Published on the occasion of Mac Adams: Crimes of Perception, works from 1970′s. Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, June 2013

 

One

Let’s embrace the hybrid character of photography. In Mac Adams’ pictures

you will find allusions to detective stories and news reportage, crime scenes and

film noir, the Nouveau Roman and the photo-roman, movie publicity and film

frames, snapshots and high art, advertising and the still life, voyeurism and

exhibitionism, glamour and horror, sculpture and painting, literature and

architecture. When he began to make these works the reigning dogma in

photographic art was still very much about purity, about finding the ground and

the qualities that belonged to the medium alone. That was becoming something of

a dead end. Why shouldn’t photography accept and enjoy the overlaps with the

other arts? Moreover, might this hybrid approach actually cast new light on what

really is particular about the medium?

Tennis (diptych), 1976, black and white photograph, gelatin silver print. 31.5 x 26.77 inches (80 x 68 cm) each

 

Two

The gallery is an operating table and a stage set, to which the different

potentials of photography are brought. These two metaphors – operating table and

set – map very well onto what seem to be the two key impulses of the medium: the

forensic interest in detail and the cinematic interest in mise-en-scène or staging.

These impulses are so forcefully present today because all photography in art is

somehow obliged to enter a dialogue either with the notion of visual evidence or

with the culture of the moving image in which the still image finds itself. Or both.

Mac Adams does both.

Three

Watch carefully. Economy of means and economy of expression have been vital

to Mac Adams throughout his career, be it in photography, or sculpture or

installation. But his deftness and precision only serve to highlight the ambiguity of

communication and the essential openness of all images. Looking at Adams’s

diptyches is like watching a close-up magician. Everything seems clear and lucid,

everything seems graspable but suddenly something has slipped your attention.

The magician does it once more. You watch intently. It’s gone. The key has

vanished between one certainty and another.

Double Split Triptych, 1978, back and white photograph, gelatin silver print. 30.08 x 37.24 inches (76.4 x 94.6 cm) each

 

Four

Everything starts in the middle. Agatha Christie would often start writing her

detective fictions with the outlandish murder of the finale and the unexpected

motive. From these she would work backwards, reverse engineering her plots so

that they would always go where they were predestined to go. Mac Adams has

spoken of a certain debt to, or influence from Christie. However his photographs

are not ‘whodunnits’. They’re not even ‘whydunnits’, or ‘howdunnits’. All those

forms are essentially linear, and explanatory. Adams’s scenarios are suspended.

They are middles with no beginnings or endings. They are more like the tableau

vivant or loop. We come in somewhere in the middle and we leave somewhere in

the middle, and we must make of it what we can. There is no explanation, no final

settling of accounts. No pointing the finger.

Five

Photography has many time zones. I sense Mac Adams has much in common

with Nicolas Roeg, the director who once described cinema as a time machine.

The syntax of Adams’ diptychs is reminiscent of Roeg’s editing. A mix of formal

analogy, temporal leaps and associative linkages. More often than not filmmakers

and critics tend to see photography as a raw and elemental unit, awaiting cinematic

articulation as one of twenty-four per second. Yet, away from cinema we can see

that photography has always had its own complex engagement with time, with

duration, and with movement. Think of the ‘decisive moment’, the pregnant

moment, the constructed tableau, flash photography and the long exposure, to

name of few of its different temporalities. To these we must add all the procedures

of assembly that have been so crucial to the development of photography: the

album, the archive, the diary, the photo essay, montage, collage, sequences,

pairing and juxtapositions (not to mention all the new modes opened up by

electronic technologies). The time of photography deserves a philosophy every bit

as sophisticated as that extended to cinema.

Orian (diptych), 1980, black and white photograph, gelatin silver print. 28.35 x 28.7 inches (72 x 72.9 cm) each

 

Six

‘Narrative’ is a noun and an adjective. An image can simply be narrative

without belonging to ‘a’ narrative. Actually photography is pretty lousy at

narrating in the conventional sense but it’s quite perfect for suggesting narrative

possibilities. Often we sense these possibilities when they are set in motion by the

most succinct and minimal means. An ambiguous gesture. A stray object. An

allusive composition. An enigmatic detail. An action pointing beyond the frame.

Whatever else it is, Mac Adams’s photography is a rich inventory of such things.

 

Seven

Diptyches are difficult but Mac Adams makes it look easy. The diptych is one

of the most challenging of modes for art and particularly for photography.

Challenging both for makers and audiences. This is because it undoes the formal

unity of the single image but shuns the comfort of the extended sequence. In a

diptych there is no flow, but a shuttling to and fro. A seductive and confounding

short-circuit. Two images. One gap. Look before you leap. Mac Adams calls this

‘The Narrative Void’.

 

Eight

The best things often fall into the void. Art history has its voids, and for a while

it looked as if Mac Adams’ early photography was to be lost, somehow misplaced

between overly tidy accounts of Conceptualism at the start of the 1970s and the

Postmodern Art of the decade’s end. But that period in between was so rich for

photography, perhaps the richest there has ever been. And this was precisely

because it was so messy, so uninterested in categories and boundaries. Everything

was up for grabs, nothing was off-limits, and artists went at the high speed of

creativity, not the sluggish speed of the market. Adams’s work exemplifies the

particular balance of promiscuous exploration and rigor we also find in the work

of James Collins, John Hilliard, Victor Burgin, Robert Cumming, Barbara Kasten,

Eileen Cowin, John Divola and Ger van Elk. Critics in the mid-1970s even

referred to a discernible ‘narrative turn’ in photography. In 1977 it was notable

enough to have a presence of its own at the now legendary Documenta 6 in Kassel,

Germany. This was before Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, before Robert

Longo and Jeff Wall. Maybe it was less glamorous, less concerned with spectacle

and consumerism and it came to be overlooked for a while. But it’s no surprise

today’s audiences and critics are looking again, not to correct the past but to

recognise the continued relevance of the work. Finally we might be getting the

past we deserve, the past we need right now.

 

Nine

All great art strikes us as contemporary. This is so even when we know full

well it could only have been made when it was made. In fact the hold that the

present may have on the art of the past is often intensified by its historical

qualities. Think of the paintings of Johannes Vermeer or Edward Hopper, the films

of Robert Bresson or Jean-Luc Godard. We’d be foolish not to see them as

contemporary, not to see them as rightfully ours. There is no denying the period

detail of Mac Adams’s photographs – the clothes, the objects, the décor, the chairs

and tables. But the concerns – with perception, seduction, privacy, looking,

pleasure, evidence, artifice and knowledge – they are timeless, they abide. They

belong to every era and we are free to claim them as our own.

 ______________

Marianne Wex: Let’s Take Back Our Space, 1979

by David Campany

The German artist Marianne Wex started out as a painter before producing her photographic project Let’s Take Back Our Space, one of the great unsung works of 1970s feminist history and cultural analysis. Born in Hamburg in 1937, Wex studied at the city’s University of Fine Arts, where she later taught for seventeen years. In 1979, she published Let’s Take Back Our Space as a book, with the subtitle “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures. It is a visual survey comprised of hundreds of photographs assembled into dozens of thematic grids: Seated persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; standing persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; people sitting and laying on the ground; arm and leg positions; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statuary; how the men of Christianity took over an old goddess gesture; the stultifying effect of the patriarchal socialization of men. And so on. The images were culled from a huge range of sources—advertisements, reportage, fashion magazines, studio portraits, the history of art—and many were taken on the streets of Hamburg by Wex, who proposes that our smallest, most unconscious gestures speak volumes about the power relations of gender in daily life.

It is an argument made with images, and, as such, it is highly dubious as science. We all know photographs can be chosen and sequenced to make an argument, that their evidential quality can be bent to serve almost any view. But Wex goes beyond the scientific. Her project is an intervention, and its claims to authority come less from the presentation of facts than from the flashes of recognition we may have in response to what she presents. Decades on, it’s impossible not to see aspects of ourselves and of present society in these images.

Moreover, there is space in the project for plenty of experiments and anomalies. Women do sometimes stand with their feet turned outward, but only if they are working class and not in the company of men, Wex notes. When shown stereotypical photos of men asserting themselves, women can easily and comfortably imitate them. But when men are shown images of women in “feminine” poses, they either can’t or won’t imitate them, even for the sake of an experiment. The few images of children and young adolescents are very telling: we can sense how the gender- and sexuality-neutral body language of early youth is soon conventionalized into familiar patterns. Not always, but most of the time. Wex is careful not to make the argument seem totalizing, or the situation hopeless, and she seems to retain a revolutionary zeal for change. Yes, her approach uses heterosexuality as a kind of default, and there is little space for questions of ethnicity, subculture, or the ironic adoption of the body language of the powerful.

Such complexities would make updating the project almost impossible, if Wex were still a working artist today. Let’s Take Back Our Space was first exhibited as photo panels at NGBK (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst) in West Berlin in 1977, but a serious illness turned Wex away from art and toward the study of alternative medicine. This remarkable project wasn’t shown again until Mike Sperlinger curated a show in 2009 for Focal Point Gallery in Essex, England. Let’s Take Back Our Space is both a remarkable record of its time and a still-troubling reflection of ours.

Thanks to Michael Famighetti who commissioned this piece for Aperture no. 213, 2013

A review of Oranges on Fire, a survey of the work of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel (Published by Walther König, 2012)

Finally we have a book that surveys one of the most interesting artistic collaborations of the post-war era.  In 1973 Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel began a long career that traced an erratic but always intriguing arc from the playful, image-savvy conceptualism of America’s west coast to that strain of postmodern appropriation that concerned itself with the increasingly sinister machinations of the mass media. With billboards, books, films and exhibitions the duo coaxed photography and audiences into a realm in which equal weight could be given to humour and rigour, curiosity and the intellect, history and autobiography, sober documents and spontaneous invention. The collaboration lasted until Sultan’s death in 2009.

What distinguished their work from the ‘hard conceptualism’ from which they emerged was a genuine affection for making and looking at photographs in all their seductive, uncontainable wildness. Smart wit leavened the cool strategy, but silence was always chosen over didacticism. They had as much in common with Robert Cumming, John Divola and Keith Arnatt as with Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner or Victor Burgin. In fact it was Arnatt who introduced me to Mandel’s serio-comic spoof of time-and-motion photography Making Good Time  (1989) when we taught together, and I first encountered their influential book Evidence (1977) on Victor Burgin’s bookshelf.

Sultan and Mandel seemed to make as much work apart as together but this book, comically titled Oranges on Fire, straddles the two because even when working alone they were foils for each other. Sultan’s book Pictures from Home (1989) was a brave mix of family album photos, Super-8 film frames, open-hearted writing and his own elegantly formal photographs, which told the story of his difficult relationship with his very conservative parents. When it didn’t influence subsequent photographers directly it was opening doors for them. One can trace a distinct line to Mitch Epstein’s intimate epic Family Business (2003) and Chris Coekin’s Knock Three Times (2006). While theorists wrote difficult essays about the always-political nature of the personal, and the personal nature of the political, Sultan did it simply by looking with steely-eyed honesty at how his own middle class white American family had come to be what it was. ‘Families’ are no more natural than the mass-produced goods that are marketed to them or the ‘family values’ they reproduce so effortlessly.

Since its republication in 2004, Sultan and Mandel’s landmark book Evidence has hogged the limelight. It was a gnomic collection of photographs extracted from police, scientific and fire department archives, reproduced on white pages like classical ‘art photography’. But the pictures were just too outlandish, too esoteric to simply become art. Instead they sat there on the page, keeping their arcane secrets while disturbing aesthetic judgement.  Strip the most functional photography to its bare essentials and you’re left with enigmas, not facts.

But there were many projects before and after Evidence that are just as rich. Mike Mandel’s early books were ludic inversions of traditional portraiture. Seven Never Before Seen Portraits of Edward Weston (1974) simply presented average photos of seven men named Edward Weston. They had a knack for giving their projects deadpan titles that turn out to be anything but.  Their first jointly authored book How to Read Music in an Evening (1975) comprised illustrations lifted from mail order catalogues, sequenced across white pages as an enigmatic psycho-sexual allegory of the relation between consumer goods and the erotic. At least I think that’s what it is.  I know few other books as compelling or elusive.  Several spreads of this hard-to-find title are reproduced, followed by a fascinating exchange of typed correspondence with the lawyers representing the irate mail order firm, Blum, Propper & Hardacre (really!). Sultan & Mandel pleaded artistic licence, invoking the long history of appropriation in art. The lawyers settled for a guarantee that no more than the original one thousand copies would be printed.

There is a chance to see documentation of a series of often discussed billboards in which the artists mixed popular commercial illustration with a surrealist flair for out of place language (Oranges on Fire was the title of one of these).  The problem with publishing ‘public art’ in books it that it’s no longer public in the same way. It becomes difficult to imagine what it might have been to encounter these billboards on the street – unannounced, unauthored, uncommercial and inconspicuously artful.  But it is illuminating to see them in their whole oeuvre, rather than rounded up with similar public work by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, for example. One can’t help feeling the early 1980s was the last moment before public urban space was finally privatized and branded once and for all. Sealed off in its gloss, even dissenters now seem to think the passage from the street to the auction house is normal and automatic (yes you, Banksy).

The book has five essays, which in other circumstances would be overkill, but the work of Sultan & Mandel is open and generous, and it is illuminating to read the range of informed perspectives here.  The highlight is Carter Ratcliff’s assessment of the significance of Evidence. I tore it out of Art in America six years ago (2006) but it is reprinted here in expanded form.  Charlotte Cotton’s lengthy introduction sets the stage with great care. It’s an illuminating account of the art scenes of California in the early 1970s as Pop gave way to the paranoia of the Nixon era. But the book is more than a time capsule. The work of Sultan & Mandel has lasted because their concern with the power of media images is as relevant now as it ever was.

In 1983 they turned a public gallery into a 24-hour newsroom, with Wirephoto and electronic news machines from Associated Press and United Press International. Stories would arrive – as text and image – and the artists would respond as critically minded editors, fashioning their own counter reading of the mass media’s news values. Oranges on Fire may be the only place to see Newsroom now, but it wouldn’t have looked out of place amid the political urgency of last year’s Documenta or Berlin Biennale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Few photographs have had anything like the impact or enduring fascination of Edward Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion, made in the 1870s and 1880s. They changed things forever and have come to symbolise modernity’s seismic and irreversible shifts in the understanding of vision, the living body, nature, science and art. So singular, so bold, so uncompromising was his project that it can seem as if historical time is split into two epochs. There is ‘before Muybridge’ and there is ‘after Muybridge’.

That is extraordinary enough but it misses something even more profound: the impact of Muybridge’s work has never ceased. It still has the power to stop us in our tracks. When each one of us first encounters those sequences of ecstatic arrest do we not feel a change in our own internal order? Does not each one of us have a ‘before Muybridge’ and an ‘after’? Many nineteenth-century pioneers strike us as historical curiosities but Muybridge trapped secrets so fundamental to modern experience that all subsequent generations have considered him theirs, if never in quite the same way. His influence on art confirms this. From Thomas Eakins using Muybridge’s images as guides for paintings as early as 1879 to filmmakers of this century, artists have been struck by the locomotion studies in myriad ways. Each finds in them a different revelation of what is contemporary.

When I first came across the reissued books of Muybridge’s work they were the most vivid, uncompromising and authoritative images I had ever seen. They were also the most ambiguous, voyeuristic and obsessive. Who made them? Why? What were they for? How were you supposed to look at them? That story about whether a galloping horse has all its feet off the ground could hardly justify this endless parade of beasts and men.

The reissued books chimed with the interest in all things serial that preoccupied vanguard artists of the 1960s. In December 1967 Artforum published ‘The Serial Attitude’, an essay by the artist Mel Bochner that placed Muybridge as the distant precursor of an art based not on ‘a method, not a style’. In different ways Minimalist sculpture and music, Pop and Conceptualism were concerned with a new aesthetic based upon the hypnotic precision of near-mathematical systems. The more recent precursor, noted Bochner, was Marcel Duchamp. The essay reproduced Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1913) and highlighted its debt to another chronophotographer, the Frenchman Etienne-Jules Marey, whose multiple exposures overlayed the instants where Muybridge’s frames separated them.

Opening page of ‘Dada’s Daddy’, Life, 10 October 1952. Photograph by Eliot Elisofon.

Much earlier (1952) Life magazine had run a feature on Duchamp in which the artist re-enacted his painting for a multi-exposure portrait taken by Eliot Elisofon. A corny publicity stunt perhaps, but it was a key moment in the post-war rediscovery of Duchamp. By 1970, when MoMA New York presented Information (the first international survey of Conceptual art) his interests in chance, performance and mechanical repetition seemed to have permeated everything. To mark the show, Life magazine reproduced Keith Arnatt’s Self-Burial (1969), a deadpan photo-sequence of himself descending into the earth. Printed above the images was the declaration: ‘The content of my work is the strategy employed to ensure there is no content other than the strategy.’

Keith Arnatt, Self-Burial, 1969, reproduced in Life magazine, 14 August  1970.

Sol LeWitt, Muybridge II, 1964

 Tight systems and repetitions tend to produce their own pathologies, especially in art. The experimental filmmaker, occasional photographer and writer Hollis Frampton knew this well. In his beautifully operatic essay ‘Fragments of a Tesseract’ (1973) the source of Muybridge’s compulsion to control and repeat is located in his damaged psyche: having discovered his wife had given birth to a child by another man he promptly tracked down the imposter and shot him. Muybridge was acquitted. He departed for South America to clear his mind with other projects but returned to the locomotion studies with inexhaustible vigour. Perhaps he really was replaying the traumatic instants when his found he’d been cuckolded and then exacted his revenge. Or perhaps that’s dollar-book Freud. Either way, Frampton’s own homage to Muybridge, the hilarious Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (made with Marion Faller in1975), point at the madness in any method pursued so single-mindedly.

Hollis Frampton and Marion Faller, Watermelon falling (var. “New Hampshire Midget”) from Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion, 1975.

In ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967) Sol LeWitt proclaimed: ‘The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.’ Like Arnatt’s statement it was typical of the terse, recalcitrant definitions of the time. This is only a recipe for austere anti-aestheticism if you think deployed machines or systems cannot produce anything of beauty, and if that’s the case you are probably not going to ‘like’ Muybridge’s locomotion studies very much. Lewitt paid his respects to what he found fascinating in them with Muybridge I (1964). Through a peephole in a wooden box we see a photo of the torso of a naked woman seated. Across ten images we get progressively closer until only her abdomen fills our vision, moving from scientific objectivity, through intimacy to something a too close for comfort. It is a hint at the sexual politics of looking that were expressed starkly in Eleanor Antin’s landmark Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1971). A series of 140 pseudo-scientific, full-length photos of Antin’s own body were taken over thirty-seven days during which she dieted to lose ten pounds, ‘sculpting’ herself towards an idealized image.

Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1971). 148 black-and-white photos documenting 37 days (four photos per day) of the artist’s weight loss. Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago / Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

At a formal level Carving is strikingly similar to Muybridge’s grids but it highlights the ways the sexes are almost anxiously differentiated in his locomotion studies. Muybridge’s men run, leap, throw and tumble, while the women flee, act coy, nurture children and carry pails of water.

Thomas Eakins, William Rush and his Model, 1907–8.

Thomas Eakins’ painting William Rush and his Model (1907–08) depicts one of the United States’ first sculptors at work. Rush had been commissioned to carve in wood a female figure as a symbol of the Schuykill River, which runs through Philadelphia. Eakins portrays Rush helping the model down from her podium. To paint the nude he deferred to one of Muybridge’s studies (Woman walking downstairs, throwing scarf over her shoulders, c. 1885), changing it only a little to suit his purpose. In the final work the woman’s shadows do not match the man’s at all. Moreover Eakins’ rendering of her is so graphic and lucid against the impressionistic background that the sculptor seems to he helping her right out of the painting. At first glance it is difficult to tell if this is technical naivety on Eakins’ part or a brilliant meditation on desire and its tendency to hallucinate its object as something hyper-real and otherworldly.

Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953

Within a few decades it was precisely this unnerving strangeness that was attracting the painter Francis Bacon to Muybridge’s studies. Like Eakins, Bacon was less struck by their sequential nature than the mesmeric power of just one, plucked and scrutinized. But where Eakins saw in Muybridge a path towards idealization, accuracy and knowledge, Bacon found the opposite: debasement, distortion and chaos. Both were right. There is a profound ambivalence lurking in the camera’s ability to make visible phenomena that are far beyond human perception. This ‘optical unconscious’, as Walter Benjamin cleverly named it back in 1931, can bring enlightenment but it can it also bring uncertainty and even monstrosity. Bacon’s art of physical extremity and psychical trauma expresses the fear and loathing common to so much post-war existentialism and his way of reworking Muybridge was crucial. The photo cut off from its natural order is rendered inexplicable, becoming a metaphor for the isolation of human beings from each other and from the world around them. Even the schematic frames Bacon painted in white to heighten the presence of his figures owe something to the cold abstraction of Muybridge’s metric grids. But just what are the spaces Bacon’s figures occupy? Torture chambers? Bedrooms? Stages? Theatres of enlightenment or theatres of cruelty? We rarely admit to ourselves how strange it must have felt to be one of Muybridge’s performing specimens but I think such difficult empathy is what energises all of Bacon’s best paintings.

Nearly every book about the history of cinema offers Muybridge as one of its ‘parents’. We have all grown up with moving images so it is difficult not to connect his instantaneous consecutive images with cinema. And while it is true that Muybridge himself devised a way of animating his photos (the Zoopraxiscope of 1879) he saw it as a novelty, far removed from the serious and noble project of stopping things. Chronophotography and cinematography give rise to incompatible yet intertwined ideas about the truth of images, time and motion. More importantly they are aesthetically distinct forms. Nevertheless the fact that a movie camera is just a still camera that takes photos in an unusual way can never be quite overcome, particularly if you are a filmmaker. It is a fact you face all the time in the edit suite.

Perhaps this is why for decades filmmakers have wanted to set Muybridge in motion. Dead Horse (1998), the video installation by Tim Macmillan, is the most visceral and perfect use of his Time-Slice ® technique. At the moment of its execution in an abattoir a horse is photographed simultaneously by row of many still cameras. The photos are then ordered into a filmic sequence. The result is a static world traversed by a moving gaze. Although it feels strikingly contemporary, the technology for doing this is as old as cinema, if not older. If Muybridge had fired all his cameras at once and animated the results via his Zoopraxiscope we might have had a century of Time-Slice. That it appeared only recently is less an anomaly than a sign of the fact that for any image form to come into being it must be first imagined or desired. Imagination and desire are historically grounded. Nobody wanted Time-Slice in 1879. The basic structures of photography and cinema have existed for a long time, but they have proved flexible enough to accommodate ever-newer conceptions of time, space, movement and stillness. That is why they are still with us rather than belonging to the nineteenth century. Macmillan’s video alludes to this historical delay with a clear reference back to the work of Muybridge’s very first studies of horses in motion.

 

Tim Macmillan, Dead Horse, video installation, 1998.

 

Opening titles, Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta 1977 © Paramount Pictures

One could go on listing the influences Muybridge has had on art. But those unexpected moments when we are reminded of his project are at least as telling. How do I account for the fact that I can never watch John Travolta’s bouncy-groovy stroll that kick-starts Saturday Night Fever (1977) without thinking of Muybridge’s studies of men walking? I guess I discovered both the same year but that’s hardly an explanation. It is the rhythm, the looping, loping rhythm. It is knowing that every walk is the same yet every walk is unique (in fact every step is unique). It is knowing that even walking is an expressive cultural act that cannot be reduced to science. It is staring like a voyeur at people in the form of objective documents, while knowing deep down it is a performance entirely for you. It is the inseparability of looking, learning and pleasure. And that raw, almost visceral scopic satisfaction is at the heart Muybridge’s work.

At the 1893 World’s Fair, Muybridge the showman delivered his lecture ‘The Science of Animal Locomotion in its Relation to Design in Art’. He was booked to do it three hundred times but audiences were failing to show up. It would take a while to come around again to his work. The lecture title shouldn’t be blamed either. Although none too catchy it was spot on, roping together the triumvirate of science, design and art without resolving the relation between them. It was precise and all too humanly ambiguous, just like the photographs. And that’s why they still look contemporary.

 

by David Campany, from Neus Miró ed., Insomnia, exhibition catalogue, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2013

All American: Five Photographic Books about the USA

A short text by David Campany

Modern America has been a project, an experiment. As such, its self-image is a matter of some importance. The critic Van Wyck Brooks once wrote of “the immense, vague cloud-canopy of idealism” that spread over the national culture in the nineteenth century. This was a self-image of sorts, pervasive and persistent. Of course, what has been so striking about the country’s most vital voices is the unwavering and critical concern with what goes on beneath that canopy, day to day, place to place, person to person. Mark Twain, Edward Hopper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walker Evans, Jacob Lawrence, William Faulkner, Douglas Sirk, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Robert Altman, Toni Morrison. The list is long and the standards high. Popular or avant-garde, and frequently both, this culture has attuned us to what can be shown and known when looking not upward, or from on high, but on equal footing with one’s fellow citizens: anonymous, familiar, and yet cut off by the systemic alienations so characteristic of our era.

With the rise of mass-circulation illustrated magazines in the 1930s there was growing tension over how national identity was to be defined and pictured. As a tool of propaganda and social record, of officialdom and dissent, photography was debated and contested. When Life magazine was launched in 1936 its ideological power was clear. Many disliked its spectacle, its sentimentalism, and its presumption that “popular” had to mean crudely populist. While on commission from Fortune magazine, Walker Evans and James Agee submitted a proposal for a subsection of Life (Fortune’s sibling at Time Inc.) to be turned over to them. As editorial advisors, they would provide a space for experimental forms of journalistic writing and a visual approach devoid of what Agee called “all ‘art’ and ‘dramatic’ photography and of the plethoric and flabby ends of Leica photography.” To take care of everything from commissioning to page layout they asked for an office and $100 a week each. Their request was declined.

An alternative to the magazine was the book. Its audience would be far smaller but so would the compromises of politics and form. In 1941 Evans and Agee published Let us now Praise Famous Men, initially selling just four hundred copies. Evans’s 1938 picture book American Photographs faired slightly better. And unlike ephemeral magazines, books last. They may be reread, reassessed, reinterpreted, even republished. They may find new audiences and influence the work of others. Indeed there is an unbroken thread running from American Photographs to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958/59), Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures (1977), Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects (1987), right up to Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture (2010).

And what does “American” mean here? An ambiguity was there from the start. Was Evans’s photography particularly American, or his subject matter, or both? Was it a statement of fact or a provocation? Was it intended to reject and replace previous American photographs? To modify? To allegorize? All these projects have been sincere acts of intervention, attempts to check and keep open the idea of what the country is or could be. However unattainable, every utterance of the word “American” evokes something of that “cloud-canopy of idealism.” Perhaps rightly so, for what may be truly American is the capacity of its citizens and its culture to be attentive to shortcomings. Dissent is not anti-American. In an ongoing project it might well be as American as you can get.

______________________

Walker Evans, American Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1938)

Published on the occasion of a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, American Photographs fused Evans’s avid learning from European books and journals about complex sequencing with his acute attention to bodies, faces, and places eclipsed by modern progress. No celebrities, no soaring skyscrapers—in fact, nothing very new at all. This was a world persisting against the grain. The inscrutable photographs in suggestive, provocative order were the antithesis of the slick Life photo-stories Evans detested. His mentor and backer Lincoln Kirstein helped with the book’s structure. It uses the two key principles of modern photography editing: part I is an associative sequence linked by theme and form; part II is an inventory or album of American vernacular architecture. With one image per spread the intelligence and political implication of the sequence were easy to miss. For the attentive, it marked the beginning of modern American photography.

____________________

Robert Frank, The Americans (Delpire; Grove, 1958/59)

While the emotional tone and technique of The Americans broke with Evans, Robert Frank’s iconography was remarkably similar: emblems of a national vernacular deployed with ironic wit. The melancholy outsiderism was easier to identify with than Evans’s cool distance, although it took a while. Excessive blur, off-kilter framing and other half-controlled accidents were recoded as signs of a fundamentally fractured postwar experience. At times these slices of 1950s America seem dissolute and distracted (it’s the unwatched TV sets glowing in lonely corners that are key, not the juke boxes or flags). Frank was marking out a problem that has since become central to contemporary photographers: how to depict the encroaching banality of modern life—a banality of time as much as things—while neither succumbing to it nor transforming it into something else. Frank offered no answers, but set out the problem for others.

____________

Jacob Holdt, Amerikanske billeder/American Pictures (Informations Vorlag; American Pictures Foundation, 1977/85)

While Frank left photography for filmmaking, the Danish-born Jacob Holdt found different ways to overcome the dominant clichés of the “poetry of poverty.” He lived an itinerant life, sleeping on floors, staying with friends, documenting a growing and marginalized American underclass with his half-frame camera (seventy-two exposures instead of thirty-six). In 1976 he returned to Denmark, putting together epic slideshows over which he spoke his sober and unremitting testimony. The following year he self-published the project as Amerikanske billeder. The utilitarian layout used every inch of the pages, with extensive texts explaining what photography only shows. Corruption, drug abuse, racism, poor housing and health care, and worsening education. It became a bestseller. Holdt returned to the United States, publishing the book in 1985 as American Pictures, and presenting his slideshows at hundreds of universities.

_______________________

Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects (Times Books/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1987)

Prospects as in “views.” Prospects as in “likely future.” Joel Sternfeld rejected speedy snapping for the penetrating stoicism of the 8-by-10-inch view camera. American Prospects is less a composed sequence than a series of deceptively classical compositions. But many of the pictures contain wild juxtapositions: firefighters extinguish a blaze while one of their number shops nonchalantly for pumpkins matching the flames; a basketball hoop stands sentry in a new suburban dead-end; pretty flowers shimmer alongside a sports car in the same wild pink. The idealized semirural life is really a world of uncanny disquiet, perfectly suited to the still and mute image. A new surrealism was emerging, or had it been hiding in the light? Sternfeld’s America resembles establishing shots from a David Lynch film. Indeed, in 1987, when American Prospects was published, Lynch’s Blue Velvet was the surprise hit in suburban multiplexes.

__________________

Doug Rickard, A New American Picture (White Press/Schaden, 2010)

In 2007 Google launched “Street View,” the Internet photo-environment of the world’s thoroughfares. A camera car cruises stealthily taking a clutch of photographs every twenty meters. These are stitched together into panoramas to be navigated onscreen. It’s the big urban centers that are well covered in the highest definition. A New American Picture presents us with single figures and occasional groups. The focus is on secondary and tertiary places and thus, inevitably, on the intertwined politics of race and class. Google smudges out the faces. Rickard shoots his computer screen with a 35mm camera, the preferred choice of the classic “street photographer.” Indeed, A New American Picture is one logical extension of the long and winding development of street photography. The book is a mix of ethnographic study, subjective seeing, and pointed cultural intervention. First published in an edition of two hundred, an expanded version was issued by Aperture this year.

 

First published in Aperture n. 209, Winter 2012

Commissioned by Michael Famighetti

 

 

 

 

 

       

• 184 pp., 196 color illustrations, 11½x8”
• Buy from the Tate website
• Abrams book website

David Campany’s essay ‘William Klein’s Way’ introduces the book. It is also published in Italian in William Klein: Il Mondo a Modo Suo (Contrasto, 2016)

From the TATE dust jacket:

 “THIS ASTONISHING BOOK, FOR WHICH ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHS HAVE BEEN SELECTED AND LAID OUT BY WILLIAM KLEIN HIMSELF, IS AN INSPIRING VISUAL HISTORY OF A LONG AND DISTINGUISHED CAREER […]

SUPPLEMENTING THE STUNNING IMAGES IS AN INSIGHTFUL TEXT BY DAVID CAMPANY THAT IN KLEIN’S OWN OPINION WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO BETTER AS A SUCCINCT DISTILLATION AND FINE UNDERSTANDING OF HIS LIFE’S WORK ACROSS A WIDE RANGE OF ARTISTIC FIELDS.”

Extract from the essay:

Few artists have an approach that is all their own, even fewer working in film and photography and design. You are holding a book that could only have been put together by William Klein.  From his early abstractions to his Dada-Pop take on 1950s New York.  From Rome, Tokyo and Moscow to Paris, London and Algiers.  From the pages of Domus, Vogue and his photographic books, to the twenty-plus documentary and fiction films. This is Klein’s ABC. Signposts to sixty years of work and a guide to the teeming, voluptuous, ghastly, lovable, absurd, angry, tender, gruff and beautiful decades we have lived since World War Two.

These days any artist with a singular vision is presumed to be an outsider, especially one who is more interested in the world itself than the ‘art world’ or the ‘film world’. But the label is an odd one for Klein, a man so immersed in the contradiction of modern life, so profoundly curious about how it has left its mark on us all. He has been unflinchingly close to the heart of global-imperial-petrococadollar capitalism, seeing how it shapes desires, ideologies, even our unconscious. Klein has been inside what matters and outside what doesn’t.

He was born in 1928, at 5^th Avenue and 110^th St, on the edge of Harlem, New York. A Jewish kid in an Irish neighbourhood. He was clever, got a place at a good school and could do as he pleased so long as he did well. By the age of twelve he was soaking up great cinema and roaming the nearly empty galleries of the Museum of Modern Art.  Too young to serve in the war he studied sociology.  But in 1946 he joined the army and was stationed in Germany as a radio operator on horseback. That year he won his first camera in a poker game. Every image since has been a little pokerish: street-wise, bluffing, anticipating. Intuitive and spontaneous too: the last thing you want in poker or art is formula.

Fuelled by what he had experienced at MoMA he was keen to get to Paris. In 1948 he got a chance to enrol at the Sorbonne. On his second day in the city he asked a beautiful woman for directions. It was Jeanne Florin and they were soon married.

There was no point pretending Paris after the war was Paris before the war. The city was no longer the centre of culture (although it did have the daily glories of Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française). Briefly he came under the tutelage of the painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger. “Get out of the galleries”, he warned. “Think about architecture. Think about the street.” The advice would prove right but it did not hit home right away. Klein’s early career breaks came from exhibitions. He made figurative paintings, then hard-edged abstract paintings for a few years. At a gallery in Milan, the latter were seen by the architect Angelo Mangiarotti. Klein was asked to recreate one on rotating room dividers in a Milanese apartment. It was his first commission. Out of the gallery, into architecture. While photographing the set-up, he caught the blur of the spinning panels. Painting morphed into kinetic sculpture. Hard edges became fluid. The camera documented and transformed.

Back in the darkroom he explored pure light, form and materials. It was a late Bauhaus self-education guided by László Moholy-Nagy’s book Vision in Motion and György Kepes’ The New Landscape.  Cutting holes in sheets of paper – circles, squares, slots and stripes – he made dozens of abstract photograms. A bridge between the Bauhaus and the graphic arts to come. In November 1952 Gio Ponti’s architecture and design magazine Domus began to publish them as covers. In early 1954 he presented some alongside kinetic panels in a Paris group show, Le Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. The editor of American Vogue, Alexander Liberman, was in town for the fashion shows and saw the exhibition. He asked to meet. Enthusiastically, Klein showed him more. Vogue published his Mondrianesque photos of Dutch barns in its April issue. Liberman was a painter-sculptor with a talent for magazine design. Doing Vogue subsidized his art. Klein liked that.  Would he like to join Liberman at the magazine? Doing what?  Odd jobs in photography. Why not?

After eight years away he returned to a New York that was familiar but strange. A world of McCarthy and Marilyn, Elvis and excess, A-bombs and admen. The abstraction would have to go, or be channelled into something else. Vogue allowed him to invent and innovate for more than a decade. In fact he had no choice: he was untrained and just about everything was new to him. He admired the polished beauty of the best fashion photography but took it in his own direction. Experiments with lighting. Emphatic poses stolen from painting and cinema. Even a shop front could be repainted to complement the season’s clothes. Streets could be photographed, blown-up and brought into the studio as backdrops. He was well paid for the first time in his life. Plus, Vogue funded him to go into the streets and photograph the urban scene. “I felt like a Macy’s parade balloon floating back after a million orbits. I knew the city but it was now in a different focus. All the sights and sounds I had missed or had forgotten or never even knew suddenly moved me very much. I was in a trance but I was able to do something about what I felt. I had a camera but I barely knew how to use it.” For eight months he shot with extraordinary energy, making hundreds of images. It was almost a game to see how much one could photograph, how much one could invent. The camera was being used to discover the city, the city to discover the camera. It was a mutual exploration in the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

Although New Yorkers were not ready to admit it, their city had been falling apart, becoming a slum. He harnessed every ‘bad’ technique to his expressionist vision. No rules. No good manners.  Wide angle distortions. Blur. Unconventional focus. Over- and under exposure. Quick reactions. Accidents. Provocations. Then, with all the lessons learned in the darkroom, his negatives became raw material. Grainy blow-ups. Wild cropping. Moving the focus while printing. Chance. Fun. Risk. Photography had never looked dirtier, edgier, livelier or more delirious. Neither had New York.

Klein has never made any pretence to objectivity but there is a deeper psychological realism – an honesty of feeling achieved not by retreating from the world to a cool distance but by throwing himself into it. The camera was not so much a glass barrier as a floodgate.  His crowded frames pulsate with human drama in close-up. The observer is inseparable from the observed, implicated and complicit. A great Klein photo is a snatched marvel of formal organization but it never lets you forget it is a physical encounter. A kiss or slap. At best, both.

    

David Campany and William Klein in conversation at the Museum of Art & Design, New York

 

‘Brighton’ is a very short text written  for a four publication set produced by Preston is My Paris as the outcome of the FIND project at Brighton Photo Fringe 2012.  An assembled archive of 192 images is split over the four publications, each consisting of a risograph cover, photocopied pages and the text.

12 pages per publication / Ed. 50 / December 2011

Contains the essay ‘Ninety Seconds’, by David Campany.

The book features Klein’s early paintings from the late 1940s and ’50s, unseen abstract silver-gelatin photos, magazine covers, ‘Lettrist’ paintings of the 1960s, designs and drawings for films, street photographs and murals.

Read David’s essay and see William Klein’s early work here.

David Campany and William Klein in conversation at the Museum of Art & Design, New York.

A publicity photo for Lust for Life, Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic of Vincent van Gogh. A Los Angeles art teacher supplied the production with copies of canvases in various states of completion. Playing Vincent, Kirk Douglas poses at the easel, pretending to paint a portrait of Dr. Gachet, or a portrait of the actor Everett Sloane, cast for his resemblance to Dr. Gachet as van Gogh painted him.

This is an indoor sound stage at MGM Studios. The foreground is a set. Behind, a flat backdrop painted by anonymous technicians. In addition, the colour of the photo betrays the stylised over-painting common to film stills of the era. Perhaps inadvertently, the expressionistic look desired by Minnelli reduces van Gogh to a realist, simply painting what he sees.

In 1990 Ryoei Saito, honorary chairman of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co., Japan, bought Portrait of Dr. Gachet for $82.5 million. Upon Saito’s death in 1996 it disappeared and its whereabouts remains a mystery. All we have are reproductions. Or copies of reproductions. Or reproductions of re-enactments.

This photo was bought on eBay for $3. The deepest reflections on art’s fate and fortune may come as readily from the garbage heap as the from avant-garde.

‘Literature’, Susan Sontag once said, ‘is writing one wishes to reread’. Artworks, one might extend, are images or objects or performances one wishes to re-view. Early in his long career, 1973 to be exact, the artist-writer Victor Burgin offered a slightly different definition:

‘A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to recombine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.’

Here an artist isn’t simply someone who works within the institutions of art; it is someone who works in relation to, and at odds with, the structures of culture at large. An artist may well exhibit in galleries but may also be a writer, architect, filmmaker, designer, musician or speaker. Burgin himself has made visual work and written essays for over forty years. His photography and video pieces are visual and textual, and so are his writings.

My first encounter with his work came in the form of the book Between, published in 1986. Elegantly designed, it contains sequences of black and white photos with overlaid texts. The photos are quite like many things: film stills, classic street photography, fashion, advertising and reportage. In addition there are various pieces of writing that seem ‘theoretical’ but are also poetic, aphoristic, polemical yet fragmentary. There are also short, free-standing paragraphs full of insight into the presumptions of the mass media, the clichés of art-speak, the role of the unconscious in looking, and the shaping of class, gender and sexuality.  The contents are ordered in rough chronology although it’s not necessary to read it that way.  But this is how Burgin begins:

‘My decision to base my work in cultural theory, rather than traditional aesthetics, has resulted in work whose precise ‘location’ is uncertain, ‘between’: between gallery and book; between ‘visual art’ and ‘theory’; between image and narrative – ‘work’ providing work between reader and text.’

Books of photographs and words may construct a space set apart, a world in which the oppressive conventions of daily life may be suspended and rethought. Between is as rich as the best movies by Jean-Luc Godard: fiercely critical, joyously playful, wildly idiosyncratic yet always interested in telling us about the culture in which we live and the alternatives. And like Godard, Burgin opened more doors than I have been able to explore in the years since. From this one book I found my way to writers such as Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Viktor Shklovsky, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva and Karl Marx. It also led me to Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Alexander Rodchenko, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Hitchcock and John Cage. Sure, all these figures came before Burgin but none of us discovers things chronologically. We are always going backwards and forwards.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s Between charts Burgin’s passage from early conceptual art, via appropriationist works and critiques of mass media imagery to a series of photo-texts informed by psychoanalysis, semiotics and cinema studies. During this period, the art markets came to dominate and dictate as never before. Art was no longer that stubborn space of resistance and reflection; it was to be part of the spectacle of neo-liberal capitalism in which image is all.  Self-congratulatory art fairs, artists as media celebrities, bloated auction prices, and the reduction of criticality to recognizable and increasingly empty gestures. Between includes an extract of a letter written in reply to a collector:

“We are a consumer-society, and it seems to me that art has become a passive ‘spectator sport’ to an extent unprecedented in history. I have always tried to work against this tendency by producing ‘occasions for interpretation’ rather than ‘objects for consumption’. I believe that the ability to produce rather than consume meanings, the ability to think otherwise – ways of thinking not encouraged by the imperative to commodity production, ways condemned as ‘a waste of time’ – is fundamental to the goal of a truly, rather than nominally, democratic society. I believe art is one of the few remaining areas of social activity where the attitude of critical engagement may still be encouraged – all the more reason for art to engage with those issues that are critical.”

Burgin makes photographic work like no other artist, but his themes and motifs are drawn from experiences common to us all – the modern city, the structures of family, language as something that forms and reforms us, the power of images, principles of government, memory and history.  And yet, encouraged by the media to look to art for quick messages, some audiences and critics have found his work ‘inaccessible’. Actually Burgin’s work is among the most accessible I know, if by that we mean ‘easy to get into’. It’s the getting out that’s tricky. To be truly challenged and changed is to find yourself unsure, slightly lost, forgetting where you came in but pleased you did. As Roland Barthes once put it, ‘To get out, go in deeper.’

You won’t see this publication in the canon of photobooks, nor on lists of recommended theory books. It’s not a catalogue, or a monograph or an ‘artist’s book’. It really is between.

David Campany, 2012. First published in Aperture no. 210, 2012.

 

 

Too much, too little

An essay first published in the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize catalogue, 2012.

One salutary consequence of the rise of photography in and as art has been the acceptance of common ground between ‘photographers’ and those ‘working with’ pre-existing photographic imagery. The most important procedures are shared: recognition, selection, framing, cropping, editing and re-presenting. Many concerns are shared too: the desire to illuminate the world and its representations; the slowing down and interrupting of our viewing habits; and the animating of the tension between the photograph as raw document and the photograph as artwork.

This common ground is far from new: as early as the 1930s documentarists such as Walker Evans were slotting anonymous press archive photos into their own image sequences, while photomonteurs like John Heartfield were integrating images they had shot themselves with found imagery in their constructions.  But it seemed to take another half century or so for the wider realization to set in.

Postcards, film stills, images from half-forgotten photographically illustrated books. These are John Stezaker’s source materials. Selecting, cutting and joining are his techniques.  Humble materials, humble means. The artist has been making collages in this way for four decades. While his oeuvre is one of the most distinctive of any living artist, there are, for those who want them, rich connections with many of the most significant moments of modern art. The avant-gardes that preceded Stezaker – Dada, Cubism and Surrealism – were responses to a world changed by the first profusion of photo-mechanically produced mass culture. The arts of second half of the twentieth century – Pop, Situationism, Conceptual art and Postmodern appropriation – deepened and extended that engagement with the wider image world. And in recent years, two themes have dominated artistic production internationally: the exploration of image archives, and the reimagining of the cinematic. There are traces of all these practices in Stezaker’s collages. Indeed it is difficult to imagine another artist with quite so many points of reference.  Nobody should be burdened with the label ‘emblematic’ but it’s hard not to see Stezaker as an exemplar what an artist can be in the world of images.

Stezaker himself is exceptionally well informed about photography and the various developments of collage since the nineteenth century (he taught in art schools for many years, reads avidly and writes occasionally). But there is nothing in his art that is dryly ‘academic’.  It is too wild, too disturbing, too original for that.  Instead, he is best seen as an artist shaped by, and even beholden to, a profound fascination with images. And a fascination with that fascination. Just about every citizen of the modern era would profess to a fascination with images, but the great collagists have always had a more a reflexive stance. Distance to balance the intimacy.  Circumspection to balance the affection.

If you really come under the spell of images, if you have felt yourself being drawn into some kind permanent exile in their midst, you will know just how compulsive, how unsettling and overwhelming even the most banal picture can be. Collage can be a means of holding on, of finding calm in the eye of that storm. Collage is a place to think and act. Pivotal here is the idea that collage involves a love of images and a desire to destroy them. The collagist does deals, letting some things go in order to get something back. Perhaps something unexpected. For Stezaker at least, collage is iconoclasm (the destruction of images) in the service of iconophilia (the love of images).

Fascination, like our unconscious, has little sense of time. Preoccupations often persist like a subterranean stream running beneath the superficial changes of our shared lives. Stezaker has talked in the past of working in a state of mind in which the ego barely seems to be directing things at all and a kind of automatism take over. Time feels as if it is suspended and apparently disparate images begin to suggest their own unlikely affinities.  No wonder his work is peppered with the voids, repetitions, doublings, mirrorings and recurring motifs that scramble common logic but suggest a deeper order.

In the last year or so Stezaker has had a number major exhibitions, some of which have been semi-retrospective in nature. It has been striking to see that pieces made in the last few months are as out of time as those made in the early 1970s. Series begun many years ago are still being added to, as if the basic obsessions cannot be put aside or brought to conclusion. Viewers find themselves checking the dates of his works. The curatorial fiction of a retrospective hinges on the idea of progress or evolution. However, it often has the unwitting effect of showing a profound resistance to the very notion of artistic ‘development’. These are often the most revealing and pleasurable exhibitions, because suddenly we are allowed to enter into that suspension of time that we are so often denied in our lives but which we all crave (the suspension of time is the prerequisite for pleasure and free thought).

An exhibition in a photography gallery, occasioned by a photography prize, offers Stezaker and his audience an opportunity to consider the relation of his art to the medium as such.  There is not space here to consider every aspect of this complex question but I would like to say something about one remarkable group of works in the present exhibition.

The most unexpectedly pure example of the photographic in Stezaker’s work is The 3^rd Person Archive. It is an ongoing series of excisions from printed matter, each containing a human figure or small group. There is not even any collage here, just the re-presentation of fragments, each isolated at the centre of a large white surround.  The series was begun in 1976 but not published until 2009. In book form, all the  images came from John Hammerton’s  illustrated encyclopedia Countries of the World (1920). Hundreds of pieces of images were printed one to a page, actual size. The series has since expanded to include figures removed from picture postcards. Sometimes less than the size of a postage stamp these fragments – squares, rectangles, triangles – are pictorially indistinct but distinctly photographic. As we come forensically close we confront the dot matrix of the halftone screen of mechanical reproduction, or the gravure of finer printing. Yet the images formed by these patterns remain just discernible, just figurative. They are about as minor, as ephemeral as an image could be, right on the cusp of being and nothingness.

In fact, a passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness (1943) may provide a key to The 3^rd Person Archive. Sartre describes being alone in a forest. In the solitude his sense of himself fluctuates between feeling at one with his surroundings and feeling like master of all he surveys. A dissolved ego and a fortified ego. He comes to a clearing and takes in the view. When he glimpses another person in the far distance  suddenly the entire symbolic order changes. The world is now governed by ethical demands and accountability, by relations of self and other. We are all familiar with tiny figures seen at a distance in landscapes or cityscapes – people who in all likelihood we shall never meet but who nevertheless populate and affect our shared space and our shared visual culture.

One of the fundamental ways photography changed the world of images was the vicarious access it gave us to strangers.  Stezaker’s ‘third persons’ are the descendents of the very first strangers to be preserved by photography.  In 1838 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre pointed his primitive camera from a fifth floor window onto the Boulevard du Temple, in the centre of Paris. There may have been many people in that street but only two figures remained still enough to register in the necessarily long exposure. A shoe-shine boy and his client, a little blurry but definitely there on the street corner. Two people coming together in a moment of economic exchange, which was also a moment of social exchange. Perhaps Daguerre paid them. No matter, it was a commonplace and inconsequential incident rendered momentous and beautiful by an act of attention and depiction.

If we sense an image is photographic, and we sense that it contains a person then we know we are in the presence of a trace of another subjectivity, another consciousness.  This is true no matter how hazy, fragmented or banal the image. With the 3^rd Person Archive Stezaker stretches almost to breaking point what a photograph can be. But as we know, it is often at its limits that photography may become a source of great aesthetic and psychological intensity.

It is in the nature of images, all images, to offer us too much and too little. Images exceed meaning in ways that are unruly, even treacherous. They are also elusive, laconic and enigmatic. René Magritte called it the ‘treason of images’. This is why the image world is so bound up by the conventions of genre and the law of language  (caption, title, commentary). But in the last instance images remain anarchic. This is why they have always been a source of great attraction and great suspicion. The anxiety that the world of images might disturb or distort civil society is familiar. How often do we hear that we are ‘bombarded’ or ‘under siege’ from pictures, as if somehow they were pursuing us? And in that narcissism we may delude ourselves that it is a new problem, afflicting only us, and only now. The arrival of photography in the 1830s and its subsequent development into a mass medium certainly introduced new problems, new pleasures, new disturbances into the family of images. But these have only exacerbated the essentially unpredictable condition of the image as such. But in the right hands an image can be made to reflect upon this.

 

 

____________

The Time of Chris Killip

by David Campany

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
(Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Scene V.)

 

This is a good moment to look at the work of Chris Killip. The period and places he photographed intensively belong to that most precarious of states, the recent past. They are neither fresh in the mind nor solidified into convenient history. His images can still be measured against living memory and experience, still fought for and fought over as documents, as artworks. For those who were not there – those too young and those to come in twenty, thirty, fifty years’ time – this work will be just as compelling, if on different terms.

The facts of Killip’s life in photography are straightforward enough. He was born in Douglas on the Isle on Man in 1946. He began to use a camera aged seventeen and moved to London at eighteen to become an assistant to a successful advertising photographer. He worked as a freelance until 1969 when, on a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he saw the work of modern photographers such as Paul Strand and Walker Evans. Inspired, he left his commercial work to pursue his own path.

Returning to the Isle of Man he earned his keep working nights in his father’s pub. The island’s new status as a tax haven was undermining all continuity and Killip took as his first major theme the disappearance of its traditional work and culture. He immersed himself in the lives of others. The outcome, after several years, was a large collection of formally elegant, rhetorically complex and emotionally rich photographs, later published as a book.

He developed this intensive way of working through a series of long-term commissions and fellowships in different places including Bury St. Edmunds, Huddersfield, the north east of England, and the Pirelli tire factory at Burton-on-Trent, Derbyshire. Over twenty-five years these patient, epic projects built into a profound attempt to describe the way the British working class was being confronted, often very brutally, with hostile economic policy and cultural authoritarianism. This is the overarching theme that shapes the work gathered here.

From 1970 onwards Killip’s images appeared regularly in the photographic press and his reputation grew with each published folio.[1]Audiences could see he had absorbed the best qualities of the interwar photographers he admired and whose work was then being rediscovered (notably Eugène Atget, Bill Brandt and August Sander, along with Strand and Evans). There were also links with the fluid, more openly subjective possibilities opened up by Robert Frank’s book The Americans (1959) and the vanguard Japanese photography of the 1960s.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Killip exhibited either in solo shows or alongside kindred spirits such as Graham Smith.[2] In 1976 he co-founded Side Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and was intimately involved with its pioneering programme of resistant, independent photography. Commissions from The London Review of Books added to his growing body of portraits.

The Pirelli work would be the “last and very necessary piece of the jigsaw puzzle” of Killip’s work in Britain.[3] In September 1991 he took a teaching position at Harvard University, having never taught before. Twenty years on he is based there still, a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. He has not photographed in America but regular trips to Ireland between 1993 and 2005 led to the book Here Comes Everybody (2009), which included his first work in color.

Facts and chronology can be deceptive. The path of Chris Killip’s working life gives us little sense of how his project took shape and how significant it has been for more than a generation of followers, photographers and cultural historians. As early as 1971 he was described by his friend and mentor Shoji Yamagishi (editor of the influential magazine Camera Mainichi) as “a young man with a strong will, bordering on the stubborn.”[4] He was also possessed of an understanding of human character and a singular photographic vision, both of which were mature almost from the outset. This rare combination set him apart from his peers and on a course quite out of step with developments in the medium’s artistic and documentary directions.

Work of the very highest standards never belongs entirely to its moment. Its genesis cannot be predicted or accounted for, nor its resonance over time. Its force and complexity elude comprehension because its mysteries are as vital as its revelations. Given the nature of his photographs it seems entirely plausible that the young Killip understood this, at least on an intuitive level. Perhaps it came from his early encounters with the great photography of the past, sensing how it belonged to him and was pertinent to his own situation. But it may have come simply from using a camera from a young age, thinking carefully about what it can and cannot reveal, the perplexing way it is both a machine and a transformative instrument. The answer is probably too elusive but it is important to realize how unusual Killip’s photography was, in its approach and its quality. If he was a ‘product of his time’ it was in no straightforward sense.

Time and timeliness. These are the two qualities that have bound photography to the project of modernity, for good or bad. “One must be of one’s time” was of course the slogan of the realist artists and writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, when photography was new. For the painter Gustave Courbet and his circle, it represented not just an artistic calling but a commitment to a new way of living, a new way of being, a new way of attuning oneself to the world. The demand was simple but multi-layered. Firstly, it implied that ‘one’s time’ was significantly different from the past, and from times to come. Indeed it was in the nineteenth century that artists and writers first experienced in a deep and unavoidable way the ruptures of modernity. Time was inconsistent, ‘out of joint’. It did not simply pass, rather its very character was subject to change. Secondly, it implied that the role of artists and writers was to immerse themselves in this new temporality and allow it to be expressed through them. Their task was not to look back nor to resist the present, nor to predict the future. It was to grasp everyday experience in its transience and particularity, its subtlety and physicality. Thirdly, being attentive to the texture and the grain of the present also implied being attentive to one’s location in the world. In effect to be of one’s time implied that one must be of one’s place.

