Béatrice Helg: Modern Hesitation

Béatrice Helg: Géométries du Silence, Musée Reattu, Arles, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1992, the photographic artist Craigie Horsfield wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Campany, 2025