happens when we glance between black-and-white and color. We have to think about it case-by-case, which is how we experience it. Nevertheless, I think an awareness of this phenomenon is always there in people’s minds to some extent. After all, in daily life we do still encounter black-and-white and color, even if they are uncommon in the same body of work.

Meanwhile, I notice a lot of contemporary movies are switching between the two, perhaps to distinguish dream or memory from waking life; or one place from another; or one character’s perspective from another’s. It feels contemporary but it has a long history. In The Wizard of Oz 1939, do you remember the transition from the black-and-white of Dorothy’s Kansas farmstead to the Technicolor of the yellow brick road? The farmstead interior was painted in shades of grey. Dorothy wore a black-and-white dress and black-and-white-make up. When she opens the door the colorful land of Oz really overwhelms. This was the very first color movie that millions of people saw. In A Matter of Life and Death 1946, the transition from monochrome heaven to colorful earth happens in a close up of a rose, blooming from clay-grey to bright pink on the lapel of a descending angel. “We are starved of Technicolor up there,” he sighs knowingly as he touches down in a moonlit summer forest. Is black-and-white a kind of starving? Of what? Color? Pleasure? The full life? Perhaps it is, but there’s a place for that, and you feel it when the color comes.

Three years after the opening of the main exhibition What does the picture do? The Museum of Photography in Krakow gives readers a book with the same title. However, it is not a classic catalog, but a collection of essays, articles and stories about photography, addressed to all those who like to take and view photos.

Among the authors answering the title question were: Aleksandra Boćkowska, David Campany, Jacek Dehnel, Weronika Kobylińska, Zofia Krawiec, Maciej Marcisz, Adam Mazur, Wojciech Nowicki, Kaja Puto, Radek Rak, Milena Soporowska, Filip Springer, Marcin Stachowicz, Monika Szewczyk-Wittek and Łukasz Zaremba. The texts cover a wide range of topics – from photography as a tool of expression and emancipation, through its role in shaping images and waging wars, to the relationship with artificial intelligence.

Published jointly with the Museum of Photography in Krakow

Trzy lata po otwarciu wystawy głównej Co robi zdjęcie? Muzeum Fotografii w Krakowie oddaje w ręce czytelników książkę pod tym samym tytułem. Nie jest to jednak klasyczny katalog, lecz zbiór esejów, artykułów i opowiadań o fotografii, skierowany do wszystkich, którzy lubią robić i oglądać zdjęcia.

Wystawa główna MuFo to jedyna w Polsce ekspozycja w całości poświęcona fotografii jako fenomenowi kulturowemu. Ukazuje widzom, jak od niemal dwustu lat medium to towarzyszy człowiekowi. Tytułowe pytanie, zarówno wystawy, jak i książki, skłania do refleksji na temat tego, czym jest fotografia, ale również jaki ma wpływ na naszą rzeczywistość. Książka zachęca do krytycznego patrzenia na fotografię, a tytuł Co robi zdjęcie?prowokuje, by udzielać własne odpowiedzi. To publikacja przede wszystkim do czytania, ale też do oglądania – teksty zostały uzupełnione bogatym wyborem zdjęć ze zbiorów MuFo i nie tylko.

W gronie autorów odpowiadających na tytułowe pytanie znaleźli się: Aleksandra Boćkowska, David Campany, Jacek Dehnel, Weronika Kobylińska, Zofia Krawiec, Maciej Marcisz, Adam Mazur, Wojciech Nowicki, Kaja Puto, Radek Rak, Milena Soporowska, Filip Springer, Marcin Stachowicz, Monika Szewczyk-Wittek oraz Łukasz Zaremba. Teksty poruszają szeroki wachlarz tematów – od fotografii jako narzędzia ekspresji i emancypacji, przez jej rolę w kształtowaniu wizerunków i prowadzeniu wojen, aż po relację ze sztuczną inteligencją.

Książka wydana wspólnie z Muzeum Fotografii w Krakowie

English language version below:

‘Do’

by David Campany

To think of photography as ‘doing’ something, doing anything, is to attribute to it some kind of animate agency which, of course, it cannot possibly have. Nevertheless, this kind of thinking is perfectly commonplace in the way we discuss technologies, particularly communications technologies (‘What does an iPhone do? What does the Internet do? What do headphones do? What does a typewriter do?’ And so forth). To ask what a technology or medium ‘does’ focuses us on those properties that we think are specific to it, or which it is best at, or commonly used for. But thinking about what something does is not quite the same as thinking about what it could do. And if we ask what something could do, we open up the gap between actual use and potential use. And what if photography had nothing to do? How would we then understand it? Could we understand it? Would we be able to envisage its potential differently?

To explore these questions, it is instructive to go back and consider the origins of what we think of as photography in the 1820s and 1830s. It was then that the already-known effects of light on certain chemical substances were combined with the already-known optical properties of lenses and the camera obscura.  Bringing these things together, as Nicéphore Niépce did in France and William Henry Fox Talbot did in England, gave rise to at least a general idea of photography and its condition as a medium. I will focus here on Talbot, for reasons that will become clear.

There is a lot of research being conducted at the moment into Talbot’s position as a wealthy man with connections to all the various technologies and natural resources that the new invention required (from lens manufacture and advanced cabinet making in London, to silver mining in Central America). Talbot was at the intersection of all the key technological and material components that made early photography and its standardization possible. Photography may not have been produced as a direct response to the demands of European capitalism, industry and empire, but its development and functions were certainly shaped by them (not entirely – such matters are never entire – but substantially). Talbot was also at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and various branches of new knowledge formation that were emerging from the industrial revolution. All this made him well situated to consider what photography might ‘do’ or, to put it more practically, what individuals and society might do with it.

Talbot attempted to speculate about all this in his remarkable publication The Pencil of Nature, issued between 1844 and 1846 in six parts, each containing four photographic prints paired with short texts. In these texts, Talbot explained the technical procedure of each image, but he also extrapolated what photography could be used for, and what its status might become within the arts and sciences. Perhaps because he so embodied the values of Victorian capital and industrialism, his list has proved to be uncannily prescient. He covered everything from classification, archiving, topography, social documentary, journalism and legal evidence, to art, promotion, and the making visible of things and phenomena beyond the reach of the naked eye. He considered the possible role of photography in the formation of knowledge and as a distinct aesthetic experience. He considered how photography might describe details in ways that are more practical, useful and engaging than either drawing or writing. He noted how, through the use of a negative, prints could be made from a single source in a potentially unlimited number. He noted photography’s potential use in the copying and replicating of documents. He noted its personal functions and state functions. He noted how photography’s perplexing tension between automation and intention, between cold fact and subjective wish or desire will never be fully resolved and will therefore remain a constant source of doubt and possibility.

Most importantly perhaps, in being a work of photography and writing, Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature foreshadowed in a profound way just how entwined with text the medium would become. Talbot understood that photography would not be able to ‘do’ much without the accompaniment of words. In fact, just about every field, institution and discourse in which photography would be given a role, would be ‘scripto-visual’, as the artist and writer Victor Burgin has put it.[i] The cultures of photography are really cultures of images and words combined. Of course, this is not to say photographs and writing are the same. Far from it. It is the specific differences between the two that are the foundation of their complex intertwining.

For example, photographs show (describe), but they cannot explain nor communicate intention with any great precision. Open the shutter and the world as light floods unbidden through the lens and onto the light-sensitive surface, containing quantities of visual information that can far exceed intention. This is an excess of potential meaning and function, and it is created every time a photographic exposure is made. The details of the image are specific in ways that its proposed meaning and function are not. A photograph, any photograph, can ‘do’ or ‘be’ many different things, and to emphasise one of those things over the others usually requires language, in one form or another. Remove the language and the image reverts to open ambiguity; change the language and the function or emphasis is changed.

Just as meanings and functions may change, photography’s technological basis changes constantly. However, this is not simply a matter of ‘development’ or ‘evolution’, as if there was some natural force at work. Changes need to be desired, although these desires can be quite inchoate and open-ended. One of the many genuinely profound things about photography’s technical advances is that their uses have far exceeded any of the desires that brought them into being. This is true for all mediums and their development, but especially so for photography. We could compare this to the invention of ‘radio’. It is said that upon Marconi’s successful receiving of a radio signal sent across the Atlantic Ocean, a journalist congratulating the inventor noted that one person could now communicate with millions simultaneously. One transmitter; unlimited receivers. This was a potential that had not fully occurred to Marconi, who had been focused on point-to-point signalling, one person or location sending a message to one other. For Marconi, radio had not been about what very soon came to be called ‘broadcasting’. Within a few years, the notion of ‘radio’ seemed inseparable from ‘broadcasting’. What a medium ‘is’ and what it can ‘do’ are not the same.

Such potential can lay dormant for very long periods before it is realised. In my book Photography and Cinema, I describe the example of what came to be known as ‘bullet time’, the cinematic effect by which a moving subject appears to freeze while a movie camera’s point of view moves around it or past it.[ii] The 1999 film The Matrix popularised the technique, and since that film was set in the future, audiences at the time assumed they were watching the very latest imaging technology, something that perhaps only the new digital possibilities could have brought to photography. In fact, ‘bullet time’ could have existed as far back as the 1880s. While Eadweard Muybridge is celebrated for his rapid, consecutive frame photography of humans and animals in motion, he also experimented with simultaneous photos shot by multiple cameras of the same moving subject. If he had animated these – turning simultaneous frames into consecutive frames with his primitive but effective Zoopraxiscope projector – we would have had ‘bullet time’ over a century earlier. So, while the technique had long been possible, it had not been imagined, not been desired. Quite why it came to be desired when it did (the mid-1980s), and quite why mass audiences were ready for it when they were (the late 1990s) are fascinating and important questions I must leave to others. But this is not an isolated example. It is perfectly commonplace. While we tend to think of innovation arriving with new technological forms, it can just as well come from older forms. In photography, there is nothing to foreclose an innovative use of the Daguerreotype, just as we cannot predict what image makers might do with the latest smartphone camera app.

There is a parallel here with what we might call the historicity of the ontology of the photographic image (please forgive this slightly awkward and contradictory phrase). If we look back at the various attempts to define photography, we can see that the task never quite escapes the social and psychological circumstances of those doing the defining. Just as photography was a product of its complex circumstance, so too have been the various approaches to theorizing it. For example, in his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (published in 1949 but written a little earlier), André Bazin argued that what distinguishes the photographic image is its status as a deathly trace of life that once was.[iii] Roland Barthes in his celebrated book Camera Lucida (1980) came to a similar conclusion. However, Bazin was writing in the traumatic aftermath of the Second World War, and Barthes was writing while mourning the death of his mother. In other words, both were expressing some kind of desire to hold onto and privilege particular existential aspects or potentials of photography. The medium really does have important functions in relation to loss and trauma, but that does not mean they are its ontological foundation. A child born in 2014 with a life far away from the experience of death may well have a very different take on what photography essentially ‘is’, but if her parents die suddenly or her community is plunged into war, then we would not be surprised to find that the preserving and memorial functions of photography come to the fore. The medium may switch overnight for her, from a means of ephemeral and light-hearted exchange with friends to the preservation of her past.

Very often, the new technological forms of photography have the retroactive effect of making the older forms seem simpler than they really were. The arrival of Photoshop seemed to make people think that its rapid facility with image alteration threatened the supposed purity and integrity of photography, especially in such fields as photojournalism.  The reality was quite the opposite. The era of Photoshop led to a re-evaluation of photojournalism’s past, revealing how commonplace retouching and other forms of manipulation had always been.  Moreover, Photoshop led to the establishing of a much tighter code of conduct for professionals, much greater vigilance and scrutiny around digital image manipulation in photojournalism, and thus much lower occurrences of it. (The overheated but undercooked debates about so-called ‘AI’ are also confused by this kind of retroactive misunderstanding.) The broader point, however, is that, as Talbot had pointed out, if photography is going to be classified as evidence, it will be “evidence of a novel kind”, and “what the judge and jury might say to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculation of those who possess legal acumen.”[iv] In the end, the image itself is not the testimony. Someone, or an institution, must make a claim on behalf of the image for its evidential status (language again). They can also do this on behalf of a sound recording, a drawing, or even a memory. Indeed, a child’s drawing of a witnessed event may turn out to be more significant as evidence than a photograph made by a professional journalist. Or it may not.

In a similar way, photography’s artistic or aesthetic potential will always be shadowed by its descriptive and evidential potential. It is significant that John Grierson, who coined the term ‘documentary’, described it as “the creative treatment of actuality,” with the understanding that any separation of objectivity and subjectivity would be absurd. Similarly, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and the photographer Jeff Wall have noted that even if a situation is staged in a highly artificial manner, the photographic image of it is a document of that artifice. In this way, all films and photographs could be understood as documents. The reverse is also true. Any image put forward for its evidential status will also have an aesthetic status, even if this is unmentioned or disavowed in its evidential claim. You get the idea. What a photograph can ‘do’ is bound to remain an open question.

[i] Victor Burgin, ‘Seeing Sense’ (1980), The End of Art Theory, MacMillan, 1986.

[ii] David Campany, Photography and Cinema, Reaktion Books, 2008.

[iii] André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1949), What is Cinema? Vol. 1, University of California Press, 2004.

[iv] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1844–46.

An essay on the relation between mid-century abstraction and photography Aperture magazine n.258, ‘Photography & Painting.’

Abstraction as Event. Event as Abstraction.

Every picture-constructing advantage accumulated

over centuries is given up to the

jittery flow of events as they unfold.  —Jeff Wall

This phrase seems a perfect description of the work of abstract painters such as Joan Mitchell or Jackson Pollock, who reinvented their medium to find different ways to get loose constellations of energetic, antifigurative marks onto their canvases. The quote, however, is from Jeff Wall’s 1995 essay “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” where he uses it to describe something quite different: the model of reportage taken up by many midcentury photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. Compositions could be snatched from the fleeting world in almost instantaneous acts of picture making.

On the face of it, Abstract Expressionism and photographic reportage seem to have nothing much in common beyond reaching their North American peaks in the 1950s. The former was a turning away from description and the activities of the outside world; the latter threw itself headlong into both. Each was doing what it was thought to do best in the decade when the modernist doctrine of “medium specificity” was at its most intense. Imagine a visit to the commercial galleries of New York showing almost nothing but abstract painting, then stopping at a newsstand to buy a daily paper or the weekly Life magazine full of world events frozen as pictures. Life was also where you might see a feature on the latest abstract painter, while crowds flocked to the Museum of Modern Art to see The Family of Man (1955), a world-conquering showcase for the populist art of reportage .Such is the powerful myth of that era, but it only takes a slight shift in thinking to see how deeply connected abstraction and reportage really were, and still are.

In his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters,” the art critic Harold Rosenberg noted: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. … What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” By “event,” he meant physical gesture: The daub, scrape, or splash on a surface now understood as a repository of kinetic traces. One could think of the photographic film in a camera in a similar way, as a surface on which events could leave their impressions. Abstract painting and reportage were circling around the challenge of making jittery flows visible.

Many photographers at the experimental edge of things were fascinated by this sidelong affinity with abstraction, and their work took two distinct directions. One of these was the pushing of photography’s powers of description toward material breakdown. William Klein’s New York photographs from 1954 to 1955 incorporate motion blur, grain, vague focus, thick shadow, and blown-out highlights. Such “mistakes” could be recoded as expressions of visceral and agitated city life. Klein had already spent much of 1952 in his darkroom, holding various opaque cards with holes cut in them over the photosensitive paper, moving them around under the enlarger’s light to produce black-and-gray shapes over white backgrounds. Out in the world, it was the same swirling energy he was after. Roy DeCarava’s New York images from this time express something similar. Acres of deep, impenetrable shadow could be offered up as metaphors for everything from Black consciousness dodging the glare of white media to the compositional abstractions of jazz.

Robert Frank was finding his own ways of intertwining description with abstraction. Trolley Car, New Orleans(1955), the signature image from his book The Americans (1958/1959) is a remarkable example. The bottom of the picture presents a monochrome rendering of the painted side paneling. Through the middle runs a sequence of square portraits (white passengers at the front, Black at the back, in accordance with the racism of the time), while the panels along the top resemble a strip of 35mm frames of varying degrees of abstraction. Frank’s intention here is not the issue. Having seen and framed the situation, he captured it all in a fraction of a second, making the picture’s order all the more extraordinary Abstract painters in the 1950s were exploring what was called “all-over” composition—flat and anti-hierarchical, with incident scattered evenly across the surface. A photograph, regardless of what’s depicted, is captured when the world as light leaves its mark on the evenly primed film. An all-over canvas might take a while to complete, whereas photography is all over in an instant, so to speak.

The second dialogue with abstraction at this time involved close attention to casually haphazard marks found around cities: spilled house paint, torn posters, patches of graffiti, and the ad hoc appearance of trash and construction sites. In his photo-essay “Color Accidents,” published in the January 1958 issue of Architectural Forum, Walker Evans noted that there were public walls offering as much visual fascination as anything on view in the upscale galleries. All one had to do was look carefully, and pick them out with a camera. Aaron Siskind, in his exacting photographs of blotches and daubs, was explicit in his homage to gestural abstraction, particularly the angular, black-on-white strokes of Franz Kline.  Straight and true, this was photography’s way of invoking the abstract without having to give up its special capacity for realist description.

Siskind’s work resembled not abstract painting itself, but abstract painting as it looked on the printed page. Rosenberg makes this point in Siskind’s book Photographs (1959), observing that “the printed page is where today most people see the paintings that they see.” In reproduction, all art is converted into image, unmooring it from its scale, materiality, and context. Painting, sculpture, photography, and even performance art are lent a spurious kind of equivalence on the page.

Reproduction was also an issue for Ernst Haas, who for decades photographed every kind of abstract-looking surface using his beloved 35mm Kodachrome transparency film. Good prints were almost impossible to make from these slides—the nuance of his colors was often lost in the chromatic sludge of page reproduction. Life made a fine attempt to print his New York color work in two issues in 1953, but Haas came to the conclusion that the ideal format would be a slideshow, where the images would be pure light, scaleless and immaterial. He worked on this slideshow for years, sequencing the visuals to music by the avant-garde composer György Ligeti and titling it Abstract (1984). Although Haas experimented elsewhere with distortions such as blur and long exposure, there’s nothing particularly abstract about the images in the slideshow. They are all correctly focused and exposed, and most of the time, it is fairly easy to identify the subject matter.

So, what makes us feel these images are somehow connected with abstraction? It might be the flatness and lack of perspective, combined with the scale of subjects, which implies Haas was about as far away from what he was photographing as we might stand while viewing an abstract painting. Geometric pattern and apparent formlessness also tend to get labeled “abstract” when seen in photographs. The world of photography is a little cursed by loose adjectives. We often hear images described as “painterly” or “abstract,” but painting can be so many different things, as can abstraction. Nevertheless, the vagueness can help suggest connections and overlaps.

Saul Leiter’s photography of the 1950s and 1960s is often described as painterly, but if it means anything, it is in relation to his two great influences, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. These were painters whose use of color threatened to overwhelm the figurative aspects, a red wall or a yellow curtain becoming its own near-abstract shape. Leiter began as a painter and that sensibility never left him. It’s there in his photographs, which offer lush or solid color as phenomena about to separate from worldly description. It is also there in his creative desire to paint over certain photographs—obscuring details, pushing the image beyond the machinic, adding texture to the industrial gloss of the print. The paintbrush and the mark of the hand can compensate for the glassed-off, hands-off stare of the lens. These works by Leiter are not like the kinds of painting indebted to photographic realism, nor are they like photography attempting to be “painterly” (whatever that means). They are their own rich and generative hybrid.

As with abstract painting from the 1950s, the photography that was in dialogue with it feels very much of the era. And yet, work so specific to its time always has a certain intensity that causes reverberations. Whenever the word abstract is invoked in relation to either painting or photography, that 1950s moment is never far away.

 David Campany

Photographs by Txema Yeste. Essay by David Campany. Publisher ‏: ‎ RM; Bilingual edition (English/Spanish) (April 1, 2025). Language ‏: ‎ English. Paperback ‏: ‎ 96 pages. ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 8410290049. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-8410290044. Dimensions: ‎ 8.46 x 1 x 12.8 inches. 

Needles of the Afternoon

Let us begin somewhere else. In the book The Sculptures of Picasso, published in 1949, there are some intriguing photographs that appear to be there to make us wonder what photography is, what sculpture is and how strangely and beautifully intertwined the two can become. After about thirty pages, the photographer Brassaï (Picasso’s good friend) shows us in close-up what looks like a twig, or maybe it is an old cigar, with one end resting on a matchbox. Is this really a sculpture by Picasso, or is it a casual arrangement that Brassaï happened to notice somewhere in the corner of the artist’s studio? Were the objects placed with some kind of sculptural and artistic intent, or is it Brassaï’s camera and the resulting photograph that make them feel sculpturally significant?  Photographs intensify, turning objects into signs of themselves. Dramatic and enigmatic signs. A few pages later, we see a flower shaped from paper, its stem pushed into the end of a crusty baguette, like a little plant in a pot. Surely, none of those material objects lasted very long. It is photography that hold their forms in place and give them permanence. But even in such permanence, such holding, photographs can summon for us the fragile and ephemeral nature of things.

Well, even if you have never seen that book, I am sure can understand why it might come to mind when looking at Txema Yeste’s Needles. Both come from, or suggest, a similarly fluid and hybrid kind of art making. Somewhere between image and object, found material and formed material, accident and intention, physical space and pictorial space, observation and creation. And yes, there’s the same gentle, unnameable collaboration between sculpture and photography. Sculpture with an eye for how the cameras sees things; photography with an eye for how an object might present itself. Yeste is both sculptor and photographer here, which puts him in a long and rich tradition of artists who have combined the two.

Part of the pleasure of Yeste’s work is its sense of play, which of course means play for its own sake. The French cultural critic Roland Barthes once wrote that the most playful and therefore the most human gesture he could think of is the striking of a match for no reason beyond simply wanting to see a flame spark into brief life and die between one’s fingers. A little stick of wood from a tree. That flame should be kept well away from dry pine needles, but Barthes’ insight is important here. When would we light that playful, pointless match?  In a moment of boredom, perhaps. In a moment when we are alone. In a moment when matches are plentiful. In that part of our day between obligations, when time stretches out and play can take over. I may be completely wrong but I am guessing this is the kind of mental time in which Yeste played with those needles and made these photographs. And I’m guessing it was in the hours of the afternoon.

It does not matter whether or not it was really the afternoon. This the mood and the sense of time Yeste suggests. Long afternoons with nothing more to do than play. He may not have been alone. There may have been others around him, but again that’s not the point. The work evokes solitary creation. An activity seen only by the artist. Pine needles seen only by the artist. Sculptural and photographic decisions taken alone. Even so, the camera brings something of the time of creation to us. I am reminded of the much-loved series of photographs by Peter Fischli & David Weiss in which they pass the hours in their studio balancing everyday objects precariously on top of each other. Their camera acts as a kind of visual brace, fixing the assemblages as images. (It is fitting that the duo named their series Stiller Nachtmittag. Quiet Afternoon.)

At times, Yeste’s needles look more like wire, evoking the work of the sculptor Alexander Calder, who had a very similar sense of play.  At other times, the needles suggest the simple line drawings that Picasso and Matisse would make daily.  But whether they look like wire or drawn lines, the pine needles always look like pine needles too. It is not a matter of transformation but of keeping the material reality and the poetic suggestion alive, together.   Every single pine needle is recognizable as a pine needle, and every single one is unique. Moreover, each one can present itself to the camera in infinitely different ways.  A needle might be curved but appear quite straight when seen from a particular angle, and perhaps only its shadow will reveal its hidden form. This is in part why the shadows seem to be as important and the needles in these images.

We think of the camera recording ‘things’ –-objects, spaces – but in truth all it records is the light that bounces of those things, gathered by the lens and projected onto the light sensitive surface. The result is a perfect illusion, and not unlike eyesight itself. Our vision does not reach out and touch things, the way our fingers do. All we ‘see’ is light. Perhaps this is why shadows are no more or less material than anything else we see. And in photography, it’s all just a matter of light and dark, all shadow play. As images, Yeste’s needles seem to enjoy their moment. They know they are mere needles, but for a fraction of a second, they know that can resemble ballet dancers, or athletes, or children, or lovers, or lone wanderers. Isn’t that the miracle of all figurative art?

‘August Sander’s Open Work’ is an essay commissioned for a publication coinciding with an extensive presentation of Sander’s portrait project People of the 20th Century at ParisPhoto, November 2024.

August Sander’s Open Work

David Campany

August Sander’s epic People of the 20^th Century is often described as a typological study of the German people, which would imply a somewhat rigorous and cold method in its making. While there is something of this in Sander’s adoption of societal positions as his organising principle, the portrait photographs themselves feel far from systematic. Each one is the result of a unique experience between the photographer and those he photographed. Each has its own nuance, its own aesthetic charge, and its own sense of what a portrait can be. Sander’s work would be less rich in possibility, and far less enduring if he had imposed a tight system (photographing as if for a medical institution or police department, for example). Instead, what we find as we move between the project as a whole and each image in particular, is a series of unresolvable but generative tensions: between social structures and individuality, between outward appearance and inner life, between portraits as artworks and documents, and between a rigid social order and something much less stable.  (Of course, it is not lost on any of us that Sander was working at a time of tumultuous change.)

While People of the 20^th Century is now among the most canonical projects in the history of photography, this does not guarantee any consensus about its meaning. It remains a touchstone because its significance cannot be fixed or foreclosed. We can agree upon the importance of the work but not upon its interpretation. This is why it continues to be so keenly debated and written about to this day. Indeed, People of the 20^th Century has become a case study in the ways a body of photographs can renew itself across time and across cultural contexts.

Some years ago, I was giving a talk at a school of art and design in London.[i] The school had had no specific photography programme, although most of the students engaged with the medium in one way or another. I arrived a little early and visited the library. There, I found a heavily used copy the grand book of Sander’s project, featuring 431 images, published in 1986.[ii] It looked like an old and well-thumbed telephone directory. Who at this school was so interested in it? I asked a librarian. The book had been borrowed most often by fashion students. I was surprised, then embarrassed at my surprise. Sander’s work is bound to lend itself to a great range of interests, far beyond the world of ‘Photography’, capital ‘P’. Fashion students have as much of a claim to it as anyone. Nevertheless, could we ever know exactly what a fashion student gets from these photographs? It may be information about how Germans dressed in the early decades of the last century, but it may be other things to do with the histories of gesture and posing, or the appearance of fabric when photographed in black and white, or something much more indeterminate.

In 1929, Sander published a sample of sixty of his portraits as the book Antlitz der Zeit [Face of the Time].[iii]  We can imagine Germans measuring the images against their own experiences, and their own varied conception of themselves in that complex historical moment. Sander’s work was a contribution, perhaps even an intervention into the conflicted idea of modern national and European identity. Even so, we have no real idea who was buying the book or what they made of it. Of course, as time passes, images cannot be measured against experience so readily, and they run the risk of being slipped into the role of a simplified substitute for the past. Perhaps any photograph has a greater chance of becoming an authoritative document as it ages, but in important ways Sander’s project has proved resistant to this.

Two of the most significant essays on photography from the inter-war era responded to Sander’s first publication. In ‘The Reappearance of Photography’ (Hound & Horn, October 1931), the American Walker Evans noted: “Antlitz der Zeit is more than a book of “type studies”; a case of the camera looking in the right direction among people. This is one of the futures of photography foretold by [Eugène] Atget. It is a photographic editing of society, a clinical process; even enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so called advanced countries of the world have not also been examined and recorded.” In ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ (‘Little History of Photography’) published across three issues of Die Literarische Welt (18 and 25 September, and 2 October, 1931), Walter Benjamin wrote:

Works like Sander’s can accrue an unexpected topicality overnight. Shifts in power, such as have become due in our land, foster training and make the sharpening of the physiognomic perception of vital necessity. Whether people come from the Left or the Right, they will have to get used to being inspected for signs of provenance. And they will in turn have to scrutinise others. Sander’s work is more than a picture book: it is an atlas of exercises.[iv]

It is notable that Evans and Benjamin do not refer to ‘art’ and in fact neither were much concerned with photography’s status or acceptability as an art form. If photography could make itself significant in an intelligent and critical way, that would be more than enough. The art part could be left to take care of itself. What made photography truly modern by the 1920s, particularly in book form, was that it existed at the free intersection of so many discourses and frames of reference. Since the medium had penetrated almost every sphere of society – from art and design to sociology, biology, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, journalism, politics and more – Sander’s work could be read through the prism of any number of them, and simultaneously, in unpredictable ways. In belonging to no particular context but invoking so many, a book of photographs could dramatize this sense of radical possibility and make it an interpretive challenge. This would require a reader/viewer willing to spend some time with the work, rather than trying to consume it quickly, as with an illustrated magazine.

The German version of the Sander book I had seen in that London art school appears in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987). Two angels are wandering the divided city of Berlin. Unseen by the living they watch as the citizens go about lives, caught between the upheavals of the past and the uncertain future. In the grand Staatsbibliothek an old man is seated at a reading desk looking through the book, an invisible angel at his shoulder. The man is old enough to have been one of the three young farmers on their way to a dance in 1914, who can be seen in the much-loved image on the book’s cover. As he looks at the portraits, he ruminates on the nature of history and his own life, and we are given to see Sander’s work not as an uncomplicated record but as a set of images to be read in open dialogue with their original time and with the contemporary moment. “What is wrong with peace that its inspiration does not endure and that its story is hardly told?” the man asks himself. Wenders cuts briefly to old newsreel footage of the human carnage left by a wartime bombing raid. The generations caught up in that conflict are fast dying out and direct experience of it has all but disappeared from our culture. But in this brief and simple scene, of a man weighing the pictures against his past and present life, something of the eternally provisional nature of Sander’s project, its speculative and inconclusive power, is permitted to surface.

As I watch that scene of turning pages, with one image replaced by the next and the next, I wonder: what is the relation between individual pictures and the full extent of a photographic project?  In 1951, Sander wrote to a friend:

A successful photo is only a preliminary step toward the intelligent use of photography. …I would very much like to show my work again, but I cannot show it in a single photo, nor in two or three, after all, they could just as well be snapshots. Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse.[v]

Even though his images are extraordinary (and much more than ‘snapshots’), we can understand this resistance to showing them individually. Yet, this does beg the question of how photography ‘en masse’ is actually looked at and engaged with. Is it a matter of taking in many individual images and allowing the impressions to accumulate? Is it a matter of suspending response to (or judgment of) a single image and deferring instead to the totality? Is the autonomy and ‘composition’ of each image to be subsumed in the heteronomy and composition of the whole oeuvre?