Even in the nineteenth century to know with any certainty the nature of one’s time and place was not easy. In fact, the emergence of a desire for such knowledge was itself a response to the difficulty of attaining it. After all, we tend to think we know what is particular about a time and place only with hindsight. Perhaps we can only be of our time and place without really knowing it in the fullest sense. The task would only become more difficult. Histories began to conflict with each other. Populations began to move. Cultures began to mix or clash. Different orders of time and place began to assert themselves on daily life in ways that could not be reconciled. Even finding a fixed position from which to consider the rapid changes was a challenge. Here in the twenty-first century we are trying to come to terms with the effects of a long period of instability, if only to prepare ourselves for the instabilities to come.

But there is another way of understanding the injunction to be of one’s time, one that responds to the contradictions of modern life. It involves the invention of one’s own time, against the grain. This seems to have been Killip’s approach. On the Isle of Man around 1970 it took the form of a rejection of the relentless turnover of mass culture he had come to know in London. He attuned instead to the slow procedures of the large format camera on location, feeling his way in to the careful production of crafted, hewn images. This required working without the distraction of peers or deadlines. His work on the island began as a study of its water mills and he had thought he might make a book on this subject. But as he began to photograph people in relation to their landscape and architecture (‘the social fabric’) a more explicitly political understanding of modern time and its effects began to emerge. Killip’s subject matter was to be history as it is lived from within, not as it is written. His subjects would be those people left behind, marginalized or otherwise locked out by the forces of modernity. The slow commitment of Killip’s long projects would be an empathetic commitment to lives lived in the shadow of history.

In this sense only it has been a documentary project. The term is misleading because the narrow and conservative conventions that still dominated photography in the 1970s were part of what Killip was resisting. In the hands of the mass media and the populist illustrated press, documentary photography had been reduced to a formula reliant on spectacle, sentimentalism and a depoliticized account of the downtrodden. The photographic theory then emerging in Britain and North America was developing a powerful critique of the ideological underpinnings of the illustrated press, but the mistake, dangerously widespread at the time, was to assume that documentary ‘was’ its mass media manifestation.[5] Many critics, commentators and educators were set on denouncing the medium’s truth claims and commercial illusions as equally dubious tricks. Impatient with just how ineffable and demanding images can be, the terms of the discussion were often reductive. Faith in the reality of images or faith in their unreality. Naïve realism or real nihilism.

Killip and a handful of others felt photography should not, could not, be equated with its easiest and worst practices. There was, if you looked carefully, a long and hard-won legacy of experimental documentary photography, a way of working in which form was not assumed as a convention but shaped in the midst of each and every project. This was a practice in which the descriptive limits of photographs would not be glossed over by racy editing or glued together by captions for easy consumption.[6] Any meaningful documentary practice requires work from the reader. It asks them to consider what is being described, how it is being described and to accept the parameters. But in the 1970s and certainly by the early 1980s the idea of an experimental documentary photography seemed to most like an oxymoron. One could be experimental or documentary.

In the years since, the illustrated press has all but collapsed, taking its conventions with it. There is no longer a default form and as a result there is a more open attitude to photography, albeit with 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. This is the climate in which Chris Killip’s work has been so enthusiastically discovered by new audiences.

Before this gets too abstract let us hear from Chris Killip, talking not about himself but the work of a fellow photographer. In a review of the exhibition A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham (MoMA, New York 2009), Killip described a brief sequence of a woman sitting alone:

She is eating a take-out meal, perhaps a pig’s foot or hock, from a polystyrene container. This meal is balanced on a plastic carrier bag, which acts as a napkin on her knee to protect her white skirt. Her hair is a strange artificially orange color. On the ground in front of her are other previously discarded containers. In this first and largest image she is intent on eating her meal and takes no notice of Graham’s camera. The next image is solely of her food and, by now, greasy hands. Two similar smaller photographs follow, taken from very slightly different angles, looking down at the debris-strewn ground. The final image shows the woman as she inhales hard on a cigarette at the end of her meal. These brief unscripted moments of her immediate circumstances bring a paradoxical sense of separation and distance, completely contradicting the closeness of the images, making it, for me, part of an overwhelming sense of estrangement. If this is the status quo, then I want to change it.[7]

It is a fascinating passage of writing not least because it shows how a commitment to photography is a commitment to the world it depicts, to the act of depiction and to the precariousness of reading photographs carefully. Killip sees in Graham this search for form that has nothing to do with novelty. It is driven by the need to describe an encounter, to articulate something of its emotional and political significance. The paradox of intimacy and distance, of vision and knowledge, is a particularly photographic one. Every photographer must face sooner or later. The key image of Graham’s sequence recalls Killip’s own Woman at bus stop, Middlesborough, Teeside, 1976. Here too the photographer was close enough to disclose something of the woman and her situation, yet the nearness to a soul so self-absorbed is unnerving. The image invites us in but suspends our response. There is no caption that presumes to reveal her inner psychology. Instead the photograph is a drama between visible facts and the facts of life.

In the most rewarding and probing bodies of photographic work images are put in relation to each other so that the unanswered questions enrich each other. In Creative Camera magazine, May 1977, Woman at Bus Stop appears on the final spread of a bold twenty-two page sequence of Killip’s photographs from the north east of England.[8] It is paired with an image of civic robes on public display, taken in Tyneside in 1975. Suddenly the woman resembles a costume standing in for her absent self. Her pearl broach gleaming in the harsh sunlight echoes and contrasts with the metallic braid on one of the robes, caught by the camera flash. In Killip’s book In Flagrante (1988) she sits on a page opposite a photograph of a man in heavy boots and overcoat, perched on a low wall, cropped from the waist down. We might be led to think about matters of gender and dress, of fabric and light, of work and the human body, of pride and pragmatism. In the book you are holding she appears again, this time beside another man in coat and shoes resting in a doorway.[9] They face in opposite directions, like a couple estranged by mutual circumstance. These pairings have their own associations but they can never close the gap they ask us to contemplate. In the end each image is the guardian of the other’s secrets.

This high-wire act of disclosure and withdrawal produces the restlessness that has kept Killip’s photographs and books so vital all these years. But it has also been the source of some misunderstanding. The cursory speed and passivity with which audiences have been encouraged to respond to photographs in recent decades has given rise to hasty assessments. The problem is compounded by Killip’s gift for formal rigour and dense allusion. Whenever I come across one of his better-known photographs singled out and cut off from its body of work, I must confess I feel uneasy. It is too tempting to misread it as an icon or symbol of the social situation it depicts, rather than as a photographic response to it. Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, UK, 1976 is often celebrated as a condensed summary of Britain’s slide toward the divisive social and economic policies of the 1980s. Some even overlook the date and presume it somehow must be an image from Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing reign over British politics (she came to power in 1979). But what I see is an image that could be that but might not be. The space of doubt opened up by a powerful single photograph may be foreclosed by the temptation to simplify.[10]

This is not a new problem but it is a persistent one. It has been faced in different ways by photographers struggling to give appropriate shape to their work while maintaining the openness that is the necessary condition of possibility. In the 1930s Bill Brandt was drawn to the rituals and customs of daily life, to the deeply unconscious ways the English inhabited their social roles and class structure.  To him the English were strange and he photographed them with a dreamlike sensibility at once detached and emotionally charged. In their anthropological reserve his photographs court a documentary reading but they estrange and exceed it, somewhere between facts clearly stated and what John Grierson called “the creative treatment of actuality.”[11] His book The English at Home (1936) is full of striking images but it is the edit dramatizing distinctions of social class that was insidious, so potentially scandalous. But on publication it made little impact, was remaindered and all but vanished.[12] In the decades since it has come to stand for the complexities of the documentary project in general, with its balance of surgical record and subjective ‘vision’.

Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938) opened with an image of a commercial photo studio followed by a grid of anonymous portraits. The sequence unfolded in bold leaps of allusion, each image presented as both an autonomous statement and an associative link. An art-political poem. For those patient enough to notice, this was a book of photography, of a world already saturated with photographs. To make sense of it one would need to temper its description of 1930s America with the knowledge that all photographs, and all arrangements of photographs, are acts of interpretation requiring further interpretation.[13] Evans’s collaboration with the writer James Agee, Let us now Praise Famous Men (1941), went even further. The uncaptioned photographs of Alabama tenant farmers stood quite apart from Agee’s searing, self-reflexive text. The reader had to find a way of either putting them together or comprehending their separateness. It sold just a few hundred copies and was only hailed a classic of experimental documentary twenty years later. We may wish to think of these books and others such as August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time, 1929) or Eugène Atget: Photographe de Paris (1930) as typical of their time. They were not. They were quite exceptional.

Chris Killip’s books have been similarly out of step, both in theme and form. His first, Isle of Man, was somewhat classical in structure, comparable in many respects to a great realist novel or one of Paul Strand’s studies of place, such as Un Paese (1955) on a rural Italian village, or Tir a’Mhurain, on life in the Outer Hebrides (1962). But its appearance in 1980, several years after completion, compounded its untimeliness. When he came to publish In Flagrante (1988) he was much more aware of the problems of readability and turned these to advantage. The sequence, one of the most sophisticated and enigmatic of all postwar photobooks, begins and ends with shots that include the shadow of the photographer’s body and bulky 4×5 camera. To this he added a cautionary epigram ending with a memorable couplet: “The photographs tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.”[14] The desire to keep things open was an expression of his humility and our forever-partial understanding. But it was also informed by a politics of representation: the last thing required by the people he photographed was a book that proposed to lock them into their situation as willingly as had the society that was making their lives so difficult. Killip’s openness was a rejection of the social fatalism that infected both the documentary form and government policy. It was a sign of hope.

At the Pirelli tire factory in 1989, Killip restated his commitment to the world of work, making intense portraits of gravity and grace. This at a time when most photographers of his generation shunned blue collar manufacturing to focus on the colorful, amnesiac world of consumerism, leisure and the service industries. If the Pirelli work was out of time then, it was even more so when the book was published seventeen years later.[15] But Killip had come to embrace this untimeliness, perhaps as a sign of what he had realised so early. Good work belongs to all eras and can guarantee no particular affinity to the moment it was made. In the early 1980s he had photographed extensively on the beach at Lynemouth in Northumberland. For periods he lived there with the people who gathered coal that washed up on the shore. Several of these remarkable images appeared in In Flagrante but the full extent of the project became evident only with the book published in 2011.[16] Nearly thirty years on the images are more poignant, obviously. But the intensity of seeing, the depth of human understanding and the virtuoso photography were as uniquely unexpected then as they are now.

When I met with Chris Killip to talk about his life and work, he was returning from one of his regular visits to meet up with people he has photographed. The Seacoal book had just been published and it was fresh on his mind. He talked of the past feeling both very near and very far away, and how important it is to trace the developments that bind now to then. But we agreed that at its best photography pulls us close and pushes us away, answering some questions, asking others. There is much to be said for being not quite of one’s time. What made Chris Killip’s work difficult to grasp when it was contemporary will only prolong its afterlife.

[1] Killip’s first published work, two 35mm shots taken in London, appeared in Creative Camera (London), February 1970 under the title ‘Young Contemporary’. He also published in Camera Mainichi (Japan) and Camera (Switzerland) among others.

[2] In 1985 the London’s Serpentine Gallery presented the landmark exhibition Another Country. Photographs by Chris Killip and Graham Smith.

[3] Chris Killip in Clive Dilnot, ‘Chris Killip’s Portraits of the Pirelli Workforce’, in Chris Killip, Pirelli Work (Steidl, Göttingen 2009) p. 72.

[4] Shoji Yamagishi, ‘Chris Killip. On the Isle of Man’ Camera Mainichi, November 1971.

[5] In the UK the critique was led by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the journals Screen, Screen Education and later Ten8.

[6] Daniel Longwell, an executive editor of Life once exclaimed: “The quick nervousness of pictures is a new language”. This is what John Tagg describes as “those dreams of transparency, efficiency, and accelerated exchange that marked the instrumentalization of photographic meaning, in social administration as in commercialized communications, in the documentary archive as in the photojournalistic picture file.” See John Tagg, ‘Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans’s Resistance to Meaning’ (2003), The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning(University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London 2009) p. 96

[7] Killip’s occasional writing is invaluable. He has published short but insightful texts on the work of Marketa Luskacova, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Goldblatt, Boris Mikhailov and Walker Evans, among others. Like Evans, who also published occasional writings on photographers, Killip illuminates the work he admires and tells us something important about his own.

[8] Creative Camera was the most significant outlet for serious photography in the UK. When the whole of the May 1977 issue was given over to Killip’s project the impact on several photographers, including Martin Parr, was profound.

[9] Although this book is an overview Killip has approached the sequencing with the same searching rigour and suggestive allusion that are hallmarks of all his publications.

[10] I first raised this point in a short text I wrote on Chris Killip’s work for Photoworks (Brighton, UK) no. 12 Spring/Summer 2009.

[11] John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary (Collins, London, 1946)

[12] In the last few decades The English at Home has come to be regarded as a classic work, not least because it is tempting to project onto its uneasy restraint a mood of premonition. With hindsight we can see a portrayal of the insular English unable to recognise their own image when they see it, sleepwalking towards the nightmare of the Second World War to be awoken all too close to disaster. Its failure “almost attests to its originality” (Mark Haworth-Booth in Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera, photographs 1928-1983, Aperture / Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985, p. 12). Mark Haworth-Booth was also responsible for exhibiting the Pirelli work in 1990 at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

[13] Evans was already wary of the popular illustrated press but was not prepared to give up on it entirely. Back in 1937, when Life magazine just a year old, he and James Agee proposed a subsection be devolved to them. As editorial advisors they would provide a space for experimental forms of journalistic writing along with a visual approach devoid of what Agee called “all ‘art’ and ‘dramatic’ photography and of the plethoric and flabby ends of Leica photography”. They asked for an office and $100 a week each, promising to take care of everything from commissioning to page layout. Life declined but the desire to carve out an independent space within mainstream culture never left Evans. His self-assigned, fiercely independent work made for Fortune (1945-65) is a testament to this.

[14] On the genesis of In Flagrante Chris Killip has stated: I was approached by David Godwin who was then the boss of Secker & Warburg. He said he liked my work and if I ever wanted to publish a book he would like to do it. I came to see him one year after that initial contact and said yes, I did want to do a book but I wanted to work with a particular editor, Mark Holborn. Mark had just returned, rather exhausted, from his stint at Aperture. He had also during his NY time edited Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture, 1986). I wanted to work with someone who had been exposed to the best current work that was out there. I was living in Newcastle more or less in isolation and thought that any book that I did would benefit from Mark’s experiences. I told Godwin that he would have to pay Mark for his work and we would work together and, when it was ready, bring the sequenced book to him. Godwin could then only say one of two words: Yes or No.

I laid out the book in Newcastle and then came down to Mark Holborn’s London house and he would challenge me on things in the layout. It was often very tense but we never fell out. I would return to Newcastle and come back after making changes. There was usually something like a three-week interval and the process took nearly six months so I suppose there were about ten meetings. Godwin saw the book and agreed to do it and Peter Dyer, Secker & Warburg’s designer, did the design/ typeface,  etc . I also stopped Godwin from sending any press copies to anyone in photography and asked him to only send copies to his normal literary reviewers. That was a good decision as Blake Morrison who reviewed poetry for The Observer (London) wrote a very good and influential review. Chris Killip, email to the author, September 28, 2011. For additional information see ‘Dispatches from a War Zone’ in Jeffrey Ladd, ed., Chris Killip. In Flagrante (Errata Editions, New York, 2008).

[15] Coincidentally seventeen years is the same delay between Walker Evans’s photographing of faces looming from the darkness of the New York subway and their first appearance in print. See Walker Evans, ‘Rapid Transit’ in i.e. The Cambridge Review no. 5, Winter 1955, pp. 16-24. Text by James Agee. For a brilliant discussion of the ‘untimeliness’ of Killip’s Pirelli project see Clive Dilnot, ‘Chris Killip’s Portraits of the Pirelli Workforce’, in Chris Killip, Pirelli Work (Steidl, Göttingen 2009) pp. 65-85.

[16] Killip exhibited some of the Seacoal photographs at Side Gallery in 1984.

   ‘In the Frame’

Doug Rickard’s Google Street View project A New American Picture was first exhibited as part of Anonymes: unnamed American in photography and film, the show I co-curated with Diane Dufour at Le Bal, Paris, in 2010. To mark that occasion Doug produced a book with White Press (the 250 copies sold out almost immediately). This is his larger version, which includes an introductory essay he asked me to write, titled ‘In the Frame’.

 

In the Frame

The essence of photography 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.

Walker Evans

 

 

Modern America has been a project, an experiment. As such, its self-image has been a matter of some importance. The critic Van Wyck Brooks once wrote of ‘the immense, vague cloud-canopy of idealism’ that spread over the national culture in the nineteenth century. This was a self-image of sorts, pervasive, persistent and problematic. But what has been so striking in the country’s most vital voices is the unwavering and critical concern with what goes on beneath that canopy, day-to-day, place-to-place, person-to-person. Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Douglas Sirk, Robert Altman, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank. The list is long and the standards high. Popular or avant-garde, and frequently both, the work of such figures attunes us to what can be shown and known when looking not upwards, or from on high, but at one’s fellow citizens: anonymous, familiar and yet cut off by the systemic alienations so characteristic of our post-colonial, technocratic age. Beneath the canopy things are far from ideal.

When American movies address the state of the country, they frequently open with a view of the sky, tilting down until human life comes into view; or with a crane shot that lowers itself into the flow of citizens on the street. The device is literary but visual, and in a country that cannot do without definition it is familiar enough. So before we get to the subject matter of Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, let us consider the ‘vantage point’ we are offered here.

As the reader is probably aware, these images derive from Street View, Google’s internet photo-environment of the world’s thoroughfares, launched in the spring of 2007. The Street View camera is mounted atop a purpose-built vehicle, two and a half meters above the ground. This is neither human eye-level nor the dispassionate overview we associate with surveillance. Soliciting neither empathic immersion nor cool distance, the point of view is fraught with psychological uncertainty. Travelling at a steady speed, the camera takes a cluster of photos every twenty meters or so. Stitched together they assemble an almost spherical panorama of the sky above, the streetscape and the road surface. On your computer screen an orientation must be chosen and a rectangular view must be framed – looking up, ahead, around or down. You may zoom in and out, although zooming brings you no nearer, and that point of view remains fixed.

It is said that when Guglielmo Marconi arrived back in England after receiving the first successful transatlantic radio signal, a journalist congratulated him by proclaiming that one person could now address millions across vast territory. Marconi was dumbstruck momentarily. He had been thinking only of one person communicating with another, but broadcast was indeed the significant breakthrough. Technologies are not their applications. What ‘use’ is Street View? Is it for something in particular or a set of potentials? An insidious act of surveillance? A gift for realtors and retailers? A guide for tourists, anthropologists and armchair explorers? A resource for artists and photographers? Google may not have anticipated Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture but it could not have ruled out the possibilities he has brought to light, nor the complex statement he has made.

Time and Place

In the age of satellite positioning systems, it is worth remembering how much of the important culture of the last century was premised either upon the chance encounter, the frisson of getting lost or the desire to disappear into the world. Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, André Breton’s Nadja, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Situationism, street photography. But sometime around the advent of the mobile phone there was a profound change in our relation to spaces and places, and it was irreversible. Whatever else it is, A New American Picture may be the first important work about not being lost, about no longer being able to be lost. Even the lowliest backstreet is a grid reference. Every monetary transaction is a discernible location. Vanishing is all but impossible.

And yet, while these scenes derive from a mapped spatial order, their temporal dimension is another matter entirely. Photography finds itself, reinvents itself in an unprecedented timeframe. Firstly, if this is ‘street photography’, it has ceded the genre’s vital shutter and the choice of instant it affords. From a pre-frozen world, Rickard’s selections can be only geographic and compositional. (It is worth noting that he shoots his computer screen with the 35mm camera, the preferred equipment of the street photographer, but uses a tripod and a slow shutter speed.) Secondly, Street View permits a seamless pass over a terrain assembled to give the impression of permanent daytime. We can see on these pages the differences between overhead sun at noon and late afternoon gloom or glow, but in Google World the sun never sets. You will never see the bright lights of a city after dark. You will never see the velvet black of a desert or forest at midnight. The total visibility can be blinding, like the delirium of sleeplessness.

Lastly, these images are historical documents, marked moments as unlikely as they are irrefutable. Street View is always updating itself with second, third, fourth passes of its cameras. Each time the technology has improved, rendering greater detail and smoother transitions. Each time the light, the buildings, the people have changed, sometimes a little, sometimes drastically. The earlier images are overwritten. We have come to regard the internet as some kind of ultimate archive, a memory bank in which everything is stored forever. But it has been alarmingly remiss about archiving itself. We have almost no record of the history of the internet, and most of its representations of the recent past have been lost. This auto-erasure is likely to continue. Many of the images printed here are available only here.

However, photography fascinates because it escapes narrative and wrong-foots the easy explanations it can seduce us into making. Like the visitor with fresh eyes, the camera takes in everything. It sees without hierarchy or intention, with no knowledge of the before or after. In fact, it sees more than any human can. Its voracity and its veracity are inseparable. In the chosen image the smallest things may become insistent signs, calling inexplicable attention to themselves across time. Google software automatically blurs the human faces but what of bodies, clothes, gestures and dispositions? What of the cars, homes and storefronts? How will they be read in the future? The photographs cannot say.

This unpredictable significance is what troubles photography’s artistic ambitions. No matter what their makers’ intentions all photos end up as complex documents, as surfaces to be actively decoded. And the value of that documentation cannot be known in advance nor reduced to intention. Who is to say which detail from which image may prick our personal memory, trouble our identity or cause us to revaluate our view of history? For audiences this is what can make a photograph so compelling but for photographers themselves it is a humbling phenomenon, better embraced than resisted or resented.

A New American Picture presents us with single figures and occasional groups in small towns and at the edges of large cities. No downtown Manhattan, Chicago or Los Angeles. The focus is on secondary and tertiary places and thus, inevitably, on the intertwined politics of race and class. Moreover, these often feel like places from the past, in which the surveying Street View vehicle would have looked quite outlandish as it glided down the quiet, dusty streets. Citizens stare at it, perhaps with curiosity, perhaps with suspicion. The obscured faces do not tell. But these are contemporary places populated by contemporary people. The pernicious urbanite fantasy that small town and semi-rural American life belongs to the past goes back a long way. It is a fantasy precisely insofar as it allows the kind of symbolic separation or disowning that is the source of all prejudice. It was there in the 1930s when images made by photographers of the Farm Security Administration were used in the mass media to position the South and Midwest as a behind-the-times basket case in need of charity. (Suffice it to say, many of the photographers objected to that assessment).

Continuity and Rupture

For those who seek them, there are traces in this book of the rich history of itinerant photographers who have taken the American streetscape as their inspiration and muse. Rickard knows well this history, and my essay begins with a remark made by one of its guiding lights. Walker Evans resisted all artiness of technique in favour of the clear and unforced vernacular document of common life. Careful and inscrutable images may be gathered up as so much data for review. It is in the selection and sequencing that the work really begins. This is where the art is, and the politics too.

There is a levelling, subversive potential in the found photograph because any image can be vital if seen or deployed in the right way. Photography is selection, quotation, citation. The gap between one’s own photographs and those around us can be very small. With the camera, any camera, a portion of the world can be selected; photographs can be included within in one’s own photographs; one can make a photograph as if it were an already existing image; or one can repurpose an already existing image. As early as 1933 Evans was slipping anonymous news pictures of corpses into his photographic sequences. Later, photographing laborers in the street, passengers on the subway and scenes from a moving train, he pushed photography to be serial and systematic. His camera use could border on the automatism of the programmed machine. His various publications of intelligently made, intelligently sequenced photographs threw a door wide open. There is an unbroken thread that runs from his book American Photographs (1938) to Robert Frank’s The Americans(1958/9), Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces (1972), Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures (1977), Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects (1987), Paul Graham’s American Night (2003) right up to Rickard’s A New American Picture.

And what of that persistent adjective ‘American’? Ambiguity was there from the start. Did Evans mean his photography was somehow American, or his subject matter, or both? Was it a statement of fact or a provocation? Does Rickard imply this new American picture is to reject and replace the old? To modify it? Allegorize it? All these American projects have been sincere acts of intervention, heartfelt attempts to check and keep open the idea of what the country is or could be. Every utterance of the word ‘American’ evokes something of that ‘cloud-canopy of idealism’, however unattainable. Perhaps rightly so, for what may be truly American is the capacity of its citizens and its culture to be attentive to shortcomings. Dissent is not anti-American. In a country that is an ongoing project it might well be as American as you can get.

 

Here are two very different publicity stills from two very different films: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), which I watch often, and Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), which I saw only once and will probably never see again.

 

A Matter of Life and Death (in America it was titled Stairway to Heaven) is a very English fantasy film. David Niven plays Peter Carter, a Second World War pilot shot down over the English Channel. Leaping from his flaming aircraft he doesn’t die but washes up on a beach. He soon falls in love with the American radio operator (played by Kim Hunter) to whom he thought he’d given his last words.  But he may have been affected psychologically by the brush with death: he begins to have hallucinations in which the world around him is temporarily suspended while a messenger appears from the afterlife to summon him. He should have died. In this suspension Peter argues with the messenger that he’s now in love and therefore cannot be summoned to heaven. His girlfriend and his doctor try to monitor these hallucinations. While Peter sleeps in the adjacent room they play table tennis. Suddenly they freeze. Peter wakes up. He knows the messenger is here. He rushes next door to tell the doctor but finds him immobile. Peter stares at him.

You can watch the scene here:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sbjD9SpiRo]

Now strictly speaking, I guess this scenario shouldn’t ‘work’ as a still photo. How can you show an animate person looking at a frozen person when the photo freezes everything? But somehow it does work. The doctor’s body is so contorted, while Peter’s stare is that of a man poised with cogent intensity. It’s quite a grotesque photograph, like a punch-line for a missing joke. I watch the film often but I rarely look at this image. Nevertheless once seen, it is not forgotten. I don’t know of any other photograph that expresses this very unusual sense of time.

I saw Bresson’s Mouchette several years ago and I’ve never been so moved by a film. I was shaking when I came out of the cinema. It’s about a young adolescent girl, the Mouchette of the title, whose poor life in a rural French village is hard. Her father is an alcoholic and her mother is very ill. She looks after her younger brother and does all the housework. She is teased and tormented at school, and ostracized in the village. Despite moments of joy there’s really nothing but pain and tragedy in her life. She seems strong enough to deal with her lot. One morning she is by a river. She rolls herself down the bank in her shawl and is stopped by a bush at the water’s edge.  She seems to do it for the dizzying little pleasure. A stolen moment of abandon. But she does it again, this time rolling into the river to drown herself. It’s the last scene. Mouchette should be a ‘coming of age’ film but she doesn’t get that far.

At a fleamarket in a French village last summer I found this photo and I treasure it, both as a beautiful picture and as a memento of a film I don’t think I can bring myself to watch again. I can think about Mouchette’s fate without having to put myself through it.

Both of these photos were taken by stills photographers. Almost every film production has a stills photographer. Stills provide the movie with everything from working descriptions of interiors and locations to archival records. And of course they are made for publicity purposes. After the director has a take in the can the actors may be called upon to repeat their performance, ‘once more for stills’. What is performed firstly for the cinematographer is performed again for the photographer.

Movements must be converted into stillness. The transfer is not always as straightforward as it might seem. Actors need to be posers too, but the essence of an unfolding scene may not be achievable in a single shot. The art of film acting is above all the art of movement, one might think. Stillness may deprive the actor of their métier.

In the case of my two examples the problem is even more complicated. The photographer on the set of A Matter of Life and Death had to quickly work out how best to present as a single image a form of stillness that really requires movement. Robert Bresson had a very different attitude to cinematic performance. He disliked the idea of actors and preferred non-professionals in his films. He avoided even the term actor and all its theatrical implications. He preferred the idea of the model, a term that recalls the still photograph or the painter’s studio. He had his models drain themselves of theatre, insisting they perform actions over and over in rehearsal. Finally they could perform before the camera without thought or self-consciousness. Bresson writes in his only book Notes on the Cinematographer (1975):

No actors. 

(no directing of actors)

No parts.

(no playing of parts)

No staging.

But the use of working models taken from life.

BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors)

Later he notes: “Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and thought.” The result is a style of performance in which both everything and nothing looks controlled. The ‘models’ perform with an inner calm and apparent stillness, even when moving. They ‘go through the motions’, we might say. Unfairly described as austere, the restraint in Bresson’s films can seem unapproachable but absorbing too.

One task of the stills photographer is to condense and distil a filmic scenario into a readable image. Gestures are altered, body positions are re-organised, and facial expressions are held. Often the lighting is perfected, wayward hair and clothing are groomed so as not to distract and the camera focus is pin sharp. Caught between cinematic flow and photographic arrest, the classical film still has a unique pictorial character.

Even today individual film frames are of low quality. The film grain is coarse and the image may suffer from motion blur or loss of focus. The richness and precision of the moving image we see on screen is in part an illusion, conjured by the real time projection. Flashing up, twenty-four frames per second, our visual pleasure derives from a constant tease. Always shifting, always changing, it is forever out of reach. It can never be trapped and held. The stills photographer can suggest movement but cannot recreate it. The static photograph made on set requires something else. It must satisfy the desire for fixity. The still photo must hold the stilled gaze.

In the 1920s the silent movie was perfected. The 1930s then saw the introduction of sound. Styles of acting began to change. No longer did physical gestures need to carry everything. A line of spoken dialogue could be enough to energise a scene. The arrival of sound also changed the relation between cinema and the still image. Silent film had a secret affinity with the silence of photographs. Both were voiced by text  – the inter-title, the caption. The ‘talkies’ interrupted that. Just as the arrival of cinema’s movement made photographs look still, the coming of sound emphasised their muteness. Thinking about it now, what I like about these two photos is that they come from moments in their films that are nearly silent.

In this transition cinema became a truly popular form and a systematic industry. The finest technicians were under contract and the filmic image became a source of beauty, of desire, seduction and spectacle. Also, cinema became a popular art when mass media magazines were dominant. It was here that the film industry and the popular press began their co-dependence. Magazines carried publicity for the movies – advertisements, portraits, profiles, gossip, previews and reviews. They were also the home of photo-reportage. The crafted film still and reportage might at first strike us as total opposites. After all, cinema had already become an escapist world of fantasy while the subject of reportage was actuality, the real events of the world. But each in its own way had to solve the same two problems: visual clarity and narrative stillness. Film stills achieved it through staging and the use of large format cameras. Reportage took another route, a picture taking rather than making. It elevated quickness, lightness, mobility and economy of expression. The technical tools were minimal and immersion in the changing world was the key. Motion would be frozen in fleeting frames by solitary photographers working with the Leica camera. First introduced in 1925, it was small, neat and portable. It used the 35mm film that had become standard for the movie industry. Where cinema celebrated movement by recreating it, reportage celebrated by suspending it. Searching for beautiful and symbolic geometry, the photo-reporter would pounce when the world appeared to be organised momentarily as a picture: the ‘decisive moment’. And where the film still staged arrestedness, reportage used fast shutter speeds to freeze it. Both sought to trap fleeting detail and to halt time. And both pursued, as the artist-photographer Jeff Wall put it, ‘the blurred parts of pictures’. The image from A Matter of Life and Death corresponds with this classical idea of the film still, but Robert Bresson was after something else, something less polished and more direct. Stills from his films often have the look of seemingly casual photographs or reportage. Imperfect and spontaneous.

Today the close analysis of films is open to anyone with a DVD player, or access to the internet. A movie can be watched as a whole or as a set of bits and pieces – scenes, chapters, freeze frames, alternative edits. To some extent we are all film theorists now. To watch is to analyse. Meanwhile the DVD has given a new life to the film still in the form of ‘picture galleries’ that are frequently included as extras.

As a result our viewing habits and therefore the making of films has changed. Contemporary films expect to be seen in pieces.  And it seems to be those filmmakers from the past whose work stands up to this repetition and fragmentation that are valued today. Alfred Hitchcock is the obvious example but one could also include Powell & Pressburger. I can watch any part of A Matter of Life and Death and enjoy it. In many respects the film is an elaborate string of set-pieces, perhaps less than the sum of its sublime parts. Mouchette is quite the opposite. In parts it is nothing.

_____

A short foreword written by David Campany for Juliet Hacking’s book Photography: the Whole Story.

Strictly speaking, the whole story of photography would be an account of every photograph ever taken and every response to it, from that tentative handful made in the 1820s and 1830s to the thirty billion or so now snapped annually around the world. Impossible. Choices have to be made. In fact the process of shaping a ‘story’ of photography is not unlike taking photographs. It is an art or science of abbreviation. It involves judgment, selection, framing, editing, assessment and reassessment.

Photography has had more lives than a lucky cat, each with its own convoluted story. It has had many deaths too. For over a century now the medium’s demise has been announced regularly. The first challenger was cinema and then came television, the electronic image and most recently the Internet.  But photography has been nothing if not resilient and adaptable. Its essence does not reside in any particular technology, nor in any particular social function. Indeed the argument still rages as to whether there is an essence at all, or just a loose and shifting affiliation of characteristics.

Photography was well established before anyone even tried to tell its story. Indeed it was only its centenary in the 1930s that prompted the attempt.  For much of its existence it symbolised a moving present, the medium best able to picture a rapidly changing world. The relentless onward drive seemed to cut it off from its own past. Photography had given rise to whole new fields of experience, entering every institution of modern life. Journalism, ethnography, architecture, advertising, fashion, topography, medicine, education, tourism, history, law, politics, design and of course, art. It was becoming the preeminent modern art. It was also transforming the other arts by redefining realism and becoming the reproductive medium through which all art would be known beyond the museum. Even in the 1930s an overview of it all was a Sisyphean task. Put together with a mix of connoisseurship and science, those early attempts at a history established a familiar a roll call of great names and watershed moments of technical innovation.

Since then the story has become even more complex and plural.  Nevertheless the fascination with its telling has not gone away. Indeed, for every voice claiming that photography is responsible for obliterating history in a blizzard of disposable ‘nowness’, there are those who see clearly the links between what photography is today and what it has been.

Over the last few decades photography has become a much more reflective medium, aware of its history and able to draw upon it with maturity. As a result the continuities are as striking as the ruptures. This book captures the widespread revival of interest in photography’s past, not as a set of dead facts but as a way of understanding where we are now.

No doubt the Internet has had much to do with this revival. Firstly the experience of looking at immaterial screen images has made us acutely aware of the physical and material properties that shaped photography for much of its life. Not just prints but books, magazines, newspapers, albums and archives (none of which have yet vanished entirely into the electronic ether). Secondly, the Internet has allowed us to grasp the tensions between local histories of photography and the uneven globalization of visual culture. Thirdly, it has made photography’s past more available to us and in greater richness than ever before.  So many of the challenges, issues and interests we think of as uniquely our own have been encountered by photographers and audiences in the past.

For example, the perplexing tension between the photograph as record and expression has animated every stage of its development as art. Its legal and factual status is as unavoidable and contested today as it was when William Henry Fox Talbot so prophetically described it as “evidence of a novel kind”.  The narrative properties of the still image engaged photography’s pioneers just as much as the most contemporary image makers working in art or advertising. The relation between the single image and the many was also explored by those pioneers in their books and early photo-essays, while today we understand a photograph as both a unique image and part of a larger body of work.  The photography of people, places and objects remains central and always will: the portrait, landscape and still life persist not as an upholding of traditional genres, but as flexible pictorial forms.  Then there are the deep connections between the colonial impulse that spread photography so rapidly around the world in the nineteenth century and new global culture emanating from the centres of image production and beyond.

Photography appeals because it is both a subject and a passport. To be interested in it allows one to feel grounded while venturing into all those aspects of the past and present it has touched and transformed.

 Precedented Photography

 By David Campany. First published in Aperture n.206, Spring 2012.

Photography’s rambling, unsystematic past is becoming increasingly available to us—not least the history of illustrated printed matter, which is now easily uploaded, accessed and bought via the Internet, and studied with growing intensity. As a result, we are now more likely than ever to encounter precedents that may cause us to rethink our ideas about what is significant in contemporary photography and why.

What do we presume to be original? Why does art still put such a premium on originality while its advanced theories question the very idea? And what might this tell us about photography’s “applied” fields (documentary, journalism, illustration, fashion, and architectural photography, for example), in which originality is a lesser matter? Consider the following three very different examples.

In the spring of 1952 Ralph Ellison published his novel Invisible Man, a revelatory account of what it was to be black in postwar America. Ellison’s good friend, Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, was so impressed by the book he decided to create images illustrating some of its key moments. Ellison himself helped out and Life published four of the results on August 25. The opening photograph, of a young man emerging from (or perhaps disappearing under) a manhole, is a striking if ambiguous symbol of black experience and often reproduced as such. The final image—published only once—was an elaborately staged scene from the book’s prologue. It shows the narrator holed up in a windowless cellar into which he has fallen during a riot. He is drinking sloe gin and listening to jazz records, surrounded by light bulbs he has connected illegally in order to banish the darkness. This is the place from which the narrator will recount his story. The episodic and vivid style of Ellison’s writing lends itself to still images, so it is unsurprising that a photographer might wish to respond to it. Moreover, Parks was himself an accomplished writer—and later a painter, musician, and filmmaker—who moved with enviable ease between his talents.

In 1999 the art photographer Jeff Wall read Invisible Man and, like Parks, was prompted to stage and photograph its prologue. Wall’s image took more than a year to complete. It is much more detailed than the 1952 interpretation. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a more detailed photograph—each and every one of the 1,369 bulbs specified by Ellison seems to be present, along with furniture, clothes, family photographs, and toiletries. Everything to subsist is in that room, including the kitchen sink. Nevertheless, as responses to the same text, the two versions share the essentials: a black man sequestered and self-absorbed in an illuminated room, depicted in such a way that he is both an individual and a metonym, or symbol. When I happened to show Wall a copy of the August 1952 issue of Life , he was impressed at the achievement of Parks and Ellison. Despite his very different historical and cultural circumstance, Wall wondered whether he would have pursued his own version of the image had he known its precedent.

In 1954 a two-part book was issued by Toho Shupan in Japan titled Ginza Kaiwai, Ginza Haccho. The first volume is an account written by Kimura Shohachi about the Ginza district of Tokyo, with reproductions of woodblock prints by Hiroshige, drawings, maps, and photographs by Yoshikatsu Kanno. The second volume is a long accordion foldout of Yoshikazu Suzuki’s photographic panorama of every building on Ginza Street. It presents two parallel photographic strips showing either side of the road. Although formally ingenious and quite a feat of publishing, the format is a traditional means of making a clear topological inventory along a path or journey (for example, there are numerous linear panoramic paintings of the buildings that line the serpentine Grand Canal in Venice.)

In recent years Ginza Haccho has been rediscovered with great excitement by photo-historians and bibliophiles, who see in it a precedent to Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Edward Ruscha’s celebrated artist’s book of 1966. The similarities are certainly striking. Comparing his strategy to the thinking of Marcel Duchamp, Ruscha once described his photo-books as “an extension of the readymade in photographic form.” Indeed, it would not be surprising to discover that a Los Angeles architectural firm or town-planning office has its own panorama of the Sunset Strip (although there’s never been much evidence of “planning” in that part of the world, admittedly). Ruscha took the photographs for Every Building on the Sunset Strip himself, using an industrially standard technique; that is to say, the work is akin to a readymade in that his images may as well have been appropriated. And so might those in Ginza Haccho, which rather complicates any notion of originality, let alone precedence. I don’t know whether Ruscha was familiar with Japanese books of the 1950s; there is no reason to presume Ginza Kaiwai, Ginza Haccho made its way across the Pacific, but it may have done.

Third example. In early 1946 the editors of Fortune magazine were planning a special issue on American housing. Staff journalist Wilder Hobson was commissioned to write an overview and decided to collaborate with his friend Walker Evans, Fortune’s recently appointed staff photographer. Evans drew on his own archive of photographs of houses—images made by himself and others. The result was ‘Homes of Americans,’ published in April 1946. Through canny editing and a provocative introduction, what looks at first like a simple survey of the country’s housing stock becomes a proto-conceptual think piece on the limits of the photographic document. The text is worth quoting at length:

The pictures are not accompanied by captions (which are all gathered on page 157). The aim is to avoid distraction from the naked, graphic facts, to have you see the sundry remarkable shapes, textures and glints of light quite as they are, without verbal comment. Few of us really take the time to see what we look at, and these thirty-three pictures, drawn from hundreds, may deliver their impact of excitement, nostalgia, humor or repugnance much more strongly if the eye is not led away to documentation in words. Besides you may enjoy guessing what parts of the country the various scenes represent.

Photography, that great distorter of things as they are, has, here as elsewhere, played its particularly disreputable, charming trick [ . . . ] But like the deliberate inflections of men’s voices, they are tricks now and then lifted to an art. Take your time with this array. You may be in a hurry to turn to page 157 for the names of what you are seeing. On the other hand it may pay you to incline with Herman Melville to “let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness.

Opposite these words sit two images. The first looks like a typically modern postwar interior devoid of decoration; the second, a gaudy Baroque boudoir. The captions reveal the first to be a Shaker interior from 1819 and the second to be Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s neo-Baroque drawing room of 1883. Expectations are turned on their heads. An image of a new Long Island housing development is captioned “A Life-Time Opportunity. Steam Heat, with Gas, Electricity and Water. On Easy Terms . . . ,” mocking the rhetoric of the real-estate sales pitch to be found elsewhere in the magazine. A photograph of a sleek, high-modernist home by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer sits in a grid of anonymous vernacular houses from the nineteenth century. A field of Airstream trailers serving as emergency homes for defense workers has a caption celebrating the trailer’s mobility and long-standing popularity in American culture.

‘Homes of Americans’ is typical of the provocative resistance to easy interpretation characteristic of Evans’s published work, notably his book American Photographs (1938) as well as his image sequences accompanying Carleton Beals’s writing in The Crime of Cuba (1933) and James Agee’s writing in Let us now Praise Famous Men (1941). But ‘Homes of Americans’ is now forgotten, along with so much of Evans’s remarkable magazine work. In 1965 he retired from Fortune to teach at Yale and attend to his growing reputation as a museum artist. This was crowned by his 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which passed over Evans the writer, editor, and subversive journalist in favor of Evans the maker of exemplary art photographs in the “documentary style.” The presumption was (and still is) that Evans perpetrated an outrageous scam to make great art while being paid as a journalist. But he was also making great, independent-minded and highly reflexive journalism.

 

Compare this with ‘Homes for America,’ Dan Graham’s endlessly celebrated magazine piece made twenty years later. Graham was one of a number of conceptual artists looking to make “works for magazines” in the 1960s. Could an artist get work published that pushed and critiqued the conventions of journalism and documentary? Graham was interested in postwar suburban tract housing and took to photographing it on slide film with an instamatic camera, making images as perfunctory as his subject matter. He wrote a deadpan text explaining how house building was a crude, cultureless business interested only in money. He hoped to publish it, he said in “a magazine like Esquire” [Graham] but settled for Arts magazine, where the piece appeared in December 1966. The editors omitted Graham’s images, however, and replaced them with one of serial houses by Walker Evans. They also added the subtitle “Early 20th-Century Possessable Houses to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ’66,” which, combined with Evans’s image, undermined the notion that rationalized modular architecture was a new thing. In 1966 the twenty-four-year-old Graham had encountered Evans’s work on neither the page nor the wall.

 

Soon after, Graham began exhibiting an editioned lithograph and then a maquette of his original intended layout. To this day many commentators assume this is the layout that was published in Arts magazine. The work’s failure as a magazine intervention paves the way for its resurrection in the museum. These days Graham’s project appears in just about every survey of postwar art. Evans’s and Hobson’s ‘Homes of Americans’ does not.

What might examples like these tell us? First: they remind us that a precedent becomes so retroactively, of course. It is through the significance of the latter that the former is reconsidered. I’m told there has been a scramble by a number of venerable art libraries to acquire copies of Ginza Kaiwai, Ginza Haccho. This would not have happened without the canonization of Ruscha’s book. It was Jeff Wall’s image that led me to read Ellison’s novel, which led me to read a biography of the writer, which mentioned the Life magazine piece. It was the unsatisfying handling of Graham and Evans by the museum that led me to return to the magazine sources. Second: smart, inventive, ambitious, and resistant photography did not begin with conceptual art and can never be the exclusive preserve of any avant-garde. Good work gets made in unpredictable places and times. We can never rule out where or when. Third: the history of the illustrated press remains largely uncharted. Despite the recent profusion of studies of photographic printed matter, I suspect it will always be unchartable: there’s simply been too much of it. (But we certainly need an account of the influential Life magazine that goes beyond the crude “Mom and apple pie” ideology of its advertising pages and recognizes the political and cultural complexity of its middle-class audience.) Finally: many of the challenges that face progressive photography today have been faced in the past. As writers and curators, photographers and artists, we need not succumb to the anxiety that “it’s all been done before.” We should be grateful and learn from the situation.

Does this lead to any conclusion about “originality” in art photography vs. the “applied” fields? Does being aware of the precedent dampen original inspiration? Or maybe halt an artist from unwittingly redoing? Nothing general can be said. We must proceed on a case-by-case basis. But we can be sure there will be many precedents to come.

 

An essay on some of Walker Evans’ photo essays for Fortune magazine.

David Campany contributes three entries to David Evans’s fine neo-Bataillean anthology Critical Dictionary (Black Dog Publishing, 2011).

Bed, 1995

Photography may have triumphed in art over the last couple of decades, but questions linger as to whether art gets the best out of it. Many artistically minded photographers admit to finding art an interesting place to visit but they wouldn’t want to live there. It can be airless, self-serving and very slow. (Photography permits rapid artistic development for those who want it, but curators and collectors rarely do.) Moreover, given that art photography triumphed by remaking, diverting or otherwise contemplating the medium’s ‘applied’ forms – such as the document, the film still, the advertisement and the archival image – there is always much in common between art photographs and those we see elsewhere.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the promiscuous still life photograph, present everywhere from the gallery wall and the family album to billboards and mail-order catalogues. Picked fruit and cut flowers, artefacts of glass, plastic, wood and metal, objects rare and commonplace, the still life bridges art and commerce. Its rise from the lowest genre to the equal of landscape and portraiture followed the rise of commodity culture. In the 1820s and ’30s, the pioneers of photography could not resist gathering objects before their cameras. Nicéphore Niépce shot a dining table laid for one. Louis Daguerre contrived arrangements of classical sculpture and paintings. William Henry Fox Talbot showed off his china and glassware. Were these images documents, pictures for contemplation or advertising? All three. The still life was ideal for a world of accelerated manufacture and exchange, mobilizing desires and expressing tastes. Even the humble table, the basic support for the still life, was unthinkable without its marketable image. As Karl Marx famously declared in his 1867 passage on commodity fetishism, a table ‘not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.’¹ Two years later, Comte de Lautréamont was after the new beauty of ‘the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.² Such wild tableaux! In the hallucination of capital the still life is a hybrid of sculpture and montage.

The rise of still life from the lowest genre to the equal of landscape and portraiture followed the rise of commodity culture.

When photographers made their bid for modern artistic significance in the 1920s many were key figures in the medium’s applied fields, notably reportage, portraiture and the advertising still life. They included Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Laure Albin-Guillot, Helmar Lerski and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Others made still lifes that could be taken for advertisements (Edward Weston, László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Heinz Hajek-Halke). But as Modernists true to their métier, the aim was to make good photographs and the ‘art’ part could be left to take care of itself. Photographers as different as Man Ray and Walker Evans insisted their medium was not art but it could be an art – a distinction lost on many today. Exhibiting or publishing a book of one’s commissioned work might be enough to shift the emphasis from the things depicted to the depiction, from anonymity to named author, from paid work to Works, from applied art to fine art. Context, as any photographer will tell you, is key.

This indirect path to artistic status produced extraordinary images – and they could only have been made that way. A weak claim to art can be a great stimulus for photography, but a strong claim can crush it. This is why so many contemporary photographers feel constrained by the anxious categories and stifling agendas of art world photography and look to the freedom of that older attitude. But this has proved difficult. In the 1950s and ’60s, commercial photography became wary of the unpredictability of art and tried to develop a reliable science of image design (the TV series Mad Men, 2007–ongoing, nails this shift brilliantly). Images would be vetted or even designed in the boardroom. In his 1964 essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Roland Barthes examined a still life advertisement for Panzani, a food company contrived to connote ‘Italianicity’ to the French.³ It was the start of ‘photography theory’. Branded tins and packets intermingle with fresh fruit and vegetables spilling from a rustic net bag against a scarlet backdrop. It was a ruthlessly designed image and, like its makers, Barthes accounted for its every aspect from colour, lighting, composition and text to its committee authorship. He described the ideological sleight of hand that endows manufactured goods with ‘naturalness’. And it is photography that facilitates the slippage most effectively. It is unique in appearing to point at things transparently (‘there it is’) while fashioning appearance artificially (‘this is how it is’). Photographs are taken and made, natural and cultural. Barthes’s semiotic critique also aimed to be a science of popular signs and advertising got the analysis it deserved.

This calculated attitude was quite of a piece with Pop art’s approach to commodity images. Andy Warhol’s stacked ‘Brillo Boxes’ (1964) were a strategic fusion of the readymade and the still life, and it made little difference whether you saw them exhibited or in photographic reproduction: the flash of recognition was all. Warhol, the former ad man, grasped Marcel Duchamp’s insight that the industrial/commercial object plucked and placed incongruously (like Lautréamont’s monstrous encounter) will hit the viewer with the deadpan force of a snapshot. But a less remarked legacy of Pop was the polarizing of art’s attitudes to commerce into rictus-grin irony or high- minded disgust. It led to a fraught attitude to money, to the commodity status of art works themselves and, indirectly, to a stand- off between art photography and applied photography. Since the 1960s, the still life photograph in art has passed through the polemic Postmodern image–texts of Barbara Kruger (a former art director at Condé Nast), the post-classical allegories of Olivier Richon and Karen Knorr (whose first joint publication was a cookery book), and the photography-as-sculpture-montage-joke of Fischli/Weiss, Gabriel Orozco and Vik Muniz (a former advertiser). All of which is Art with a capital ‘A’, all of it keen to distance itself from the still life as Commerce (capital ‘C’), even though commerce is often the subject matter.

Photographers as different as Man Ray and Walker Evans insisted their medium was not art but it could be an art – a distinction lost on many today.

Consider two examples from either side of Pop, both by figures better known for other things. In 1955, Walker Evans published ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’ in Fortune magazine: five exquisitely restrained still lifes of one-dollar pliers and wrenches. Reproduced larger than life, they were monuments to blue-collar labour. In his accompanying text Evans praised them for holding out against overdesigned and image-led manufacture, while his photos resisted the graphic opulence typical of Fortune. In 1992, the BBC commissioned 20 artists to make public billboards, including the young Damien Hirst, who was the only one keen to do more than simply re-present gallery art. He approached a professional still life photographer to help shoot exquisitely restrained pairs of objects: a hammer with a peach and a cucumber with a pot of Vaseline. They formed two panels of a rotating tri-vision billboard; the third read ‘The Problems with Relationships’. On the street it looked like advertising with nothing to sell but an idea. Evans and Hirst were fashioning still life as a pitch-perfect intervention beyond art. However, whereas Hirst remade his billboard in 1996, exhibited it and sold it, Evans let his magazine work slip into obscurity.

Few photographers find these options appealing, preferring a more open situation. The work of British photographer Jason Evans is exemplary here. For 20 years he has moved between still life, portraiture, fashion and music photography, and between commissions, collaborations, websites and images made for fun. He has exhibited in major museums but refuses any hierarchy between the wall, the magazine page and the computer screen. Everything he makes is driven by curiosity about the medium: its processes, transformative qualities and its powers of proposition.

A request from i-D magazine to shoot a Miu Miu skirt is an opportunity to see clothing as a Modernist still life or sculpture. Christmas present packaging by Gareth Pugh is photographed for Fantastic Man magazine with the precisionist flair of the machine aesthetic. An experiment by the design provocateurs Dunne & Raby to harness energy emitted by live rodents leads to images that update the paranoiac lab science of the 1950s. When Evans exhibits such laconically elegant photographs they carry this astute assimilation of the best applied photography of the past. Little surprise then that Evans’s touchstone is Evidence (1977), the gnomic book of photographs gathered by artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan from police, scientific and fire department archives. Strip the most functional photography to its bare essentials and you’re left with enigmas, not facts.

With its use of images and objects from the recent past, there is a twinge of ‘retro’ here, comparable in some respects to the work of photographers – for all their differences – such as Christopher Williams and Roe Ethridge. This is less nostalgia than a sign of how hard it is to develop an artistic relation to the very new. ‘Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.’⁴ So declared Walker Evans. How perceptive. He wasn’t writing off the aesthetic of any era, merely noting that not-newness is what often permits artistic access.

Countering the restraint and historical consciousness of his black and white work, Jason Evans’s colour photography is a nower-than- now world of crazed form and crafty process. The hugely popular website thedailynice.com is an outlet for his compulsive photo-notations that have no other home. There’s only ever one image to see, which changes daily, and there is no archive. What you are likely to get is a disarming configuration of colour and shape presented as a considered observation of the made stuff that fills the material world. Fittingly, when thedailynice.com briefly became a gallery exhibition in 2009, visitors could help themselves to prints from a big cardboard box on a table.

Evans’s artwork for musicians such as Wild Beasts and Four Tet reminds you that record covers can still be hotly anticipated and dearly prized. The sleeve for Four Tet’s There is Love in You (2010) started with the scavenging of test prints made each morning by the digital photo labs of central London. Colour spectrums, bright flowers and fine geometric grids will tell technicians if their printers are working correctly. These were pinned on his studio wall and photographed on colour negative film, which was then subjected to a hole-punch.

The tiny, rough-edged discs were arranged meticulously on a sheet of glass from which a positive print was made. The digital/analogue blend is a consummate visual expression of the electro-acoustic music. Look closely and see that it could only have been made this way. This is still life as pure process, as profound as the best of the process-driven photography in art, but it’s less po-faced and lot more joyous.

This fluid, exploratory and untormented attitude to image-making has much in common with that earlier era of only vague distinctions between art photography and applied photography. If Evans’s refreshing work is now coming to wider attention it’s because it offers so many paths for photography around the Art Obstacle. Besides, in a climate where we are now provided with media-ready art the way supermarkets provide oven-ready chickens, doesn’t most art photography start to seem more applied than fine?

