A very interesting symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:
From SF MOMA Website:
"Photography has almost always been in crisis. In
the beginning, the terms of this crisis were cast as dichotomies: is
photography science or art? Nature or technology? Representation or truth? This
questioning has intensified and become more complicated over the intervening
years. At times, the issues have required a profound rethinking of what
photography is, does, and means. This is one of those times. Given the nature
of contemporary art practice, the condition of visual culture, the advent of
new technologies, and many other factors, what is at stake today in seeing
something as a photograph? What is the value of continuing to speak of
photography as a specific practice or discipline? Is photography over?
SFMOMA has invited a range of major thinkers and
practitioners to write brief responses to this question and then
to convene for a two-day summit on the state of the medium. Participants
include Vince Aletti, George Baker, Walead Beshty, Jennifer Blessing, Charlotte
Cotton, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Geoff Dyer, Peter Galassi, Corey Keller, Douglas
Nickel, Trevor Paglen, Blake Stimson, and Joel Snyder.
Their texts will be used to kick off a panel
discussion Thursday night. The 13 participants will continue the conversation
Friday morning in closed-door sessions and will report back in a public session
Friday afternoon.
Read the participants' responses to the question here.
SFMOMA, Phyllis Wattis Theater Thursday, April 22, 7:00 p.m. Friday, April 23, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m."
UPDATE:
This week SFMOMA hosted a major symposium on the current state of the field of photography, with two intensive panel discussions Thursday evening and Friday afternoon. Yesterday's reports are here. The initial texts from the symposium participants are here. Other blog posts addressing the question "Is Photography Over?" can be found here.
Read the participants' responses to the question here or below (Source: SFMOMA website)
Vince Aletti
Vince Aletti, formerly the art
editor and photography critic at the Village Voice, reviews photo
exhibitions for the "Goings on About Town" section of the New
Yorker and photo books for Photograph. He was the co-curator of the
International Center of Photography's 2009 Year of Fashion, including
the traveling exhibition Avedon Fashion 1944-2000.
Is photography over? To anyone who
spends time looking at photographs in galleries, museums, art fairs, flea
markets, books, and magazines, the question seems absurd, unthinkable. When
photography seems to pervade, if not dominate, every aspect of our culture,
what could it possibly mean? Sure, there's been some anxiety about the
continued survival of the medium at its most traditional -- the modestly scaled,
handmade, black-and-white print that once defined photography as art. Vintage
work is fetishized, but does the black-and-white print have a place in
contemporary practice? Ask Lee Friedlander, Judith Joy Ross, Robert Adams, and Sally
Mann. The regular disappearance of favorite photographic papers, the recent
dismantling of darkrooms, and the relentless rise of digital capture and output
would seem to signal the end of a long, vital chapter in the medium's history.
But when virtually every antique process -- daguerreotype, tintype, and
cyanotype; albumen, salt, platinum-palladium, and wet-plate collodion printing
-- has been revived over the past few decades, there's no reason to think
gelatin silver will disappear totally anytime soon. There's never been just one
kind of photography, and now there are many.
Is the concern that the medium's
role as a reliable reporter has been so thoroughly undermined by computer
manipulation and convincingly staged fictions that every photograph is thrown
into doubt? If absolute truth were the only thing photography had to offer, it
would have disappeared a century ago. Photography isn't merely a window on the
world, it's a portal into the unconscious, wide open to fantasies, nightmares,
obsessions, and the purest abstraction, as envisioned by Julia Margaret
Cameron, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Simmons, and Adam
Fuss. But this is a legitimate concern, and it's a question of trust.
Photojournalism is not over -- if the response, both professional and amateur,
to the attacks on September 11, 2001, didn't make that abundantly clear, the
public's extraordinary appetite for the pictures did -- but when everyone knows
how easily and flawlessly an image can be manipulated, its credibility is constantly
in question. But credibility is an issue for all photography these days;
although a certain amount of skepticism is always in order, when every image is
examined for digital imaging effects, doubt can be not just distracting but
corrosive. So the public's gullibility may be over, but photography, having
survived a blow to its confidence, goes on.
What's over is the narrow view of photography -- the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational -- not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract. But surely that notion died long ago, along with the idea that there was an important distinction to be made between pictures made by "artists" and everyone else with a camera. Thanks to pioneering curators and collectors like John Szarkowski and Sam Wagstaff, more serious attention has been focused on the broad range of anonymous, vernacular, and commercial work, opening up the field and enlivening the discussion. Photography over? More often these days, it feels like it's only just begun.
George Baker
George Baker teaches art history at
UCLA and is an editor of the journal October. His publications on
photography include the books James Coleman: Drei Filmarbeiten (Sprengel
Museum, 2003), Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (Sternberg
Press, 2003), the essay "Photography's Expanded Field (2005)," and a
forthcoming book to be entitled Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of
Photography.