Perhaps the enigmatic mental path we take between the one and the many is a special form of montage. Conventionally, montage is understood as a rejection of the single photograph in favour of a synthetic combination of fragments (think of the political photomontages John Heartfield was producing while Sander was making his portraits). However, in their number and sequence images can be made to modify and modulate each other. They appear as single works and as elements of a larger whole. This is something Walker Evans carried forward in his first book American Photographs(1938), and you can see the debt to Antlitz der Zeit. Like Sander, Evans was also keen that whatever individuality his photographs possessed should be seen in relation to the wider presentation (the dustjacket of his book even carried a warning: “These photographs are arranged to be seen in their given sequence. They demand and should receive the slight flattery of your closest attention.”)

Essentially, there are two ways to edit images: the sequence and the set or album. Sander’s project belongs to the latter. While his social categories and subcategories were vital, it appears he had no strict image-by-image sequence in mind, although most presentations default to chronology. Beyond the page, what about the space of exhibition? Small groupings? A single line? Distinct grids? A total grid? If the whole project cannot be shown, by what criteria should the images be selected? I have known August Sander’s work for many years and have seen various configurations of it on the walls of galleries and museums. Each has had its own merits. What is important, however, is that the principles of the project are honoured while allowing its essential generosity to be an invitation to new audiences and new interpretations. While People of the 20th Century emerged from a specific time and place, its unpredictable and open significance continues.

[i] I first recounted this incident in ‘Yesterday’s Everyday and the Depiction of Work’, in Sergio Mah. ed., The Everyday, PhotoEspana, 2009.

[ii] August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs 1992-1952, MIT Press, 1986.

[iii] August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit, sechwig aufnahmen deutscher Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Transmare Verlag, Kurt Wolf Verlag, 1929.

[iv] Walter Benjamin, ‘Small History of Photography’ (1931), in Ester Leslie, ed., and trans., On Photography, Reaktion Books, 2015, p. 87.

[v] August Sander, Letter to Abelen, Jan. 16, 1951, cited by Ulrich Keller in August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century Portrait Photographs 1892-1952, MIT Press, 1986, p. 36.

Contributors (in order of appearance):

• Irina Rozovsky With Tim Davis
• Collier Schorr With Elle Pérez
• Lee Mary Manning With Charlie Porter
• Ernest Cole And Lindokuhle Sobekwa
• Nick Sethi With David Strettell
• Magdalena Wywrot With David Campany
• Peter Tomka With Sammy Loren

Order here

In a small apartment in the city of Kraków, Poland, Magdalena Wywrot raised her daughter, Barbara, making photographs of their life together whenever she could. Over many years the images accumulated, until Barbara reached the age of 18. The project is called Pestka, Polish for ‘seed’, or ‘kernel’ – a mother’s affectionate name for her daughter. This is all the back story you are getting, because that is all I know, or want to know, and I think it is all you need to know.

Magdalena sent a me a folder containing about seven hundred photos. You might think that’s a lot, but how many do mothers take of their children?  Thousands, I would imagine. Mostly, such images are sentimental or plain boring, significant only to those involved. Clearly, Magdalena’s are much more than that. They overflow with energy and enigma, with wisdom and wonder. When I first saw them, they astonished me. I looked at them daily for a long while. Then, Magdalena texted to ask if I would try to turn them into a sequence, something that might become a book.

Could I piece together a narrative of the life of these two people? No, not really. I could intuit that Magdalena and Barbara shared a deep sense of exploration and theatre, and between the lines I felt there were moments of pain and difficulty. But what shone through was a feeling of profound affection between people and for life itself in all its fragile, difficult beauty. Either I could have asked Magdalena hundreds of questions or I could have asked her nothing at all. I decided to ask nothing. These pictures don’t need explaining or accounting for. They don’t need the facts of a biography, nor a declaration of intent. Without all that, we have the pleasure of looking and responding for ourselves. On her rather elusive website, Magdalena has a brief statement:

In my opinion, the Earth is an incredible laboratory, in which we are destined to spend only a fraction of a second in the immensity of the universe. Everything we witness, experience and create belongs to us, regardless of what happens after our death. Life is like a vicious crazy circle, the madman’s dream. I am trying to capture the moment between dreams and reality cleanness and dirt. What I value most, is distortion – both in art and in life.

The words confirm what is there in the work: a spirit that is existential, even fatalist, with a survivor’s tenacity and a poet’s eye for the redemptive transformation of life’s raw material.

Over time, I selected and sequenced around one hundred and twenty images, and sent a PDF to Magdalena for her thoughts. “You understand my art and my life. Thank you,” she wrote. I don’t think I do understand her art or her life but, in a way, understanding is not the point, and barely even a possibility. I suspect art and life are never really understood, not even when they are our own. Yet, sometimes, if one is lucky, one can get a glimpse of the art of another human being in a way that is enough to help give it the form it needs. In essence, I think this is my role as an editor.

The Los Angeles publishing house Deadbeat Club, run by Clint and Alex Woodside, understood Madgalena’s photographs, and knew immediately what the book needed to be as an object. Restrained, richly printed, and bound simply. Every decision serves the work, serves the artist’s vision. When a book is ready, it goes into the world to belong to the lives of others, and perhaps not even to those who made it. Pestka, the book and the daughter, will be let go, to find homes of their own. I don’t know what Magdalena thinks about this, and I don’t know what she will do next, but I am grateful she made these images, and grateful the book exists. There’s a part of me that wishes I could tell you more (I’m a writer, after all) but anything else is interpretation, and with photographs as engaging as these we can all do that.

Floridas: Walker Evans and Anastasia Samoylova

by David Campany

In the mind’s eye or with a camera, Florida is almost too easy to picture. So much about it is unnervingly photo–ready, like it’s all been seen before and primped for the hungry lens. This is probably why so many Florida images simply confirm what the world thinks it wants of it: a tropical paradise, tourist excess, shopping and the good life. Nevertheless, the place is as complex and contradictory any, so how does a serious image maker go beyond the clichés to express something deeper? Walker Evans, a giant of 20th century photography, documented Florida over several decades. Anastasia Samoylova has lived and photographed here since 2016, quickly becoming one of the region’s most celebrated artists. Although generations apart, their sidelong and gently ironic take is a welcome invitation to look again, and think again about what is just below the surface of the sunshine state.

A young and ambitious Walker Evans first visited in Florida in 1934. By then, it was already a winter haven, with a real estate boom and bust that had contributed to the financial crash of 1929. Always counter-intuitive, Evans felt the larger situation might be glimpsed in the smaller details of Florida’s daily life. What he explored prompted him to list his themes:

People all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out. Automobiles and the automobile landscape. Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, the city street atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women’s clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay. The movies. Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amusement, do for relaxation and not get it. Sex. Advertising.

He seems sardonic here but he was after some critical distance, in the way America’s better artists and novelists always are. Taking the cultural temperature means looking at the overlooked. A hand-painted shop sign might say more than portraits of celebrities or politicians. A common shack or caravan always appealed to him over a slick hotel or new mansion. Between the early 1930s and the early 1970s he returned to Florida often, shooting color and black & white, and on Polaroid film. These visits refreshed his eye and sharpened his sensibility. At times, he even put down his camera to paint in a simple vernacular style.

Anastasia Samoylova’s first response to Florida was a series of sumptuous collages, made by painting over photos she was shooting as source material. When Hurricane Irma struck in 2017, she ventured into the aftermath, taking striking photographs that worked in their own right. The dissonance between an idealised southern Florida and the realities at the forefront of climate change was unsettling, like a mental collage lived daily. It led to her breakout book, FloodZone (2019) an extraordinarily complex and nuanced take on fragile beauty. Meanwhile, Florida was becoming a touchstone for national debates about politics and culture. Samoylova embarked upon countless road trips, covering every corner from the southernmost Keys up to the Forgotten Coast. Through it all, Walker Evans’ acute eye was her chief guide. She even visited the legendary Rybovich family boat works in West Palm Beach, which Evans had photographed for Fortune magazine back in 1961.

Wary of being overly ‘arty’, both these photographers prefer to meet the world head-on and look it in the eye. Their subject matter is usually central in the frame and the edges are a surgical cutting out of a portion of the world. In this way, things can be studied closely until they either offer up their secrets, or deepen their mystery. “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more,” Evans once said. “Die knowing something. You are not here long.” He and Samoylova rarely chase after anything fleeting. Instead, they move stealthily through places, finding telling vantage points from which to look.

Contemplate something for long enough and it can becomes trangely enigmatic. What does Evans’s photograph of a lion on a torn circus poster mean? Is it a symbol, an allegory, or just a poster? All three, probably. In Orlando, Samoylova noticed a building with a typical mix of styles – Mediterranean, Cuban, Anglo-American. In reality it is the facade of an outdoor mall, an architect’s attempt to conjure up a cultural melting pot in the service of retail and leisure. The ‘Cuba Libre’ café, bottom right, and the 1950s-style Havana belle, top left, are joined by a patchwork of elements in fake-worn yellow, reflected blue sky, and that ever-present Florida pink. She composes her frame to invite scrutiny and a slow unravelling. Look closely and in this one image you will find the rich narrative of Florida’s past and present. In photography all we have is appearance, gossamer thin. The trick is to make appearance hint at the depth of meaning it encodes.  

I have written books about Walker Evans, and for a number of years I worked closely with Anastasia Samoylova. It seems so unlikely that the art of someone born in St Louis in 1903 could chime so deeply with the work of one born in the Soviet Union in 1984. Clearly, something about Florida focused their sense of themselves as artists, and as people. We cannot know for sure what it is. I suspect it is to do with the way this place stimulates the eye and the mind in slightly different ways.  It can make one truly think about looking, about pictures, about seductive surfaces of the world and what they can tell us. Yes, you can get this anywhere but in Florida it comes at you with almost too much intensity and visual noise. It takes artists of fine visual attention to distil it for us. 

Lee Friedlander’s The Little Screens

Commissioned by Stefano Tonchi for The Wrap Book vol. 2: The Art of Television

 David Campany

Taking photos of our hotel rooms is a minor ritual most of us enjoy. It’s a way to mark our presence without marking the room itself, to which we lay only brief claim. Whether it’s for ourselves or to share with others, documenting our temporary surroundings comes as naturally as noting the fixtures and fittings. Bedside lamps. Mirrored closet doors. Impersonal tables, functional chairs, and bad art reproductions on the walls. But let’s face it, our photos are mostly as generic as those interiors.

Back in the early 1960s, documenting one’s hotel room was uncommon, but the photographer Lee Friedlander was making a habit of it. It wasn’t just the rooms that interested him. Each of his images included a television set broadcasting a face, or a random arm or leg. Muted and stilled by the camera, these ghostly emanations of the entertainment industry seemed to haunt the lonely spaces. At that time, photography was hardly being taken seriously as an art, and Friedlander’s witty but bleakly uncompromising efforts didn’t appear to be helping. But he was onto something and he knew it. For decades, his mentor, the photographer Walker Evans had been photographing the modern world’s growing addiction to the mass media. Edward Hopper, by then in his final years, was still painting the everyday sadness of hotels. Meanwhile, the emerging Pop Art was in thrall to trashy TV and the flood of disposable images. The time was right.

In February 1963, Harper’s Bazaar published a suite of Friedlander’s photos under the title ‘The Little Screens’. Amid the bright fashion imagery they looked especially eery. Walker Evans penned a pithy introduction:

The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, spanking little poems of hate […] It just so happens that the wan reflected light from television boxes casts an unearthly pall over the quotidian objects and accoutrements we all live with. This electronic pallor etiolates our bed boards and pincushions […] it is a half-light we never notice, as if we were dumbstruck by those very luminous screens we profess to disdain […] Here, then, from an expert hand is an account of what TV-screen light does to rooms and the things in them. The human denizens are purposely left out. In this atmosphere of eclipse, the sense of citizen presence is actually increased […] For the thousandth time, let it be said that pictures that are really doing their work don’t need words.

Television was the invasive ‘little screen’ dislodging cinema’s ‘big screen’ from the center of culture. Moreover, television was also trouncing the popular illustrated press. LIFE magazine, which had dominated American culture since 1936, folded ignominiously in 1972. Photography had survived the ascendance of cinema but, consciously or not, Friedlander seemed to be forcing it to contemplate the ubiquitous TV. Imagine him alone in those rooms, camera in hand, waiting for just the right screen image to flicker past. Silencing television’s noise and rendering it immobile, photography could have the upper hand, at least for a fraction of a second.

Lee Friedlander was young when he made these photos, but his star was on the rise. Today it is rising still, and if anyone can claim to be America’s greatest living photographer it is probably him. Not that he would presume such an accolade. He is also the least egotistical of artists, keeping his head down, making the thousands upon thousands of images that amount to a profound and unexpected chronicle of our strange times. His abiding fascination is with the hectic and cacophonous world. Its busy interiors and disorienting streets, the mish-mash of buildings, and the endless flotsam of consumer culture. But photography is an art of selection, and Friedlander is still finding angles and moments from overlooked life, to contemplate it, and even appreciate it.

Over sixty years on, those little screens still burn bright. Yes, we can assume almost nothing we see in Friedlander’s frames has survived the decades of built-in obsolescence and profit-driven renewal. So, there’s a nostalgia here, for sure. Even so, the sensibility Friedlander was expressing remains perfectly contemporary. We still visit hotel rooms, and they still have TV’s and bad decor. The screen images glow before fading from memory, as we head for the check-out desk.

The British photographer Brian Griffin died on January 29. It is fair to say he wasn’t a household name, but the outpouring of feeling has been intense, particularly among fellow photographers. They knew how good he was, and how unique he was.

Griffin theatricalized and dramatized things you wouldn’t expect to receive that kind of treatment. Boring men in suits. Offices. Sliced bread. Familiar streets. He could make you feel, usually with a sense of comic surrealism, the gap between his mundane subjects and their wild transformation into unlikely but compelling images. Life is boring and must be elevated, if only to laugh at how boring it really is. Maybe that’s a kind of working-class humour. Maybe it’s to do with coming from Birmingham, one of the most tragically boring cities in the UK, and hence one of the most creative.

Talks by artists can be terribly boring, making us regret ever wanting to know more than the art might give us. But very occasionally, an artist makes a presentation that is unforgettable. In 1988, as an undergraduate student I went to London’s National Portrait Gallery to see Brian Griffin present his new photographs. I knew a little of his work, including his striking cover for Joe Jackson’s album Look Sharp, and some strange and stylish portraits in dog-eared issues of Management Today. Griffin had been photographing Broadgate, a postmodern Gotham-style development in London’s booming financial district. A spotlight hit a lush red curtain, and into it he stepped, wearing a showman-vampire cape, which he removed and cast aside in one suave gesture. To the right, a second spotlight picked out three musicians (Elvis Costello’s super-tight band, The Attractions). A pulsing rhythm and big, stabbing chords accompanied even bigger images – square, black & white, and vivid. A Hasselblad medium-format projector clunked beside me in the audience, throwing a dazzling sequence of photographs at the stage. And Griffin, swaying gently, began to sing his presentation. Yes. Sing. “The Big Tie Came Down on Broadgate!” The photographs he showed that night had been a commission, but they were clearly brimming with Griffin’s own visual panache and puckish wit. Through his eye, a Thatcherite amalgam of office blocks looked for all the world like a combination of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the setting for some absurd but dark ritual. Given how the shamelessly greedy the finance industries were, this seemed about right.

Griffin was a true original, a photographer who had somehow invented himself as an act of pure artistic will and survival. In the early 1970s he had studied with Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows, but none of their parochially limp realism seemed to rub off on him. Looking back (with a better sense of photo history than I had as a student), I now see that his frame of reference was the European modernism of the 1920s and 30s: the New Vision, Surrealism, expressionist cinema, and the vivid industrial photography that could make you worship an office desk or rack of test tubes.  Back then, many of the most significant photographers had no regard for boundaries between art and commerce. Some were pivotal figures in the avant gardes while also being well-paid image makers. Photography was understood as the promiscuous scrambler of distinctions and hierarchies. But the British art and photography scenes have never really grasped this, and Brian Griffin never received the full recognition he deserved.  He was, by far, the most creative and singular photographer to have emerged from the bleak and backward visual landscape of ’70s Britain.

Key to Griffin’s early development was the always surprising work he was able to make for Management Today, a magazine not exactly regarded for its visual flair. He developed a canny knack for turning corporate board members, union leaders, scientists, factory workers and their products into disarming and sometimes extravagant tableaux. His camera craft was impeccable, and it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. It led to shooting now-famous record covers for the likes of Kate Bush, Depeche Mode and Siouxsie and the Banshees. He moved into film, making commercials and music videos, but always came back to still photography, publishing over twenty books. My students adore his work.

Griffin’s photographs were up in the clouds of imagination, but in interviews and in-person he was down to earth, and quite devoid of pretension. Create your work, create yourself the best you possibly can, but stay grounded. The wilful creativity and restless invention came from knowing the alternative could well be life in a factory.  He was tireless and hungry, driven almost maniacally at times to make the very best images he could. The result is a body of work that will last. Of course, it helps that the photographs, like the man who made them, were always slightly out of time to begin with. Perhaps that’s how it is with true originality.

 ‘Heads Up, Heads Down’ by David Campany

You may have noticed that Rulx Thork describes himself as a rather shy person.  This may or may not come as a surprise. Either way, it is worth taking a pause to think about this. In a time when the worlds of art and photography seem to be full of loud and brash personalities, Thork’s shyness is something of a quiet blessing. I say this not to speak on his behalf but because there is a long and important history of shy people turning to the camera and becoming very great in their individual ways, particularly in the area of community-centred observational photography. Many of the image makers Thork himself admires, from Jim Goldberg, Larry Clark, and Diane Arbus, to Arlene Gottfried and Nan Goldin essentially began this way. Maybe their public confidence grew as their work found recognition, but their desire to photograph, and their ways of growing in the process, came from a shy place.

One advantage of shyness is that it allows for curiosity without imposing on the world too heavily. I see this when you look at these photographs. There is a deep affection for people, for a sense of place and time, for details and daily dramas small and large, for the gentle rhythms and energies between people on the street, and in their homes. But there is no judgment, no commentary beyond what the photographs allow us to see.

The psychology of observational photography is so complex. The photographer has to feel both deeply connected and a little separate. Just separate enough to make the image as good as they can make it, while being there in the unfolding flow. The glass lens and the open aperture of the camera permit connection, but they also permit distance. When the photographic observation is really acute, viewers can feel or at least intuit what was going on. Sometimes, Thork’s photographs have such a natural and unforced intimacy that I almost forget he was there. Very often the images appear to have no ego at all, just a profound sense of occasion that comes from feeling, knowing, that nothing is more important than everyday life.

We are all encouraged to be ‘mindful’ these days, to be aware of ourselves in the moment. It is hard to argue with that because it is such lovely idea. But I think that what makes us human is that we cannot ever be fully in the moment, fully in the here and now. Sure, we exist in the present, but we are also creatures of memory, and of hope, of longing and daydreams. Past, present, future. I think shy people know this and feel it deeply. To be shy is to be not quite present, feeling the passage of time, anticipating what is ahead, sensing it come into the here and now, and continuing into the past. Maybe you can see what I’m getting at. The shy photographer anticipates, readies himself to press the shutter when the moment comes, but knows that once the photograph is taken it belongs to the past. This can happen in just a few seconds. Or minutes. Or hours. Or years.

It is true that photographs cannot really explain what they show. In calming the motion and the noise for just a fraction of time, they offer us a world silent and still. That is their gift. What I have come to admire in Rulx Thork’s images is that they do not fight this. There is so much to look at and think about here, so many layers and possibilities, so many aspects of perception, so much human biography, social setting, political consequence, and aesthetic charge, that there is no need for the photographs or the photographer to explain anything. What is important is that Rulx Thork was there, not so much as a witness, although that’s part of it, but as a sensitive respondent – open, sincere, caring. In turn, his photographs invite us to respond openly, sincerely and with care. The quality of our response is set by the quality of Thork’s tender observation.

He has been looking around for a long time now, and he has kept his head down. I mean this not just in the sense of looking down into the viewfinder of his camera. He kept his head down and got on with his work. Year on year, his pictures accumulated. The earliest here are from 2005, the most recent from 2018. The photography got done. He has an archive and it is ongoing. There are more books to come. He has had some showings of his work here and there but shyness can have its own long-term reward. There is no guarantee a photographer’s work will find its appreciative audience, no matter how great it is, but there can be no chance of that if the work has not been made. Rulx Thork’s archive is something to celebrate.

And then there’s the sense of loss, of things having slipped away or been taken. Moments. Relationships. Lives. Thork’s photographs of memorials – candles, informal shrines, newspaper headlines – are threaded through this book like incantations of love and grief, pain and anger. But in a way, every one of these photographs is a memorial. An act of homage. A gesture of safekeeping.

‘Off the Wall’

by David Campany & Sara Knelman

Alluring Deceptions

David Campany on the work of Valérie Belin, FT Weekend, May 4/5, 2024

 

Untitled, from the series Michael Jackson, 2003. Gelatin silver print, 63.4 x 49.2 inches.

Untitled, from the series Michael Jackson, 2003. Gelatin silver prints 63.4 x 49.2 inches.

In 2003, the artist Valérie Belin made a series of photographs of Michael Jackson lookalikes. Not the preternaturally gifted child Michael, but the troubled, older megastar. We can assume the lookalikes never met him. They were mimicking an image, or an amalgam of images. Jackson was probably the most recognisable person on the planet, although his fame was inseparable from the lurid spectacle of his physical shape shifting. What was going on with his face? Plastic surgery? Good old-fashioned cosmetics? Photoshop? He seemed in a permanent state of transition. A morphing icon. Many people made a living as Jackson impersonators, but they had to select a look from the evolving catalogue. In a white studio, Belin portrayed a handful of them under stark light as they struck a classic 1990s Jackson pose. Her photographs add to the disturbing hall of mirrors. They also allow us to contemplate it at a chilly distance.

Based in Paris, Belin has been interested in this kind of alluring deception for over three decades. Her work has been celebrated in France although it is less known internationally, but this is changing.  The daily platter of contrived celebrity culture, coupled with the widespread desire to brand oneself in the online visual marketplace has made Belin’s circumspect approach entirely refreshing. This month she is to be honoured as Master of Photography at Photo London, with a major exhibition surveying her work.

Untitled, from the series Crystal 1, 1993. 29.5 x 19.7 inches

Belin’s interest in the way photographs present and package the world is often right there in the titles of her series. Stage Sets, Masks, Brides, Models, Magicians, Mannequins. She established her concerns in 1993, photographing cut glass objects against deep black backgrounds. Since glass is transparent, we see not the object itself but what it reflects and refracts. Pure light. In this sense, looking at glass is not unlike looking at a photograph. We see the light that has bounced off the world and passed through a lens to form an image. Then, our vision passes through the non-existent surface of the image to land on… what, exactly? Every photograph is illusionistic and glassed-off, accessible but ultimately elusive. It’s what makes photography so vivid and yet so deathly and phantom-like. Of course, none of this bothers us most of the time, but Belin wants to draw our attention to the strangeness at the heart of the matter.

Bodybuilders 1999 was her first series depicting people. Pumped-up men and women stand before her exacting camera and inscrutable eye.  “I’m not really a portraitist,” she tells me from her Paris studio. “I photograph groups, types, more like a scientist.” Her images deflect from any psychological insight into her subjects. Contemporary art photography is dominated by confessions and promises of revealed inner life. Belin resists all that. What is it bodybuilders do in competition? They show off their toned forms by holding silent poses to be viewed from particular angles. In other words, they aspire to become photographs. Almost. In Belin’s hands the whole situation is disarming, leaving the over-fortified bodies looking unexpectedly vulnerable.

 

Untitled, from the series Bodybuilders 1, 1999. Gelatin silver print 39.4 x 31.5 inches.

 

Untitled, from the series Mannequins, 2003. Gelatin silver print 39.4 x 31.5 inches

Mannequins 2003 updates the Surrealists’ obsession with fake female form. “I came across a suite of hyperreal mannequins. They had been developed using casts of actual bodies,” she explains, “which is almost a 3D version of photography.”  Her photographs evoke a sales catalogue or window display, but their impersonal sheen pushes any realism into the uncanny. Two decades on, the mannequins and her pictures of them look as if they could have been generated entirely by AI. Camera technologies have always been in flux, but Belin’s artistic career maps almost exactly onto photography’s ever deepening connection with the digital and the virtual. Should a photograph refer back to some concrete reality that we’d like to think was ‘there’ in the visible world? Or, is the medium so entangled with pretence and artifice, and so integrated into networks of computation that its reference can be only to other images? Belin saw these questions coming.

While her work can involve careful post-production, it always begins with something in front of her camera, something she has seen and decided to explore. “I’m not interested in generating just with a computer,” she tells me. “I want to start with reality, and then push photography until it comes close to pure image.” Invariably, however, what attracts her in the real world comes with its own complicated reality. What is a lookalike, a mannequin or a bodybuilder if not an aspiration to transform, or become something else? When Belin photographs shop windows or theatre sets it is with the understanding that their purpose is to be made over into other spaces, of fantasy and suspended disbelief. In 2001 she photographed transexual people in the early stages of transition, one set of visual characteristics giving way to another. Photography’s traditional function of defining and fixing appearance comes undone.

‘Beltline Burger, Atlanta’, from the series Reflections, 2019. Pigment print mounted on Dibond 68.9 x 52 in.

The key influences for Belin have been the Baroque, with its love of excessive visual ornament, and Minimalist art with its emotional restraint and detached air of seriousness. She relishes the tension, offering visual immediacy only to unsettle and leave things ambiguous. Belin is not out to ingratiate, but she is interested in the way our image world is nearly always about ingratiation. With their centred subjects and large scale, her exhibition prints hang on the wall with the swagger and confidence of classical painting. The grand size is used to invite a closer look at the smaller details, which often undo the first impression. The nearer you get, the less sure things become. Is that real hair on the mannequins? Is that a reflection in glass or a double-exposure?

  

‘The Girl Who Never Died’, from the series Heroes, 2023. Pigment print 68.1 x 51.2 inches

‘Lady Heart’, from the series Heroes, 2023. Pigment print 68.1 x 51.2 inches

For Belin, the other important aspect of the digital era is the seemingly endless availability of past culture. Films in cinemas used to come and go, as did broadcast television programmes. Magazines and newspapers would be consumed and discarded. Today, past and present are equally accessible online, and permanently there. History feels less like perspective lines disappearing into the past than a dense layering, one thing seen flatly through another. For a few years now, Belin has been making layered works. The latest series, Heroes 2023, is a group of eight portraits, although what is being portrayed remains deep in a forest of signs. The points of reference appear to come from theatre with its dramatic make-up, and mime, an art of pretence as mute as photography. Starting with a traditional portrait sitting, Belin then builds up a digital collage with fragments of images from different eras. At the centre of each picture is not so much an individual woman as a swirl of associations. Film noir. Detective comics. Theater programs. The feel is not exactly ‘retro’. There is something perfectly contemporary about these works, formed by our present means of retrieving the past.

The fate of photography is clearly up for grabs, and it has as much to do with what we might want from it as what technology will do with it. This is how it has always been. Whether we are right to feel it more acutely today is yet to be seen. In the meantime, an exhibition of the work of Valérie Belin is a provocative place to think about it all.

Book specs:

Page size: 8.2 x 7.2 inch / 20.9 x 18.4 cm.  Page count: 36. Paper: 170g coated.  Binding: clothbound hardcover black cloth, white foil stamping. Printing: Offset Tritone with matted inks and matted varnish.

Printed by Steidl, Göttingen – Germany

Essay by David Campany

Published on the occasion of:

Robert Frank, The Americans, 1954-1957. 84 gelatin silver prints on Agfa paper 12 x 16 inches (30.5 cm x 40.6 cm), each sheet. Each signed. Printed by photographer Ed Grazda, under Robert Frank’s supervision, in 1983. One of three 12 x 16-inch sets, two of which reside in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France. All photographs © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation

Text © David Campany

The Instantaneous Reaction to Oneself

by David Campany

The phrase ‘instantaneous reaction to oneself’ is pure Robert Frank. As with his photographs, his choice of words could feel disarmingly simple, but with endless depth. He used this particular expression in a statement published in US Camera 1958, accompanying a portfolio of the photographs he had made on the road in the USA. Here is a longer extract:

With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. The view is personal and, therefore, various facets of American life and society have been ignored. The photographs were taken during 1955 and 1956; for the most part in large cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and in many other places during my journey across the country. My book, containing these photographs, will be published in Paris by Robert Delpire, 1958.

I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.

Born in 1924, Frank had come to the USA from Switzerland in 1947. His now legendary road trips, which began eight years later, supported by two Guggenheim Foundation grants,were in effect his discovery of the extent of the country, its appearance and its conflicted values. His photographs really were his instantaneous reaction to it all, and to himself. They have been described often as moments between, rather than ‘decisive moments’. This is not quite true. Frank was decisive, extraordinarily so, but decisive about his need to express mixed feelings, and doubt. He seemed to have attuned himself to finding a vantage point and pressing his camera’s shutter when the emotions pulled in different directions at the same time. There was no other way to describe what he saw, and express what he felt about it.  

In his first few years in the USA, Frank had worked commercially for American magazines, notably Harper’s Bazaar under the guidance of its art director, Alexey Brodovitch. But he sensed what he really needed to do was beyond commercial commission. “I didn’t want to produce what everybody else was producing. I wanted to follow my own intuition and do it my way, and not make any concession—not to make a Life story. . .  Those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end.” He had insisted in his Guggenheim application that his project needed to be “essentially elastic” and would “shape itself as it proceeds.” So, with a proposal to make a “broad, voluminous picture record of things American” and a 1950 Ford, he began.