My thanks to Jennifer Higgie who commissioned this essay for Frieze n.143, Nov-Dec 2011; and to Jason Evans whose work can be seen at: www.jasonevans.info   www.thedailynice.com   www.thenewscent.com

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol 1., translated by Ben Fowkes, Vintage, New York, 1977, p. 163
2. Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, Œuvres complètes, Guy Lévis Mano, Paris, 1938, p. 256
3. Roland Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’ (Rhetoric of the Image), Communications no. 4, Seuil, Paris, 1964, p. 40–51. Published in English in Barthes’ anthology Image-Music-Text, Fontana, 1977
4. Walker Evans, ‘Collectors Items’, Mademoiselle, May 1963. Evans’s statement accompanied his photographs of thrift store windows, shot as if they were found still-life compositions. See David Campany, Walker Evans: the magazine work, Steidl, 2014.

Photography from Page to Wall

The development of vanguard photography from the 1960s to the 1980s involved, among other things, a profound shift from the printed page to the gallery wall as the site for which its images were to be conceived. In 1954 Irving Penn had declared: “For the modern photographer the end product of his efforts is the printed page, not the photographic print”. By 1964 his assessment had changed: “The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.” The ascendance of television as the defining mass medium meant an eclipse of the illustrated press, and of certain roles for photography and photographers. In the decade that separates Penn’s remarks many important photographers began to move away from magazine work to produce significant independent photographic books. These include William Klein’s New York (1956) Rome (1960), Moscow (1964), Tokyo (1964), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959), and Richard Avedon & Truman Capote’s Observations (also 1959).

At this time street photography, that model of social observation and picture making that had evolved in parallel with the illustrated press, was consolidating itself into a definable genre. This was expressed best by Garry Winogrand who absorbed of the insights of Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and Robert Frank, pushing hard at the pictorial and descriptive limits of the spontaneous city street photograph. But when all these photographers exhibited their work their prints were barely larger than they appeared on the printed page.

In the Conceptual Art that emerged in the 1960s, the photograph as document and the image-text as report or chronicle were adopted and critiqued by a number of artists who did not identify themselves as ‘photographers’. Notably, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson began to produce experimental works modeled on, but subversive of, magazine photojournalism. Smithson’s ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, published in Artforum in 1967, was a series of deadpan visual documents of the post-industrial landscape, accompanied by a text that veered between detailed description and delirious hyperbole on the slow collapse of the modern world into entropy. For Smithson the eventless, marginalized landscape was more characteristic of the modern condition than any city centre and the challenge was to find a para-journalistic form to describe and express it.

  

Dan Graham hoped to publish his  ‘Homes for America’ outside of the art world “in a magazine like Esquire”, as he once put it,  but settled for Arts magazine (December 1966 – January 1967). With an instamatic camera loaded with colour slide film he documented the monotony of post-war American tract housing, noting in his deliberately flat, uninflected prose how domestic architecture was becoming less a cultural matter than a commodity, developed and produced according to rationalized modular design principles and a reifying economic logic. Arts magazine failed to include Graham’s images, replacing them with a Walker Evans photo of Victorian serial housing taken in 1930s. He persisted with the idea of making ‘works’ for insertion in magazines but in reality they have lived on through their redeployment in the more robust space of the gallery, in the form of exhibited artworks. In 1971 ‘Homes For America’ was remade as an editioned lithograph of its unpublished layout and Graham continues to exhibit photographs from the project. [i] Smithson’s piece for Artforum also migrated from page to wall.  Such works inhabit the wall not as pictures that ‘belong there’ but as layouts that might not. As such their relation to the spaces of both the printed page and the gallery is ironic and parodic.

Beyond making artworks that resemble magazine spreads, the idea or promise of the intervention in magazine culture lives on as a symptom of the feeling that the space of the popular press should not and cannot be declared off-limits to artistic production. But it has proved difficult. The kinds of institutional spaces that allowed Walker Evans to be employed by Fortune magazine (1945-65) and be left pretty much alone to produce subversions of the mainstream photo-essay (such as his ‘Homes of Americans’, 1946) have become increasingly limited and difficult to occupy, particularly by ‘outsiders’. And even in the 1960s, Evans’ sly magazine work was unknown to artists, precisely because it was made in and for a non-art magazine to be disposed of soon after the next issue appeared. (Not surprisingly, Dan Graham was unaware his ‘Homes for America’ had such a striking precedent.)

Many of the photographs gathered here [in the exhibition Jeff Wall: The Crooked Path, Bozar, Brussels 2011] from the 1970s and 80s are indebted to the rich and productive paradigm opened by Walker Evans – but Evans understood not as a canny journalist but as modern artist who made striking museum pictures in the ‘documentary style’. The work of Stephen Shore and Thomas Struth is exemplary here. Both photographers are fascinated by the ad hoc, informal development of the urban scene. They make it thinkable and appreciable through the masterly formality of their compositions. Shore’s best-known body of work from that era was published as the book Uncommon Places (1982). Five years later Struth published the book Unconscious Places. Even these titles express Evans’s characteristic attention to the recently forgotten and the ways modern life renders the everyday almost invisible to most citizens.

Shore has understood his photography as belonging equally to the page and the wall. As a result his influence has been as much through publications as exhibitions. His exhibited prints are modest in size and their effect is cumulative. Although they function as individual pictures his attention – like Evans’s – to seriality, mass production and daily ritual invites a movement from one image to the next. The suite of photographs presented over pages or along a wall accommodates and encourages such a reading. This dynamic is present but less emphatic in Thomas Struth’s photographs.  Moreover while Struth’s early prints were also close to page size, he belongs to a generation of artists, including Jeff Wall, Jean Marc Bustamante, Andreas Gursky who began to conceive their photographs as individual pictures to be presented at a larger scale in relation to the body of the beholder in the gallery space. This broke once and for all the primacy of the art-photographic page that was first asserted in the 1840s and 1850s, explored as a specifically modern form between the 1920s and the 1950s, and ironised by Pop and Conceptualism in the 1960s and 70s.

While many have argued that the triumph of photography in art since the late 1970s has come in the form of the gallery-specific tableau it would be hasty to overlook the continued significance of photographic publications. The recent renaissance of the ‘photobook’ as a specific form, the flourishing of independent arts publishing (much of it taking its inspiration from the likes of Dan Graham, Robert Smithson and Hans Peter Feldmann) and the seemingly unshakeable status of catalogues and monographic books suggest a more fluid dialogue between page and wall, albeit one that respects the differences.

Traces and Pictures

by David Campany

Looked at as a whole the works gathered together here cover one of the richest and most complex periods in the development of photographic art. The collection of Zellweger Luwa AG begins with key works of Conceptual and performance art from the late 1960s and early 70s, passes through what came to be called the ‘postmodern’ arts of appropriation, quotation and re-photography, and concludes with large-scale photographic tableaux. Each of these moments is of course rich and complex in its own right and has been the subject of important exhibitions and critical studies. Through the Looking Brain allows us to consider what is particular about these moments but more importantly perhaps, it allows us to see significant overlaps, dialogues and tensions in the way photography has been understood and what its artistic possibility has been thought to be across the last four decades

Few would dispute that the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and early 70s continues to loom very large in accounts of the artistic development of photography. The taking up of the medium by artists of all kinds placed it in an expanded field of production. At that juncture the attractions of photography were multiple but quite particular. It seemed to many to have little artistic baggage or accumulated history of the kind that weighed so heavily on the shoulders of painters or sculptors, so it offered the promise of a new start. It allowed a dalliance with something other than high art, perhaps with mass culture, or at least with making art that did not look or feel like high art as traditionally defined. Certain forms of photography were easy to make, or use. It was largely a democratic medium, not perceived as special or privileged. In addition the medium could bring site-specific works, interventions and performances into the space of the gallery and also into the orbit of published reproduction and distribution. Central to this conception was the photograph’s status as base record, document, or trace. Photography produces imprints of light and by extension traces of that which is before the camera. Whatever else it was, that neo-avant-garde moment involved an equivocal, perhaps irresolvable reflection upon what is at stake in the photograph as and of traces. For example Chris Burden had many of his performances and documented and those actions live on as a series of photographs that oscillate between being historical documents and partial interpretations, between records and artworks. The same could be said of Richard Long’s photographs, which both document his actions in the landscape (moving stones, making paths in the dust or grass) and immortalize them as mythic emblems. That tradition continues in the performance documents made by Roman Signer and the sculptural opportunities photographed by Gabriel Orozco.

The attitudes to photography at that time certainly opened up new artistic paths, and made it possible for new kinds of artists with non-traditional skills and aptitudes to emerge. But it also closed a number of doors. The reductionism, the anti-aestheticism, the de-skilling and the anti-pictorialism were a blessing for some but a curse for others. While important strands of contemporary photographic art can be traced back to the innovations and insights of conceptualism, that moment was also became something to be overcome, particularly if a reengagement with the pictorial was the goal. For there is, at the heart of the matter, a tension between the photograph as trace and the photograph as picture, that is to say between the photograph as document and the photograph as artwork.

To be sure, this is not a new matter. It has been there 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 other modes of authorial erasure. Just about all the vanguard art of the last century walked or erased the line between artwork and document, and this is why photography became so central.

Reflecting on the relation between documents and artworks in 1928, 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 centre.

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.[i]

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? 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 dramatize the tensions between artwork and document.

Towards the end of the 1970s a number of important artists began to propose forms of photographic art that shifted image making away from conceptualism’s interest in traces and towards a an exploration with the photograph’s potential as ‘picture’. But just as conceptualism held in tension the idea of the photo as trace here too there were significant differences as to what a photo as picture was, or could be.

In 1977 the US critic Douglas Crimp curated a group show titled ‘Pictures’ for Artists’ Space in New York. Featuring work by Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith, it came to be regarded as an early landmark of postmodern photography, and these artists (along with several others, including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince) are now often referred to as the ‘Pictures Generation’. This is the second paragraph of Crimp’s essay for the catalogue of that show:

To an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures firsthand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the picture itself, not in order to uncover a lost reality, but to determine how a picture becomes a signifying structure of its own accord. But pictures are characterised by something which, though often remarked, is insufficiently understood: that they are extremely difficult to distinguish at the level of content, that they are to an extraordinary degree opaque to meaning. The actual event and the fictional event, the benign and the horrific, the mundane and the exotic, the possible and the fantastic: are all fused into the all-embracing similitude of the picture.[ii]

Here ‘pictures’ constituted the dizzying vortex of mass media spectacle rather than what you might find in traditional museums and galleries. Pictures were, as so much postmodern theory went on to proclaim, untrustworthy, illusory, distractive, hegemonic, dangerous to ‘firsthand experience’ and proliferative. A debt to the warnings Guy Debord sent out in 1967 with The Society of the Spectacle (first published in English in 1970) is evident, as is an echoing of Jean Baudrillard’s writings on simulation, which he started developing in the mid-1970s.[iii] Crimp reflected on the show the following year in Flash Art International, and again the meaning of the term was pressing:

‘Pictures’ in the colloquial usage is non-specific: a picture book might be a book of photographs or drawings; a film is sometimes called a picture-show or a moving picture and in common parlance a painting, drawing or print is often called simply a picture. Equally important, on a more theoretical level, picture, in its verb form, can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object. By using this term I want to avoid references to mediums, as if they were ontological categories, and to aesthetic styles, as if art were somehow exterior to those activities which produce instances of it. In all of its usages of course, picture carries the notion of representation, of copy. A picture is always ‘of’. Yet, in modern culture, the relationship of the picture to what is pictured has been obscured. Because the relationship of a mechanically, or electronically reproduced picture to what is pictured is unquestioned (it is, after all, simply a trace, and is therefore one-to-one), it has been supplanted by an infinitude of indistinguishable copies, and the notion of the original is lost. We are left, therefore, with an experience that must remain, and in any case chooses to remain, with the picture itself. [iv]

The ‘Pictures’ artists were trying to make art by means of appropriation and dissimulation in ways that would make sense of, or at least dramatize, the cultish power of images in a world increasingly dominated by advertising. If their art was ever at large-scale it was in order to allude to publicity, the cinema screen or the cityscape of advertising, rarely to the bodily scale of the painted canvas or sculpture. Large meant looking too large, ‘blown-up’. When the artworks were presented at small-scale, as many of these originally were, this played on the fact that imagery derived from printed pages looks noticeably smaller on the wall than in the hand, creating an air of knowing, faux-classical seriousness.

For example, the scale of Cindy Sherman’s 10-by-8 inch prints of her series Untitled Film Stills was deceptive. They resembled magazine-sized images or standard publicity shots for page reproduction or display outside movie theatres. At the same time, 10-by-8 was the sanctified format of purist fine art photographers, who, if they had become aware of Sherman’s play with masquerade and role-play, would probably have been quite baffled by it. Only when artists began to explore greater scale in the late 1980s did Sherman reprint some of the seriesmuch larger (40 by 30 inches), evoking less the classical museum picture than the cinema screen.[v] Richard Prince also began to enlarge his source images beyond the magazine page, while Sherrie Levine stayed close to the scale of the printed matter she was copying.

Around this time a number of artist photographers began to explore a very different idea of the photograph as picture. For them pictures were not simply things to be overthrown or ironised. Rather, in their connection with the pictorial tradition, they contained a promise, a way of outflanking spectacle and carving out something else, a way of picture making that reconnected with those modes of picturing that were once predominant but had been repressed by the iconoclasm of the avant-gardes. In 2007 Jeff Wall ventured:

A picture is something that is difficult to define, but we know that what we call a picture, in the Western tradition of art at least, is something extremely compelling and that the standards for it, established both by painters, photographers and so on, are very high. Therefore a good picture is difficult to make.[vi]

This is close to Jean-François Chevrier’s idea of the photograph as tableau.[vii] While this term may connote staging or something overtly theatrical, it need not involve any of that. A photograph is apprehended as a tableau if it is given to be seen, by whatever means, as an internally organised image that compels on the basis of that organisation. It may be documentary in origin or highly staged, but what is important is that the mode of attention and aesthetic judgment solicited by the tableau is itself a way of ‘artificing’ it. The tableau always has, at least in part, an ideal, a promise.[viii] Of course, this idea has existed for centuries in painting, but when it appears in photography it produces a tension between the image’s status as evidence or trace, which locates it in the past, and its pictorial organisation, which conjures an imaginary, contemplative dimension.

So, in parallel to the Pictures Generation there emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s what we might call a ‘picture generation’ (although the artists may not have seen themselves in such terms). Along with Wall the list would include Jean Marc Bustamante, Hannah Collins, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Such works understand photography not as a pretender, not as medium to hang on the wall with irony or the mocking distance of an outsider. On the contrary, these artists accepted that there was no longer any anything to be gained by behaving as if photography was only effective as a provocation to the academy. The challenge was to find a way to take up and renew the pictorial tradition, working with contemporary concerns in depictive form.

In many respects the internal paradoxes of the photographic medium have at each historical moment produced splits, rifts and oppositions in the way it is to be understood and pursued as art. The tensions in conceptualism over the photo as trace, and the ensuing tensions over the photograph as picture might be thought of as instances of this. But it would be hasty to assume that the animating force of photography as art simply moved from a preoccupation with the trace in the 60s and 70s to the picture in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. Although photography ‘matters as art as never before’, to paraphrase Michael Fried’s recent account of the situation, there can be no unified assessment of exactly how it matters. And this lack of unification is implicit in the medium itself. There is a thread that connects the photographs of Chris Burden’s performances to Gordon Matta Clark’s photographs of sculptural-architectural interventions, to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, to Sarah Lucas’s performative provocations before the camera, to the photographs produced by Matthew Barney in conjunction with his films and multi-media installations. Similarly a thread connects Ed Ruscha’s ‘artless’ photographs of American gas stations to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘artful’ typology of movie theatre interiors, to Andreas Gursky’s topographic landscapes and the photos of flowers by Fischli & Weiss

That thread has something to do with both the trace and the picture, the document and the artwork. Something is recorded before for the camera but the camera also poses, theatricalises what it records. The camera is not outside of what is presented to it. Rather, it is complicit with it.

Jeff Wall, The Crooked Path, 1991

It seems fitting that this collection includes a key historical precursor of these productive ambiguities, a 1921 portrait by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. But it is perhaps more instructive to consider as emblematic of all this an image made in 1991, roughly in the middle of the period covered by the Zellweger Luwa AG collection. The Crooked Path, by Jeff Wall shows an informal, semi-planned area, perhaps on the outskirts of a city, where nature begins to give way to industrial development. The foreground is a flattened expanse of uncut damp grass and shrubs fading from the greens of late summer to the straw browns of autumn. A path, in places worn down to the bare earth, extends from the lower edge of the composition, through the foreground and into the mid-ground. It is, as the title states, a crooked path, the result of repeated crossings by animals, or, more likely, by humans. A second, lighter path traverses the grass from left to right, forming an irregular cross in the middle of the scene. In the background on the right we see the typically modular architecture of a large food processing depot. Emblazoned on the side is the company name. The company has made an attempt to soften the harsh outline of the building by painting it a pale sky blue. But the sky on this day is overcast and colourless. The building is partially obscured from the camera’s view by the leafless trees and telegraph poles that sketch the border between the uneven grass and the tarmac or concrete surface, which cannot be see but we know must be there in the distance. On the left of the photograph, amid the trees, is a small group of beehives, distinguished by their brightly painted stripes. Some of these stripes match the blue of the factory building. The path seems to beheading between the beehives and the factory but ends nowhere in particular, at least nowhere we can see.

Although Wall has made ‘cinematographic’ images in which scenes are prepared in advance he has also made many ‘documentary’ images, in which places or situations encountered in the world are simply framed and photographed.   Sometimes his cinematographic images advertise their own artifice, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes his documentary-looking images are naturalistic; sometimes their formality as pictures raises the spectre of artifice. The documentary claim is put forward but suspended, and in that suspension other ways of relating to the image and what it depicts are permitted to emerge. Wall himself notes of this image: “It’s a little path made by its users, without a plan, in order to do something that the usual administration could not or did not do – so there’s a slight trace of disobedience or independence – people may do things that we can’t predict.” He refers to it as ‘a’ path, which of course it is, but for the title of his photograph he has chosen what in English called the definite article: ‘The’ Crooked Path. The distinction is significant both for Wall, whose titles over the years indicate a very careful understanding of the matter, and for the photographic medium as such. A photograph refers to and describes things in their particularity – this, that, these, those, an, a. Strictly speaking one cannot photograph ‘the’ crooked path; one can only photograph ‘a’ crooked path, one instance of a potentially limitless number of crooked paths in the world. (One can photograph ‘the’ Queen of England because there is only one, and to title it ‘A Queen’ would be a mild subversion of the idea of monarchy). To title this photograph ‘The Crooked Path’ is to draw the image away from its status as prosaic document or trace and towards a more pictorial, symbolic or allegorical reading.

There is nothing particularly special about this path. What might transform it is the way in which it has been photographed and how the photograph’s title might encourage us to make sense of it. So what might be ‘The Crooked Path’ here? Is it the path between nature and industry, perhaps? Between the country and the city? Between subsistence farming and corporate food production? Between nature’s chaos and modernity’s fantasy of order? Between civilization and its discontents? Between summer and winter? It could be one, or all, or none of these because a symbolic title cannot guarantee anything. It can only suggest, and as such it is in irresolvable tension with the factuality of the photograph.

And the brute fact of the path is important too. A path is a trace, so a photo of such a path is a trace of a trace. Wall’s photograph of that worn path conjures up memories of marks left in nature by performance artists and Land artists. So might the crooked path here be between the photograph as raw document and the symbolic language of composition and titling? The crooked path between trace and picture.

[i] ‘Thirteen Theses Against Snobs’ in Walter Benjamin’s ‘One Way Street’ (1928), One Way Street and Other Writings (New Left Books, London 1979) pp. 66-67. Why thirteen? Benjamin makes light of the arbitrariness by quoting Marcel Proust: “Thirteen – stopping at this number I felt a cruel pleasure”).

[ii] D. Crimp, ‘Pictures’, in Pictures, Artists Space, New york, 1977, n.p.

[iii] See Jean Baudrillard Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1976.

[iv] D. Crimp, ‘About Pictures: Picture as Representation as Such’, Flash Art International, no.88–89, March–April 1979, p.34.

[v] Sherman evoked classical museum pictures in her History Portraits series (1989–90). Discussing the origins of these images, she has said: ‘When I was doing those I was living in Rome but never went to the churches and museums there. I worked out of books, with reproductions. It’s an aspect of photography I appreciate conceptually: the idea that images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone.’ See Michael Kimmelman, ‘At the Met With: Cindy Sherman; Portraitist in the Halls of Her Artistic Ancestors’, The New York Times, 19 May 1995.

[vi] ‘Jeff Wall Talks About his Work’, public lecture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26, 2007.

[vii] See Jean-François Chevrier, ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography’ (1989, trans. Michael Gilson), in Douglas Fogle (ed.), The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960–1982 (exh. cat.), Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, pp.113–28.

[viii] Jay Caplan argues that the tense of the tableau (in classical painting at least) is future perfect, ‘the tense that makes a past out of the present (or entombs it). “What will have been” is the present viewed from an imaginary perspective in the future: a perspective that simultaneously recognises the mobility (or inherent “pastness”) of the present and claims to bring it all together from a fixed (transcendent), future perspective. It reconciles the fact of mobility (of life) with a desire for immobility (for death).’ J. Caplan, Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986, pp.89–90.

The Lens, the Shutter and the Light Sensitive Surface

What gives rise to the wish or the need to define something? It usually happens when we are attracted to it, or when we find it threatening, or when it is new to us, or when it is disappearing from us. Photography attracts definition, or definitions, because it fits all of these criteria, often all at once. It has done so for quite a while now. Photography eludes definition but the more elusive it is the greater the wish to pursue it. In what follows I make a response to this state of affairs by looking at different approaches to the problem. For the sake of brevity I will try to confine myself to thinking in the first instance about the camera.

Looking back at the many discussions of photography and its apparatus I have noticed that the character of the argument tends to change depending upon which part is being thought about. The camera, which is just one part of the photographic apparatus, is itself made up of what we might think of as three distinct parts: the lens, the shutter and the light-sensitive surface. When the lens is the centre of attention it is usually in relation to the depiction of space and the conventions of realism determined by theories of perspective and the laws of optics. Here we are in the realm of resemblance and iconicity. When the shutter is invoked it is in relation to time and duration. When the light sensitive surface is invoked it is usually in relation to the question of indexicality, contiguity and touch. To me this seems as perfectly reasonable as it is complex.

At different historical points and in different contexts we can see that the emphasis on each component part of the photographic apparatus has varied. For example think of how, between the mid-1920s and the mid-1970s the shutter seemed to play a very active part in popular and more serious thinking about what photography is. The celebrated ‘Decisive Moment’, in which the lens cuts out a bit of space and the shutter cuts out a bit of time, was thought be as close to the essence of the medium as you could get.  It loomed very large in popular and artistic accounts of what photography was or could be. Looking back however, we can see that that era (a long one at half a century) was in part prompted as much by other media as by photography’s autonomous search for its own essence. Cinema, a fully mass medium by the 1920s, invented the moving image but it also invented a new relation to still images. Photography began to pursue this stillness as ‘arrestedness’. It mastered and monopolised arrestedness roughly until video intruded as a mass form to become widespread by the 1970s, with its portability, dispersal and capacity to be readily fragmented. At that point the Decisive Moment – with its active and dertermining shutter – began to wane in the understanding of the medium. Photo reportage of ‘events’, in its applied and artistic guises, receded. These days few people speak of the moment, decisive or otherwise, being unique to photography or definitive of it. But they certainly used to. The moment still haunts photography of course, which is partly why so much staged photography in art since the mid-1970s renounced the decisive moment the better to explore what such a moment was or is. The early work of Cindy Sherman and much of the work of Jeff Wall comes to mind in this regard. Both of them began in earnest in the late 1970s. Today contemporary photographic artists seem to prefer the stoicism of the lens to the ecstasy or trauma of the shutter. That seems to be what this now relatively slow medium is for them.[i]

So photography has always had a shutter in one form or another but its significance has experienced a rise and fall. Likewise we could think of the various points at which the light sensitive surface – the component that makes photography at least in part an index – has peaked within the understanding of the medium. These would include the crises of historical memory felt in the wake of the two world wars. Think also, in a different way, about  how the becoming electronic of the apparatus (“digital cameras”) focuses discussion on the light-sensitive surface. Debates about digital cameras have made a fetish of their difference rather than their continuity with older equipment. (Digital cameras still have lenses, which makes them still analogical, but little is said of this.[ii] We might also think of the indexical turn in art’s conception of photography in the 1970s that was so well described by Rosalind Krauss. Advanced art of that time stressed the photograph’s status as physical record, either by making use of it in practices such as performance and Land Art documentation, or by digging up the foundations of its status as neutral evidence.

Conceptions of the role played by the lens have also risen and fallen, but with fewer extremes. Think of the preoccupation with the ‘faults’ of the lens and the artistic aversion to clear detail typical of pictorialist photography – shallow focus, vignetting, imperfect glass; or the return in recent art of the ‘straight photograph’ – frontal, rectilinear, uninflected  – which clearly marks a certain kind of ascendance of the perfectible lens and its descriptive capacity.

Since the beginnings of photography lenses have basically stayed the same, or at least they have inched steadily towards a kind of perfection. About shutters  – control of duration and exposure – we can say much the same. That’s the front of the camera (I am simplifying, obviously). At the back, the light sensitive surface has changed a great deal, especially in the move from paper, metal and celluloid coated with chemicals to the electronic. It will no doubt continue to change. Putting all these things together, which cameras do, we can say that photography stays the same and changes too.

Is that all there is to the apparatus and to photographic change? Yes and no. We should also add in the question of subject matter, because although ordinarily it may not count as being part of the apparatus it is indispensable to photography. Subject matter, without which photography would not be photography, has changed the most. There has been about one hundred and seventy years of global change under modernity since its invention. I’ll return to this.

We tend to think of photography telling us something about subject matter, or at least about what subject matter can look like when photographed. But it also works the other way around. It is barely possible to understand photography outside of what and how it photographs. Subject matter affects what we think photography ‘is’. For example industrial subject matter (say, a steel and glass building) makes photography seem industrial. Nature (a forest or a cloud) makes it seem natural. The fleeting (a man jumping over a puddle) makes it a medium of the shutter. The immobile (say, a water tower) makes it a medium of the lens. And the desirable or the past (in the end they are much the same thing) make it an existential medium of connection and contact. The actual technical procedure of the photo might be exactly the same in each case (lens, shutter, film and so on) but the subject matter seems to dictate how the photography is ‘felt’. Here is a bizarre scenario. Imagine a formal photograph of a building. There is nobody in front of the building. The camera would seem here to be emphasising its lens to us, with its powers of optical description of the thing and space before it. Imagine the next image on the roll is shot just the same but it happens to ‘freeze’ a figure now running past. Suddenly the shutter seems to be more active. Imagine the building has since been destroyed or that the running figure is your since deceased lover in the flush of youth. Suddenly the physical contact of light, the indexicality of the optically produced image, the trace, becomes more central. Perhaps it even becomes overwhelming, as it did for Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida. The sense of a person or building ‘having been there’ overcame him and flooded his conception of photography. Our grasp of lens, shutter and light sensitive surface are never really this separate but abstracting the idea may allow us to see how subject matter conceptualises photography for us in different ways.

It can sometimes seem as if photography awaits definition from the world. Let’s recall John Szarkowski’s first major attempt to define the medium when he was at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In The Photographer’s Eye (1966) he came up with a set of categories. If a photo – any photo – ‘excelled’ in one or more categories it would be worthy of serious attention (his and presumably ours). They were: The Frame, The Detail, Time, Vantage Point and The Thing Itself. It is a flawed if fascinating attempt, as many critics soon pointed out. Nevertheless his inclusion of The Thing Itself is instructive. The other four categories seem to pertain directly to the procedures of the camera. The Thing Itself, i.e. subject matter, is resolutely not ‘of’ the apparatus yet it is necessary for the making of a photograph. Could we go the whole way and say that subject matter is part of the photographic apparatus? It is a drastic redefinition but in granting all the things necessary for photography a place in our thinking it might get us closer to grasping the problem.

“The magic of photography” suggested the philosopher and photographer Jean Baudrillard “is that it is the object which does all the work.”[iii] It is a suggestive idea (especially coming from the man who heralded “the precession of simulacra”). Might it suggest that beyond the art and craft of the image-maker it is the thing in the picture that is the real source of photographic meaning? Or is this itself an effect of photographic “magic”? In appearing to merely present us with the world as a sign of itself (as what Barthes called a “message without a code”) photography hides its own powers of radical transformation. Its transparency is more than it seems. It allows the photographer to camouflage the preparations that make the image of the object what it is. The photographer need not even be aware of the process, and it leads Baudrillard to conclude that: “the joy of photography is an objective delight”. It brings to mind the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch’s famous essay ‘Joy Before the Object’ (1928). “There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object” he declared “and the photographer should become fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique.”[iv] He argued for a photography of servitude, homage and worship of the world’s things. More than that, taking pleasure in photography for its own sake risked competition with the object (leading to the “error” of pictorialism). For him the task of the photographer was to imagine and then master an art of selflessness.  The joy taken in photography would then be inseparable from joy taken in the world. The more selfless the photography, the more the delight would appear to stem from the object and the more enjoyable the making of the image. In this regard it is interesting that Renger-Patzsch didn’t like the title of his best known book Die Welt ist Schön (The World is Beautiful, 1928), which his publisher insisted upon. He preferred the more disarming Die Dinge. Things.

This transference of pleasure is always present in photography, but it can best be understood if we think of perhaps the most selfless and authorless uses of the medium: the copying of paintings for reproduction. The photographer Edwin Smith described it thus: “Making an accurate colour transparency of a painting is perhaps one of the least creative of a photographer’s tasks. If he is sensitive to the painting, there will be, if the work is admired, the consolation of having it to himself and of paying it the ritual homage of his own craft; though this pleasure may turn to torture when the work is despised – a condition not infrequent enough to be ignored!”[v]

Does photography ‘point’ at what is photographed? It may be dumb of me but this line of thought always calls to my mind the utopian concept of the ‘picture dictionary’ as much as the thinking of C.S. Peirce.  The best selling pocket book Point it is subtitled Traveller’s Language Kit. You can buy it in dozens of countries now. It comprises photos of 1200 objects with a family resemblance to the straight  ‘pack shot’, as it is called in professional circles. Everything is there from Apple, Bicycle and Caravan to X-ray, Yacht and Zebra. The principle is simple. Photographs are taken of various objects. The resulting images are assembled in the book. When words fail the tourist abroad they can point at the right object in the photo. The book thus overcomes language barriers, providing of course we wish to communicate only with nouns. Photography’s ostension, its capacity to point, works best when it points at discrete and familiar things such as named objects. (This is why conceptual art, in its disarming exploration of the camera as ‘dumb’ recording device tended to point the camera at banal objects: Edward Ruscha’s photo-books such as Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963), Joseph Kosuth’s ‘proto-investigations’ such as One and Three Chairs (1965) and Victor Burgin’s Photopath (1967-69). Point it makes no attempt to represent adjectives, prepositions, verbs and so on, although this might be possible within limits:  we could imagine a page of seascapes from ‘calm’ to ‘stormy’, faces from ‘sad’ to ‘happy’, or little tableaux enacting scenarios such as ‘missed flight’ or ‘lost luggage’. The further photography moves from known objects, the less reliable its description of the world. If, as we are often told, the photograph is a universal form of communication it is only at the level of the obvious and the already understood. It is clichés and only clichés that bind us in this increasingly fragmentary world, argued Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, what there is of a ‘global language of photography’ is made up of images of hamburgers, carbonated drinks, cars, celebrities (people-objects) and sunsets. ‘Viewzak’.

Reality, argued Freud, is essentially that which gets in the way of our fantasies. In this sense the photographic real is never just a matter of formal technique or ‘objective style’. In photography it is often the ugly that seems more real than the beautiful; the flawed seems more real than the perfect (that’s why “cleaning up ” an image with Photoshop makes it look less real); plain buildings seem more real than named architecture; cheap commodities seem more real that luxury goods; work seems more real than leisure; TV dinners more real than posh food; the passport photo more real than the glamour portrait. As a result the photographic real is always marked at a social and political level. This may account, at least in part, for why it is that documentary photography – which has invoked realism the most  – has generally taken as its subject matter the various obstacles to fantasy and the various states of unfreedom that exist in the world (in recent decades documentary photography has looked to consumption and commodities as subject matter, but the aim has still been to show them as obstacles – false, distracting things that in the end come between us and our happiness).

No doubt this is in part a consequence of the “reality effect” of photography, derived from its blind inability to distinguish between what might be desirable in the picture and what might not.  As the photographer Lee Friedlander put it: “I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry, and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.”[vi] Uncle Vern and the Hudson were what Friedlander desired but he got a lot more besides. But the point is that the photographic reality of Uncle Vern and the Hudson are guaranteed, so to speak, by their co-oexistence with the undesired stuff. (Interestingly Roland Barthes illustrates the same point with a startlingly similar example to Friedlander’s in his Camera Lucida (1980). Talking of André Kertész’s image The Violinist’s Tune (1921) he asks “How could Kertész have separated the dirt road from violinist walking on it?” Of course if we are not interested in Uncle Vern or his Hudson everything in the picture flattens to a banal equivalence with everything else. This is a phenomenon – seen as both attractive and dangerous – that runs through many of the different conceptions and definitions of photography. It is there in accounts of the medium in the 1840s and in different guises in Benjamin, Bazin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Batchen and Burgin.

Is there a tension between the lens and the light sensitive surface? As I have remarked already the light sensitive surface brings to mind matters of touch and contact while the lens implies separation. This is what makes photography ‘scientific’, distant and cool yet also intimate, close and tactile. It is also what leads Joel Snyder to suggest that what is indexed in photography is strictly speaking photons of light, not the object (how could it be the object when a lens comes between the object and the sensitive surface?) Light bouncing off the object passes through the lens, to be focused or not on the surface. Thus the photograph obtained is an index of that light, which may or may not be arranged by the lens in an iconically recognisable way. However because of the mediating presence of the lens (or pinhole even, we don’t need glass) the photograph is an index in another sense too: it is an indication of the presence of a vantage point. That is to say it indicates a spatial relation between object and the light sensitive surface. When we make sense of photographs we make sense of both things at once – the viewed and the view. Again, a co-definition is in play between photography and the photographed.

I rather like this idea that photography and its subject matter define each other in both directions and that our conceptions of photography emerge from this. It allows for both a technical and a cultural reading of the medium. i.e. as something that “is what it is” and something that is “is what we do with it”. It also tells us something about why discussions that only admit to one direction  – photography telling us about the world, or the world telling us about photography – tend to go around in circles producing fixed but frustrating accounts.

Even so, accepting this two-way co-definition does not solve things once and for all. If we wish to discover why photography remains so elusive the answers are to be found less within the medium per se, regardless of the technical changes, than in its status as recorder. Photography is inherently of the world. It cannot help but document things however abstract, theatrical, artificial or contentious that documentation may be. So the meaning of photography is intimately bound up with the meaning of the world it records. Moreover, photography is a product of modernity. Modernity has meant change, in photography and in the social world. So the identity of photography as recorder is condemned to remain restless, mobile, volatile even.[vii]

 

NOTE: This is an expanded version of an essay written for James Elkins’ book Photography Theory (which contains a long-winded roundtable discussion about definitions of the medium with some invited responses).

 

‘Noticing’ is an essay commissioned for Paul Graham’s Hasselblad Award publication 1981 & 2011 (published by MACK in 2012). The book brings together Graham’s first major project A1:The Great North Road with The Present.

 

Noticing

by David Campany

With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes,we must not cling to “tried” rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws. 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.

Bertolt Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism’, 1938

 

What are the relations between looking at the world, photographing the world and looking at photographs of the world? This is the most profound and perplexing question that photography asks of us, or that we can ask of it. It is a medium that may show us things as we never see them (microscopy, high-speed photography, X-rays and so forth) but it is also a medium that at times seems to come very close to how we see. And yet eyesight is such an elusive, variable phenomenon.

We catch something out of the corner of our eye. We stare in concentration down a road as it curves away. We glaze over at the density of a forest or the complexity of an automobile engine. We approach or move back. We hold an object in our hand and feel the strain on our binocular, liquid eyes. We follow something on the move. We see the same thing at different times, in different atmospheres, different states of mind. Our eyes may switch between two unrelated things and a mental connection is made. We look with curiosity but slip into reverie, mind and vision diverging. We gaze into the depth of clouds or the heavens and perceive only flatness. We stumble into blinding light or palpable darkness. We may recoil from what we see, confused, intrigued or seduced, sometimes all at once. There are moments when our eyesight is all we want it to be and moments when it betrays us. Moments when the meaning of the world seems to be right there, inscribed on its surface and moments when appearance is inscrutable. All this before we even pick up a camera or look at the image it produces.

To become a photographer it seems reasonable to presume one would need to notice the potential of the medium. This may happen through seeing possibility in one’s own amateurish snaps, but it is more likely to result from noticing the advanced work of others. Paul Graham ‘discovered’ such work in 1976, aged 19, firstly in the pages of Creative Camera, one of Britain’s few serious photo magazines. He soon came to know the work of Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Robert Adams, Edward Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, Tony Ray Jones, Paul Hill and Chris Killip. All ‘hunter-gatherers’ yet extremely diverse in their ways of noticing and photographing, and only one working in colour. But one is enough.

Graham decided photography was for him (or he was for photography) and began working through his influences. His first series Café Interiors, 1977-78, showed English décor attuned to the colour of light and the everyday things upon which it falls. The austere House Portraits, 1979, melded the architectural formality of Walker Evans and Lewis Baltz with the large format work of Stephen Shore.

But noticing the photography of others is not enough to make one a photographer, at least not an original one. One needs to notice the world. What is striking about even Graham’s earliest work is the understanding of what happens to subject matter when shot in what Walker Evans called a ‘documentary style’. The image becomes as much a set of propositions as facts. Things become signs of themselves, clear to the eye yet ambiguous in meaning. Making images in that idiom, and then sequencing them without recourse to the explanations of language has become one of the richest ways for a photographer to work. The result, if done well, can be a complex arrangement of intelligent, provocative challenges; a commentary on the world and the medium that makes it noticeable. This is the direction Graham took with his first major project, A1: the Great North Road.

The A1 had been the ‘spine of England’, the first road to connect London with Edinburgh 400 miles north, just into Scotland. In the 1950s traffic and commerce began to shift to the new motorway system, leaving the A1 and its hinterland to stagnate. It became a decelerated world, eclipsed by modern progress. Graham chose a suitably slow way to notice and photograph it. A 5×4 inch camera imposed a measured stoicism on landscapes and interiors, while a 10×8 exacted an intimate discipline on the portraits. Self-designed and self-published in 1983, the book of the project featured forty photographs, sequenced as a journey. We travel from the Bank of England, up through Holloway and Highgate, out into the open spaces and onwards. Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear. Cafés predominate, interspersed with car parks, scrubland and topographic views of farmed fields and industry. The light is muted, the air is damp and the mood is sombre, somewhere between resilience and resignation.

Those who knew the A1 and its fate could recognize the value of Graham’s assessment. But the success of the project had to do with wider social forces that allowed for metaphorical, even allegorical readings. This is where noticing becomes properly significant. The book opens with tailored young bankers beloved of the zealous Thatcher government’s free market ambitions (wearing ties of her preferred blue). It is followed by a bleak shot of the imposing Methodist Church in Archway, its retail units housing a video store and an employment bureau. Then comes a photo of a woman at a brutal-looking bus stop scrawled with ‘Mike of NW7. Punks’. NW7 is the postal code of the working class Mill Hill area where the image was taken in 1982. At that point punk was six years old, its bright and brief energy all but snuffed out or diverted by the new consumerism. Graham’s sequence becomes more lyrical as it heads north, lingering with people making do and getting by, but it is haunted by that opening blast. An exhibition of A1, comprised of 8×10 inch prints, showed in London, Stoke on Trent and Bristol. At the time what Graham had noticed, and the way he made viewers notice it, were wholly new in British photography. Today the tone and attitude of the project seem less of a radical departure, not least because of Graham’s profound influence on ambitious colour photography and its audiences. The connection to independent American colour work is clear to contemporary eyes: melancholy diners, sleepy gas stations, fading signs, all observed in such a way that colour serves the social commentary. But even without such points of reference the vitality, intelligence and conviction of A1 ensured its significance.

Graham was in it for the long run but this posed complicated problems. Photographs may contribute to the understanding of their own moment, but if they last their meaning will be shaped by the fate of the intervening years. Three decades on A1 seems at once familiar and strange. A project made in the absolute specificity of time and place, at a political, economic and cultural watershed is still resonant in so many ways. The fate of the Great North Road has become the fate of England: overshadowed, sidelined, scrambling to balance the values of locality and modernization, under the spectre of anonymous global capital.

The implicit politics of A1 became explicit in Graham’s next project, Beyond Caring. It was a response to, and contemplation of mass unemployment. By 1982 there were three million people without work in the UK. Again it was a survey of sorts, but where the Great North Road was an outward journey, with discoveries to be made along the way, this was a message from the interior, addressed to a nation’s increasingly brutalised psyche. Travelling across England, Graham visited hundreds of state unemployment offices: depressing and decrepit rooms in which men and women wait to be told if they if there are suitable job vacancies or if they will receive any state support. There is precious little variation in these spaces. The same cheap benches appear time after time, the same clocks, the same colour schemes, the same fluorescent light, the same government notices on the walls. Photographically the challenge was very different. How to convey this near hopeless waiting, this waste of human potential? How to interest and engage the viewer without resorting to entertainment or novelty? And how to avoid the well-established clichés of the depiction of unemployment?

Graham shot with a Plaubel Makina 67, a simple camera compact enough to fit in the pocket, yet able to produce a sizeable negative. Adopting a similar disposition to his subjects he sat, camera in lap. Superficially his images resembled casual snapshots, but on closer inspection it was clear something very different was being noticed. The dissipated, scattered compositions expressed the dissipated, scattered mindset of unemployment (something Graham knew all too well, having been out of work himself). Slumped against walls, standing alone or hunched on those benches, the people adopt the same flung arrangements in photo after photo. The disconcerting vectors of the pictures trace the strained relations between citizens. Strictly speaking all photographs suspend what they capture but Beyond Caring managed to convey what it is to be suspended, to be plucked out of time and held there, one’s dynamism and sense of purpose sapping away. Beyond Caring remains one of the most acutely observed and articulate responses to that era. And once again, in the midst of global recession and catastrophic levels of unemployment it remains relevant.

From compressed interiors Graham changed tack completely to landscapes, but the subject matter was an unlikely candidate for the genre. The British presence in Northern Ireland was at a critical point. Violence was part of daily life and political imagination was drying up. ‘The Troubles’ as they had come to be called, were at deadlock, fuelled in part by a deadlock in representation. Pictures and words in the mass media relied on the well-oiled and self-perpetuating stereotypes of conflict. So Graham reversed the golden rules of reportage. Instead of getting closer he stepped back. Instead of looking for the decisive moment he allowed in a more expansive sense of time and history. He made broad, topographic views of town and country, containing details just noticeable enough to disturb the tranquillity. Soldiers stopping and searching a car on the epic coast at Warrenpoint. A Union Jack flag right at the top of a tree in a field in County Tyrone. A helicopter, tiny as a bird in the broad sky above the border at Armagh. Troubled Land anticipated the more politicized understanding of landscape that is now commonplace in art and documentary. But once again the form of the work was not driven simply by a need to innovate. The photographs are true to an experience of the place, one not blinkered by ideology. Graham photographed what you might notice if you went there. When the project was shown he was invited to do the same thing in other troubled lands: South Africa and Israel. “It’s tempting of course, but I just can’t do that. I’m one of those artists who, once something is working, I have to drop it and find a new way to scare myself.”

So often in photography, what counts as a style is really a commitment to mastering one particular relation between noticing and photographing. We might think of Henri Cartier-Bresson closing the gap between the two, snatching virtuoso pictures from the almost nothing of everyday life. William Klein’s all-over compositions of crowds. Lee Friedlander’s planes and lines that disorient and delight. Garry Winogrand’s hell-bent stretching of composition until it nearly snaps. In a medium of almost limitless possibility, repetition can be a safety net.

Paul Graham has done without a safety net. He is one of very few photographers who has refused to settle for any specific way of working. Each new project demands its own approach, internally coherent but different from last. At times the jumps have been radical. There has been no Paul Graham ‘style’, no formula to rely upon, no territory to stake out, no ‘look’ to establish in the worlds of photography or art. That is to say there has been no fixed relation between noticing and photographing. It has been a risky path.

Although different in approach A1, Beyond Caring and Troubled Land, comprise a loose trilogy, and have come to be seen at Graham’s response to Britain in the 1980s. For the next fifteen years he made work in continental Europe and Japan, pushing hard at finding forms for ever more complex projects. And then in 2002, he relocated permanently to the USA and began what has turned out to be another informal trilogy.

Now he was living in a culture synonymous with the image and home to a photographic heritage he admired greatly. But what he could not fail to notice was the racial and social inequality. It was so commonplace it had taken on the concrete condition of fact, yet so ingrained it could barely be seen for what it was. Graham has been a subtle observer of the effects of light but in American Night (2003) those effects become the explicit subject and central idea. Travelling by car he explored the country’s various suburbs. Most of the time he overexposed his frames so there was almost nothing there. He took just a few that register ‘correctly’ those generic expressions of political and aesthetic conformity: brightly coloured of cars, manicured green lawns, blue skies and figures tiny in the frame going about their business. Then to the urban centres, making photographs of African-American citizens on the streets in the dirty sunlight of late afternoon. In the book we get page after page of bleached out images, punctuated by vivid colour, then a plunge into semi-darkness, before a return to suburban white-out. The difficulty of actually looking at the pictures offsets the almost too obvious ‘message’. In its uncompromising form and content the book of the project was his bravest to date. In the gallery, the prints were monumental, the sheer presence of light and dark filling the beholder’s field of view, presenting a challenge of ‘perception’ at once physiological and ideological.

Street photography is perhaps the only genre specific to the medium. Graham has been interested in it since the beginning of his career. Indeed the shot of bankers that opens A1 prefigures the kinds of images he is making presently. In the 1920s and 30s most of the innovative street photographs were made in Europe and the Soviet Union. After the war the cultural shift that made America the centre of art also made it the centre of street photography, particularly New York. But by the early 1970s the genre had been pushed so hard it seemed that nothing much more could be done. Publishers and galleries set the achievements in stone (this was the legacy that had so impressed Graham in his early years). Meanwhile photography began to be explored anew in what came to be called conceptual art. It valued predetermination and the critique of everything from photography’s truth claims, to its access to the poetic and the value of spontaneity. System was all and everything else was suspect or sentimental.

At the same time, the penetration of corporate values and bland imagery seemed to level out appearances. By the 1980s citizens and their cities had become so saturated with pictures and so anxiously image-conscious that the relation between surface and deeper meaning became fraught, threatening to become indecipherable. This was the postmodernization of daily life. How can we read appearances when denim and sportswear are worn by bank CEOs and bank cleaners, when the whole population appears to shop at GAP? What happens when locality is smothered by architecture and commodities designed by the same globalized software, following the same committee criteria? Or when the same branding is found in every main street? The subtleties that make life worth living (and looking at) do not offer themselves up as readily. It is easy to give up noticing.

In America, Graham found his way into street photography first by leaving the big city behind. In the secondary places – small towns, semi-rural settings – the pressure is gentler. The present and the past intermingle, offering up spaces for the observer to enter. Street photography is, in essence, at attempt to bring noticing and photographing almost into one action. For that reason perhaps it has tended to pursue the isolated, ecstatic single image. But in reality noticing is an ongoing experience, at least partly at odds with the snap of the shutter and its freezing of motion. Although he has made exceptionally singular pictures along the way, Graham is committed to the internally organised body of work, often aiming somewhere between cinema and literature. Loosely inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories, he began to make short sequences of intimate public moments.

Eight shots of man mowing a lawn, the sun streaming through a sudden rain shower. A woman eating fast food from a polystyrene container at a bus stop. A man selling roses in the night. A man taking a cigarette break, out behind his place of work. Each brief passage of pictures is as improvised as the incidents depicted, the photographer moving with the rhythm of his subjects. Eventually this work became

a shimmer of possibility (2007), published astwelve slim volumes. Sometimes a volume gives us just one sequence, sometimes two are cross-cut. On the page the varying size and position of the pictures help to suggest a sense of place and the intervals of time. In the gallery Graham was equally innovative, drawing on all his experience of just how differently we engage with walls and books. Instead of turning pages held in the hand, the gallery goer moves – in and out, backwards and forwards, looping without beginnings and endings, noticing in different ways.

Graham has had little cause to look back. While each project has been an opportunity to challenge himself he has never waivered in his commitment to noticing and photographing. And while no project is a culmination, we can certainly see his latest as a supremely confident restatement of intent. For The Present, Graham has put his head right into the lion’s mouth of photography, making fluid work on the streets on New York City. His diptychs and triptychs revel in the ephemeral pleasures of being alive in the here and now. Nothing much happens but everything happens. Taken a few instants apart and presented large on the wall, each is a supreme intensity of photographic seeing. But what is photographic seeing? For The Present at least one of the keys is the use of shallow focus (a rarity in these days of pin-sharpness). Enabled by the immersive scale of the prints, our eyes travel into the image, seeking the detail. But what do we do when we get there? We take it in, and we flick to another detail, perhaps in an adjacent image. We look back to the first. Or we look at what is not in focus. We step move around, take in the composition. We contemplate light, bodies, clothes, gestures, sidewalks – all vividly there and yet all enigmatic. We contemplate seeing. We contemplate photography – framing, timing, colours, resolution, even shutters and lenses. We may wonder whether what catches our eye is what caught Graham’s eye. And finally we may notice those profoundly ineffable relations between looking at the world, photographing the world and looking at photographs of the world.

In the early 1980s Paul Graham had a modest but appreciative audience and a limited network of support. These grew steadily as his projects accumulated. Then, a shimmer of possibility touched the nerve of a much wider public. It prompted several curators and commentators to look again, often realizing with some astonishment that this was the same photographer who had made A1, Beyond Caring, Troubled Land and many other bodies of work.

The recognition of Graham’s achievement has had only a little to do with the much-hyped triumph of photography in contemporary art. What is much more important is that audiences, curators and critics have come to understand that the documentary impulse cannot be removed from photography nor channelled into simplistic formulae (as it had been by the mass illustrated magazines). Documentary form is not a given: it must be hard-won, fought for, often against received wisdom and expectation. It is of necessity experimental and thus artistic. This is what has led to a flourishing of documentary forms on the wall, on the page, and sometimes in the illustrated press that survives. From this perspective it is possible to see all of Graham’s remarkable innovations for what they really are, and to see that the tension in photography between art and report is vital.

What to Photograph?

I recall the very first project I gave to my students on my very first day as a photography tutor. If they learned a tenth as much about photography as I did from it, I’d consider it a success. I had a group of thirty-six students and it went something like this. Each student thought of an object, place or scenario to be photographed. The thirty-six thoughts were written down in a list. The list was photocopied and given to all thirty-six students. Each student was given a roll of color film (thirty-six exposures) with which to make one attempt at responding to each thing on the list. They processed their films at a local lab and brought their six-by-four inch prints to the studio. We laid them out in a huge grid, so that vertically you could see thirty-six different responses to the same instruction, while horizontally you might be able to discern each student’s approach or ‘style’.  I still have the list of instructions they gave each other:

1. A red ball
2. A tree and a dog
3. An ugly photograph
4. A political argument
5. A kiss
6. A shallow focus image of a bar of soap
7. A random photograph
8. An unambiguous photograph
9. Grass and concrete
10. An old fashioned photograph
11. A futuristic photograph
12. A blue car and a white car
13. Nigeria
14. Timeless beauty
15. Flowing water
16. A woman dressed as a man
17. An empty room
18. Consumerism
19. A person crying
20. A really bad smell
21. Bright clothing lit by flash
22. A dangerous place
23. Dawn
24. Justice
25. A cheese and tomato omelette
26. A boy shoplifting
27. A plate in the air
28. A modern landscape
29. A car park at night
30. Things in a pile
31. Things in a long line
32. A fake photograph
33. A celebrity
34. Someone asleep
35. A classic still life
36. A smile

 

It is a list compiled by nineteen year-olds thinking they might want to take photography seriously, and in that light I think it is remarkable. It tells you something about their ‘world’ and how photography might fit into it or express it. It also seems uncannily like an inventory of all the major trends in ‘art photography’ from the 1960s to the 2000s.  We didn’t really know what we were doing but the results proved to be so fascinating that we put up the grid on our studio wall and it stayed there all year. I wish I’d kept the pictures.  All 1296 of them.

 

This piece is also published in: 

The Photographer’s Playbook

Over 250 Assignments and Ideas

Edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, Aperture 2014

The ‘Sinister’ Photograph: Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s Parábola óptica, 1931

by David Campany

It is said that towards the end of her life Marilyn Monroe began to veto many of the portrait photos taken of her. Increasingly troubled by her own image, she would run her eye over the contact sheets placed before her and run a pen through most of the shots, leaving very few available for publication. Exasperated, the more manipulative photographers took to making images the wrong way around, flipping over the negatives before printing and showing them to her. Monroe then would see something more like her own mirror image, the personal rather than public version of her face. She accepted many more of these. Surreptitiously they would then be reversed back again for the mass media.

This story may be apocryphal but it is certainly true that many later photographers, including David Bailey, exploited this effective if dubious trick. These days, magazine culture and the publicity industry are even less careful about the images they circulate. In the digital age every computer design programme has a ‘flip’ command as standard, a creative tool lending instant flexibility to layout. Look closely and you see that the faces of the famous appear both ways around, to the extent that it is often difficult to say which is correct.  One wonders if this ever troubles the famous themselves, or whether it’s an advantage to not know quite who you are, given the basic unreality of celebrity. What follows here is a set of thoughts about the reversal of images, about what it tells us about photography and what it tells us about looking.

Reversal has a long history in the making of images. Print makers, engravers and typesetters have always had to be intimately familiar with it because it’s a necessary stage in reproduction. When optics were put at the disposal of painters, lenses and concave mirrors were deployed to cast reversed images onto canvas to be traced off. The effect, as David Hockney has noted, was to suddenly flood western painting with depictions of left-handed people. William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the photographic negative, through which light must pass in order to make a positive image on photographic paper, opened up the potential for reversals by design or by accident.  In Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s version of photography, a flipped image was fixed on a highly polished metal surface. Viewers had to adjust to the jewel-like apparition that boasted great detail but in reversed form. It proved less irksome than one might imagine, since most people wanted images of themselves and the Daguerreotype duly offered them their familiar mirror image in miniature.

The painter Edgar Degas had experimented with photographic reversal as early as 1895. He combined the procedure with positive/negative reversal in such a way that front/back inside/outside confuse each other to leave the photograph oscillating between realist description and plastic objecthood. Degas also took to painting and drawing only what he saw reflected in a mirror so as not to be overawed by actuality. Indeed many of his sketches of ballet dancers were made via those large mirrors that are still a fixture of dance studios. In a note to himself he wrote: “Do not permit yourself to paint things except when seen in a mirror in order to habituate yourself to the hatred of trompe l’oeil.”