The question is hyperbolic,
overblown, risible. And yet, after the mannerism (indeed hyperbole) of most
postmodern engagements with photography, there is undeniably what Frank Kermode
called the "sense of an ending." I am interested, like Kermode, in
the directions and the possibilities that such narratives of photography's end
make possible; I am, specifically, interested in the connections that our
current endgame narratives make to other such narratives and other such moments
in photography's history.
I think, for example, of Walter
Benjamin predicting the rebirth of photography in the wake of the stock market
crash of 1929, of his hopes for a return to the forgotten potentials of the
medium before its industrialization. I think, too, of Walker Evans announcing
the "reappearance" of photography around the same historical events.
I think of Roland Barthes prioritizing similarly atavistic potentials of the
medium at the moment of a later economic recession, that of the 1970s, which is
also the moment immediately preceding the technological shift from the analog
to the digital that we have subsequently witnessed. We exist today in a moment
not unlike these -- of historical and economic crisis, perhaps epochal
transition, though it is too early to be sure -- moments that provoked major
rethinkings and reorientations of photography, in both theory and practice.
And so I have become interested in
photographic forms that stage something like the sense of the medium's ending,
a dispersal that is also -- strangely, paradoxically, impossibly -- a form of
return, to lost or forgotten potentials of photography. These dispersals and
returns can be staged in forms rather far-flung from the medium-specific notion
of a photograph; this is the development I have tried to trace with what I have
called "photography's expanded field." I will simply offer up one of
many potential examples: the artist Moyra Davey's early photographic series
entitled Copperheads (1990). Andreas Gursky's 99 cent (1999)
could be imagined as the series' anti-type. Produced (again) during a prior
moment of economic recession, Davey's low-tech color images focus on the
profile of Abraham Lincoln engraved on the United States penny, the cheapest,
most devalued piece of American currency. Copperheads thus comprises an
archive of silhouettes, a typology of portraits, pointing back to one of the
origins of the photographic impulse itself, an Ur-form of the medium, we might
say. And yet the kind of recursivity that Davey seeks is not self-reflexive or
medium-specific; she locates photographic qualities in an analog outside of the
photograph itself.
Basically worthless, the pennies
that Davey depicts are "like" photographs in many different ways:
they are objects of circulation and objects of use; they are objects kept close
to the body, in wallets and pockets, and fingered by hands; they are tokens
stamped with their time and date. They are small objects, miniatures, enlarged
by the photograph's innate habit of holding on tight to its object-world,
progeny of the close-up and the zoom. They are obsolete, throwaway vestiges,
but also keepsakes, collectors' items, the useless avatars of blind luck or
cunning thrift simultaneously. Indeed, each Copperhead seems a memorial
to photography's eradication, or -- what amounts to the same thing -- its
ceaseless dedication to that which is on the verge of disappearance. The works
capture the immeasurable variety of the decay of each cast profile upon the
penny's surface, embodying meditations upon loss, erosion, and the slipping of
a thing into the status of detritus.
And yet, in fixating on this image-loss, the Copperheads depict the penny as a receptor surface, a skin infinitely susceptible to wounds, gouges, and scratches -- in other words, a site of contact, an object, like the photograph, endlessly open to receiving the marks of the world. They also depict the penny as a reactive surface, the site of myriad eruptions and chemical "blooms." In recording this, Davey's Copperheads mirror photography in yet another way: they are images of serial objects, replicas, all given over to the condition of absolute chance and singularity. And if each photograph seems an image of disappearance, a cast or imprint fading away before our eyes, the images' condition as "last photographs" can also be reversed. For it is as if we gaze upon photograph after photograph of what seem to be "latent" images, a form at the point of its emergence, like a landmass surfacing from the ocean's depths, an unknown object blanketed by deep but melting snow. The photographs are images of destruction and resurrection, loss and potential rebirth, at the same time. Arranged in a recent artist book devoted to the series with one photograph following the other, one image to each page, the typology is transformed into a kind of flipbook, a proto-cinematic device carrying the photograph and the image into other domains. It is another mode of photography's "reappearance," another form of the photograph's periodic emergence.
Walead Beshty
Walead Beshty is an artist and
writer born in London and currently living and working in Los Angeles, where he
is Associate Professor of Fine Art at Art Center College of Design. Recent solo
exhibitions include Production Stills at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, UK (2009)
and Walead Beshty: Legibility on Colored Backgrounds at The Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2009).