Many photographers have spoken of what driving for long periods can do to the visual imagination. There are times when it becomes trancelike. There are also times when the landscape rolling by can make the photographer intensely aware so that when they step from the car, they are hypersensitive to the world around them. The switch in tempo, from driving with hands on the wheel to walking with hands on the camera, can be dramatic. Indeed, Frank hadn’t even owned a car until deciding upon the trip. The thrill of mobility was new and led to a heightened feeling for the motion of driving and the edgy stillness of photography. Fixed, but like a frame from a movie.

From the start, Frank knew the project would become a book and Robert Delpire, the French publisher, had committed to it. When the shooting was complete, Frank went to Delpire with what was very close to the final selection of photographs and a strong sense of the sequence. In the course of an afternoon, they made a few changes. In many ways, the final book is not ‘of’ the work, it is the work. That is to say, it was in becoming a book that Frank’s project found its form.

He had shot around 28,000 frames in total, which is roughly 780 rolls of 36-exposure film. His book, Les Américains, published in France in 1958, contained 83 images. That is a shooting ratio of 337:1. One frame for every nine or ten rolls of film.  In his introduction to the US edition, The Americans, published in 1959, Jack Kerouac compared Frank’s sensibility to a jazz musician. Indeed, four ground–breaking jazz albums appeared in 1959: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. Bebop had exploded, with space opening out to take players and listeners down side roads and byways. But underneath was a pulse, or at least the intimation of one. At a formal level, Frank’s photography was a visual equivalent to this music. Confident yet unpredictable, he could weave around his chosen motifs: ragged American flags, lone jukeboxes, glowing television screens, automobiles, and rich people looking as cut-off and lost as the poor. He became alert to the way the background and foreground of daily experience could switch without warning. Out of the humdrum, the unexpected lunged forward. Behind a glowing starlet at a Hollywood premiere it is the common faces in the watching crowd that are in focus. Under this tarpaulin is a car but under that one, perhaps a body. From Frank’s underlying sensibility sprang great fountains of visual invention, existing from moment to moment through wits alone. And between the instants, he was able to evoke the miles and miles, the hours and hours of tedium on the road.

Frank used his camera like a needle flickering on the dial of the everyday, registering the tiniest tremors. It was startlingly supple. None of his pictures are obvious or familiar. He was after something else. Such photography is exhausting to make. It takes a toll on the body and nervous system (years later he recalled, “I was in good shape back then”). Frank had held it together long enough to produce an anti-epic of troubling, bitter, angry and yet melancholy beauty. The debt to his mentor Walker Evans was clear enough, but Frank rejected a cool and dispassionate gaze for a vision so wilfully subjective that each image seemed as much a record of his own state of mind as a report on the world.

While the cultural influence of Evans’s vision has been slow and consistent over the years, the impact of Frank’s work was much more immediate, traumatic even. The initial response to The Americans was, as is now well-known, deep shock. It was not possible to be indifferent. For some, that shock led to outright rejection. Bad photography. Ugly. Uncouth. Unamerican. Communist. For others, it was a shock of recognition. A sudden and unignorable confrontation with what had been hiding in plain sight amid the country’s self-deceptions and advertised myths of happy success. However, in the decades since its publication, the cultural status of The Americans has all but reversed. Today, for a nation slowly reckoning with the 1950s as a period of profound tension and simmering problems, Frank’s work stands as something like the new official account of how things were. The intensifying of the civil rights movement, the growing unease with disposable culture, and the realisation of just how raw and anti-social the country is for most of its citizens… Frank saw it all coming.

Within a few years of its publication, many photographers were trying to work in the manner of The Americans but it was really too complete, too closed, and too tied to Frank’s own specific being. In its unlikely perfection, the project was definitive and beyond imitation. Afterwards, Frank pursued photography much less intensively and committed himself to filmmaking. Around a decade later, it was through collage, montage and the use of text that he established a hybrid form for himself that seemed somewhere between still photography and the cinematic. Sometimes his images from the road found their way into this newer work. It was as if, like everyone else, he was still coming to terms with their power.

It is fitting that the only addition to the set of 83 images was a print Frank made in 1978 to appear at the end of the sequence in the publisher Aperture’s twentieth anniversary reissue of The Americans. The print comprises three consecutive frames from a roll of 35mm film. In the first two frames we see Frank’s young children and wife huddled, loving and vulnerable, in the front passenger seat of their car. It is parked on the roadside of nowhere in particular. In the third frame, taken at a dusty rest stop, there is an oversized sign: TRUCK RATES. Over the bottom of the image Frank has written ‘ANDREA, MARY AND PABLO, TEXAS 1956’. He had rediscovered his whole project in a three–picture haiku.

No doubt The Americans is absolutely of its time in North American history, in art history, and in Robert Frank’s own history. Even so, it continues to resonate profoundly with new audiences and old. And, since there is no time travel, there must be something beyond all the period detail that still feels contemporary, that speaks to us now, in our moment. That ‘something’ is partly to do with The Americans being art of the very highest standard. Such work is never confined to its original moment. It is also to do with the bitter feeling that the USA really has not made the progress it could have, should have. It might even be slipping backwards. Decades on, looking at these photographs can still feel like an instantaneous reaction to ourselves.

Date: 2024
ISBN: 978-0-9569085-5-1
Dimensions: 208x260mm
Pages: 300
Edition: 400
Softback
English & Arabic
Essays by David Campany & Will Self

Book available here

Anton’s hand is made of guilt. No muscle of bone. He has a Gung-ho Finger and a Grief-stricken Thumb. is a research-based documentary project, a novel, a journal, a lipogramme and an imaginary anthropological study in one.

It is a multifaceted body of work, which includes original photographs, archival photography and images researched from private Islamist, Libyan and dark web forums. It is also accompanied by album of probing soundscapes exploring the everyday experiences of a war correspondent as well as a book of drawings of war scenes (collector’s edition).

Developed in north Africa from 2019-2023, this part-documentary, part-speculative project is based on a poignant and very personal story and experience: the death and disappearance of Edgar Martins’ close friend, photojournalist Anton Hammerl, during the 2011 Libyan war. The book responds to Anton Hammerl’s disappearance/death through an examination of the geography, players and circumstances surrounding his demise as well as a reflection on the decisive but paradoxical role that photography has played in conflict zones.

Through a meta-representational approach that looks beyond the referent – which Martins terms ‘impossible document’ – this publication represents an ambitious attempt to develop a visual lexicon that can be used as a representational and pedagogic tool to interrogate and document modern conflict as well as the spectacle of photojournalism.

About the Author
Edgar Martins is visual artist woking across different media. His work is represented in several high-profile collections, such as those of the V&A, RIBA, the Dallas Museum of Art; MAST , MUDAS, Modern Art Centre Lisbon, MAAT, Fondation Carmignac, amongst others. He has published over 16 books which were met with critical acclaim and exhibited internationally. He was selected to represent Macau (China) at the 54th Venice Biennale.

About the Writers
David Campany is a curator, writer, and Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography, New York. For his writing, he has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, the Alice Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society award.

Will Self is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing.

I Saw Right Away that He Was Not There’

by David Campany

In 1962, Michelangelo Antonioni concluded his film L’Eclisse with one of the most sublime and troubling codas in all cinema. The protagonists in the story are a couple in the midst of a slowly disintegrating love affair. Almost exhausted, they agree to yet another rendezvous. Alle otto. Solito posto. (Eight o’clock. Usual place.) The film fades to black, then fades up in that place, and we see once again the streets and the buildings we have come to know over the previous two hours. Antonioni cuts between almost static details. A curb. A tree. A wall. Slowly, a doubt arises. The couple may not have kept their promise to show up here, but the film has. The film is present, and so are we. Invested, hopeful, anticipating. Pregnant with open meaning, the shots continue. A traffic sign. A window. A parked car. The sequence goes on far longer than we are used to in cinema. Several minutes. Water dripping. A lawn. Another tree. Each shot comes with its ambient sound. No dialogue, no music.  Finally, we must accept that there is nothing to anticipate. The couple will not appear. Instead, we are left to contemplate their absence, the void of their world. They are elsewhere, and in all likelihood they are not together. We are here, in their former place, imagining the couple’s separate places. Three geographies. Four, if we include wherever we are watching the film. Have the couple left an impression here where they used to meet, or is the impression merely upon our memory? Will the memory fade?

This may seem a strange place to begin a set of reflections on Edgar Martins’ project Anton’s Hand is Made of Guilt. No Muscle or Bone. He has a Gung-ho Finger and a Grief-stricken Thumb. Nevertheless, it is what came to mind when he first showed it to me. On the floor of my sitting room in east London, Edgar patiently laid out the many small prints in a provisional sequence that eventually would become the book you are holding. One by one, he placed them in rows, unfolding before my eyes like a cinematic montage of discrete elements. Several types of imagery and details – some grouped together, some overlapping – began to appear. I watched in silence. “I don’t know what I need to tell you,” he said.

“You don’t need to tell me anything, but tell me what you want to tell me.”

“Well, there’s a search, for a person, my friend Anton Hammerl, a photojournalist who was killed in the 2011 Libyan civil war. No grave and no body have been found. I went looking. But there’s also a photographic search. A search not just for images but for what we want from images… the promises they make… at some point these searches became inseparable for me… Anton was gone… there would be images… maybe of him… maybe of people like him… of places and situations he had been in or might have been in. People he knew.  I could go there, and also I could look online. So that’s what I did. And now all these many parts are coming together.”

I suddenly realised that although Edgar’s varied practice has taken many directions over the years, it has always been a search, or a double-search: for an elusive subject and for the elusive heart of photography. It is a medium he loves and mistrusts, but he cannot walk away from it. (Perhaps this is what photography is for so many of us). Even the titles of his projects and books, stretching back over more than two decades, signal this searching. Black Holes and Other Inconsistencies. The Diminishing Present. When Light Casts no Shadow. The Wayward Line. This is not a House. The Time Machine. The Rehearsal of Space & The Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite. Siloquies and Soliloquies on Death, Life and Other Interludes. What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase. I could go on.

So, maybe it wasn’t such a leap to be thinking of the end of Antonioni’s film. It makes us believe in people until we cannot, then makes us believe in images until we cannot. And we go on needing both. Edgar tells me of the point at which his search for Anton’s remains came to an end. The trail simply ran dry, but he could not stop. He bought mobile phones on the Libyan second-hand market that might have had memory cards with images of the conflict. He photographed places Anton was known to have been in at one point or another. Rooms. Trees in the desert. Edgar entered the ‘dark web,’ searching countless unnamed folders for images of the civil war, and of Anton.

As more and more of the sequence was elaborated across my floor, it became clear that Anton was not going to materialise, but something else was emerging. We might call it the form of an absence, or the outline of a desire, or even the shape of a trauma. For all photography’s claims to disclose, to show, what we think of as ‘the real’ is always that which escapes comprehension, and so escapes representation. The real is the absence, the desire, the trauma. The real is not so much the goal of a search as its motivation. It initiates the search. The real is the jolt to go looking. Edgar laid out more images (it is a big book, as you now know) and involuntarily I recalled a vivid passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:

I have an appointment with Peter at four o’clock. I arrive at the café a quarter of an hour late. Peter is always on time. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room and I say, “He is not here.” Is there an intuition of the absence of Peter, or does the negation come only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak of intuition here, since there cannot be an intuition of nothing, and since the absence of Peter is precisely this nothing. Everyday language, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, “I saw right away that he was not there”?

That’s twice already that my mind had drifted from Edgar’s sequence and from the Anton I never knew. Was this unethical, given the seriousness of the subject matter? I’ve learned to trust such drifts, so I mention them both to Edgar. He has not seen L’Eclisse and the Sartre passage is new to him, but he grasps the resonance and makes mental notes. We talk about the value of metaphors, and how they help us to understand things like searches, and the factual enigmas of photographs that seduce, or entice, or shock while being unable to tell us what we most want to know. Metaphors are there to help, until they do not, or until we do not need them.

Looking closely at the rows of images, my mind drifted yet again. In every generation, a film adaptation is made of HG Wells’ classic story, The Invisible Man. In one of these adaptations there is a street scene where wind whips up lots of bits of paper and blows them against the body we cannot see. Suddenly we can make out his outline. I suggest to Edgar that this too might be a metaphor, perhaps for his approach, perhaps for the absent Anton. On this point Edgar grows silent for a moment, but replies to it later, via email:

I really like the idea of the images, work, narrative and things depicted in the images being the leaves that form the shape. But then I also recalled that scene from American Beauty, you know the one, with the guy’s home movies of things blowing in the wind (plastic bags and leaves, if I recall…). I was thinking that as beautiful as the metaphor is, leaves on the floor seem somewhat unimportant and aleatory and to some degree random and fleeting. So, if the work and everything in it is the leaves, I’d probably say they are very specific leaves. Maybe the leaves that have fallen from one of the trees I photographed, that mark the places where atrocities took place or that guide people through the desert, or the hill Anton died on, or that covered the mass grave he was purported to have been buried in. I suppose what I mean is that as much thought went into selecting the people and places I did photograph as those I chose not to, disavowed or found ‘surrogates’ for. I hope that makes sense… Even behind every seemingly unrelated or random web photo there was a concrete intent to search for a photo of Anton. Of course, there are elements in the work that are a tad more aleatory. I’m thinking specifically of the found photos. What resonated to me with these is that there is also a search of some kind that underpins them and which intersects with that particular time and place. Above and beyond this there are images specifically inserted into the work that are only there to destabilise our reading and the certainties we demand of the act of looking. But these are few and far between and the goal with these is primarily to question our convictions and expectations.

There is little doubt this project is Edgar’s most personal. The kernel of its unrepresentable real, the death of a friend in unknown but hostile circumstances, is something he has felt acutely, perhaps the to the point of unsettlement or even delirium at times. But this is not a fully private matter. Many people want to know what happened to Anton, and to others. And all of us want to know how to conduct a search, especially when there is no certain way of doing it.

I could have begun my writing here another way,  perhaps with the idea of documentary, but even then we would soon be facing these same challenges. The term documentary is misleading, but it shouldn’t be. The Scottish film-maker John Grierson is credited with coining the word back in 1928. He described is as “The creative treatment of actuality with a social purpose.” Just eight years later, in his 1936 essay ‘Popularity and Realism’, the anti-fascist writer and cultural critic Bertolt Brecht laid out the urgent and difficult task of representing an increasingly unpredictable world:

With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not […] derive realism as such from particular existing works, but we shall use every means, old and new, tried and untried, derived from art and derived from other sources, to render reality to men in a form they can master. […] Our concept of realism must be wide and political, sovereign over all conventions.[i]

In other words, Grierson and Brecht understood documentary and realism as necessarily experimental practices, riven by complexities and unknowns which ought to be embraced as generative. Documentary and realism require guesswork, speculation. In other words, they are arts. They require risk and not just from the maker, but from audiences. Form is not to be assumed upfront and simply applied to subject matter. Rather, form has to be found and fought for in the midst of the search. (There is an important parallel here with the origins of the essay, a kind of writing understood from the outset as necessarily risky and without fixed form. We derive the English word ‘essay’ from the French ‘essayer’: to try; to try out.)

Brecht was writing during the rise of European fascism, but also in the year of the founding of Life, the North American illustrated weekly current affairs magazine that, perhaps more than the many others, squeezed out the experimental basis of documentary and realism. In the hands of the mass media and the populist press, documentary and realism were streamlined to a formula reliant on spectacle, sentimentalism and voyeurism – easy for audiences to consume, almost passively. There was plenty of resistance to this, sometimes from within the mass media itself, but mostly from the margins. Then, as the power of the magazines dwindled (Life finally folded in 1972), television took over with its own formulas for documentary and realism. These reigned until the break-up of broadcast TV by the bespoke media consumerism of the internet age. Although it doesn’t often feel like it, one blessing of this has been a returning of documentary and realism to their experimental roots. There is no longer a default form and as a result there is a more open attitude to what documentary can be, needs to be, albeit with more limited outlets.

We can certainly see the recent renaissance of the experimental documentary photobook in these terms, the innovations of which have even influenced the illustrated press that survives in the wake of television and the internet.  Experimental form has also been documentary’s ticket into the institutions and discourses of art, having been all but banished from them for several decades. I have come to understand much of Edgar’s work and his broader trajectory in this way. I don’t know if he sees it similarly.

For every photograph in the world, past and present, there is or was someone who could say something on its behalf. Where it was taken. What it shows. What the broader context was.

Photographs cannot do that for themselves, as they are so easily cut off, so easily orphaned from those who might be able to supply the missing information.  What a photograph in isolation powerfully describes it equally powerfully fails to account for. This is why so much photographic culture has evolved, both in the mainstream and the margins, as image-text practices of one kind or another, and as practices of accumulation. One photograph is never enough.

I often hear photographers describe themselves as ‘visual storytellers’ (Edgar does not consider himself one). It’s an attractive label but also somewhat misleading. A still, mute photograph, extracted from the noise and continuum of life is the gift (or problem) received in exchange for letting go of the story. The photographer’s storytelling then involves the overcoming of this letting go, usually through words and sequencing, but the overcoming is never complete, and to pretend it is complete is folly.

The authority suggested by an image is only ever dependent. William Henry Fox Talbot, in 1844, described photography as “mute testimony”, offering “evidence of a novel kind”, adding that “what the judge and jury might say to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculation of those who possess legal acumen.” He knew there and then, right at the beginnings of photography, that matter would never resolve. For Talbot, the novelty of photography was its existential relation to what was before the camera, or at least to the light bouncing off it, passing through the lens and registering on a light sensitive surface. This is what came to be called photography’s indexical character, which involves not just a causal relation between referent and image, but a mechanised, automated relation that is substantially beyond intention or will. No painter would bother to put all that detail there unless they were aiming for photorealism. And no words could very well describe it.  The photograph will register more detail, more information than anyone could have wanted, and this excess will somehow underscore its reality effect. But a reality effect isn’t reality. It’s an effect and it needs support if it is going to be anything other than a seductive enigma. Here is the artist and writer Victor Burgin:

[n]ews reports that refer to images of a massacre but with the caution that the veracity of the images ‘cannot yet be confirmed’. This has become a familiar refrain throughout the reporting of the recent and ongoing conflicts in the Arab world. The image is never enough, at some point someone has to step forward and say: ‘I was there, I saw this’ – and then even this statement has to be interrogated and either substantiated or denied by others […]  The most epistemologically profound register of the indexical is discursive and affective, the optical is quite literally superficial.[ii]

Indeed. It is not as if journalism, or reportage, or documentary, or realism began with photography. There was writing, there was drawing, and there was the eye-witness account. It could well turn out that photography’s special claim in this arena was a distraction, rooted in its labour-saving mode of description.

But we are still left with the rend, the inevitable tear between the image and what it can be made to mean, between the visual and its textual supplement, or saviour.  Edgar and I continue to talk about this as we look across the growing sequence on the floor. How is the meaning of an image modified and enriched by its placement next to another, or even under another? What is the difference between a glance between images across a page spread, and turning the page to pass over one image for the next? What writing would help? What writing would hinder?  Can a photograph, so clearly out of its originating context find a meaningful place in a new one?

In the end the artist can only do so much with their material. They make the work but not the meaning, which is the privilege and the obligation of the viewer/reader. The musician John Cage once called it ‘response-ability’. The ability to respond, but also the responsibility to respond. Any meaningful practice asks us to consider what is being described, how it is being described and to recognise the parameters. If the realist project is an experimental one, it is going to require experimental audiences.

[i] Bertolt Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism’ (1936), in Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs, Aesthetic and Politics, New Left Books, London, 1977.

[ii] Victor Burgin, ‘Other Criteria’, Frieze magazine, April 2013.

Ernst Haas’ most cherished and personal project—originally conceived as an audiovisual slideshow—is recreated here in stunning color that will delight his numerous fans as well as anyone interested in Kodachrome photography.

‘Looking back’ is such a powerful, loaded, layered expression, but it might be a way in to Amin Yousefi’s enigmatic Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth. What are we looking at here? A set of photographs, upright, ‘portrait’ format, of people. There are levels of optical interference. The images might be taken through a magnifying glass, or a loupe for looking at small details, and it also feels like a telescopic sight of the kind one might find attached to a long-range precision rifle. The images feel mediated through the dot matrix of halftone printing. At the centre of each is a face, sometimes a man but not always, picked out from a crowd. The angle of view is somewhat downward. The faces look up from their huddled, energetic groups. The eyes are looking into whatever camera it was that took the image. The mediated treatment gives an air of surveillance, perhaps, but it is not clear if it was that kind of ‘gaze’ that motivated the original images.

Yousefi writes: ‘I want to find my suspects like a detective among the revolutionaries of Iran in 1978–1979. The Iranian revolution stands as a paramount milestone in the Middle East over the past five decades, exerting multifaceted ramifications that have reverberated throughout the region’. The artist was too young to have been there. He has rephotographed images from books: David Burnett’s 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World; Michel Setboun’s Days of Revolution; and Kaveh Kazemi’s Revolutionaries: The First Decade. Photographs contain multitudes beyond intention, beyond what the photographer might have knowingly desired to include. This excess — of visual data, of potential meaning and possibility — can feel confusing but it is also what guarantees a photograph can never be stable and can never be made to mean once and for all. It is also what guarantees a photograph has what Walter Benjamin once called an ‘optical unconscious’. Open the shutter and the world as light floods in. The camera does not prioritise or judge. Any and every photograph will hold more than was bargained for.

Unexpected or unwanted details are a kind of utopian promise. In the midst of crowd scenes, the camera has caught faces looking into its lens, into the context of unknown futures. Decades later, Yousefi picks out those faces and makes of them new subjects, new portraits. What do they mean? Perhaps only for a fraction of a second, these people slipped out of their moment in history and into another realm. Maybe this is what we all do when we look into a camera, or look at a photograph, or photograph a photograph. It’s not easy to be in two places at once, but it’s not possible to be in only one place, either. To be human is to exist not just ‘in the moment’ but in the murky past of memory and history, and in the equally murky time of unknown events that are yet to unfold.

So, let’s imagine Amin Yousefi looking through his camera and into those pre-photographed faces, collapsing the stack of years between now and 1978–1979. Collapsing the geography between London, where he made the project, and Iran. We will never know what was going on in the minds behind those eyes during the revolution. That is not the point. The point is something was going on, and photography is pretty good at making unknown somethings significant, and thinkable. ‘It seems that their gaze has been waiting for my eyes for decades, filtering through a multitude of lenses and eyes before reaching me’, he writes. Beyond the metaphor, whether or not the eyes depicted in a photograph can ever ‘meet’ the eyes of a viewer is a moot point.

The psychodynamics of re-photography are complex. Yes, it always feels a little transgressive to do it, and a little transgressive to look at the results. But against the notion of appropriation and theft, there is an equal and opposite notion of homage. Of paying close attention. Of respect. Of communion. Re-photographing also makes us look slower and closer, accepting what cannot be known but must be thought, nonetheless. It keeps the door open.

 – David Campany

All images from the series Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth © Amin Yousefi, courtesy of the artist.

Essay commissioned for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Louis Stettner, Fundación MAPFRE, Spain.

Published in English by Thames & Hudson, 2024.

To value what is in front of us. On the photography of Louis Stettner. 

David Campany

extract:

An image is capable of being like life at its very best –

moving us deeply without our knowing fully why.

Louis Stettner

Photographs, particularly those of the kind made by Louis Stettner, show what they cannot explain. The world’s appearance – captured and organised as a picture– is preserved, factual yet poetic and elusive. Faces encountered by chance on the subway. Hats on heads thinking thoughts we shall never know, and which the photographer could not have known either.  A street corner with memory longer than ours, and much more obscure. In a window display from 1951, a black cat looking mysterious and quite contemporary, as black cats in photographs always seem to do.  Café tables, awaiting or recovering from coffees and conversations. A worker’s arm, taut and purposeful. Newspapers brimming with old urgencies. Figures standing, walking or running between the life before and the life after. A ray of light. A crashing wave. We can marvel at Stettner’s spontaneous and empathetic artistry, making pictures out of the almost nothing of everyday life, turning non-moments into something momentous. But photographs have a way of covering their tracks, of cutting themselves free from the life stories from which they came, but which we will never really know: the stories of those people and things photographed, and the photographer’s own story too. Story, or narrative, is what is sacrificed in the making of a still photograph. It is not a loss. What we gain is our own occasion to respond, to fill in the missing pieces for ourselves, or to enjoy what is missing.

If would be fair to say that Louis Stettner’s photographs have, thus far, achieved more recognition than he did. Many of his images are well known but his name is not, at least not to a wider public, despite recent efforts to redress this. In our present era, in which name recognition and personality are what oil the market of culture, the relative obscurity of Stettner could be seen as refreshing, even subversive. But it must be said that for audiences who have grown used to understanding art through its maker, it is also a little perplexing.

In truth, Louis Stettner was not an altogether obscure or isolated figure, although there were many moments when felt he was. He was extremely connected, accumulating across the many years of his creative life a great network of friendships and acquaintances, as well as a few notable enemies, in the worlds of commercial and artistic photography centred around New York and Paris. On top of this network, there is another kind of connection, broad but harder to define, that was entirely to do with the qualities and character of the photographs that Stettner made. His visual sensibility was so varied, so protean that it overlapped with just about every other photographer of his era who worked as he did, in the mode of lyric observation of daily life.  One could make an exhibition pairing his pictures with similar works by a wide range of great figures, among them Roy DeCarava, Willy Ronis, Louis Draper, Aaron Siskind, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Morris Engel, Edouard Boubat, Shawn Walker, Jerome Liebling, André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Beuford Smith, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Sid Grossman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Izis, Louis Faurer, William Klein, Weegee, and Ruth Orkin. There is something of Stettner’s work in theirs, and theirs in his.  My list is long, but it could be much longer. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of the styles of the great observational photographers of the last century, we would find Stettner at the point where they all intersect.

[…]

‘Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark’ is the first significant publication to focus on photographic and cinematic works from the 1960s to the present that use night as the starting point for their explorations.

A lavishly illustrated compendium, ‘Night Fever’ is committed to those lens-based practices that have found in the night the opportunity to rejoice and rebel, but also to seek rest, refuge and perhaps some revelation.

Collectively, these films and photo portfolios, as well as the newly commissioned essays and texts from an international and cross-generational group of scholars, critics and curators, stress that there is no single night. For a person, place or group, night’s threshold, its liminal edge, is ever-changing, dependent not only on the actual conditions of light and dark, but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment.

The films and photographs in ‘Night Fever’ assert that for each person, place or group the night happens differently, and can be suffused with a range of emotional and physical experiences – joy, ecstasy, pain, fear, anxiety, mystery, tedium, inertia, exhaustion, and peace.

Edited by Shanay Jhavari, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, London. Jhaveri was previously Associate Curator of International Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

David Campany contributes a short text ‘Cameras Need Not Sleep’ on Dhruv Malhotra’s series Sleepers and After Party.

DHRUV MALHOTRA: SLEEPERS AND AFTER PARTY

David Campany

When making night photographs, insomnia helps. Drift is punctuated by moments of lucid attention. Observing after dark, the allure and cheap mystery of low light gradually passes, and the eyes and the mind attune to the less obvious. Keep looking. Shadows begin to open up. What at first seemed dimly, seductively impenetrable now appears vivid and bright. Keep looking for weeks, months, years: night becomes no stranger than day, and no less so, either.

For eight years, Dhruv Malhotra photographed urban nights in India, eventually producing his After Dark Trilogy. It began with Noida Soliloquy (2007–2010). Noida was a fast-developing suburb of New Delhi – empty lots and construction sites, pylons and water towers, trees and odd public sculptures, low-lying shacks and highway flyovers, dirt tracks and concrete walls. Malhotra’s camera stared glassy-eyed, lifting scenes out of the darkness, through exposures often of many minutes. Everything looks just a little artificial, like theatre or a movie set, hyper-factual, yet fable-like.

Chance encounters led to a second series, Sleepers (2007–2013). To western audiences, sleeping outdoors means “sleeping rough” and “homelessness”. In India, outdoor sleeping is as likely an escape from the heat of an uncooled bedroom, or a furtive nap taken on his night shift by a security guard. Malhotra made no contact with the people at rest, with whom he somewhat identified. By his own admission, he was directionless at the time. He would hang back, keeping his frame wide to show the setting. The images are not portraits, nor are the sleepers deep enough into the picture to be mere figures in the landscape. The distance is of respect and curious contemplation. Malhotra was making no political or social point. His intention, he has stated, was “not to comment on poverty; rather … to look at the sleeping figure in a particular context – the urban environment.” It is a picturing of complex situations. Good photography, compelling photography, can come from mixed feelings, and lead to them too.

Next came the even more theatrical After Party (2009–2015), a suite of photographs made all over India in temporary outdoor-event spaces. Dining chairs swagged in fabric and ribbon, carpets of artificial grass, empty platforms for speeches, backdrops of bright curtain, floors strewn with trash, all bathed in an acrid, eye-watering, artificial light. The revellers are gone, and dawn is breaking in the skies. Workers and security guards catch some sleep before the sets must be cleared away.

Whatever else they are about, these images are about photography: how it transforms what it documents; how camera vision is unlike eyesight, but related to it; how photographic time is not quite human time. But it is estrangement that makes these night scenes thinkable. In some ways, Malhotra has returned documentary photography to its surrealist roots of the 1920s. Before it was tamed and standardized by the mass media, documentary was understood to be experimental. Realism requires risk, not convention. Pictorial form is not a given; it must be discovered, in the midst of provisional experience in a changing world, which is without certainties.

A Criticism Review is a manifesto where different writers reflect on how we can make changes within the writing community, carving out new ideas about how to work and be published. Contributions from Delphine Bedel, Susan Bright, David Campany, C-print, Lillian Davies, Travis Diehl, Andreas Frei, Tomas Lagermand Lundme, Nina M. Schjønsby & Halvor Haugen, Nicholas Muellner & Catherine Taylor and Nina Strand.

First published 2021, expanded and republished 2024

Theory as Literature

by David Campany

What is the relation between ‘theory’ and ‘writing’, and ‘literature’? Many theorists don’t think of themselves as writers, and of course few writers think of themselves as theorists. As we know, a lot of ‘theory’ is not very well written, probably because those who write it do not think of themselves as writers, let alone literary writers.

The essayist and psychotherapist Adam Phillips once suggested that psychoanalytic writing, from Freud onwards, but particularly Freud, should be read as a form of literature. That is to say, not as a claim to truth or science, but as a claim to literature. Asked for a definition of literature, Susan Sontag suggested it was writing that you would want to reread.