The deliberate reversal of the photograph is not as commonplace as photographs that include mirrors, which have littered the medium’s history from the beginning. Nevertheless the mirror has recurred in photography’s self-understanding, giving rise to all those metaphors and analogies such as the ‘mirror of nature’ and the ‘mirror with a memory’.  Its glass optics and automatic duplication seems drawn by kinship to the nature of mirrors.  A photograph of a reflection is, on one level or another, a reflection on photography. The writer Craig Owens described it as photography en abyme: the image reproduces at an internal level the fundamental condition of the photograph as a whole. The camera ‘naturally’ produces a double of the world, a substitute of unprecedented naturalism, so a photo that includes a mirror doubles the double, defamiliarizing that first replication. At the same time it enables a mastering knowledge of the whole phenomenon, for photographer and viewer.  It is photography made ‘self-conscious’ in a very direct sense. Just as a young child turns its empty mimicry of sounds it hears into intentional communication by repeating them (ma-ma, da-da), so the searching photographer seeks out the camera’s own kinds of echo in mirrors and reflections. Most photographers will admit to having pointed the camera at a mirror at an early stage in their explorations, usually to picture their own reflection. While discovering what photography is for them, they also attempt to confirm or recognise themselves as photographers. The two go together in a private moment of self-disclosure made public when the image is printed.

Producing a ‘mirror image’ by flipping the negative before printing is a peculiar, even perverse, species of manipulation. It keeps the image quite intact while fundamentally changing its relation to reality. It is natural yet unnatural, true yet distorting, ordinary yet extraordinary. As a result it tends toward the uncanny, which was described by Sigmund Freud as “that class of frightening thing which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”. It reveals the world but at the cost of uncertainty, showing us the “familiar and agreeable” but in some way “concealed and kept out of sight”.

Not surprisingly Surrealism, with its interest in the uncanny and the unsettling double made great use of the mirror, most famously in the self-portraits of Claude Cahun. But it made almost no use of the reversed print. A rich and strange exception is Manual Alvarez Bravo’s Parábola óptica (Optic parable, 1931). Taken in Mexico, we see an optician’s shop window – all glass, reflections and doubling. There are seven eyes and a pair of spectacles in the picture, visual motifs we can read either way around. There is also writing that appears to us the wrong way around (since it is mono-directional written language within an image tends to betray any reversal). Are we inside the premises looking out through the reflective glass? No, but we are not fully outside either. We see the shop is called Optica Moderna, or Modern Optics. The name takes on wider resonance for an image declared a ‘parable’: a photo of one optician’s in particular becomes a meditation on optics and photography in general.

In Bravo’s image our point of view is made uncertain. The phrase “point of view” in everyday day speech refers to values or opinions about things (“What’s your point of view?”). In photography it refers to where you put the camera in relation to the subject. So it is often tempting to draw a straightforward parallel between a photographer’s values or opinions about the world and the positions from which they shoot it. There is always some kind of relation but there can be no formula. Part of the unspoken fascination of looking at photographs derives from the way we must always negotiate this relationship. This is especially true of Bravo’s image since its point of view is so blatantly equivocal. It deprives us of a solid position from which to look by proposing a point of view that is imaginary, as if from within a mirror.

Michel Foucault included the imaginary space of the mirror in his suggestive essay ‘Of Other Spaces’. There he compiled a speculative list of what he called heterotopias, social spaces of indefinite or multiple purpose that are understood to be both inside and outside society’s order (other heterotopias included the cemetery and the cinema). For Foucault,

From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

His description certainly offers a productive way to think about the perplexing pleasures of Parábola óptica especially since the image does not actually include a mirror as such. It suggests or projects one.

In the spirit of the Surrealist embrace of chance, the final form of Bravo’s image came about by accident. He was checking over some printer’s proofs in readiness for a publication. He saw it had been reversed by mistake but he found he preferred it that way. A moment of uncanny recognition perhaps, in which his image appeared to have found some other intention, some other author, some other point of view beyond his own.  Thus a photograph already thick with ambiguous duplications was given its final twist by the automatic hand of a technician.

Bravo took artistic possession of the gesture in 1940 when the front cover of the catalogue for the Exposicion International del Surrealismo carried his photograph of a broken stained glass window propped against a vine-covered wall, while the back cover showed the same image in reverse. Here the very architecture of the book form with its serial rectos and versos was recruited into the exploration of the photographic medium. I think this is significant. Modernist photographers of all persuasions saw themselves as belonging primarily to the printed page and assumed it would be where and how viewers would encounter their images. The page has exerted a tremendous influence on how photographs are conceived, selected, ordered and presented. Bravo’s reversed catalogue cover belongs to an unwritten history of reversal prompted by the formal and graphic possibilities of the page. That history includes the publications of many of the medium’s luminaries. For example Bill Brandt didn’t think twice about reversing an image if he felt it would aid the flow or juxtaposition of his photographs. László Moholy-Nagy’s book 60 Fotos (1930) is a dizzyingly sustained experiment with left/right positive/negative inversions across its thirty spreads.

 Spread from L. Moholy-Nagy, 60 Fotos, 1930

Decades on, Surrealism has been somewhat institutionalised but Bravo’s image still causes problems. Over the years I have encountered it often in publications of one kind or another and many times it has been ‘corrected’ by diligent designers, thus undoing the conspicuous reversal that had made it what is was. It is cautionary tale that hints at why the technique has not been explored more widely. It needs constant vigilance.

A few years ago I found myself checking over the proofs of a book about to go to print. A friend leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “You have that Robert Mapplethorpe image the wrong way around”. The photo in question is an early self-portrait in which the young photographer leans into the picture from the right, his arm reaching across to the other side of the square frame. My friend showed me Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, in which Mapplethorpe’s image appears. Sure enough, he leans from the left. Nothing in the picture itself signals a reversal: no writing, no buttons or zip fasteners on clothing, no recognisable location. The image cannot declare itself correctly or incorrectly printed. It turned out the reproduction in Camera Lucida has always been in error. Unusually, Barthes’ book has kept the same layout it had when it was first published back in 1980. Perhaps the mistake doesn’t matter. Or perhaps it does. Several writers have remarked on the way Mapplethorpe’s half-open hand resembles the hands in Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel. The bare arms of God and Man reach out to each other across a sublime void.  Earth is on the left, heaven is on the right. Mapplethorpe placed himself on the right.

Beyond the accidental, would it be unreasonable to imagine that many of the famous photographs with which we are familiar are the result of crafty reversal? Who would know if for aesthetic reasons Edward Weston flipped his celebrated images of peppers or shells? Or if a tableau constructed by Jeff Wall looked better printed the other way around? These kinds of reversal would not draw attention to themselves and would go unremarked, carrying on a secret life within our field of vision and right under our noses.

Certainly the mirror image and the flipped photo are very closely related. But the latter may have less narcissistic origins than the former. Flipping comes not at the founding moment of the taking of the image but later. The taker becomes a maker who doesn’t over-identify with the photo as a slice of the real but sees in the image new and latent possibilities. Nevertheless both the mirror and the flip are gestures that can be photography’s path to profound meditation or to a cheap trick. And as we know, with photography the cheap and the profound are never that far apart.

Thanks to Zelda Cheatle who commissioned this essay and edited the book Photography Discussed. 

 

Some of the ideas I discuss here are reworked in my book Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (Afterall/MIT Press, 2010) and in ‘Left Right, Wrong Right’, an essay written for Source magazine.

Drink the wine, discard the bottle, then drink something else.

A short text commissioned for the first issue of the journal Philosophy of Photography, 2010

 

A couple of years ago I was at a seminar that was intended to bring together ‘theorists of photography’ and ‘philosophers’, to see what would happen. With such a crude distinction being made in the first place I think the organisers secretly knew the outcome. By ‘secretly’ I don’t mean they kept it from the participants so much as they kept from admitting it to themselves. The theorists of photography assessed what the philosophers might be interested in and vice versa, and each side tailored its presentations to the other. These weren’t really ‘sides taken’ so much as hats temporarily assumed for the day (I don’t know anyone who is not on some level a theorist of photography or a philosopher of it). To nobody’s surprise the common ground was the perennial hot potato that is the definition, or essence or ontology of photography. Or maybe it’s a cold potato, depending on whether you think the topic is worth pursuing beyond the fairly well established positions that either the matter is decided and closed, or is open permanently because the object is a moving target.

And here we have a journal titled Philosophy of Photography.  Photography is being conceived as the object of philosophical reflection or inquiry. Not that the term or discipline ‘philosophy’ is any less contested than ‘photography’.  Nevertheless to quote the card the editors of the journal sent me in September of 2009, its remit is to “provide a forum for debate of issues arising from the cultural, political, historical and scientific matrix of ideas, practices and techniques that constitute contemporary photography.” Although this is necessarily vague (as any project must be to accrue funding and institutional support these days) it is helpful in a roundabout way. It gives a sense of how the editors do plan to conceive of both philosophy and photography: culture, politics, history, science; ideas, practices, techniques. Photography has now had at least three decades of very serious attention from some of the most advanced minds of our time who have understood and approached it as something that is profoundly shaped by and able to shape our understanding of culture, politics, history, science, ideas, practices and techniques. So is this business as usual, or is there a, or many, philosophies of photography?

It is certainly true that a number of people who would consider themselves to belong to the discipline of philosophy have in recent years become interested in photography. And on this basis what they do with this interest is more likely than not to be called a ‘philosophy of photography’. However, whether what they are actually doing is something other than participating in the “debate of issues arising from the cultural, political, historical and scientific matrix of ideas, practices and techniques that constitute photography” is another matter. In a recent and fascinating article Diarmuid Costello and Dawn M. Phillips (from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick) tell us the philosophy of photography is a “relatively untrammelled field” but what they then ‘trammel’ it with is a series of astute reflections of photography’s relation to automatism, causality and realism, picking up where the existing debates that have not bothered with the title ‘philosophy’ have left off.[i] If photography’s relation to automatism, causality and realism interests you, you’ll be interested in this essay. If you were wondering what on earth a philosophy of photography could be you might also be interested, and you’d learn that it’s not so different from the wider and ongoing discussions. That might be a disappointment or a nice surprise.

Any new journal will want to make the case that its time has come. So why might a philosophy of photography seem particularly pressing? Two asymmetrical yet connected answers suggest themselves. The first follows a line of thought we can see in the diagnoses of Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, to name only the most obvious.[ii] Over the last three decades or so photography has been displaced from the centre of visual culture and dissolved in its specificity through the demise of the illustrated press, the rise of television and the electronic convergence of media. This period corresponds with photography’s new availability to, and triumph in art. In its eclipse photography becomes a theoretical object that comes to ‘matter as art as never before’ to paraphrase the title of the book by Fried (which, as many critics soon pointed out is persuasive but not in its mobilization of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger). The core argument is that photography became so central to art only once it became thinkable, and it only became thinkable once it didn’t occupy the centre of visual experience, once it was no longer the defining medium of the day, once its burden as primary chronicle and document was lifted.  Krauss calls this ‘obsolescence’ but that seems hasty because clearly there’s still plenty of photography around. The model ‘T’ Ford is obsolete; photography isn’t. Let’s stick with ‘eclipse’. Photography, its practitioners, its theorists and its philosophers are making sense, are perhaps only able to make sense of photography in this eclipse.  One doesn’t have to go for either of the very different and narrow canons of photographic art defended by Fried and Krauss to entertain this general assessment.

However, this journal’s remit mentions neither art nor aesthetics specifically and this points us to a second sense in which a philosophy of photography might seem attractive.  That eclipse affects not just art; it affects all existing photographic practices and our relations to them. While it’s true that art has become the privileged space for the discussion of photography, its terms are inevitably narrow and often debilitating.  A few years ago I suggested that:

“…art has become the space to look askew at the general field of the photographic, to engage directly or indirectly with a commentary upon the image world at large. The space of art has thus come to function either as a dissecting table to which the different forms of the social photographic are brought for creative reflection, or as a set upon which they can be can be reworked. These two metaphors – dissecting table and set – map quite well onto what seem to be the two key impulses behind much current photographic art: the forensic interest in detail and the cinematic interest in mise-en-scene or staging. These impulses are so forcefully present today because all photography in art is somehow obliged to enter into a dialogue either with the notion of the photo as visual evidence or with the culture of the moving image in which the still now finds itself. Or both.”[iii]

However to observe documentary practice (for example) only through its current guises in and as art is rather like studying a tiger in a zoo: it acts differently and so do its observers. In needs to be studied in the wild too, however depleted the habitat. The same can be said for all those photographic practices that are not art (which, conservatively estimated, is about 99.945% of them).

So far what has gone on under the banner ‘philosophy of photography’ has been a continuation of the debates about medium specificity and the ontology of the photographic image and/or reflection on photography in/as art. Although this is may be familiar wine in new bottles there is every reason to continue drinking it. Those issues won’t go away any time soon. So let’s not forget that it is the wine that matters, even in these label-obsessed times. If I am pleased that Philosophy of Photography understands its task is to “provide a forum for debate of issues arising from the cultural, political, historical and scientific matrix of ideas, practices and techniques that constitute photography”, it’s because in principle it covers everything photographic. In practice, we’ll have to wait and see.

By David Campany. First published in Philosophy of Photography, vol. 1, No. 1, 2010.

Mr. Eggleston, have we met before?

by David Campany

A response to 21^st Century, photographs by William Eggleston at Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 15 January – 27 February 2010. First published in Source n. 61, 2010.

Michael Almereyda’s recent documentary about William Eggleston opens with a shot of the photographer wandering down a nondescript street, a little hunched, camera in hand, looking, looking, looking. Store fronts. Windows. Signage. Brick. Trees. Debris. He stops, starts, detours, doubles back, takes a photo, moves on and repeats. The longer the scene continues the more precariously it teeters, Beckett-like, between the profound and the pointless. A curious, relentless man whose every move tells you he’s been doing it for decades. It’s as good as any description of Eggleston and at least has the advantage of being an image. I have never read anything about his photographs that added to my experience of them, and I proceed on the basis that my remarks will not add to yours. It’s not that Eggleston’s images defy writing or commentary (in the last few years he has become one of the most discussed, profiled and praised of photographers) only that the terms for doing so seem destined in advance to fall so short. John Szarkowski, who gave Eggleston that landmark exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in ’76, sensed as much and turned his text for the accompanying book into a side-stepping meander around what made the photos so perplexing. Mark Holborn’s 1991 account of Eggleston’s development was clear and elegant but couldn’t avoid the vague adjectives that now pepper the standard descriptions.

For me Eggleston’s work is doubly exotic. His ‘everyday’ is not mine. Although steeped in an aesthetic of vernacular things that has spread across the globe, his vision remains intrinsically American. When I think of what used to be called the ‘Americanization’ of the world’s cultures, what comes to mind is less the bulldozing materialist populism than the mock-gentle, mock-bemused gaze upon it all that Eggleston extended from that nation’s two great contributors to popular iconography, Andy Warhol and Walker Evans. Today that attitude is everywhere, a layer of the carapace of irony that allows it to continue. We would recoil or lose our minds at the assorted crap modern life still throws about were it not so deeply photogenic. In and as photographs it all can be made palatable, pleasurable, even philosophical. That surely does not account for why Eggleston makes his pictures, but judging by contemporary commentators this is what he represents for them. Endlessly fascinating pictures that let you think you are confronting reality when really it is displacement.

The second exoticism concerns time. Eggleston’s wider recognition came almost a generation after his most celebrated images were contemporary. His everyday is an older everyday, a quality emphasised by his subsequent aversion to anything absolutely new and his consistency of motif over the last forty years. And like the other ‘new colorists’ who were recognized belatedly (Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld among them) Eggleston strikes me as a figure from the past and contemporary artist all at once. I find myself looking at the dates of his photos.

This latest showing, at London’s Victoria Miro Gallery, of just twenty recent images includes one of a faded newspaper discarded in scrubby grass. Shot in 2000 it’s a reworking of his 1986 image of a newspaper blown into a crevice of an archaeological dig. Where the earlier one offered a witty observation on the nature of history, the later newspaper carries a colour image of the hyper-capitalist waterfront of Shanghai. Eggleston’s photos remain perfectly consistent, leaving world events to provide the update. Elsewhere the familiar motifs seem less rewarding. We have a photo of the inside of an icebox, the encrusted crystals pastelizing the gaudy contents just as they had when he photographed an icebox thirty years ago. But where the first had the glassy, unnerving stare of an insomniac desperate for a midnight snack, the latest is an exercise in composition, all repeated forms and modulating colours. It’s polite, tasteful and rather gorgeous but with little of the unexpected menace of old. Things really come full circle with the interior Old TV, Lamps, Wildwood, New Jersey (2002). The unforgiving direct flash punches the planes flat in the manner of today’s trendy editorial photography that is itself indebted to the Eggleston of old, among others. Moreover it looks like a retro furniture shop crammed with the kind of ’60s vinyl stools and tacky lamps that he once photographed when they were new. It’s Eggleston doing an Eggleston if no less accomplished for that. But you cannot unring a bell and surely he knows as much. Modern life has rolled over. Its dark underbelly is now deeply tanned mainstream entertainment. Today there is little risk of artistic failure or even misunderstanding in such photographs. So established and familiar is the genre for which Eggleston accidentally provided a cornerstone that it is difficult to imagine any photograph of the flotsam or jetsam of daily life being artistically objectionable. But that was not always so.

If I am uneasy about all this it cannot be a criticism. Eggleston is part of that pioneering generation of photographers who are finding out for the rest of us whether or not the medium, and this genre of hunter-scavenging in particular, really can offer the possibility of artistic maturity. What is mature work in photography? We just don’t know. We do know that great things can be achieved at a young age (the parallel here is with those pop stars of Eggleston’s generation who made extraordinary albums in their youth and knew they would have to carry that weight a long time). But whether the life photographic is a mountain to climb or a street to wander forever is another matter. For Eggleston I suspect it’s the latter.

All images © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

William Eggleston  UNTITLED (ROOM WITH OLD TV, LAMPS, WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY), 2002.  Pigment print 55.9 x 71.1 cms 22 x 28 inches

William Eggleston, UNTITLED (FREEZER WITH ICE BAGS, KENTUCKY), 2000. Pigment print 28 x 22 inches 71.1 x 55.9 centimeters

William Eggleston, UNTITLED (NEWSPAPER ON GROUND, GRASS, CALIFORNIA), 2000. Pigment print 55.9 x 71.1 cms 22 x 28 inches

Let’s look at the facts. A man in a dark suit in a dark alleyway holds a divining rod. A woman stands on a gridded mat, her fingers wired for some kind of monitoring. A girl’s head and arms poke out of one cardboard box while her legs extend from another, like a magician’s trick. A figure shrouded in a black sheet festooned with stars stands on an office desk for what might be a performance or a perverse kind of punishment. A hand lifts the corner of a grubby carpet tile, as if to reveal some hidden significance. A chair is inexplicably knocked over in an otherwise explicable English dining room.

Clare Strand gives us all this in the form of black-and-white photographs that would be equally at home in an art gallery, the offices of a scientific institute, or the archive of a dark cult. The bright spotlighting common to most of these images illuminates in only the most literal sense. They look like evidence, but of what we cannot know. If they are prized answers, what on earth were the questions?

“Research” has become a chronically earnest concept in contemporary art. So often the artist is supposed to “conduct” it in lieu of making things up, in order to be able to account for what he or she is doing. Artists who conduct research seem like safe bets: funding bodies like them. Curators, publishers, biennials and buyers like them. Strand is the parodic mirror image of all that. Nothing is safe here. Yes, she may be a “research artist”—but only because her subject matter is research. Specifically, she is interested in the kinds of photographs that are presented as “‘findings.” If photography thinks it is a competent witness, Strand is here to cross-examine.

Her photographs conjure the kind of intense physicality that is often thought to be the essence of the medium. If a photograph is at root a trace, a mark, then a photograph of a trace or mark is something like a primary instance. The evidential force of the photograph and the evidential force of the marks it records restate and compound each other. Although such logic was not what drove photography to become a dominant medium of record (institutionalized as documentary work, photojournalism, medical and police photography, scientific imaging, and the like), it might account for the persistent fascination we have with such images well after their practical application has ceased. How else to explain, for example, the steady stream of books of archival police and crime-scene photographs that have been published in the last decade or so? They do more than satisfy a curiosity about long-forgotten misdemeanors and the voyeur’s desire to gawp at transgression or misfortune. They also let us contemplate photography. The forensic photograph in particular shows us the medium in all its success and failure: facts clearly stated yet unable to explain themselves. “Evidence of a novel kind,” as William Henry Fox Talbot put it in 1844.

Forensic and scientific imagery entered mass culture in the 1920s and ’30s with the popularization of crime movies and pulp fiction. The Surrealists were drawn to it: Salvador Dalí was transfixed by the wayward visual excess of the document; Georges Bataille (who appropriated for his journal Documents a police photograph of a Chicago gangster frozen in ice) also saw something wild and uncontainable in its supposedly sober facts.

The forensic penetrated art in the 1960s and ’70s when the documentation of performances and site-specific Land art drew audiences into a confrontation with photographs that presented themselves as records of absent activities/things and as works of art in themselves. At the same time the limits of the document were scrutinized in the playful yet philosophical “photoconceptualism” of Keith Arnatt, Mel Bochner, Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan, Robert Cumming, John Divola and others. The concerns of these figures are now being re-explored by a range of younger photographers. Recent books, such as Shannon Ebner’s The Sun as Error (Wallis Annenberg, 2009), Michael Schmelling’s The Plan (J & L Books, 2009), and Johannes Schwartz’s Das Prinzip (Van Zoetendaal, 2007), as well as Jason Evans’s 2000-2005 series The New Scent, play off the seductive promise of visual clarity against the medium’s inevitable betrayals. If there is a context for Strand’s work this is as good as any. But really she is a photographer whose primary context is the medium itself and the habits of seeing, knowing, and picturing that have formed around it.

Strand is at least as fascinated with anonymous images as with her own. What makes her recent book (Clare Strand Photoworks/Steidl, 2009) particularly engaging is the tantalizing inclusion of anonymous visual references. She has opened up her unruly scrapbooks to present clippings of photographs marked with arrows, lines, and circles. The gun was found here. The criminal ran down here then along there. Rod A attaches to axel B here and here. Time and motion studies from the 1930s sit next to ‘how-to’ magic guides and illustrations of dubious psychic experiments.

This adventure comes together with Strand’s 2003 series Signs of a Struggle, comprising what look like 8-by-10 glossies of “incidents” housed in a yellowing archival file. A photograph of a herbaceous border with a miniature white picket fence is marked with a “2 arrow” and an “A arrow.” A photograph of a white bedroom with black dots on the wall is marked “GPS/13” (does it refer to the global positioning system, and if so what is its relation to this anachronistically black-and-white print?). When Strand declares that these images “are contemporary constructions of invented narratives or, alternatively, authentic images discovered in a folder in an archive,” we are none the wiser, unless we just accept that it might not matter. The real subject may not be this or that struggle, but this or that sign. This or that image. Photography cannot be evidence of the world without first being evidence of itself. And there are fewer lessons in photography more simple or more complex than that.

by David Campany, first published in Aperture n. 200, Fall 2010

The Scene of Photography and the Future of its Illusion

By David Campany. First published in Photoworks no. 14, 2010

 

When Tate Modern presented the huge survey show Street & Studio back in 2008, a single striking point seemed to emerge from its teeming presentation of hundreds of photos by dozens of photographers. Distinctions between the street and studio are becoming less clear, or rather, they were never as clear for photography as the show’s mischievous title implied. In the 1930s Bill Brandt was selecting locations and recruiting models to make ‘near documentary’ images long before today’s staged tableaux photographers, while Helmar Lerski was shooting studio portraits that mimicked naturally refracted daylight. Philip-Lorca diCorcia can now shoot street portraits with all the rhetorical artifice associated with a multi-flash studio rig. Jeff Wall can rebuild a nightclub in his studio when the real one he is photographing closes down unexpectedly.

The restrictions of both street and studio are there to be overcome and for a range of reasons – aesthetic, practical, philosophical – much photography prefers increasingly to ignore the distinction altogether. Now that lights are so portable and digital post-production has become at least as significant as pre-shoot planning, much of the palaver that kept the photo studio rooted in bricks and mortar has been overcome. The studio can be anywhere you want it to be. Well, nearly. Even if the facilities offered by a well-appointed studio seem less of a necessity that they once did, such spaces do still exist and they are needed. But it may well be a weakening of the necessity that has attracted a number of photographers to turn their cameras upon the studio and reflect upon what it actually is.

Harry Watts, from the series Studio, 2009

The studies of studio environments and equipment by Harry Watts along with Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s shots of white backgrounds conjure up the pre-theatrical void and limitless potential of images past and future, picturing the spaces in which photographs have been and will be made. There is still plenty to look at on these stripped stages of marked floors, electrical cables and defeatured surfaces but they allude inevitably to what is not there and signal the idea of the ‘degree zero’ of the photograph – its point or place of origin. Whether such a thing exists as anything more than a theoretical abstraction is another matter, as is the question of whether that degree zero might be located elsewhere, perhaps in the camera, the darkroom, on paper, screen or even on the human retina. These photographs conjure that conceptual netherworld between the prosaic, material facts of images and what so many contemporary philosophers refer to as ‘the image’, as a nebulous and immaterial idea.

We might be tempted to make a parallel with that age-old subgenre of art in which the painter paints their own studio, producing an image of the scene of its own making. But ‘studio’ tends to mean something quite different for photographers. It is not a space permitted to fill up with the cast-offs of their art, the way painters might casually discard failed canvases, swatches of colour, preliminary studies and the like (although there are some photographers who do inhabit their studios this way).  Generally speaking the photographic studio is a space to be kept clean and sparse, returned to neutral after the image making has been done, particularly if it is has been hired for the shoot. Perhaps the comparison should be with the blank canvas. In picturing the studio space the photographer confronts at some level their tabula rasa.

It is worth noting here just what status the monochrome and the blank image have for photographers. Or do not have, since they mark a direction few have been willing to take or even recognize.  For a contemporary painter the blank canvas and the monochrome loom very large on their horizon of possibility.  Once the blank canvas was accepted as an artistic gesture and a legitimate work of art, every painting thereafter would be a painting on a painting. Even a painted monochrome is a painting on a painting. While a similar condition does exist for photography (for example in the form of the unexposed/overexposed negative or the monochrome made by a variety of possible means) its profound implications have barely made a dent on the understanding of the medium hitherto. Indeed photography has had a rather repressed relation to its founding blankness. Consider what it would it mean if the first exercise for students of photography was to make a print from an unexposed negative and then one from a totally overexposed negative (assuming they still shoot on film and print in a darkroom).  Would this be no more than a perverse exercise, a pedantic hoop to jump through, or would it ground an understanding of photography upon something else, something set apart from the weighty presumptions of realism? Could the monochrome figure as meaningfully for photography as it does for painting?

There is a parallel to be drawn between the photographing of the studio space and the recent revival of interest in what is limitedly labelled ‘abstract photography’ – those images that seem to be recognizably photographic without having a recognizable referent or subject. I am thinking here of certain works by Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, Lisa Oppenheim and Walead Beshty but there are many others. Both the image of the studio and the abstract photograph constitute gestures that may strike the viewer as simultaneously a filling-up and an emptying out of the photographic act, and even as symptoms of a moment of heightened awareness of the fragility of the medium as it mutates from one form to another, or heads toward dissolution or even obsolescence.

Perhaps too this photography echoes the historical fate of painting. Finding itself in a new visual culture and artistic order defined at least in part through the growing ubiquity of the photographic image, painting was forced to look inward in order to find the courage to reinvent itself.  Tenuous or not it’s a line of thought that is instructive not least because it might steer us away from the temptation to read these images as pre-emptive obituaries for photography.  Mediums do not really disappear or die, especially in the context of art, but their status and significance as art is often conditional upon their broader status beyond art. The present security of photography’s place in contemporary art seems inseparable from its insecure status outside.

Broomberg & Chanarin, American Landscapes, installation view, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, 2009

Broomberg & Chanarin’s images of what are known in the advertising and portrait business as cycloramas show the white walls and floors joined by seamless curved cornicing that provide the most adaptable arena for the widest variety of studio photography.  As staunch allegorists they have titled this series American Landscapes and their website blurb suggests we see these spaces as the ‘scenography for a free market economy’: where the real space of the American West was once also the imaginary space of the nation’s ideological projection, so the commercial studio came to assume a similar role in the virtualised era of image spectacle, they tell us. That’s an interesting take, certainly, but the fact that the duo are minded put it forward themselves shows just how fragile the meaning of such images can be. There’s nothing in these photographs than can secure this reading, or any other. The industries of American fantasy, notably advertising and Hollywood cinema, have been inviting us behind the scenes and showing us the machinery for almost as long as they have been in business. Part of the appeal of fantasy, as any Freudian will tell you, is knowing very well that it is fantasy. It is not as if the whole edifice comes tumbling down once you get a glimpse of the scaffolding. Even if these photos propose a ‘laying bare of the support structure’, what is really laid bare is that facts do not speak for themselves: they still require interpretation, however stripped back they seem. Allegories are by their nature fragile, however securely we may wish to hold them in place. ‘American Landscapes’ sounds like a plausible title for an advertising company or a commercial post-production studio but if Broomberg & Chanarin’s images cannot be co-opted easily into looking like adverts for the advertising industry it is only because they are a little dirtier than would be preferred. The precarious criticality hinges on the foregrounding of wear and tear – the scratches and scuffs that would be otherwise conjured away by Photoshop.

James Welling, from the series Degradés, 1986-2006

A different version of all this can be found in the ongoing series of colour photograms James Welling has been making since 1986, known as Degradés. They are made in the darkroom simply by adjusting the enlarger’s colour filtration and producing a unique impression on C-type paper.  While Welling’s procedure has remained admirably consistent for a quarter of a century, it has gone from looking state of the art in the pre-digital 1980s to a specialized craft in 2010. The shift is made starker still when we know this was the procedure once used to make bespoke colour backgrounds for shooting still lifes and portraits (simply dial in your colours and make a large color-field print). The Degradés once turned photography’s background depth into its foreground flatness. Now they seem more about holding onto something material in the face of virtualization. But none of these ‘meanings’ are particularly secure.

 

Roberta Mataityte, from the series 80 Hours

In her series 80 Hours Roberta Mataityte has photographed the matt black interiors of darkrooms – the revolving doors; the heavy curtains and printing cubicles; the walls marked by sightless groping with high precision machinery. The title refers to the total time spent on the project. We presume the series was shot and produced in the very kinds of space it depicts. At first glance it is difficult to tell if it is the photographs or the scenes that are black and white. Photographic printing is by its nature a ‘dark art’ and Mataitiyte’s prints are as sinister as they are banal (with the grubby theatre we might expect from forensic photos of an S&M club).  But are these photos responses to a space that feels totally familiar, documents of a space that is strange, or records of a space whose days might be numbered?

John Hilliard, Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 Apertures, 10 Speeds, 2 Mirrors), 1971.

Back in 1971 John Hilliard produced a piece titled Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 Apertures, 10 Speeds, 2 Mirrors). He pointed his 35mm SLR at a mirror and took shots at every possible aperture and shutter speed setting. The resulting photos were arranged in a grid in which only a diagonal line of prints appears ‘correct’ while the opposite corners are complete white and complete black. Back then it seemed like the ultimate self-reflexive, reductive gesture.  But what should we make of the fitful but significant works subsequent photographers and artists have been making in that direction for the last forty years? Attempting to record and reflect upon photography by means of foregrounding its apparatus can produce any number of artworks, all quite different in approach and character. It suggests that photography’s ‘own condition’ is not as easy to reduce or define as it may seem. And beyond images of studios, darkrooms, cameras and the exploration of abstraction, might we still need to accept that every photograph ever taken cannot help but record its own condition?

 

 

Yesterday’s everyday and the Depiction of Work

by David Campany

Commissioned for the book The Everyday, edited by Sergio Mah, PhotoEspana, Madrid 2009.

A few years ago I was invited to give a talk at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. I don’t remember the theme of my talk that day but I do remember I arrived at the school a little early so I went to the student library. Browsing the shelves my eye was caught by a very worn copy of Citizens of the Twentieth Century, the grand opus of August Sander’s inter-war portrait photographs of German ‘working types’, published posthumously in 1986.[i] Saint Martin’s has many art and design programmes but at the time it had no specific photography course, although it is a medium used by all the students in one form or another. The Sander book was obviously well used. It had been repaired twice at least and had dozens of date stamps on its record card indicating it had been borrowed many times over the years. It goes without saying that Sander is an important figure in the history of photography and the history of inter-war Germany, and of course his work looms large for many contemporary photographers. But who at this School was so interested in his work? I asked a librarian. The book had been borrowed most often by fashion students.

I was surprised, then slightly embarrassed at my surprise. Why should this be so unexpected? After all, Sander’s work, like that of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans (who also made portraits of ‘working types’) is endlessly discussed and theorised in ‘photography circles’ because of its richness, its ambiguity, its potential for meaning. As such it is bound to lend itself to a great range of interests, far beyond the purview of Photography with a capital ‘P’. Fashion students have as much of a claim on the work of Sander as anyone. Indeed they may have been alerted to Sander’s work by Wim Wenders’ film Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), in which the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto talks of how Sander’s photographs were a great influence on him. But could we ever know exactly what such a student is getting from the images? It may be information about how Germans dressed between the wars but it may be other things; perhaps things to do with the history of gesture and bodies, or the appearance of fabric when photographed in black and white.

In 1929 Sander published a sample of his portraits as the book Antlitz der Zeit [The Face of Our Time]. One can imagine German audiences of 1929 measuring the images against their own experiences, their own conception of themselves in that complex historical moment. Sander’s work was a contribution, perhaps even an intervention into the conflicted idea of modern European or national identity. Of course, as time passes the images cannot be measured against experience so readily but can become a substitute for it. They no longer contribute to an understanding of a present and are instead slipped into the role of stand-in for the past.  This historical and semantic shift is what Jean-François Lyotard had in mind when he spoke of the construction of the ‘reality’ of the past: “Reality succumbs to this reversal: it was the given described by the phrase, it became the archive from which are drawn documents or examples that validate the description.” [ii]

Frames from the film Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)

If they live on, photographs have the potential to acquire far more authority in posterity than they ever had in their own lifetime and it is often difficult to recover the circumstances of their first appearance. But it can happen. Sander’s Citizens of the Twentieth Century appears in Wings of Desire (1987), the film Wim Wenders made just before his Yamamoto film. Two angels are wandering the divided city of Berlin. Unseen by the living they watch as the citizens try to go about their lives, caught as they are between the upheavals of the past and the uncertainty of the future. In the grand Staatsbibliothek an old man is seated at a reading desk looking through the book, an angel at his side. 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 famous image reproduced on the book’s cover.  As he browses the pages he ruminates on the nature of history and his own life, and we are given to see Sander’s project not as an uncomplicated historical record but as a set of images to be read in dialogue with their own time and their own people, to be measured against their experience. “What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn’t 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. Over time the generations caught up in the war are dying out and direct experience of the inter-war period has all but disappeared. For younger people who gaze upon them now Sander’s images are perhaps a definitive record of the period and of ‘the way things were’. But in this brief and simple scene, of a man weighing the pictures against his own history, something of the provisional nature of Sander’s project is permitted to resurface.

It is with this in mind that I would like to say a few things about a piece of work which has fascinated me for a number of years. It is Allan Sekula’s Untitled Slide Sequence (1972). I saw it first in reproduction in the 1980s. The twenty-five black and white ‘slides’ were printed on consecutive pages of October, the journal of art criticism and theory. It was only in 2001, almost thirty years after it was made that I saw it ‘properly’, installed as part of Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art show Open City: Street Photographs Since 1950. So I never saw it as a contemporary work ‘in its own moment’, so to speak. I have not seen it since and this is how I remember it: in a dark space slides were shown sequentially at regular intervals on a single screen, interrupted by the black gaps so characteristic of slide carousel projection. They were monochrome 35mm reportage-looking ‘snapshots’ of workers leaving a factory.[iii]

Allan Sekula, image from Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972. End of day shift. General Dynamics Convair Division aerospace factory. San Diego California. 17 February 1972. 75 black and  white transparencies (three duplicate sets of 25) projected at 13-second intervals. 17 minutes 20 seconds, looped. Projection size 2m x 3m. Courtesy of the artist.

Several slides showed the workers looking at the camera with a mixture of boredom, fatigue and sometimes suspicion. Sekula seemed to have been standing in their way so they had to negotiate his presence. I remember feeling how this ‘exchange of looks’, for want of a better expression, seemed to foreground the camera and its operator.  Each image was on the screen long enough to encourage the viewer to begin to explore the frame and reflect on what it offered.  In fact I remember feeling the timing of the projection seemed calculated to frustrate both the comfortable ‘nowness’ of an elapsing cinematic present and the ‘pastness’ that defines all still photographs to some extent. It was neither fast enough nor slow enough. I cannot recall if that feeling was awkward or illuminating. It was probably both.

Louis Lumière, Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving a Factory). 1895. France. 35mm print, black and white, silent, 45 seconds.

In 2001 I was watching a lot of early cinema, and Sekula’s images seemed to me to allude to the very first film shown in public, the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving a Factory (1895).[iv] In that film the workers are primarily women. They file out through the door of what is the Lumières’ own photographic business and onto the sidewalk. Just a few of them look at the camera, which seems as if it is on the other side of the street.  The subject matter and the means of representation are so intimately connected here. This group of workers, employed in the production of standard imaging equipment, are caught en masse in their everyday ritual by the mechanically repetitive rhythms of the filmic image. That cinema was inaugurated and set on its way by such a highly reflexive film seems bold and provocative even today.

The Lumières’ film stops after forty-five seconds when the short reel of celluloid runs out. Sekula’s slide sequence ends with a dissolute shot of feet, as if the photographer was either torn away from his task by force (perhaps he was trespassing) or had finished shooting and was simply firing the shutter to complete his roll of film. Sekula describes much of his work from the 1970s as ‘disassembled movies’ and Untitled Slide Sequence certainly fits that description.  He has talked of the influence of experimental documentary film on his work. Film has always had an experimental documentary tradition but by the 1970s photographic practices had become so entrenched and formulaic that the very idea of an experimental documentary photography seemed to many a contradiction in terms. [v] You could be an experimental photographer or a documentary photographer but not both. Sekula’s whole oeuvre strikes me as exemplary in its refusal to accept that simplistic reduction. Untitled Slide Sequence both documents workers leaving a factory while also documenting the act of making such documents. Its strategy is up-front and anti-illusionistic. There is no pretence to neutrality here, and no pretence to totality either. For example when the workers look into Sekula’s camera, we cannot tell if they are quick glances or longer stares because still photographs have few ways of indicating whether the human expressions they capture last longer than the length of the shutter speed. These are ‘fragmentary and incomplete utterances’ to use one of Sekula’s own descriptions of the photographic image, and he has the good sense to make no more or less of them than that.

Walker Evans, ‘Labor Anonymous’, Fortune magazine, November 1946.

Walker Evans was an experimental documentary photographer but to really grasp what that means one would have to look at how he used the printed page. In November 1946, he published Labor Anonymous in Fortune magazine. It was a double spread of eleven photographs. At first glance it looks like a set of serial portraits taken surreptitiously of anonymous workers leaving a factory. That is how the images are usually presented when recycled in exhibitions and monographic books.  But in this spread there are telling details with which Evans deliberately complicates such a reading. His accompanying  paragraph of text makes no reference to the end of a working shift. It is in fact subtitled ‘On a Saturday Afternoon in downtown Detroit’, suggesting this might not be a day of work at all, even if this is one of America’s foremost industrial cities. In addition Evans’s words remind the reader that there is no physical consistency here: laborers cannot be visually stereotyped, neither in appearance nor disposition, nor dress: “His features tend now toward the peasant and now the patrician. His hat is sometimes a hat, and sometimes he has molded it into a sort of defiant gesture.” He concludes: “When editorialists lump them as “labor” these laborers can no doubt laugh that one off.” It is an obvious point but it is easily forgotten: a person cannot be anonymous in and of themselves. They are only anonymous to, or in the eyes of an other. The title Labor Anonymous is thus revealed to be at least partly ironic and even critical of the assumptions of the magazine’s readership. Looking again at the photos we see they are not entirely serial (even though this was about as serial as Evans’ work got). In the first, a man in overalls seems to look directly at the photographer. The brim of his hat casts a heavy shadow over his eyes, giving the impression that he sees the photographer without revealing himself. It undercuts the illusion of the unseen observer and I sense Evans placed this image first in order to suggest that the shots that follow should not be taken ‘at face value’. The final photo shows a man and a woman together as a couple, complicating any simple distinction between ‘labor relations’ and ‘sexual relations’. All this in a single spread!

The Lumières’ workers leaving their factory; Sander’s catalogue of social types; Evans’ sequence of laborers; Sekula’s sequence of laborers. In all these projects connections are made between the seriality of manual work, the seriality of the means of representation and those particular experiences of the everyday that characterise modern life. It seems clear enough that what has come to be called ‘the everyday’ in current critical parlance is intimately bound up with notions of alienation and repetition both in work and leisure; with over-familiarity and an often fatalistic sense that life as it has come to be organised is inevitable (and that only its estrangement by art or literature can make it endurable). But grouping these works together we may be reminded that nothing will last forever, not even the everyday.

_______________________

First published in Sergio Mah, ed, La Cotidiano / The Everyday, PhotoEspana, Madrid, 2009.

In memory of Allan Sekula (1951-2013).

 © Rinko Kawauchi

       Releasing the Shutter and Drinking Tea

It is tempting in these narcissistic times to assume that ‘the personal’ is a realm of experience entirely distinct from social or collective life. But the boundaries are never really that fixed.  Perhaps we cling to the idea of the personal being completely unique and separate because we feel that it is somehow under threat. We sense it might be endangered by everything from the encroachment of stupid television to the commodification of the personal that infects internet websites such as Facebook. (What strikes me most when I look at these sites is just how similar everyone’s individuality is, as if it was one big, shared ‘personal life’).

 

© Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi has become well known in the last few years for making what many have described as intensely personal photographs of her everyday experiences. Of course many photographers work this way but not all are as artistically successful. So it is worth considering what has made Kawauchi’s work so popular.

© Rinko Kawauchi

What happens when a viewer responds to a body of work on the basis that it is personal? Are they responding to it personally, for themselves? Or are they imagining they are seeing (that is, projecting) the personality of whoever made the photographs? I imagine the response to Kawauchi’s imagery involves a little of both. We see something personally for ourselves and we imagine the personality of the artist or observer. Her photography seems fascinated with the pictorial potential of the most mundane of things. An insect, a hand, light reflecting or refracting, a face, a plant, a moment in the life of her grandmother. In these photographs the mundane is given back to us strange and new. In other words, it is redeemed. And everyone wants to find some redemption in the mundane. So much of modern life is filled with the mundane and most of the time we cannot escape it. It sometimes seems as if we can only escape into it, through its transformation into something else. An image perhaps. This is not a new idea. It has been a fundamental part of art’s response to modern life at least since the beginnings of photography. But it is a task that will always be there and will always be renewed.

© Rinko Kawauchi

When I first saw Kawauchi’s images of her grandmother, I sensed they were genuine, that the relation between the photographer and the subject was complex and tender. I sensed this, but I cannot know it. All we have are the photographs.  All we do with photographs is sense things, and when we sense things what we are doing is a mix of recognition and wishing. The photographs lead me to believe something that I actually want to believe in. I think this is a key to the extraordinary response there has been to Kawauchi’s photography. It has an ability to tap into what many think they want from everyday life, what they hope it could be. Strange and new, yet familiar too. So in the end these pictures are going to be as much about me and my grandmother or you and your grandmother, as much as they are about Rinko and hers. If this photography is personal it is because we want it to be personal. And if it is popular it is because what think of as personal is actually much more collective than we might realise.

________

In 1924 the German pacifist-anarchist Ernst Friedrich published an illustrated polemic titled War Against War. It was a picture book that gathered together images of war and its effects that had been censored, suppressed or were never intended for public consumption. There were photographs of what have come to be known as war crimes, of injured and dead soldiers in the trenches and a number of medical photographs of appalling facial wounds and scars.

The text (in four languages) was a mixture of Friedrich’s anti-war sentiment and ironic quotations of jingoistic war propaganda. It was the first time that most of those not directly involved in the First World War had seen its human cost so explicitly. There had been statistics of the losses, representations by artists and poets but nothing with the force of these photographs. It sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. War Against War was and still is shocking. In the copy I have seen someone had pasted a ledger onto the inside cover, urging the reader to sign their name and then hand it on to someone else. How right that was. Keeping such a book seems absurd: it should circulate.

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), Susan Sontag is haunted by a number of the images she has seen in War Against War. She returns to them at a number of points in her unillustrated argument about the effects of the depiction of suffering. For all the gallant efforts of photojournalists to fashion convincing images it is the medical photographs of brutal injuries that she cannot dislodge from her mind. While she never quite puts her finger on why this might be, it is probably safe to assume that the force of those images derives very precisely from the fact that they are not trying to persuade you of anything. They lack any of those forms of visual rhetoric that aim consciously to direct your response. On the contrary, good medical photographs, like good doctors, need to be sober and level-headed. While images that are designed to draw our compassion may lead to compassion fatigue, these shots of injuries are stubborn, insistent. Faced with such directness it is the viewer who feels the compassion and the imperative to interrogate the cause, rather than having it directed vicariously by a photojournalist whose compassion may be as brutal in its own way as the horrors she or he photographs.

If we follow this line of thought it raises some very complicated questions for photojournalism. It suggests that the truly effective photograph is the one that resists commentary or the pictorial strategies of compassion. It is a flat document that relies instead on the informative caption to contextualise what it shows. Photojournalism has often been caught in a dilemma in this regard. It makes a claim to objectivity while also trying to ‘convince’ at the level of the image, showing you the world’s unfreedom while also telling you what to think about it. But photojournalism might be more effective if it resisted doing this.

I am reminded of Roland Barthes’ review essay ‘The Scandal of Horror Photography’ of 1969 (reprinted in his anthology The Eiffel Tower). Seeing an exhibition of ‘shock photos’ in Paris, Barthes finds he is not shocked at all because he can sense the presence of the photographer directing his emotion via artful composition and emotive printing. Barthes suspects the photographers’ good intentions tend to pacify the viewer, even directing the response away from what is being reported and towards judgment of the photograph as a ‘picture’. The few photographs that do trouble Barthes have the kind of instrumental directness of the police picture, the mug shot or the medical photograph.

The police photo or the medical photo are characterized by a gaze not meant for ‘us’. If we see a police or medical photo we are seeing something from outside of the profession and purpose that brought it into being. But we find ourselves unable to be as dispassionate as that, and the effect such pictures may have on us derives from the disjunction. Modern warfare is of course brought about and sustained by just these kinds of disjunction. This is why, despite the profusion of ‘committed’ video- and photojournalism we rarely see pictures of the kind of brute factuality brought to light by Friedrich’s book. But they do exist.

In 2008 the publishing wing of the United States Army issued War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007 (edited by Shawn Christian Nessen and Dave Edmond Lounsbury) . It is a medical training manual. War is a technological business and new advances in the techniques of killing and maiming are producing ever newer kinds of injury. For example, in war today bombs cause many more deaths and injuries than bullets, and they keep changing their blast patterns to stay one step ahead of the medics. The book is an aid to field surgeons who are about to go into war zones but may have never encountered such injuries. Compassion and commentary are reserved for the book’s foreword (by the ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff who was himself almost killed by a bomb in Iraq in 2006) and the afterword (quotations from Virgil and Wordsworth). The bulk of the 440 pages are given over to the surgeons themselves; to show with copious photographs and explain with detailed notes just how they attempt to save lives. In the first instance the book is intended for American surgeons but one would hope all surgeons might get an opportunity to see and benefit from it.

To those outside the medical profession this is a difficult book to look at. The photographs are necessarily graphic, although of course they are not intended to shock, disgust or persuade. They are surgical aids. But there was some serious resistance within the American army, including some military surgeons, to the publishing of this book, given the risk that it might fall into civilian hands. But it was published. I don’t suppose we will ever know if somewhere along the line there was a secret hope that the book would reach an audience beyond the military or even become a tool of the anti-war movement. But that potential is there. In fact now it is very easy to download pdf’s of the whole book.

I should explain how I found out about the book, since this is itself significant. A friend with a great interest in the problems involved in the representation of war told me of a piece written about it by Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the ‘Health’ section of the website of the New York Times (‘To Heal the Wounded’, August 5th, 2008). McNeil gives a good account of the book’s genesis, even reporting a series of changes instructed by censors, including the obscuring of faces and genitals, and the removal of detailed descriptions of how the American soldiers came to be injured in the first place. The website also reproduces several representative spreads of the book. On the face of it McNeil was simply presenting as specialist news the issuing of this Health-related publication. I have no idea if either he or the New York Times harbored some hope that publishing the article online might also extend the book’s reach beyond surgeons. In any event, it seems improbable these days that a book could be published and read by only the narrow group for whom it was intended, particularly a book such as this. News travels fast even if books do not. War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007 took weeks to arrive in the post from the US but arrive it did. I have read it and come to my own conclusions. I shall sign my name in it and pass it on.

Thanks to Richard West at Source magazine for first publishing this piece.

Read the New York Times article here

 

The first of the Errata Editions reissues of classic photography books is Atget: Photographe de Paris, first published in 1930.

The reissue includes an early version of the essay ‘Eugène Atget’s Intelligent Documents’, by David Campany. 

Let us begin with some facts. Eugène Atget (1857-1927) became a professional photographer at the age of around forty having been, among other things, a seaman and an actor. He was well read, cultured and acutely aware of Paris, its environs and the rapid changes that were transforming them. This was the subject that dominated the second half of his life. He photographed Paris for nearly thirty years, making approximately 8500 glass plate negatives, 18 by 24 centimetres in size. Some images were shot speculatively; others were commissioned.  He sold photographs to salon painters, cartoonists, sculptors, illustrators, avant-garde artists, sign painters, set designers, couturiers, industrial designers, architects, town planners, topographers, libraries and lovers of old Paris. Above his door hung a sign: Documents pour Artistes. Documents for Artists.

Atget’s studio was on the same street in Montparnasse as the studio of the artist Man Ray who encountered the photographer’s work around 1923. That year Man Ray hired Berenice Abbott as a darkroom assistant. He was looking for someone who knew nothing about photography (and would therefore be comfortable with his unorthodox practices). Abbott had come to Paris to be a sculptor but soon became a photographer. In 1925 Man Ray introduced Abbott to Atget’s photographs and she became fascinated. In her rich introduction to the book The World of Atget (1964) she recalled ‘Their impact was immediate and tremendous. There was a sudden flash of recognition – the shock of realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity.’ She visited Atget’s studio many times and purchased prints when she could. In 1927 she photographed him in her own studio and one of the portraits from that sitting became the frontispiece of the book of his work.

Before he could see Abbott’s portraits, Atget died. With the help of the gallery owner and art dealer Julien Lévy, Abbott acquired a substantial part of his archive. This was the remainder after 2621 negatives had been sold in 1920 to the French state and a further 2000 had been sold shortly after his death to Les Monuments Historiques (by Atget’s close friend and executor André Calmettes). Abbott catalogued the plates and prints in her possession and in 1929 returned to America to arrange publication of a book of Atget’s work. (Soon after, she relocated to New York and began her documentation of the city very much in the style of Atget, eventually published in 1939 as Changing New York). She remained the great champion and promoter of Atget’s work until 1968 when the Abbott/Levy archive was sold to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The book of Atget’s work appeared in 1930. A thousand copies were published in New York by E. Weyhe, a thousand in Paris / Leipzig by Henri Jonquières. Housed in a cardboard slipcase it had no dust jacket. The name ATGET was embossed in gilt on the dark red cloth cover (the French / German edition had cream coloured covers with the name in black). The Weyhe edition included an introduction in French by Pierre Mac Orlan while the Jonquières edition was introduced in German by Camille Recht.

Around the time of the publication there was an exhibition of Atget’s photographs at the Weyhe Gallery in New York at 794 Lexington Avenue. The ground floor was a bookshop, with an exhibition space above.  The gallery exhibited many significant European and North American artists including Karl Blossfeldt, Edward Hopper, Edward Weston, Diego Rivera and Alfred Stieglitz. The bookshop would publish books and portfolios of the artists’ work. Photography sat comfortably both on page and wall, so the arrangement at Weyhe was an ideal platform for the presentation of Atget’s work.

In the late 1920s there had been a burst of interest in Atget’s photographs, mostly following his death in 1927. Numerous vanguard art and culture publications used or presented his photographs including Transition, Variétés, Le Crapouillot, L’Art Vivant and Arts et Métiers Graphiques.[i]  This interest provides the context for the appearance of the book so it is worth looking at some of these publications.

Only four of Atget’s photographs were published by the ‘art world’ in his own lifetime and these were all in La Révolution Surréaliste. The first has become the most famous. The cover of issue number 7 (15 June 1926) reproduced a print that Man Ray had purchased. Atget had given it the descriptive title The Eclipse – April 1912. He insisted on remaining uncredited in the journal (“Don’t put my name on it. These are simply are documents I make”,  Man Ray recalled him saying). The title was replaced by a provocative caption: Les Dernières Conversions (The Last Conversions). A photograph of an informal group gathering to watch an eclipse is bent into a piece of anti-religious satire. Atget’s document was certainly being put to use by artists, but not perhaps in a way he would have expected.

In May of 1929 the French monthly magazine Le Crapouillot published a special issue on Paris. Atget’s elegiac shot of Notre Dame seen through the branches of a tree appears on the cover as a halftone print with a white border. It was printed separately and pasted down to look like a print in an album. Around thirty images by Atget, all from the collection of Abbott, illustrated a number of short texts on different parts of the city. Pierre Mac Orlan wrote about Montmartre but did not refer directly to Atget’s work (perhaps because that same month another publication, Merle, was running a piece by him on the photographer). Two months earlier in the March 1929 edition of Le Crapouillot Mac Orlan had published his remarkable little essay ‘Elements of a Social Fantastic’, a densely poetic exploration of several interwoven themes: the photograph as exemplary witness; the photograph as conduit to the spirit of a place; and the deep connections between photography and death.  Images by Atget could have sufficed as illustrations but Mac Orlan selected a lithograph of Daumier’s La Rue Transnonain and a police photo of a bedroom stained by blood. Mac Orlan’s essay for the Atget book picks up some of these themes. We will return to the idea of  ‘the scene of the crime’ a little later.