Before one could address the
questions above in good faith, one would need a serviceable definition of what
"photography" (and here, its hypothetical exemplar, a
"photograph") is. Without veering into convoluted ontology, this
"photography," regardless of what might be argued to fall within its
boundaries, seems best described as a type of "medium," or "an
agency or means of doing something," and in its specific case, "the
intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses or a
force acts on objects at a distance." Defined in this way, a medium is
constituted by a dialectic of applied use and technological development, and is
further defined by the conventionalization of the relationship between the two,
a process that occurs over time and is in a state of constant revision. It
would follow that a medium is never freed from its use, nor is it freed from
its position between some agents in a transaction, and it is always steeped in
the inertia of its conventions, for this is how, by analogy, each new relation
between shifting technologies and new applications is self-historicizing and
legible. This is the unending "crisis" of all media, the struggle
between adherence to convention, and new relations between technology and use.
This would describe the transformation of a series of relations between
technology and use, to the becoming of a "medium," in short, the
institutionalization of these instances of negotiation, which is consummated by
the use of its name in an abstract trans-historical sense, as in when its name
is invoked in and of itself as a stable entity. The identification of a medium
is an act of institutional reification par excellence, in fact, it is the
institutional act, that which makes the institution concrete, like air made
solid.
The means by which this
conventionalization is distributed is either practical, such as vocational
training or apprenticeships, or disciplinary, i.e. localized within -- from the
perspective of media -- a meta-discourse such as the museum or art history (a
hybrid form of these is reflected in most art school curricula). But the
process of development, and institutionalization mentioned above is internal to
the "medium" itself, and it would be appropriate to add that only an
outside agent (a disciplinary agent) would be concerned with the nature of one
medium's distinction from other media, and in so doing, is attempting to
situate that medium within a larger array which is specific to that
institution. In short, a medium is always relational, and the attempts to
isolate and treat it as discrete is to institutionalize it, and to further
attempt to place it within a larger schema is to institutionalize it a second
time, rendering it further abstract. While a medium is always a play between
the spectral hold of its name, and the material minutiae of its development,
the disciplinary must cling to the spectral alone, and make it tangible. This
is always tenuous. So it seems safe to say that when we speak of a
"crisis" in the way asserted above, we speak of the trouble in
institutionalizing photography within a broader field as a discrete entity,
here specifically the field of art, and whether or not this category, in and of
itself, is still useful for these purposes.
So we have a question above that
tacitly pertains to ontology, that points to the status of
"photography's" being -- here of being "over" -- and thus, it
is not only "photography's" position within a larger constellation of
aesthetic production residing under the umbrella heading "art," but
the entire structure of differential media within the institution of art that
is called into question. When we ask "what is at stake in seeing something
as a photograph?" we ask that of all media (it would be just as sticky to
ask the same of painting or sculpture). In other words, when we ask the value
of the term beyond its provisional utility, and moreover, when we ask these
questions from the perspective of the maintenance of the disciplinary
institution of art (pertaining to taxonomic areas of study, and theoretical
objects or objects of discourse) alluding to the need to reevaluate its
parameters, we are implicating the categorical systems applied to all art
objects, questioning the way medium specificity is applied on an institutional
level. "Photography" becomes, in this instance, a way to name this
institutional anxiety, and any perceived crisis is really that of the
disciplinary structures applied to it. In the case of photography, this
difficulty has inspired several admirable attempts at reconciliation which are
germane to the current debate, from John Szarkowski's foundational "The
Photographer's Eye," to Rosalind Krauss' "Photography's Discursive
Spaces," to Peter Galassi's "Before Photography: Painting and the
Invention of Photography," to the more recent "Photography's Expanded
Field" by George Baker, all of which attempt to negotiate a position for
photography within the museum or art history as a discrete and identifiable
"medium," one with a coherent identity, and in so doing, they
constitute a defense of the institutionalized categorical delimiters of art
historians, curators, or critics respectively.
The questions posed for this conference neither relate to practices which we might call photographic, nor do they point to the theorization of those practices, as these practices are all specific sets of relations and do not operate at the level of abstraction. Instead the condition of "crisis" is realized on the level of abstract institutional categories invented to delineate one set of practices from another, a crisis pertaining to whether or not the current structure of disciplines is able to identify and dutifully manage the traditions they are called upon to preserve and maintain; it is about creating a criteria for what is excluded and what is included in the hypothetical warehouse called "photography". It is less a crisis for the medium, but more so a crisis of the institutionalization of art itself. Actually, it is even more mundane than that, when medium specificity is staged from within academia or museums, it is really a question of paying the bills, of funding lines, departmental autonomy, curriculum, intellectual fiefdoms, library tabs, allotted real estate, and canons wrapped in the guise of a broad philosophical conundrum. When these debates are realized on the level of abstraction, such as "what is photography?" or "Is photography over?", the details of this bureaucratic topography are glossed over; we are reduced to the intellectual equivalent of theorizing empty filing cabinets, of treating the terminology and categories as fixed and searching for some hidden meaning within them. A more pointed question might be: How is the current means of understanding the institutionalization of these conventions useful for the maintenance of the organizational structure of cultural institutions? For example, why do photography departments exist in institutions alongside regional or historical specialties? Or why do we maintain photography departments within art schools, most absurdly graduate art programs, when these professional distinctions barely exist within contemporary art? We could also ask if these departmental divisions continue to serve any purpose, or if they are the institutional equivalent of the appendix, slowly evolving away. Is that what we are worried is "over"? Or, is it possible to leave behind the empty essentialization of categorical delimiters without sacrificing an awareness of historical development? These are not ontological questions, but questions of logistics, of bureaucracies and their historical development, of how the contemporary field is an accumulation of minute negotiations. These are the questions pertaining to the quotidian, and the incremental formulation of history, the same incremental formation implicit within the course of any medium's, or discourse's life. This would be a pathway from abstract argumentation to the real political stakes of the production and reception of aesthetics, and more so, a means to confront the widespread confusion of a disciplinary reckoning for a crisis in its object of study.
