The following essay has been excerpted with the permission of Aperture Foundation.
Art Photography Now was originally published in 2005; copies are available from the Aperture website.
Essay by Susan Bright from the introduction to her book, Art Photography Now
‘The discovery of photography was announced in 1839. Quite optimistically, many artists held the view that it would “keep its place” and function primarily as a factotum to art. But this was both presumptuous and futile.’
Aaron Scharfi
Photography is constantly changing and hard to define. Its discursive and somewhat promiscuous nature has tended to confuse many people as to its status and value as an art form. The trouble is that it lends itself to many varied uses. We see photography in newspapers, surveillance, advertising campaigns and art galleries, and as fashion shots or family snaps. Meanings can slip and slide depending on context, and the fact that photography lacks any kind of unity and seems to have no intrinsic character makes the insistent cry of ‘but is it art?’ a constant refrain throughout its relatively short but complex history.
What is more, photography’s mechanical nature, its prolific use in the commercial sector, its ability to constantly reproduce itself and its apparent lack of ‘artistic’ skill have also fueled criticisms that have dogged the medium since its invention in the 1830s. French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire’s protestations against the display of the photographic portraits of Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in the Paris Salon of 1859 sum up persistent (though now somewhat redundant) feelings regarding the intrusion of the machine into the realm of fine art: ‘We must see that photography is again confined to its real task, which consists in being the servant of science and art, but a very humble servant like typography and stenography, which have neither created nor improved literature.’ii
And yet this ‘humble servant’ has now become the medium of choice for many artists, as contemporary art has become increasingly photographic. Indeed, the very fact that it has inextricable ties with other fields such as science or journalism is one of the reasons why it is so attractive to some. Artists have taken the criticisms, or ignored them altogether, and used photography to their own advantage to create work that smashes through definitions of what art is and what it is not. We are now at a point where challenges to photography’s status have been exhausted, and it goes without saying that it can be art. Its high-profile presence in contemporary exhibitions at major international art museums signals its importance, as does its ever-increasing market value. And as more and more people – both individuals and institutions – collect photography, the traditional divisions between what comes under the domain of museums’ photographic collections and what is the responsibility of contemporary art departments are being rethought. National art galleries, which in the past often held snobbish attitudes towards ‘mere’ photography, are now re-examining their collections and filling in gaps as the history of the medium is re-evaluated; museums that previously had no photography collections at all are now beginning to establish them.
This book does not distinguish between terms such as ‘art photography’ and ‘artists using photography’, but instead seeks to examine work that is interesting, regardless of who has made it.iii Some of the image-makers here refer to themselves as artists; others call themselves photographers. Some show their work primarily in the pages of magazines or books; others operate purely in the gallery arena. Many work in other media too, such as film, video and installation. For these practitioners and others
like them, such definitions and titles do not matter; what does count is that the work communicates intelligent ideas that are worthy of attention, appreciation and investigation.
Interestingly, as we reach this stage in the acceptance of photography, new areas of confusion are emerging. Just as we think we are beginning to recognize the medium, or at least to characterize it, important technical changes see certainties slip through our fingers once again. Just as earlier technical breakthroughs, such as the use of colour, were once hurdles for some, photography has recently begun to mutate again, and not without controversy. The digital revolution has impacted in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, causing some to ask not ‘Is this art?’ but ‘Is this photography?’ However, this dynamism and volatility in photographic practice are not the final blows to the medium, as so many purists would claim, but vital developments that are important to its existence. The application of digital technology has helped open up debates, not only about photography’s future, but also its past and its present.
Today we are a sophisticated audience, used to seeing cynical distortion of images in the media and body and head swaps on the internet, and software such as Photoshop has made photographic manipulation open to anyone with a computer. This demystification of process has made us aware of how easy it is to distrust a photograph. Digital techniques, from touch-up to total construction, are now as much a part of photographic practice as the darkroom once was, and just another example of how technical advances affect photography’s ever-changing identity. The impact of this digital technology has seen some theorists describe the current situation as being ‘post- photographic’. But instead of employing one single overarching term that can never adequately cover the breadth and depth of the medium, it is probably better to think of there being several photographies.