In 1929 Abbott selected eleven of Atget’s photographs for inclusion in Film und Foto, the great traveling exhibition of modern cinema and photography that opened in Stuttgart. His now well-known image Corsets, Boulevard Stasbourg (1927) opened the book Photo-Eye which was put together by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold and published to coincide with the exhibition. The editors juxtaposed the photograph in typical avant-garde fashion with a press shot of a diver, her shape mirroring the shape of the corsets. The diver’s crisp contour caught by the shutter also contrasts with the blurred garment that swings in the breeze that blows through Atget’s long exposure.   In one sense,  the pairing suggests a free and dynamic modern world leaving behind the strictures of the old, but these images and subjects are contemporaries of each other (the Atget is dated 1927), suggesting the modern world is never entirely modern.

Atget’s photographs featured several times in the French magazine L’Art Vivant. In the issue published on January 1 1928 seven of them filled the centre spread. Atget’s name was misspelled ‘Adjet’ and a banner text proclaimed  ‘Un Précurseur de la Photographie Moderne’. This was and remains the position that art has given to Atget: a precursor of modern photography. Not a pioneer (that would suggest too strong an intention on his part) but a forerunner, a beacon.

Modern photography began in the late 1910s when the medium began to shake off its fawning imitation of painting to pursue an artistic identity of its own. Initially this meant an embrace of clarity, description and sober observation of the world. It pulled photography away from the canvas but brought it into dialogue, if not alignment, with the instrumentalism of the document.  Modern photography would be based not on artiness but on an intelligence of the document. Atget certainly made intelligent documents but not, in the first instance, as art. Rather it was art that recognised the intelligence of Atget’s work, rescuing it from the archival oblivion that befalls most documents. Pierre Mac Orlan was keen to emphasize this in his introduction to the book. For him Atget was an ‘artisan poet’ whose work, thankfully, had not been left to ‘founder in dispersion’.

We should stress this idea of the intelligent document, however nebulous it seems. It is very easy to talk of photographic documents as the brute result of machines, of perfunctory formulae or even mindlessness. It is true that the extremes of the photographic document have this character  – the passport photo, police photos and the like but these are extremes. Most documents require intelligence and some allow for a great deal of it. That intelligence may be overlooked in the functional and applied use of the image but art tends to hold use in suspension allowing the image to be seen in its complexity.

It has been said that the editing and sequencing of the Atget book contributed to a narrowly modern artistic reading of his work, bending his oeuvre to quite particular ends by aligning it with the progressive photography of the time. With just ninety-six images, the book could present little more than 1% of Atget’s output. Moreover the Abbott/Levy collection from which the choices were drawn was not entirely representative of the whole of Atget’s work. Compared to the French collections there were fewer straight architectural details, fewer of the uncompromisingly utilitarian record images, more urban views, more of the evocative and atmospheric shots, in general more documents that could be read more openly and more easily in relation the art of the time. To further this it was decided that Atget’s informational titles should be kept out of view in a folding flap at the back of the book and with no dates included. This certainly fostered a less contingent, more timeless and contemplative attitude to the images. It also asked more of the reader/viewer, recruiting them into the sense-making adventure of what were now much more open photographs.

Perhaps any book of Atget’s work would be a transformation of it. It was never meant to be a book. Atget had no desire to produce one, at least not one titled ATGET.[ii] However complex his intentions, however intelligent his images, Atget amassed a working archive of documents. Documents are means to ends, not ends in themselves. But of course something happens when we try to treat documents as ends in themselves.  To look ‘at’ rather than ‘with’ or ‘through’ a document will always transform it. This is not altogether a travesty since a document treated as art, whether by Atget in the making or us in the looking, never quite transcends the document. It never quite overcomes its status as report or chronicle. We can never really look at a photograph without looking through it as a document. In this way art allegorizes documents, granting us the chance to consider Atget not simply as an auteur but as a working man with motivations, intentions, imperatives and pressures that were as complex as anyone’s.

All photographs give you more than you bargained for. They have the potential to exceed their function as documents. Walter Benjamin called it photography’s optical unconscious. Photographs are generous things but their gifts are unpredictable, especially if you don’t know what you think they should be giving you, or what you think you want from them. Let us accept that Atget did what he claimed and made “Documents for artists” as the sign over his door declared.  A literal reading of this would reduce Atget to a depersonalized functionary, simply meeting the artistic needs of others. But this would of course assume that those going to Atget knew exactly what they wanted. But what if they were looking for inspiration, or at least looking with open minds at what Atget had to offer? And what unconscious part might aesthetic response play in their conscious search of documents? Here the document opens out. Atget found a space between document and artwork. It was a space that allowed him to satisfy the demands of others and the demands of his own calling, without ever having to define either in the last instance.

The book of Atget’s photographs was reviewed by, among others, the photographer Walker Evans and the German critic Walter Benjamin. Evans’s article ‘The Reappearance of Photography’ (1931) was a round up of recent photobooks from Europe and North America.[iii]  He opened with a series of remarks on the medium’s relation to time and space, noting that recent practice was dominated by the exploration of  “swift chance, disarray, wonder and experiment”. But this had not been Atget’s calling. Evans remarked,

‘Certain men of the past century have been renoticed who stood away from this confusion. Eugène Atget worked right through a period of utter decadence in photography. He was simply isolated, and his story is a little difficult to understand. Apparently he was oblivious to everything but the necessity of photographing Paris and its environs; but just what vision he carried with him of the monument he was leaving is not clear. It is possible to read into his photographs so many things he may never have formulated to himself. In some of his works he even places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most unorthodox of surréalistes.’

Even then Evans displayed a nuanced grasp of the fraught relationship between artwork and document.[iv] This tension interested Benjamin too. His ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931) was a treatise on the medium disguised as a review of photographic books.[v] In the late 1920s photography was looking back at its own history, perhaps for the first time. 19th century photography was being ‘renoticed’, as Evans put it, and several books were published to bring it to a new audience.[vi]  Benjamin opened with a discussion of the medium’s great early achievements before the descent into the populist mire of cartes de visite, narcissistic portraiture and kitsch. But, like Evans, Benjamin thought photography might be entering a third phase, a phase of intelligent documents assembled as small archives in book form that might reward a socially and historically alert audience.

Benjamin’s interest in photography was closely bound to his interest in constructing a counter-history of modernity out of its minor details and ephemeral fragments. Atget was significant because he was both a figure from the past and a contemporary photographer. He was man out of time. We ought not to forget that even in the 1920s Atget’s glass plates and prints of old Paris were a living anachronism. In his desire to photograph a threatened but still extant Paris rather than the newly emerging one, Atget figured the contradictions of modernity. By the second half of the 19th century industrial Europe was amnesiac – devaluing, erasing and forgetting the past that it did not need. At the same time it was turning History into a bourgeois discipline, in which the past could be selectively recruited to prop up the dominant order of the present. Benjamin sought a revolutionary history, one that he hoped would help to shatter the false continuum of history and emancipate the present. In Atget he saw if not an emblem of that counter-history then a path towards it. Photography was the child of modern progress yet its nature as record condemned it to look backward, to document ‘what is’ but to present it as ‘what was’. In this sense photography could leave behind facts but no interpretation of them. It could acknowledge the existence of particular things but it could not guarantee a particular knowledge of them. Detective work would be needed to rescue the images from picturesque nostalgia and make them meaningful.

Walter Benjamin remarked: “Not for nothing have Atget’s photographs been likened to the scene of a crime. But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime?” He had read the introduction to the German edition of the Atget book in which Camille Recht compared the photographs to documents of crime scenes (‘eine Polizeiphotographie am Tatort gemahnend’). In fact, Recht was referring less to the street shots than the images of domestic living quarters and he was pointedly political about these documents of dwellings: “a nuptial bed next to a chimney flue…testifies to the housing problem”. Nevertheless Recht’s invocation of the crime scene was already common in discussions of Atget’s work. For example in December 1928 Albert Valentin, one of the editors of the Belgian journal Varietés wrote:

‘…on closer inspection those dead-end streets in the outlying neighborhoods, those peripheral districts that his lens recorded, constituted the natural theatre for violent death, for melodrama, and they were so inseparable from such matters that Louis Feuillade [the creator of the serial film version of the Fantômas crime stories which were very popular in France] and his disciples – at a time when studio expenses were what was skimped on – employed them as settings for their serials.’[vii]

The projection of narrative – criminal or otherwise – is a way of taming the anxiety produced by Atget’s unpopulated pictures. Although they show indisputably social settings to read them as stages is to sidestep their troubling absences and voids. Turning them into backdrops for actions they do not show is a way of refusing to accept the unsettling temporality at the heart of so many of these images.

Today the work of Atget seems to loom larger, command more attention and generate more fascination than ever. A booming market both elevates and debases the public perception of art. High prices can cheapen things. Part of the enduring appeal of Atget is that he came before all this. Even in his own time he was outside the indignities of pursuing photography as art, knowing perhaps that the role of the “artisan poet” was in the long run more rewarding, for himself and for others. Perhaps he knew that art would only ever be one of many possible destinies for his photographs.

Photography has triumphed in the art of recent decades not by convincing us of its unique artistic merit. The merit of photography in art lies in its ability to dramatize the tension between artwork and document, between its artistic and its non-artistic character. That is what modern art photography of the inter-wars years was doing and why it claimed Atget as a precursor.  That is what Pop and Conceptual Art did in their artistic investigation of the functional document.  As the complexities of the archive come inevitably to dominate the minds of artists and photographers today, Atget  – or at least art’s version of Atget – achieves a new significance.  In his later years Walker Evans suggested “a document has use whereas art is really useless”. That is not quite true. An artwork does have uses but we can never predict what they will be.

 

Copyright: David Campany

Between Cinephilia and Cineclasm

A short essay on the work of Jason Dee, commissioned by Stills Gallery, 2009.

Jason Dee makes formally elegant, perfectly realised short films that play as loops in gallery spaces. They are sophisticated, knowing, seductive, profound, quite obsessive and often funny. I am not sure how much more I can say about his art in general. While there are certainly themes and concerns that stretch across his body of work, there is something in the nature of the overview that is at odds with the work itself. Each of his films is so dense, so layered and yet so particular in its effects that hopping from work to another, as an overview must, risks losing the sense of intense fascination that has formed each one and which in turn shapes the response of the sympathetic viewer. An overview cannot do justice to the pleasures afforded by each film. If I can offer an account of my own response to just one of them, perhaps this might offer a sufficient basis for a broader reflection.

Dee is brave to fashion much of his art from movies of the past that themselves have set high standards for formal daring and innovation. But he is an appropriation artist with a great affection and respect for what he appropriates. He does not attempt to ‘kill the things he loves’. If anything, his films are deep acts of homage.  We’ll revisit the scenes of our youth (2004) is a split-screen reconfiguration of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Max Ophuls’ masterpiece set in Vienna around 1900. Told in flashbacks of seductive, swirling reverie Ophuls’ film is one of classical Hollywood’s most perfect explorations of desire, memory and fate. It is also one of those rare mainstream films that is itself a profound meditation on illusion. Dee chooses to revisit the scene in which Ophuls himself seems to be making a comment on upon the nature of filmmaking. The rakish pianist (played by Louis Jourdan) is taking the infatuated ‘unknown woman’ (Joan Fontaine) to a fairground in which they take a ‘ride’ on a stationary train. As they board he says: “We’ll revisit the scenes of our youth.” Panoramic paintings of romantic locations of their choice are scrolled jerkily past their carriage window. Ophuls revels in letting us see the mechanics of the ride, showing the old man whose job it is to peddle the panoramas and power this quaint attraction. It is a scene of self-conscious seduction, both of the woman and the audience. Both she and we will only be ‘swept off our feet’ and into the delirium of the man/film if we want to be. But Ophuls knows, and he knows that we know, that there is no point watching such a knowingly romantic movie, or falling for such a man, if you’re not willing to enter into the illusion. Dee freezes the couple as they are beginning to flirt with each other. Motionless they are denied speech and thrown out of their performance so that we see them more as actors or models than the characters they are portraying. All the while the landscape continues to pass by their window. On the adjacent screen the old man peddles his stationary bicycle. Presented as a loop we are free to move between involvement and distance from the images, or simply to fall in and out of the illusion.

Just as Ophuls was paying tribute to and incorporating cinema’s prehistory in the panorama, Dee’s reworking pays tribute to and incorporates Ophuls. So we have pre-cinema, classical cinema and digital post-cinema all in one dizzying filmic haiku. But it would be hasty to read this as a simple chronology of media.  There is nothing to say the pleasures of the simple panorama have been superseded, and certainly nothing to say that the landmarks of Hollywood’s classical period have been surpassed. But it is certainly true that new technologies reinvent and may reinvigorate our relation to the cultural artefacts of earlier epochs. Digitization has made cinema’s history available to new audiences, including artists. My feeling is that this has itself introduced a kind of multiple temporality into the experience of the cinema of the past. A film like  Letter From an Unknown Woman may strike us as a very particular product of a specific cultural moment,  which of course it is. Yet a film, like any work of art, also belongs to the moment in which we view it. If you are looking at it now, and it means something to you, it is on some level contemporary. I look at Ophuls’ film and I see it as a contemporary film, and I can only suspect that Dee does too. Certainly, anything unsurpassed is contemporary. But what marks our present moment is a tension between parts and wholes. If we like them, films of the past are worlds or times we wish to inhabit, yet we cannot help but subject them to the scrutiny of repetition and fragmentation that characterizes contemporary viewing habits. Watching favoured films is as likely to involve extracting parts of them – scenes, sequences, shots, even frames – as swallowing them whole.

For an artist this is clearly a post-avant garde position, one that is not inclined to throw out hastily the great achievements of the past. But the past cannot be repeated or fully reclaimed either.  Dee’s art finds solace in living in the past a little, the present a little and the future a little. To do otherwise in this amnesiac age would now lead to madness.  I think Colin MacCabe was quite right when he wrote is his biography of Jean-Luc Godard that  “in a world in which we are entertained from cradle to grave whether we like it or not, the ability to rework image and dialogue … may be the key to both psychic and political health.” Whatever pleasures Dee’s films offer us, they also offer this small but important lesson.

Perhaps this is the attraction of the looped film that plays forever (potentially) in the gallery space. While the loop has always struck narrative cinema as an unhealthy aberration, it seems like an ideal means of turning film into a ‘durational object’, one that is able to partake of cinematic time while also preserving art’s long-standing preference for suspension.  In this Dee’s loops share a family resemblance to films made specifically for the gallery by Mark Lewis, Victor Burgin, David Claerbout and Kirk Palmer, among others. They point us towards a space of promise somewhere between cinephilia and cineclasm.

 

 

William Klein’s lasting legacy to photography will be his four city books: New York (1956), Rome (1959), Tokyo and Moscow (both 1964). New York in particular is regularly lauded as one of the great photographic achievements of the last century. Its visceral imagery and endlessly inventive layout was a groundbreaking form of hyper-journalism melding the spirits of dada, Pop, abstract expressionism and counter-cinema to dizzying effect. If it had been published in America it might now be as over-celebrated as Robert Frank’s The Americans, issued two years later. Even so its influence has been considerable. A number of Japanese photographers were impressed by its energy and graphic daring. I think Klein got better and his later books built on the achievement of New York. Tokyo is my favourite, not least because it sees Klein returning to the city whose photographic culture he helped to revolutionize.

In 1964 Tokyo was the most populous city on earth and the world’s media were about to descend to cover the Olympic Games. Three years later James Bond arrived in You Only Live Twice, sealing a popular iconography for Tokyo that barely seems to have changed. Klein’s assessment of the city incorporates every Tokyo cliché but in pushing them to breaking point it soars above them too.

Klein had been involved with abstract painting in Paris in the early 1950s and had explored the possibilities of abstract photography (cameraless photograms and the like). But he turned to the camera more intensely in response to the chaos of the daily life he encountered in New York. His images were immersive, layered, riffing ensembles concerned less with perfect technique than the charged physicality of the unexpected encounter and the unpredictable vectors that connected him to his subjects. In the process, retooled the anti-perspectival ‘all-over’ compositions so central to abstract painting.  He was radical in the extent of his dependence on chance, on the unfolding of events before for him which he always had a part in provoking. Klein is not the neutral observer here. He’s the prompt, the choreographer and the audience.

If the imagery were not enough to justify an analogy with the high modernist canvas, in Tokyo Klein presents a frenetic sequence of a Japanese action painter throwing himself into his art. This is Klein’s own brilliantly dense caption from the book:

“He covers a 50-foot wall in paper, wraps his fists in rag, dips them in ink and squares off. New York school of “action painting” caught on when Georges Mathieu showed, in a Tokyo department store window [behind glass], how it was done in France. Local painters rushed to renew with traditional callisthenic calligraphy that possibly started it all in the first place.”

This kind of painting had taken performance towards a theatre directed more at the complicit camera than the canvas. It is well accepted now that most of the ‘works’ produced by Japanese action painters were artistically worthless and junked after the cameras had captured their creation.

Before I saw any of Klein’s work from Japan I had read about it.  I remember Roland Barthes’ particularly po-faced remark in Camera Lucida (1980): “In William Klein’s Shinoheira, Fighter Painter (1961) the character’s monstrous head has nothing to say to me because I can see so clearly that it is an artifice of the camera angle.” Barthes was never going to appreciate such exuberant playfulness for what it was. He didn’t dignify the image with reproduction in his book but it made me keen to see it. When I did, the photo struck me too as monstrous and artificial. But it was clear that this is also part of what photography and life are, or can be. Klein’s particular skill seemed to lay in indulging in monstrous artifice but distancing himself from it too. That’s not easy to do. There are plenty of complicit photographers today who will swear blind their work is ironic or subversive, but it’s never for them to say.

After New York and Rome Klein increased his page size so that when you open up the full-bleed double spreads of Tokyo they are more than half a metre wide. With those dense, complex compositions in your lap you feel like you’re up close to a huge mural, not a page. I’m not sure you are going to feel that in the reproductions here but I hope you can imagine it because this is where Klein is at his best, achieving the most powerful effects with the most unlikely material. I’ve no idea why he was in attendance at a meeting of an agricultural committee or how he got so close to the ceiling but his shot through a chandelier of bored bureaucrats in session is such a photographic joy. It is difficult to look at it and not imagine Klein muttering to himself: “Jeeeesus this is boring! What can I do here? Ah, a chandelier!”

Klein made plenty of singular and extraordinary images, more than enough to warrant a place in any history of ‘great Pictures’. But as with so many of the last century’s well-known photographers (Moholy-Nagy, Krull, Sander, Brandt, Evans, Friedlander, and Moriyama among them) it is becoming increasingly clear that it is on the page that the imagery was (is) at its most sophisticated. Klein’s achievement as a photographer is inseparable from his achievements as an editor, designer, writer and maker of books.

Of all his books it is Tokyo I take down from the shelf most often. It’s so rich, so relentlessly inventive that I can never remember it all and find myself constantly surprised. It was published in New York and Tokyo. I’ve no idea how Tokyo received it. No doubt it was measured against the experience of those who lived there. For the rest who saw it in 1964 I imagine it was seductive, bewildering, breathless, cacophonous, grotesque, gorgeous, informative and very intelligent. It is still.

‘…page after page…’

 By David Campany for C Magazine, 2009

It is fairly clear even to those only remotely interested in the matter that cinema and photography have had a rich and strange relationship right from the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s. The terms, ideas, aesthetics and values of the relationship have changed constantly in the decades since but this seems only to have strengthened it.

The interesting thing about exploring the relationship is how you present it. For example, if you were to make a film about cinema and photography you could include moving images and perhaps the photographs would suffer a little. The still image would certainly be transformed in a context synonymous with the moving image. On the internet and its computer screen the relationship between the two is quite different because moving and still images seem to cohabit there to mutual advantage. It is not a context identified with one more than the other. If you explore cinema and photography on the page, the terms are very different. Cinema is reduced to still substitutes while photography is much more at home. But since this is a magazine and not a screen we ought to make the most of the page, no?

The invention of motion pictures revolutionised the way still pictures would be not just made but sequenced and presented. Photography is a medium synonymous with the page for most of the 20th century at least, and it is still the site that many photographers and artists prefer, despite the triumph of photography in the museum and gallery. It is difficult to imagine the history of the magazine or illustrated book without the counterpoint of cinema.  Many of the landmark photographically illustrated publications were cinematic in their thinking, rhythm and aesthetics.  In 1923 El Lissitzsky, setting out to redefine layout in Soviet Russia, proposed the “cinematic book” with a “continuous sequence of pages”, as he put it. Two years later László Moholy-Nagy published Painting, Photography Film, which concluded with his Sketch for a Manuscript for a Film, reinventing the page as quasi-cinema. By 1932 he was convinced photography’s importance lay in the putting together of fragmentary images:  “The series is no longer a ‘picture’, and none of the canons of pictorial aesthetics can be applied to it. Here the picture loses its identity as such and becomes a detail of assembly, as essential structural element of the whole which is the thing itself. In this concatenation of its separate but inseparable parts a photographic series inspired by a definite purpose can become at once the most potent weapon and the tenderest lyric.” The same year Alvin Tolmer declared “The mingling of real life and imaginary life, of present and past, of probability and improbability, could only be expressed hitherto in surrealist poetry and by the technique of cinema. To-day it is one of the most powerful devices of the art of layout.”

Right up until the end the 1960s cinema’s biggest effect on photography concerned the dynamics and flow of the sequence. That’s what is so striking about publications such as William Klein’s New York, Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, Robert Frank’s The Americans or Stanley Kubrick photo-essays for Look magazine (made before he made the jump to movies). This was disassembled cinema. Klein even declared of his books “only the sequencing counts…like in a movie”. But audiences had long appreciated the fragmented photo-essay, and films had been presented on the page in what the Italians called fotoromanzi at least since the 1920s. Filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague such as Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were fascinated with the form and took it in new directions in the 1960s. Perhaps the appeal was the way the cinematic page seemed like an analysis of the projected film.  In 1965 Godard suggested: “one could imagine the critique of a film as the text and its dialogue, with photos and a few words of commentary.” (Anna Karina, Godard’s actress and muse that year was a star of cheap photo-novels before she appeared in his films) That allure or sense of criticality may seem quaint to us now but before the advent of video, DVD and the internet the only way you could hold onto a movie, to ‘own it’, to think about it, to think with it, was in print.

Nevertheless the renaissance of serious and ambitious photographic books and magazines in the last decade or so is among other things a sign that sequenced pages allow for forms of expression that are simply not available to the computer screen or the gallery wall. Clearly in an age of photography defined by images dematerialized on-line and over-materialised as art world commodities the printed page has a very different cultural place from the one it had in the last century. But as a ‘secondary form’ it seems indispensible, not least because of the relations it can propose between images, without making that proposal too forcefully or too weakly.

________

 

That Obscure Object of Photography

My title comes from Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), a film about a man chasing a woman who is played by two different actresses. The man doesn’t seem to notice the switch and the film itself makes little of the conceit. It is surprising how quickly the audience gets used to the situation without really accepting it. Bunuel was getting at the problem of how we are always imagining what it is we think want, from people or things. We are always a little blind at the very moment we think we know for sure.  To desire is always in some ways to project onto obscure objects.

Bunuel’s fable tells us something about what it is we think we want from photography, what we want it to be. Consider this apparent paradox. Almost every piece of writing about photography these days, be it highbrow theory, catalogue essay, exhibition blurb or review, tells us the medium is hybrid, fractured, inconsistent, and ‘ontologically uncertain’. This is the now-standard take on the ‘identity’ of photography, that it doesn’t really have one. At the same time the inexorable rise of photography in art has been built around individual practitioners each with a unique and consistent approach. How come these individuals are so consistent? Are they fighting their own little battles against photography’s lack of identity?  Or is it the institutions of art that tend rather anxiously to promote consistent artists while side-stepping those who are less consistent (and more versatile)? Is inconsistency the mark of a lack of seriousness?

Of course the question of the identity of photography is inseparable from the question of identity in general. Long ago Michel Foucault raised the matter of which works produced by a writer or artist should be considered ‘official’:

Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche’s works for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published but what is ‘everything’? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? And so on ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory.

Clearly any individual produces a lot of stuff in their lifetime. What interested Foucault was what he called ‘the author function’: the way ideas about authorship organize how we make sense of culture and how we produce it. For example we insist on novels being authored, with a name on the cover and all that this implies. In advertising the author doesn’t matter to the public, despite the advertising industry recognizing certain auteurs. In film and fashion it varies – the author may or may not matter to the public.  Wherever authorship does matter what is at stake is consistency and originality i.e. ‘signature style’. This is something we think we want from the makers of culture but it rarely occurs naturally. Some practitioners pursue it through trial and error. Others just get on with things and leave it to others to decide what stuff fits the signature and what doesn’t.

When a famous artist or photographer dies there is a rush to define publicly the essence of what they did or stood for. It seems rude not to. But after a period of grace the life and work are reconsidered, this time in the pursuit of anomalies, contradictions and unanswered questions. This can be cruel but generally it’s realistic (we are all made up of anomalies, contradictions and unanswered questions, photographers more than most). I recall the obituaries of Henri Cartier-Bresson who died in 2004. Most boiled down his achievement to ‘the decisive moment’ and the famous twenty or so images that best exemplified it.  The extraordinary diversity of his work and the sheer size of his oeuvre meant little. He himself had a hand in this of course, nudging his audience further away from the unruly breadth of his photojournalism and closer to the steady depth of his art. But it is becoming clear just how versatile and varied his practice was.  His ‘minor’ works are now looking just as interesting: the colour photographs of China in the late 1950s, the commissioned photos of IBM computer workers from the early 1970s, the photo-essays for magazines, not to mention his films or the countless images that were published only once in the various books he produced. Would our appreciation or the standing of Cartier-Bresson be diminished by casting the net a bit wider? I don’t think so. Perhaps one day we might see a show or book that does just that.

Very few books about photographers attempt this kind of breadth (even Cartier-Bresson’s recently published Scrapbook entrenches more than it broadens our understanding of his photography). For all the excitement about a renaissance in photobook publishing, the output it is dominated by hysterically consistent books of the ‘see the first five pages and you’ve seen the whole book’ kind. Repetition is the simplest path to looking like you know what you’re doing. Educators along with editors, curators, gallerists and publishers generally prefer a known quantity, but it’s not exactly enriching visual culture. (Photography tutors – why not stop telling your students that doing ten of the same thing is good enough? It probably suits your assessment criteria more than it suits them. Let them make a mess of things).

But there have been a few wildly erratic photobooks that do justice to the idea of photography as an interesting mess. In the mid 1970s Thames & Hudson published some slim books under the series title Masters of Contemporary Photography. The books were either themed or featured the work of just one photographer. I still find them refreshing because there are so few books in which photographers are presented as working people finding ways to balance the demands of earning a living with whatever social and artistic ambitions they may have. One book focuses on the work of the North American photographer Duane Michals. It is called The Photographic Illusion: Using the Mind’s Eye to Create Photos for Collectors and Clients, an intriguing if clichéd title. Even if you’re not much of a Michals fan (I’m not that much of one) it’s stills worth a look. Alongside his well-known staged sequences we see his commissioned work including documentary, fashion, editorial portraits, advertising and even some film stills shot on the set of The Great Gatsby. On the page we see not just the photos but the subsequent layouts showing what editors, designers and journalists did with them. We see contact sheets. There are diagrams revealing how Michals achieved his complex optical tricks. The introductory text (by Ronald H. Bailey) includes some of Michals’ pretty clunky early work (who would dare publish their failures in these neurotic times?). We also get to see images that were sources of inspiration for Michals, and there is a photo of him as a young man posing with mates in the army. There is a reproduction of a newspaper clipping of Michals as a boy posing as a school art competition winner (who these days would admit that, let alone publish it?) At the back there are technical passages with even more diagrams explaining his use of depth of field, multiple exposure, camera formats and printing techniques. These are some of the clearest technical writings I’ve ever come across. More radically the book’s contents just don’t add up stylistically. Yes, there are plenty of Michals’ deft photo-fictions that demonstrate his particular blend of magic and realism. But there are plenty of other pictures that look like they could have been taken by any reasonably competent hack with a penchant for natural light and wistful composition.

The book doesn’t throw all these things at the reader in an attempt to be groundbreaking. All these elements are here because they are parts of Michals’ practice and the book grants the reader the intelligence to move between them. Indeed, despite all its jumping about the book is thoroughly common-sensical, engaging and clear. It becomes evident that Michals is both a versatile image-maker for hire and an artist pursuing a particular sensibility. It’s worth noting here that this split still dominates photographic education. Students are either encouraged to ‘develop their own style’ or they are led down the pragmatic route to photography as a ‘transferable skill’ in the marketplace.

Anyone wanting to take photography seriously is obliged to consult many different types of books: histories, theories, monographs, technical manuals, books about commercial practice, books about art photography, and so on.  But an unspoken discursive hygiene tends to keep these types of writing separate. Rarely do all appear in one book as they do in this one. I’ll confess here. I was asked by some photography graduates which single book I’d recommend if I could only recommend one.  I racked my memory and perused my shelves. Barthes? Langford? Jeffrey? Burgin? Szarkowski? Frampton? Newhall? Wells?  Eventually I plumped for this Duane Michals book. The selection surprised me as much as them. Alas it is long out of print and I doubt it will qualify for the rather connoisseurial criteria that dominate the reissues market. But you’ll find it for next to nothing on the internet. It’s a book full of insight, instruction, wisdom and pragmatism. Nothing is mystified except for the object of photography itself, which of course remains delightfully obscure.

by David Campany

First published in Photoworks magazine, Spring/Summer 2008

Is there any photograph more hybrid, less aesthetically pure than the film still? It has its admirers but there are few of them among the guardians of photography. The film still is something of an orphan. But of course orphans usually have interesting stories to tell.

Here is a publicity still from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), one of the most celebrated films to feature a photographer. It is an image that comes from somewhere between cinema and photography, with characteristics inherited from both. It is also an image that was made halfway between the beginnings of cinema and today.

The man in the wheelchair with his leg in a cast is the actor James Stewart playing L. B. Jeffries, a New York photojournalist who works for magazines like Life and Look. Such magazines offered a mix of entertainment and news. Along with reportage photography arranged as photo-stories, their pages carried publicity for movies in the form of preview features and advertisements. Film stills like this one and the reportage of the kind ostensibly made by Jeffries may strike us as opposites. On the whole, popular cinema was and remains escapist fantasy, while the subject of reportage is actuality, the real events of the world. But in their own ways the film still and the reportage photograph have to solve the same two problems: visual clarity and narrative stillness. Film stills solve these problems through the group effort of staging and the detail afforded by large-format cameras. Reportage has to take the other route—by picture taking rather than picture making – relying upon the speed and lightness of  small cameras and economy of expression. Where the film still restages motion, reportage uses fast shutter speeds to freeze it. Both seek to secure detail and master time. Both pursue what the photographic artist Jeff Wall has called “the blurred parts of pictures.”

The woman in the still is Grace Kelly, playing Lisa Fremont, who works for a fashion magazine much like Harper’s Bazaar. The couple are looking intently for evidence of a murder. In their poses and attitudes they embody precisely the film’s complex balance of gender and power. As many commentators have pointed out, Rear Window does not quite fit the classic 1950s Hollywood pattern of the actively “looking” male lead and the passive, “looked-at” female co-star. Although Jeffries does most of the looking, the film dwells a great deal on his many weaknesses:  indecisiveness,  cowardice,  immobility. And while Lisa wishes to tame the photojournalist into a settled marriage, she is shown to be independent-minded, authoritative, and full of initiative. Indeed, after the solving of the murder the film ends not with the unification of the couple but with comic tension between them. Look closely at this still and you can sense it. They are not quite looking in the same direction. Neither are they looking through the rear window into the courtyard where the film’s action takes place. If they were, we would see only their backs. For our convenience they look out to the right, producing an odd disjunction between foreground and background. In fact, the still is a montage. Kelly and Stewart were shot before a white backdrop in a portrait studio, and inserted later. This was probably done to ensure that foreground and background could be lit perfectly and shot in crisp focus.

It is we viewers of the still who can see the courtyard and the windows of the various characters from the film—two newlyweds, a lonely spinster, a dancer, an artist, a group of musicians, and a murderer (played by Raymond Burr). The duration of the film has been compressed here so that they are all there for us at once, as if in a gallery. We can roam around the picture at our own pace. Indeed, this is just how the film opens, with a long take that moves around the courtyard and then around the apartment, setting the scene. A photojournalist hunts for a single moment, perhaps, but in this still we get the whole scenario in a different kind of image with a different sense of time, as in a tableau. It is a photograph not so much “from” Rear Window as “of” it, as a whole. It publicizes the film to come, but it is also a summary for those who have seen it.

Although photojournalists have often been depicted in films, L. B. Jeffries is unusual. First of all, he is confined to a wheelchair. Secondly, he takes no photographs in the film. For Hitchcock’s purposes, a photographer is above all someone who looks. It is their socially accepted voyeurism that is significant, not their images. Voyeurism requires a safe distance, a vantage point for the observer beyond the reach of the observed (much like a movie audience, watching but not accountable). In Rear Window, the photographer is cut off not just by the lens of his camera, or by the glass window of his apartment, or indeed by the abyss of the courtyard across which he stares. It is his professionalized looking, with its fantasy of objectivity, that cuts him off. It demands his separation from the world. Despite witnessing what he believes is a murderer covering his traces, he feels no urge to get it on film. Rather, he uses his camera’s long lens as a telescope to watch, swapping it for binoculars when things get really intense.

Even so, Rear Window “looks” photographic—but for reasons that are thoroughly cinematic. Hitchcock’s idea of pure cinema rested on a classical theory of montage. He took the formula of shot/countershot and turned it into a looped circuit of looking/action/reaction. A basic pattern of short, near-still shots dominates the film as the photographer observes the actions of the murderer and reacts. The photographer’s curiosity is merely Hitchcock’s means to a thoroughly cinematic end. If proof were needed that photography was not really Hitchcock’s subject, consider the bits of photographic activity that we see in Rear Window. They are odd, to say the least. In the opening pan we glimpse a framed photograph, taken from the middle of a racetrack, of two cars crashing. A tire is hurtling toward the camera, presumably destined to hospitalize the photographer. A real photograph of the crash would have been impossible to make from this vantage, and the image is clearly a montage. We then see a very old crushed camera (too old to have been used by a photojournalist even in 1954), followed by an image of Jeffries’s leg in a cast. The sequence is a quick expository device and its realism is not important. Later in the film Jeffries notices that plants in the courtyard flowerbed have grown shorter, leading him to presume a body has been buried there. He consults a box of “before” and “after” transparencies he has taken of the courtyard. No account is given of why he might have made such banal photos. Then, in the film’s denouement, the murderer spots the watching photographer and comes over to his apartment to confront him. As he enters, Jeffries slows his approach by firing flashbulbs at him repeatedly in the dark. The strobes blind the killer temporarily, deferring the moment of confrontation—the few seconds it should take him to cross the room are distended to a tense minute or so. All these instances are unrealistic and even ludicrous. It is as if Hitchcock is interested in everything about the photographer apart from the photography.

            Rear Window was made in 1954, just as television was beginning its inexorable transformation into the dominant mass medium, eclipsing still photography in the process. The end of the reign of the big-circulation weekly magazines could already be glimpsed. With a TV in the home, never again would people have to stare out their windows to satisfy their curiosity. Television promised optimistically to be “a window on the world,” not a distraction from it. In this sense Rear Window is, among other things, a prescient farewell to life before/without the small screen, to the classical photojournalism endangered by television, and to an equally endangered “golden era” of cinema.

Often the nature of a technology or a cultural practice becomes clear to us just as it is about to mutate or disappear. Cinema seems to have been attracted to different forms of the photographic image at such moments. Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), a story told in backward-moving episodes about a man with no long-term memory who is trying to solve a murder, makes compulsive use of Polaroid photos. The hero takes shots of key faces and places and relies on them to tell him who he is and what he must do next. Yet Memento was made just as chemical photography was being replaced by cheap and accessible digital cameras, moving the photograph from object to pure image. Indeed, the Polaroid company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2000. In a similar vein Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo (2002) is the story of a sinister technician at a shopping mall photo-lab. He runs off his own copies of snaps of an ideal family in order to insinuate himself into their lives, first in his fantasies then in reality. Digital cameras were already cutting out the lab technician at the turn of the millennium. One Hour Photo was made at that last point when a contemporary film could linger legitimately over celluloid negatives, sprocket holes, gurgling chemicals, and all the rest of the production process, without seeming nostalgic.

Stills such as this one from Rear Window look like no other photography, except perhaps for the staged photographs typical of contemporary art that mimic them. The staged photograph has a long history, but its ascendance in art has much to do with the eclipse of the still photograph by the moving image. Few art photographers working today aim to shoot moments directly or instantaneously. Most prefer to empty their frames of movement or to choreograph it. But the momentary continues to haunt photography as its ghostly other, just as it haunts the film still.

 

 

 

The photographic art of Thomas Ruff makes very particular demands of us and offers very particular kinds of pleasure, both aesthetic and intellectual. His work seems cold and dispassionate, willful, searching and perverse but at times surprisingly beautiful. Whether he is working with found photographs or shooting his own, the results are similar. He makes images that are at once familiar clichés and estranged visions of our collective photographic order. Ruff’s art dramatises photography for us as an image form that is always as public as it is private, and as anonymous as it is personal. The viewer may find themselves switching between thinking about the particular image they see before them and contemplating the state of ‘all photography’ in its terrifying and sublime totality.

Indeed what is particular about Ruff’s work is its potent ability to solicit individual and global responses that cannot be entirely reconciled. It seems to belong to everybody and nobody and as a result we are neither free to look just as individuals nor to respond ‘collectively’ either. For obvious reasons I will try to leave aside your personal response and concentrate on what we might call the public or collective context.

Found images and archives have been of interest to vanguard artists at least since the 1920s with the rise of Dada, Surrealism and Cubism. This was the first era of the mass media, defined by the popular illustrated magazines and cinema. Since then artists have worked with found images in different ways but always in an attempt to make sense of a culture increasingly dominated by spectacle. In an age of distraction how do we hold on to what is important? How do we maintain meaningful relationships? How do we keep to reason? How do we find alternative values? How do we map the ways mass culture constructs our notions of desire, beauty and significance? For many artists, using the imagery produced by mass culture is a necessity. Adapting the images that surround us is a way of making sense and staying sane. As Colin MacCabe put it in his biography of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, ‘In a world in which we are entertained from cradle to grave whether we like it or not, the ability to rework image and dialogue … may be the key to both psychic and political health.’

All photographic images come from archives. The very idea of the archive shaped how photography developed from its invention in the 1830s. The standardisation of cameras and film formats, the standardisation of printed matter, the standardisation of the family album, the picture library, the computer image file, the press agency and even the modern art gallery – these are all archival forms of, and for, the photographic image. The hungry gathering and ordering of information proceeds according to rules but it is forever holding off a potential collapse into chaos, because there is always something wild and unpredictable about the behaviour of images (never mind the quantity of them).  We feel the strain of that disaster more than ever as the world’s archives are themselves subject to digital re-archiving and redistribution via the internet.

When artists address the archive they align themselves with that confidence and that doubt, with the archive’s order and its barely contained anxiety. Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism, perhaps the three most influential strands of post-war art, all prized the archive or the archival grid as their ideal form. We see it in Warhol’s screen-prints, in the sculptures of Donald Judd and Carl Andre, the installations of Sol Lewitt and Hanne Darboven and the photo work of Christian Boltanksi and Bernd & Hilla Becher. The archival grid has been art’s quasi-bureaucratic way to mimic and estrange the modern regimes of the image.

In Thomas Ruff’s JPEGs the grid is present in a number of ways. Firstly there is Ruff’s preference for working in series. Indeed all his work to date has been serial. The series presents whatever is particular about an image in the context of a general group. The effect is to simultaneously emphasize and de-emphasize whatever is specific about his chosen photographs. We see each image as unique but we see that uniqueness only by sensing the grouping or series of which it is a part. Meaning emerges as much from comparison and contrast as from any individual image. We cannot know simply by looking at them from which archives Ruff’s JPEGs have come. Certainly they come from Ruff’s archive, from his own assembled series. But they might also come from other archives. These might be images from the internet, for example. (In fact Ruff tells us they are from the internet). He searched for the images online, often following links from one site to another, following his own routes as we all do. But what does it mean so say that an image is ‘from the internet’? Is the internet an archive? In one sense it is but it is too general a term. It is not so much an archive as an archive of archives. So Ruff’s JPEGs belong to at least three archives: his own, the internet, and the specific archives accessed online. They may also belong to a fourth archive, perhaps an original analogue archive that has been digitized and made available electronically. And they may belong to a fifth archive of collective memory and to a sixth archive of the viewer’s individual memory. And so on.

All images that appear on the internet and/or printed in books and magazines today are digitised.  Nearly all images are digital even if they originated in non-digital or pre-digital forms. Given this fact it is surprising how few of them ever wish to address the fact that they exist as masses of electronic information that take visual form as pixels. Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image. Of course he does this not by showing us the images on screens but by making large scale photographic prints, blowing them up far beyond their photorealist resolution. This might be the first time some of these images have ever taken a material form.

The pixel has replaced the grain of photographic film. Either images are shot digitally or older analogue images are scanned and converted into electronic data.  Analogue photography developed an aesthetics of grain quite early on, especially through reportage.  In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, graininess took on the connotations of ‘authenticity’, coded as a kind of limit to which the photographer and the equipment had been pushed. The most famous example is Robert Capa’s group of pictures from the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach during the Second World War. The indistinct haziness of the images was treated as a sign of the sheer urgency of the situation and of extreme human endurance (even though Capa’s grain was actually the result of hasty processing by an assistant in the darkroom).  In the post war decades photographers borrowed this convention, using grain as an expressionistic device to speak of limits of one kind or another – personal, aesthetic, technical, artistic. It’s in the work of everyone from William Klein and Robert Frank to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Today it is almost a cliché but for a while at least grain became a sign of the virtuous materiality of the image and of the virtuous, embodied photographer.

Pixels are quite different. They are grid-like, machinic and repetitive. They do not have the scattered chaos of grain. When we glimpse pixels we do not think of authenticity (although we may do one day). The pixel represents a cold technological limit, a confrontation with the virtual and bureaucratic order that secretly unites all images in a homogenous electronic continuum, whether they are holiday snapshots or military surveillance. But there is evidence that our response to the pixel is changing and we can measure something of that change through Thomas Ruff’s JPEGS.

Many of these photographs are images of unpredictability. Water, fire, smoke, steam, explosions, ruins. These are all phenomena that cannot be mapped or modelled in their detail. They are in a sense irrational, anarchic. We see these subjects throughout Ruff’s  grids of pixels. We switch from looking at figuration to abstraction and back again. The result is a great tension or drama. And it is tempting to see in this drama something of the character of modern life with its great forces of rationality and irrationality.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay was first written for a IANN magazine.  Ruff’s JPEG series doesn’t work very well on the internet or computer screen: the images need to be experienced as printed matter, moving from screen to page or wall.

Comparatively little attention has been paid to photographically illustrated books for children.  They hardly appear in the histories of photography or children’s literature. This seems like an oversight. There have been thousands published, the earliest appearing in the first decades of photobook production in the nineteenth century. Many well-known photographers and designers have made or worked on photobooks for children, including Edward Steichen, Claude Cahun, Alexander Rodchenko, Bruno Munari and Cindy Sherman. Even if such books don’t merit serious consideration on their own terms, perhaps knowing something about the child’s engagement with the photographic image might tell us about something the ways adults engage with it.

Photobooks for children appear to fall into three rough categories: objects, situations and stories. Nearly all combine image and text in some way. Unsurprisingly, similar categories dominate the study of language acquisition in children (nouns, descriptions, actions). But I do not wish to be very scientific here. What follows is a rather idiosyncratic set of observations. They have emerged from looking at photographic books with the young children in my family and from the foggy memories of my own past.

I begin with an old book about objects. In 1930 Edward Steichen, then one of America’s best-known art and advertising photographers, was commissioned by his daughter to produce a photographic book for young children. Mary Steichen Calderone was a leader of the progressive school movement and wanted a book that would help them recognise objects. The First Picture Book, subtitled Everyday Things For Babies, has twenty-four black and white pictures and no text. Each presents a domestic object – telephone, toy train,  toothbrush and glass, clock, teddy bear, tricycle and so on. They are photographed in the slick style typical of 1930s studio photography. The objects appear with a heightened presence, their surface texture and sense volume exaggerated as if compensating for the fact that the objects cannot be touched or held.

Already we should pose the vexing question of whether young children should come to know the world ‘directly’ in the first instance and only secondarily through images (putting aside for the moment just how inseparable images and objects are). Steichen’s daughter was adamant that images should be secondary. She declared: ‘It is unwise for a baby to get his first experience of an object through the picturization of it. This may lead to a fantasy habit, or the formation of an incompleted image of that object, even when this is finally met.’  I’m not sure what to think of this. How bad could such a habit get? I look through my own sixteen month old daughter’s ‘object’ books. There are images of toys, cups, clothes, babies and food that are familiar to her. There are also lions, starfish and rockets that I’m pretty sure she’s never seen in real life. Moreover contemporary children’s books switch between photos of real things and photos of toy versions. They also switch between photos and drawings. One of my daughter’s books has a photo of a fierce lion roaring, another has a photo of cuddly toy lion while another has a hand-drawn lion. All have the word ‘lion’ written underneath. I wonder what fantasy habit she is developing about lions.

Steichen Calderone’s preface to The First Picture Book promotes the use of photographs on the basis that hand-drawn illustrations are ‘coloured by the artist’s viewpoint and personality, thus presenting a falsified image of the object’. But the book’s introduction by Harriet M. Johnson (Director of the Nursery School of the Bureau of Educational Experiments) claims that Steichen’s photographs are successful because they have the ‘simplicity of a line drawing’ while showing the ‘salient qualities without which the object loses its own identifying characteristics’. Clearly there is a contradiction here, but it is not an uncommon one. I sense it is as a symptom of the deep uncertainties about the photographic image that prevail still.

Photographs may be least problematic when they picture objects, but there may still be problems. The camera records everything before it. Objects come with backgrounds. Background is of course one key differences between photography and drawing. The camera records everything before it, at once, without hierarchy or distinction. Or, as the art photographer Lee Friedlander put it: ‘I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry, and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.’ Friedlander should know. He’s built an entire career out of wrong-stepping the viewer with visually confusing pictures that jumble foreground and background for the sheer joy of it. He could make a crazy children’s book.

What Friedlander calls ‘generous’ about photography others have called wild or anarchic. If photographs give you more detail, more information than you could ever want, making sense of them depends upon being able to organise your wants, to know what you should be looking for. Most of the time we are not very good at this and rely on titles, captions and commentary (the authority of the word) to guide us. Another way is to radically simplify the photograph by removing the object from its background. Steichen opted for simple studio settings but it soon became common practice to cut out the image-object so that its only background was the page itself. This is the norm today in photographic children’s books.

But there is still plenty of room for ambiguity. Which specific object will represent the general group? If you want to represent a car to a child, which car do you photograph? This is where the photo is potentially less suitable than a drawing. Consider the continued use of hand-drawn illustration in botanical books and other scientific representations of nature.  Here the aim is to produce an image that is representative of a species as a whole. The skill of the illustrator is not their artistic treatment of the subject but the judgment required to observe a range individual specimens and produce a drawing that averages their particulars into a useful guide-image. Similarly, pared-down pictograms are used for public signage because they can generalise concepts. Photography is unsuited to this because it is unable generalize. You cannot photograph ‘carness’. You can only photograph a car and the one you photograph may not be the most representative. It’s an interesting problem but perhaps not a big deal. A child is going to see a hell of a lot of representations of cars before its first birthday. It will be able average them just fine. (And it helps that all cars are starting to look the same anyway).

Narrating stories with photographs is not easy, as the large number of clunky failures in art testify. One of the most successful attempts, commercially and photographically, is The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse’s book of his short film that was an international hit in 1956. The book has been in and out of print ever since. Like all international hits its story is simple. A boy of about six (played by Lamorisse’s son) finds a red balloon. It follows him around, plays with him and becomes his friend. A gang of boys get jealous. They hound him and burst his balloon. Suddenly balloons from all over Paris leave their owners’ hands and fly into the air. In a swoop of magic realism they descend on the forlorn boy and carry him off over the rooftops. It is often described as timeless because it is an everyday tale of a child’s relationship to a transitional object, as psychoanalysis would put it. This relationship allows him get from one stage of psycho-social development to another. But what is striking is how in every other respect The Red Balloon is socially very specific. You cannot photograph a timeless story, because photographs will always be full of highly contingent information. The setting of The Red Balloon is 1950s Paris, in the picturesque quarter of Ménilmontant. There is barely anything postwar to be seen in the romantic imagery. Indeed The Red Balloon was one of dozens of illustrated books published in the’50s that cemented a quaintly nostalgic image of Paris for the popular imagination. It’s the one we see in the Parisian photos of Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and many others.

Moreover the antagonism between the boy with the balloon and the gang is a drama of emerging class-consciousness. He is realising he is a petit bourgeois lad experiencing something special on his own, as do the young readers when they identify with him. By contrast the boys in the gang are depicted as if they already know they’re from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ and must stick together. The Red Balloon is only timeless if you think this kind of antagonism is timeless. If my reading seems a little over the top have a look at Jean-Luc Godard’s and Anne Marie Miéville’s video interviews with young French children (France/tour/detour/deux/enfants, 1978). They are asked adult questions – What is money? What is work? What is fair? What is violence? Their faltering responses speak clearly of class ideologies taking root at an early age.

Come Look with Me (1994) by Jean S. Tucker has the subtitle Discovering Photographs with Children. This is unusual. Most children’s books use photographs to discover the world. This one promises to discover photographs. Alas it’s not a child’s guide to trawling flea markets. ‘Discover’ here means a visual training in looking at photographs. The twelve images chosen for the book are intriguing. Many are by famous photographers including Matthew Brady, Helen Levitt, Alfred Eisenstadt, Joel Meyerowitz and Diane Arbus. But the book finds it hard to address the photographs as such. Instead it opts to guide the child into retrieving information from them. Adopting the role of a sociologist is perhaps the easiest option when faced with a photograph. Arbus’ famous shot of twin girls (Identical Twins, Roselle New Jersey, 1967) prompts Tucker to write ‘Even though these sisters look very much alike, they differ in certain ways. Can you see any? If so, what are they? Do their clothes make it easier of more difficult to see the differences? Do you know any identical twins? If so, take their picture and discover the differences between them. If not take pictures of your brothers and sisters and try to find features that are alike and some that are different.’ This is followed by some notes for parents in smaller type. There is no reference to the complexity of Arbus’s imagery that even a child would sense. No mention of the unease or ambivalence many feel looking at her images. Instead Tucker makes the case for Arbus as a compassionate humanist who photographed every one as a unique and special individual, making her choice of an image of identical twins wonderfully confusing.

We are still left with the question of what it means to grasp that a photographic image is photographic. Is the child involved in some ontological revelation about optics and indexical causality? Does recognising a photograph as a photograph mean coming to understand the photographic process or act? At what point does a child realise that photographic images are connected to what they depict in ways that are different to drawings? It’s a simple question but a clear answer proves elusive. Perhaps this is not surprising. Judging by current debates even adults cannot agree on the ontological status of the photograph.

So, children’s photobooks are full of the paradoxes that plague the wider understanding of the medium. This should be embraced. Perhaps those elements of unpredictable wildness, of confusion, that are bound to creep into photographs are what make learning from them,  with them, or about them, worthwhile. And realistic too. After all when we grow up it’s not as if we enter a world of certainty about how to make sense of photographs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Motion Pictures

An essay on the films of artist Mark Lewis.

Mark Lewis’ single take film North Circular (2000) begins as a fixed shot of an empty car park. In the distance is a derelict Modernist office block. After two unnerving minutes of almost photographic stillness the camera lunges forward and leaves the ground, elevated on a crane, gliding towards a grid of broken windows. Three boys are playing inside the building. One boy approaches a table and sets in motion a spinning top. Coming closer, we watch the top, which loses its centrifugal grace and begins to wobble. The instant it skitters to a halt the shot ends with a cut to black, four minutes after it began. Looped for gallery presentation, what seemed at first coldly hermetic begins to open up. Lewis’ film becomes a metaphor for its own mechanism and for the mechanism of history: everything must come to an end – including modernity and its movies – if only to start anew. It is a rare reflection on the nature of modern life and film’s long-standing depiction of its fortunes.

North Circular is also emblematic of the 37 films Lewis has made since the mid-1990s. Many are silent single takes that run the length of a reel of commercially available celluloid film, transferred to DVD for display. They are slow, meditative and rich in allusion. North Circular alludes to, among other things, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Portrait of the Son of M. Godefroy, Jeweller, Watching a Top Spin (1738). The absorbed boy watches a humble top, while the mastery and mystery of the depiction have the potential to absorb the beholder and set the mind spinning. Lewis has spoken of Chardin’s anticipation of art’s great shift from the ‘representation of drama to the drama of representation’.1 The modern art work may depict the most inconsquential moments of everyday life, but the manner in which it does so can be profound.

Lewis’ dramas of filmic representation could be described as ‘motion pictures’. This is an antiquated term (we encounter it perhaps once a year, when the Oscars are handed out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). To think of a film as a motion picture connects it to that premiere of premieres in 1895, when the Lumière brothers screened the first film (Workers Leaving a Factory). The very first frame appeared on the screen as a still picture, set in motion by the deliberately delayed cranking of the projector. Suddenly the static photograph sprang to life. Can we still imagine the uncanny pleasure of seeing pictures in motion for the first time?

If that pleasure lives on anywhere, it is in contemporary art, which seems compelled to spiral back to the beginnings of cinema. Indeed the theorist and curator Raymond Bellour has spoken of a ‘Lumière drive’ in much recent film and video art, with its preference for the long take, simple apparatus and almost forensic attention to duration and movement. These were the joys of the Lumières’ films, most of which were records of minor movements: trains arriving or departing; menial tasks being performed; people walking or setting off on journeys. Nothing much more than this happens in Lewis’ films, but that is enough. Windfarm (2001) is a majestically composed landscape in which dozens of wind turbines rotate at their individual speeds. One is stationary, while another casts its flickering shadow across the mid-ground. The invisible wind that animates the scene also flutters the desert plants in the foreground. Each element in the frame marks time differently, while we observe them all through the elapse of a filmic time made palpable by the tension between motion and stillness. It is typical of Lewis’ ability to fuse the pictorial tradition with the art of movement.

For certain guardians of the pictorial tradition, Jeff Wall among them, the moving image is an intrusion. Movement was what the pictorial arts of painting, sculpture and photography were obliged to find the courage and craft to depict. Film simply mimics movement. This is not to denigrate the moving image (there are few artists to whom it means more than it does to Wall), but it places it outside of art, in the cinema. Lewis is equally committed to the pictorial tradition, but for him it is not so much movement that is the intrusion as sound. Lewis has a deep respect for the silence of the pictorial: most of his films are mute. This, combined with a preference for the long take, allows them to appear as pictures in motion. Several can be shown in a single gallery space, since the silence allows them to remain apart. Unenveloped by sound, the viewer is not recruited into a cinematic spectacle but permitted to remain detached and observant, as though in a gallery of photographs, paintings or sculptures. In this sense Lewis does not use the gallery wall as a screen: he accepts it as a wall.