I read a lot of theory, but the only theory I reread are the texts I want to reread, and these I think of as also being literature. However, I would like to think that I have a wide sense of what literature is, and can be.  When reading, I keep my mind open for those unpredictable moments when a theoretical idea finds what seems to be a fully satisfying, or startling, or at least profound literary form.

People often complain about the way certain writers still seem to dominate theoretical discussions of photography, particularly Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag. I share that frustration. But do you know why their thought dominates where the equally significant thought of many others does not? It is because it was well written. Their writing stays with people as sentences, as modes of thought that found compelling written form, as literature.

Rereading a text has its own satisfactions. Not the least of these is the fact that we never read it the same way twice. In rereading, the emphasis, our emphasis, may fall somewhere else. In this sense, to reread a text is to measure one’s own changes – intellectual, social, political, aesthetic, critical, poetic – and in the process, we find that resonant meaning comes neither from the text, nor from us, but from somewhere between the two. This may explain why there is often a gap between the self-perception of ‘theorists’ and literary ‘writers’. A theorist is often hoping to ‘convey’ their theories, to communicate them unequivocally. A literary writer says “never mind if this is strictly true; is it interesting?” But if a text is interesting, that is a kind of truth. This is why Phillips suggests psychoanalytic writing be read as literature, regardless of the writer’s intention.  Freud the writer will outlast Freud the theorist, or even psychoanalysis itself. And perhaps Freud knew that.

‘Theory’ is often suspicious of the power of ‘literature’, seeing it as rhetorically sly in its way of not appealing to the intellect only. In doing so it often condemns itself to small and specialized audiences. This is why the idea of the ‘public intellectual’ is vanishing. But there were never that many public intellectuals, never that many who had found a way to give literary form to their theories. It is a very difficult thing to do.

‘Weegee and Kubrick’ is an essay commissioned for the book accompanying the exhibition Weegee: Autopsie du Spectacle curated by Clément Cheroux, presented at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid; and the International Center of Photography, New York.

French edition published by Textuel

Spanish edition by Fundación MAPFRE

English language edition, Society of the Spectacle, published by Thames & Hudson.

The essay considers the photographer Weegee’s time making photographs on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove.

Continuity and Change

David Campany

If you have a knife, and you break the blade and replace it, and then you break the handle and replace that, is it the same knife? This is a well-known philosophical question but for reasons that will become apparent, it is the first thought that comes to mind when I look at Francesco Neri’s photographs gathered here, and it offers a rich point of entry.

Although his subject matter has varied, for several years Neri has been photographing the life and landscape of farming around his home town of Faenza, Emilia-Romagna, southwest of Bologna. The region and its rural activity are the air he breathes. Hi photographs underscore a connection to the land, and assert a continuity across generations in changing times.

Neri took a while to come to his mature approach to photography and his themes. Born in 1982, as a young man he tried many ways of making pictures, figuring out his relation to the world and how cameras might render that relation. At a certain point, he crossed paths with the photographer Guido Guidi, who became something of a mentor, as he has for many younger image makers in Italy. A distinct path into photography opened up. More importantly, another way of being in the world opened up, one that is slower, more measured, less inclined to chase after fleeting moments. Neri began to attune to much longer wavelengths of time and history, and a deeper sense of place started to emerge. The landscape was not to be moved through, like a swift hunter, but dwelled within, belonging and somewhat rooted. An 8x10inch view camera helped to slow the pace. It cannot be rushed. Neri has been using one for fifteen years now.

There is a tradition of this kind of photography in the region. It is a generous tradition, with all kinds of directions and different sensibilities within it. There is something international about it too, drawing on aspects of North American photography, particularly the legacy of Walker Evans as it has been carried forward in the work of Stephen Shore; as well post-war German and British photography of the social landscape. To have an affinity with a particular place or region, while also feeling connected to a much wider and longer understanding of photography, one that crosses continents and can be traced back almost to the beginnings of the medium, is very special.

Neri spends a lot of time making portraits of farmers, but has also made remarkable images of structures that are important to the farming life: tool sheds. Let us imagine Neri observing one of these sheds, approaching it perhaps for the fourth or fifth time. Moving around it. Looking closely. Stepping forward, stepping backward. Noticing the small differences since he saw it last. Getting to know it. Waiting for the light. Setting up his tripod and camera.  Making his judgements as to how this three-dimensional form, in all its particularity, should be translated to two. Making all the microscopically fine but necessary adjustments in preparation for an exposure.

Imagine the camera and the tool shed together in the landscape, and Neri standing with both structures. It is not such a stretch of the imagination to see a deep kinship between the camera and the shed. The word camera, of course, derives from the Latin, meaning room or chamber. A camera obscura is a darkened room with a small hole on one wall, allowing light to enter and cast itself as an image upon the opposite wall. For all the constant changes in photography, the endless so-called ‘advances’ in its technology, it has not moved so far beyond the darkened chamber pierced by light. Even your smartphone has one. Most 8×10 cameras are wood constructions, and not much different from the early cameras of the nineteenth century. Lenses have not improved significantly since then, either. This kind of camera, and the kinds of photography it permits, live on today as relevant as ever. They have endured.

We might say something similar about the common tool shed. Nobody ‘designed’ it. It is a lasting expression of a common vernacular – pragmatic, adapted, renewable but essentially constant. If its form has an aesthetic charge, it comes from its gentle sense of evolved purpose and function. In 1955, Walker Evans published in Fortune magazine a set of photographs of cheap but reliable hand tools. A wrench. Pliers. A crate opener. Tin snips. A trowel. It was a celebration of everyday beauty, but also a riposte to the growing cult of design and designers that was beginning to accelerate mass production and waste. Evans honoured these lasting tools with exquisitely direct but exacting photographs. Each tool was centred on a plain background, moulded by gentle light, and reproduced on the page so that one might be tempted to reach out and feel the patina, the natural curves, and the unarguably correct edges of the tools. (A young Robert Frank assisted Evans, and later recalled: “I learned what it was to make a simple photograph.”)

So, let us say the encounter between an 8×10 camera and a tool shed, both modified but unchanged over generations, is a meeting of similar forms and values. A meeting of alter-egos, even, mediated by the photographer with a concern for both. An isolated box is used to photograph an isolated box. There is something miraculous about camera optics, in the way a rectangular shape can pass through a circular hole, through a curved glass lens, and re-emerge on the other side as a rectangular shape again, with all its infinitesimal details intact.

In one of Neri’s photographs we see the side elevation of a tool shed. The structure is   covered in horizontal strips of what looks like thin metal. The strips overlap to waterproof the structure (similar to wooden clapboard buildings of the kind Evans loved to photograph in the 1930s). On the ground, there are rusting buckets. They probably have rainwater in them. Neri’s framing allows us to see just enough of the world around the tool shed. Trees and half-forgotten metal things. The withered winter remnants of optimistic weeds. Low sun warming cold air. But there, almost in the middle of the side of the shed is a small, circular hole. Perhaps at one point it was cut to let a pipe pass through the wall. Now there is no pipe, and the hole remains. If you put your eye to it, you might be able to see inside. In Neri’s photograph the hole is black. I find it irresistible to think that whatever purpose this shed was then serving, it was also an accidental camera obscura. Imagine Neri placing his tripod before the shed, and mounting his 8×10 camera. And yes, let us imagine that inside the shed, on the back wall, is a very feint image of Neri and his equipment, upside down and back to front. His photograph of the shed is also a self-portrait, and a contemplation of what photography is.

Even if we do not want to go quite that far in our speculation, there is still a sense in which Neri’s photographs of sheds are portraits, and also settings for portraits. He observes the comportment of the structures, how they hold themselves under pressure from worldly forces, upright but a little crooked, and posed by the camera’s way of fixing things. This is what the sheds looked like at this moment in their life journey. Come back next year and they will be different. The same, but different, and then one year you will find them gone.

Neri walks around the structures, sometimes photographing from different angles, accepting the limitation of the single image by adding others so that we might get a sense of the whole. This is where photography’s two main modes and addition – series and sequence – combine to profound effect. When we look at a group of photographs taken of the same thing from different angles, naturally we tend to place them in the same moment, as if they are simultaneous views. Of course, it is really a little image sequence. Neri has made one photograph, then another, then another. However, the idea of a sequence becomes more explicit when he photographs the same structure, from the same point of view, over time.  We notice the incidental changes, as we would in two portraits of a person made years apart. A slight shift in colour. A minor repair. A deepening of patina. Series and sequence equate to passage across space and through time. These are Neri’s twin axes, exploring a region and living with it, connected and not separate.

When Neri makes portraits of people, the sheds become backdrops. Again, it is hard to escape the benevolent presence of Walker Evans and his remarkable portraits of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama, standing in front of their clapboard facades. If photography’s temporal condition connects it to the momentary, and thus to change, it is heartening that in other ways it can be a supportive medium of continuity and long duration. It is not a matter of imitating photographers that have come before us, but of sharing a disposition towards the medium and towards the world, through its changes. Evans loved the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget, but it was not an influence so much as a significant affirmation of his own direction.  Knowing something of what came before, in the world and in photography, is in itself a rich source of motivation, and inspiration.  The writer Umberto Eco put it like this:

The exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.

Indeed, all this is very beautiful, but the beauty of photography is also the beauty of the world it pictures, and the two cannot in the end be separated. The one, somehow, honours the other.

Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me! assesses the career of the hugely influential Harper’s Bazaar art director, who changed the course of twentieth-century American photography and graphic design

This lavishly illustrated volume explores the influence and significance of the Russian-born photographer, designer, and instructor Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971), best known for his art directorship of the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958, as well as his tutelage of many celebrated documentary and fashion photographers, including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, and Lillian Bassman. Though disparate in their aesthetic approaches, these figures are unified by their responses to Brodovitch’s dictum to “astonish me.” The authors address Brodovitch’s impact on photography as an artistic medium in the mid-twentieth century and explore how European art and design became the foundation of a new American print culture. Brodovitch’s own work will be illuminated through his personal projects—such as the magazine Portfolio and the photographic project Ballet, which depicted performances of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the United States (whose evolution echoed Brodovitch’s own émigré condition). Case studies of his transformative collaborations with photographers such as Arnold, Avedon, Penn, Lisette Model, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hans Namuth, and André Kertész reveal pivotal encounters that may surprise even the most ardent photography aficionado. An illustrated chronology offers an important tool for scholars on this influential but often overlooked figure.

David Campany contributes an essay about Brodovitch’s 1945 photobook, Ballet. 

Exhibition: Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
(March 3–May 26, 2024)

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet: A Complete Work of Art

David Campany

Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet (1945), his only book of photographs, is as innovative and influential as it is rare. Although only a small number of copies were printed, none of which appear to have been distributed commercially, it has come to be regarded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, ground-breaking in its form and complete in its vision.[i]

Brodovitch’s connection to the world of ballet ran deep and was very personal. Shortly after coming to Paris from Russia in 1920, he met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who offered him work painting backdrops for the Ballet Russe, the visionary touring company established in the city in 1909.[ii] Brodovitch had wanted to be a fine art painter, but his experience with Ballet Russe opened his eyes to commercial art and the endlessly rich possibilities of collaboration. In 1935, a year after becoming art director at Harper’s Bazaar in New York, he began to frequent rehearsals and performances of various world-touring ballet companies when they visited the city. These included the Ballet Russe (now renamed the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, after the death of Diaghilev in 1929). Photographing the intensity and exuberance of such occasions allowed Brodovitch to reconnect with that formative time in his creative life.

In the 1920s and 30s photography was being pushed hard towards a precisionist capture of action. Sports and dance, in particular, were to be frozen by the camera, crisp and sharp. Fast shutter speeds, sensitive film, bright light, and use of a tripod could eliminate motion blur and camera shake, maximizing detail. Brodovitch chose to ignore all that. Instead, he used a handheld 35mm Contax camera, slow film, and shutter speeds as long as one fifth of a second in the available stage light. Rather than requesting performers to pose for his camera, he preferred to slip incognito through the delirious action, catching whatever came his way, uncontrolled and uncontrived. Few of his photographs have much sharpness and most are either under- or overexposed. He then exaggerated these qualities in the darkroom through heavy printing of shadows and bleaching of highlights. He welcomed scratches and dust on the negatives, from which he often took just small sections to enlarge, indistinct and grainy. In the swirl, faces were rendered vague and everywhere documentary fact was sacrificed for poetic feeling. Brodovitch was reimagining photography’s catalogue of “mistakes” as artistic possibility. While clarity and instantaneity were thought to be the ideals to which photography should aspire, Brodovitch saw that the medium was much more expansive. If it is to be explored fully, nothing should be ruled out.

His prints accumulated but it remains unclear whether at that point he saw the work as a personal experiment or something with a more public appeal. What is clear is that there was little else remotely like these images, even within photography’s avant garde circles. What would become of them?  With the outbreak of the Second World War, they were put aside.

The images were only half the originality. It is what Brodovitch eventually came to do with them on the page that really makes his book remarkable. Here too, all conventions were cast aside. The format of Ballet is horizontal and the 104 photos flow laterally, each bleeding to the edge of its page. There are no white borders to isolate or stabilize the visual experience. The viewer cannot engage with the book without physically touching the images, connecting with the atmosphere they conjure. Ballet is not an album of individual pictures to be contemplated; it is a total and immersive work. Across many of the double-spreads, Brodovitch places two photos of the same scene, giving the impression of snatched movie frames separated by a brief moment. Occasionally a pairing feels like continuous panoramic space, the join between the two images lost in the book’s central gutter. There is a sequence for each of the eleven ballets: Les Noces, Les Cent Baisers, Symphonie Fantastique, Le Tricorne, Boutique Fantasque, Cotillion, Choreartium, Septième Symphonie, Le Lac des Cygnes, Les Sylphides, and Concurrence. Each begins with a page bearing the ballet’s title, typeset in its own decorative, pre-modern font. The sequences work on their own but they also unfold one after the other, across the entire book. First, there are several spreads of backstage preparation – dressing rooms, make-up and scenes behind the curtain. These are interspersed with writing by Edward Denby, the renowned novelist, poet, and ballet critic. Then, as each subsequent ballet is introduced, the images become increasingly energetic, lighter in their tonal range, and hazier. By the end the book the feeling is of gauzy recollection, the photos almost fading to white.

A ballet is an event in time, and all that remains once it is over are fragmentary impressions. Brodovitch evokes the slippage from event to memory. In his text, Denby refers to the book’s evocation of “the elusive stage atmosphere that only ballet has,” and to the “unemphatic moments, the ones the audience does not applaud but which establish the spell of the evening.” Perhaps the book was also Brodovitch’s attempt to re-envision those swirling memories of ballet back in Paris.

Every design aspect of the book is carefully controlled. The matte paper dustjacket, folded around stiff boards, is filled edge-to-edge with the word BALLET, repeated smaller on an understated card slipcase. Printed in inky gravure to emphasise the rich tones, it was published by J.J. Augustin, for whom Brodovitch also designed the cover and worked on the layout of photographer André Kertész’s Day of Paris (1945). Originally from Hungary, Kertész was working in New York, but in the late 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most widely published photographers in the many Paris-based illustrated magazines, and had also produced a number of photographic books there. Of course, the double appeal of books is that they do not need to be made under such tight deadlines as magazines, and they last. Even the very best photographers and art directors working for magazines see their work casually discarded every week or month. Such disheartening experience can make the prospect of publishing a book for posterity all the more alluring.

Brodovitch’s layout for Kertész is sensitive yet much more conventional than his own book. Considered together however, Ballet and Day of Paris show how versatile Brodovitch could be in his handling of photographs. He was not an artist with a signature style to be imposed on material. His role was to understand that material and shape the best presentation for it.  In the making of Ballet, it was probably an advantage that the photographs were already several years old. Brodovitch would have been able to see their graphic potential more objectively, and thus shape book more radically. At the same time, they were his images and he could do anything he wished with them.

Since it was not primarily for sale, there were no reviews of Ballet. It did receive the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ prestigious Book of the Year Award, but that was an insider’s accolade. It is an open question as to how the book might have fared with the public. Nevertheless, with his finger of the pulse of popular taste, Brodovitch would have known Ballet was extreme, and quite at odds with the conservative values dominating serious art photography. So, what is the source of this book’s extraordinary reputation and influence?

Brodovitch gifted copies to design colleagues and photographers in his circle at Harper’s Bazaar, and beyond. Among the notable recipients was Richard Avedon, a junior photographer who in 1944 had come to study with Brodovitch at the New School of Social Research. Avedon’s early work evolved in tandem with Brodovitch’s photo/graphic sensibility. In 1949 the two collaborated on the Ninth Ballet Theatre Annual, a publication now even rarer than Ballet itself.[iii] Neither the photography nor the design was quite as graphically daring (because the dancers all had to be recognizable and credited) but it is still a remarkable achievement, especially for the young Avedon. Several of his portraits from this assignment, particularly of the dancer Hugh Lang, remain among his best-loved.

Other photographers in Brodovitch’s orbit developed approaches that seemed to pick up where Ballet left off. Lillian Bassman and Deborah Turbeville, who both worked at Harper’s Bazaar, came to understand the photographic print as physical material to be manipulated by hand into finely crafted and overtly subjective expression far removed from the documentary impulse. We can also see echoes of Brodovitch in the use of blur made by Ernst Haas in his color work, and in Paul Himmel’s book Ballet in Action (1954). Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer hired by Brodovitch in 1947, had arrived with a portfolio of technically polished images. Almost immediately he was exploring the missed focus, non-standard exposure and off-kilter framing that came to define his landmark book, The Americans (1958/59).

In debates about the most influential photographic publications of the twentieth century, Frank’s book regularly vies for top spot with a publication that is arguably even more indebted to Brodovitch’s Ballet. William Klein, a New Yorker who had been living Paris, returned home in 1954 at the invitation of Alexander Liberman, art director of Vogue (USA). Like Brodovitch, Liberman was a Russian émigré saturated in the arts. Klein was an ambitious abstract artist, moving between canvas and the darkroom, but Liberman was excited by his graphic energy and was convinced it would suit Vogue. Klein accepted on the proviso that the magazine paid for the materials he needed to shoot on the streets of New York in his spare time. While he had enormous respect for Liberman, Klein was impressed by Brodovitch’s constant reinvention of the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, and managed to get hold of a copy of Ballet.[iv] It confirmed his own photographic approach, which was similarly experimental, unpredictable, and indifferent to established good taste. Moreover, from the start Klein envisioned a book, and like Brodovitch he wanted to do it all himself, from the gritty photography and full-bleed layouts, to the writing, design and cover. Like Ballet, Klein’s Life Is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels missed out initially on a US audience, since no publisher there would issue a book so wild and uncompromising. It appeared in Europe in 1956, the same year a tragic house fire destroyed Brodovitch’s remaining copies of Ballet, along with most of his original negatives from the project.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the significance of printed matter of all kinds began to be reappraised by scholars and critics. New histories of photography recognized the centrality of the book form to the graphic and artistic development of the medium. In this context, the reputation of Ballet began to soar, and the scarce copies of the book that were on the open market found their way into the hands of collectors and institutions. Nobody knows for sure how many copies were printed in 1945, although the consensus seems to be that it was less than five hundred.[v]

In 2001, Ballet was included in The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, an early anthology that attempted to establish a canon.[vi] The following year, there was much excitement when Kerry William Purcell’s monographic study of Brodovitch featured reproductions of all Ballet’s page spreads, albeit at reduced scale.[vii]Then in 2011, Ballet appeared in the innovative Books on Books series published by Errata Editions, again reproducing every spread.[viii] Although it is still talked about far more than seen, Ballet is now recognized as a landmark, and a beacon of what a photographic publication can be when all elements come together to produce a unified whole. Far ahead of its time, it was a boundary-pushing experiment that took nothing for granted.

[i] Alexey Brodovitch, Ballet, New York: J.J. Augustin, 1945

[ii] Brodovitch and Diaghilev were part of the Union of Russian Artists in Paris.

[iii] Ninth Ballet Theatre Annual. New York: Charles Payne, 1949. Design by Alexey Brodovitch, photographs by Richard Avedon.

[iv] In my discussions with William Klein, conducted between 2012 and 2022, Brodovitch came up often. See David Campany ‘Insider/Outsider’ in William Klein: YES, London: Thames & Hudson, 2022.

[v] As I write, the German publisher Steidl is embarking on a facsimile edition.

[vi] Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LCC, 2001. The entry on Brodovitch’s Ballet was written by Vince Aletti.

[vii] Kerry William Purcell, Alexey Brodovitch, London: Phaidon, 2002.

[viii] Alexey Brodovitch, Ballet, New York: Errata Editions, 2011.

The book includes an essay by David Campany, The Glitch is in Us, and a 52 page insert placed into the book, featuring contributions from 36 renowned artists, writers and curators. Essay below:

Collaboration: a Potential History of Photography, edited by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler.

Photography – Real and Imagined interrogates the proposition that photographs are either grounded in reality – a record, a document, a reflection of the world – or the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion. On occasion, they can be both. In this publication, 295 photographs from the National Gallery of Victoria, by Australian and international photographers, are richly illustrated and explored through 21 themes, including light, movement, narrative, conflict, work, play, and death. Spanning the 1840s to the current day, the works in Photography: Real and Imagined are an exploration of the past, present and future of photography, and a celebration of more than five decades of collecting photography at a major art museum. The photos, selected from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, are divided into thematic groupings such as: environment; arrival and departure; built; science and the archive; war, protest and propaganda; work and recreation; selling the dream; storytelling and narrative; Surrealism; sensuality; Identity; and death. Photographs are uniquely examined in short texts by NGV curators Susan van Wyk and Maggie Finch and local and international authors Kyla McFarlane, Astrida Neimanis, Charmaine Toh, Robert Zeller, Patrick Pound, Sophia Cai, Claire G. Coleman, Jennifer HIggie, Elsa deCourcy and Helen Ennis. The book also includes three major essays including an introductory essay by Susan van Wyk; a text by Susan Bright examining the idea of the photograph as a document of the ‘real’; and a piece by David Campany, ‘Fixed Images, Unfixed Meanings’, exploring the imaginative capacity of photography.

Fixed images, unfixed meanings

David Campany

There are any number of reasons why a gallery or museum might want to acquire photographs. As part of an art collection. As part of a design collection. As a way of marking, commemorating or even questioning historical events. As documentation of other works in its collection. As examples of commerce. As legal evidence. As records of people. As examples of exceptional image making, or of plainly typical image making. The photographs may have been made with the institution or collection in mind, or they may not have. Acquisitions can be made for several overlapping reasons, perhaps well defined, perhaps less so. These days most established galleries and museums have cross-referenced and keyworded databases of their photographic holdings, through which potential frames of reference or use can be determined. Photographs tend to accrue a lot of keywords.

I mention this to begin with because such plurality combined with unpredictable possibility is a condition peculiar to photography, a medium of which we ask so many different things. Moreover, while it might be a way of capturing and fixing appearances, photography struggles to fix meanings in any permanent sense. If a collection lost the various documents, records and keywords it appends to its photographs, could we know for sure what to make of them? Probably not, for they would be returned to their essential ambiguity. Of course, at any given moment it might seem pretty obvious what the significance of a photograph is, but the changing times and shifting concerns through which any photograph passes in its archival life tells us that nothing stays quite the same. Does an institution collect in order to fix meanings, fix histories, or is it open to the idea that this is beyond its capability? This could well be the most profound question affecting museums, galleries and collections today. So, what follows here is a set of reflections upon this question, seen through a number of photographs from the NGV Collection.

Let’s begin with something seemingly obvious. Alfred Stieglitz’s The steerage, 1907, an image which, by 1979 when it was acquired by the NGV, was about as canonical as any photograph could be. Stieglitz has been positioned as a sort of father of modern North American photography, and The steeragewas his emblematic image, discussed in hushed but exulted tones as a bravura formal organisation of real space into flat pictorial space, without sacrificing the realist detail. Stieglitz and his camera are looking across and down from an upper deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm II en route across the Atlantic from New York to Germany. The image frames both an upper deck and the lower ‘steerage’ deck, where huddled third-class passengers are making the crossing in poor conditions. The image is full of social information, so it could be considered and used as a documentary record. Stieglitz, however, preferred the formal language of high modernism, encouraging a response to The steerage’s formal organisation of lines and planes into a modern picture.

The NGV’s print of The steerage is a gravure. Stieglitz has been a figure renowned in fairly equal measure for his own photographic art; for his canniness as a gallerist and publisher in early twentieth-century New York; and for the sharp revisions in attitude that he made to both. He hedged his bets between the wall and the page as sites for photography, a medium that can belong equally well to both. He set up galleries but also finely printed journals, notably Camera Work (1903–17). He often found that the short runs of prints made for the pages of Camera Work, in continuous tone techniques such as gravure and collotype, were superior to the artists’ darkroom prints of the same images. At times, Stieglitz took to exhibiting these prints that had been intended initially for inclusion in his journal. Once the works had been framed and placed on the wall of his gallery, any easy distinction between publication and exhibition was blurred. Modern photography would belong to both page and wall, although rather more to the page, at least until the late 1960s, when it really began to be championed as an exhibitable art in major museums and galleries.

The NGV’s acquisition of The steerage in gravure came four years after it had featured in one of the defining essays of postmodern photographic theory, ‘On the invention of photographic meaning’, by the artist and writer Allan Sekula.1 Here, The steerage is contrasted with another image of people making the transatlantic crossing, by Lewis Hine. Stieglitz was a self-declared ‘artist’ and his photograph was soon inserted into the art history of photographic modernism. Hine’s photograph was made and used in the context of social documentary and was later shifted into the museum. Rather than assuming there are inherent characteristics that made the Stieglitz image ‘art’ and the Hine a ‘document’, Sekula takes himself and the reader step by step through the different discursive and institutional positions given to each. Both images can be understood as artworks and as documents, and where the emphasis falls is largely down to the way the images are contextualised and presented.

This dualism is at the core of nearly all the shades of debate about photography’s merit as art, a debate made rich and strange by the fact that photography’s triumph in art came through its flirtation with its status as document, with science, with automatism, with anonymous vernacular practices, and with other modes of authorial and artistic erasure. Just about all the vanguard art of the last century walked or erased the line between work of art and document, and this is why photography became so central. It became an art at a time when art was questioning its own identity, limits and place in society. Reflecting on the relation between documents and artworks in 1928, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin assembled a list of thirteen propositions formulated as binary pairs:

I           The artist makes a work.

The primitive expresses himself in documents.

II          The artwork is only incidentally a document.

No document is as such a work of art.

III         The artwork is a masterpiece.

The document serves to instruct.

IV        On artworks, artists learn their craft.

Before documents, a public is educated.

V         Artworks are remote from each other in their perfection.

All documents communicate through their subject matter.

VI        In the artwork content and form are one: meaning.

In documents the subject matter is dominant.

VII       Meaning is the outcome of experience.

Subject matter is the outcome of dreams.

VIII      In the artwork, subject matter is a ballast jettisoned during contemplation.

The more one loses oneself in a document, the denser the subject matter grows.

IX        In the artwork, the formal law is central.

Forms are merely dispersed in documents.

X         The artwork is synthetic: an energy center.

The fertility of the document demands: analysis.

XI        The impact of an artwork increases with viewing.

A document overpowers only through surprise.

XII       The virility of works lies in assault.

The document’s innocence gives it cover.

XIII      The artist sets out to conquer meanings.

The primitive man barricades himself behind subject matter.2

For all the internal complexity and despite the fact that they are not entirely consistent, these binaries express the idea that the artwork and the document may coexist but will remain irreconcilable. Did Benjamin have in mind two separate and distinct categories of object, or, more radically, was he proposing that ‘art’ and ‘document’ might be two potentials of the one object or medium? Photography has made its strongest claim to art not by choosing between these oppositions but by insisting on having it both ways, putting itself forward as the medium best placed to dramatise the tensions between work of art and document. This was recognised in an NGV statement on the founding of its Photography department: ‘Because photographs can possess an aesthetic and historical value, it is often difficult to decide whether a particular photograph should be gallery or library material.’3

It goes without saying that any photograph of sea passage or disembarkation is going to have its own complex set of resonances for an Australian audience. Indeed, to the Stieglitz we could add David Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney, an image made in 1966, just a year before the Photography department was established at the NGV. Moore was on assignment for National Geographic, where this image of passengers on board the Galileo Galilei from Italy was first published. Initially it was titled ‘European migrants arriving in Sydney’. In reality, two people to the right of Moore’s intentional or accidentally Classical framing were from Lebanon and Egypt, while the group on the left was the returning Imbruglia family, from Australia. The image was taken and first printed in colour but later converted to black and white. For a while, the facts didn’t trouble the myth, and the image was regularly celebrated as an Australian national symbol of immigration from Europe. Today, however, these slippages, transformations and misattributions have become part of the biography of the photograph.4

The images by Stieglitz and Moore began their lives on the page, migrating to the wall and to institutional collections at different times, and for different reasons. Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work was in some ways a throwback to the 1840s–80s, the early decades of photographic publishing. It wasn’t until the 1880s, with the invention of halftone printing, that text and image could be reproduced on the page together, in one technique. Before that, darkroom prints had to be either pasted to the page laboriously or converted to engravings or woodcuts for printing alongside text. Once halftone became the norm, with its cruder and less nuanced tonal quality, those older books of ‘tipped-in’ plates became quite sought after. In fact, they were the beginnings of the collector market for photography, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, Giorgio Sommer’s quietly evocative images from around 1873, of preserved figures recovered in Pompeii from the ash produced by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, were made for inclusion in commercial books appealing to historians and archaeologists, but also to wealthy travellers on the extended European ‘grand tour’. While some copies of Sommer’s books survive, many were taken apart to sell the images individually. The NGV has a print of the best-known Sommer photograph, Human imprint, Pompeii, 1873.

Much of the most important photographic work, from all fields, was made for books. Moreover, photographic work often had, and still can have, its most significant impact in book form. Many of the great photographic works of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries had not just appeared in books; they were conceived as books, carefully sequenced, designed, scaled and printed, meeting audiences far beyond the spaces of exhibition. Of course, any museum or gallery collection of photography now includes key publications past and present, and the NGV has many.