One reason why digitalization makes many observers uncomfortable is that it takes us away from reality and into the realm of fantasy, an area which at first seems at odds with a seemingly objective and descriptive medium. However, the photograph’s role as a conveyer of ‘truth’ or as a trace of reality has long been contested; and photographs have always been manipulated, whether in the taking or in the printing process. Tricks of the trade such as splicing and double-negative printing have been part and parcel of photography since the nineteenth century, and the contemporary urge to escape into a fantasy world through photography has parallels with the medium’s early days. In the domestic sphere there are fine examples of family albums that were elaborately collaged and painted upon with fabulous pre-Surrealist narratives, quietly, and perhaps unconsciously, deconstructing the ideology of the Victorian family. Perhaps the most elaborate and amusing example is that compiled by the early British photographer Kate E. Gough in the 1860s, now held in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. As critic Marina Warner put it, ‘Her mixed-media treatment of family snaps has a wild wit that prefigures the collage novels of Max Ernst half a century later.’iv Deflationary scenes of family members transformed into ducks and monkeys can be read as subversive and gentle protests against the order and categorization of regular carte-de-visite albums with their rigid display panels and sanctimonious Bible-like appearance. Also in the domestic realm, fantastical flights of fancy became public when, famously, in July 1917, fifteen- year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths produced five fairy photographs now known as the Cottingley Fairies. These charming images were believed to be proof of the existence of other-worldly creatures, although in fact the ‘fairies’ had been cut out of magazines and made to stand up with hatpins. The hoax was not uncovered until many years later. The collective disappointment showed the extent to which photography’s role as ‘evidence’ was fundamental to the way it was understood as a medium.
While both examples might be written off as harmless child’s play, the Victorians’ use of photography in science (or, more accurately, the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology) relied heavily on the photograph’s role as evidence. And yet here, too, we find that manipulation existed very early on in the medium’s life. By layering negatives on top of one another, scientists created composite portraits that were hailed as a method for parents to see what their future children might look like. More sinisterly, they were used as validations of Jewish ‘identity’ and other ‘types’ such as criminals and ethnic groups. The same method has been used, but with an enquiring postmodern approach, by contemporary artists such as Thomas Ruff in his Other Portraits (1994–5) and in the continuing work of Nancy Burson. Both use digital imaging to debunk ideas of archetypes and employ photography’s supposed objectivity, if only to expose it as a fiction.
Science, art and photography have long had close ties, especially in the field of psychoanalysis. Freudian concepts of the unconscious and phantasy reverberated through Surrealist photographic practice of the 1920s and 1930s, and continue to be influential in the making and interpretation of art photography. Not all Surrealist images used ‘tricks’ or manipulated photographs, however: writers such as André Breton employed ‘straight’ photographs in order to illustrate their texts and ideas. Perhaps the most influential piece of writing of the 1930s that addressed the nature of photography was ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) by the German critic Walter Benjamin. In this famous essay, in which the late-nineteenth-century French photographer Eugène Atget is presented as a forerunner of Surrealism, Benjamin talks of the ‘optical unconscious’ and the ability of photography to open up spaces that previously existed only in dreams – things that had never been consciously seen, let alone reproduced: ‘the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’.v
The writing of Walter Benjamin was especially important to artists working in the late 1960s and 1970s, one of the richest periods of photographic history. The art of this moment grew out of a diversity of critical positions informed by a range of issues, ideas and theories such as Marxism, gender, race, postcolonialism, literary theory, anthropology, art history and social history, and aimed to strip photography of any supposed guarantees. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, William Wegman, Dan Graham, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel played with context and probed the belief in the photograph as evidence, questioning its relationship to realism and reality in provocative ways. They made the photograph a perfect means of redefining aesthetic experience and transgressing the medium-based categories and inherent elitism of modernism. In the words of the current Chief Curator of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Peter Galassi, ‘Tinkering with the artless sincerity of the most banal photographs – passport portraits, real estate ads, textbook illustrations – these artists make a world of engaging mischief. The appealing wit of their pseudo-documents and photographic conundrums undermined the presumed reliability of photographic fact, showing that what we see always depends in part on what we expect to see.’vi
This investigation into the multiple roles and contexts of the photograph rocked the very grounds on which photographic modernism had been built in the early decades of the twentieth century. The stylistic elegance of photographers such as Ansel Adams,Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston had an eloquence based on formal control and photographic ‘purity’, and they strove to have their work received and understood as art. Their status in photographic history has much to do with the earlier campaigning of photographer, gallery director, writer and editor Alfred Stieglitz. He fought to position photography as an equal with painting and at the polar opposite of what he considered crass commercial imaging.vii By creating a specialist market for art photography and becoming a guiding spirit to Beaumont Newhall (MoMA’s first curator of photography), Stieglitz was a crucially important advisor on what and whom MoMA should collect and display as photographic art and therefore was a major influence on photography’s status in American art.viii
Stieglitz held fast to the belief that art photography was special and had nothing to do with the commercial roles of the medium. It was somewhat paradoxical, therefore, that Pop artists such as Warhol and Rauschenberg and later Conceptualists such as Ruscha and Graham saw photography as a medium of anonymity and function, rather than considering photographs as beautifully crafted objects, and exploited this with their art. Both Warhol and Rauschenberg celebrated the vernacular and commercial representations of popular and capitalist culture. By adopting the mechanical, mass and lowly elements of photography, both artists would conspire to create an atmosphere in which hybrid practices of art and commercialism prevailed. Their use of photography as a tool to question and critique the medium itself, and to examine its place in society, paved the way for lens-based media to become a major part of contemporary art practice.
