Abstraction as Event, Event as Abstraction

Aperture magazine n.258, Spring, 2025

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