Germaine Krull’s publication, Étude de Nu (‘Nude Studies’, 1930, is a ribbon-tied portfolio of unbound prints, as easy to look through in the hands, like a book, as to exhibit on the wall. Based in Paris, Krull was one of the most widely published photographers in Europe in the 1930s. Her varied images – everything from documentary and photojournalism, to staged images accompanying fiction writing, to fashion, portraiture and architecture – blurred any easy distinction between art and commercial practice. She was so versatile and worked across so many fields that for decades she was impossible to classify. Today, that very elusiveness – of modern photography itself, as much as of Krull’s work – is making her a celebrated figure, almost a century after her most productive years.

Part of the narrative of the NGV’s Photography collection, told in previous publications, concerns a fact-finding mission undertaken by its first photography curator, Jennie Boddington. She visited several museums, galleries and photographic collections beyond Australia. Upon her return, she wrote:

My ideas about the running of my department are radically changed since spending nearly four weeks in [New York’s] Museum of Modern Art … I believe that for some time in the future immediate priority and all possible energy should be given to the acquisition of important overseas material, remembering that ours is the only museum in Australia with a consistent policy of international collecting, and that effort in the initiation and mounting of exhibitions can be saved by showing some of the best works we have already purchased.5

Certainly, MoMA had made an unusually early commitment to the medium, collecting it across all departments, not just Photography. The image maker most closely identified with MoMA is Walker Evans, and the NGV holds a substantial number of his works. In 1930, a year after its founding, MoMA acquired its first photograph at the behest of its department of Painting & Sculpture. It was made by Evans and depicts a sculpture by another artist, and was not listed under Evans’s name as a work of photographic art. In 1933, Evans was commissioned by MoMA’s Architecture department to photograph nineteenth-century houses, and an exhibition of these prints was presented in its Architecture Room. In 1935, Evans was commissioned to photograph the works displayed in MoMA’s African Negro Art exhibition. These were published uncredited in a catalogue of the show and printed as a teaching portfolio. It was not until 1938 that Evans had a solo show at MoMA completely under his own name, but it was still two years before the museum had a photography department as such. At the time, the museum was undergoing expansion, and Evans’s show actually took place in temporary galleries in the basement of the Rockefeller Center. He hung the 100 images himself, framing some works and gluing others directly to the wall. But what survives and has influenced countless generations is his book American Photographs, published by MoMA on the occasion of the show. It was not a catalogue (thirty-three pictures in it were not in the exhibition) but a work in its own right, carefully sequenced and designed. One image that was in the show and book, and which is also in the NGV Collection, is Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of a cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. It has become something of a symbol of Evans’s direct and acute observational work, as well as an icon of modern photography, and a popular visual shorthand for ‘America in the 1930s’, but even this apparent example is more complicated. Evans actually made four portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs, all of which are in circulation. He was working at the time for the US government (the Resettlement Agency, later renamed the Farm Security Administration) and his images entered the public domain, eventually being housed at the Library of Congress. To this day, anyone can request a print, for a small fee. The service is now digital, but the fibre-based darkroom prints were of fine quality for many years. In American Photographs, the image was simply titled Alabama cotton tenant farm wife. Three years later, an alternate portrait of Burroughs, looking slightly less stern, was published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), in an uncaptioned image sequence set apart from the writer James Agee’s episodic, vivid and experimental account of three tenant farmer families. Agee changed the name ‘Burroughs’ to ‘Gudger’, introducing an unsettling level of fiction into the report. Although there were opportunities, Evans had very few exhibitions in his life, concentrating on book and magazine work. It was only in the period briefly before his death in 1975 (the year Boddington visited MoMA) that prints by Evans began to be acquired by collectors and institutions. The NGV’s print was printed around 1975.

I could go on with these kinds of complicated, fascinating and surprising examples. Nevertheless, I hope I have made it clear how photography is so deeply marked and characterised by instabilities in its material form, titling, captioning, provenance, context and meaning. In the end these instabilities are not really ‘problems’, although they probably once were for departments of photography that were set up to stabilise and give some kind of concrete shape to a canon and history of photography. Today however, ‘canon’, ‘concrete shape’ and ‘singular history’ are seen as problems. The aim now is to challenge or undermine the canon, presenting various narratives rather than a master history, and suspending the very idea of a concrete shape. Photography, a promiscuous, mercurial and elusive medium that could never really be defined or contained, finds itself centrestage once again. It is the complicated and conflicted stories of so many of the photographs in the NGV Collection that are its treasure.

Notes

[1]           Allan Sekula, ‘On the invention of photographic meaning’, Artforum, vol. 13, no. 5, Jan. 1975, p. 37.

2          Walter Benjamin, ‘Thirteen theses against snobs’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter, Verso, London, 1979, pp. 66–7. Why thirteen? Benjamin makes light of the arbitrariness by quoting Marcel Proust: ‘Thirteen – stopping at this number I felt a cruel pleasure’.

3          Isobel Crombie, ‘Introduction’, in Isobel Crombie & Susan van Wyk, Second Sight: Australian Photography in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, p. 6.

4           For example, the exhibition Australian Vernacular Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (8 Feb. – 18 May 2014), presented Moore’s photograph in the context of its complex story.

5          Crombie & Wyk, p. 9.

How to Move a Mountain is Caleb Stein’s photographic essay of the Carrara marble quarry, a series of intimate portraits of robotic arms and raw marble that offer nuance to today’s debate around artistic authorship and AI and computer-augmented art.

Sent on a commission for Smithsonian Magazine, Caleb Stein traveled to northern Italy to photograph Robotor, a company based in the Carrara quarries that utilizes digital schematics and robotic technology to translate marble into sculpture. The quarry has been mined for millenia, its marble sculpted by generations upon generations of artists and, now, with the introduction of new advancements in technology to the sculptural process, conceptions of artistic authorship come into question.

Shot in black and white, Stein’s portraits of this site lend an intimate eye to the process. As robotic arms carve topographic maps into the surfaces of the stone, water drips down the steel machinery, the lines mimicking the striations of gray found in the raw marble. This exploration of texture and light reveal the drama unfolding in this quarry–a place where artistic visions find their form, whether assisted by human hand or robotic arm.

The artist book is accompanied by an essay, ‘Surgical and Sensual’ by David Campany which details the history between photography and sculpture and Stein’s place within this lineage.

Photographs by Caleb Stein. Essay by David Campany. Design by Zoe Lemelson. Edition of 600. 9.25 x 6.7 inches, softcover. 100 pages / 40 plates. ISBN: 979-8-218-27261-6. Release date: 9 January 2024.

‘Surgical and Sensual’

by David Campany

Visually, there is a purity and elegance to Caleb Stein’s Carrara photographs, with their fine balance of formal rigour and clarity of visual communication. On other levels, however, it is hard to think of a less pure, more hybrid body of images. This is commissioned work but with its own artistic ambition; and even while it is art, it takes another art form, and the automation of that form, as its subject matter.

Artwork/document. Interpretation/record. Wish/fact. Hand/machine. Stein’s photographs may seem to break boundaries, or at least to unsettle them, but in truth they connect with attitudes that were there right at the very beginnings of photography. Many of the first photographers, including Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Hippolyte Bayard and William Henry Fox Talbot took artworks as their subject matter, particularly classical sculpture. It was an ideal motif. Sculpture did not move during the necessarily long exposures; the tones and shadows of carved stone registered well in the relatively primitive monochrome chemistry of the first prints; and sculpture associated the new medium of photography with the established fine arts and their métiers. For a few decades at least, the photography of artworks was a respected and important genre in the newly emerging art of photography.

Among the best-known early photographs of sculpture are the two that William Henry Fox Talbot made of the Bust of Patroclus. To be more exact (and more complicated) they were photographs of Fox Talbot’s own plaster copy of the original marble sculpture that was in the British Museum. Photographing it at home, Talbot was able to take the time to control the background and light. Both images appeared in his The Pencil of Nature, 1844-46, the first commercially produced photographic publication. In his writing to accompany the images, Talbot did not admit to working from a plaster copy, but he had a number of interesting things to say:

Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic Art; and also very rapidly, in consequence of their whiteness. These delineations are susceptible of an almost unlimited variety: since in the first place, a statue may be placed in any position with regard to the sun, either directly opposite to it, or at any angle: the directness or obliquity of the illumination causing of course an immense difference in the effect. And when a choice has been made of the direction in which the sun’s rays shall fall, the statue may be then turned round on its pedestal, which produces a second set of variations no less considerable than the first. And when to this is added the change of size which is produced in the image by bringing the Camera Obscura nearer to the statue or removing it further off, it becomes evident how very great a number of different effects may be obtained from a single specimen of sculpture.

Talbot included the two different photographs of the bust in order to help make his point. Elsewhere in The Pencil of Nature, he intuited something of a tension that will never quite resolve: while photography may be an art, it will also come to be seen an artless art of documentation of the other visual arts. Sculpture, painting and drawing will be known through and as photographic reproductions, but it will be a spurious knowledge, conditional upon photography’s terms of transformation – scale, tonality, lighting, loss of surface, loss of context, and so forth.

By the 1920s, the culture of art enabled by reproduction on the printed page had spread so comprehensively through modern society that an art of photographing artworks was somehow too confusing to be acceptable. Photography could be pursued as a modern art of its own, or it could be put to use for copy work, but mixing the two was to be avoided. The popular art culture could not risk undermining the authority of photographic reproduction, while the modern art of photography now needed to distinguish itself from copy work at all costs.

When, in 1947, André Malraux published Museum Without Walls, his illustrated work of world art history, he was so reliant on photographic reproductions to make his sweeping visual argument that he had to deny photography itself the status of art, lest it compromise his project. In truth, Malraux knew all too well that photography was always an interpretive, subjective and even manipulative medium with its own artistry. In order to learn just how the perception of art works could be controlled by the camera he commissioned the photographer Gisèle Freund to photograph a sculpture. She recalled:

I photographed from different angles and in changing light conditions, which made the same sculpture appear to be several different sculptures […] Malraux chose one of these reproductions for his book, but his choice was conditioned by his own taste and his perception of the sculpture.[i]

Malraux realised that photography was the founding disavowal of art history in the age of mechanical reproduction. Any modern illustrated art book or art magazine is on some essential but denied level a work of photography, since art must pass through the camera in order to get to the page.

And yet, so many of the great photographic artists of the last century or so have also been photographers of art. Gisèle Freund was an artist in her own right. Man Ray taught himself camera technique as a way to make images of his paintings and sculptures for publicity purposes. When asked by a collector to document her inventory, he at first recoiled: “The thought of photographing the work of others was repugnant to me, beneath my dignity as an artist.” (It was a paid job and he needed the money). Similarly, Walker Evans took commissions to photograph art, while confessing: “I could support myself copying paintings but I don’t relish the work.” Even so, both men learned (if not earned) a lot from doing that work and used those skills in their own photographic art.

Making art by photographing art works has never quite disappeared as a genre. There have always been artists wanting to explore the possibilities, and even to make work that unpicks and dramatizes the complications (think of Louise Lawler photographing art works in auction houses, Sara VanDerBeek incorporating images of sculpture into her collages, or Jeff Cowen making unique, hand-crafted darkroom prints of damaged ancient sculptures). One of these complications, related to the tension between artistry and copying has to do with work and money. The labor and financial reward for art making is seen by contemporary society as distinct from the labor and reward for ‘menial’ copy-work and reproduction, but the distinction can never be absolute. Moreover, similar grey areas have long been present in all the arts, especially sculpture and painting, in circumstances where the artist oversees the vital but anonymous work of assistants.

Charles Baudelaire once remarked that a shoemaker who makes a good pair of shoes today can be fairly sure they can make a good pair of shoes tomorrow, but a poet who writes a good poem today has no guarantee they can write one tomorrow. But all the arts, except perhaps poetry, involve a mix of the shoemaker’s practicality and the poet’s inspiration, and on a sliding scale, especially sculpture and photography.

Getting marble out of the ground and sculpted to its final form can require many shades of labor, from the tough and physically gruelling, to the highly finessed and inspirational. In fact, the more finessed and inspirational the final result – think of the greatest works of Renaissance sculpture – the less imaginable its tough origins in the earth. (Let’s presume this is why the depiction of quarrying and stone cutting was not much of a subject for Renaissance sculpture.) The prized marble at Carrara in Italy has been quarried at least since the Roman Empire but by the late nineteenth century conditions there were so arduous, and the laborers so neglected, that the place became the heart of the country’s strong anarchist movement. This is not necessarily something people around the world associate with Carrara marble, but it is an important part of its story, and an important part of the political history of labor in Italy.

In general, it is presumed that the process by which marble is quarried and turned into fine sculpture is a passage from ‘shoemaking’ to ‘poetry’, from brute work to fine art. However, the advent of Robotor in 2019, a computer-aided machine for carving stone that is the subject of Caleb Stein’s photographs, might appear to have upturned that presumption. If programmed correctly, Robotor does not make mistakes or get tired, although its makers do describe it as ‘anthropomorphic’, with its arm-like movements,  thus softening (or perhaps dramatizing) the distinction between machine and man. Even so, Robotor does not ‘know what it is doing’. It is blind to its own procedure, but then so is a camera, which has no idea what it ‘sees’ or helps makes visible to us. I am reminded of a remark made by the musician, Bjork: “I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.”

Much of the promotional material issued by Robotor and its parent company invokes the Renaissance and the supremely sensual depictions in stone by Canova and Michelangelo, while pointing out that these artists had countless unnamed assistants.[ii] The initial conception of the sculpture would be by the master artist, as would the finishing touches, while everything in between was anonymous labor. Similarly, Robotor does all the in-between donkey work, allowing the artist to concentrate on being an artist at the start and the finish of the process.

Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that today’s culture does not have too much demand for stone sculpture of sensuous human form, beyond copies of the great Roman and Renaissance works, or ironic derivatives by contemporary artist like Jeff Koons and Maurizio Cattelan. No doubt there will be some artists who will use the technology not merely to replicate, nor to save labor, but to explore what only this technology can do. However, it seems clear already that the greatest demand and the chief source of revenue will come from the making of copies of existing works from the history of sculpture.

If Caleb Stein had made images only of the finished works produced by Robotor, they could well have taken their place in the long but erratic genre of photographic interpretation of sculpture, but they could also have slipped into a Robotor promotional brochure. That ambiguity is inevitable. But what Stein has produced is a sequence, along the lines of what magazines might call a ‘photo-essay’, from quarry to finished work. As such the photographs feel more like a slow contemplation of the kinds of questions and paradoxes I have outlined here.

I am finishing these words in my London kitchen, sitting at a knock-off copy of Eero Saarinen’s famous ‘tulip’ table. Like the original, mine has a heavy circular top carved from Carrara marble (only the table’s base is truly fake). My right leg is stretched out horizontally on a chair beside me, as I am recovering from partial knee replacement surgery. I mention this because the operation was performed by a machine. After my surgeon had made the initial cut into my skin, the computer-programmed MAKO robot, working from a 3-D CT scan of my knee joint, proceeded to shave away tiny fragments of white bone to prepare the contours for my prefabricated titanium and plastic implants. The robot does not make mistakes and it does not get tired. Although my surgeon was present and guiding, no human can carve bone to instruction so precisely.[iii] The procedure was surgical, not sensuous, although returning me to sensual life was the aim. Maybe this is what Robotor is for. Somehow, a parallel version of Caleb Stein’s concerns is here with me, within me. Looking through the captions for his surgical and sensuous photographs, I am struck by this one: 3D views are shared with the Robot who then carries out the initial phase of production with human oversight.

[i] See David Campany, ‘Making Art from Art’ in Micol Forti and Alessandra Mauro, eds., A Matter of Light. Nine photographers in the Vatican Museums, Contrasto Books, 2018

[ii] For example, see this promotional video for Robotor: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvGtdP-6IOU

[iii] If you’re not squeamish: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGYVhSymNN4

Trapped: Troubled Souls in Eerie Times

Photography by Ximena Echagüe

Foreword by David Campany

Foreword:

David Campany

Book blurb:

In the latest series from Anastasia Samoylova, the Russian-born, Miami-based photographer studies the proliferation of photographic images in urban environments across the world. Samoylova observes how, in our neoliberal era of networked economic markets and networked imagery, the global centers of internationalized money and culture are becoming increasingly aligned and similar: “all these cities are moving towards a generic urban landscape of anonymous steel and glass architecture in which homes, offices and storefronts all appear and feel the same. This is a new global order in which old ideas of nationality are at odds with the 21st-century notion of borderless economics and transnational culture. And yet, those older ideas are now deployed as attractive marketing devices, giving the illusion that these cities are somehow still appealing in their uniqueness rooted in the past.” Samoylova’s work also points to the role photography plays in creating this ideological gap between branded urban identity and lived reality.

HATJE CANTZ (March 2023); ISBN-10  3775754806; ISBN-13 ‏ : 978-3775754804

The Fiery Pool

by David Campany

Anastasia Samoylova is a collagist at heart, although what she collages are as likely to be conflicting thoughts and experiences as images. Whether she is working in her studio or photographing the richness of daily life, in all her art there is an underlying feeling of cognitive dissonance, of elements brought together, not quite cohering but rubbing against each other to strange effect. Image Cities is the latest in her sequence of extraordinarily ambitious photographic projects, and the persistence of collage is clear. Her seductive compositions of bravura formal unity are motivated by deep and troubling tensions.

An initial response to this body of work would seem at first straightforward: Samoylova is interested in the proliferation of public images in a number of generally wealthy cities. Real-estate billboards. Corporate fashion branding. Car manufacturers’ campaigns. Banking and insurance propaganda. The allure of tourism. Often monumental in scale, the fabric of these images is frequently integrated into the urban architecture itself, blurring any simple distinction between surface and built form, between picture and substance. But why is this happening to these cities and what is at stake?

It would be tempting to read Samoylova’s photographs as a polemic against the triumph of an increasingly international consumerism, and the divisive effects of the speculative housing market with its incessant waves of gentrification. It is clear that a global visual-economic order now wraps itself around whatever once felt local and civic about these places. It is slowly numbing them, and perhaps us as well. This is how the dominant order of twenty-first century capitalism looks and feels. And yet, Image Cities is more elusive than any simple argument or statement.  There is so much more going on within and between these photographs. Samoylova is an artist of intelligent play. Formal play. Rhetorical play. Spatial play. Temporal play. Conceptual play. Historical play. She ventures into our thick forest of signs and symbols, to see what an alert mind and eye will make of it all.

An artist need not express a clear point of view, even if they have one. In fact, it is probably an advantage if they do not express it. But an observational photographer needs subject matter or themes. This combination of defined themes and withheld views has characterized the best observational work of the last century. Clear and direct pictures with less than direct meanings. Since they show without being able to explain, photographs make for ideal propositions, or even provocations, posing questions without having answers. They suspend, not just because the camera holds the world still and stares at its appearance, but because it is unable to pass simple judgment. Samoylova embraces this. For her, to photograph is to condense a set of visual and social ideas and set them spinning.

Image Cities began in Moscow (where Samoylova grew up) in the early summer of 2021, followed by New York and London. At that point the interest was in cities, as her original project statement put it:

In today’s age of neoliberal economies, interconnected financial markets and related images, big cities are becoming increasingly alike. However, these great economic and cultural centers try to promote their individuality, often giving new meaning to their specific history. Moscow promotes itself as a protagonist in the world economy, but through a manipulated iconography of its past. New York, a city deeply uncomfortable with itself, looks to its triumphant past and imagined future while ignoring its current problems. London, a fading imperial power, mobilizes its heritage as if it were a contemporary cultural asset.

The choice of cities derived largely from a survey published biannually by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC), which ranks cities according to their degree of “global interconnectedness.” Only New York and London currently hold the “Alpha++” rating, followed by Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Singapore, on “Alpha+.” Project statements and photographs are not the same thing, and thankfully so. Nevertheless, it is instructive to think how this set of ideas was at least the springboard for the wider project. As Samoylova explored another dozen cities, the photographs she made suggest subtle but important shifts in emphasis, not least toward the experience of gender: her own as she walked hundreds of solitary miles, and within the depictions of women that she encountered along the way.

An iconography of women dominates the visual inventory of all these cities, although what this might mean is complicated. On the one hand, it indicates the persistence of some very old and stereotypically patriarchal ideas about “woman as image,” as object of visual pleasure, “woman as spectacle”, and of the “feminine” as an overfamiliar embodiment of lifestyle and consumer culture. On the other, the top of the GaWC list mirrors closely the list of cities regarded as best for women in terms of social mobility, economic power, and safety. Of course, there is oftentimes still a long way to go, and some of GaWC’s top cities rank quite low in opportunities for women. Nevertheless, a broad correlation is evident. Patriarchal object and feminist resistance, playing out at the level of public imagery: one could write an entire book on this duality, but it is unlikely to be as complex as Samoylova’s response to it, which deepens and twists from image to image, and city to city.

Sometimes the women on these billboards seem no more than spectacle, a shorthand signaling of the desire for commodities, or even the commodification of desire. At other times, they are symbols of liberation, of the freedoms that may come with financial independence and social autonomy. This is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive. Indeed, a large amount of contemporary commercial imagery mobilizes female independence as a hyper-visual currency. Samoylova is adept at reframing all this, adding nuance to the implications of these public depictions of women, so that they might undo their own myths and subtexts. Physical fitness advertising can easily look like neofascist body propaganda. Real-estate billboards suddenly look like sinister social programming. And “freedom” is revealed to be constrained by consumer choice. Meanwhile, a fashion image framed by Samoylova to cut out the brand name may set the model free. Symbolically, at least.

It is no surprise to see so many of the people in these photographs using smartphones. They could be doing any number of things: taking photos, texting, scrolling social media, talking, reading the news, or reading Proust, for all we know. They are moving through city space while being at least partly somewhere else in their imaginations. Their existence is already a collage of places and times. Despite what the advocates of “mindfulness” might promote—the need to be fully “in the moment”—it is actually one of humanity’s great gifts that we can never achieve this. Our minds are too layered. We have memories, we have plans, we have fantasies and fears. This certainly makes us liable to distraction and anxiety. Nevertheless, being in many mental states at once is also the condition of the dreamer, and the creator. Imagination requires it. Citizens in twentieth-century street photographs carried a newspaper or a book, but now they carry interactive screens, often looking at them as they walk. When they look up, they see images that might relate to those in their hands or minds. Or they might not.

The idea of the city as a visual and mental collage is not new. In the 1920s, many artists and writers were prompted to respond to it. This is Siegfried Kracauer, from his essay “Photography” (1927):

The street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself . . . The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appears to him are not so much sharp contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story yet the story is not given.[1]

Two years earlier, Virginia Woolf had published Mrs Dalloway, a remarkable novella in which a woman moves through her neighborhood of St James’s, London, while recalling her past and imagining events and conversations to come. Sights and impressions cause her mind to wander. Woolf interweaves the experience of real space and real time with the elastic space-time of an agitated inner life. Clarissa Dalloway’s day in the street switches from lucid engagement with her morning tasks to something close to daydreaming, her eyes and body doing one thing, while her mind does several others. Her inner world begins to swirl. The dislocation comes from the trauma of World War I, but Woolf is also attempting to capture something of the modernity of the city, with its broken intensities. Samoylova’s photograph of vintage fighter planes superimposed on a neoclassical white façade seems to me an astute allusion to London’s awkward preoccupation with an idealized history full of pageant, benevolence, and military victory. It is also a striking echo of Woolf’s book. But all of Samoylova’s images invite these kinds of resonance and association, because her sophisticated knowledge of history and culture surfaces in unforced and unexpected ways.

The 1920s was also the period in which visual culture expanded dramatically. Cinema became a mass medium. Newsstands carried ever more illustrated magazines and newspapers. Billboards grew in size and number. Toward the end of that decade, Walker Evans, one of Samoylova’s key antecedents, began to photograph American advertising as if it were a kind of code hiding in plain sight.  If you want to understand modern society, be prepared to sift through not just what it aspires to but what it discards: its trash. Billboard images are both. They go up fresh and spontaneous only to be junked and replaced in a matter of weeks. The images die but the dreams resurface, and to photograph the ephemeral presence of a billboard is to give it an afterlife it neither expected nor deserved.

As Evans began photographing America, in Germany the cultural critic Walter Benjamin published One Way Street (Einbahnstrasse, 1928), a carefully sequenced collage of paragraphs about modern life. It is another of Samoylova’s touchstones. On the matter of commercial imagery, Benjamin came to much the same conclusion as Evans:

What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.[2]

City lights shimmering in water was already a photographic cliché, something for serious artists to avoid. However, Samoylova has a striking habit of taking cliché seriously. It has fascinated her for the best part of a decade now. She engages with it, takes it apart and reassembles it, gambling that the easy allure of the cliché can be taken to a level of pictorial sophistication that might allow it to become “criticism” of the sort Benjamin hoped for. Image Cities is full of knowing and masterful refinements of so many of the existing clichés of urban photography. Citizens dwarfed by giant images. The storefront window as an aquarium of consumer reverie. Images of eyes and mouths. Faces and bodies refracted through glass. Architectural trompe l’oeil. The Pop-Cubism of visual bricolage. Such imagery has a century-long history, and Samoylova knows it well.  She is paying attention not only to what she sees, but to how we see, and how seeing is itself conditioned by the image cities in which so many of us must conduct our lives, for good or bad.

[1] Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ, 1960), p. 72.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), p. 86.

IN SEARCH OF BLUE GOLD
Photos by DANIEL SHEA & Words by DAVID CAMPANY
A road-trip with denim hunter Bret Eaton.

The Colour Journal is a lavish publication that explores colour in art and photography. It has been conceived as a collection of six volumes, each devoted to a single colour: blue, red, yellow, green, white and black. The Blue Issue contains, over more than 400 pages, about twenty contributions by international art historians, writers, anthropologists, philosophers, critics, artists and photographers that start from the colour blue.

Colours have not been approached in a literal way but as a starting point, a pretext to tell bigger stories, a means of revealing the story within the story: we all know Henri Matisse’s Blue Nudes, but who can say the same about Biskra, the forgotten Algerian oasis that inspired him? We may also know about the ultramarine pigment that Yves Klein patented, but who has heard of Edouard Adam, a merchant in Montparnasse who discovered its formula?

The Colour Journal intends to fight against the dictatorship of immediacy, to give depth to the pretty images of fashion magazines and Instagram feeds, to delve into familiar moments of art history and discover what lies beneath, to dig into museum libraries and reveal unseen treasures.

To bring this enterprise to life, we travelled from Idaho to Guangxi, from antiquity to the present day, to bring you a dialogue between forgotten archives and contemporary photography: follow a denim hunter in the American West, visit one of China’s last cultural minorities, peek into Helmut Newton’s private collection of Polaroids and dive into David Hockney’s chlorinated swimming pools.

Works by Giotto, Sassoferrato, Yves Klein, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Helena Almeida, Anna Atkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, Tim Barber, Elin O’Hara Slavik, David McDermott & Peter McGough, Henry Peter Bosse, Arthur Wesley Dow, Frederick K. Coulson, William H. Cades, Jean-Eugène Durand, Paul Burty Haviland, Kenro Izu, Lourdes de Castro, Henri Matisse, Jean Geiser, Auguste Maure, Felix Moulin, John Beasley, Lehnert & Landrock, Hélène Adant, Jacques Majorelle, David Hockney, Julius Shulman, Mel Roberts, Bob Mizer, George Tate, Ed Ruscha, John Divola, Grant Mudford, Reenie Barrow, Jonh Schott, Henry Wessel, Rene Burri, Raymond Depardon, Bruce Davidon, Robert Adams, Mark Swope, Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Lee Friedlander, Bernard Plossu, William Claxton, Charles Brittin, Marvin Silver, Seymour Rosen, Ed Ruscha, Helmut Newton, Cecil Beaton, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, David Abrahams, Jeff Boudreau, Charles Fréger, Alexandre Guirkinger, Robbie Lawrence, Rafard & Roussel, Daniel Shea.

Edited by Benjamin Grillon
Texts by Michel Pastoureau, Benjamin Grillon, David Campany, Tim Ingold, Bertrand Raison, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Liam Hess, Robin Muir, Alexandra Genova, Philonema Epps

Published by Alep Publishing

2023
English edition
24 x 32 cm (softcover)
436 pages (ill.)
ISBN : 978-1-8382377-0-7

© Alep Publishing

In Search of Blue Gold

by David Campany

In her song The Boho Dance (1975), Joni Mitchell offers a whip-smart take on the growing cult of authenticity. She sees how a bogus and corporate world hijacks anything it imagines has integrity. Most often it’s black culture and blue-collar culture that gets raided. Mitchell checks both:

Down in the cellar in the Boho zone
I went looking for some sweet inspiration, oh well
Just another hard-time band
With Negro affectations
I was a hopeful in rooms like this
When I was working cheap
It’s an old romance—the Boho dance
It hasn’t gone to sleep

 But even on the scuffle
The cleaner’s press was in my jeans
And any eye for detail
Caught a little lace along the seams

Mitchell, or her character, is the self-aware and privileged interloper. Feeling fake but seeking truth. She’s wearing denim but not like a worker, and it gives her away. More than satin, silk or velvet, the fabric with the richest and most complex cultural associations is denim. It’s also the one with the closest connection to a single colour. Blue.

Never let anyone tell you what a colour means. Yes, red may well signify danger and death, but its associations with love are just as strong. Green readily connotes planetary health, but it’s also a sign of illness and decay. Colour always means something, no doubt about that, but exactly what is a matter of cultural convention. A colour’s meaning is never entirely fixed, and blue may be the least fixed of all. When it comes to blue denim, it is as much flexible myth as durable fabric.

If the pioneering French critic of popular culture Roland Barthes had been American, I think he would have written about denim: how it derives its name from the French town of Nîmes where it was first produced; how it came to America in the mid-nineteenth century; how the Nevada tailor Jacob W. Davis used copper rivets on the strong cloth to make incredibly hard-wearing clothes, and took his innovation to Levi Strauss & Co.; and how, somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, denim’s associations with work and authenticity got repackaged by Hollywood and the fashion system as a culturally renewable style statement.

Barthes would have also traced the shifting status of blueness. There was a time when making anything blue was expensive. The indigo dye required to colour fabric was once a rare commodity. So was lapis lazuli, the semi-precious stone that was powdered to make the intense ultramarine pigment for painting. Imported from Afghanistan, the value of lapis was higher than gold. This meant that for centuries blue was accessible to only a few painters, such as Giotto, who had rich patrons.