Jennifer Blessing
Jennifer Blessing is curator of
photography at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Most recently, she
organized Catherine
Opie: American Photographer, as well as two exhibitions for the Deutsche
Guggenheim in Berlin: True North and Jeff Wall: Exposure. In
addition to organizing photo-based exhibitions, she is responsible for
developing the museum's photography collection.
Photography has been over,
finished, dead from its inception. As a medium founded in technological
innovation, it is subject to the product life cycle, which is to say that every
new device or process reaches a zenith of popularity only to be superseded by
the next invention. The seed of each innovation's demise is thus planted at its
birth. Many writers have speculated on the unique morbidness of the
photographic image, how it is suffused by death through its divided
temporality: the subject before the lens, so visceral in the present, is long
gone, such that every photograph becomes a memorial to the past. The melancholy
intrinsic to the photographic image is reiterated in its physical form, as
every viewer repeatedly witnesses medium obsolescence across their lifetime,
bringing this knowledge to their experience of the work. This twin-fold characteristic
of photography -- both image and form indelibly stamped by time -- has defined
the medium since its invention. It is the ghost haunting the ecstatic
enthusiasm that meets every innovation.
So yes, photography as we have
known it is over, as it has been many times before. Yet there is still
something that is "photography," there is still something inherent to
the medium. How do we define it? We could say it is "lens-based,"
thus encompassing the moving image (video and film), digital, and virtual technologies,
but cameraless photographs defy this definition. A related exception presents
if we define the medium via its (mass) reproducibility, as the photogram is
unique, and uniquely photographic. In the end, what makes a photograph a
photograph is its ephemerality, its special connection to a moment in time that
is always already lost. Indexicality as the defining characteristic of
photography is a faith to which I subscribe. The photograph has a privileged
connection to the past, which it seems to preserve like no other medium.
Therefore, I would argue that all recording technologies (including lens-based,
sound, and sensitized surfaces) ultimately have more in common ontologically
with performance than with traditional painting and sculpture. All recording
media document acts, and performance (art), if it is to be preserved, must be
repeated or recorded. This argument informs the exhibition Haunted:
Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, which opens at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York at the end of March.
It also informs the collecting priorities of the Guggenheim. Ours is not an encyclopedic collection, so while I fully recognize the pressing need for research, publishing, and exhibition of historical photography, our mandate concerns contemporary issues and work. As a museum professional, what is at stake in the broad definition of photography that I propose is how to collect and preserve art that is inherently ephemeral, focused as it is on the momentary, and subject to the inherent vice of its relentlessly newfangled and rapidly obsolete technologies. Just as performances are reiterated via scripts, notations, and scores, it may be that contemporary recording technologies will require instructions for their re-fabrication by future generations. Already, rapid changes in platforms have required us, as an institution, to grapple with reformatting media-based works. We face related challenges with color photographs.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Philip-Lorca diCorcia lives in New
York City. He holds the position of Chief Critic at the graduate school of art
at Yale University from which he received an MFA in 1979. His work, exploiting
the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction, has been collected and
exhibited widely, most recently in monographic exhibitions at the Institute of
Contemporary Art, Boston (2007), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(2008).
"Over"... like,
"Dead"? Or, like, "Finished-for-now"? I don't think
Photography is dead, maybe slightly moribund, and it is finished as we knew it,
but still capable of the surprise that we have become so inured to. There has
been a protracted crisis of representation that has left behind a myriad of
claims on Photography's legacy and no sure future to proclaim. Most predictions
are based on technical developments that alter the form more than the content.
The delivery system is rapidly shifting but the content is little altered. The
most realistic of mediums seems to be suffering from a detachment from reality.