Over the last two decades the network of filmmakers’ co-ops and independent venues that supported experimental film since the early 1960s has all but collapsed. Film has been granted a new home in the gallery and museum system. Many are ambivalent about this, because gallery spaces are unsuited to the proper presentation of much experimental film: the sound is not ideal, 16 and 35mm projectors are expensive to maintain and invigilate, there is no seating, light leaks, sound leaks and there is no scheduling (unless, of course, the gallery is temporarily turned into a cinema). At the same time moving image work has blossomed from within contemporary art. Thus the exhibition space finds itself home to films made for the cinema and for the gallery.

For Lewis the gallery is not a cinema. Although his work is indebted to cinema’s experimental tradition, notably the Structuralist films of the 1960s and ’70s, he has accepted the established conventions of the gallery. Its indifference to beginnings and endings is essential to his work, as are its unseated viewers, its roots in the pictorial and its convention of silence. Apart from leaving the lights off and mounting projectors on the walls, his art makes no special demands either on the space or the audience. Indeed most of his films last no longer than one might spend contemplating a painting.

 

Lewis has taken a while to arrive at this position, and he doesn’t stick to it dogmatically. His first major works were the Two Impossible Films (1995), structured as wildly ambitious trailers for imaginary biopics of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Comprising graphic title sequences and sharply cut vignettes of keys scenes, they follow Hollywood conventions but at an alienated remove (Hollywood just wouldn’t take on such subject matter today). The Pitch (1998) is a shot of Lewis himself, filmed in a busy railway station. He is delivering to camera a spoken homage to movie extras, cinema’s unsung proletariat. Around him the milling commuters become unwitting extras in his film, far more realistic than any hired hands would be. Lewis ends with a rallying cry to the audience to help him make a big-budget CinemaScope movie, with no plot or stars, which is all about the extras. In a wonderfully neat tautology, the film we have just watched is virtually that. His most recent work, Documentary Film (2008), comprises four nine-minute shots of a tour guide leading us around the labyrinthine corridors of a vast private collection of movie ephemera. The guide’s soft, measured voice soothes the ear while our eyes gawp at a teeming archive verging on chaos. The camera sets out with the stealth of a Stanley Kubrick Steadicam shot, but it soon begins to drift. As the guide walks ahead, the camera lingers over drawers marked ‘Gulag Guns’, boxes of fanzine clippings, spare parts for projectors and bits of Art Deco signage. These films belong to an approach Lewis has referred to as ‘part cinema’. Cinema has been the art with which all the other arts have had to make their peace. For him this has involved breaking cinema down into its grammar, syntax and genre conventions, any of which can be isolated and mobilized to a generate a stripped-down, elemental work.

For all their variety, most of Lewis’ works deploy the long take. Looking back, we can see the long take as one of art cinema’s key responses to the cut and thrust of mainstream films and of spectacle in general. It offers an alternative to distractions allowing the audience instead to dwell with and within the image, trusting it to remain before them. Moreover, the long take is inseparable from the place where it is shot. Its lingering stare explores locality like no other image. All those who have made the long take their own, from Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders to Chantal Akerman, Michael Snow, Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-Liang, have a deep understanding of place. Lewis does too. Many of his works have been made in the places where he has lived, and most were inspired by locations he has known or stumbled across. The results are films that seem to be, among other things, celebrations of particular spaces.

That said, Lewis is from Vancouver and now lives in south London, near the Elephant and Castle. For all their particularity his locations seem to be quite generic too. There are parts of Vancouver and south London that could be just about any modern city. Watching his films, we confront that strange double articulation of place that is becoming so typical of modern life: we are here now, but we could be nowhere or anywhere. More to the point, a similar fate is befalling cinema as it fragments and disperses itself across the face of visual culture. Cinema may be particular to cinemas, but we watch it anywhere these days, from television and laptops to aeroplanes and art galleries. It is a rare artist who can show us the deep connections between the fate of place, the fate of time and the fate of their representations.

1 Mark Lewis ‘Art and Theatre’ in Mark Lewis: Some Near Distance, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain, 2003, pp. 81–7

Many thanks to Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze, who commissioned this essay.

Essay coming soon.

‘The Career of a Photographer, the Career of a Photograph – Bill Brandt’s Art of the Document’

First published in the Tate Liverpool exhibition catalogue Making History: Art and documentary in Britain from 1929-Now, 2006.

Photographs are highly mobile images. Made at particular times, often for particular reasons they can reappear in other circumstances. Some of the most well known photos have had long lives and numerous manifestations – in magazines and books, on gallery walls, postcards and posters. Many are essentially simple, their meaning able to withstand the vagaries of cultural transit. Others are more pliable, yielding to different demands, shifting in meaning, lending themselves to different ends. Some become well known through a single, highly visible use (on television or on the cover of a newspaper). Others accrue their meaning over time.

One of the best known and most reproduced English photographs has had one of the longest and most complex careers of any photograph. Bill Brandt’s Parlourmaid and underparlourmaid ready to serve dinner, as it has come to be known, was taken in 1933. Today it has several roles. At times it is used to stand in for all of Brandt’s work; it is regarded as a milestone in documentary photography and a milestone in art photography; and it is seen as an illustrative document of life in the 1930s.

 

Its inaugural appearance in print came three years after it was taken, in Brandt’s first book The English at Home (1936).  In this little hardback comprising sixty-three photographs, Brandt traversed the country to make a pictorial survey of sorts, moving across the social classes, and between rural life and the urban city. He titled the image Dinner is Served and it appeared opposite an exterior shot titled Regency Homes in Mayfair. The two photographs are similar in form with their cluttered foregrounds, flattened vertical backgrounds and bold interplay of black and white shapes. Through this pairing we might assume that the maids worked in such a Mayfair home, perhaps even one of the homes that is actually shown. With its presentation of the disparities between the wealthy and the working class, Dinner is Served is in keeping with the overall theme of The English At Home. The book’s front cover showed a posh crowd watching the races at Ascot in their fine clothes while the back cover showed a miner’s wife and children in their cramped living quarters. The book contains several similar pairings, including a playground scene in London’s working class East End placed opposite a photo of an upper middle-class children’s party in Kensington, west London. A workmen’s restaurant contrasts with a “Clubmen’s Sanctuary”. (Pointed juxtapositions across the double page had been a staple of the German magazine Der Querschnitt, and the device soon spread through publications across Europe).

In the 1930s Brandt was drawn to the rituals and customs of daily life, with what he saw as the deeply unconscious ways people inhabit their social roles and class positions. For him, to photograph these minutiae was not simply to document but to estrange through a heightened sense of atmosphere, theatrical artifice and a dreamlike sensibility. As an outsider he seemed to see English behaviour as bordering on passive automatism. Before his camera people look self-involved, fixed in their slightly old-fashioned ways, going through the motions. There are very few traces of modernity in Brandt’s work and few depictions of individuals as self-aware agents.

Brandt took a copy of The English at Home to Tom Hopkinson, then the assistant editor at Weekly Illustrated magazine. Hopkinson liked the book and Brandt received commissions. Often these involved the simple class contrasts that had become common in the popular press. His piece ‘Topper versus Bowler’ published in July 1936 was typical. Later Stefan Lorant, editor of Lilliput use Brandt’s images in satirical pairings with other photos. However Brandt’s parlourmaids image is unusual in that something of those social contrasts is at play within its frame and so the image doesn’t lend itself to juxtaposition in the same way.

We see a dressed dinner table of a well-to-do household and the attendant women. The head parlourmaid seems at first glance to express a stern resentment mixed with weariness and professional discipline, but there is a kind of blankness about her too. Her junior has the vacant expression of an adolescent, not yet able to grasp the social forces that will shape her, perhaps. A reading of the image made by the photographer Nigel Henderson is similar but more pointed:

“In his marvellous photograph the two house parlourmaids, prepared to wait at table, have eyes loaded like blunderbusses. Their starched caps and cuffs, their poker backs, mirror the terrible rectitude of learned attitudes. They have the same irritated loathing in defence of caste that shows in portraits of Evelyn Waugh.”[i]

Rhetorically, this is an image of doubles and differences. Its economy of form and content forces us to see in opposites, tapping into and reinforcing a general understanding of the social structures of class and service.  It is as barbed as The English at Home gets. There is nothing overtly angry or revolutionary in the generally restrained tone of Brandt’s book. However it was unusual in bringing different classes into one volume, leaving the viewer to reconcile the social contradictions and inequities. As the historian John Taylor put it, the book’s audience was “expected to see the relationships and differences that built up page after page.”[ii] With its disconcerting, uneasy mood across the social sweep The English at Home demanded a lot from its audience. But the English were not ready for such a book. It made little impact upon publication, and it all but vanished. However, looking back in 1978 Brandt wrote to the book’s publisher Sir Brian Batsford:

“At the time before the war you were the only publisher who was interested in my photographs. It may amuse you to hear that I saw the other day an advertisement in an American magazine in which they offered a second-hand (damaged) edition for $500. In 1936 you sold the book for five shillings and as you may remember after some years it had to be remaindered.”[iii]

In his introduction to The English at Home the critic Raymond Mortimer wrote of the photographer’s fascination with English life being tempered by a distinctive reserve, the result of Brandt being a newcomer to England: “Mr. Brandt shows himself not only to be an artist but an anthropologist. He seems to have wandered about England with the detached curiosity of a man investigating the customs of some remote and unfamiliar tribe.” Brandt was born into wealth in Hamburg and spent time in Switzerland, Austria and France. In Paris he had worked in the studio of Man Ray.  He visited England in 1928 and settled in 1931. Mortimer’s reference to art and anthropology was apt. That mix was at the heart of the poetic realism typical of much British documentary work in the interwar years. Poetic realism often adopted well-established visual devices, clichés even, that flattered the viewer with pictorial artfulness as a means to convince them of the social authority of the imagery.[iv]

But a far more radical clash of art and anthropology could be found in Surrealism. The Surrealists approached the photographic document more dialectically. They understood it as a charged, enigmatic fragment that left as much unknown as it revealed, pushing the viewer back onto their own judgment or imagination. This was an approach with which Brandt was more at ease. He remained unconvinced of the efficacy of the photograph as means of straightforward social description and he was wary of its use within projects of social reform. As he grew older he yielded ever more to his Surrealist impulses but his work from the thirties is an unresolved and elusive mix of methods and intentions that frustrates any simple reading.

Even when it was published, The English at Home was out of step. But in the last few decades it has become regarded as a classic work, not least because it is tempting to read in its mood a premonition. With hindsight we can see the insular English, unable to recognise their own image when they see it, sleepwalking into the nightmare of the second world war, awoken all too close to disaster.

In 1938 Parlourmaid and underparlourmaid ready to serve dinner was published in Verve, the English and French art and literature review edited and published by Tériade, who had previously worked on the art direction of the  Surrealist journal Minotaure . The photograph appeared opposite a reproduction of a painting by Henri Matisse of a dinner table, accompanied by the introduction to an essay on the culture of food by Jean-Paul Sartre.

 In July of the following year the English weekly magazine Picture Post carried a photo-story by Brandt titled ‘The Perfect Parlourmaid’.[v] It comprises a short text and twenty-one photographs. Most of the images were shot freshly for this assignment but a few were drawn from Brandt’s archive of photographs taken in previous years. Each is given a title and caption. Across five pages the piece narrates the activities of a head parlourmaid of a stately home, from 6.30 in the morning to 8 o’clock in the evening. She is the centre of each picture. We see her as she prepares the Master’s bath, starts to clean the silver, arranges the “family’s” breakfast, opens the drawing-room windows, superintends the housemaids, lays the luncheon table, tidies the top of the writing table, presides at the servant’s lunch, opens the door to visitors, waits table at luncheon, lays the table for dinner, writes a letter home, chooses the silver, takes an afternoon off, does a little sewing, settles the details of the menu for dinner, oversees dinner, serves nightcaps in the drawing-room and finally she sees that the house is safe. The ‘day in the life’ story was common in the illustrated press and in documentary film. Brandt himself had adopted it a few months before for Picture Post in a quite similar story about a young teasmaid. It was a comfortable, often conservative format that fitted documentary photography into a popular literary structure.

Parlourmaid and under-parlourmaid ready to serve dinner does not actually feature in the Picture Post photo-essay. We cannot know for sure why this was but looking at the other pictures it seems there may have been something too forceful about this image, too internally organised and self-sufficiently formal. In other words, too ‘whole’. The other photographs in the story are less visually striking and less formally elegant. They adhere more closely to the familiar style of photo-essays where no image pretends to stand alone, each one opening on to the next like a cinematic assembly of narrative fragments. (Indeed, they have a feel typical of film stills and photo-novellas of the period.)

More importantly Picture Post portrays the parlourmaid in a much more complex way than the famous single photograph. In the magazine she is shown via the text and the images to have an ambivalent position in the class structure of the pre-war wealthy home. While in the end belonging “downstairs”, the head-parlourmaid had the confidence and trust of the family. At dinner “she hears every word that is spoken, yet she does not hear it” tells one caption. She is depicted as a trustworthy mediator, privy to the concerns of those upstairs and downstairs. Moreover, she is also shown as a representative of a new professional standing for women. Head-parlourmaids were beginning to replace male butlers, a change that probably prompted the piece to be commissioned. The introduction to the photo-story states “1,332,224 persons are employed in domestic service in England and Wales. There are no separate statistics for parlourmaids, but with house-parlourmaids, they are said to number about 20,000.” In this sense the head-parlourmaid is shown as part of an old class structure but a sign of new trends too. Brandt had first photographed her in 1933, six years before her appearance in Picture Post. Her role must have been even more unusual then. It almost goes without saying that little of this is evident in the famous single image alone which, perhaps by default, we assume shows us a situation typical of its time.

Like many of his apparently documentary images, the Picture Post story was a family affair. It is in fact Bill Brandt himself who is served dinner in the final image. The parlourmaid went by the name of Pratt and she was in charge of the two residences owned by Bill’s uncle, the banker Henry Brandt. One was in Mayfair, the other in Redhill, Surrey, where most of the images for the photo-story were shot.

Brandt frequently made use of friends and family in his photographs and it seems he sensed right away that Pratt would make for an interesting subject. He had made a note about his first meeting with her in 1928: “Fortuite ou nécessaire – qui sait – la rencontre avec Pratt m’était en tous ca fatale” (“Fortuitous or determined – who knows – the meeting with Pratt was in any case a fatal/fateful one for me”).[vi]

In the 1930s and early 1940s Brandt produced many photo stories for Weekly Illustrated, Picture Post and its brother publication Lilliput. Yet he seems to have somewhat stumbled into his work as a photojournalist, and had all but given it up by the mid-1940s. In 1948 he wrote:

“Towards the end of the war, my style changed completely. I have often been asked why this happened. I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it. Besides, my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast.”[vii]

England after the war was still a country steeped in social division, despite the need for co-operation and collective rebuilding. What had gone was the clear visibility of those divisions. As the photographer August Sander had found in Germany after the war, clothing and gesture were no longer so obviously marked by social position or profession. Appearances were leveling out and ‘reading’ people from their surfaces had become much more difficult.

By the 1940s Brandt had done his youthful, energetic work (he was born in 1904). Despite his early “enthusiasm for reportage” he had always struggled with the pictorial form of the photo-essay. His forte was the singular image that worked best alone or in simple juxtaposition. Each of Brandt’s well-known images aims for a tight formal organisation, its content given dramatic charge and dense psychological resonance. As documents they aim unapologetically to exceed visual description. In this sense what served him ill as a photojournalist was just what predisposed his images toward posterity via art. Not surprisingly this preference for the self-contained image is shared by many of the documentarists and photojournalists who pursued their commissioned/paid work as artists.  When we think of Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example, what comes to mind are the great single pictures – his ‘decisive moments’ of pictorial geometry and poetic expression. His photo-essays for magazines are much less celebrated. Similarly the American Walker Evans worked within reportage but with ‘higher’ artistic aims. Picture Post has long since vanished, its undeniably powerful place in British society a dimming memory. An issue of a weekly magazine had a cultural life little longer than its initial seven days. Its impact would be widespread but brief. Brandt’s images have lived on in the more robust histories of photography and art that were taking shape just as he was turning away from photojournalism.

In the 1950s he continued to work professionally but concentrated on the more established genres of portraiture and landscape. In the 1960s there were two major changes in his work and its reception. Both were related to his emerging position in art photography. He began to print his negatives much more harshly, sacrificing the mid-tones for more modish graphic blocks of black and white. The rich descriptive information in his negatives would be subsumed, even obliterated in his new aesthetic. It was a technique that looked backward through German expressionist cinema to art photography’s Pictorialist preference for deep shadows and chiaroscuro, but it also connected with the emerging Pop sensibility.

While his latest photography was pursued more openly as art, notably  his nudes (published as a book in 1960), his expressionism was released anew upon his earlier work. His books from the 1960s are printed with graphic extremes of black and white. The large format anthology Shadow of Light (1966) selected photographs spanning his career with an emphasis on the singular print and Brandt as a single-minded visionary. This was the book that made the case for his position in twentieth century art. The idea of a working photographer is  sidelined in favour of the persona of an intuitive artist, which perhaps he had always wanted to be.

Nevertheless artwork and document are never entirely separate. Parlourmaid and under-parlourmaid ready to serve dinner is included in Shadow of Light, this time opposite a photograph titled In a Kensington drawing room after dinner. The spread echoes that first juxtaposition made in The English at Home thirty years before. Another two images of Pratt from the Picture Post story are also included. In one case an image first captioned by Picture Post as “Taking her afternoon off to visit friends in Putney” reappears in Shadow of Light titled ‘Putney Landlady’. Words could make her stern face mean many things in Brandt’s  slippery use of the social document.

The reprinting of Parlourmaid and under-parlourmaid ready to serve dinner was never too harsh. Brandt knew well that the force of this photograph resided in its details as much as its bold graphic organisation. Shadow of Light even improved on its past reproductions allowing new layers of meaning to emerge.  In this book one can see more clearly that in taking this shot Brandt deliberately focused on the shiny glass and silverware of the dining table. The parlourmaids behind are not so crisp. It may have been that the whole scene could not have been rendered in detail for technical reasons (low light and moving subject matter leading to the necessity of a wide aperture offering a shallow depth of field). Brandt chose to let the faces of the women fall out of focus. We can still see that they avoid eye contact with the camera – as if averting their gaze from their master (they “know their place”). The camera clearly ‘sees’ them, offering them a vital place in the composition but it does not to focus on them.  What is the effect of this? It is difficult to say exactly.  Does Brandt put us in the position of the master of the house, keener to scrutinise the dinner table than connect with the lowly maids in the room? Perhaps, but in doing this he opens up a commentary, a critical distance, on the whole scenario. In being given to see the maids out of focus at a technical level we are by extension given to see them out of focus at a social level too. Their being out of focus becomes the focus of the picture, so to speak. Rarely in the history of medium has this optical effect been deployed to open up such complexity (we might think of Robert Frank’s image taken at a Hollywood premiere, in which a blonde starlet occupying most of the frame is out of focus while the faces in the crowd behind her are clear). While some meanings of  Brandt’s photograph have been buried as the image has moved across time and from documentary to art, new meanings have come to the surface, meanings entirely dependent on art’s demand for superior qualities of reproduction.

In 1969 the American photographer Walker Evans was invited by Louis Kronenberger to select a handful of photographs for the book Quality. Its Image in the Arts. Evans included Parlourmaid and under-parlourmaid ready to serve dinner. “This picture is Brandt striking home (in all senses of the word)” he wrote, “Instantaneous precision is only the beginning of its quality; it proceeds to a lot more; surgical detachment, wit, theater…”[viii] That year, at the age of 65, Brandt had a major show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art which came to London’s Hayward Gallery in 1970. The catalogue reproduced 13 of the show’s 125 images, including Parlourmaid and under-parlourmaid ready to serve dinner, further establishing Brandt and the status of this image.

As with many photographers who were discovered by a wider audience later in life, Brandt found himself regarded as a ‘figure from the past’ and as a contemporary artist at the same time. Layered on top of this was what looked like a shift from documentarist to artist. The reality, as always, was more complicated. At his best Brandt was a ‘documentary artist’ with all the paradoxes and interpretative difficulties that entails. There could never be any simple distinction between his artistry and his documentary description. The two are inextricable and give us no clear answers. And in the end these tensions are at the heart of his work and its success.

 

 

 

 

The End. An essay on Simon Patterson’s ‘Black List’ by David Campany

How does a film come to an end? It may be more complicated than we might presume. Think of a typical experience in your local cinema. The average film actually has a sort of compound ending, made up of several parts that are carefully choreographed. Firstly, the plot of the film will resolve, more or less. The arrival of the words The End will then confirm this for you. Rarely do the words themselves introduce the end – that would be too sudden. In effect, the words are already the second ending. They will appear in the centre of the screen or rise from the bottom. What we see may be accompanied by a change on the film’s soundtrack to what Hollywood calls ‘exit music’. This is music that seems to belong to the film but also seems to come from outside of it, like a commentary or Greek chorus. The end credits will follow.  As the final words of the credits leave the frame a black screen will be left behind. As this is happening curtains will close across the screen. We are never permitted to see the final frame of celluloid pass through the projector’s gate – that would be too ‘material’, too anti-illusionist, and too hard on the eyes. As the curtains close, lights will illuminate the auditorium. This is usually gradual and slow, but not as slow as the dimming of the lights at the beginning of the film. By this time most of the audience will have left their seats, if not the cinema. Perhaps a few will remain for a short while. Finally, if you are still there, an usher will ask you to leave. Which of these micro-events is the ‘real’ ending? All of them and none of them.

A film’s end credits are an example of what Gérard Genette has called a paratext. Paratexts are those supplementary bits and pieces that surround a work. They are not strictly speaking parts of the work but they frame it for us (like the art catalogue essay frames the art, like the gallery frames the art). They give it a place, an order, a set of conventions and boundaries, and to some extent paratexts determine how we approach the work itself. Genette’s interest was neither film nor art but literature. He looked at all the possible paratexts we might find around a typical novel. In near endless detail he considered book jacket design, titles, author’s photographs and biographies, publisher’s logos and notes, graphic design, quotes from reviews, colophons, the ISBN and barcode, prefaces, the contents page, dedications, chapter titles and even the words The End (which few novels have). These are just some of the paratexts within the book itself. To these Genette added others that influence from a distance – publicity, reviews, gossip, recommendation, the author’s reputation and all the rest. So much for a work “speaking for itself”. We can imagine the dozens of paratexts that surround a film.

End credits mark the transition between the film’s celluloid paratext, the paratexts of the auditorium, and the paratexts beyond in the culture at large. The purpose of end credits is twofold. Firstly there is the pragmatic and even ethical need to ‘credit’ those who made the film. Then there is the psychological function. End credits help to smooth the audience’s passage from the world of the film to the world outside. The audience suspends its disbelief in order to immerse itself in the filmic illusion. End credits help to bring the film back to a prosaic level while bringing the viewer from one mental state to another. You cannot see a film as an illusion and as a material object at once. It requires either a sudden jolt or a gradual transition from one to the other. This is why certain strands of avant-garde cinema became obsessed with trying to demystify the illusion, with self-reflexive shock tactics and alienating tricks.  It is also the reason why even the most basic closure of a movie in the cinema is made up of all those incremental transitions. Like sleepwalkers, we must be awoken gently or not at all.

Of course it is not always like this. Sometimes we want to be ‘in’ the film long after it has ended. The film’s closure and our closure are not quite the same thing. We may sit there in denial or reflection, giving our mind and body the time they need to make their own transition. We may read the end credits, out of interest, guilt, respect or merely as something to keep doing with our eyes. We may take the darkness that accompanies end credits as a subdued period of grace (they are invariably white-on-black, not black-on-white, and thus the movie theatre remains darkened at this point).

In his little essay ‘On Leaving the Cinema’ Roland Barthes describes his own body as it moves from the auditorium to the street. It is “a little numb, a little awkward, chilly…sleepy, soft, peaceful: limp as a sleeping cat.” We can pull our body from its seat but we might remain in a dream state. Sometimes we never quite sink into that semi-somnolence to begin with. At the end of a bad film we take our first cue to leave without hesitation.

Conventions are there to be broken. At the close of The Birds Alfred Hitchcock withheld the words The End. Moreover the film’s narrative refuses to resolve. The car containing the lead characters creeps through the menacing mass of birds until the sudden appearance of the Universal Studios logo across the screen. No end credits, no words at all, just a fade to black. And no ‘exit music’. It is disquietingly abrupt. It is not even a cliff-hanger. The film does not end; it just stops. The reassurance of the words The End lies not just in their signalling that the film is over. They provide an official voice letting us know ‘this is how it is’. The non-ending of The Birds is more radical than the notorious ‘bad’ endings of Hollywood movies from the 1970s in which the good guys die.  It is more radical than non- or anti-narrative films. Just as there is no warning that harmless birds will turn on the characters, there is no warning that the filmic conventions will turn on us. Or perhaps there was. The ending echoes the paratextual subversion of the film’s pre-release poster which read: The Birds is Coming.

At the other end of the scale there is the long end credit sequence. The record is currently held by the second in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. No doubt there were fans who watched right to the end. (What is a fan if not someone with a greater appetite for the paratexts than the rest of us?) No doubt many people worked on the film, but at nine and a half minutes it suggests the director was less interested in ‘credits’ than in being sure his film went on much longer than the audience. It says:  ‘The Lord of the Rings is epic – it has more than you can take’.

What about film and video in art? End credits are quite unusual in the gallery. They are not a conventional paratext of the ‘Artist’s Film’. Certainly some make their films alone, justifying art’s stubborn insistence on the singular author-creator. Others opt for looped films without end or beginning, avoiding the problem of credits all together. Or the credits may appear in other places: on an adjacent wall, in a gallery leaflet or in a catalogue.

The monochrome casts a long shadow over painting. Sooner or later every painter must make their peace with it. Painters work in the knowledge that the monochrome is a permanent fixture on the horizon of options.  Once the blank canvas and the black canvas were accepted as art, every painting thereafter would be a painting on a painting. For the weak-hearted the monochrome represents the end of painting. The bold  see in it new beginnings writ large.

Simon Patterson is bold and writes large on his monochromes. And the writing we see here speaks of cinema. The flat blackness his Black-List canvases speaks of art, of modernism in transition between the painterly surface and the industrial surface. The writing – so clearly cinematic – introduces what they used to call a ‘double articulation’: the already ambiguous black rectangles oscillate between canvas and screen. Their size is equally in-between. As ‘movie screens’ they are small, as canvases they are large, alluding to that strange hybrid: ‘home cinema’. Moreover look closely and we see the letters appear to glow, mimicking the bad transfer of big screen celluloid to TV screen.

Hollywood is deeply anxious about endings. If a film gets bad notices in preview screenings it can trigger an eleventh hour crisis. Editors may be called upon to reshape the final minutes. Cast and crew can be obliged to reshoot. The irony is that our memory of films rarely hinges on their endings. Indeed the memory of film follows the dream logic of displacement and condensation. Isolated fragments are recalled, scenes are mentally stitched together out of order, moments and actors from different films may find themselves combined in our minds. Patterson displaces and condenses different names and films. One painting looks like a credit list from Martin Scorsese’s ‘mob story’ Goodfellas. Almost. Scanning the others we may pick up names from the Cold War anti-communist tribunals.  Those witch hunts led to a Hollywood ‘black-list’ of banned writers, directors an actors.

The old Cold War has been replaced by new wars and new paranoid fantasies. They are fuelled in part by the expanded realm of visual representations that now seems to govern political thought. This may be why we are seeing a tentative return to political filmmaking at the edges of Hollywood. It may also be why ‘the political’ has returned equally tentatively to contemporary art. Our political present is haunted in so many ways by history. Our cultural present is similarly haunted, not least by the history of film and the history of art. It makes it all the more pertinent to look at the deep connection between looking back and the return of the repressed. After all, the repressed always returns out of place, just when we think things are over.

 by David Campany, 2006

First published in Simon Patterson: Black List, Haunch of Venison, Zurich/London, 2006

 

‘Photography and the Wind’. First published in Photoworks magazine, Spring/Summer 2006

 

There is a song by Robert Wyatt titled The Sight of the Wind. Backed by whispered sucking and blowing sounds he sings of a lazy afternoon by a beach:

Then we found

Miniature sand dunes

On the concrete of the balcony

And a dead leaf

Zig-zagging

Scratching an urgent message

In Sanskrit

Before hitching a ride

On a frisky gust,

A plastic bag

Caught by a rail

Rearing to go,

In such a flap

We set it free

To join a page of last week’s news

Racing high

And the invisible flying sand

Casting a fast moving shadow

Stroking the beach clean

Wyatt’s subject is the incidental, the almost overlooked. His language is languid but his imagery is crystal clear. Wyatt cannot see the wind. He sees or imagines its effects, evoking them in a way that is quite photographic and quite filmic too. Listening to it recently led me to this reflection on the unique place of wind in matters of stillness and movement.

I begin with cinema and the human face. The stillness of the face in movie close-ups is often offset by wind, usually playing in the hair. It can be made to suggest many things for the character concerned, from stoicism or torment to lack of control or fate. Perhaps the most famous example is the closing shot of Queen Christina (1933). In the title role Greta Garbo stares out impassively from the prow of a ship, an ‘untamable’, adventurous woman. While she’s instructed by the director Rouben Mamoullian to hold herself as still as a photo, the camera approaches. Her hair blows wildly, letting us know she is at the eye of her own emotional storm, sailing onward. Versions of this scenario are numerous.  In Powell & Pressburger’s Back Narcissus (1946) Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) is a troubled nun whose violent passions become murderous. She bursts through a convent door into the final scene and stands immobile for a few seconds. Her habit and veil are gone and she stares wild-eyed and motionless into the camera while her hair dances frenetically in the mountain air. In Jules et Jim (1962) Jeanne Moreau’s character flirts with her boyfriends and the camera. She strikes a series of photographic poses in the breeze and the frame freezes each time. While she poses, the frame halts her unruly hair, mimicking the clichés of informal fashion and portrait photography. In a more complicated case we may remember the mental image carried in the mind of the hero of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a short film comprised almost entirely of stills. His picture resembles a cherished snapshot of a girlfriend taken by a boyfriend and the fleeting nature of their moment together is enhanced by the mess of hair framing her face.

 

Such scenarios depict women more often than men. This is partly because they tend to have more hair, but really it’s to do with their still narrow place in popular film as figures to be looked at, ‘contemplated as enigmas that play with patriarchy’s linear time’, as they used to say when film theory was at its height. There are notable exceptions. Think of Tom Cruise’s gorgeously tossed locks in the adoring close-ups in Vanilla Sky (2001) and Mission Impossible (1996), or Martin Landau’s unkempt short-back-and-sides as he is shot and slowly topples from Mount Rushmore in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959). More recently Zhang Yimou’s Chinese epic Hero (2002) is built around a series of outdoor close-ups. The sublimely still faces of the male and female leads are framed by masses of swirling hair that wouldn’t look out of place in a shampoo ad. Whatever the gender we can see the appeal. Spectators get to contemplate stilled faces, to project their desires and identifications upon them, while the accompanying wind signals time passing.

Wind presents different problems and attractions for still photography. But let us approach the matter indirectly, by way of a grey area between film and photography. For a number of reasons much recent video art has become preoccupied with the radically different natures of movement and stillness. The long take of an almost static world, shot with a locked-off camera is common in contemporary art. It has no apparent gimmicks, just straight, unblinking recording. Time itself becomes the overriding subject. (The artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was once asked about the difference between a photograph of an object and a film of it. “In the film” he replied “time courses through it.”) It is typical of what critic and curator Raymond Bellour calls the ‘Lumière drive’ in time-based art media. He suggests that video art is reworking of the approach of cinema’s inventors the Lumière brothers, with their unedited single reel shots. When Sam Mendes director of American Beauty (1999) wished to describe how ‘sensitive’ boys can be, he showed us a long take made by an adolescent with his video camera. We see a single shot of a plastic bag tossed by the wind along a melancholy side street. It is a brilliant piece of contemporary video art, and a brilliant parody of alot of it too,  showing us the daft assumption in contemporary realism that the more trivial or marginal the subject matter the more ‘authentic’ it must be.

More specifically some video artists have merged static and moving images in the single ‘shot’. They blend the Lumières’ temporal stare with the trickery and filmic magic of their contemporary, Georges Meliès. Interestingly several do this through the depiction of wind. David Claerbout’s projection Untitled (single channel view)(1998-2000) appears to be a still of bored boys in a boring classroom. The only perceptible movement is in the leaves on the shadow of a tree cast on the back wall. Something similar is at play in Victor Burgin’s meditation on time, love and place, Nietzsche’s Paris (1999-2000). A ‘nineteenth century woman’ sits uncannily, photographically still on a park bench while the foliage around her shimmers. Past fact and present memory fuse, or at least trouble each other. This is something like art’s version of Hollywood tumbleweed. The sole purpose of that odd plant, it seems to me, is to bowl through small towns that time forgot as a visual equivalent of a drum roll, creating expectation, promising action.

Let us move a little closer to photography, while staying near cinema. There is an image from the American silent film The Wind (1927) in which the young actress Lillian Gish struggles to dig the ground with a shovel as a dust storm engulfs her. I say ‘Lillian Gish’ rather than the character she plays because I imagine she cannot really be in character under such duress (there are times when acting is more about fortitude than finesse). This is a publicity still, not a frame of the moving film. It was shot on a 10×8 inch plate camera. Having done her takes for the film, she would have had to pose for this and other still shots. For publicity stills make-up and hair are usually groomed to perfection (consummate glamour is their point). Gish’s hair is quite unmanageable, blurring into the dust. And her face is almost invisible. While there is great technical skill in the making of the photograph, it is an image of semi-controlled chaos. Beyond the frame there were wind machines with airplane propellers. After filming Gish told a movie magazine,

“It is, without any doubt, the most unpleasant picture [film] I’ve ever made… the most uncomfortable to do. I don’t mind the heat so much, but working before the wind-machines all the time is nerve-racking. You see, it blows the sand, and we’ve put sawdust down, too, because that is light and sails along in the air, and then there are smoke-pots to make it all look even more dusty. I’ve been fortunate. The flying cinders haven’t gotten into my eyes, although a few have burned my hands.’[i]

Realism in cinema is often the genre requiring the most artifice. Perhaps knowing this is a film still and not a documentary image lifts a burden from the viewer. We are a little freer to enjoy it. That said it still strikes me as an image of real endurance on the part of the actress if not the character. Moreover I am somewhat relieved that it dates from 1927 and not later given the many similar images it anticipates. After all ‘popular memory’ of 1930s America is still dominated by reformist documentary photographs  – ‘Great Depression’ images of the ‘dustbowl’. Arthur Rothstein’s Farmer and Sons Walking in the Face of a Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936, springs most readily to mind.

In his suggestive little essay ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’ (1989) Jeff Wall talked of the way the chaotic forms of water may be captured by the camera, allowing us to see it in new ways. We could say the same about dust and other wind-born material. Think of all those laboratory photos of turbulence patterns. Wall made his own homage to wind in 1993. A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) is a ‘decisive moment’ remade from a set of digitally composed photo-fragments. It gives us the illusion of a too-perfect instant. Wall had models, assistants, wind machines and all the rest. He describes this method as cinematographic, involving ‘preparation and collaboration’ and the suspension (in part at least) of photography’s claims to actuality. A Sudden Gust of Wind is not an obviously ‘digital’ image. Nothing betrays the presence of the technology besides the unusual nature of the result. It conforms to the idea of the singular, coherent photograph while still looking a bit unlikely. But once we know it is a composite many things change, not least our relation to the wind that appears to blow through the picture. This is a curiously airless depiction of wind, especially compared to the equally film still of Lillian Gish. The wind animates Wall’s image at a level more conceptual than actual. What is captures in the first instance is an idea, not a gust of wind.

The central figure in Wall’s picture has long hair but it is tied back and well under control. Unlike Gish he is shown enjoying the disruption in which he is caught. Wall has recounted how the man’s smile was not scripted. It was the actor’s own spontaneous response to the absurd request to pirouette repeatedly while looking up towards his hat and flicking out his coat tails. It is one of very few depictions of levity in Wall’s highly studied oeuvre.

In his book Poetics of Cinema, the filmmaker Raul Ruiz recalled a scene from his own past:

“I remember an image from my native land, Chiloé. In front of my house, wind would move the trees. At a certain point the wind would blow with such regularity that one had the impression the trees were frozen in place, bent over in the same direction. The fishermen moving through the scene stopped short themselves, but in a posture opposite that of the trees.  Complemented by the extravagant positions of the fishermen and the trees, that moment of immobility gave the impression that movement and its opposite were not contradictory. When the wind recovered its irregular rhythms, the immobile image vanished in homage to movement and everything became normal again. But it always could happen that the wind would blow constantly and the landscape would return to immobility, only to spring back into motion some few seconds later. This oscillation gradually gave a new feeling to the scene: when everything moved about one only saw immobility, and vice-versa. I told myself this was a good way to photograph wind.”

This is a memory or a wish for that non-existent state between movement and stillness.

I cannot tell from this intriguing passage whether Ruiz is thinking about making a still photograph or a moving film of his scene (‘to photograph’ could mean either here, I think). Each would be extraordinary in its own way. Or perhaps, like Robert Wyatt’s song, the image of wind may be expressed best in words.

David Campany, 2006.

 

Once More for Stills

First published in Christoph Schifferli, ed., Paper Dreams: the lost art of Hollywood stills photography, Steidl, 2006. 

Almost every film production has a stills photographer. Stills provide the movie with everything from working descriptions of interiors and locations to archival records. And of course they are made for publicity purposes. After the director has a take in the can the actors may be called upon to repeat their performance, ‘once more for stills’. What is performed firstly for the cinematographer is performed again for the photographer.

Movements must be converted into stillness. The transfer is not always as straightforward as it might seem. Actors need to be posers too, but the essence of an unfolding scene may not be achievable in a single shot. The art of film acting is above all the art of movement. Performing for the still camera is not always easy. Stillness may deprive the actor of their métier.

So one task of the stills photographer is to condense and distil a filmic scenario into a readable image. Gestures are altered, body positions are reorganised, and facial expressions are held. The lighting is perfected, wayward hair and clothing are groomed so as not to distract and the camera focus is pin sharp. Caught between cinematic flow and photographic arrest, the film still has a unique pictorial character. It also has a sense of time all its own.

Many of the images gathered here are from 1920s and 30s, when stills were often shot on the largest format available. The eight-by-ten inch camera, always mounted on a tripod, produced negatives of near limitless detail. They were far superior to any blow-up of a 35mm frame of movie footage. Even today individual frames are of low quality. The film grain is coarse and they suffer from motion blur or loss of focus.  The richness and precision of the moving image we see on screen is in part an illusion, conjured by the real time projection. Flashing up, twenty-four frames per second, our visual pleasure derives from a constant tease. Always shifting, always changing, it is forever out of reach. It can never be trapped and held.

The stills photographer can suggest movement but cannot recreate it. The static photograph made on set requires something else. It must satisfy the much more fetishistic desire for fixity. The still photo must hold the stilled gaze.

The images you see here are reproductions – actual size – of original contact prints. The negatives would be placed directly on the photographic paper without enlargement. The result is the richest, most faithful photograph possible. But these pictures were very rarely seen in quite this way. Many were for ‘in-house’ use by the film studios. Others would be reproduced in the popular press as pictures of much poorer quality. Occasionally such prints would have been seen ‘front of house’. Outside the cinema, behind glass, they became tantalising advertisements for the movies.

In the 1920s the silent movie was perfected. The 1930s then saw the introduction of sound. Styles of acting began to change. No longer did physical gestures need to carry everything. A line of spoken dialogue could be enough to energise a scene. The arrival of sound also changed the relation between cinema and the still image. Silent film had a secret affinity with the silence of photographs. Both were mute. Both were voiced by text  – the inter-title, the caption. The ‘talkies’ interrupted that. Just as the arrival of cinema’s movement made photographs look still, the coming of sound emphasised their silence.

In this transition cinema became a truly popular form and a systematic industry. The finest technicians were under contract and the filmic image became a source of beauty, of desire, seduction and spectacle.  The 1920s and 30s were also the time when mass media magazines were dominant. It was here that the film industry and the popular press began their co-dependence.

Magazines carried publicity for the movies – advertisements, portraits, profiles, gossip, previews and reviews. They were also the home of photo-reportage. The crafted film still and reportage might at first strike us as total opposites. After all, cinema had already become an escapist world of fantasy while the subject of reportage was actuality, the real events of the world. But each in its own way had to solve the same two problems: visual clarity and narrative stillness. Film stills achieved it through staging and the use of  large format. Reportage took another route, a picture taking rather than making. It elevated quickness, lightness, mobility and economy of expression. The technical tools were minimal and immersion in the changing world was the key. Motion would be frozen in fleeting frames by solitary photographers working with the Leica camera. First introduced in 1925, it was small, neat and portable. It used the 35mm film that had become standard for the movie industry. Where cinema celebrated movement by recreating it, reportage celebrated by suspending it. Searching for beautiful and symbolic geometry, the photo-reporter would pounce when the world appeared to be organised momentarily as a picture: the ‘decisive moment’. And where the film still staged arrestedness, reportage used fast shutter speeds to freeze it. Both sought to trap fleeting detail and to halt time. And both pursued, as the artist-photographer Jeff Wall put it, ‘the blurred parts of pictures’.

Cinema, photography and the ways they have been understood have changed constantly. But there have been moments when the change has been rapid. For example, in the 1970s the study of cinema was radically transformed. For the first time theorists and academics gained access to Steenbeck viewers. With these tabletop machines movies could be examined in detail – forwards, backwards, sequence by sequence, frame by frame. A good memory for films seen in movie theatres was no longer needed. One could sit alone in a room and ‘possess’ the film. Theorists began to open up the ways that film works on the viewer. They grew almost forensic in their attention to the detail of movies and how we watch them. Serious publications were suddenly filled not with film stills but with grids of actual film frames. Perhaps rightly the staged film still was regarded with suspicion. After all it did not come from the film ‘itself’. It was not strictly speaking a part of the object being studied. So it was disregarded, seen as frivolous, as distracting marginalia.

Today the close analysis of films is open to anyone with a video or DVD player. A movie can be watched as a whole or as a set of bits and pieces – scenes, chapters, freeze frames, alternative edits. To some extent we are all film theorists now. To watch is to analyse. Meanwhile the DVD has given a new life to the film still in the form of ‘picture galleries’ that are frequently included as extras.

The 1970s was also a turning point in the material fate of the film still. Many distribution companies and movie theatre chains dumped great quantities of their photos onto the second hand market. These holdings from long forgotten movies were thought to have little cultural or economic worth. Cut loose from their sources, the glossy prints were left to fend for themselves. Suddenly the photographs and their meanings were up for grabs. New audiences of collectors, film fans, historians and dealers began to scramble for these exotic fragments. With a freshly acquired exchange value the stills were assembled into new collections, with all kinds of archival intention. Some buyers admired the original films from which they came; some liked particular movie stars; some were attracted to the individual styles of particular photographers; some collected by genre, or director, or film studio or period.

Others developed more enigmatic ways to view the film still. They saw in these drifting images more obtuse, less obvious meanings – perhaps a mood, or a feel, an oddness of gesture, a fascinating composition or an unusual situation. There is something intriguing about the gap between the film still and its distant origin. What new sense do we make of an image when we do not know exactly where it has come from? What does it mean if we cannot recognise the film, or the actors, or the genre? What does it mean if the photo barely resembles a movie still at all? The care, the craft, the beauty of the image is robbed of its raison d’etre. It becomes a luxury with no obvious purpose and as a result a new kind of beauty may emerge. In this way the fate of the film still embodies the potential fate of any photograph. Made for one purpose it is easily detached. Outliving its first use it can be reinvented in other times, other places, other cultural moments. The stills assembled here were selected with something of this in mind, as much out of a fascination with photography as with film.

Many artists have been attracted to those chaotic boxes of discarded stills to be found in old bookshops and thrift stores. Three decades ago John Baldessari in the US and John Stezaker in the UK began to work these loose pieces of popular culture into their art. Their experimental collages and juxtapositions were charged with enigmatic, suggestive power. They invented their own ways of seeing, thinking and re-using. To classify his unruly archive Baldessari developed his own A-to-Z . It had little to do with film industry categories. ‘A’ was for for Attack, Animal/Man, Above, Automobiles (left), and Automobiles (right); ‘B’ was for Birds, Building, Below, Barrier, Blood, Bar (man in) Books, Blind, Brew, Betray, Bookending, Bound, Bury, Banal, Bridge, Boat, Birth, Balance, and Bathroom. No stars, no titles, no studios.

Around the same time a revolutionary essay by the writer Roland Barthes appeared in the American magazine Artforum. ‘The Third Meaning: research notes on some Eisenstein stills’ was a kind of revenge upon the power of the moving image. Barthes looked at single frames from movies by the Russian avant-garde filmmaker and found all kinds of new meanings, many of them non-specific and incomplete. Released from the tight grip of motion the arrested frames allowed free rein to the viewer. The eyes and mind could wander and chance upon details beyond the intention of the director or actors. Movement, he felt, ‘tamed’ the image, giving it a tightly defined function. Strip away the movement (and with it the sound, the speech) and we can see that all images are anarchic on some level.

Barthes had used the word ‘photogramme’ in his original French, designating the frame taken from a strip of film. The English term ‘film still’ is of course more ambiguous. It refers both to extracted film frames and to images taken on set with a still camera. While at points they can certainly resemble each other the differences are stark. Each has its own relation to movement, stillness and time. And while the film frame might have a particular enigma, the staged still also has its own mysteries.

By the early 1970s photography had found its way into vanguard art as a form of documentation. Live performances, site-specific sculptural works and constructed environments were recorded by the camera. The resulting images occupied that curious space between the artwork and the functional document. This was a phenomenon already established by the film still, although the connections were rarely made at the time.  But by the end of that decade artists’ awareness of the film still did begin to open up new narrative possibilities. Photography was freed from an over-reliance on painting, literature and theatre. Some artists were able to see in the found film still an instruction manual for new forms of storytelling. Others, such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall were attracted by its compact power. The pictorial conventions to be found in film stills were steeped in association and full of dramatic possibility. No other kind of photograph seemed to imply such a rich world beyond the boundaries of the frame. It could pose so many interesting questions without having to answer them.

This elusiveness could be played with.  Artists constructed imagery that set in motion meanings that could never be fully resolved. No longer confined to ‘posing’ for the camera, figures in art photographs began to ‘act’, or at least pose as if they were acting in isolated scenes. This new art approached ‘narrative’ as an adjective rather than a noun. In other words photographs could be narrative in style without having to be narratives, in the literal sense. Cindy Sherman’s highly influential Untitled Film Stills from the late 1970s were black and white photographs mimicking the look and feel cinema. Her evocative imagery was an endless staging of herself as various female personae from popular and art-house cinema. And for her, the term  ‘film still’ seemed to encompass both the staged photo and the enlarged film frame. Sometimes her camera felt like a stills camera, sometimes it felt like a movie camera.

Art also looked to the film still as a symbol of our fragmentary experience. Modern culture and memory come to us in pieces that are difficult to put together. In the 1970s and 80s Victor Burgin’s allegorical chains of photos and text echoed the suggestive picture/caption conventions typical of movie posters and advertising. By contrast Nan Goldin’s slide work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was an ever-changing sequence of autobiographical images accompanied by a soundtrack of her favourite pop music.

By the 1990s it was clear that just about all art forms were going to have make their peace with a world dominated by the moving image. Once the epitome of speed, photography was now looking decidedly primitive. Its slowness and silence made it attractive in new ways. Yet the allure of movement pervades contemporary art photography.

Until recently much of the photographic art that has engaged with the cinematic has been made on very small budgets. Sherman used thrift store clothing, found locations, a few lights and just herself in front of the camera. Similarly, buying old film stills to re-use them cost next to nothing. But in the last decade the market for art photography has grown beyond expectation. In 1995 a full set of Sherman’s sixty-five Untitled Film Stills sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for a million dollars. For the first time in the history of the medium some contemporary artists have been able to make photographs with budgets more typical of movies. Not since the film stills of the 1920s, 30s and 40s has so much craft, attention and narrative possibility been present in single photographs. The American artist Gregory Crewdson has even recruited Hollywood stars to appear in his spectacular tableaux. Teams of assistants – electricians, props people, make-up people, wardrobe people fuss over the production. The ‘film still without a film’ is now so widespread in photographic art that it has become a genre all its own.

Photography has triumphed in art not by asserting some unique essence but by connecting itself to the widest world of images.  The gallery has become the space to look again at the general field of the photographic, to engage directly or indirectly with a commentary upon the image world at large. Thus the gallery has come to be the host for ‘art versions’ of all the different fields of photography: fashion; the snapshot; the portrait; the medical photograph, the architectural photograph; the passport photo; the archival image; the legal image; kitsch; the topographic image and of course the film still.

The space of art has become either a dissecting table to which social photographs are brought for creative reflection, or as a set upon which they can be reworked. Dissecting table and set: these two metaphors map very well onto what seem to be the two important impulses behind recent photographic art. On the one hand there is the forensic interest in detail – the photograph’s unrivalled but questionable relation to the real. On the other there is the cinematic interest in staging and narrative. Photography in art is somehow obliged to find its relation to visual evidence and to the dominant culture of the moving image. Or both.

From this perspective we can see that the kinds of film still gathered here are the precursors to all this. They have a split character. They float between the forensic and the cinematic. Between fixed evidence and fleeting invention, between the reality of visual fact and the fantasy of contrived fiction. In the film still there is magic in the realism and realism in the magic.

All of this is new and yet not new. In the 1920s Dada artists such as Hannah Höch incorporated film imagery into her subversive collages, along with press photos and adverts. At the same time the Surrealists André Breton and Jacques Vaché would visit the cinemas of Nantes but not to watch whole movies. Whenever boredom took hold or their concentration broke they would simply get up and leave. Slipping out of their seats they would enter another movie house mid-film. For them cinema could be like a daydream. Half controlled, half random, the mind could be set free to wander between disjointed parts. Breton and Vaché became active editors. Viewing became a form of collage, assembling bits and pieces in the mind, on one’s own terms with no regard for origin. To indulge but resist the seduction of narrative was for them a creative and radical intervention.

The story of art in the twentieth century has been played out as a tension between the artwork as fragment and the artwork as unified whole. (Should art show us the disunity of modern life or attempt to piece it together?)  So it is little surprise that the film still has engaged artists in different ways at different times.  However consummate its composition, however assured its realisation, however perfect its technical control, the film still always remains a piece of something else. It is a total image and a partial image at the same time. Full of meaning yet half empty. Fragmentary yet whole.

David Campany, 2005 

Posing, Acting and Photography

by David Campany

First published in Joanna Lowry and David Green, eds., Stillness and Time, Brighton, Photoworks, 2006

A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating an original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.

Milan Kundera Immortality

… I would say that no picture could exist today without having a trace of the film still in it, at least no photograph, but that could also be true of drawings and paintings maybe.

Jeff Wall, ‘Interview/Lecture’ Transcript  vol. 2 no. 3

Defining photography has always been a matter of comparison and contrast, of understanding with and through other media. Across its history, painting, literature, sculpture, theatre and cinema have offered different ways to think about what photography is. Not surprisingly different ideas have emerged. Painting puts the emphasis on questions of description and actuality; literature puts the emphasis on realism and expression; sculpture emphasises qualities of volume and flatness; theatre emphasises the performative; cinema usually emphasises aspects of time and the frame. These ways of thinking are almost unavoidable. We see them in all kinds of discussion of photography, both popular and specialist. They can be illuminating, but they can also be artificial.

First of all, the comparing of media often lapses into ‘technological determinism’, stressing the mechanical facts over social use. Or more frequently, what may seem like technical thinking often turns out to be thoroughly rooted in our always social understanding of media. For example, Christian Metz’ brilliant essay ‘Photography and Fetish’ is an attempt to compare and contrast photography and film.[i] He sees that the two share a technical similarity but each has its own relation to time, framing and the experience of objecthood. But as his argument unfolds it becomes clear that what’s really at stake are not the differences or similarities between film and photography per se, but between film in its popular narrative form and the photograph as domestic snapshot. Film is not inherently narrative or popular, and photography is not inherently domestic nor a snapshot. Metz’ opposition starts off general and technical but soon becomes a particular contrast between quite specific social uses of the still and the moving image. Metz’s approach probably wouldn’t work if the film he chose was Warhol’s Empire, and the photograph a publicity still from an Indiana Jones movie.

Secondly, simple binary contrasts can overlook the fact that crossover between media can be much more radically hybrid. The growing convergence of image technologies and their uses may often appear to make the idea of distinctive mediums seem old fashioned to us. Technologies are overlapping and blurring while the once distinctive uses of media are being eroded (producing ‘infotainment’, ‘docudrama’,  ‘edutainment’, ‘advertorials’ and the like).[ii] That said, such hybrid forms may also to alert us in new ways to specific differences between things. For example, we may grasp ‘cinema’ as a cultural form now scattered across many sites and technologies – television, DVD, video, the internet, mobile phones and posters, as well as actual movie theatres.  But the scattering may attune us to what is particular about each encounter. In this sense the world of ‘multimedia’ is also a world of ‘many media’, and we come to know what media are less by looking for their pure centres than their disputed boundaries.

I want to take as an instance of all of this the recurring fascination shown by photographers and artists with the depiction of narrative gesture in the still image. I have in mind the ‘staged’ photograph as it has developed in the art of recent decades. It provides a useful way to think about the way hybrid practices attune us to differences and similarities.

I begin with a particularly rich binary: acting and posing. Straight away we may associate ‘acting’ with something unfolding or ‘time based’ like cinema or theatre. ‘Posing’ may suggest the stillness of photography or painting. A sharp reader will also be thinking of examples that complicate this: scenes of arrest such as the tableau vivant in theatre, or cinema’s close-up of a face in pensive contemplation, or blurred movement caught but escaping a long exposure, or as we shall see, the narrative gesture performed for the still photograph. Such things might be considered exceptions that prove the rule that acting belongs to movement and posing to stillness, but they are much too common to be mere transgressions. They are a fundamental part of how makers and viewers have come to understand images.