By the nineteenth century blue was no longer special. The colour had found its way into all kinds of images and commodities. With denim, it completed its passage from precious to popular. Indeed, denim has now been around long enough to have its own venerable history—and with that history comes an interest in rarity. There are things like jewels and old master paintings that are always rare and precious, and there are things that were once so commonplace they were nearly all thrown away. Magazines. Postage stamps. Packaging. Clothing. Charles Baudelaire once wrote that to really understand a society we must look not to the lives of its rulers, but in its trash.The real gold for contemporary social historians is the common item that by some miracle has survived. Today, some denim items are more prized than you can imagine.

Last year, photographer Daniel Shea and editor Benjamin Grillon met up with the most renowned and resourcefuldenim hunter, Bret Eaton, who has made a living tracking down rare and unusual items. They travelled with him through Wyoming, Montana and Idaho with a question in mind: how do you even start to hunt for old jeans, shirts and jackets? Barreling along in the car, talking constantly, Eaton would suddenly spot a house in some nondescript American town. With the sixth sense that all great hunters develop but cannot explain, he would knock on the door, strike up a conversation and within minutes emerge with a find. How could a box of unused denim from the 1920s have gone unnoticed for so long? We all harbour hopes that someone will appear out of nowhere and point out our hidden treasure, so Eaton has to be wily to get his hands on what he’s after. After two decades of hunting he has built a lucrative business. He sells to a worldwide collector base, and rents vintage items to filmmakers seeking that authentic period feel. 

Eaton’s hunger for rare items has even led him into abandoned mines. It’s hard to miss the irony of prospecting for labouring clothes once worn by those who prospected for gold. But if he can pull out a pair of jeans from 1880, he pulls out that moment in history. Even the maker’s names are evocative: A.B. Elfeft & Company, Underhill, Boss of the Road, Greenbaum Brothers, Stronghold, S.R. Krose, and of course Levi’s.

Daniel Shea’s photographs, shot in black and white and colour, show how Eaton’s own story is also becoming part of the myth of denim. Almost any black and white image of rural America looks old, and denim is photogenic whether or not you can see the blue. Pictured in shades of grey, denim evokes a mix of eras, from the California Gold Rush of 1848-55 to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Today the popular understanding of 1930s America is based on photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, John Vachon and others, commissioned by the government. Their images were made in resistance to the way the country was being pictured at the time: instead of idealising manual workers, they showed hard graft.

Every era of twentieth century America has a particular colour palette, visible in cars and clothes and interior design. Every era has its own photographic palette too. Most of the iconic images of denim were shot in black and white, but today colour photography also has its own historical associations. Shea’s colour images, a little bleached and yellowed, feel like prints left in the sun, fading along with the denim they depict. “Any eye for detail caught a little lace along the seams”, Joni Mitchell sang. Keen observers will notice Shea’s refinement of the time-worn effect. What appears to be a photograph jaded by history is a refined image crafted in the present day. In subtly performing ‘authenticity’ Shea shows us that it is a fantasy, an aesthetic. As they say in show business and politics, if you can fake authenticity you’ve got it made. If you can procure it from the bottom of an old gold mine, all the better.

‘Definitively Unfinished’ is an essay by David Campany written for Joan Fontcuberta’s book Cultura di Polvere, published by Danilo Montanari Editore / ICCD, 2023

Definitively Unfinished

David Campany

The promise of photography, born at the onset of a rapidly changing modern world, was immortality in the form of the frozen image that would last forever and lend itself to the mastery of history, and of progress. But it was a promise that could not be kept. It is a cruel if poetic irony that photography, a medium tasked so often with the fixing of appearances and the preservation of history, should turn out to be so materially susceptible. And, it is perhaps more ironic still that a medium which finds the visual effects of time – decay, deterioration, mould, putrescence, entropy – to be so photogenic, should itself inevitably succumb to these effects. If photographs preserve anything of what they represent, it is only for a short time, and only if the photographs themselves are preserved. Photography seemed at first impervious and absolute, but it turned out to be human after all: bold, vivacious and unmarked for a while, but eventually frail, decrepit and headed for the grave. As Orson Welles puts it at the end of his last great movie, F for Fake:

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash – the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. ‘Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.’

Visiting the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale at the ICCD (Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation) in Rome, the photographic artist Joan Fontcuberta has found a set of images by Prince Francesco Chigi Albani della Rovere. A keen traveler, Chigi photographed the alpine region where Switzerland, France and Italy meet, producing a set of stereoscopic glass plate negatives. Over time, humidity and mould have severely deteriorated their photographic emulsions. Ordinarily, such images would be either restored or discarded. Fontcuberta does neither, preferring to accept them for what they are, for what they have become, for the song they now sing. These decaying images have been digitally photographed, and the files have been reproduced in this book. The glass plates will, unless rescued, continue their slow but inevitable transformation into that ‘ultimate and universal ash’.

Digitization and book publication are often undertaken as methods of preservation, of fixing images not just for a wide audience, but for posterity. Yet, as we know, digital storage has its own frailties and has not been in existence long enough to be truly tested over time. In less than four decades, methods of digital capture and storage have already been through several technical revolutions. Books, being bound sheets of ink on paper, begin the process of organic decay almost as soon as they are published. With great effort, the process can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped entirely. Eventually this book will go the way of the prince’s glass plates. The bold modern era that gave rise to photography may well be coming to an end, its delusions faced at last. We are now, locally and as a planet, making our peace with the ephemeral, the temporary and the unstable. Joan Fontcuberta’s celebration of the natural transformation of the plates, which are decaying against the designated purpose and the desire of the archive, is also an act of acceptance. Fontcuberta’s images do not preserve the prince’s images so much as travel with them, giving them comfort on the same slow path to oblivion. “Be of good heart” cries the dead Prince, through the mouth of the living Fontcuberta.

With the use of word ‘Polvere’ (dust) in his title for this project, Fontcuberta has in mind Elevage de poussière (Dust Breeding), the photograph taken in 1920 by Man Ray of the thick dust that had accumulated on the glass surface of an unfinished artwork by his friend Marcel Duchamp, titled La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even ), also known as Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass), 1915-23. For a number of months, Duchamp had left open the window of his studio at 1947 Broadway, New York. The idea was to let dust from the polluted modern city air settle, and then clear it away from all but a few key areas. The remaining dust would be fixed and sandwiched between sheets of glass in the final artwork. Duchamp planned to secure several different thicknesses of dust that would produce different densities of translucent colour to embody different periods of time. Decay becomes a measure of elapse. In this way the fixing of the dust was akin to the fixing of a latent image on a photographic negative or print. Moreover, once upright the glass support would allow light through the fixed dust, like a slide in a slide projector. The critic Jean Clair even described The Large Glass as ‘a giant photographic plate’.[i]

Dust is marginal material, an unwanted by-product of modern life, but Duchamp wanted it. He found a way of ‘breeding’ it, harnessing it, and turning it into something significant. The photograph came about almost by accident. Man Ray had been complaining to Duchamp that the wealthy art collector Katherine Dreier had asked him to use his camera to document works in her collection. “The thought of photographing the work of others was repugnant to me, beneath my dignity as an artist,” he complained in his 1963 memoir, Self Portrait. Duchamp suggested Man Ray practice by shooting the dusty glass. “Since it was to be a long exposure, I opened the shutter and we went out to eat something, returning about an hour later when I closed the shutter.” Back home that night, Man Ray developed the exposed sheet of film. “The negative was perfect – I was confident of the success of any future assignments.”

When that image was first published, its caption was a complete lie: “View from an aeroplane.” Eventually it came to be called Dust Breeding, a title that alludes both to the idea of ruin or entropy being desirable, and to a process that is ongoing. In the hour-long exposure, time is passing and dust is breeding. The image captures not a fixed state but an ongoing process. And after the exposure was completed, the breeding process would have continued until Duchamp stopped it with his varnish. Years later, The Large Glass suffered a major transformation when the glass cracked dramatically in transit. Duchamp accepted the cracking as the pleasing intervention of chance and fate, and declared The Large Glass ‘definitively unfinished’.

We can see why Fontcuberta would enjoy this story of dust, and we can see the parallels with his own project. It seems that photographing these works by the Prince was not repugnant to him, not beneath his dignity as an artist. Indeed, Fontcuberta has built a much-celebrated career by immersing himself in so many of photography’s ‘undignified’ practices and materials. Vernacular images. Fakes. Social media. Fontcuberta is less interested in high art than in photography as a complicated set of activities that shape and mediate culture, and provide us with the means of understanding and misunderstanding the world. There is little space for dignity here. Fontcuberta is in some ways a Baudelairean figure, pursuing his conviction that a society reveals most about itself not through what it values as high and noble, but what it throws away, what it deems ‘low’ and disposable, what it consigns to the trash.

Of all the treasures he could have chosen at the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, Fontcuberta becomes fascinated by a set of objects that are already half way to disintegration. The figurative images which these objects bear – of romantic landscapes populated by lone figures – are giving way to abstraction. But abstraction is never truly abstract, especially when it is in the vicinity of photography. It is an invitation to speculative meaning, but it is also a matter of distance: zoom in, and there is nothing abstract here at all. The growth on these glass plates is organic form, every bit as complex as the mountains, lakes, animals and forests depicted in the photographic emulsion. Zoom in further still and these forms are not static. There are microbes, alive and reproducing, feeding on the chemistry. The prince’s photographs have become moving images (and it seems quite fitting that the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale was founded in 1895, the first year of cinema.) Fontcuberta could have made a film of their living surfaces. Instead, he gives us freeze-frames. In any case, turning the pages of a book is a kind of cinema. It may not animate the images, but it can animate the mind, setting it free, letting it play, feeling time pass, in small steps closer to the end.

[i] Jean Clair, ‘Opticeries’, October no. 5 (Photography Special Issue) Summer 1978, p. 101.

Seeing Sweet: a Pink Suite

David Campany

Here are some thoughts about colour, black & white, and pink in the photographs of William Eggleston and Anastasia Samoylova.

In the twentieth century, several difficulties slowed the artistic development of colour photography. Firstly, it was for a long time notoriously tricky to print colour with any nuance. While negatives and transparencies captured colour with great subtlety, print technology was limited. It was almost impossible to control contrast and saturation, although many photographers adapted their art to the limitations and made fine work. Only the expensive dye-transfer process offered prints that came close to the full richness.

Secondly, black & white photography preceded colour photography. The habits and criteria for art photography were first formed in relation black & white, and were entrenched by those who could not see beyond colour’s association with commerce and entertainment. The photographer Paul Strand went so far as to claim that: “higher emotions cannot be communicated in colour.” The sentiment would have sounded ridiculous to painters like Hilma af Klimt, or Nathalia Goncharova. The supposedly greater seriousness of black & white was also present in magazine photojournalism, which remained distinct from the pages of colour advertising well into the 1950s.

Thirdly, black & white and colour are not opposites. The relation is not symmetrical. A colour image contains a black & white version of itself, but not the other way around. In the digital era, all the colour can be removed from an image at the touch of a button. Adding colour to a black & white original is painstaking, and akin to painting.  When colour first became widespread in cinema, in magazines and then in domestic snapshots, it did indeed feel like an addition. The critic Roland Barthes felt that colour was “a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph […] an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses).”

Lastly, the meaning of colour is unstable and difficult to define. What does a red umbrella in a rainy grey street mean? Or the blue of a car? Or the pink of a cake? The presence of each can transform a scene dramatically, without any particular meaning. Observational photographers, especially those working in the post-Second World War consumer societies, had to confront colour not as something extra, not as a layer on top of black & white, but as something fundamental. Colour is intrinsic to the world. The photographer William Eggleston was not the first to grasp this, but it is his work that has had the greatest influence on subsequent colour photographers, curators, critics and the public. Of his image Memphis (1965-68), he has said:

“It’s of a place in Memphis that’s long gone, and I was entranced by what she was wearing – her sweater and dress, light red and white – and how the colour of her lips and fingernails went beautifully with those colors. The wall – those multicolors – is just incidental.”

In the flow of daily life, a reactive photographer cannot look at everything. Eggleston gazed through his viewfinder at the clothes, lips and nails in shades of pink, the overall composition, and quickly pressed his shutter. That glorious colour grid could well have been incidental. The fact that her hair, right in the centre, would look almost the same in a black & white photo may have been incidental too. But neither are incidental to the resulting picture.

And the neon mercury vapor-stained
Miami sky
It’s red as meat
It’s a cheap pink rosé

         Joni Mitchell, Otis and Marlena, 1977

Naturally occurring pinks (think of flower petals, exotic bird feathers, or blushing white skin) are signs of vitality. By contrast, the man-made pinks of buildings, clothes, nail varnish and cakes, revel in artifice. They are sugary, frivolous, ingratiating, and ‘fun’. That is to say, man-made pinks are always a little camp. When Susan Sontag defined camp as ‘seriousness that fails’, she wasn’t thinking about pink things, but she could have been. Pink is always in danger of trying too hard, as if a thin coat of pink paint or pink-dyed fabric is enough to make something happy, or genuinely joyous. Things shouldn’t appear to be having more fun than we are, but pink things often do, and we often notice. So, pink always threatens to become its inverse – from upbeat to melancholy, from sincere to manipulative, from beautiful to ugly. And maybe this is why pink goes so quickly from being the stereotypical colour of choice for little girls, to being the ironiccolour of choice for adolescent girls.

Anastasia Samoylova has photographed various pinks in the southern United States, especially in and around Miami, Florida. It is a place renowned for its pastel colours. The famous Art Deco architecture, with its characteristic mix of baby blues, dusty yellows and powder pinks, screams ‘retro-leisure’. In truth however, most of the city’s modernist Art Deco edifices were originally white, the default non-colour of architecture’s International Style in the 1920ss and 30s. It was only in the 1980s, when Miami’s reputation for cocaine-fuelled gang violence threatened to scare all tourists away, that it got a colourful makeover. The man responsible for Miami’s new look was Leonard Horowitz, a furniture designer and window-dresser from New York. He helped establish the Miami Design Preservation League and got the city’s South Beach neighbourhood of Art Deco buildings into the National Registry of Historic Places. He also devised a new colour palette, and managed to pass it off as historically authentic. Given that barely a century ago southern Florida was swampland and almost uninhabited, it seemed there wasn’t all that much history to be authentic about. Besides, the region prides itself more on reinvention than continuity.

Samoylova’s fascination with pinks is part of her broader interest in the contradictions of the region. While it is the classic ‘tropical paradise’, Southern Florida is also at the forefront of climate change. Hurricanes are threatening more often and with greater force. Even minor rises in the sea level are causing severe problems. The place is very slow to adapt. The reality is finally being accepted, but there is not yet the will to do much about it. Miami is very rich but also very selfish, a land of individual pursuit more than collective ambition. It runs on fantasy and denial. Pink fantasy and denial.

In an oblique way, the pinks in Samoylova’s photographs express these tensions. They go from luxurious shimmer to moulding putrescence. In the heat and humidity even concrete constructions ooze mauve chemicals. Pink buildings expect to be bathed in sun, but in shade they look drab and humiliated, like a starlet without a spotlight.

Pink always feels depthless. Mere surface. Pure veneer. But that’s largely what Miami is about. We barely expect it to be anything other than superficial. Of course, in photography all we get is surface, or the impression of light bouncing off surface. This might go some way to explaining why pink is particularly photogenic. It is as thin as a photograph. And yet, its visual impression is so strong it can overwhelm the other senses. Here is Jean-Paul Sartre from his book Being and Nothingness:

If I eat a pink cake, the taste of it is pink; the light sugary perfume, the oiliness of the butter cream ARE the pink. Thus, I eat pink as I see sweet.

Seeing sweet. It is difficult to walk the streets of Miami without that feeling. Too much sweetness will rot your teeth, and perhaps your eyes too. But anyway, the place is rotting on its own. Nothing lasts for long here. Miami’s fortunes have gone up and down with the economy, and now with the climate too. And nothing looks more ephemeral than peeling pink paint.

Samoylova shot Pink Staircase during a king tide in Hollywood, an area between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. A flooded parking lot is observed as if it were a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, or a backdrop for a visionary movie. The image describes the space lucidly but there is something otherworldly about it. It reminds me of the final scene of The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998). Jim Carrey’s character is born and raised unknowingly in a giant TV studio the size of a county, and is filmed by hidden cameras his entire life, for a worldwide audience. Sensing all is not what it seems, he sets sail to escape, until his boat bumps into a painted sky backdrop. It is literally the edge of his world. Nothing had been authentic apart Truman himself. He climbs a staircase to exit the set, and enter a reality for which he is utterly unprepared. To me at least, Samoylova’s pink photographs, and Pink Staircase in particular, seem to push that colour, and the region’s investment in it, into heartbreak. Maybe it’s the relentlessness, the purging of almost any other colour from her frame. It’s the pink we think we want, but there’s just too much of it. I stare at it, and it stares back.

It is curious how in photography the term ‘monochrome’ tends to mean ‘black & white’, while in painting, it means ‘single colour’ (and black & white paintings have their own name, ‘grisaille’). Anastasia Samoylova is a digital native. She never went through that analogue stage of black and white preceding colour. Inkjet printing is her medium. I think this gives her more of a painter’s understanding of the term ‘monochrome’, with colour acute and alive. But colour is not something she takes for granted, and it is significant that her project Floridas contains a number of black & white images, which she seems to use quite consciously to evoke photography’s past, and Florida’s past too. For William Eggleston it was different, I suspect. His black & white work did precede his colour work. When the colour came, it was with a disturbing force. And I think it’s that sense of colour disturbance is what ties together the work of Eggleston and Samoylova, particularly in the pinks.

‘Something Lost, Something Gained’ is an essay written for Giulia Parlato’s book Diachronicles.

24×30 cm / 120 pages
500 copies / Soft cover with Swiss binding
Design by Nicolas Polli
Text by David Campany
Published in February 2023
ISBN: 979-12-80177-21-6

€35
Preorder here

Something Lost, Something Gained.

David Campany

Let us imagine Giulia Parlato’s recent photographic series Diachronicles is acquired by an important museum of art and archaeology for its permanent collection. A set of prints, editioned and signed, is proposed by a curator to the museum’s acquisitions committee. At a meeting of the committee, a thorough discussion takes place as to the merits of the photographs and how they might benefit the museum and its audience, both now and in the future. The committee votes, and acquisition is approved, although there are differences of opinion as to how the images should be classified and the context in which the museum might display them. This will be decided later. Funds are found and allocated for the acquisition. Parlato prepares a portfolio which is delivered to the museum’s registrar. The prints are carefully unpacked and photographed, and the digital image files are uploaded to the museum’s online database along with important information including titles, dimensions, descriptions of materials, a long list search keywords, and accession numbers. A place is found for the portfolio in the atmospherically controlled facility that houses the museum’s permanent collection. Its future is reasonably secure, although its meaning remains less so.

Years later, the museum loses its database when it is attacked by an unknown virus. After much delay, the arduous process of re-cataloguing the entire collection begins. Giulia Parlato’s Diachronicles becomes a troubling point of uncertainty and consternation for the curatorial team. What is this set of images? An artist’s project? A collection of disparate documents of museum displays and archaeological digs? Instructional photographs for some kind of museum training manual? Is it a fiction? An allegory? A work of criticism? Thinking positively, the curators turn the mystery into the new significance of Diachronicles. The portfolio will be displayed as an enigma, inviting visitors to speculate as to its meaning and the possible reasons why the museum acquired it. Visitors will be encouraged to reflect upon the purpose and function of the photographs and, by extension, upon the function and purpose of the museum itself. Some curators suggest simply displaying the images with no text or captions; not even an author’s name. Others feel the museum ought to introduce the works with a text, indicating different ways visitors might wish to consider them.

In the grander scheme of things, it seems museums had only a very brief period in which their methods were not in question, and rightly so. Today one has only to hear the word ‘museum’ and the string of associations moves rapidly from ‘history’, ‘archives’, ‘facts’ and ‘artifacts’… to ‘stories’, ‘fictions’, ‘empire’, ‘power’, ‘exclusion’ and even ‘theft’ and ‘repatriation’. Museums seem to survive and find new purpose not by repressing this situation but by embracing and addressing it. The good museum is the museum that reflects publicly upon its own presumptions and is open to revision.

In 1974, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) issued this statement:

A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of the society and its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment.

In 2022, after a period of deep soul-searching, self-questioning, and eighteen months of participatory consultation, ICOM revised its statement:

A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.

Despite the attempts at clarity, the function of such a statement is left deliberately open. It could be a description of what museums actually are and do, or it could be a prescription – aims, goals, practices, programmes and behaviours for museums to aspire to. Either way, the update points to a shift, real and desired, towards transparency and accountability to potential audiences, or communities. And between the lines, one might sense a change of emphasis from museums being for ‘anyone’ to museums needing to be for ‘everyone’.

In this new situation for museums, the photographic image is mobilised in many different ways. Its presumed accessibility or even democracy makes it unintimidating and ‘user friendly’.  Photos appear as parts of explanatory display panels. They are exhibited as documents imparting information. And the public is invited to make and contribute their own photos in the newly embracing and participatory museum culture. All these types and uses of photographs are retained and archived by the museums. But if the databases collapsed, the images would not be able to speak for themselves.  For all their use and functionality, they would be returned to the essential condition of the photograph, which is ambiguous and enigmatic, suggestive and associative.

In the light of all this, the images that comprise Giulia Parlato’s Diachronicles seem exemplary. They adopt and adapt the photographic rhetoric of use and function but they withhold any ultimate commitment to meaning or significance. Even if the artist were to declare her intentions, which in the lazy way of contemporary culture might become the preferred script for looking and interpreting, the uncertainties would remain. Indeed, it is almost as if the more straightforward the imagery seems, the less straightforward it really is. This is not a new revelation. In 1844 William Henry Fox Talbot wrote in The Pencil of Nature of the way even the plainest and most descriptive kind of photograph cannot secure its own meaning. It would be ‘evidence of a novel kind’, as he put it, to be fought over by lawyers and other interested parties. In the 1920s the Surrealists appropriated Eugène Atget’s photographs of old Paris for their own experimental journals, bringing out their latent poetic strangeness. In 1977, the American artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan published Evidence, a book of photos they had found in various scientific and industrial archives, now presented without their original captions and contexts. Function fell away, leaving aesthetically charged visual mysteries, full opaque rituals, and questions without answers. Parlato’s Diachronicles certainly bears a relation to these examples, and it would not come as a surprise if in some way they had helped to form her own approach. Nevertheless, one need not know much about photography’s complex history to make complex photographs. They can emerge simply from thinking about the medium and the expectations that culture seems to want to make of it.

So, to return to the speculation with which I began, you may recall that the imaginary museum that acquired the Diachronicles portfolio did so without knowing exactly what it wanted to do with it. That was the appeal of the work for an institution coming to terms with its own presumptions and revised practices. Eventually, the museum did not make up its mind but turned over to its audience the question of what exactly these images might be, or could be. This, it seems to me, would be the ideal context for Diachronicles. And it would not require the catastrophic loss of a database to make it happen.   

William Klein won his first camera in a poker game in 1946. Every image he made was a little pokerish: street-wise, bluffing, anticipating, but intuitive and spontaneous too. In a career spanning seven decades he made some of the most famous fashion and documentary photographs, but also some of the most critical films about those worlds. He was an insider, and an outsider who made up his own rules, and broke them too.

Klein was born on 19 April 1926 on the edge of Harlem, New York, a clever Jewish kid in an Irish neighbourhood. By the age of 12, he was roaming the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, impressed by Edward Weston’s photographs (mainly for their flagrant nudity), the earthier Dustbowl imagery of the 1930s Farm Security Administration, and the avant-gardes of Europe.

He arrived in Paris in 1948, after serving with the US Army in Germany as a radio operator on horseback. On his second day in the city, he asked a beautiful woman for directions. Her name was Jeanne Florin. Half-Flemish, half-French, and somewhat aristocratic, she had studied Russian and sculpture. Soon, they were married.

Klein’s head was full ambitions to become a painter, and the GI Bill paid for him to attend the studio of Fernand Léger. “Léger was a big muscular guy, like Lee Marvin, and he would talk in a very simple way. He would say ‘that’s strong, keep it up’ and shit like that,” Klein recalled. “He was a Normandy peasant, no references to Heidegger or to Kant. But he did have a reference to a culture that we didn’t know. He talked about the Quattrocento and what the painters in Italy were doing. He said: ‘All you pseudo-geniuses, you’re trying to find a gallery, trying to meet collectors, trying to sell your stuff, but all that is bullshit.’ At that time there were big painted tableaux outside of movie houses, where a guy would take one photograph of a scene from the movie [and] make a big mural to advertise it. And Léger said, “these guys are working in the city and what they’re doing is much more important and relevant than what you’re doing, jerking off in the studio here. So, check it out, learn about Masaccio, Cimabue, Piero della Francesca.” We had no money and the books about these guys were expensive, so we all stole them. We studied them, and we tried to find the equivalent of their work in modern terms.”

He took to hard-edged abstraction, but was not convinced by the high modernist talk of purity dominating that field of painting. “I realised that there was something that could be done with blurriness in photography. I could go into the darkroom, take a piece of paper, cut holes in it, hold it over the photographic paper, put the enlarger light on and get blur. And I thought: maybe this is a way out of the rut of geometrical forms.”

Each photogram captured the movements of simple shapes dancing and gliding across the paper. In the summer of 1954, the art director of American Vogue, Alexander Liberman, saw an exhibition of Klein’s abstracts, and was convinced of his talent. He invited Klein to join him at the magazine. Figuring out the world of fashion would follow easily, Liberman told him. In October 1954, William and Jeanne set sail for New York.

After eight years in Paris, New York felt familiar but strange, a world of McCarthy and Marilyn, Elvis and excess, A-bombs, ad men and Mad Men. Louder, brasher, brighter and also more paranoid, anxious and derelict. “I had a peculiar kind of double vision, one almost Parisian, the other an incorrigible wise-ass New Yorker. I realized that whatever culture shock I felt would wear off eventually, so I went to town and photographed non-stop, with literally, vengeance.”
Klein’s gritty and anarchic New York street photos come as close as any images, still or moving, to the crazed and endearing intensity of the city. He decided to make them into a book, but like a “tabloid gone berserk, gross, over-inked, brutal layout, bullhorn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get. As a poor kid, I’d felt excluded from this brilliant Big Apple and sulked. Coming back, I found it was the Big Meatball and exulted.”

No American publisher would touch the project, so he published it in Paris, London and Milan as Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956). As well as the photography, Klein composed the wildly inventive layouts, the sardonic captions, and the striking cover design. A total work of art. Today it tops many lists as the most influential photobook ever made.

****Klein showed his book to the director Federico Fellini. “I was a Fellini groupie and I knew which hotel he was staying at, so I just phoned and asked to speak to him. You could do that in those days. “Come tomorrow at three.” So, I went along. He said: “Listen I like this book, I have it already. Why don’t you come to Rome and be my assistant?” I had no idea how movies were made. I asked: “What does an assistant do?” And Fellini said, “If I’m sick, you film”. I said “No problem, I can do that”.

Klein discovered Fellini already had “eight assistants, he really didn’t need me.” Fellini was casting for Nights of Cabiria(1957), and asked Klein to photograph prostitutes, the theme of the film. But it was the star, Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina, who fell sick. With time on his hands Klein photographed all over Rome, and made his second book, rapturously received. “How strange that we needed a New Yorker to discover us!” said the director Pier Paolo Pasolini. “An often sun-less Rome, where catacombs are garages and tombs bungalows… this is Klein’s Rome and mine too.” Fellini was just as smitten: “This book could be a film and someday I hope I will do it.” There is much of Klein’s vision in Fellini’s subsequent movie, La Dolce Vita (1960).

The jump to moving images was inevitable. Klein wanted to make a film that was the opposite of his New York book: “in colour, beautiful and at the same time about brain washing.” He simply pointed his movie camera at New York’s electric advertising signs in all their flickering neon colours. He cut his 11-minute film in Paris and titled it Broadway By Light(1958). Sailing back to New York with the initial print, Klein met the director Orson Welles and arranged an impromptu screening for him in the ship’s cinema. Welles declared it the first ever film that truly needed to be in colour. Later, it was recognised as the first Pop Art movie, years before Andy Warhol.

***

Throughout all this, Klein was enjoying a parallel life as a witty and inventive Vogue photographer. Post-war fashion photography had been studio-bound, and the models, as John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art rather cruelly put it, often resembled ballet dancers who had retired and married well. By the end of the 1950s, all that had begun to change – thanks in no small measure to Klein.

“I would come into the office with a bunch of propositions – new techniques + graphic ideas + slapstick + soap opera + neo­Dada + pre­pop + Post­Anything Goes. My projects met mostly with blank stares…” But Klein learned fast. “I accepted the obligation of showing the clothes. Sharp, all the buttons, pleats and whatever. As long as I did that, I found I could do pretty much what I wanted with the rest…”

He felt the fashion studio was a little bubble of good manners, so he pricked it. He asked models to suck on their cigarettes rather than holding them like quills. He enlarged prints of faces to emphasize the grain. He shot architectural façades and brought them into the studio as giant backdrops. He moved lights around the models in long exposures to make abstract swirls. In 1959, when a studio shoot got boring, he took the models and their dressing mirrors up to the rooftop, and the fun began, in front of the New York skyline. Then they went out into the traffic, still carrying their mirrors, striking knowing and ironic poses. Klein’s irreverent photographs had the edgy chic that Vogue and its readers didn’t know they wanted.

In 1962, Klein was finding abandoned shops in Lower Manhattan and painting them bright colours that coordinated with the season’s outfits. He noticed a black guy in overalls working next door and invited him to pose in the window, beside the white models. The resulting provocation was too much for Vogue, and the man was cropped out.

***

Klein’s understanding of black experience in the USA, and his anti-colonial sentiment, were sharpened by a trip through West Africa in 1963, exploring what were then Volta and Niger, as well as Ivory Coast and Senegal. Several of his images appeared in a special issue of the Telegraph magazine. The next year, he set out to make a documentary about the young boxer Cassius Clay, who was due to fight Sonny Liston in Miami.

“Cassius was not considered a serious boxer. They thought he was a clown; they thought all his fights were fixed. Nobody gave him a chance in a million against Liston,” said Klein. On the flight down to Miami he found himself sitting next to Malcolm X, Clay’s unofficial mentor. By the time they arrived they were good friends and Klein had full access to the training camp.