Photography's role as a verification of the world is lost. Reality has become a
parallel universe with photographers returning with different versions of what
it truly looks like. And nobody really believes any of them. What is being
called "abstraction" has taken the position that photography of
photography or investigations of the nature of perception offer the only
uncorrupted path to a truth worth knowing. After years of questioning the
nature of photographic truth we have arrived at a place where truth is measured
by the degree of the lie and the only thing positive is a double negative.
Neologisms abound as artists vie to define something that doesn't exist -
something new. It has come to the point where everything is an instant cliché
which is doubled by its expression as another cliché mediated by a computer.
Thus the question: "Is Photography over?" I suggest Photography is
just tired. The fatigue seems partly a result of its sudden over-inflation and
equally sudden deflation: stress fractures in its credibility. I find that issue
displaced. The real question should be "Is Art over?" To me, it is
more like:"Was it ever relevant"? To that I say Photography has
always been an unwelcome bedfellow to Art, which is for most of the world
irrelevant, and Photography has been, and remains, relevant. So, if it's over
then the issue has to be looked at as either a precursor to the demise of Art's
sanctity, or the liberation of Photography from the threadbare criteria that
Art History has imposed.
William James said, "Wisdom is learning what to overlook". We now look at everything, including the invisible. Photography, a mechanical form of looking, is intrinsically limited in what it can show. There lies the wisdom. The current crisis is partially caused by attempts to extend Photography's capability. Maybe it will succeed and show us something new we don't really need to see, or maybe it will fail and be the wiser for it.
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer's many books include Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansi:
A Novel; and The Ongoing Moment, which won the International
Center of Photography's Infinity Award for writing on Photography.
Let's start by enlarging the field
of enquiry, by considering two responses that have nothing to do with
photography -- or with each other.
Philip Larkin was dismayed by the
death of Duke Ellington in May, 1974. "Let us bury the great Duke,"
he wrote to a friend, "I've been playing some of his records: now he and
Armstrong have gone jazz is finally finished."
Published a year earlier, Raymond
Williams's The Country and the City begins with Williams pondering an
account from the 1960s of how the life of rural England -- which had endured for
centuries -- had just come to an end, was over. This reminded Williams of
something else he'd read, saying pretty much the same thing in the 1930s, which
in turn put him in mind of a similar elegy from the early years of the century.
And so he continued to chase this recently vanished past as it receded further
and further in history, to William Cobbett, to Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted
Village" and so on. Ultimately, of course, we would end up in the Garden
of Eden which retains its pristine beauty only because we were expelled from
it.
The connections between jazz and
photography are obvious. Lee Friedlander remembers his friend Steve Lacy saying
that the time when he was cutting his teeth in the 1950s was a "Golden Age
of jazz because all the giants were alive." And Friedlander himself saw a
parallel with his own medium: in 1950, he said, "85 percent of the history
of photography were living people."
By the Lacy-Friedlander standard
Larkin was right. But Friedlander's point is misleading because history doesn't
stop. (Plenty of important photographers weren't even born back in 1950.) The
tradition keeps extending itself even if, in order to do so, it has to mutate
into something which may not look or sound like what has gone before. Miles
Davis realized this. That's why his response to Ellington's death was to
go into the studio and record "He Loved Him Madly," a 25-minute,
partly electronic Stockhausen-inflected elegy which would have appalled Larkin.
And Larkin had been complaining about jazz being over -- not from when Coltrane
started ruining it with his "cobra-coaxing cacophonies" but from the
moment it got to be truly great: with Charlie Parker who Larkin blamed, along
with those other famous Ps (Pound and Picasso) for destroying poetry and art
respectively. In other words, Larkin is a one-man symptom for the kind of
elegiac recession identified by Williams.
In any medium certain periods are
characterized by the production of a large quantity of material of a
consistently high standard, rapid innovation and consolidation of the classic
status of pioneers. Such phases can come to an end without the medium as a
whole being over or finished -- even if that medium is elegy-prone.
In Camera Lucida Roland
Barthes famously claimed that photography was wedded not just to what was but
to that which no longer is. This would seem to make photography uniquely
disposed to self-elegy, but its history has been remarkably free of the
elegiac. Which is a bit of a shame, frankly, because I had intended going back
through its history to find Larkin-like laments and expressions of decline and
to use these in a Williams-like way as inverse iterations of the continuing
robust health of the medium. Such laments are few and far between. There are
plenty of adverse critical reactions, announcements that a particular figure --
Eggleston in the 1970s or Frank in the 1950s -- is a disaster or an affront, but
what's astonishing is not the way such people have been vilified but the speed
with which that initial revulsion reversed itself into acclaim and assimilation
within a tradition that continues to advance.
If people have spoken of photography being "over" they tend to use the word in the way that Joseph Keiley (one of Stieglitz's spokesmen) did in a 1906 issue of Camera Work when he said "the real battle for the recognition of pictorial photography is over." This seems apposite in that the history of photography is the history of victories won and goals achieved. If photography is over it may be because of the thoroughness of its victories; like some warlord or general habituated to a life of battle there are no more wars to be fought.