The questioning of the relationship between value and form was exacerbated later in the twentieth century in what became known as the era of postmodernism. Postmodernist art and theory asked questions about the place of images in our culture, who produces them and also who reproduces them. Postmodernists considered form (in this case art, but also everyday language, literature, advertising, fashion, film) as the embodiment of the values of a given society, not as a transparent and neutral carrier of meaning, as pure modernists would have it. And since they also explored the question of who defines those values, postmodernists saw form as embodying the power relations at work in society – between classes, between genders, between races, and so on. Postmodernism impacted on art photography in vital ways. It exposed how photography was used and understood as a medium, as a material and as a message; and the study of ‘great’ masters became increasingly irrelevant and problematic, since a work was no longer seen as the creation of a single ‘author’ who retained the monopoly on its meaning but as the product of a certain context with a multiplicity of meanings. One group of artists in particular – among them Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler and Cindy Sherman – were influenced greatly by postmodernist theory in the mid- to late 1970s and early 1980s. By mocking aspects of the mass media, both Kruger and Prince, for example, revisited codes of representation (especially of sexuality and gender) by appropriating images originally used in advertising and re-presenting them in the gallery space. This change of context and conceptual understanding exposed the images’ multiple viewpoints and possible meanings.
So, as we search for a definition as to what photography actually is and the varied ways in which it has become accepted as art, we repeatedly see a collapsing of boundaries that may seem rather at odds with the more traditional genre-based way in which this book is structured. As with any project that aims to bring together a diversity of artists, some kind of categorization is needed. The decision to use traditional genres – document, narrative, landscape, etc. – was, on the one hand, a pragmatic one. But by
placing what may seem like limitations on how we understand certain photographs, I have also attempted to show how these classic genres have been reinterpreted by contemporary artists, and how they often overlap. Much of the work in the book refuses to be pigeonholed and could easily sit in another chapter. With this in mind, one will find that less tangible themes – such as memory, time, space and, of course, identity (both of the medium itself and of the subject) – cut across the book’s formal structure.
The portrait is without doubt the most popular form in contemporary art photography and there has been a rush of exhibitions on the theme over recent years. The human face has long been read as a ‘window’ onto the soul of a person, and early photographic portraits, like their painted equivalents, were certainly read in this way. But in the late twentieth century, with the debunking of the idea of essences (of both the photograph and the sitter) has come a sustained questioning of what a photographed portrait is. Is it all about surface appearance or can it communicate something more?
What remains true, however, is that the portrait continues to function as an index and a symbol, an icon and a metaphor, making claims about ‘humankind’. As viewers, when we engage with another human face, we often feel moved to make comparisons with ourselves, to sympathize or empathize with the subject. At the same time, some of the work in this chapter taps into insecurities surrounding such problematic territories as cosmetic surgery, cloning, and issues of privacy. The self-portraits in this chapter are different. Addressing questions of personal identity more acutely, the artists who work with their own image show us that identity is fluid and interchangeable, depending on our surroundings and those around us. The use of the mask, and the play between what is revealed and what is disguised, is central to self-portraiture as artists offer different versions of themselves up to the camera. Gender, sex, age and personalities are all adopted and discarded for the camera and scenarios are performed in a process that continuously picks away at the ‘self’ of the self-portrait.
Strange as it may seem at first, investigations into personal identity can also be seen in the landscape chapter. The search for ‘man’s’ placein the world and age-old questions of nature and culture are at the core of many of the artists’ work here. As writer and theorist David Campany has pointed out, the camera and the land have had a long history together: ‘As an invention of modernity, photography was central to the desire for a control and ordering of the natural world. It could map terrain topographically in preparation for urban expansion.’ix It could document the huge changes to the land being wrought by industrialization, commenting upon – and, more often than not, critiquing – so-called progress. As our relationship with the land became increasingly complex in the twentieth century, there was a horrific realization that in the battle between nature and culture, culture might actually be winning. The cost of human consumption remains a subject for many of the artists in this chapter, along with associated issues of preservation and alienation. At the same time, landscape – often following the example of painting – can also offer a form of escape, nostalgia and fantasy away from all that is man-made and ‘unnatural’. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the genre is that many contemporary photographers still take painting as their point of reference, whether to critique it explicitly or to borrow and make use of its aesthetic or metaphorical signs and symbols.