Frame from Federico Fellini’s Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheikh 1952)

Let us first consider a film made over half a century ago. In one of his early comedies Federico Fellini makes a light-hearted but perceptive comment on cinematic movement and the stillness of photography. Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheikh 1952) follows the making of a fumetto (or fotoromanzo). Fumetti were quickly produced photo-stories printed on cheap paper. Read in great number by hungry film fans they were commercial spin-offs from popular film culture in the style of comic books, using sequences of staged photos to tell filmic tales with the help of captions and speech bubbles. (Although never very popular in Britain, they were a staple of post-war popular culture in mainland Europe, particularly Italy and France). In the The White Sheikh we see what looks like a regular film crew setting up on a beach. They are about to shoot a scene in which the gauche and chubby White Sheikh – a pale imitation of the silent movie heart-throb Rudolph Valentino – slays his foe and rescues a ‘damsel in distress’. Fellini shows us a frantic director preparing his ragbag crew while marshalling his second-rate performers who can’t get jobs in the real film industry. They begin to play out the scene.  Suddenly in a comic reversal of cinematic action, the director shouts “Hold it!” The ‘actors’ freeze in their postures, as if in some party game. A cameraman – we now see he is a still photographer- excitedly takes a single shot. The actors spring back into movement and the scene continues. Sometimes they pose themselves as best they can, or they halt when the director yells at them in the flow. Fellini cuts rapidly between the director, the actors and the photographer, presenting it all in his carnivalesque, knockabout style. The slapstick pace may be why, unlike the more self-conscious films that have explored stillness (most of which are ponderously slow films) this one is all but forgotten.[iii]  Nevertheless, the scene is a subtle and nuanced commentary on acting, posing, movement and stillness.

No doubt Fellini gives us an unrealistic account of how a fumetto would actually have been produced. He models the photo shoot too closely on filmmaking, and plays it as a losing battle of arrestedness against the juggernaut of popular cinema’s momentum, as if a photographer were trying to actually photograph during the making of a moving film. In this, Fellini positions photography as a poor relation of cinema. In cultural, economic and artistic terms this was so, even by 1952. The inequality was not something to be thought just at the level of the apparatus (the photograph as a primitive ancestor of film). Fellini was thinking in cultural terms too. Photography was being used to serve and mimic cinema.

Today the fumetto has all but vanished. The viewer’s desire to possess a film in a fixed form is now satisfied by video and DVD. But photography and cinema maintain an uneven relationship. Cinema continues to make use of the still for publicity (I return to this later), while photography in art has moved from the spontaneous freeze of the ‘decisive moment’ (by which photography was first compelled to differentiate itself from cinema in the 1920s and 30s) to the slower narrative tableau that we now see in advertising, documentary photography, fashion and photojournalism, as well as in art.

There is quite a variety of styles of acting, performance and gesture in contemporary photography. The more dramatic follow the precedent set by Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, two artists who turned toward cinematics in the late 1970s. They began to expand what was then the pretty narrow repertoire of human expression and behaviour to be found in art photographs.[iv] Technically and stylistically their pictures were highly accomplished from the start. Departing from the simple use of photography to document performance, Sherman and Wall engaged explicitly with the idea of performance for the image and performance as image.  Their pictures were the result of range of considerations – not just gesture but framing, lighting, costume, make-up, props, location and so on. The craft complex more readily associated with cinema was applied to photography. This was an instance of the ‘reskilling’ that followed the technical reductions of photography in Conceptualism.

Despite its regular dialogues with theatre, photography’s artistic merit was discussed almost exclusively in relation to painting until the 1970s. It was only when it was taken up in relation to cinema that its theatrical condition was examined comprehensively. At its inception cinema inherited the behavioural conventions of theatre and developed its language from there. Cinema acting came into its own with the advent of the psychologically charged close-up. Paradoxically the close-up requires the actor to act as little as possible and tends to be reserved either for moments of reaction or contemplation. This makes the close-up as uncinematic as it is cinematic, and introduces pleasurable delay into the narrative film. As Laura Mulvey has pointed out, the close-up arrests time, absorbs and disperses the attention and solicits from the viewer a gaze that is much more fixing and fetishistic than narratively voyeuristic. It was also through the close-up that the ‘star persona’ was created. Stars are those actors that are more than their performances. They have a sense of ‘being themselves’ as much as playing their part. The phenomenon of the star is a recognition of the artifice of cinema, an acceptance that there can be an excess beyond the part played.

Although it has become central to mainstream film culture, this excess has troubled many filmmakers. The French director Robert Bresson, for example, disliked the idea of actors and preferred non-professionals in his films. As well as avoiding close-ups he avoided the term actor and all its theatrical implications. He liked the idea of the model, a term that recalls the still photograph or the painter’s studio. He had his models drain their performances of theatre, insisting they perform actions over and over in rehearsal. Finally, they could perform before the camera without thought or self-consciousness. Bresson writes in his only book:

            No actors.

            (no directing of actors)

            No parts.

            (no playing of parts)

            No staging.

            But the use of working models taken from life.

            BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors)[v]

Later he notes “Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and thought.” The result was a style of performance in which both everything and nothing looked controlled. The ‘models’ perform with an inner calm and apparent stillness, even when moving. They ‘go through the motions’, as we say. Unfairly described as austere, the restraint in Bresson’s films can seem unapproachable but absorbing too.

Jeff Wall, Volunteer, 1996

Jeff Wall’s photograph Volunteer (1996) may owe a great deal to Robert Bresson. Wall hired a man to clean the floor of a set built to resemble a community centre. The man cleaned it for a month or so. Only after he had become unconscious and automatic in his actions was the image taken. Wall has many different methods to distil a performance or narrative gesture into a photograph, accepting that there is no single solution to the challenge. For Outburst (1986) Wall’s models improvised situations between a tyrant boss and his sweatshop workers. These were recorded on video. The tape was then reviewed and frozen in playback to discover the gestures needed. These were then restaged for the final image. Here is Wall describing the image:

“Outburst is a factory scene in which somebody – could be foreman, could be owner, is just losing his temper entirely. I wanted to depict it as if it was happening instantaneously so, for example, the woman, who is the object of his wrath, is entirely startled by it. I also saw it as a kind of explosion.”[vi]

Jeff Wall, Outburst, 1989

Where Volunteer threatens to become mundane in its flattened performance Outburst threatens to swamp us in dramatic excess, to burst out. But in their gestural language both may strike us as curiously automatic, deadly robotic even.

To become automatic is to enter into blank mimicry. Roger Callois once talked of mimicry possessing an estranging force.[vii] Similarly the philosopher Henri Bergson remarked that humans behaving like automata or robots may be a source of unexpected or uncanny affect, even anxious humour.[viii] So, what is the relation between human gestures that are automatic mimicry and the still camera, which is itself an automatic, mimicking machine? For art, the strangeness of photographed mimicry has often had a critical or analytical impulse. It has been used to distance us from the familiar.  Mass culture and daily life can be re-examined through engagingly awkward images of ‘petrified unrest’, as to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin.

Frame selected by Barthes for his essay ‘The Third Meaning. Some notes on Eisenstein Film Stills’, 1970

Excess in photography is usually thought to be a different matter from excess in cinema. In his essay ‘The Third Meaning. Some notes on Eisenstein Film Stills’ (1970), Roland Barthes looks for something between the two.[ix] He is attracted to enigmatic, unnameable meanings he senses lurking in the details of frames from movies. These meanings are beyond the conscious control of either the actor in the image or the director.  Often for Barthes they derive from those inert things that attach themselves to the flesh and blood of the living body – hair, nails, clothing and teeth. (Indeed, it is hair, nails, teeth and clothing that return in the form of the ‘punctum’ in Barthes’ later book Camera Lucida). These are things that belong neither to life nor to death, attached to the body but not strictly of it. They may express but they are in themselves inanimate, and in the suspended frame their excess significance looms large. For Barthes it is not the acting that interests, rather it is the capacity of the extracted film frame to intervene in the acting, to rub it against its own intentions. The choice of stills from films by Eisenstein was deliberate and quite subversive.  Famously, Eisenstein had championed a very different kind of third meaning. Putting one shot after another in a cinematic sequence could implant a controlled ‘third effect’ in the mind of the viewer.  Much more disturbing, Barthes’ third meaning resides within the single frame that lies within the single shot of the film. Barthes unearths the instability lurking even within the tightly organised imagery and editing (montage) of Russian avant garde film.[x]

In some respects, Barthes’ thinking responds to ways in which photography is an inherently theatrical medium, in the sense that it theatricalizes the world. Everything is alive and unstable in the image and as Barthes rightly noted this aliveness, or polysemy, is usually contained and directed by text, context, voice-over, discourse, ideology. Barthes appeals to the way in which the arrestedness of the single frame poses the world, or more accurately imposes a pose on the world, making it signify in often unlikely ways.  The philosopher (and photographer) Jean Baudrillard suggests that something similar is at work not just in the film frame but in every still photograph:

“The photo is itself, in its happier moments, an acting-out of the world, a way of   grasping the world by expelling it, and without ever giving it a meaning. An  abreacting of the world in its most abstruse or banal forms, an exorcism by the  instant fiction of its representation […]”[xi]

He is right, I think, that photography cannot but transform the world into a world performed or posed. This seems to be so even if it is a world of objects and surfaces. Understandably Baudrillard himself prefers objects to people in his own photographs precisely because there is then no confusion of poses. A photograph for him is performance enough without humans.

Let us return to the “film still”, which is a suitably ambiguous term for an ambiguous kind of image.[xii] It can refer to an actual frame extracted from the moving film, twenty-four of which conventionally make up one second of moving footage. However, it also refers to still photographs, shot by a stills photographer on the film set. For these images the film actors run through things again, “once more for stills”, adjusting their performance slightly so that the scene or situation can be distilled, posed almost, into a fixed image closer to the procedure of the condensed tableau. Both kinds of photo circulate under the name “film still” and both contribute to a film’s publicity, which in turn helps form the social memory of a film. But each has its own very different relation to acting, posing, stillness and movement.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Film Still) #56, 1980

Given this ambiguity what might we make of Cindy Sherman’s first major body of work, the Untitled Film Stills? Nearly three decades on this landmark series still has the power to fascinate. I see the title of the series playing very much on the ambiguity of the term “film still”. Are her images modelled on the film frame or on the restaging of the scene for the still camera? Does Sherman pose or act, or act as if posing, or pose as if acting? Is she posed by the camera, or does she pose for the camera? Or is it something even more complicated? A few years after Sherman made the series the writer Craig Owens pointed out the similarity between posing for a photograph and the nature of photography: “Still, I freeze as if anticipating the still I am about to become; mimicking its opacity, its stillness; inscribing, across the surface of my body, photography’s “mortification” of the flesh”.[xiii] When we pose, we make ourselves into a frozen image, into an anticipatory photograph. More importantly, even if we do not pose, the camera will pose us, perhaps in an unexpected way, without first being able to com-pose ourselves. Hence also the source of the great antagonism between the ‘taken’ and the ‘made’ photograph. By turns political, ethical, aesthetic and intellectual, the antagonism has fundamentally shaped debates, artistic credos and popular understandings of the medium. (It also shaped camera manufacture as it split between lightweight reportage equipment and larger format apparatus for use in studios).  While the taken and the made can never be totally separate – not least because both pose the subject – photos can still seem to flirt with the distinction. The staged photographic tableau often has a coyness in this regard. The sense of theatrical display orients the scene toward the viewer. At the same time the ignoring of the presence of the camera aspires to classical narrative cinema. Still photography always seems to carry with it a sense of frontality, a sense that the world will recognise the presence of the camera and reconcile itself to it.

Craig Owens’ insight about the parallel between posing and the still photo seems straightforward enough. Yet it may not account too well for what is going on in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, nor indeed for the kinds of behaviour that have evolved in the art of staged photography since the 1970s. If posing suggests consonance with the still image, Sherman inaugurated a much richer dissonance. Coming at the end of the 1970s, her performance broke with what we traditionally think of as ‘performance art’ photography. This was usually premised on an authentic, non-fictional, direct relation between subject and camera, in which the image was assumed to function as a transparent document outside of the performance. Sherman’s camera is complicit in the performance, accepting that it would always be at least as responsible for the posing as Sherman herself. This, I think, has been the lasting influence of those early images.

I have always been struck by a certain reserve in Sherman’s work, despite all the performance. Within the endless personae and masquerades there is a remarkable withdrawal and I think it has to do with the face. With a few notable exceptions Sherman’s face remains almost neutral, very limited in its expression. All about her there is theatre, performance and gestures of communication yet her face gives little away. She refuses to act or pose with the face, even when appearing to cry. Instead, the face gravitates towards a mesmerising blankness, an immobility as still and automatic as the image itself. The photography poses and acts, the mise-en-scène poses and acts, but Sherman remains elusive and non-committal. (Interestingly Sherman did use exaggerated faces in her later Fashion series. Fashion models are often required to wear a blank, enigmatic face, so Sherman mocks this with a corny photographic grin). This blankness is not the cliché of the artistic self-portrait (artists, it seems, will never smile when taking their own picture, unless it’s ironic). Instead, Sherman alludes to those cool stars of cinema who rarely smiled and made only minimal gestures.  But Sherman’s blankness for the still image is of a very different order.

The opposite of overt theatricality is often thought to be introspection or absorption. While I was thinking about this I glanced at the image on the cover of my copy of Illuminations, an anthology of Walter Benjamin’s essays. In Gisèle Freund’s portrait from 1939, Benjamin is thinking. Or he acts as if he is thinking. Or he is thinking that he is thinking. Or maybe we think that because he is such a serious thinker he must be thinking. Maybe that is how Benjamin thought he ought to appear. Or perhaps Freund caught him thinking. Or she caught something that looked like thinking. We are so familiar with chin stroking, reticence and spectacles as signs of the intellectual that we do not give it much thought at all. Freund’s camera is so close to Benjamin that he must surely be aware of it. There is nothing surreptitious here. He is either pretending or he is pathologically absorbed. We can relate this to Michael Fried’s distinction between absorption and theatricality in painting.[xiv] Fried saw absorption as a mode in which people are depicted either being or doing something oblivious, or apparently oblivious to the presence of the viewer. While theatricality involves an explicit recognition of the presence of an audience, depictions of absorption solicit a suspension of our disbelief. We imagine we are looking at an unobserved scene. In photography the issue is slightly different since it is quite possible to take a photo of an oblivious person, usually from a distance. Any sense of theatre would stem from the photographic act, the posing of the scene as a scene by the camera. The ‘authentic’ photo of absorption at close range can only be achieved, strictly speaking, either with a hidden camera, or with the subject’s familiarity or indifference. But it is easy to simulate it with the resulting image becoming a theatrical representation of absorption.

I am fairly sure what this image of Benjamin is supposed to mean, but I am less sure what is, or was, really going on. This may be why it holds my interest. I sense mental movement beneath his still face and body. I sense too, a degree of melancholia in the portrait and by extension in Benjamin. Melancholia was a subject central to Benjamin’s thinking and it is a disposition to which he was himself prone.[xv] Melancholia has a very particular relation to photography because it is a state that exists on the threshold of self-performance and withdrawal, between social mask and nothingness, between theatricality and absorption. It is a condition not of the melancholic’s conscious making but it is experienced by them as a conscious condition. The melancholic is trapped in a kind of attenuated self-performance – alone but feeling regulated by the gaze of others, or by his or her own imaginary gaze. Obviously, melancholy can be coded in highly specific ways in photographs, and a number of women photographers of the nineteenth century refined this, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Hawarden. Less closely coded, it slips into a range of moods – pensiveness, listlessness, boredom, fatigue, waiting. These are all states that seem to appeal to contemporary photographers, not least because the actors or models need not do very much. As long as they do little and the photography does a lot – in the form of ‘production values’ – a good result can be achieved. Narrative can still be present if entropic, while the pitfalls of hammy performance – always tempting in the face of stillness – can be avoided. (I have just returned from a seeing an exhibition of Gregory Crewdson’s latest series of cinematic tableaux photographs, Beneath the Roses 2004. At the heart of Crewdson’s spectacular over-production is the same basic human gesture, a sort of exhausted standing or sitting around, slump-shouldered with the vacant face of a daydreamer. The gap between inactive humans amid the over-active photography is so extreme as to be comic, although I’m not sure this is intentional.)

This might also be the reason why our galleries and art magazines have of late been populated with so many photographs of adolescents standing around. The adolescent embodies so many of the current paradoxes of photography: the awkward fit between being and appearance; between surface and depth; between a coherent identity and chaos; between assertion and withdrawal; between irrationality and order; between muteness and communication; between absorption and theatricality; between stasis and narrativity; between posing and acting. More significantly this turn towards ‘slow’, sedimented photography also chimes with the predominance of slowness in contemporary video art. Photography has all but given up the ‘decisive moment’ in order to explore what a moment is; video art has all but given up movement, the better to think what movement is. This is why just about all the current art and writing that explores stillness and movement really only considers slowness and movement. Worked-up tableau photos and decelerated video art partake of the same kind of exploration. But must the speedy always be sacrificed in all this? Need slowness be the only way? At this key point in the histories of art and media, I think it is a question worth posing (and a pose worth questioning).

[i] Christian Metz ‘Photography and Fetish’ October 34, Fall 1985, reprinted in Carol Squiers, ed., The Critical Image: essays on contemporary photography Bay Press 1990.

[ii] The consequences of this are discussed by Victor Burgin in ‘The Image in Pieces: the location of cultural experience’ in Amelunxen, ed., Photography After Photography G+B Arts 1997.

[iii] I am thinking of the post war cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Straub and Huillet, Robert Bresson, Wim Wenders, and Michael Snow (and countless contemporary video artists for whom slowness seems the only possible mark of serious reflection). A full discussion of the often-simplistic equation between slowness and seriousness will have to wait for another day.

[iv] Wall’s dialogue has also been with the history of painterly depiction, and at times this has interested Sherman too

[v] Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer (1975) Quartet 1986, p.4.

[vi] Jeff Wall “My Photographic Production” in Die Photographie in der Zeitgenössischen Kunst Edition Cantz 1990. Extracted in David Campany ed., Art and Photography, Phaidon 2003, 249-250.

[vii] Roger Callois “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, October n. 31 (1984), pp. 17-32.

[viii] Henri Bergson, “The Intensity of Psychic States” in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, George Allen and Unwin (1910). 

[ix] Roland Barthes ‘The Third Meaning. Some notes on Eisenstein Film Stills’ (1970) Image-Music-Text Fontana 1977.

[x] There are echoes here of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘optical unconscious’ which might be brought to the surface of things when the high-speed shutter or close-up lens appear to penetrate the obvious meanings of the world and reveal something deeper, beyond intention. Walter Benjamin ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931) One Way Street, New Left Books, 1979.

[xi] Jean Baudrillard “It is the object which thinks us.” Jean Baudrillard: Photographies, 1985-1998. Hatje Cantz (2000).

[xii] “Film still” is the translation used for Barthes’ French term “photogramme”. In English, “photogramme” has another meaning – a cameraless image made by placing objects directly on to photographic paper before exposure.

[xiii] Craig Owens ‘Posing’ (1985) Beyond Recognition: representation, power and culture, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 201-217.

[xiv] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of Chicago Press 1980.

[xv] On the subject of Benjamin and melancholia see Susan Sontag’s introduction to Benjamin anthology One Way Street, Verso, 1985.

The Red House

 by David Campany

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have photographed marks and drawings made on the walls of a fading pink building now known as the Red House. Situated on the slope of a hill in the town of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdish northern Iraq, it was originally the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist party. It was also a place of incarceration, torture, and often death for many of the oppressed Kurds for whom the cell walls were the most immediate outlet for expression.

In 1991, prompted by the ‘first’ Gulf War, there was a popular uprising supported by Washington. Iraqi Kurds stormed the Red House, freeing the prisoners, massacring up to four hundred Ba’athist officials and members of the security forces. The Ba’athists held out on the rooftop, striking out with mortar shells at the surrounding Kurds. The fighting was particularly savage. The uprising was eventually quashed but the ravaged Red House was deserted soon after. Having fallen into dereliction, the site is still thick with evidence. There are the remains of Ba’athist torture cells, lined with wood to muffle all sound. There is evidence of mass rape. There are hooks in the ceilings for securing prisoners. And beneath great concrete slabs, there are mass graves.

These are not the only records to have survived. That last gruesome battle was filmed by video cameraman Abbas Abdul Razza and it is said that the footage has been used in different ways. Ba’athists show it to their loyalists as a warning of what might happen if they don’t fight. But for many of them it is a portent of a last bloody stand they feel is coming in the present war. The Kurds have used the film as a tool in the rally for independence from Iraq. Thus, the Red House has become a complex and highly contested symbol of Iraq’s relation not just with the Kurds but also with the current occupying forces in the country.

What is the role of photography in such a situation? Does it still have one? It might be argued that as a means of reportage it has been largely displaced by other media. This eclipse was well under way even in the 1960s. The war in Vietnam, so often thought of as the last “photographer’s war,” was perhaps the crossover point between still photography and video imaging. In the decades since, the place of photography has been redefined, from within and without. Two new paths have emerged for photographic reportage.

First there is what we might call the retrospective mode. The now distant “golden era” of photojournalism looms large in the popular imagination, fueled by its commodification (it has been much packaged in coffee-table books and the news media glossies). At the same time, classic photojournalism has been institutionalized in the history of photography, often as the work of heroic men with “signature styles.” Rarely is such work seen as the product or symptom of a particular moment in the intertwined histories of global economy, warfare, and media technology. One of the widespread effects of this has been an emergence of a new brand of photojournalism that is often keener to quote and imitate its own illustrious history than to understand the present.

The second path of reportage photography is what I have called elsewhere “Late Photography.” (“Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on the Problems of ‘Late Photography,’” in David Green, ed., Where is the Photograph? Brighton, Photoworks/Photoforum, 2003). Many photographers have taken the encroachment of other media into their journalistic domain as a challenge and a new possibility. They approach the relative “primitivism” of their means of representation as an advantage, even a virtue. They forgo the medium’s onetime role as documenter of unfolding events, leaving that job to video and television. They opt instead to take as their subject the aftermath of events. In a reversal of Robert Capa’s enjoinder to get close to the action, proximity is often discarded in favor of distance; instead of quick reactions, we have slow deliberation. The jittery snapshot is replaced by a cool, sober, unhurried stare. Lateness takes the place of timeliness. The event itself is passed over for its traces.

Here, reportage becomes forensic and in so doing it openly accepts that it will be an insufficient and partial account of things. Most often it lands upon leftovers and signs of damage, both of which are highly photogenic, though not often easy to decipher. The image becomes a trace of a trace. This is an overtly allegorical mode of photography in which images present themselves as fragments, not wholes, to be read through and against a backdrop of other media representations of warfare and international conflict. Photography becomes a second wave of representation, returning to the scene to look again at what was first understood (or misunderstood) through other media.

Broomberg and Chanarin approach photography as a form of conceptual ethnography. Much of their work has been concerned with the gathering of visual data relating to matters of human behavior, often in places of political tension. Stylistically, they avoid the overtly creative, opting instead for a pared-down, formal approach with no “signature style.” For them, the world is a set of highly coded surfaces or stages of action. The camera is used to isolate these things, to cut them out for interpretation and reflection. Their camera usually looks at the subject head-on and center frame, raising the promise of immediacy or “plain speaking.” Indeed, photographically their images tell us quite a lot about what things look like. However, the apparent straightforwardness of their photographs is offset by the indirect and uncertain status of what it is they select and present to us. Another of their recent projects looks at first glance like the documentation of a war-torn Palestinian settlement. Closer inspection and supplementary knowledge reveal it to be “Chicago,” the mock-up town built in the desert for the training of Israeli troops. What seems to be a clear instance of “Late Photography” turns out to be something else.

At the Red House, many things could have been photographed. And many of them have been, by various parties for various reasons. Broomberg and Chanarin have chosen what at first seems too incidental, too tangential to the history of the building. What are we to make of these marks made by Kurdish prisoners? They are unlikely to be the free and uncensored expression of the oppressed, given the surveillance the prisoners were under. Most of the marks are images, not words. Some are figurative, some incomplete and abstract; others are suggestive but illusive sketches. Some of it seems like fantasy imagery, some of it looks like the bored marking of time. We cannot tell what marks were made when, or in what order. History presents itself as a palimpsest. If you wish you can sense in these photographs echoes of Brassaï’s surrealist images of scratched graffiti from 1930s Paris, or Aaron Siskind’s photographs from the 1950s of daubs and tears made in homage to Abstract Expressionist painting. But this context is more pressing and more fraught. The traces recorded by these photographs may relate to past events in the history of the Red House, but nothing is settled in Iraq yet. While the photographs are fixed forever, these may not be the last marks made on these walls.

David Campany, 2006

 

August Strindberg, Self-portrait, Gersau, Switzerland, 1886

 

‘Art, Science and Speculation: August Strindberg’s photographics’

by David Campany. First published in the TATE Modern catalogue August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer, 2006

 

August Strindberg developed an interest in photography in his boyhood in the 1860s and it continued into his final years.  As a subject it appeared only occasionally in his writings, and there were few moments when his attitudes to photography aligned with his painting.[i] Nevertheless throughout the great changes in his life photography remained significant for him. Whether he was preoccupied with science, art, chemistry, alchemy, philosophy, politics, mysticism or magic he saw in it a means of exploration and expression. His photography was always ambitious, often prophetic and frequently erratic.  It provided Strindberg and now provides his audiences with a parallel position from which to chart the richness of his intellectual and creative work.

Several of Strindberg’s most ambitious projects never came to fruition. Even so they leave us tantalising glimpses of his thinking. For example in 1886 he planned to make a study in words and pictures of rural life in Europe. As an Agrarian Socialist he felt too much attention had been paid to the modern metropolis, overlooking the countryside and its people. The idea was to shoot everyday scenes inconspicuously and then combine the images with his writings. Strindberg was an avid follower of new technology but his engagement with cameras and darkrooms was never less than maverick. Many shots were taken for this pioneering project, particularly in France, but errors were made in the exposure and the development. What might have been a landmark ethnographic work in text and image came to little. Had the project succeeded it may have marked the beginning of Swedish photojournalism.

Strindberg dressed as a Russian nihilist, self-portrait, Gersau, Switzerland,1886.

That same year in Gersau spa, Switzerland, he made a characteristic switch in direction. Learning from past errors he embarked on a series of self-portraits.[ii] Taken either with a cable release or by his wife, Siri von Essen, he made bold and striking photographs showing the different dispositions of the writer-photographer. We see pride, narcissism and a sense of fun but also anxiety, doubt and torment. Where many assumed in photography a power to capture and summarise an individual, Strindberg saw nothing so simple, especially when it came to describing himself. Even by the 1880s the ‘portrait of the author’ had hardened into a stale convention, offering little more than promotion for writers and publishers. Strindberg’s photographic theatre conjures up a creative persona that cannot be grasped with any certainty. In some images he is at his writing desk, staring with great intensity into the camera as if into a mirror or his own soul. In others he is a caring family man at peace with the world; or a folk musician; or a dapper city gent. They have a freshness and sense of play quite out of step with their time, anticipating the complexities of self-image that came to preoccupy twentieth century art and photography. Strindberg’s intention had been to publish the photographs as a companion to the fourth volume of his autobiography, The Author. However, the production costs were prohibitive for such an unprecedented and experimental venture. The individual photographs survive.[iii]

Coming back to Sweden three years later, Strindberg returned to the idea of a photographically illustrated social project, this time a study of Swedish nature. The George Eastman Company had recently launched the first box camera, a hand-held model that could take one hundred images on a roll of film. Excited at the possibilities Strindberg shot extensively. He took full advantage of the small format to make informal and spontaneous images of scenes and people as he encountered them. Again he was ahead of his time. He was also prone get ahead of himself, tripping up on simple technicalities.  On development it seems Strindberg had been shooting not on film but on a roll of photographic paper (which should have been used for making contact prints from negative film).

Even so, it was in many ways his idiosyncratic understanding of the science of photography that led him to see in it unexpected potential and to push it intuitively in new directions. Thus far the medium had offered Strindberg a mode of reporting that could parallel and complement his literary descriptions of the social world around him. In Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century writing and photography became thoroughly intertwined.[iv] Novelists turned to intense description of the minutiae of the everyday, producing a “reality effect” out of the teeming detail of modern life. This way of seeing and thinking suited Strindberg’s poetic attraction to truth which he grasped as a series isolated intensities that flash up somewhere between objective and subjective experience. However toward the close of the 1880s he was falling prey to something of a writer’s block. At the same time his fascination with science was growing, intertwined with a much more fantastic interest in alchemy. Photographic activity continued but it took a very different path. Moving away from the idea of description the medium began to appeal much more as a means of visionary suggestion.

Perhaps the most intriguing of Strindberg’s photographic works are the Celestographs made in 1894. They also provide the clearest overlap with his creative process as a painter. Working on canvas Strindberg would attempt to let representations emerge out of the abstract materiality of paint as he manipulated it. He would coax, interpret and respond as a painting progressed in front of him, incorporating what he called “chance in artistic creation”. The results hovered between form and formlessness, with paint becoming image only to return to paint again in the mind of the viewer. Something similar is at work in the Celestographs. They were made without a lens or indeed any kind of camera. Instead, sensitized photographic plates were faced directly toward the night sky and left to expose. The results were mottled patches and subtle swirls of blues, browns, greens and golds. In all likelihood they were formed from particles in the air and imperfections in the chemical process. Billowing and gaseous they certainly resemble the star-strewn heavens seen through clouds. Yet it is misplaced to say they are ‘of’ the night sky in the familiar sense. Here most of all Strindberg transgressed the very basis of what we think of as a photograph: a direct physical impression of the world through light. Hard proof and factual record give way to a wishful correspondence between image and object. The connection is not physical (what semiotics would call indexical) but implied. Titled Celestographs, what we see could be the heavens, or just a patch of ground, or mere photochemical stains. For Strindberg they were perhaps all these things at once, indivisibly: the infinite heavens and the earth, base material and the lofty representation, fact and  wish. Worldly matter and the stars could resemble each other and be thought as part of the same whole. This certainly went well with Strindberg’s interest in the latest scientific accounts of the universe, which suggested a common origin of all the planets and stars. It also fitted his more mystic, religious belief that “Everything is created in analogies, the inferior with the superior…”

Strindberg’s interest in chemistry grew evermore intensive and more cameraless images followed. He became absorbed by the way crystalline forms seem to grow almost organically. For him the phenomenon expressed a universalism that connected the animate and inanimate worlds as one. He began to cultivate various salt crystals. Brine solutions would be left to evaporate on sheets of glass in the heat or cold. The resulting deposits resembled plant forms reaching out with a living force of their own. These would then be used to make direct contact prints: laying the glass on photographic paper and making an exposure. The photographs were, for Strindberg at least, fixed impressions of mineral “life” as it grows organically.

The idea of close contact came to dominate his understanding of photography. In 1905, with the assistance of the photographer Herman Anderson, Strindberg attempted to make life-size portraits of heads. Initially this was achieved through re-photographing and enlarging existing images. To him an actual size photograph seemed to offer the opportunity for direct communion or spiritual attachment to the sitter. The physical presence and immediacy of the image suggested a relation that would transcend the cold, objectifying effects of the medium.  Scientific discourses saw optics as neutral but Strindberg’s attitude was ambivalent. For him the glass lens of the camera was not so much a portal as a source of distortion and subversion. Rather than a means of allowing the world to make its own image, the lens could be a barrier that broke natural connections.  At times he shot with a rough, uncut lens. He also built his own pinhole camera  (he called it a Wunderkamera) with no lens at all.  With these he attempted to make what he called Psychological Portraits.  These were long exposures during which sitters would be encouraged to be open to mental suggestion from Strindberg. Extending the portrait beyond the instant he felt much more of the inner life and personality of the sitter could be expressed. He made several portraits of himself but also left the studio to make many of sitters in their own homes.

Strindberg’s final photographs were studies of cloud formations made in 1907.  On his morning walks in the city he had seen similar clouds recur in the same places. Gripped still by the idea of correspondence he saw in these phenomena evidence of deeper order and symbolism amidst apparent chaos. Perhaps it was here at last that Strindberg managed to reconcile the ineffable and the poetic with the science of photographic description: however accurate a photograph of a cloud, its meaning will remain open to suggestion. Cloudy.

Strindberg’s photographic speculations barely register in the conventional history of the medium. However this is only because it is a history of the conventional. Nevertheless his work has a place in a counter-story of photography made up of bold beginnings, false starts, intuitive prescience and wild misconception. Certainly it is easy enough to disregard Strindberg’s more outlandish claims and conclusions. It is less easy to dismiss the complex forces that directed his thinking. Rational and irrational, mad and tame, they emerge from the profound questions that are within photography itself: What is the relation between appearance and meaning? Does photography offer impartial knowledge or a surface for imaginary projection? Does it have any value outside of conventional uses?  These are questions that neither art nor science have entirely contained. Strindberg may well have grasped over a hundred years ago that they never would.

Written for the book John Divola: Three Acts, Aperture, 2006 

Once seen, the work of John Divola is not easily forgotten, particularly his photographs made in disused buildings. There is nothing quite like them in the history of the medium. The first one that I came across was from his extensive Vandalism series. It was a square, frontal, black-and-white image of a light grey wall, from which plaster was flaking off in the lower left corner. In the middle was an array of white aerosol spray dots. They looked like vandalism, only prettier. Over the dots was a long white string hooked around pins to make a grid. Halfway between deadpan fact and elusive narrative the scenario looked playful and sinister. The photography was precise and controlled but its intention was mysterious, defying all categories. It was a mixture of police forensics, trophy snapshot of the kind a graffiti artist might take of their work, and a totem from some kind of secular ritual.

In its oddity the image resonated with other experiences. Around the same time I had chanced upon an old book about police detection. PhotoCrimes presented the reader with the evidence of twenty-six assorted misdemeanors. They were not real incidents but reconstructions. The reader was supposed to examine the evidence and solve each crime, but what really fascinated was the process of staging. How had these images been made? How could you make a photo look like an image of a crime scene? Divola’s photograph also recalled a travelling police display that once came to my town. A flatbed truck arrived with a big, rectangular box on the back. Inside was a set built to resemble a domestic bedroom. We citizens filed in, stood along one wall and stared at a sea of broken furniture, scattered clothes, and graffiti. Dotted around the room were handwritten signs, all facing us: Did the villains get in through this window? Was this jewellery box left in a visible place? Was this door locked? It was civic crime prevention: we were to imagine this was our home. It didn’t really work. The message was lost in the bizarre spectacle. There were too many other questions: Did the police vandalise the room themselves? Did they enjoy it? Did they feel destructive or creative? How carefully were things arranged? Did they improvise? Did they base it on a real room? On photographs? Did they have to reinstall it when it moved to the next town? If so, did they get better at it over time?

These kinds of association may seem to have little to do with advanced art, but they are not unusual. The visceral quality of Divola’s Vandalism photographs connects readily to a world of property, transgression, and ritual — and out of this flows their artistic complexity.

John Divola occupies a unique place in the art of the last few decades. The series collected here [in Divola’s book Three Acts] were made in the 1970s, a period of redefinition when the very terms of visual art and photography were transformed. At the centre of the change was a widespread shift in art from what we might call the pictorial, or picture making, towards the performative or event making. At an extreme some artists gave up making traditional objects altogether to perform instead with their bodies. Others turned toward using photography because it seemed not to be an object at all, certainly not an object with the heavy baggage of painting or sculpture. Mainly, it meant artists leaning toward ways of working that emphasised process. Art took the form of outcomes resulting from open-ended experimentation, improvisation, and hypothesis. And it often assumed the look of collected data – marks, remnants, results, traces.

Being the preeminent medium for documents, photography was pivotal to this, but its role was fraught with contradiction. On one level all art was reliant upon photography to reproduce and publicize it. This was especially the case for the new art forms that broke out to explore the possibilities of installation art, Land art, and performance art. Work could be made anywhere, anytime, in any form and audiences could come to know it via images appearing in magazines, journals, and catalogues. Art was free to move into an “expanded field” with an expanded art press to follow it. Yet,at the very same time, the idea of the photograph as a neutral transmitter was being teased apart. Artists were fabricating things to be photographed; or undermining the image with contradictory captions; or seeing the photograph as no more automatically realist than words or paintings.

Divola took his own intuitive line through the tangle. In producing these series he was certainly involved in doing things and making things in places outside the studio, which he then photographed, engaging with key aspects of installation, Land art, and performance art. However, while those forms relied on the supposed transparency of photography, Divola also made a comprehensive inquiry into its nature and conventions.

There was no better mode in which to test the limits of the document than the forensic photograph. This after all is a type of image backed by the full institutional force of the state. It is invested with unparalleled authority and often seen as proof. The archetypal forensic image is a photograph of a floor or ground taken from eye level. A downward tilt of vision turns incidental details on a receding plane into signs for our attention. The lowered angle also emphasises the body of the photographer or viewer as a present witness. It places us at a threshold between the closure of an event that has taken place and the opening of its investigation. Divola made a number photographs that take this form. At times his camera stares down at surfaces covered with scattered debris and arranged patterns.

Looking back it is surprising just how often this visual trope recurred across the art of the late 1960s and 1970s. We see it for example in Bruce Nauman’s documentation of temporary sculptural forms such as Flour Arrangements (1966). It is in Edward Ruscha’s Royal Road Test (1971), his parodic investigation of the wreck of a typewriter hurled from his moving car. Lewis Baltz made use of it in his series of cool topographic photographs of suburban building sites such as Nevada (1977). It opens Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence (1977), their book of puzzling photos gathered from scientific archives. Ana Mendieta’s Silhueta series (1978) of her own bodily outline adopts this gaze as do Mac Adams’ extensive Mysteries of the late 1970s and 1980s, his enigmatic photo stories set in motion by apparently incidental traces. This was a period of art that is thought to have had no unifying style. The widespread anti-formalism of the time almost went out of its way to refute style. So the prevalence of this sort of “paraforensic” image is all the more telling. Its look is so artless that it lends itself to all kinds of art interested in the idea of the trace.

In typical forensics, the “event” has already happened and the photograph follows. The photographer arrives at the scene late, so to speak. Divola’s series Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone (LAX NAZ) just about obeys this rule. The zone in question was a swathe of houses bought by the airport to meet noise pollution targets. Decommissioned as homes they stood empty. Divola began to photograph them, documenting the evidence of the inevitable break-ins. His photography is cool, formal, and conventional. By contrast in the Vandalism and Zuma series many of the actions recorded are of Divola’s own making. In these, he commits what for forensics is the cardinal sin. Where the police photographer responds dispassionately to what is there, recording without touching, Divola acts as mark maker, arranger and orchestrator, as well as recorder. He responds as a photographer to his own actions as a painter and sculptor.

Making art out of ruins has been a part of culture at least since the Dadaists worked the flotsam of modern life into their collages. And photographing ruins is as old as the medium itself. Cameras seem drawn to them. Divola’s engagement with detritus is altogether more complicated. To begin with he erases the boundary between making and breaking. His interventions in vacant spaces complement and extend what we know and expect of vandalism. He works with the vandal’s tools and his simple language (if we can call it a language), refining what constitutes the sprayed mark, the daub, the tear, and the cut. Mindless or repetitive destruction gives way to artful fabrication but slips back again. Objects and surfaces appear to move between intention and carelessness. Between action and entropy. Between destructive creativity and creative destruction. Divola reveals and  revels in the hidden craft of ruination. His photos turn damage into an object of aesthetic contemplation without ever letting us forget its destructive character in the social world.

Divola works in half-abandoned spaces with the intense play and experimentation we associate with the studio-based artist—but we are reminded that the buildings are not his private domain. His presence and his means are fugitive, just as the spaces themselves are in transition from one social use to another. His images are records of past events, documents of things done before the photograph was taken. However, each one is also an event in itself. This comes across in different ways. Firstly, there is the use of series. Each image is a pause in an improvised situation, coming after what has been done and before what is to come. The image is not a final report but provisional marker. Secondly, Divola frequently welcomes the way the camera image transforms three-dimensional space into graphic flatness. The classical forensic image is careful not to draw too much attention to itself but Divola shoots in ways that allow his marks to belong both to the real space and to the flatness of the photograph. The grids, dots, and curves can often appear to hover between the space depicted and the surface of the image. The effect is often estranging, leaving photography itself hovering, somewhere between fact and fiction. We are lured by the promise of forensic objectivity but reminded that photography is always a transformative act. Lastly, the photographs may become events through another kind of hovering: some of Divola’s strangest images include found magazines or bits of fabric hurled into the air and caught by electronic flash.

Forensic photography emphasises the camera’s lens through which passes the stilled world. It tells us the event is over and can be gazed upon at a remove. But nothing signals an event like an instantaneous exposure or a flash strobe that freezes movement. Here the burst of light and the shutter are emphasised along with the lens. The coolness of a lens gives us a slice of space, while a shutter or flash cuts a slice of time. Divola’s imagery rarely settles for one or the other. He is not interested in anything clear-cut.

With its heightened use of color and modern epic sensibility, the final Zuma series brought together all of Divola’s experiments while adding new ones. He photographed one deserted beach house over several months. The images record his own presence mingled with the ongoing vandalism by other anonymous visitors. In its technical virtuosity it can be compared with Jeff Wall’s early lightbox tableau The Destroyed Room (1978). Both are carefully staged and equally ostentatious scenes of break-ins. For both, the effects of light and color are central. In Wall’s back-lit transparency the image is illuminated from within, lending artistic intention to every bit of the planned chaos recorded by the camera. In the Zuma pictures, the scenes are given to be recorded through the artifice of direct flash. The photographic equipment emits the light and then records its consequences. Light is thrown out to the scene and bounces back off its surfaces to be caught by the camera. The effect in Divola’s hands is quite visionary, almost as if we are projecting as much as receiving what we see. Wall offers us his scene while pointing to its artifice by showing his studio space beyond the three walls of his set. Divola conjures something similar through the use of light. The flash is balanced with the saturated sunrises and sunsets we see through the windows of the beach house. Where Wall’s studio acts as the real space, Divola’s ambiguous skies resemble artificial backdrops.

We can approach this hybrid blending of signs in another way. Consider how photographic realism seems to hinge on incidental detail. What often guarantees the authenticity of a photograph is the way that the camera automatically records all that is before it, indifferent to what is significant or insignificant. It presents a world in which there is a background of information beyond the photographer’s intention. For example, you might photograph your lover on a beach but it will be the additional presence of the infinitesimal sand and the fine chaos of the clouds that will help render it factual. The secondary information guarantees the primary. If for some reason we sense that the unintentional information might actually be arranged for the image then its realism begins to crumble. We are not sure how to take it. Everything in the image is equalised and no hierarchy can be made between things. Many of Divola’s photographs dramatise this. What in his frames is casual vandalism and what is artful construct? What is natural dilapidation and what is intervention? What is decay and what is creation? What is captured automatically by the camera and what is artfully displayed for it? Nothing can be taken for granted. Every square millimetre of the picture surface is charged, oscillating wildly between passive and active.

So making sense of these photographs we have to move between different kinds of creativity, just as the artist did when making them. Divola the impromptu sculptor vies with Divola the abstract graffitist. Divola the performance artist vies with Divola the photographer. And even Divola the photographer swings between dispassionate observer and formalist innovator.I scratch my head and wonder to which artists the Divola of these series might be compared. Perhaps, Fischli & Weiss crossed with Jean-Michel Basquiat crossed with Vito Acconci crossed with Weegee crossed with Lee Friedlander. There are few bodies of photography as hyrid or restless. Moreover, in their tireless attention to the conditional status of photographic meaning, they show us that the medium itself is fundamentally hybrid and restless.

All photographs are on some level caught between static fact and mobile drama. This may explain why forensics, with its inherent mix of theatre and cold observation often strikes us as the medium’s “truest” calling. We can discern this very clearly in other works by Divola in which the forensic has taken a highly theatrical detour into cinema. In 1979 he made an extended series of photographs on MGM Studio’s New York City back-lot in Culver City, California. Like Edward Weston’s shots of MGM lots made in 1939, Divola used the still camera to show us the fine line in cinema between actuality and artifice. He documented flimsy facades, derelict cars and fake boulders. The Hollywood “dream factory” arrested and denuded. Moreover, the back-lot itself was falling into ruin and was demolished shortly after Divola photographed it. We cannot tell the difference between ruin and imitation ruin.

In 1995, the forensic became more explicit for Divola. Rather than taking photographs he became a researcher, gathering together archival stills from Warner Brother’s movie productions of the 1930s.  Not film stills as such, these were continuity stills – high quality shots taken of sets between takes to document the place of objects and décor. Divola grouped his finds according to type rather than movie title. Along with Hallways and Mirrors there is a series titled Evidence of Aggression. Here the remnants of pretend fights or fits of fictional rage are seen scattered around the room sets. Once again the line between accident and intention is obscured.

Throughout his career, Divola has had a long- standing commitment to photography, but it is photography defined expansively and socially rather than narrowly and formally. His imagery has not been shaped by the anti-formalism that characterised much of the work by “artists using photography” in the 1960s and 1970s with its embrace of the deskilled snapping of the amateur. In these series, Divola meditates on ruins but not through the ruination of photographic craft. There is a technical mastery at work here that is fundamental to the meaning of the photographs. By the same token, he is not seduced by precious formalism of the entrenched “art photographer.” For him, photography is first a social sign, not a private one, and his technical grasp is not a matter of personalised “style.” He is neither an artist using photography nor an art photographer.  Perhaps now, as the last traces of that once very real distinction begin to disappear, we can begin to see this work for what it was and what it is.

The profile of photography in contemporary art is now higher than it has ever been. But the rise has not been without a certain cost. Much of the photography that was made in the years just before the art market really began to take hold has been overlooked, if not forgotten. However, the sheer experimental will and the radical impulses that fuelled so much photographic work of the 1970s in North America and Europe is making itself felt once again. While Divola continues to unfold his interests in new projects, his older work is being discovered by new audiences for the first time. And like many others whose photography was first formed in that decade, Divola finds himself in a double position—as a contemporary artist and as a “figure from the recent past.” For someone whose work has always played with cause and effect, expectation and construction, this has a satisfying irony.

In William Henry Fox Talbot’s early treatise on photography The Pencil of Nature there is a humble image of a piece fabric. Talbot placed black lace directly on to sensitised paper and exposed it to the sun. The lace appears white on a dark background. It doesn’t look like a negative, since we are as familiar with white lace as black. It doesn’t look like a cameraless photogram either since the flat fabric is so well rendered by the simple technique.

Talbot’s term for the process was ‘photogenic drawing’, connecting it to the idea that the photographic image was a semi-automatic stencil of the world. His image is simple and fascinating. The not-yet standard mechanism of photography takes as its subject a piece of not-quite standardised, handmade lace. It is scientific, distant and cool. It is also intimate, close and tactile. In this it embodies the paradoxes that run right through thinking about photography from its beginnings to the present. A photograph is all about surface yet it appears to have no surface. It is formal and systematic yet it brings out the particular in things. It is stoic and removed yet the light that touches the object then touches a receptive surface – photographic paper first, then the retina.

 (detail)

Helen Sear has been making photographic work as an artist for twenty years. She is one of photography’s foremost innovators. For her the medium is one of magic as much as realism. It is never pure, fixed or entirely knowable. Each new series presents a new set of challenges that offer up her fascination with craft and our habits of looking. Her output is remarkably varied but much of it makes a virtue of the qualities we see Talbot’s picture. Questions of touch and the experience of surface are central (as they are for many painters moving toward photography). Moreover the series Inside the View (2005), also involves the presence and absence of lace. It is a suite of combined images which on one level contribute to the long history of montage. In each work a portrait and a landscape are brought together to generate a third meaning. Sear also produces a third image out of this method. The two photos are combined on a computer screen in Photoshop. Onto the image of a woman’s head, Sear ‘draws’ a lace-like network of lines in which emerges a photo of a landscape. In painting and drawing the line is usually there to form an image. In Sear’s work the line is the image. The network becomes a veil to look at and to look through. It is difficult to tell if it is really ‘there’.

The recent influence of painting on photography has been dominated by a kind of classical imitation. Photographic artists and documentary photographers in particular seem to wish to quote from painting, often in pursuit of credibility or knowingness. Think of the ex-battlefield photographed like a Constable or a Lorrain; or the inner city portrait posed like a Vermeer or a Chardin; or moments of human uncertainty alluding to tableaux of the everyday by Manet or Hopper. Sear shows there are other relations photography may take up with the painterly. Certainly she engages with the pictorial, with genres as they have been handed down and modified.

Sear’s painterliness emerges in the image as a worked surface. It is often thought that photography lacks surface, that its picture plane is intangible. This is why pictorialist photographers in the early part of the last century wanted to work with hand brushed emulsions. It is also the reason why the modernists that came after played off the sheen of their prints against an obsessing over texture in the subject matter  (think of the crumbling walls, sand, bark and skin in the work of Edward Weston, for example). Sear is interested in touch and surface but in a different mode.

Inside the View involves two screens. Firstly there is the computer screen on which the lace effect is drawn. The hand doesn’t touch the screen directly. Sear draws by way of a pen on an electronic tablet. It is an abstracted mode of drawing with which we are all becoming familiar now. We move our hand in one place – using a mouse, say, – and its indexical effect is registered somewhere else. Hand and eye work together. Making Inside the View involved painstaking, immersive work that demanded an inner intensity. Perhaps this is why Sear takes as her subject women contemplating landscapes. A landscape is always in some sense a mindscape, not least when we are ‘immersed’ in it. But the women we see are not strictly ‘in’ these spaces. Sear has combined images to give that impression. The effect is seen spatially but constructed on our mental screen, so to speak. It is we who are ‘inside the view’.

____________

 

Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp: Dust Breeding 1920

David Campany 

It’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust. Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Photographs sometimes work upon us very slowly, their resonance building over time. For a decade or so I have circled around one photograph more than any other. When I first saw it – I cannot even remember the occasion – it made no immediate impression on me. There was no flash of recognition, no deep connection.  But it is an image with which I have had many encounters in various settings and it has crept up on me.

Elévage de Poussière (Dust Breeding) is attributed to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. It has had an unusual life, and its origins were also unusual. In 1920 a very young Man Ray was asked by Katherine Dreier to photograph some of her art collection. She was planning to set up a new museum. It was not something Man Ray had done before and he was far from enthusiastic about the task. ‘The thought of photographing the work of others was repugnant to me, beneath my dignity as an artist’, he declared in his memoir. But he was keen to please and he set a date.

In the meantime he went to the studio of Marcel Duchamp on New York’s Broadway, where a sheet of glass, covered in dust, rested on saw-horses. Duchamp had been cultivating the dust as a stage in the making of what later became his great work La Mariée mise nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even) (commonly known as The Large Glass, 1915–23). The dust would eventually be wiped away from all but a key area, where it was fixed in place with clear varnish. When Man Ray told Duchamp about Dreier’s request, Duchamp suggested he practice on the dust. His camera was duly positioned, and the daylight was supplemented with a bare electric bulb. The shutter was opened and the two of them went for lunch. After about an hour they returned and closed the shutter. Man Ray developed the sheet of film that night. ‘The negative was perfect’, he stated. ‘I was confident of the success of any future assignments.’ The image bears little resemblance to the functional photography of paintings or sculptures that we associate with inventories and catalogues, and it can hardly be thought of as a technical test or apprenticeship. It is too odd, too singular.

The original negative shows the edge of the dusty glass and a little of the studio beyond. Man Ray cropped it down, removing the spatial certainty, letting it become a separate world. The first publication of the image played on this. In the October 1922 issue of the French Surrealist journal Littérature it is attributed to Man Ray and accompanies an article about Duchamp written by André Breton. This is early in the history of Surrealism, so early that it may make Dust Breeding the first Surrealist photograph. It was captioned Voici le domain de Rrose Sélavy. Comme il est aride – comme il est fertile / comme il est joyeux – comme il est triste! Vue prise en aéroplane Par Man Ray 1921 (Here is the domain of Rrose Sélavy. 1921. How arid it is – how fertile it is / how joyous it is – how sad it is! View from an aeroplane By Man Ray) Aerial reconnaisance photos had entered the popular imagination with World War I. Rrose Sélavy was a more obscure reference. She was the female figure invented by Duchamp as a second persona, muddying any idea of the singular, masculine artist. Already the photograph had become doubly ambiguous. Dusty glass alternated with an aerial view; Man Ray alternated with Duchamp and his alter ego.

Dust, like water, is an enemy of photography. It might be photogenic but it needs to be kept at a distance. Dust is a trace – a trace of mortality. A photograph is a trace of what was before the camera. So a photograph of dust is a trace of a trace. In this sense Dust Breeding emphasises what is known in semiotics as the photographic ‘index’. Traditionally defined, an index is a sign caused by its object. For example smoke is an index of fire because it is the burning wood; a footprint in mud is an index of the foot. Similarly, light bouncing off a object registers on a light-sensitive surface, and thus the photograph obtained is the index of that light. However a photograph is an index in another sense too. It is an indication of the presence of a camera or vantage point. Looking at the Man Ray/Duchamp image we may be unsure what we are looking at and from where we are looking. So we turn to the title. ‘Dust breeding’ gives us information. It describes the stuff in the picture and implies the distance of the lens from the object. ‘View from an aeroplane’ gives information too, but it works differently. It indicates a false vantage point and leaves it to us to deduce what the subject matter might be.

Micro or macro Dust Breeding resembles, to borrow the French title of another Man Ray image, a terrain vague. It looks like a waste ground or disused area, perhaps the overlooked edge of a city. It is an indoor image alluding to the outside, particularly when titled View from an Aeroplane. Modern Europe saw the terrain vague as a site of anxiety: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ warned T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland. In North America there is more terrain vague than anything else. There, it appears more as a motif of boredom or entropy. Dust has a place in both schemes. It is abject, liminal, bodily stuff that threatens the modern and rational order. It is also a sign of dead time passing. The photograph was made in America, but the dust had been gathering in Duchamp’s absence while he was staying in his native France. The American Man Ray made the picture and took it to Europe, where it appeared in print in the different spatial order of Paris. All of this may have been on his mind because around that time he made another image looking down at detritus which he called Transatlantic.

As a terrain vague the photograph bears a striking resemblance to an image made by another European in America. There is a famous scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest 1959 in which a desolate plain is observed from above. It is timeless and airless. There is no horizon, just a single road across the frame. A bus drops off a solitary man in the expanse. Out of a blank sky an aeroplane arrives to terrorise him. It sprays him with toxic dust meant for crops. ‘Every place’, said Hitchcock, ‘is potentially a scene of a crime no matter how harmless or meaningless it appears to be’. For him, American space was as anxious as it was entropic and this is what makes the scene so tense. Like Dust Breeding it is all about the uncertainties of identity: Cary Grant, born Archibald Leach, plays the advertising executive Roger Thornhill, who is mistaken for a spy called George Caplan.