Peter Galassi
Peter Galassi has been chief
curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York since
1991. He organized Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, which
opened at MoMA on April 11 and will be shown at SFMOMA October 30, 2010,
through January 30, 2011. In addition to the catalogue of that exhibition, his
publications include studies of the work of Roy DeCarava, Philip-Lorca
diCorcia, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky,
Nicholas Nixon, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Jeff Wall.
Is photography over? I don't think
so. It's a human creation that has turned out to be quite useful, like plumbing
or language. Like all useful things, it keeps changing. And like all things
touched by digital technology, it is changing a lot right now. But no matter
how many new gizmos and apps come along, I doubt that photographs are more
likely than pipes and words to become obsolete.
But we're really talking about
photography in the art world, aren't we? One of the progressive myths of
today's art world is that what really matters is some core quality, idea, or
experience of art -- independent of the materials and techniques that brought a
particular work into being. I call this outlook progressive because it has
challenged hierarchies and eroded assumptions that tended to stifle rather than
inspire curiosity and creativity. It certainly was good news for photography.
Now that a work of art can be anything under the sun, the palette envy that
gnawed so mercilessly at Alfred Stieglitz ought to be a thing of the past.
Hence the question at hand. If a
photograph can be a work of art -- no fuss, no muss -- and lots of artists use
lots of different stuff to make their art, isn't it rather old-fashioned and parochial
to be concerned with photography as such? Yes, of course.
And no. It may be that Stieglitz's
grumpy resentments are indeed a thing of the past (and if so, thank God, or
whomever one thanks now that God is over). But Stieglitz's work is still here.
I get paid to believe that the past is relevant to the present, but even if
museums were to evaporate, tradition won't. Artists will make sure of that, and
it is hard to believe that they will lose interest, forever, in all of the
photographs from the time before photography was over.
And, whether or not anyone actually
believes that all mediums have now become equal, is that any reason to suppress
the distinctness of any one of them? There is a difference between anything
being possible and everything being the same. It would be marvelous if each of
us could be alert to all the different colors of the rainbow -- that's something
to strive for. But it doesn't mean we should dump every single can of paint
into a one big vat. You end up with a rather unappealing brown, and it never
changes.
Trevor Paglen is an artist and
geographer. He has written four books and exhibits visual projects
internationally. Paglen is a researcher in the Department of Geography at the
University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland and New York City.
"Photography," for me,
denotes a wide range of imaging practices sharing a common social, historical,
and technological tradition dialectically enmeshed with the construction of
practical reality. This includes everything from "art" photography to
iPhone snapshots, from MRI scans to the infrared eyes of CIA Predator drones,
and from surveillance cameras attached to facial-recognition software to
minoritarian documentary practices from Rodney King to Abu Ghraib. In this
sense, photography is ubiquitous and is only becoming more so. While
photography has an obvious relationship to the production of images, it is
perhaps less obvious what photography has to do with the production of space. I
believe, however, that by understanding photography itself as a political and
cultural geography, we may find a useful framework with which to think
critically about imaging practices.
Much work has been done on the
relationship between seeing, imaging, the production of truth, and the
logistics of domination. Michel Foucault spent much of his career showing the
central role of seeing and imaging apparatuses in the production of modern
power/knowledge. In Foucault's discussion of Bichat's directive to "open
up a few corpses," or his well-known work on Bentham's panopticon,
Foucault consistently shows how the production of visual knowledge is
inseparable not only from the exercise of power but from the production of
space. Accompanying Foucault's epistemic shifts are significant reconfigurations
of space and politics: the site of medical knowledge moving from the lecture
hall to the hospital or the spectacle of the gallows replaced by the softer
power implicit in the panopticon.
Paul Virilio, for his part,
characterized contemporary forms of state power as a convergence of imaging
technologies (the "sight machine") with coercion (the "war
machine") in such a way that the two have become increasingly
indistinguishable from one another. By way of example, Virilio quotes US
Under-Secretary of State for Defense W.J. Perry: "once you see the target,
you can expect to destroy it." For Virilio, like Foucault, the development
and refinement of imaging technologies was indistinguishable from the exercise
of power. For Virilio, the sight machine is composed of specific imaging
practices; its history is inseparable from photography, film, video, and other
imaging technologies and practices.
Implicit in these analyses is a
spatial, as opposed to a strictly semiotic, account of photography. Instead of
understanding photography in terms reminiscent of the "dark art" of
photo interpretation (whose seminal contemporary case study, Barthes
notwithstanding, is undoubtedly Colin Powell's use of Keyhole spy satellite
imagery to show Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that weren't there), we can
think about photography in terms of a spatial politics of imaging practices. In
the case of Colin Powell's presentation, for example, we can examine the
architecture of seeing behind those photographs -- the tens of billions of
secret dollars, the vast and hidden landscapes of launch facilities, ground
stations, aerospace factories, not to mention the vast secrecy and security
apparatuses and even blank spaces in the law (such as the "state secrets
privilege") constituting only one aspect of the contemporary American
"sight machine." And this is only one example.