The works in the third chapter, ‘Narrative’, explore elements of fiction and the relationship of photography to reality and realism. Highly dramatized lighting, artificial and often unlikely settings and filmic sensibilities let the viewer know immediately that we are in the realm of fantasy and artifice. We are not fooled into believing that these are
snatched moments from the ‘real world’. Cherry-picking their aesthetics from a wide range of sources from figurative painting, cinema and literature, these images do not claim to document or witness ‘reality’ but to fabricate and present an invented world of make-believe. The work in this chapter ranges from subtle comments on society to bombastic digital tableaux that have more in common with computer games and science- fiction movies.
The physical act of photographing something can in turn change its meaning. This is crucial to the fourth chapter, ‘Object’, and it is here that we turn most acutely to questions of photographic identity. Dealing with still life, experimental or abstract photography, deadpan investigations of objects in loaded spaces, and the photographic object itself, the artists featured constantly deal with questions of subjectivity and objectivity, photographic truthfulness and manipulation, and what makes a photograph and, indeed, an art work. With no set style, shared politics or obvious identity, such work demonstrates the diversity of contemporary art photography, from its variety of processes – from large-plate cameras to digital technology – to its range of influences, from important artistic pioneers to the vernacular and the commercial. The crossovers between other artistic media such as sculpture and still-life painting are also apparent in this chapter.
Compared to such traditional genres as portrait, landscape and still life, fashion photography is a newcomer. It has enjoyed unprecedented success in the art arena over the last ten years. British curator and writer Charlotte Cotton has written extensively on the crossover between fashion photography and art and has commented, ‘At its best, this cross-fertilisation proffered experimental access for fine art photographers to the working practices of commercial image-making, as well as offering magazines direct engagement with the perceived prestige of fine art.’x Exhibitions and books have allowed fashion photographers’ work to be reassessed and understood in different contexts from the magazine; and for artists, working for fashion magazines has presented different freedoms, opportunities and challenges. The images in this chapter show a combination of work done by artists for the fashion world, ‘personal’ work by fashion photographers, and work that enjoys equal status in both sites.
The sixth chapter, ‘Document’, is perhaps the most ambitious in its scope and brings together the widest range of practitioners. Documents have traditionally laid claim to certifiable truth. With traditional sites for ‘documentary photography’ such as photomagazines rapidly disappearing, there is an escalating presence in the gallery of work dealing with issues of the document. The decline of the supposed certainties of photography – such as authenticity and veracity – underpins much of the work in this chapter. It takes the term ‘document’in its broadest sense and clearly challenges the more established view that a photograph is a way of recording and showing the social world. The latter reading assumes that photography is a ‘neutral’ medium that somehow bypasses subjectivity, prejudice and ideology and re-presents the world to us ‘as it is’. New documentary strategies aim to get away from emotive photojournalism and social documentary that exposes some horrific human suffering, to find a slippery position somewhere between the traditional photographic document and the traditional art photograph. The documents in this chapter might be witnesses to a performative event, insights into intimate diaries usually kept private, or powerful political statements. We also see them function as anthropological tools or as a series of found images stripped from their original context, leaving the viewer to create imaginative narratives based on visual clues.
In many ways, it is the urban landscape that has perhaps become synonymous with photography, and it is to this that the final chapter turns. ‘Street’ photography evokes ideas of men snapshooting from the hip with 35-mm cameras, composing rhythmic and poetic images that capture the daily ebb and flow of humanity within the city. However, the increased use of large-plate cameras and the consequent slowing down of the photographic process have also had an important impact on how artists deal with the city. Panning out and taking a wider view causes one to see the city as a layering of moments in time, belonging to no one, more like an archaeological site – albeit one in which people live. Constantly changing, cities are both banal and beautiful, alienating and seductive. The mysterious spaces where cities stop and suburbia starts, or the sites one might hurry past in everyday life, are rich pickings for many of the artists in this final chapter. The act of photographing has the ability to turn what might be ignored into something much more profound. On another level, the increased threat of globalization and homogenization to the individuality of cities, and those who live in them, is a theme for some. The growing domination of Western culture and the apparent blending into one big global brand, where everyone looks the same and drinks the same coffee, is a very contemporary concern. Nowhere is this more vivid than in the cities of the Far East, which are undergoing redevelopment and transition faster than any other urban centres.
As all the work in this book testifies, photography is no longer a ‘mortal enemy’ or a ‘humble servant’ to art. It is currently enjoying significant re-evaluation in terms of its profile, acceptance and status. These developments mirror its exciting advances and shifts as a medium, and we can look forward to seeing more and more of it in contemporary art galleries and books, in whatever shape or form it may take.
*Please refer to the book for all footnote information.