In 1935 the photograph appeared once more, this time as a backdrop on the cover of the Surrealist journal Minotaure. The main motif was one of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs – his circular discs with spiral designs intended to spin for optical effect. Dust Breeding can be glimpsed behind. It is not given a title or even mentioned. Ten years later it was again used as a backdrop, this time behind the poem Flag of Ecstasy by Charles Henri Ford, in an issue of the American magazine View,dedicated to Duchamp. Ford’s verse praises Duchamp to the heavens, elevating him rather grandly above earthly art: ‘Over the towers of autoerotic honey; Over the dungeons of homicidal drives…’ On the page the words float over the photograph’s aerial view. Both publications carried André Breton’s account of Duchamp’s The Large Glass. This was the essay that began the securing of Duchamp’s erratic reputation, but it was not all Breton’s thinking; he drew on Duchamp’s own cryptic notes issued in 1934 as the Green Box. This was a loose collection of facsimiles of hand-written fragments and drawings. Also included was a reproduction of Dust Breeding. Much more than a supplement or set of anecdotes the Green Box is an integral part of The Large Glass. No clear separation can be made between the art work and its commentary, such is its enigma and complexity. Together they are a machine for generating meanings. In 1949 Duchamp was clear: The Large Glass ‘should be accompanied by a text that is as amorphous as possible and never takes on a definitive shape. And the two elements, the glass for the eye and the text for the ear and the mind should not merely complement each other but should above all each prevent the other from forming an aesthetic-visual unity.’ In Littérature, Minotuare, View and the Green Box, Dust Breeding is embedded in a dense weave of images, thoughts, ideas and associations. There is no tugging it free to make sense of it on its own terms. To get out you have to go in deeper.

For all its indeterminacy Dust Breeding has a realistic dimension too, rooted in the base materialism of dust. In conventional accounts of photographic realism it is the overlooked, the incidental details that underwrite its claim to truth. Roland Barthes called this the ‘reality effect’ – the camera exposure takes in the wanted and the unwanted all at once, without discrimination. The machinic indifference of the optical image, its ability to ‘see’ without hierarchy, was what distinguished photography from the outset. Indeed dust, that lowly, almost invisible substance, crops up in the earliest commentaries on the medium. In 1839 the Englishman Sir John Robison said of Fox Talbot’s first photographs: ‘A crack in plaster, a withered leaf lying on a projecting cornice, or an accumulation of dust in a hollow molding of a distant building, when they exist in the original, are faithfully copied in these wonderful pictures.’ The difference is that Dust Breeding turns photography’s background condition into the main subject. This dust is not ‘matter out of place’. It is willed, encouraged, bred.

Modernist photography, particularly in North America, had at its heart a paradox. It was preoccupied with a quality of the world that the photograph conspicuously lacks: texture. As the surfaces of the modern world became ever smoother, photography retained a fascination with the extremes of texture. The gleaming facades of the modern city and the crumbling, cracked hands that built and maintained it offered themselves up to a lens fascinated by both. As Edward Weston, the high priest of the photographic surface put it: ‘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.’ Let us not forget here that beneath the flaky surface of Dust Breeding is smooth industrial glass.

The play between the roughness of the weathered world and the surface (or surfacelessness) of the photograph is also a play between two notions of time. The slowness of the world’s attrition, erosion and deposition contrast with the sterile, immaculate conception of the camera image. The settling dust on Duchamp’s glass created a textured, opaque surface. It was later fixed by varnish as a smooth, permanent translucence. The process of fixing the fallen dust and sandwiching it between glass plates in the final form of The Large Glass is quite photographic. Dust Breeding is an extraordinarily self-reflexive image of photography understood as a trap for the incidental.

Trapping incidents became an important strategy early on for Duchamp. Among other things it helped him make art that downplayed the mark of the artist’s hand. ‘Canned chance’, he called it. It is not, of course, that allowing a substance to fall will eliminate entirely the role of the maker. Think of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Gravity was no longer depicted exerting itself upon objects in representational painting. Instead it became an active element of the painting as process. The receptive surface became a repository of events. Perhaps we can see a connection between Dust Breeding and the famous photographs from the 1940s of Pollock working on canvases on his studio floor. In each we look obliquely at a horizontal surface as it receives its marks. Their function is similar too since each works at the level of the anecdotal document intended for publicity.

The full impact of Duchamp’s art took a long time to penetrate. In many ways his insights seemed too complicated for the art culture of the inter-war years. Everything he did connected with everything else and there was no pretence at making singular, autonomous art works. Not until the 1960s, when vanguard art was turning away from the reductions of abstraction to ‘dematerialise’ into process, documentation and performance, did his approach seem prophetic. Dust Breeding was caught up in the delay: it is the dust swept under the carpet of purist modern art, only to be uncovered by Conceptual art.

In 1970 the photograph was given another audience. New York’s Museum of Modern Art put on Information, a large survey show that attempted to predict the artistic concerns of the decade to come. This was the first major exhibition to showcase the emerging Conceptualism that was preoccupied with art as data collection and experimentation with forms of evidence. The catalogue included a set of keynote images. One of these was Dust Breeding, reproduced as a full page. A photograph made half a century earlier now heralded radical contemporary innovations.

Many Conceptual artists relished the double relationship that photography has to form. As an apparatus, the camera is always on the side of the formal and the rational, but it can preserve the formless and ephemeral. Instead of making an object, one could perform an action and document it through a photograph. Bruce Nauman, for example, could shape a heap of flour into various forms on his studio floor and photograph it as he went along. The photograph becomes a sign to focus our attention on transient or minor things. (In 1920 Duchamp had hung a sign on his studio wall that read ‘Dust Breeding: To Be Respected’).

Dust Breeding exploits the fact that photography has always had two roles in art. On the one hand it is an art form, on the other it is the functional means by which all art forms are documented and publicised. In the 1920s, photographic reproduction was beginning to transform the entire culture of art. The ability to turn all art into photographic images would have a far more wide-ranging consequence in the form of fine art publishing than any artistic photography. Perhaps Man Ray was aware of this in his gut reaction against photographing art works.

Mulling over this duality in 1928, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin pieced together a set of binary pairs. They inlcuded: ‘The artist makes a work / The primitive expresses himself in documents’; ‘The artwork is only incidentally a document / No document is as such a work of art’; ‘The artwork is a masterpiece / The document serves to instruct’; ‘On artworks, artists learn their craft / Before documents, a public is educated’. Dust Breeding belongs to the oeuvres of both Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp as distinct artists. It also belongs to a joint body of work. Do we read the image as an artwork insofar as it is by Man Ray, then as an artless document insofar as it is by Duchamp, author of The Large Glass? Perhaps one cannot answer this in a clear-cut way. But the tension between art work and document is there, just as it is there at the core of nearly all the shades of debate about photography’s merit as art. Of course, the debate was not in the end decided in this ‘either/or’ manner. Through the conceptual strategies prefigured by Dust Breeding, photography ultimately triumphed by flirting with automatism, with being an artless document. Andy Warhol’s use of archival news pictures in his silkscreens, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s flat, neutralised photographs of industrial architecture are examples of this. In other words photography became central to art at the very point when art was asking: ‘What is art and what is its relation to what isn’t art?’

In 1989 I saw Dust Breeding in one of the many shows that celebrated 150 years of photography. There it was, this odd-looking photograph, conventionally window mounted, hanging quietly in London’s Royal Academy, which was trumpeting the official acceptance of the medium as art with a grand exhibition. However, this was an image that had anticipated not the pompous arrival of photography through Art’s great gates but its sneaking in the back as a slippery, unreliable, mercurial medium. Dada, Surrealism, Pop, Conceptual art – photography was central to them all, but none of them had elevated it as an ‘independent art’. Dust Breeding embodies so many of the formal ambiguities and expanded possibilities of what an artwork can be. In this single photograph there is an exploration of duration, an embrace of chance, spatial uncertainty, confusion of authorship, ambiguity of function, and a blurring of boundaries between media – photography, sculpture, performance.

Now Dust Breeding is eighty-five years old and its place in our current understanding of things is different. Is there not something resonant in the resistance to all things fast in this image? Dust Breeding refuted the instantaneous. It denied the quick snap of the shutter that came to dominate the medium’s relation to modern time. Its exposure was made over a leisurely lunch, not in the blinking of an eye. Its subject matter is the epitome of all that is slow. Today photography’s romance with speed is all but over. The ‘decisive moment’, the art of the caught photograph, seems like a distant chapter. Where photography was once the medium of moments, it now appears in many ways to be a deliberating, forensic medium of traces. This may sound like an end but it could be a new beginning. Photography is coming to terms with its relative primitivism. Finding itself sidelined, it is becoming a leftover medium for, among other things, leftovers. The dust of progress will go on breeding and perhaps photography will be there to record it.

 

 

Thomas shot the fresh asphalt, looking just long enough to frame it. He slid back in behind the wheel and caught me laying flat. He knew right there I was avoiding the camera.  We drove off across the black square, leaving a permanent tyre print. On the freeway we got up to seventy. The shovel skittered in the back like a lizard on noonday rock. “How many left?” I looked at the camera: “One”. I grabbed the Polaroids from the dashboard and fanned them like playing cards: the pretty sunrise, the car dealership, clouds, the Nauman Street house, the two bags, Thomas smiling, the stadium, the car lot and the asphalt. I looked across and caught Thomas looking down at them. The truck veered a little. I wound down the window and tossed the pictures into the wind, one by one. Finally I reached for the camera and photographed the sunset ahead.

 

 

 

 

[A 150-word response to a found Polaroid, commissioned by SUGO magazine, 2004.]

“Almost the same thing”:

Some thoughts on the collector-photographer.

First published in the Tate Modern exhibition catalogue Cruel and Tender: the Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, 2003

by David Campany

Near the end of his working life Walker Evans was asked about the relation between his habits as a collector and his photography. “It’s almost the same thing” he replied.[i] At times what he collected and what he photographed were exactly the same thing: small, common, vernacular items. Shop signs. Street furniture. Trash.  Occasionally, he took a photograph of an object and then literally took the object with him. Old roadside signs were particular favourites, perhaps because in themselves they blur the boundary between object and image. Indeed he even exhibited some of these signs alongside his photographs.[ii]  But Evans had a deeper parallel in mind. At their most similar collecting and photography entail accumulation, a faith in the object, but also an understanding that accumulation, collecting, is a fundamentally transformative process.

The culture of modernity that gave rise to the mass production of objects, to scientific rationality and the discourses of History also gave rise to the museum, state archives and the desire to collect. Photography was central to all of these, central to the assembling and ordering of modern society. In art, photographic practice could either attempt to ignore or work through these social functions of the medium. Pictorialist photography of the 19^th and early 20^th century ignored them. By contrast nearly all the photographers involved with photographic modernism as it emerged around 1920 engaged with the idea of photography as assembly. They turn towards clear description and the rejection of painterly pictorialism in what marked the beginning of photographic modernism, while this acceptance of the industrial basis of photography suggested not just a type of image but numbers of them. Photographic modernism departed from the single Picture and embraced the production of bodies of images – of sets, sequences and typologies. This was partly a response to an increasingly technocratic society. It was also a reflection of the intensifying of visual experience through weekly magazines and the boom in popular printed matter. People were beginning to see a lot of photographic images in daily life. This is why so many of the key moments of modernist photography are not single images, not even exhibitions, but books. The most celebrated include Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1924) Karl Blossfeldt’s art forms in Nature, Albert Renger-Patzsch’s The World is Beautiful (1928), Kurt Tucholsky & John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles and August Sander’s Face of Our Time (1929). As a product of new technologies the popular book was an ideal format for a socially engaged and reflective photo practice. It was also the most appropriate mode of organisation and distribution. I mean this in two senses: the book form entails organising and distributing across its pages; and the book was an adaptable means of organizing and distributing to new audiences. Although it was important, the gallery was secondary to the book, by a long way.

Since then the book has lent itself to a variety approaches to image organisation. From the 1920s to the present, most of the bodies of work gathered in Cruel and Tender were published and in many cases conceived as books.[iii] Represented here are typologies, such as those of August Sander, the Bechers and Lewis Baltz; the visual argument, such as Renger-Patzsch’s The World is Beautiful; the lyrical-critical essay, such as Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958/9), Robert Adams’ What We Bought (1972/1995) and Boris Mikhailov’s Case History (1999); the poetic sequence, such as William Eggleston’s Guide (1976) and Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe (1987); the album, such as Diane Arbus’ posthumous Diane Arbus (1972), Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces (1972/1999) and Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters(1999); and the thematic collection, such as Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations (1977), Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring (1986), and Martin Parr’s Common Sense (1999).

Certainly some important photographic books have been made in the last three decades. Nevertheless the form has been somewhat displaced. In part this is due to the advent of television and the collapse of print media into entertainment. It is also a consequence of the comprehensive embrace of photography by fine art. After the photographic experiments within Pop, Conceptual art and Postmodern art, photography is now celebrated as the new Picture – the singular, composed image made for the wall (and the market) that often relates to other images less by set or sequence, than through the socially absorbed laws of genre, such as landscape, cityscape, still life and narrative tableau. The work of Jeff Wall is the clearest example of this. It is made explicitly for the gallery wall and like those of many contemporary photographic artists his many books are monographs and catalogues, rather than integral works.[iv]

Historically the connections between photography and the book have been closest in relation to what loosely we might call straight photography – clear, frontal and rectilinear. Here the subject matter insists in such a way that the photograph seems as much a cutting out of the thing or person in the world as a picture. A book of these then becomes a collection of things as much as a collection of images. It functions as an archive, catalogue or atlas.[v] There are good reasons why straight images come to us in number. The straighter the image, the more it describes – or transcribes – but the less it articulates on its own. So the closer the photograph comes to artless description, the more dependent it becomes. Visual facts don’t speak very well for themselves. Moreover, the ‘real’, in the psychoanalytic sense, is that which eludes representation, eludes symbolic capture. The displacement of attention from one image to the next becomes a metaphor for the deferred search.

Adhering to the factual and avoiding the arty in photography is not easy. Walker Evans remained ever vigilant, purging any trace of artistic pretension from his images. Self-effacement was understood as the price to be paid for description: the appearing of the subject matter demanded a disappearing of the author. Of course, outside of art the suppression of individual authorship is what gives photography its social authority. In its instrumental uses (science, criminology, industry, medicine, surveillance, news and so on) it is bureaucratic text that helps articulate the dead facts of the photograph in the form of the index card, case file or caption.[vi] For the photographers in Cruel and Tender it is a matter of images being given the chance to articulate each other. In this way photography doesn’t simply show but ‘shows itself showing what it is showing’.[vii] The straight image is made self-conscious and reflexive, hence Evans’ deceptively simple description of his work as ‘documentary style’.[viii] It allows an anatomy of the processes of viewing as much as an anatomy of the subject matter.

The straight photograph is often thought of as uncomposed and artless, a ‘degree zero’ of composition, which in some senses it is.[ix] If we understand composition as an orchestration of the picture and an orchestration of its viewing, then the straight image refuses to lead the eye, refuses to lead the reading of the image. On the one hand this makes it a thoroughly generous, open and democratic kind of photograph, but it also makes it resistant and demanding. Without visual punctuation, and despite the wealth of information on offer, the single straight image can appear quite inscrutable, as dumb as it is pensive.[x] It seems to announce a functional use but we don’t know what it is. (“You see,” said Walker Evans “a document has use, whereas art is really useless.”)  Many viewers will testify to a slight bafflement on their first encounter with an image by the Bechers, or one of Diane Arbus’ portraits or one of Lewis Baltz’s images of anonymous buildings. There it is: full and open, but somehow we are momentarily disarmed. The subject matter appears to us at the centre of the image, as the centre of attention, but also as a blocking of attention. The image compels but it is difficult to look at. Our gaze is restless and we don’t know quite what to do. It is only when we see difference and repetition, comparison, contrast and dialogue between images that we can be relieved and stimulated. (Indeed, what might a solitary image by the Bechers mean?) Such is the logic of the collection or sequence. The isolated picture/artefact is given a depth of meaning through the structure and orchestration of the group. Art is largely effaced from the image but returns in the act of assembly.

We can see this orchestration of groups of images as a form of montage. Conventionally, montage tends to be understood as an opposition to the straight photograph. Bertholt Brecht’s famously political call from the 1920s for a practice of image construction is often cited as a resistance to photographic fact:  “A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. So something must in fact be built up, something artificial, something posed.”[xi] This is usually seen as an explicit argument for photomontage, anti-realist staging, or the use of text to refunction the image. But in their numbers and sequences images can be made to modify and modulate each other in a critical and reflexive manner. This could perhaps meet Brecht’s demand for the “built-up”.[xii] Accumulation, repetition, the series and the sequence are certainly less assertive than overt juxtaposition or artifice. Nevertheless there is an important element of montage here. In fact, it is a consequence of any image collection. The difference is that with the archival set (such as Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit) or the crafted sequence of straight images (such as Evans’ American Photographs) the photographs appear as single shots and as elements of a larger whole. Two readings of the same image are montaged.[xiii]

Montage as orchestration takes on a different character when photography departs from the archival straight image and takes up the model of the snapshot. This way of working became artistically significant when everyday life itself began to be experienced as a form of montage, as a set disarticulated moments that didn’t seem to add up. Robert Frank’s pioneering photo-essay The Americans (1958/9) marked the emergence of a subjective reportage modelled on the snapshot. Up to that point reportage had developed towards a crystalline freezing of movement, a “pursuit of the blurred parts of pictures”, as Jeff Wall put it.[xiv] For Frank blur and other half-controlled accidents could be recoded, for a brief period, as signs of fractured experience, of the anxious immersion of the photographer/viewer in the chaos of the world. Here the cool conventions of the premeditated straight image give way to the heated nervousness of the quick shot. The moment of exposure is privileged as an ecstatic or traumatic guarantee of the ‘nowness’ of the everyday and its photographic observation. Where the calculated straight image tends to describe things or people, the snapshot dramatises the instance of the picture making event – a photography not just of the lens but of the lens and shutter combined. Where the straight image appears to cut around objects and things, the snapshot cuts into the world with the edge of the frame and cuts into time with the shutter.[xv] Frank’s stills were informed by the dynamics of cinema and certainly they resemble the jitteriness of certain kinds of film frames. However it was the emergence of television that suddenly dislodged photography from the centre of image culture just enough to give it some critical distance. The keys to understanding The Americans are not really the celebrated images of alienated street life, but the shots of television sets in empty bars. In that period between the advent of television and the advent of video, Frank’s model of twitchy outsiderism was highly influential. Yet the ‘photographic moment’, which as recently as thirty years ago seemed to be the essence of the medium, has all but vanished from contemporary practice, ceding the momentary to the video freeze-frame. Photography has again become a slow medium attuned more to describing things than instants.

The snapshot model has had its own tendency towards accumulation that is very different from the archival straight image. Essentially chancy and speculative it works by taking many images and then editing the large haul for revelations and epiphanies. It is a procedure that derives from reportage but is also a consequence of the near endless possibilities opened up by the small format camera. It seems the more photography embraces the fragmentariness of daily life, the more the images pile up, confusing and deferring each other. In the work of Garry Winogrand there was a generous embrace of picture taking enjoyed as an act of intensive experimentation and visual hoarding. Winogrand was by no means a snapshot photographer yet the aesthetic and technical conditions of the snapshot allow an understanding of his pictures. William Eggleston’s photography also owes something to the snapshot, but in its crisp centrality it has much in common with the straight image too.[xvi] For all their differences what these two photographers have in common is their vast number of exposures. Eggleston’s projects such as The Democratic Forest often run to thousands of images.[xvii] At his death, Winogrand left over three hundred thousand exposures unseen. Veracity and voracity became almost indistinguishable. The real and the raw appetite for its image nearly collapsed into each other.[xviii] Photography always threatens to plunge itself into disorder, to become the vernacular chaos it tries to sift and interpret. The archives of Eggleston and Winogrand are thrilling and frightening in equal measure, yet they are an integral and logical consequence of their approach to photography.

As with the straight image the snapshot is also an industrial standard. Where the straight image derives its anonymity from the conventions of the archival industrial document, the anonymity of the snapshot derives from the professional formulae of reportage on the one hand, and the amateur formulae of the family album on the other.[xix] Our cameras have been developed and manufactured to these ends. Of course a technical account is not sufficient. The anonymous characters of the straight image and the snapshot are fundamentally connected to their description of the everyday as it borders on anonymity, accumulation and repetition. We see it in August Sanders’ portraits of modern citizens; in Walker Evans’ images of nameless people and vernacular houses; in the Bechers’ and Baltz’s photography of anonymous architecture; in Robert Adams’ and Martin Parr’s interest in mass produced goods; in Stephen Shore’s local streets and drab domestic décor; in Lee Friedlander’s images of office workers; in Andreas Gursky’s pictures of contemporary life gone modular; in the alienated faces of Diane Arbus’ portraits; in Paul Graham’s images of unemployment and so on. Manufacture, consumption, and the patterns of work and leisure under capitalism run throughout this exhibition as subject matter just as emphatically as any formal photographic convention. If photography is prone to accumulation it is because modern life is too. The trick is to make the one try and say something about the other.

‘Almost the Same Thing: Some Thoughts on the Photographer as Collector’ by David Campany in the exhibition catalogue Cruel and Tender: the Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, Tate Publishing 2003.

German co-edition published by Hatje-Cantz.

 

---

‘Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problems of “Late Photography”’, first published in David Green ed., Where is the Photograph?, Photoworks/Photoforum, 2003.

(Author’s note: although it’s quite old now, I still see this essay cited frequently. Perhaps this is because the notion of photography as an ‘eclipsed’ or ‘secondary’ medium of traces, remnants and echoes now seems to be common currency. The book Where is the Photograph? is a fine collection of essays by, among others, Geoffrey Batchen, Peter Osborne, Laura Mulvey, Pavel Buchler, Olivier Richon and Richard Shiff. It is long out of print so I republish my essay here.)

Several weeks into the intensive coverage of the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Centre, Britain’s Channel Four News screened a thirty-minute special report entitled Reflections of Ground Zero. It followed New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz as he manoeuvred diligently around the smoking rubble and cranes with his large format camera. He was the only photographer to have been granted comprehensive access to the scene and the clean-up operation. He produced a substantial body of colour photographs, exhibited in the city (and later internationally) which was eventually published as the large format book Aftermath. Just about everyone worldwide with access to a television had seen the strike on the towers. The ensuing news reports were transmitted globally, electronically and instantaneously. Lower Manhattan became the most imaged and visible of places, the centre of a vast amount of state of the art news production.  Nevertheless here was a report featuring a solitary man, his tripod and his heavy, sixty-year old Deardorff plate camera. It was a slow and deliberating half-hour documentary, imbued throughout with a sense of melancholy by the constant tinkling of a piano in a minor key. There was an air of ritual too, since this was at least part of the function of both the programme and the photographs. Yet the most telling aspect of the Reflections of Ground Zero was the contrast drawn between the complexity of the geopolitical situation and the simplicity of Meyerowitz’ camera and working method. There was a suggestion that photography rather than television might be the better medium for ‘official history’ and ‘images of record’. The photographs were being positioned as superior to the television programme in which they were presented.

Joel Meyerowitz, The base of the North Tower, looking east, toward the Woolworth Building, 2001. Copyright Joel Meyerowitz, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery.

The programme contained video images at least as informative and descriptive as the photographs, yet television was presenting itself as unable to perform a task now given over to photography. Meyerowitz was filmed telling us at one point: ‘I felt if there was no photographic record allowed, then it was history erased’.

No doubt the special status of his images will symbolically structure how they are seen as they tour and are published. Even so this will probably become less secure in the future – it is likely that they will take up a place alongside so many other images in the constructions of history. What may mark them out in posterity is the very act of sanctioning itself and the idea that there was a need, a desire, to nominate an official body of images, and that these should be photographs.

Joel Meyerowitz, Flags on the façade of the World Financial Center, 2001. Copyright Joel Meyerowitz, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery.

Meyerowitz’ imagery is not so much the trace of an event as the trace of the trace of an event. His ‘late’ photography is a particularly clear instance of an approach that is becoming a commonplace use of the medium. What are we to make of the highly visible turn toward photographing the aftermath of events – traces, fragments, empty buildings, empty streets, damage to the body and damage to the world? These images appear to us as particularly static, often sombre and quite ‘straight’ kinds of pictures. They assume an aesthetic of utility closer to forensic photography than traditional photojournalism. They are an example what Peter Wollen has called ‘cool photography’ as opposed to the dramatic ‘hot’ photography of events. Sometimes we can see that something has happened, sometimes we are left to imagine or project it, or to be informed about it by other means. The images often contain no people, but a lot of remnants of activity. If this type of image was only present in contemporary art it might be overlooked as a passing trend (of all art’s media photography is still the most subject to curatorial whim). But we see it increasingly in new photojournalism, documentary, campaign work and even news, advertising and fashion. One might easily surmise that photography has of late inherited a major role as an undertaker, summariser or accountant. It turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world’s activity.  This is a kind of photograph that foregoes the representation of events in progress and so cedes them to other media. As a result it is quite different from the spontaneous snapshot and has a different relation to memory and to history.

The theoretical framework connecting the photograph to collective memory is as well-established as it is complex. The photograph can be an aid to memory, but it can also become an obstacle that blocks access to the understanding of the past. It can paralyse the personal and political ability to think beyond the image in the always fraught project of remembrance. However, in the popular culture of mass media, the frozen image is often used as a simple signifier of the memorable, as if there were a straightforward connection between the functions of memory and the ‘freezing’ capabilities of the still camera. Indeed this is such a well-established assumption about photographs that to even question it seems a little perverse. So rather than thinking about a direct relation between the photograph and memory let us think about the two of them in relation to other media.

Television and cinema make regular use of photographic snapshots and freeze-frames as a kind of instant history or memory that they, as moving images, are not. Indeed it seems plausible that it is this kind of use of the still photograph that has cemented the popular connection of photography with memory, rather than there being some intrinsic relationship. There is nothing like the ‘presentness’ of the moving image to emphasise the ‘pastness’ of the photograph. It does this even more effectively than the continuum of life itself because as a technology the still is a part or a ghost of the moving image; its memory or primitive ancestor.  Yet to presume that the still image or the freeze-frame is inherently more memorable or closer to the nature of memory, is to overlook the fact that the very operation of our memory is changing. It is shaped by the image world around us. The structure of memory is, in large measure, culturally determined by the means of representation at our disposal. As our image world shifts in character, so do our conditions of remembrance.

It may well be that the special status granted the still photograph in the era of television and newer technologies is not so much a recognition of its mnemonic superiority, as a nostalgic wish that it still might have such ‘power’; a wish fulfilled in the moving image’s use of the still image. This is to say there is an investment in the idea that the relative primitivism of photography will somehow rescue the processes of our memory that have been made so complicated by the sheer amount of information we assimilate from the diversity of image technologies.

In popular consciousness (as opposed to popular unconsciousness) the still image continues to be thought of as being more memorable than those that move. Yet if the frozen photograph seems memorable in the contemporary mediasphere it is probably because it says very little. It relies for support upon the surfeit of audio-visual information in the culture at large. Its very muteness allows it to appear somehow uncontaminated by the noise of the televisual.

While its privileged status may be imagined to stem from a natural capacity to condense and simplify things, the effects of the still image derive much more from its capacity to remain radically open, radically laconic. It is not that a photograph naturally ‘says a thousand words’, rather that a thousand words can be said about it. This is why television and film tend to use the still image only for contrived and highly rhetorical moments of pathos, tension and melancholy.

That said, the static photograph taken after an event, rather than the frozen image made of an event, is the radically open image par excellence. It is ‘pre-frozen’, its stillness complementing and underscoring the stillness of the aftermath. So, of course, it isn’t the kind of photograph used ordinarily by television and film to evoke the memorable. Indeed television is usually very wary of this kind of image as it confuses the register of stillness (‘Is this a photograph or is this a continuous video shot of an immobile scene?’) When it is used, as in the case of the programme on Meyerowitz’ project, the stillness is emphasised and defined for the viewer by a restless use of the rostrum camera zooming into details and roaming about the photographic frame.

To think through the current turn toward the ‘late photograph’ it is instructive to think about images taken before, during and after events. I mean this in two senses. The first is the usual one – literally, photographs taken before, during and after a particular occurrence. However we could also think more broadly of three phases of the social history of photography. Over its one hundred and seventy year history, there was a finite period in which photography carried the weight of events and defined what an event was. In its first several decades the medium was slow and cumbersome both in its technical procedures and in its means of social distribution. Only from the 1920s, with the rapid expansion of the mass media, the growing dominance of print journalism, and technical developments within photographic technology itself, did photography become the definitive medium and modulator of the event as a moment, an instant, something that could be frozen and examined. Good photo-reporters were thought to be those who followed the action. The goal was to be in the right place at the right time ‘as things happened’. This lasted until the late 1960s and early 1970s, in other words until the standardised introduction into journalism of portable video cameras. Over the last few decades, it has become clear that the conception of events was supplanted by video and then dispersed in recent years across a variety of media technologies. In this situation, photographers often prefer to wait until the noise has died down and the event is over. The still cameras are loaded as the video cameras are packed away.  The photographs taken come not just in the aftermath of the event, but in the aftermath of video. What we see first ‘live’ or at least in real time on television might be revisited by a photography that depicts stillness rather than freezing things. Photojournalists used to be at the centre of the event because photography was at the centre of culture. Today they are as likely to be at the scene of the aftermath because photography is, in relative terms, at the aftermath of contemporary culture. Photography is much less the means by which the event is grasped. We have learned to expect more from a reported situation than a frozen image (even though in the climate of emotive news television we might be offered the static image as an ideological ‘distillation’, a mythic summary). Video gives us things as they happen. They may be manipulated, they may be misrepresented and undigested but they happen in the present tense. Today it is very rare that photographs actually break the news. The newspaper constitutes only a second wave of interpreted information or commentary. Furthermore when ‘late photographs’ appear in the slower forms of the illustrated magazine or gallery exhibit they are at one further remove.

Late 20^th and 21^st century photography takes on something of the visual character of celebrated 19^th century images of battlefields such as Roger Fenton’s photography of the exhausted terrains of the Crimea from the 1850s, or Matthew Brady’s images of the scarred earth and corpses of the American Civil War from the following decade. Yet this is a false comparison in key respects. The similarity masks the radical changes that have taken place in our image culture since then. Consider, for example, the question of stillness. Although it might be a scientific truism that photographs are still, this fact is always subject to cultural and historical interpretation. Those 19^th century photographs were not still in the way in which we think of stillness today. I don’t mean this in the sense that things moved during long exposures (which we all know they did). They weren’t still because nearly all images of that time were still. That is to say, the immobility of the photograph would be almost too obvious to mention. Stillness in photographs only became apparent and definitive in the presence and context of the moving image. The whole drive toward precision, the stopping of time and freezing of action takes place in the era of cinema. Cinema, we could say, was not just the invention of the moving image, it was also the invention of the stillness of photography. In the era of cinema, the frozenness of the snapshot – professionalised in photojournalism, democratised in amateurism – came to be understood as the essence of the photographic. It found its exemplary form in the middle of the twentieth century with the notion of the ‘decisive moment’ where the speedy modernity of the now cinematized world would be arrested by the speedy modernity of the handheld, high speed compact still camera used in conjunction with the photographer’s quick reactions.

However in the era of video, photography loses this monopoly on stillness and immediacy. This is a material circumstance and a social one: as a technology the video image is stoppable, repeatable, cheap and quick; and institutionally it has come to usurp many of the roles formerly held by photography. It is interesting that a recent book on the history of photojournalism opts to conclude in the mid-1970s, in an attempt to contrive a clean and dignified end (Robert Lebeck’s Kiosk: a history of photojournalism).

To be sure, the influence of photojournalism has declined since then. Images from its heyday now find a questionable afterlife in the coffee table book, while many of its vestigial forms have turned into pastiches of a glorious past for colour supplements and audiences who prefer an air of aesthetic classicism.  Yet announcements of the ‘death of photojournalism’ are quite premature. If it faced its demise in the 1970s it was only insofar as it was mistakenly assumed that its only possible significance could derive from a monopoly over stillness and over our comprehension of events. The last three decades have seen a coming to terms with photography’s historical situation on the part of many photographers and writers. Redefinitions of the possibilities of photojournalism are beginning to emerge which seek out new contexts and they touch on the kinds of approach I am discussing here. But first let me to sketch in a little more of photojournalism’s past.

If the war in Vietnam is regarded as the last ‘photographer’s war’, this is as much a function of the shifting nature of warfare as it is of media coverage. Vietnam was chaotic on two levels. The environment was messy (and mess is highly photogenic), and U.S. military and political policy was erratic. As a result the conflict was prolonged, increasing the photographer’s picture making opportunities. By contrast the [‘first’] Gulf War is often described as the first war experienced in terms of image simulation. What few images we saw were satellite images from news journalists along with abstracted military footage and interpretive television graphics. Very few photographers covered the war. They weren’t allowed in. After the war many photographers went to Kuwait to document the leftovers – destroyed tanks, bodies, scarred desert and burning oil fields. Their images often had a post-traumatic disposition, and a mournful paralysis. And they were often accompanied by similarly melancholic writing. Photojournalism became elegiac, poetic and muted. It communicated the feeling of being outside the time of history, of events and of politics. We may have been able to see the damage afterwards, but at the cost of a sense of removal. Photography was struggling to find a way to reconcile itself with a new position beyond the event. And it was discovering that sombre melancholia was a seductive mode for the still image.

Today more than half of all news ‘photographs’ are frame grabs from video and digital sources. The proportion increases in the coverage of international conflict. This has two related consequences. Firstly, there is a partial blurring of the distinction between different image technologies (a result of this there is a radical shift in the understanding of what photography is, what it is good at and what it is for). Secondly photography is finding other roles, or more accurately, contemporary visual culture is leaving photography with certain tasks and subject matters such as the aftermath.  Far from being its ultimate incarnation, the decisive moment that epitomised the photographic ideal can be grasped as a historically specific ideal. The definition of a medium, particularly photography, is not autonomous or self-governing, but heteronomous, dependent on other media. It derives less from what it is technologically than what it is culturally. Photography is what we do with it. And what we do with it depends on what we do with other image technologies. In the age of instantaneous and global moving images, Meyerowitz’ 1942 plate camera is given a new role.

It seems clear that contemporary art has a predilection for the ‘late photograph’. It has become a central trope in its current dialogue with documentary. The works of Willie Doherty, Paul Seawright, Sophie Ristelhueber and Richard Misrach are some of the more interesting examples (but as I write it is hard to avoid the cheaper moodiness of images of derelict buildings and urban wastelands on display in galleries across Europe and North America). There is a reticent muteness in these images that leaves them open to interpretation. Moreover their status as traces of traces fulfils for art a certain modernist reflection on the indexicality of the medium.  They can also offer an allegorical, distanced reflection on the photograph as evidence and on the claims of mainstream documentary photography.

In forfeiting any immediate relation to the event and taking up a slower relation to time, ‘late photographs’ appear to separate themselves out from the constant visual stream emitted by the convergence of modern electronic image technologies. Part of the appeal of these static, slow and detailed photographs is that they strike us now as being somehow a new kind of ‘pure’ photography that can’t be confused with other kinds of image (this is no doubt another reason for their profile in museums and galleries). They look like a very photographic kind of photography and seem to do something no other medium does, although as I have said, what strikes us as particularly photographic is very much subject to change. At the same time they refuse to be overtly ‘creative’, deploying the straight image with a mood of deliberation and detachment that chimes with a general preference in contemporary art for the slow, withdrawn and anonymous. It is telling that in the television programme Reflections of Ground Zero Meyerowitz opted to describe his photography as an automatic process in which creativity is avoidable: ‘I was just going to be there as a witness and photograph it for what it was, without trying to put on it some formal idea of how to photograph it. I was told how to photograph it by the thing itself’. Avoiding overt ‘originality’ in such circumstances is an admirable aim, but we would do well to bear in mind that there really is no ‘degree zero’ of photography, not even at Ground Zero. Meyerowitz’ images are a mixture of epic scenes, portraits and details of excavation work, all illuminated by his celebrated attention to light and atmosphere. He has photographic skills honed over several decades. It may be second nature to him now, but he knows what makes a good photo and can’t avoid the beautiful. He certainly does have a very strong formal aesthetic even though it clearly overlaps with a popular sense of what a photographic document of a ruin should look like. 

As I have remarked the late photograph has a long history. Art and literature have had an interest in it at least as far back as the Surrealist’s appropriation of the street photographs of Eugene Atget for their stoic artlessness.  Looking back over this history, writer and photographer Allan Sekula warned of the political pitfalls of decontextualising a document in order to make it enigmatic or melancholic or merely beautiful:

“Walter Benjamin recalled the remark that Eugene Atget depicted the streets of Paris as though they were scenes of crime. That remark serves to poeticise a rather deadpan, non-expressionist style, to conflate nostalgia and the affectless instrumentality of the detective. Crime here becomes a matter of the heart as well as a matter of fact. Looking back, through Benjamin to Atget, we see the loss of the past through the continual disruptions of the urban present as a form of violence against memory, resisted by the nostalgic bohemian through acts of solipsistic, passive acquisition … I cite this example merely to raise the question of the affective character of documentary. Documentary has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet, in this pictorial presentation of scientific and legalistic “fact”, the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world … A truly social documentary will frame the crime, the trial, the system of justice and its official myths … Social truth is something other than a matter of convincing style.”

In the light of Sekula’s closing remark it is worth considering why it is that the ‘late photograph’ has become a ‘convincing style’ in contemporary culture. Its retreat from the event is no guarantee of an enlightened position or a critical stance.  Its formality and visual sobriety secure nothing in and of themselves. Yet it is easy to see how it is that in an image world dispersed across screens and reconfigured in pieces, a detailed, static and resolutely perspectival rectangle can appear to be some kind of superior image.

Certainly the late photograph is often used as a vehicle for mass mourning or working through (Meyerowitz’ Ground Zero project was produced primarily for New Yorkers). The danger is that it can also foster an indifference and political withdrawal that masquerades as concern.  Mourning by association becomes merely an aestheticized response. There is a sense in which the late photograph in all its silence, can easily flatter the ideological paralysis of those who gaze at it with a lack of social or political will to make sense of its circumstance. In its apparent finitude and muteness it can leave us in permanent limbo, obliterating even the need for analysis and bolstering a kind of liberal melancholy that shuns political explanation like a vampire shuns garlic.

If the banal matter-of-factness of the late photograph can fill us with a sense of the sublime, it is imperative that we think through why this might be. There is a fine line between the banal and the sublime, and it is political. If an experience of the contemporary sublime derives from our being caught in a geo-political circumstance beyond our comprehension, then it is a politically reified as much as an aesthetically rarefied one.

ⁱ To further extend and deepen the tension between photography and other technologies that incorporate it, let me say right away that I have had my closest look at Meyerowitz’ images via the internet, having seen them firstly on television and secondly in exhibition After September 11: Images From Ground Zero held at The Museum of London. The exhibition was organised by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York.

ⁱⁱ Peter Wollen, ‘Vectors of Melancholy’, in Ralph Rugoff, ed., The Scene of the Crime, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1997. See also Thierry de Duve’s essay ‘Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox’, October, no. 5, 1978 (reprinted in Campany ed., The Cinematic, MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery 2007), which makes a similar opposition.

ⁱⁱⁱ See, in particular, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, New York, 1980 and Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) in his Illuminations, Jonathan Cape, London, 1970. For broader discussions of the subject see Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: photography, memory, identity, Routledge, London, 1997; Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity, Sage, London, 1998; and Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997.

^iv See Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the reconfiguration of memory by the new technologies of spectatorship elsewhere in the book Where is the Photograph?

^v An unnamed New Yorker in the television programme I am discussing declares at one point, ‘People will come back to Joel’s [Meyerowitz’] photographs. They have a very powerful silence in them. They are very still’.

^vi It might be argued, however, that in such circumstances it becomes possible to look at the overlooked or unreported.

^vii Robert Lebeck and Bodo von Dewitz, eds., Kiosk: A history of photojournalism, Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2002.

^viii For an account of those press photographs that were made during the Gulf War see John Taylor’s ‘The Gulf War in the Press’, Portfolio Magazine, no. 11, Summer 1991. For an account of virtual representation see Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Power Publications, 1995, and Tim Druckrey, ‘Deadly Representations or Apocalypse Now’, Ten/8, vol. 2, no. 2, 1991.

^ix For a useful discussion of this see Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, (enlarged edition), Harvard University Press, 1979.

^x Interestingly, Meyerowitz is a photographer who first came to prominence shooting ‘decisive moments’on the streets of New York, deeply influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson. As his career moved on there was a general shift from those fleeting snapshots to a slower way of working with a large camera, and from a photography of ‘events’ to a photography of longer duration.

^xi For a particularly rich discussion of allegory in documentary work see Justin Carville’s ‘Re-negotiated territory: the politics of place, space and landscape in Irish photography’, Afterimage, vol. 29 no. 1, July/August 2001.

^xii Looking back over Meyerowitz’ career I found myself returning to a book titled Annie on Camera from 1982.   He was one of nine photographers commissioned to make images during the production of John Huston’s film Annie, the cheesecake musical set in Depression-era New York. Meyerowitz’ folio includes an image of piles of concrete rubble and broken paper-thin walls lying at the foot of slanted architectural buttresses.  It was refuse discarded by set builders.  He made a strikingly similar image at Ground Zero. As photographers we tend to carry visual templates around with us wherever we go, however much we feel subject matter dictates the form of our images. I wonder if Meyerowitz had the form of his knowingly fake image from Annie in mind when he came across the same scene twenty years later in a very different situation – a situation so many likened to something cinematic. See Nancy Grubb, ed., Annie on Camera, Abbeville Press, New York, 1982.

^xiii Allan Sekula ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation’, in Terry Dennett and Jo Spence, eds., Photography/Politics: One, Photography Workshop, London,1980.

^xiv I borrow the simile and the general critique of the passivity of neo-liberal ideology from Slavoj Zizek’s ‘Self-Interview’ in The Metastases of Enjoyment. Six Essays on Woman and Causality, Verso, London, 1994.

 

Published in French as ‘Pour Une Politique des Ruines: quelque reflexions sur la photographie ‘de l’apres’ in Jean-Pierre Criqui, Diane Dufour and Christine Duval eds., L’Image-Document, Entre Realité et Fiction, Le Bal, Paris, 2010; and in Spanish in David Green. ed., Qué ha sido de la fotografîa?, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 2007.

    

The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realises that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other.

Gilles Deleuze (1)

Like the mutilated classical statue, a photograph seems to result from the artwork’s encounter with a scythe of real time, showing the bruise imprinted upon an artwork by a clash with a time not its own.

Denis Hollier (2)

Karen Knorr’s photography isn’t particularly easy to think about. It seems easier to think with it orthrough it. That is, with or through its subject matter. There is so much to think about within the images, that the images themselves become elusive. We cannot see the wood for the trees. Yet her images are in many ways particularly photographic. I think this reveals itself through their way with time. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that the meaning of Knorr’s images is a complex experience of time, but the layers of possibility within them are inextricably linked to their temporal character. So what I have to say here isn’t so much a free-standing account of Knorr’s photography as a speculation on the time structures that allow the images to mean whatever they mean.

I shall start with the past. Karen Knorr’s work deals with cultural heritage. This has been her most continuous theme since the late 1970s. She deals with taste, power and histories older than photography. She looks at how the culture and ideology of conservatism seek definition. She looks at how they seek this in a past that sometimes never really was. This is why the museum, which constructs a representation of the past from the ideological needs of the present, recurs throughout her work as a theatre for making photographs. Within this theatre she photographs, among other things, works of art. This is a practice with its own long and complicated lineage. Indeed the photography of art has a pedigree as old as photography itself. Consider this short list:

A crumbling facade of Queen’s College, Oxford; an elevated view of a Parisian boulevard; four shelves of China pottery; three shelves of glassware; a bust of Patroclus; an open door with a broom; a leaf of a plant; two shelves of books; a printed page of text; a haystack; a lithographic print; the bridge of Orleans; Queen’s College Oxford again; three men and a ladder; Lacock Abbey; Lacock Abbey, again; the bust of Patroclus, again; Christchurch College, Oxford; Lacock Abbey again; some lace; The Martyr’s Monument, Oxford; Westminster Abbey, a drawing of Hagar in the Desert; an arrangement of fruit.

This is an itinerary not too far removed from Knorr’s own subject matter. No doubt the repetition of Lacock Abbey alerts the reader to the figure of William Henry Fox Talbot. In fact it is a list of the subjects that comprise his book The Pencil of Nature from the 1840s, a publication that aimed to outline possible uses for the medium. The list has a remarkable variety. In plotting out a range of potential applications of his technique, Fox Talbot anticipates so many of the ways in which the photographic was eventually exploited. Documentary, architecture, topography, tourism, modern publishing, advertising, taxonomy and modern art history are all ‘pencilled’ in here, in their nascent states. The abundance of artifacts and commodities before Fox Talbot’s camera is in part a consequence of his class and social standing. As an educated man of means, he photographs what he owns, where he travels and what interests him. On top of this, such artifacts are inanimate and portable, which means they keep still and can be placed in the light (considerable advantages for early photography). But perhaps there is more at stake in the recurrence of art and artifacts in the list. Why might a photograph of an artwork be so well disposed to ‘demonstrating’ the medium?

A provisional answer might be that it allows two versions of time to clash – the time of the artifact and the time of the medium of photography. In clashing they emphasise each other’s particular characteristics. The answer is provisional because the reality is more complicated. For example, it could be said that all photography clashes with a time not its own. It brings a moment into another moment. We might also say that any artifact clashes with a time not its own in so far as it is a representation. Moreover an artifact might be further wrapped in other times by the activities of collecting, exchange, display and so on. Still, there is some truth in the provisional response, for when media are made to clash they tend to suppress their own internal complexities in order to offer up the more obvious differences to each other. We tie ourselves up in knots attempting to define ‘painting’, or ‘sculpture’ or ‘photography’ in isolation, and opt for the ease with which media appear to clarify themselves through comparison. Perhaps only much later are we able to grasp – or in Karen Knorr’s case, stage – the problematics within and between media at the same time. But let me keep things simple for a while longer.

Very early on art photography had a spell of a few decades in which it took up artworks as subject matter. These were decades before the understanding of all art came to be percolated through mass reproduction. In the 1850s and 1860s the photography of artworks was a recognised genre of art photography. Interpretive expression of the essence or spirit of the artwork was the aim. (3) Artistic photography and the photography of art were not mutually exclusive. It was a rich, strange and frustratingly brief period, cut short when art history was rationalised and expanded by the more utilitarian and artless deployment of photography as publicity. The photography of art soon became so ubiquitous that it began to mask rather than reveal the character of both artwork and photograph. Modern art history established itself by using photography mechanistically. It exploited the photograph’s powers of description and reproduction to give us the slide lecture, the catalogue, the journal, the monograph, the popular print and the portable history. It isn’t a coincidence that the great and false battle over the ‘soul’ of art photography, the battle between the painterly and the ‘straight’ image that replaced that earlier hybrid moment, took place against the becoming mass, the becoming popular through reproduction of the art of the past. All that uncertainty as to whether art photography should mimic painting’s crafted singularity or Modernity’s multiplicity was in effect a consequence of the fundamental shift in understanding of the very category of ‘art’ itself that was wrought by mass reproduction. Photography became art firstly as homage, then as imitation of the painterly and eventually became modern only within this new concept of art that was tacitly organised and regulated by reproduction. Since then photography has had two roles in modern art history: as an art itself, and as a mute, nameless mediator of all art. This of course puts it schematically. These aren’t so much roles as poles of the general tension between the photograph’s objectivity and its subjectivity. On the one hand art photography has always negotiated with the utilitarian aspects of the medium, and on the other the photography of art regularly has its utility undermined by accusations of partiality. The ambiguities of Knorr’s photographs derive from this polarity. Somehow we expect a photograph of an artwork to function as a record of it. We expect it to be trustworthy and silent, and there certainly is this aspect to her photographs – they do tell us what artworks look like and what particular museum installations looked like.Yet at the same time – but with a different relation to time – the images are not just objective but critical. This is because they are themselves artworks. They are put back into the spaces and discourses of art.

Knorr’s photography stages the clashing of times in very specific ways, although to my mind the results are far from specific. In general, the art of the twentieth century is not present ‘in’ her work. With rare exceptions the artworks described or contained in her ouevre predate photography. This has three consequences. It gives both the photography and the subject matter space to breath before they come to ‘clash’ with each other. It gives the images a deceptively simple entry point (on some level photographs are always easy to look at). It also means Knorr neatly leapfrogs all those bad infinities and arguments about copies of copies that so preoccupy more excitable speculations about reproduction.

Much art of the twentieth century, concerned as it was with the ‘nature’ of art and conceived wholly within the time and the aegis of the modern art museum, was either aspiring to unattainable timelessness (for example, abstract expressionist painting) or bouncing around with ecstasy or horror (usually both) in the excesses of industrial image multiplication (for example, Pop Art). Knorr’s work loops back to set up a dialogue far more complex than such rejection or repetition of the time of the museum. But it is not simply a dialogue ‘with’ the artworks she depicts. It is a dialogue with what the modern museum did with them for us, good or bad. It is a dialogue with the layers of time that build up on these works as surely as the dust is removed from them.

All of this begs some difficult questions. Can an artwork carry ‘its time’ with it like some kind of melancholic passport through all the trauma of displacement and historical change? The ideology of the museum encourages us to accept, or expect that a painting or a sculpture might be able to cling to a sense of time and place that is ‘true’ to it. As if we see it in the museum but not belongingto the museum. Can photography do this too? Or do we expect that photography, by taking on, byassuming the character of other times and places, keeps nothing for itself? Does it have a self to keep? Perhaps like the filmmaker Woody Allen’s allegorical figure Zelig, it clings only to nothing but the circumstance in which it finds itself. What happens then when photography clings to painting or sculpture? Onto what layer of time can it hold?

We can see now that a simple notion of ‘clashing’ is not really going to account for the complex registers of time in Karen Knorr’s photographs. These images are temporal puzzles. Perhaps the allegories they speak, and speak of, are in the end only available to us through a more mute allegory of time. The late Roland Barthes once spoke of the punctum – a rare occurrence whereby a photographic detail or disposition might prick the viewer’s consciousness and throw them out of the time of the image and into disjunction with their own unconscious, their own history. If I’m honest, I hadn’t thought Knorr’s photography would really allow for such inadvertencies of spectatorship. They appear so controlled. So conscious. Nevertheless standing before her imageIn the Green Room installed in the Wallace collection in London, I was struck by a particular detail. Lurking below the frame of Fragonard’s painting The Swing is a little sign, made up of two icons: a silhouette or shadow of a human profile, and a pair of headphones. It indicates that a headphone commentary on this is available. One may borrow a ‘Walkman’ and be guided around the museum by a commentary in one’s head. I hadn’t paid much attention to these signs until I caught sight of this one in Knorr’s photograph. In a rebus too dense to grasp fully, images and words raced through my mind: all those versions of ‘The Origin of Painting’ in which the cast shadow of a profile is traced on a wall… all those books in which photography is described as ‘the art of fixing a shadow’… all those reproductions of allegorical paintings in art history books accompanied by written elaboration of their half-defunct codes… memories of gallery visits watching people crane to read titles and descriptions… my own first use of such a headphone commentary which threw me into the time of the art but out of the social time of the museum. I was involuntarily fixed beforeIn the Green Room. Not transfixed. The image didn’t swallow me. It occupied my eyes while my mind went elsewhere momentarily. My vision and my knowledge were allegorised for me, by a detail that is not actually in Fragonard’s painting (although it depends on it in some ways) but is in Knorr’s photograph. At such moments one feels one’s eyes both alive and dead at the same time. They are stimulated but not connected to a consciousness, like an automaton or a mannequin… or a stuffed bird.

We could see the presence of animals in some of Knorr’s photographs as irruptions into the decorum of the museum. If they are, they are as much irruptions in time as space. For what is the time proper to an animal? They mock the distinction between ancient and modern. And their taxidermy mocks photography’s ability to freeze things in time (a stuffed bird will look more alive in a photograph than anywhere else).

In an essay published while Roland Barthes was writing Camera Lucida, his reflection on photography and memory, Thierry de Duve attempted a different dissection of photographic time.(4) Barthes preoccupied himself with the stillness of the portrait, but de Duve saw two different times in photography. One is melancholic, the other is traumatic. For de Duve melancholy surfaces in the ‘time exposure’, an image made of the world at rest. A still image of a still world. The time exposure doesn’t seem to stop the world, rather the stillness of the photograph finds consonance in the stillness of the scene. By contrast, traumatic time expresses itself in the ‘snapshot’, which freezes the world and separates the stillness of the image from the movement of the scene. We call this the ‘decisive moment’. What is interesting about Karen Knorr’s photographs that contain artworks and animals is that they are time exposures and snapshots at once. It’s not easy to see if the images are arresting the world or simply depicting an arrested world.

The time exposure and the snapshot coexist and complicate each other in the same frame. What’s more these images were taken in museums. Museums are places where history is arrested, where things are plucked out of time and out of place but made to look natural, calm, ordered and still. As if they truly belonged there. What better describes both the time of Knorr’s images and the time of the museum than a complicated coexistence of melancholy and trauma?

Perhaps this uncanny effect is most pronounced however, not in her photography but in the video work The Visitors. Here we are offered a delicately slow sequence of motionless images of monkeys, roaming amid the marble sculpture of the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. It is difficult to tell if these are freeze frames of live animals, or long takes of stuffed animals or a mixture of both. (5) While video is so often associated with the constant jittery flow of everyday life, Knorr realises that it might be equally well characterised as a medium of fixity, pause and repetition. She approaches the medium of video as being somewhere between film and photography. It has an integral relation to both but belongs to neither. And it has its own time.

By way of conclusion, and in the spirit of the work I have described here perhaps I should loop back to repeat my earlier remark: It wouldn’t be quite right to say that the meaning of Knorr’s images is a complex experience of time, but the layers of interpretation within them are inextricably linked to their temporal character.

Footnotes

1 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen. An interview with Gilles Deleuze.’ Gregory Flaxman, editor, The Brain is the Screen. Deleuze an the Philosophy of Cinema, Routledge, 1997.

2 Denis Hollier, ‘Beyond Collage. Reflections on the André Malraux of L’Espoir and of Le Musée Imaginaire’. Art Press, no. 221, 1997.

3 Anthony J. Hamber (1993) ‘Photography of Works of Art’ in Jacobsen, Ken & Jenny, Etude D’Apres Nature. 19th Century Photographs in Relation to Art. Ken & Jenny Jacobsen, 1997.

4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Noonday Press, 1981. Thierry de Duve, ‘Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox.’ October no.3. MIT Press, 1978.

5 The are echoes here of a passage in Chris Marker’s celebrated photo- film La Jetee. The hero recalls a dreamy afternoon in a Parisian museum of natural history spent with a lost lover. They lose themselves amid the stuffed birds and assorted mammals. The sequence of still frames places the animals and the people in the same register of time, somewhere between the living and the dead, just as the hero’s memory places events somewhere between ‘now’ and ‘then.’

DAVID CAMPANY

An essay on Dan Graham’s 1966 magazine piece Homes for America and its canonisation in post-conceptual art history. (Really).

Text coming when I find it. In the meantime, here are three iterations of Dan Graham’s piece:

‘Art Photographed. Some Notes on Painting and the Book’  is an essay commissioned for the exhibition catalogue Postcards on Photography. Painting and Reproduction, edited by Naomi Salaman and Ronnie Simpson, Cambridge Darkroom 1998.

Essay coming here soon (once I find the file…)