Clay’s humour and braggadocio was on full display. The conservative press never likes a black man with a big mouth claiming he’s The Greatest, even if he is. By the time Clay had won the fight, the media were against him, and Klein had enough material for an electrifying film, released as Cassius, Le Grand (1964) then recut with new footage a decade later as Muhammad Ali: The Greatest (1974).

Klein’s first fiction film was Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), although one might question just how fictional it is. On the surface it is a slapstick satire on the excesses of the fashion industry. The vanities. The money-worship. The elevation of market-driven taste into pseudo-manifesto. We see models in ludicrous aluminium outfits. Designers, editors and assorted flunkies drift through a dreamscape of delusion and self-disgust. The redeeming character is Polly Maggoo herself, played with a sad, bittersweet under-current by a favourite Vogue model, Dorothy McGowan. Upon seeing the film, the director Stanley Kubrick told Klein he was at least ten years ahead of anyone, which was maybe a little too far for his own good.

Despite the blatant mockery of fashion’s icy empress Diana Vreeland, Polly Maggoo did not spell the end of Klein’s fashion work, although that would come soon enough. “Politics came late in my life, during the Algerian War, and with a vengeance during the American intervention in Vietnam. And in May ’68, at nearly 40 years old, a sort of midlife crisis of politics got to me,” he said. “I turned away from the more or less mainstream films to put my movie camera at the service of those who have no way of speaking out.”

Meanwhile the Cassius Clay movie was still playing all over Africa, making the boxer an icon of new black confidence. In 1969 Klein was commissioned to film the now legendary Pan African Festival of Algiers, a breath-taking gathering of key black musicians, performers, politicians and activists from around the world. While in Algiers he met Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information for the Black Panthers, and proposed to make a documentary film of him. Over three days he shot while Cleaver expounded on his philosophy and radical politics. Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1970) screened in the USA with seats at ‘revolutionary prices’ (all $1). Half the proceeds went to the Panthers. It scandalised Hollywood.

Back in Paris, Klein released Mister Freedom (1969), a vaudeville sci-fi comic-book drama about the psychosexual warp of an American ideology deluded by imperialist fantasy, religious repression, celebrity worship and a fatal inability to grow up. The film starred Donald Pleasence as Dr Freedom, who sends Mr Freedom (John Abbey), a slab of arrogant–vulnerable US beefcake, to Paris to defeat Red Menace and Yellow Peril. Where Polly Maggoo took on the commodification of femininity, Mister Freedom skewered masculinity and its toxic self-deceptions. Klein’s garish marker-pen storyboards were translated to the screen as literally as possible. It pioneered the seamless mise-en-scène of dress, character and location we see in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

To fund his own production company, so he could pursue projects on his own terms, in the early 1970s Klein shot more than 250 TV adverts. His third fiction film, The Model Couple (1977), is about a young pair who win a national competition to live in a new apartment where they are monitored by psychologists, filmed around the clock and broadcast live to the nation. Under non-stop scrutiny they begin to fall apart mentally. The crew loses perspective too, and the whole thing unravels. Klein was always withering about mass media manipulation but full of empathy for individual humans and their circumstances. The Model Couple is an astonishing film, anticipating The Truman Show and reality TV by two decades.

In the late 1980s, after forty years of breathless creativity, Klein took his first glances back at his achievements, and began to oversee exhibitions of his work. His energy undimmed, more films followed, along with yet more books of photographs and a return to the world of fashion he had helped to transform.

Klein died in September 2022, just as his major retrospective at New York’s International Center of Photography was closing. A self-made maverick, he was always somewhat bullish with writers and curators who wished to canonise him, perhaps fearing somehow that it might pin him down, or signal the end of his non-conformism. Inimitable, provocative, generous, he always moved on before he got bored, or boring. As his wife Jeanne, who died in 2005, put it, he was “someone who never really wants to reveal who he is or what he wants. All the important people, he was never polite to them, even those he liked. Maybe to prove something. People think he’s tough and mean and God knows what. But he just went his own way and that was that. He never played that game.”

Extracted from David Campany’s introduction to William Klein: Yes (Thames & Hudson, £65)

 Photography’s Long, Short Road to the Non-Fungible Token

David Campany

Commissioned by The Fellowship, with thanks to Chris McCall

Republished in Zum magazine (Brazil) n. 25, October 2023

 NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN

a:   a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted,

or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is

used to certify authenticity and ownership

(as of a specific digital asset and specific rights relating to it)

b:   the asset that is represented by an NFT

 Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2022

Photography’s claims to be an art were raised

 precisely by those who were turning photography into a business.

 Gisèle Freund, Photography in France in the 19th Century, 1936

There is an old joke about a stranger asking a local for directions. “Well, I wouldn’t start from here,” the local replies. The advice might be unhelpful, or it might not. It could be the local really is used to getting to that place from somewhere else, and perhaps the best they can suggest is to go there first. Or it could be the local knows that what really matters is what the stranger might gain from starting somewhere else.

What follows is a set of thoughts about the emerging relationships between photography and the NFT (non-fungible token), but to get there it is best to go first to another place. In fact, it is best to go to a number of other places, for each will offer something different that might even change the understanding of where we think we want to get to.

Beginnings?

There is surprisingly little in the artistic or technical development of photography over the last 180 years that would have surprised its pioneering inventors and early commentators. Not X-rays, nor photocopy machines. Not smartphones with their networked cameras, nor the commodification of the immaterial image in the form of the NFT. When photography was new, the understanding of it was not clouded by habit or presumption. It could be seen for its pure, or impure potential. Wide and open. Pretty much all of what photography has become thus far could be foreseen right there at the beginning. There is something reassuring in this, especially in our amnesiac and self-obsessed culture that likes to think its own moment and challenges are fundamentally different from anything encountered in the past. But it is also unsettling. All our photographic complexity and diversity, all the commercial imperatives and artistic ambition of today… how could they have been foretold in a such supposedly simpler era, so long ago?

When William Henry Fox Talbot came up with the photographic negative, many positive images could be produced from a single source. This made photography a two-stage conception that is now so familiar to our understanding of the medium that we barely think about it. There is image capture and there is output, and to this day most photographic activity involves these two stages, even when it is digital. The means of capture and the range of outputs have grown exponentially, but the principle was there in Talbot’s negative, and its implications were profound. Photography would be productive and reproductive.

Perhaps a little less widely appreciated than the invention of the negative is the fact that Talbot counted Charles Babbage among his good friends. Babbage was a fellow polymath and the father of, among other things, modern computing. He pushed hard at the consequences of the fact that in principle, a great deal information – numerical, visual, textual, and more – could be converted into binary form: ones and zeros. In that form it could be stored, distributed, cross-referenced and even used for problem solving. With this insight, plus help from his wife and partner Ada Lovelace, Babbage produced some of the earliest designs and prototypes for computers.

Talbot’s version of photography and Babbage’s version of computing were roughly contemporary, and quite rudimentary, but the essentials were there and subsequent generations refined them. They were refined in parallel until, of course, they could be combined. This combination began over a century ago: the first image was sent electronically in 1920. Neither Talbot nor Babbage would be remotely taken aback by your smartphone, nor the Internet upon which it depends. And tucked in the corner of that phone is at least one little black box with a piece of glass at the front, and a light sensitive surface at the back. Talbot and Babbage would recognise these instantly.

Most inventions can be seen as products of their time, but they are also somehow late. Photography and modern computing were no exception. The various elements of each were known well before the 1830s, but inventions do not just ‘happen’. They need to be desired, wished for, imagined. The knowledge is one thing; the desire is another. Inventions happen when they do, but not out of the blue. The same could be said for the blockchain technology that is the basis of the NFT. It arrived late.

Pieces of paper

It is significant that the market for photographic prints emerged initially as an offshoot of the used book trade, towards the end of the nineteenth century. This market was not for contemporary images, but older ones. In the 1880s the new technique of halftone printing had allowed photographic images to be converted into dots of various sizes so that they could be printed alongside typeset text on the pages of books, magazines and newspapers. This process both speeded up and lowered the cost of illustrated printed matter. Before that, photographs either had to transposed as woodblocks or engraved on metal plates for printing, or hand-made darkroom prints had to be glued directly to the pages (‘tipped-in’, to use the correct terminology). The emerging market was for these older tipped-in prints. Books would be broken up so that the prints, which were more tonally nuanced and detailed than the cruder halftone imagery that was fast becoming standard, could be sold individually. A lot of the artistically ambitious photography of the nineteenth century, as well as the most beautiful architectural, topographic, industrial and portrait photography had been produced as tipped-in prints for publications. Sometimes in quite large numbers.

Not long after, a more modern photographic art began to emerge, and the American Alfred Stieglitz had an interesting place in this story. He is a figure renowned in fairly equal measure for his own photographic art, for his canniness as a gallerist and publisher, and for the sharp revisions in attitude he made to both. Stieglitz hedged his bets between the wall and the page as sites for photography. He set up galleries but also a finely printed journal of photographic art, Camera Work (1903-17).  He often found that the prints made for the pages of Camera Work, in techniques such as gravure and collotype, were superior to the artists’ darkroom prints of the same images. At times he took to exhibiting these prints intended for tipping-in. Framed on the wall of his gallery, they blurred any easy distinction between publication and exhibition. Modern photography would belong to both page and wall, but rather more to the page, at least until the late 1960s.

A couple of years ago, a well-known photography art market professional congratulated me on a book I had written about the work made for magazines by the American photographer Walker Evans (b. 1903, the year Stieglitz first published Camera Work). Throughout his working life, Evans had paid close attention to the page as his prime context. More often than not he set his own assignments, wrote the accompanying text and oversaw the layouts. Where most magazine work is a collective or committee effort, often involving great compromise, Evans’ magazine pages were just as much ‘his’ as the pages of his well-known books.  But the congratulation coming my way was slightly back-handed. “It’s great that you are paying such attention to photographic ephemera.” I knew where he was coming from (the auction house, basically) but I pushed back a little, suggesting those mass-produced pages were more culturally and artistically significant than the prints that were a necessary stage in their realisation. “If anything, it is the prints that ought to be considered ephemeral, even if the art market thinks otherwise,” I replied.

Money talks, if not always very coherently. We ought not to let the auction house or the museum determine what is significant and what is not. This is not to say they value the wrong things, but there is still a cultural hierarchy that puts museums and museum artifacts at the top, galleries lower down, books much lower, magazines lower still, and the Internet grubbing around in the mud of common culture. Nevertheless, we know, we know, photography has been significant because it scrambles all that. Good work gets made in all these contexts, and there’s a century-long history to show that. Museums and art markets have always lagged behind, and have never been able to take in the full scope of photography’s possibilities. Understandably, they attempt to bend photography to their will, shaping it to their own preference, or they concentrate on the most amenable aspects of it. In doing so, they tacitly accept that what can be important about photography might escape or even undermine their efforts.

I recall a visit to the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, to see a retrospective of the work of Robert Frank. The galleries were packed with people, especially the room dedicated to Frank’s mid-1950s body of work, The Americans. Visitors standing three or four deep waited to approach the small, framed prints. Looking around, I saw a young couple frustrated at how difficult it was to see anything. Dejected, they sat down and picked up a copy of the book of The Americans that was attached to the bench by a wire. They became engrossed, leaning over each page, studying the images. In truth what they had in their hands was the artwork.  Frank’s achievement was the book, not that set of exhibition prints. For the price of their two tickets to the show they could have bought the book, and owned The Americans. But all of those people were crowded into that room because of the cultural hierarchy that places museums and rare prints over mass produced pages.

In and Out of the Museum

New York’s Museum of Modern Art began its serious commitment to photography in the early 1930s, collecting and exhibiting it. But in 1942 it presented a small showcase exhibition titled American Photographs at $10. This is from the press release:

“The Museum’s Department of Photography announces an experimental project: the sale of fine photographs at ten dollars. Nine American photographers have agreed to make special editions of ten duplicate prints expressly for this purpose. The framed prints will be exhibited at the Museum, which will take orders for the duplicate prints. Arrangements have been made by the Museum to have the prints framed at reasonable cost and delivered to the purchasers. The following photographs will be offered: Ansel Adams, Utah Farm, 1941; Berenice Abbott, Miatown, 1933; Walker Evans, Interior, Cape Cod, 1931; Helen Levitt, Tacubaya, Mexico City, 1941; L. Moholy-Nagy, From Radio Tower, Berlin, 1928; Arnold Newman, Violins, 1941; Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1915; Brett Weston, Ocean, 1939; Edward Weston, Yosemite Snow, 1938.”

Note the stipulation of ten ‘duplicates’. Editioning, the imposition of fixed limits on the number of prints, would become an important condition of market acceptance, but it had not yet been fully established.  In theory, the small show was a promotional gesture to help cultivate a market and support photographers. But there was also an unspoken and perhaps even unconscious subtext there: “Look, see for yourself: the absence of a market for prints has not been an obstacle to the development of highly sophisticated and varied forms of photographic art.”

Three decades on, prints of the images that were presented in that MoMA show could still be purchased for under $100. There seemed to be an acceptance – sometimes grudging, sometimes excited – that the artistic value of photography could have little to do with market value. Moreover, a great deal of modern art photography had grown out of the fields of reportage, science, design, documentary, fashion, and so on, which offered a kind of economic support that was very different to the art market. This too made it difficult to cultivate a collector base for it, at least at the beginning. Here was a cultural form that by its nature was widespread, demotic, reproductive and somewhat resistant to commodification.

In Europe, one of the pioneering museums with a commitment to photography was the Stedelijk, in Amsterdam. It started acquiring photography in 1958, firstly under the supervision of its library (books again), and then the design department as an ‘applied’ art. Only later was it moved to ‘fine art’. In reality, all museum departments acquire photographs for different but overlapping reasons (the first photograph MoMA accessioned was of a sculpture, and the fact that the photographer was Walker Evans was incidental at that point). When the Stedelijk acquired photographs for its collection from living artists, prints were requested at around 20×16 inches or smaller, so they could be dry-mounted on aluminium sheets and stored in standardised filing cabinets. This was not unlike the way photographs were filed in newspaper headquarters, police departments, and scientific institutions. At the Stedelijk these reference prints would not be exhibited. Instead, when needed for a show they would be re-photographed, allowing for the printing of the image at whatever size was required for the exhibition design. This approach soon changed, under pressure from photographers and the shifting status of the medium. Even so, it is worth bearing in mind this beginning – photographs were understood less as finite material objects and more elastically as pure image potential.

You can probably see where this line of thinking is going. When the desire took hold to cultivate an art market for photography along the lines of the established market for painting and sculpture, it was up against the view that even the very best photography was somehow indifferent to it, or had developed away from it. Certainly, public perception was resistant. While it was willing to accept that photography was an important art, it was more sceptical of the idea that this meant it needed to be a scarce commodity or even a fixed object.

A whole set of criteria for quality and scarcity would have to be developed and implemented by museums, collectors, dealers and willing photographers.  These criteria would never be completely self-evident, nor permanent. They would need to be carefully monitored and policed if they were going to function. This vigilance can never cease, as we shall see.

In 1936, Gisèle Freund, a photographer and really the first social historian of the medium, had argued that the artistic status of photography was by that point inseparable from commodification. She had in mind less the status of the print as a saleable item than the status of art in general as commodity. If photography was to become an established art it would do so in a field now thoroughly defined by commercial exchange (and by photographic reproduction). “Photography’s claims to be an art were raised precisely by those who were turning photography into a business,” she argued, slightly too forcefully. At the time she was writing, it was clear that artistically ambitious photography was being made largely outside of the economy and institutions of the art market. There was photographic art, but little market for it as such.

Asked in his later life how he had survived financially as a photographer, Walker Evans replied that there were only four ways to do it:

• get paid to take images and do so with whatever creativity or autonomy you can
• get paid for your images (you make them and then try to sell them, through an agency, for example, or as artworks)
• pursue your photography as a serious hobby while doing something else for a living
• be independently wealthy to begin with (Evans’s example was Alfred Stieglitz).

In other words, beyond the rich and the hobbyists, photographic art happened in the guise of, or within the structures of applied commercial practices of one kind or another. Evans barely sold a print until the very last years of his life, in the early 1970s. When the opportunity came to sell, he grabbed it. Photographers must survive any way they can. He had never really editioned prints but he signed what he had, and rubber stamps of his name offered further certification. Meanwhile, prints of many of his best-known images, shot for the US government and owned by the state, could be ordered from the Library of Congress for a small sum. He also began shooting Polaroids, using the SX-70 camera. These images were unique, but more importantly for Evans they were quick and casual. Material, but almost as fluid as the spoken word. He’d have loved the iPhone. By the time Evans died, 1975, art photography no longer had to be pursued in the spaces of, or in guise, of applied commercial work.

Other hierarchies

As a curator of exhibitions, the most important (and fun) work I can do involves paying attention not to the official canons of photography, but to the image. This means that on the wall of my shows, a consecrated masterwork by Edward Weston, or Laure Albin-Guillot, or Helen Levitt might hang next to a work by an unknown photographer, a commercial poster, a record sleeve, or a screen relaying a work made for the Internet or as an NFT. This is done not to undermine the canons but to suspend them, in order to manifest the deeper affiliations and more rewarding connections that are always there in photography. To be honest, I cannot imagine curating any other way. Even when the emphasis in a show is on physical materiality of the print I prefer to range across the various fields. In a recent show titled Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, all the images shown were conceived at the same scale as their subject matter, but this still allowed a large and expensive Jeff Wall photograph, printed in an edition of three and on loan from Gagosian Gallery, to hang in the space with a 1930s postcard showing large hailstones at actual size. I had bought it on eBay for $4. The aim was neither to elevate the common postcard nor relegate the Jeff Wall but simply to allow them to be thought in relation to each other, as specific objects but also as choices about how the images take material form.

Recently, it was a thrill to curate a retrospective of the photographer, painter and filmmaker William Klein, not least because of his maverick attitude to all this. He disliked the idea of ‘vintage prints’, preferring to make large new darkroom prints that hang without glass. Klein’s work for Vogue was shown as contemporary prints but also as a digital slideshow of the original magazine spreads.  I don’t really like seeing publications in vitrines, so we made videos of Klein’s now-classic but hard to find photobooks (New York, Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo). This allowed eager visitors to see every page. Sometimes we showed the same image as a rare framed print, on a magazine spread, and as a mural-sized wallpaper print. In his youth, Klein spent a year making abstract photograms in his darkroom but he did not like their small size or their precious uniqueness. He would rephotograph them, allowing him to print them at whatever size he needed, to crop them, flip them, overpaint them and change their contrast levels. (Perhaps it is no surprise that his first major museum exhibition was at the Stedelijk in 1967). Photography can be reimagined and adapted to subsequent technologies and means of presentation. This has always been an important part of its story and its potential.

In the 1960s and early 1970s an art market for photography began to be constructed in earnest. It was an uphill struggle, in the face of perfectly understandable scepticism, and even suspicion. The underlying intuition that the medium is reproductive and even promiscuous in character was never going to go away. The market would need to be in a constant state of alertness – guaranteeing provenances, emphasising rarity, securing edition numbers, all to work around the fact that the photograph itself can guarantee none of this on its own behalf. (To this day, photography still needs talking up in the art marketplace and many of those involved in doing so have the go-getting demeanour of high-end used car salesmen. Those prints ain’t gonna sell themselves.)  Moreover, this inevitably complicated status has meant that photography has never been fully absorbed into the fine art market and  remains slightly at a distance from it. This is a good thing.

And yet, and yet. If the photographic art market really craved singularity, it would have made much more of a fetish of those aspects with greater claims to it – the photogram, the Polaroid, prints showing the unique mark of the hand, or even the negative itself. Indeed, the true origin, the holy grail of modern photography was the negative, but negatives are difficult to look at and close to impossible to comprehend or appreciate, or exhibit. (Some photographers shot on positive transparency film, which in the pre-digital era was difficult to print with any subtlety. Knowing this, the photographer Ernst Haas used to sign the carboard mounts of his Kodachrome colour transparencies. Those were what he considered his ‘originals’).

Negatives have largely remained beyond commodity status. They are not really bought and sold on the art market. Instead, if the photographer is deemed significant their archive of negatives might be acquired by an institution dedicated to preserving estates or wishing to monetise them. But if you really crave a sense of ‘aura’ and you wonder what this might be in the field of photography, go look at the negative of that great image you love. You may not be able to make sense of it, but it is the origin, the source. Or, at least, it is the origin if the photographer didn’t make two identical exposures, which was not uncommon if the subject wasn’t moving too fast.

None of what I have outlined so far is a criticism of the art of photography, nor of the forms it takes. Neither is it a criticism of the market for it. It is a clarifying of the restless, churning, unresolvable relation between them. When I hear complaints that photography has never really been accepted by the art world, I find myself quietly having three responses.  First: That is never going to happen, because photography has as much social currency outside of art as in, and the two are always going to affect each other. Second: It is reproductive, so it’s going to be at odds with the market on some level. Third: Be careful what you wish for, because ‘full acceptance’ is usually a sign that something is over. Photography’s unresolved status is the source of its energy, and significance.

The Immaterial Material

Having dwelt upon the negative and the print, let us edge toward the digital present. In the early 1990s, with the Internet still in its infancy, Bill Gates began to buy up many vast archives of historic photographs. Any image has the potential to be re-used, and Gates was quick to realise that the Internet would be a, or even the major portal and marketplace. Millions of prints and negatives, including very old glass plate negatives, were digitally scanned. The ‘originals’ were to be stored deep underground. As pure data, the new image files could be monetised via Gates’s licensing company, Corbis. Whoever owned the most images owned the biggest chunk of visual culture, and could even determine history. That’s a lot of power. In his 1995 book The Road Ahead, Gates described the electronic screens he had commissioned for his then-new Seattle home:

“If you’re a guest you’ll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like – presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.”

Immaterial but lucrative, reproduction rights to photographs were seen to be more valuable than the objects themselves, but notice what Gates had in his little list there. There is no art photography (unless you like photographs of sunsets). His examples are all from the fields of ‘applied’ photography, in which the image’s primary function is visual information. While there have long been agencies that handle fees for the reproduction of art photography, most living art photographers rarely charge for this. Why? They tend to see reproduction as publicity for the commodity form of the same images, which can be bought in galleries and at auction. By contrast, photojournalists, fashion photographers, travel photographers and the like will nearly always charge since their living is based on payment for reproduction, not payment for prints. This is changing somewhat as the financial floor drops out of the various fields of applied photography and those image makers scramble for a piece of the boutique art market. Nevertheless, the difference is significant and it’s there, consciously or not, in what Gates was boasting about.  He owned all those reproduction rights. His scenario in which images are summoned onto screens at the tap of a keyword was certainly a prophecy that came true, although less emphatically for still images than moving ones (streaming platforms, for example). Indeed, a generation on, Gates’s excited commitment to the still image now looks a little quaint.

All of this was taken up in complex ways when photographic artists began to engage with the Internet. While some thought of a website as a shop window for what they were hoping to sell in material form, others (although far fewer) saw the Internet almost as a new medium in itself, with its own specific qualities that could be explored artistically. It is notable that the first published histories and curatorial surveys of Internet Art, which appeared in the early 2000s, valued reflexive practices that somehow drew attention to the functioning of the Internet and websites, as if they really were a medium that needed to be foregrounded and made thinkable. The best that Internet Art could do, it was thought, was to somehow address itself, to highlight and contemplate its own particular parameters. In some ways that was an old-fashioned and strictly modernist mindset, but in other ways it was a recognition that in the context of art, form is always active. It is not a secondary issue, nor a bourgeois distraction from ‘content’.

In general, though, websites have been understood and deployed as platforms, as shop windows, rather than explored as a medium. This has been the same for photography too. While all images have some kind of aesthetic and formal charge, simply because they are images, most are not made with that expressly in mind. And while photography as a medium can address itself, it doesn’t have to.

Something similar can be said of the NFT. It can be a platform or a medium. It’s quite clear that the recently emerging NFT market for photography is dominated by those simply monetising work that could, and often did, exist in material form. At the same time, there are those making photographically-related work that can only function as an NFT, exploring uniquely how NFT’s work. (I’d like to refrain from listing examples as that’s not my goal here). Neither approach is intrinsically more virtuous or artistically progressive. They require consideration on a case-by-case basis.

Hopefully I have by now made it clear how photography has always been fungible in key ways, always amenable to new materials, platforms and contexts. Broadly speaking the adjective ‘fungible’ describes “something such as money or a commodity of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account; and something that is readily changeable to adapt to new situations.” Interestingly, ‘ready adaptability to new situations’ sounds like it could come straight from one of the art manifestos of the 1920s or 30s. Constructivism, the Bauhaus, or even Surrealism. It also sounds like those interwar cultural critics, such as Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin, describing the malleability of the dominant visual culture, and the need for resistant image makers to stay on their toes. And, one could imagine finding that expression in the archives of the Stedelijk around 1958, as it set out its approach to acquiring photographs as prints to be copied and reproduced for any need.

So, the ‘non’ in ‘non-fungible’ is the gesture to limit that adaptability, to curtail the promiscuous spread of the image in digital form that has become a defining characteristic of the Internet, and indeed of photography. The NFT is proof that it is not materiality that is required of photography in the art marketplace but stability. The photographic NFT takes its place in the long and still unfolding history of imposed stabilizations.

In order to be seen, any image requires what in modernist art-speak used to be called a ‘support’. In the case of a conventional print the support is the paper (and secondarily the frame, the mount, and so forth). An NFT is pure data, existing on a hard drive or distributed across many, and to be visualized it needs a secondary support: printed matter if the NFT is to be printed, or a projector and screen, or a computer screen, or whatever. In the case of printed matter, the support is fixed, unless of course the image gets reprinted another way, but then it is fixed again. As data, if an NFT is to be seen it is dependent upon the quality of whatever technology that makes it visible. A screen-based image is only as good as the screen. That was part of Bill Gate’s gamble back in 1995, and many of the buyers in today’s NFT market were born not much before then. But this is not really a distinction between the ‘analogue’ and the ‘digital’ since there were always analogue forms that required ancillary supports, such as transparencies that need to be projected. Furthermore, even the two-stage process of capture and output means that the relation of the photographic image to its support has always been provisional, never sovereign. Talbot knew that.

As a new market emerges, the talk and public attention is dominated by money, not by artistic merit. This is inevitable, and it can lead to confusion between the two. But photography is still a very, very young thing, and who knows, it may outlive the economic order that produced it and which it in turns upholds in various ways. Photography has never stayed the same for long, either as a technology or as an art, but something persists in its name, otherwise we wouldn’t use it. It could be that ‘photography’ is a placeholder for something, or a set of things, that escape definition or theorisation. The NFT is part of that. If photography didn’t escape definition or theorisation, it probably would have died long ago, like so many other innovations of the nineteenth century.

David Campany

‘Theses on the Disaster of Photography’ is an essay by David Campany commissioned for the box for The Camera of Disaster, by Studio for Propositional Cinema, 2022.

Theses on the Disaster of Photography

by David Campany

How many works of science-fiction have been made in the form of photographs? I am not thinking here of the work of photographers who see science fiction as no more than a style, a look, a mise-en-scene. (There is no end of image makers intent on mimicking the mere surfaces of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, or even Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.) Science fiction, like film noir, has really nothing to do with what it looks like, despite the visual conventions that accrue around it. What defines science fiction is the way in which it allegorizes the present, makes it thinkable from imaginary perspectives, points to its paradoxes and buried wishes, its aporia and impasses, signalling impending danger or possibility. That is a difficult enough challenge for cinema and literature, let alone still photography. So, it is not surprising that the very few works of genuine science fiction that have been made as photography come from somewhere between writing and film, adding to the still image the literary caption and the cinematic sequence. I am thinking here of Chris Marker’s filmic ‘photo-roman’ La Jetée, Victor Burgin’s book and website Afterlife, and now The Lensgrinders, from the aptly named Studio for Propositional Cinema. It is a series of still images with text overlays that seem to resemble subtitled frames from a film made in a foreign language in a time and place that feels both familiar and strange.

In order to set it apart and set it working, all good science fiction has its own founding conceit. There is the potential for time travel in La Jetée, the outlawing of all books in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, the deceptive and uncanny human replicants of Blade Runner, the downloading onto hard drives of the human mind in Burgin’s Afterlife, and the journeying to the unconscious (or is it the sublime?) in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker. The founding conceit is what allows a work of science fiction to function as an allegory of the cultural, political and psychical milieu that produced it.

The more repressed a society, the more likely it is to produce the kind of wishful, fearful, utopian or dystopian thinking that characterizes science fiction. As Fredric Jameson noted in his remarkable book Seeds of Time, science fiction is often at its most potent and subversive under the spectre of totalitarianism. The terrifying power of an authoritarian regime may produce radical works of science fiction as symptoms of what the regime fails to recognize or permit.  Science fiction functions like a loophole or a secret passage, bypassing the fixed patterns of thought, and slipping past the censors.

What is the conceit of The Lensgrinders? Of what might this conceit be a symptom? And what kind of thinking might it make possible? The work declares itself right at the start:

This is a story of a band of dreamers, deprived of their own images. In their world, individuals have been denied access to image-production. Images may be produced only by the controlling regime. As generations have passed images have become monolithic. While everything is recorded at all times, the inability of citizens to produce and transmit images has re-imbued the image with a divine hold. As their truth is unquestionable there is no truth. To propose alternate images of the world is considered blasphemous. Born into this void, the band escapes their city. Guided by elders on the other side, they attempt to re-learn the processes and potentials of image-making, and to return this process to their homeland in order to free the image from the regime’s indoctrinating hold.

Already, we may detect traces of Marker, Bradbury and Tarkovsky. (Is this a new science fiction drawing upon the old, fashioning a future vision out of past future visions? No matter. Science fiction is always a reflection and refraction of its sources, and all the better for letting us see how.)

The conceit is that placing the making of images under the sole control of an authoritarian regime will increase the symbolic power of the image, its ‘divine hold’ over the populace. As the story of The Lensgrinders unfolds we must proceed on parallel tracks, as all science fiction asks us to do, engaging with its world and our own simultaneously, looking for the moments of overlap and divergence, of the probable and the improbable.