I'm proposing that we can open up useful ways of understanding photography by sidestepping well-worn discussions about the rhetoric of the image or the "politics of representation." Instead, I propose an understanding of photography in which the performance of imaging and its attendant spatial politics are brought out. By understanding photography itself as an array of performances and landscapes, rather than a never-ending procession of unstable images, we may find a language with which to understand the contemporary ways in which imaging and reality are inescapably enmeshed.
Blake Stimson
Blake Stimson teaches art history
and critical theory at the University of California, Davis. Recent publications
include The
Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT, 2006) and The
Meaning of Photography (co-edited with Robin Kelsey for the Clark Art
Institute and Yale University Press, 2008).
Photography's
Philosophy
This may seem facile at first blush
but my own guess is that photography is not over but instead is just beginning.
Photography once helped to breathe new life into the means of representation it
rendered obsolete, after all, and it is at least conceivable that the new media
of our day are playing a similar role now by putting photography in the
position that painting occupied at the moment it gave rise to Courbet, or
Manet, or Seurat.
This begs the question about what
such a photographic Courbet would be, of course, but we might expect it to be
little concerned with anything that smacks of photographicity. Making medium
into meaning was modern art's proprietary trick and the salvation it garnered
from its plastic advantage over mechanical image-making offers little more than
techno-nostalgia for photography now. If it is to avoid the kind of quaint
obsolescence that we associate with Daguerreotypes and such, photography will
need to recast its mission at a remove from the superior powers of the new technologies
-- their greater plasticity, indexicality, reproducibility, distributibility,
surveilling power, and even, perhaps, their superior capacity to engender puncta
and pierce whatever residue remains of aura.
Photography's future might be
better served by modern art's other preoccupation: its affair with bohemia and
the cafes, garrets, and barricades that were only its most placard-like
expressions. It is too simple to say that photography liberated modern art so
that it could become the form of antagonism championed by the slogans épater
le bourgeois and art for art's sake because such antagonism had already
been born with enlightenment -- Kant called it "unsocial sociability"
or the "propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual
opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society" -- but
something like this was the case. This was photography's philosophy rather than
its science even though it never really lived up to the grandeur of Geist
or Capital or the "will to power" in the ways that modern art's
"painting of modern life" often tried to. Its most enduring purpose
was not giving form to history or alienation or ressentiment but instead
giving expression to quotidian experience -- in the
society-portrait-cum-snapshot, for example, or the class-allegory-cum-nature-morte.
Henri Lefebvre gave some sense of this relation when he said that the quotidian
and the modern "mark and mask, legitimate and counterbalance each
other."
Instead of relying on the old 19th-century realism that carried through most of the 20th, thus, photography may be best served by looking back further to the 18th century's public sphere in order to find its relevance for the 21st. Photography's distinctive value lies more in its humble documentary function, its intimate examination and commemoration of everyday life, than it does in its obsolete technology. Think of the painterly attentiveness of Chardin as being more photographical in this regard than the photo wizardry of Moholy-Nagy or Man Ray. Put differently, we might find photography's future in its role as a ritual form commemorating representation's "unsocial sociability," as Kant called it, or "the contest of meaning," as it came to be named at the end of the Cold War. Such a ritual will only survive now if its philosophically minded performativity is given equal play with its scientifically minded criticality. The contest, in other words, can no longer only be about debunking mythologies but instead also about creating myths anew. Photography's philosophy, its sociality, and even its politics were always a matter of quotidian affective labor much more so than the laboratory criticality derived from its technology. If it is to survive as a meaningful form of expression in its own right -- by becoming the art that it has always wanted to be -- my guess is that photography's better adversary will be social media more than new media per se and its measure of success will be beating Facebook and the like at their own game of everyday life.
Charlotte Cotton
Charlotte Cotton is creative
director for the proposed London space of the UK's National Media Museum.
Previously she was curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
head of programming at The Photographers' Gallery, and head of the Wallis Annenberg
Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is the
author of The
Photograph as Contemporary Art and was the founder of wordswithoutpictures.org.