The model of symbolic power suggested by The Lensgrinders looks both forward and backward in time.  Looking forward, it seems to extend and extrapolate the logic of the image under the all too familiar order of neo-liberal corporate capitalism. The Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the present, with their algorithms that make ideology perfectible, are the unspoken proxies for concentrated state power in the future. Looking backward, The Lensgrinders summons the spectre of George Orwell’s novel 1984, perhaps the defining science fiction allegory of the totalitarianisms of the first half of the twentieth century: fascism and communism. For Orwell, total surveillance is the technocratic equivalent of the inescapable voice, or eye, of God.

Why this Janus-faced look forward and backward? Early twentieth century fascism and communism mobilised the mass media technologies and platforms that had flourished after the First World War. Cinema, radio, illustrated books, magazines and posters. At the time, cinema and radio were consumed by the masses but not yet produced by them. Arguably, they had something of a ‘divine hold’. Still photography was different. It was already being marketed as a mass participatory medium. Whatever the state and the entertainment industries did with photography, you could do too. At least, it was not beyond the realm of imagination or possibility that you could do it too. In other words, part of the political power of state and corporate use of photography was that it was not remote from the citizenry. Its power was consensual, not coercive; a form of popular control, to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci and his theory of hegemony. The Lensgrinders proposes that if the masses lost access to the making of images and it fell solely into the hands of the state or corporations, the social and political power of images would be significantly strengthened, to the point of divine hold. But would it?

Is the symbolic power of the image, particularly the photographic image, predicated upon the illusion of access and participation; of it not being solely the tool of those in power? One can imagine a scenario that is quite the opposite of the one proposed by The Lensgrinders, in which the image loses its divine hold once the people have no access to producing images for themselves. Is it possible that the state or corporate shaping of desires and possibilities through photography would be meaningless to those without their own access to it?  If so, it would constitute the beginnings of the end of photography, or the end of one version of it. Of course, this is not a ‘fault’ in the logic of The Lensgrinders. On the contrary, the work puts itself forward not as a factual account but as a speculation or contemplation, of the future, present and past of the image.

In his celebrated essay ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ (‘A Short History of Photography), first published in 1931, Walter Benjamin described the beginnings of the medium as being shrouded in fog. He was half right, because even if the fog lifted there would be no beginnings in sight. The fog gives the comforting illusion that without it there would be something clear to comprehend. A point, an origin. But neither optics nor the capacity of light to transform material ‘began’ in any meaningful sense. The endings of photography ought to be approached in the same fog-shrouded way. For more than a century now, it has attracted various declarations of its demise. Cinema, television, Photoshop, the Internet, the networked camera, algorithms (the list is very much longer): each has announced the end of photography… but only according to its own measure.

There is no obsolescence of photography. All that becomes obsolete are versions, conceptions, uses, interests, and aspects of its distributive unity. In general, what is mistakenly thought of as photography’s obsolescence is better understood as its eclipse.

Eclipsed entities are not obsolete. They continue to exist in the shadows and the margins. There is always more margin than centre, more shadow than spotlight. Moreover, mediums often become more artistically, politically and socially significant when they are eclipsed. The Lensgrinders can be understood as an allegory of photography’s various phases of eclipse. It retraces the numerous moments at which photography was dislodged and redefined. The hybrid form of The Lensgrinders – almost literary, almost cinematic, somewhat digital, somewhat retro, somewhat futuristic – feels to me like the work of a mind backing into tomorrow like Benjamin’s Angel of History, picking through rubble of photography’s various past lives, sifting them like runes, looking for a way forward.

–

For the historical materialist, photography is understood as emerging as a symptom and tool of industrial capitalism in its imperialist phase. All the constitutive elements of the photographic procedure had been known for centuries – most notably optics and photochemical reaction – but communications technologies do not ‘evolve’ or ‘leap into existence’: they must be desired, no matter how inchoate those desires. (It is said that upon successfully sending and receiving a radio signal across the Atlantic ocean, Marconi spoke with a journalist who noted that now one person could now communicate with hundreds of millions simultaneously. This was a potential that had not occurred to Marconi, who had been focused on point-to-point signalling. For Marconi, radio was not broadcasting).

That tension (is it a dialectic?) between elements known for centuries and the absolute contingency of industrial-imperial capitalism is the source of an unpredictable artistic and philosophical energy in photography. The beginnings, which now seem to be shrouded in an even thicker fog, remain compelling today for conflicted reasons. Could photography have emerged at a different time, in a different cultural and economic situation? If human history were to be rerun, would photography emerge at all?

The imagining of manuals that could have existed but didn’t; the continued interest in all the techniques and materials that have been used to make and distribute photographs since the 1820s; the dreaming up of alternative societies in which photography is similar but different. There is, in our present era of networked/virtual cameras and violent capital, a continuous circling back to the fog, in a vital speculation as to whether photography could have taken other directions (which of course it still can).

This Country. Thoughts on the photography of Chris Killip and Graham Smith

David Campany

(This essay was commissioned for the book Chris Killip & Graham Smith 20/20, published by Augusta Edwards Fine Art, 2022)

Let me begin in a pub. Apart from an interest in photography, pub life is what Chris Killip, Graham Smith and I have in common. Smith made many of his photographs in and around the pubs he and his family frequented in Middlesborough, in the 1970s and 80s. Killip grew up and worked in a pub run by his father, on the Isle of Man, in the 1960s and 70s. A generation later, I grew up and worked in a pub run my parents, in deepest Essex.

Pubs are neither the world of work, nor home, but they are deeply connected to both. They are also connected to class consciousness, and gender too. My home town was socially quite varied, and our pub had a ‘Public Bar’- no carpet, hard chairs, dart board – and was used mainly by working class men; and a ‘Saloon Bar’ – carpet, soft chairs, used by middle class men and women, and sometimes by the men from the Public Bar when they brought their wives on a Sunday. Whether people are having a good time or getting into arguments, there is always a sense of theatre to pubs. The emotions are slightly intensified and acted out a little. From behind the bar, or through the frame of a camera, you can feel this quite strongly. I bought my first camera from a regular customer back then, and I’m sure the environment of the pub had played a role in my growing interest in social observation. In the book accompanying the 1991 Museum of Modern Art (New York) exhibition British Photography from the Thatcher Years, curator Susan Kismaric describes the pub as “a stage on which the drama of […] individual lives are played out.” I can’t speak for Killip or Smith, whose work was included in that now-famous show, but I imagine they would have agreed, or would have at least intuited the connection between pubs, looking and photography.

The present publication takes as its starting point an earlier exhibition, which in the world of British photography looms even larger than the New York one. In 1985, London’s Serpentine Gallery presented around 130 images by Killip and Smith under the title Another Country: Photographs of the North East of England. It was open only for a month, and there was no catalogue, just a small brochure.

At the time, British photography was in transition, if not crisis. Well, to be fair, it’s always in transition, if not crisis. That’s the nature of photography, and of Britain. The bitterly divisive demolition of the industrial working class was well under way by the mid-1980s. It had been underscored by the miners’ strike of 1983-84. The painful shift to an economy based precariously in the financial, leisure and service sectors had started. But class structure and class identity are not so easily dismissed or transformed.  Political and economic power was being centralised in the south of England, leading to a rift with the north that is as raw today as it ever was. In a piece for Aperture magazine in 1986, Mark Haworth-Booth saw how “visitors to the Serpentine were offered a view of ‘another country’ that is less than 300 miles away but strangely out of sight and out of mind.”[1]

On top of all this, and completely related to it, the world of independent photography was riven by anxieties, especially as to what documentary practice was, or could be. Killip and Smith had been finding their own ways to work, with collective ties to like-minded people.  In 1979, Smith had said:

The group I worked with (Amber Associates) has for the last ten years concerned itself with creating a lifestyle around independent film and photographic production in the North East. The keystone of our production is “commitment ” to a chosen region (with emphasis on the working class). The style is unashamedly documentary in its basis. We maintain that documentary can be extremely personal and feel it unfortunate that the word has become synonymous with factual journalism. We see ourselves as artists working within that tradition which might be described as a “creative interpretation of reality”.[2]

Smith’s remark appeared in the catalogue of the Hayward Gallery exhibition Three Perspectives on Photography. That show was an attempt to diagnose the differing approaches to the medium that seemed to be coming to something of a head. Alongside the work of the new feminist-activist photography, and a strand of socialist practice emerging from conceptual art and wary of anything ‘poetic’, Smith’s approach, like Killip’s, seemed the most traditional. It tapped into the lyric and expressive documentary modes pioneered in the 1930s, notably by Walker Evans in the USA and Bill Brandt in England. Indeed, Smith was probably paraphrasing the Scottish film-maker John Grierson. “The creative treatment of actuality with a social purpose.” Grierson is credited with coining the term ‘documentary’ back in 1928.

It is important to remember that at the beginning, documentary had its roots in the arts. It was understood as necessarily experimental and enriched by its unresolvable complexity. Creativity/actuality. Treatment/purpose. These are generative tensions that are not easy to understand.  However, documentary form soon became oversimplified in the hands of populist illustrated magazines, newspapers and then television. But there have always been practitioners, in film and photography, that have fought for an art of documentary complexity, and for an audience that might be willing to embrace it. This has never been a simple task, especially in the face of the mass media’s often authoritarian co-opting and debasing of documentary into simpleminded ‘concerned messages’.

It has not been easy for critics and reviewers either, especially if they are not from the same communities as the photographers or their subjects. As Graham Smith tells us in his words for this publication, he suffered at the hands of the British press, and by consequence so did some of the people he had photographed. Even though he had faith in his work, the high-minded but unthinkingly negative reception made Smith guarded. He withdrew his engagement, rarely exhibiting or publishing. There has never been a book of his work, nor a major exhibition. I, for one, mourn that loss. So, I am beyond happy to see a much more nuanced and welcoming climate emerging for rich and layered documentary work. New generations will get to see, enjoy and think about Smith’s remarkable photographs.

Killip’s trajectory was different. By the time of the Serpentine show, he had already published Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx (1980), and the Victoria & Albert Museum acquired all sixty-nine of the prints. He was approaching what would turn out to be his peak as an image maker, producing work in the North East of rare compassion and layered beauty. These photographs formed the core of what he showed in Another Country. By the early 1990s Killip knew his best work was done and put his energy into teaching. He continued to exhibit, museums acquired his prints, and in the 2010s a number of books of his work were published.

In an interview for the BBC in August 1985, Killip pointed out:

I have no interest really in photography. The interest is in what you can show people, what you can reveal. If all the cameras or film became unobtainable tomorrow, I would still find a way to go back to the people that I’m interested in, and I would write, probably try and learn to draw much better than I do now, but I would find a way.[3]

I imagine Graham Smith’s sentiments at that time were quite similar, and they are not uncommon among the very best photographers working right across the documentary tradition. David Goldblatt, who photographed the effects of apartheid in South Africa, comes to mind; and in a very different way Nan Goldin, who has documented her troubled bohemian life. Both have been much more ready to talk about their subject matter than their photography. You don’t hear this from painters, and only occasionally from writers. Photography allows itself to be shaped by an abiding commitment to the world. In fact, that commitment, greater than the commitment to the medium itself, may even be essential. Every decision, from camera position, composition and timing, through to printing, captioning and presentation, is driven by an ethical need to at least try to communicate what is important and meaningful to the photographer about people and their circumstances. Yes, Killip and Smith made some of the most extraordinary pictures of any artists in the second half of the twentieth century, but they did it through a commitment to what they wanted to photographed, not to some cultural abstraction called ‘Photography’, or ‘Art’.

In 1991, Smith wrote:

For the last ten years I have photographed in Middlesbrough, nowhere else. Like my parents I was born and brought up in the town. My father, mother, stepfather, and their friends are all good drinkers, and they have always used the same few pubs, which we consider to be the best in Middlesbrough. They are used by those who live on the edge, whose future is the next good time, the next good drink. It’s never clear to me why 1 photograph in these pubs. It might be that I’m using the camera as a way of looking at friends, family, people from their past and, in turn, my background. The truth might be that the camera is just an extension of my drinking arm.

This was his ‘bio’ for the catalogue of that MoMA show about the ‘Thatcher Years’. The other photographers – Chris Killip, Martin Parr, John Davies, and Paul Graham – offered long lists of published articles about their work and the exhibitions they had participated in. Smith clearly wrote what felt needed saying in that context. In fact, years later he took to writing in pencil on the backs of his prints. Memories and autobiographical thoughts. Gently literary descriptions of people, places and events. Not so much setting the record straight, as enriching the work, and puzzling over exactly why he had been so compelled to make it.

The choice Chris Killip and Graham Smith made to use larger format cameras was key to their work. While there has long been a drive within photography toward speed and efficiency, they embraced slowness and difficulty (and financial expense). It exerted a sense discipline as much as tradition, and was a way of instilling a feeling of purpose in their work. They put themselves and their cameras in demanding situations, where they had to think in the moment about what they were looking at and how to picture it. It is physically exhausting work that quickly drains the nervous system. Small format photography can do this too, of course (when asked what it was like shooting for his project The Americans on his 35mm Leica, Robert Frank replied: “I was in pretty good shape back then”) but the challenges with large format photography, particularly of dynamic scenes, are more intense. Very few photographers manage to sustain this way or working over a lifetime. If we couple this with the fact that both Killip and Smith were committed to particular social situations that were ephemeral and in transition, we can see why it was that their photography came to an end when it did. Life goes on of course, until even that comes to an end. But the images made by Killip and Smith will live on.

It is often tempting to look at a body of photographic work as being a product or symptom of its time. On some obvious level this is bound to be true. But I think it’s truer of work that is typical of its era. Work that is exceptional, like that of Chris Killip and Graham Smith, is more mysterious, and much less easily explained. So, it is best to be thankful that it even got made at all.

[1] Mark Haworth-Booth, ‘Chris Killip: Scenes from Another Country’, Aperture, Summer 1986.

[2] Graham Smith, quoted in Paul Hill, Angela Kelly, John Tagg eds., Three Perspectives on Photography, exhibition catalogue, catalogue (London: Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).

[3] Chris Killip, quoted by Mark Haworth-Booth in ‘Chris Killip: Scenes from Another Country’, Aperture, Summer 1986.

Feeling Light

David Campany

FT Weekend Magazine, September 3/4, 2022

As visitors pass between the giant bronze doors of the Pantheon in Rome, their faces change. It is not the heavy awe we associate with a grand cathedral but something much more elemental. A rare combination of space, light and sound makes the senses crackle to attention. Nobody quite knows the original purpose of the Pantheon but its name, meaning ‘every god’, keeps it inclusive and somehow very human. All are welcome. The interior is circular and open plan, with nowhere to hide. Step inside and you are part of it.

High above is a domed ceiling with a looming oculus at its centre. The distance from the oculus to the floor is the same as the width of the space, forty-three metres. A sphere of that diameter would fit snugly inside. Staring upward, you feel as if you are within a giant eye, or perhaps a camera.  It is mind-boggling that this still unrivalled architectural marvel dates from 128 AD, but the real drama is the light. When the doors are closed its only source is that open oculus. On overcast days it gives a softness to the volume of air. Raindrops plummet through the wafting incense to the coloured marble floor below. As your gaze moves from the brightness above to eye level, seeing becomes a conscious, physical experience, and the most compelling thing to look at is other people. They are doing exactly as you are. Feeling the light.

In high summer the sun hangs long and bright, and a beam of otherworldly brilliance pierces the space. It hits the wall, tracks downward, and reaches the centre of the floor. Crowds gather and the light bounces up to their faces. The background falls into near darkness and suddenly everyone is part of a Renaissance tableau. People slow down and watch each other. Every gesture, conscious or unconscious, is laden with symbolism. You can understand why all those painters fell in love with this light, Caravaggio most of all.

The photographer Elizabeth Bick comes to the Pantheon for a week or so around the summer solstice, when the light and the crowds are most vivacious. Next year will be her tenth visit. She used to be a dancer, but now she watches others move on the streets of New York, photographing with an eye that is analytical but deeply empathetic. Watch closely enough and life reveals rhythms and patterns no choreographer could invent.

Now and then, visitors step into the Pantheon’s circle of light, to pose or simply bathe in it, although the guards discourage this. All around, moments of unplanned beauty unfold for a sharp eye and a quick shutter. Passing interactions flare with brief drama. Movements mirror each other for a fraction of a second. Strangers drop their guard, surprised at the unity of just being here at the same time. Photography is a bodily act and Bick must move nimbly through it all, keeping her vision wide and her camera ready.  She is the first to arrive each morning, soaking up the atmosphere. Time passes, and the sun passes, its light transforming the space continuously. The stream of visitors rises and falls. Some, like Bick herself, are making their own return pilgrimages. There are people here she has photographed across the years. By dusk, her muscles ache and her nerves are shredded. A light dinner, wine, good rest and an early rise to begin again. The regular days make her more receptive to the unexpected little miracles humanity offers without knowing it.

In 2020 and 2021 the Pantheon remained open, but to limited numbers. Flying from the USA was impossible. The pandemic nearly scuppered Bick’s annual visits, until she found a way to operate remotely.  She worked with a trusted a photographer from Rome, relaying a live feed to her New York studio, from where she could direct the framing and timing. It sounds implausible, but think how much we all achieved online when we had to. Even so, the experience of almost missing out doubled Bick’s resolve to return this year. When she did, she could feel the crowd had an even greater intensity than before. People wanted to rediscover their public selves, and the Pantheon was an ideal place to do it.

Light is an everyday phenomenon. But when architecture makes light thinkable, it becomes strange. We do not really see the world around us: we see the light that it reflects. Although it shapes and gives meaning to mundane life, that light is cosmic, quite literally. It travels further and faster than anything we know. Looking up to that giant iris in the dome of the Pantheon, you sense the light that hits your eyes is concluding a long and mysterious journey. The Pantheon may not make you want to worship the sun but it will make you profoundly grateful for its light. And when that light illuminates us so sublimely, it might even make us grateful for each other.

Secondary Revision

by David Campany

Every photograph is a lucid and enigmatic fragment pulled out of context. It is a suspension of time and place, cut off and adrift, part of a now-lost continuum. Every photograph points us back to the time and place of its origin but the path is obscure. Photographs have a way of covering their own tracks. They pile up, and in that piling up they begin to suggest connections not so much back to their origin as with each other, in the here and now. For this reason, photography is often like dreaming, and the putting together of images into pairings and sequences is akin to the process of remembering a dream.

The great Walker Evans was once asked for a definition of photography. He thought carefully and replied: “The essence is done very quickly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine.  I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking.  After knowing what to take you have to do the editing.” In photography there is image capture, and then come the processes of choice, of editing and perhaps sequencing. The fragments are brought together into something new, but it can never be entirely coherent. Each photograph remains its own elusive entity, and so the arrangement of images remains more like poetry than prose; more like suggestion than clear explanation. When one image is placed next to another what results are resonances and associations, which have nothing to do with being correct or incorrect, factual or fictional.

It is worth returning to Sigmund Freud’s still compelling account of the dreamwork and its complex relation to waking life. Dreaming does not obey the logic of time and space. In a dream, elements of distant memory may combine with elements of what Freud called “the day’s residues”. Different times, places and events may be put together in the dream through ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’. Moreover, the dream can never be remembered exactly ‘as it was’, in its raw form. In the process of remembering, the dream is immediately and unavoidably subjected to ‘secondary revision’. The waking mind attempts to reinterpret and rework the dream’s material according to its wishes, which may be quite different from the wishes that formed the dream itself.

This process of secondary revision is a little like what happens when we look back over photographs that we have made. We might be surprised by what we find. We might try to guess what our motivations were in making the images. We might try to remember the time and place of which the photographs have become mysterious symbols. We may be left confused by our images. They may feel as if they were taken by someone else, or by a long-lost version of ourselves. Or we might try to ignore all that and live with the images in the present.

The gap in time between the taking of photographs and their secondary revision may be very small, perhaps just a matter of seconds, minutes, hours or days, but it may be longer.  Sometimes it takes years for a photographer to return to their images and shape them into something. Henri Cartier-Bresson had been photographing for two decades before he published a book of his work. It took Walker Evans nearly thirty years to turn his surreptitious photographs of passengers riding the New York subway into a book. Tod Papageorge waited nearly five decades before attempting to make sense of his earliest street photographs.

Suffo Moncloa made most of the photographs gathered here before 2015. That is not so long ago, although anything from before the global pandemic feels like a distant time and place. The social and psychological ruptures of the past year or so have distorted memory, broken continuities, and reset priorities. We are all different now, and we look at our past, collective and individual, with fresh perspectives. We may feel we are profoundly different people from who we were before. We may feel that we misunderstood what we were, or perhaps we have come to realise we do not understand ourselves now. Looking back at photographs we made in the past and making sense of them is really a process of making sense of ourselves. And we can never be sure we have got it right.  All we can do is find new forms, new resonances, new associations that may lead us towards something better.

‘Easier said than done’. An essay written for the book John Divola – Scapes, published by Skinnerboox

May 2022
Edition of 750
Hardcover
20x24cm
96 pages
ISBN 978-88-94895-57-5
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Designed by Federico Carpani

Easier said than done

by David Campany

For all of his artistic life, John Divola has concerned himself with photography itself, as a medium. Its qualities, conditions, properties, possibilities. One of those qualities, its illusionistic power to describe of the world before it, means that photography is never only photography. The medium requires the presence of something external to it, off which light bounces, to be gathered by a lens before leaving its mark. If the external world is essential to photography, then perhaps it is really part of the medium. This is where the definitional trouble, or fun, begins. And this is where I find John Divola. Figuratively, and sometimes literally he is there, convening encounters between his camera and the world.

Cameras and their users are caught between the universal and the particular. Photography and photographs; humanity and whatever specific kind of human we happen to be. There is at least something existentially universal about Divola’s photographic adventures. The lone observer moving through the world and reflecting upon it through various camera possibilities. But nobody is truly universal, or only universal. We each come wrapped in our particulars, just as each and every photograph belongs to the universe of photography precisely insofar as it is particular. Forever the two. When I look at Divola’s photographs, I sense something universal because I sense all the particulars. Yes, a white, male, middle class Southern Californian, post-conceptual artist of the kind that makes these kinds of photographs. But nobody makes photographs quite like Divola. He is one of a kind, and therein are the universal and the particular.

There is a passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in which the writer describes a person walking alone in a forest, feeling at one with it, and momentarily losing their sense of self. The person comes to the edge of a clearing. Looking across the clearing, the person glimpses another person in the distance. The stranger is far enough away that no details about them are discernible, beyond being human. But the presence of this stranger changes everything. Neither person can be at one with the space, which is now shared, charged, social. There is an ethical demand, and a focussed sense of self that results from being perceived by another.

Sartre was a very imagistic writer. He described scenarios for us to imagine. Although the forest encounter seems simple, when I think carefully about how I am actually picturing it, in my mind’s eye, it becomes more complex. I imagine it from the point of view of the person at one with the forest. I imagine it from the point of view of the stranger. I imagine the scenario from above or to the side, as if I were an invisible witness, observing without being really present or seen. I imagine other eyes in the forest, perhaps human, perhaps not. Sometimes the scenario feels dangerous. Sometimes it feels liberating. And I imagine how others might imagine this scenario. Sartre keeps its simple, in order to allow for multiple responses. Universal and particular. I know John Divola has read Being and Nothingness, and that it means something to him, because he once made an artwork about it (The Green of This Notebook 1995).

On some level I think the photographs gathered here are about aloneness, and maybe even loneliness, with all the euphoria and anxiety, all the exhilaration and boredom, all the joy and dread, all the universals and particulars that this can entail. But Divola did not simply observe distant ships, lone figures, isolated houses and dogs. He did not simply run in the desert. He photographed these things. Photography externalises and makes things thinkable, and communicable. When I look at these photographs, I enjoy them as pictures and documents. I enjoy them as records of actions, performances, places, light, time, and traces of being in the world. I imagine being Divola, while knowing I am not. I imagine other people imagining they are Divola, while knowing they are not. I imagine what Divola looks like from the point of view of a stranger, a dog, a passing ship, and a distant house.  I imagine what kind of image I would make in these scenarios, and what kind of images others might make. Universals and particulars.

There is something clarifying about deserts and seascapes.  They are like sketches of places, stripped of clutter and distraction, but they are no less particular for that. The less there seems to be in a place, or in a photograph, the more acutely we sense what is there. So, yes, they do feel like worlds set apart, slightly out of time and away from things. They also feel perfectly contingent. Being in a desert or seascape heightens one’s attention to the here and now, and this might make for something cosmic. Such places, and photographs of such places, can exaggerate the universal and the particular, and allow them to be contemplated.

It is tempting to think of the universal as a higher goal, a lofty aspiration, something edifying and transcendent. That is usually how it is thought about. But photographs complicate this, because if they allude to anything transcendent, it comes from their inevitable particularities. You may have noticed that when photographers try too hard to be transcendent it quickly becomes vapid or pompous. Divola embraces and inhabits the grounded condition of photography, the here and now of its earthly situation. If anything transcendent does emerge, it is from, and conditioned by, the plain facts of life and the attempt to make them interesting with a camera. This is the source of the profound humility and endearingly absurd humour I feel in much of Divola’s work.

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I know, I know. Samuel Beckett’s mantra from Worstward Ho is quoted too often these days, so let me give you the lines that follow it:

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.

Nothing is perfect. Nobody is perfect. Failing better is a noble goal for any photographer. And easier said than done.

Dear Ave

Hollywood Boulevard, Walk of Fame, 1970s.  You were there, with your camera, with your love of life and people. It seems you turned the sidewalk into a little stage, and everyone came for a momentary audition. Some wanted to be famous, some were OK with a walk-on part, most were just happy to see you. I can sense the life of that street. A brief time before heavy commercialisation and selfies. I can see it was rough around the edges. But oh, so alive.

What was it Oscar Wilde said? “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, although on Hollywood Boulevard the stars were underfoot too. Those crazy plaques in the sidewalk. I have always loved it that people look for the star of their favourite celebrity and walk oblivious over the ones that don’t interest them. There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

I know a number of these photos got out into the world back then. The dedicated little world of photography magazines. You may be pleased to know I have found some of them in a library here in London. I sat on the floor between the stacks and imagined it was the summer of 1975 and these magazines were new.  There is your name on the silver-grey cover of Creative Camera, along with Ed Grazda, Anders Petersen and Judy Steiner. I looked at your photographs and ran my fingers over the pages, nearly half a century old. I saw these people, in vivid fragments of time, but I wondered what they saw. What did you look like back then, Ave? I bet you had a great smile. And great shirts too.

Well…the calendar pages blew. It seems you have kept working, kept shooting, never losing that affection for things and people, and how they look in pictures.

And now it is 2022. The number looks like science fiction, and the world feels like it. But patience is a virtue (and a pain in the ass) and the world now has a book of your photos of Hollywood Boulevard. I know we all want our recognition immediately, and it can be difficult when it doesn’t come. But good photographs live on, and they have second lives. I think of Walker Evans taking his photos of strangers on the New York subway in 1938. He didn’t publish a book of them until 1966. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who I know you admired deeply, worked for twenty years before he made a book.

My friend the photographer Dayanita Singh said: “A book is a conversation with a stranger in the future.” That feels about right. Imagine this book in fifty years’ time. If there are people around to look at it, they will see in it people just like themselves. Sure, things will be different, just as they are now, but your photos have a way of getting to the eternal as much as the ephemeral. I know they say the arrow of photography is always pointing backwards in time. We get that, but it’s only half true. Photographs have a future. A future that we don’t have.

I hope we meet one day, Ave.

Congratulations. But most of all – thank you.

David Campany

London, 21 March, 2022

The catalogue accompanying Cornelia Parker’s major 2022 exhibition at TATE includes a short essay by David Campany on the artist’s relation to photography.

In 1997, Cornelia Parker presented a slideshow of her work at the Architectural Association, in London. I had seen some ofher exhibitions before then, but that slideshow made me think about her relation to the camera. Each work was photographed carefully and simply, and Parker spoke a line or two about what we were looking at. Somehow, I felt I was coming to know many works that I had not actually seen for myself. Obviously, a camera can offer only a partial account of a sculpture, but her images and words seemed disarmingly complete.  In the years since, I have followed Parker’s work(and words) closely, and with particular interest in her complex, playful, and elusive engagement with photography.

Sometimes Parker makes work with a camera and other photographic materials; sometimes she documents her sculptural work with a camera; sometimes she makes photographs of the making of her sculptural works, recordingthe process as if it were a performance; and sometimes her finished sculptures hit you with the force of a snapshot. Think of Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991, which feels like an instantaneous photograph in three-dimensional form. (It is also a piece many people have seen and known only as photographic documentation, in books, catalogues and online).

Parker seems to enjoy the slippery area where we relate to the photograph as both artwork and document, interpretation and record. This non-definitive, hybrid attitude has a lineage we can trace back via Conceptual Art and Performance Art, all the way through to Surrealism, Dada, and Marcel Duchamp. Indeed, Parker’s favourite photograph is Dust Breeding 1920, the strange image made by Man Ray of the surface of Duchamp’s unfinished The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-23. Half abstract, half figurative, it is like no other photograph. In books on Man Ray, it tends to be regarded as pioneering work by a visionary artist. In books on Duchamp however, it is often presented as anecdotal document of the making of the Large Glass. I imagine Parker also appreciates the famous photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz of Duchamp’s Fountain1917, his ‘readymade’ urinal placed on a plinth as an artwork. The urinal was lost, and all the world knew of it was its reproduced image until 1964, when Duchamp issued replicas of his Readymades. Dust Breeding was also reissued that yearin an edition of ten. Both Man Ray and Duchamp signed it, securing its ambiguity forever.

Like those two artists, Parker comes up with titles for her works that are brilliantly potent and highly visual in themselves. They are often on the cusp between prosaically literal description, like a factual caption, and suggestivepoetry. Words that Define Gravity. Thirty Pieces of Silver. Inhaled Cliffs. Embryo Firearms. Negatives of Sound. Poison and Antidote Drawing. Premeditated Act of Violence. Such titles alone are enough to evoke lucid but enigmatic images in the mind. But they also allude, like the phrase “dust breeding”, to processes that a photograph could barely capture. That combination of almost comic literalism and enigmatic allusion runs throughout Parker’s work. And I have a hunch that all of it, regardless of medium and materials, is related somehow to the slippery qualities of the photographic image: the presence and the absence; the object and its visual impression; the immediate impact and the long-lasting impression; the economy of means and the lightness of touch.