It is just one of those moments in
culture when it feels neither risible nor disingenuous for SFMOMA to be posing
such a question. It's about time for photography as a culturally
institutionalised, ghettoised, and, frankly, dull and acquiescent,
photo-art-market-serving "discipline" to be over. I understand and
appreciate the building blocks that its poets and seers developed as a discrete
history of this slippery medium. I get why a weird melange of photographers,
curators, picture editors, gallery directors, and collectors advocate still for
all of their versions of what constitutes good photography to be
culturally pre-eminent. And I recognise that their strident labouring on the
coal face of photography's legitimisation enabled me, when I started curating
in the early 1990s, to just assume that photography had a solid role in cultural
programming and discourses, and the war was over. This allowed me to be free to
embrace other challenges such as how to unpack and engagingly narrate
photography's pluralism in ways that feel absolutely relevant to contemporary
eyes.
But enough of this due deference to
the historical quest of crafting an ill-fitting essentialism onto the concept
of Photography. On a bad day, it feels as though the construction of
photo silos within encyclopaedic and modern art museums -- and also photography
non-profit spaces -- can take credit for photography's cultural validation in
the late 20th century but that those silos are, ironically, also guilty of
being temporarily incapable of meaningfully responding to the massive shifts
that are now occurring in image-making cultures. Now that the noughties bubble
market for anything laminated behind Plexi has burst, the gallery (whether
commercial or institutional) loses its status as the most desirable context for
photography's radical forward momentum. So how do we respond meaningfully to
the mass energy of citizen photography or print-on-demand publishing if the
canon that distinguished a very few from the ever so many is our overriding
mandate? How can we shape exhibitions to reflect the contradictions and t.b.d.s
of our time if our preferred model is the institution educating its public
with reassuringly complete and hermetically sealed gallery experiences? How do
we facilitate the life-changing, photographic epiphanies that our touchy-feely
education programmes should aspire to if our potential participants have a
better grasp than us on photography as a creative and social tool? Will
national and regional collections of photography truly reflect the histories of
the medium as they now unfold if they continue to co-opt in a token fashion
anything outside its core canon, whether it be the commercial industries of
photography, amateur, or non-Western practices, as a way of seasonally updating
a super-tired litany of:
•
Road trips
•
Street poetry
•
Illustrations of political and social issues
•
Light-weight Conceptual Art
•
The inoffensively and classically stylish
•
The outputs of the persistent and charming
•
The cheap stuff that contemporary art curators and collectors
aren't interested in
•
The downright over-produced?
To borrow from the enduringly
astute Noel Coward [1], people are wrong when they say that photography in art
museums isn't what it used to be. It's what it used to be - that's what's wrong
with it.
1.
"People are wrong when they say that opera isn't what it used to be. It is
what it used be - that's what's wrong with it!"
Noel Coward Design for
Living, Act 3, scene 1, 1932
Corey Keller
Corey Keller is associate curator
of photography at SFMOMA, where she has organized exhibitions on 19th-century
scientific photography, Henry Wessel, and Larry Sultan, among many others. She
is currently at work on retrospective surveys of the work of Francesca Woodman
(2011) and J. B. Greene (2013).
The challenge of the question,
"Is photography over?" is that it immediately demands a definition of
"photography," and perhaps even a consideration of what constitutes
"over." Neither is as straightforward as it might immediately seem.
For the millions of people armed with camera-equipped cell phones posting on
Flickr and Facebook, to question photography's vitality must appear at best
perplexing and at worst self-indulgent. Surely photography has never been more
ubiquitous or more accessible than it is today; in his wildest dreams George
Eastman could never have imagined the photographic possibilities currently
available to the everyday user. A brief visit to nearly any museum of modern
and contemporary art reveals that the camera is more than ever a crucial
instrument in the contemporary artist's toolbox. So what then is the problem?
Any discussion of photography's
"over-ness" necessarily evokes the ever-widening divide between
digitally produced and/or manipulated photography and what is now
(horrifyingly) referred to as "analog" photography. And, to be sure,
the advent of digital photography has caused problems, not the least of which
is the precipitous disappearance of traditional photographic materials and the
birth of a whole generation of photographers unfamiliar with the darkroom or
the qualities of an exceptional print, but it has also opened up so many
possibilities that it cannot be dismissed out of hand as the death knell of the
medium. (Although it is a subject for a longer discussion than can be
undertaken here, I do take issue with the conventional wisdom that digital's
impact has been to undermine the inherent truth-value of the photograph; to
argue thus is to ignore the medium's fraught history.) I would argue that the
critical challenge facing photography today is not so different from the crises
it has faced before, and the failure to recognize this crisis as one of
continuity, rather than of rupture, is in fact the greatest problem of all.
Alfred Stieglitz, America's most
vociferous champion for the recognition of photography as a fine art, faced a
dual challenge at the turn of the 20th century: for photography to be a
legitimate art form, he argued, it needed to be aligned with the lofty themes and
craftsmanship of painting, and at the same time distinguished from the growing
body of banal snapshots made by button-pressing Kodakers. His solution was to
espouse a photography that disguised its mechanical origins, celebrated the
hand of the artist, and threw a veil over photography's connection to the facts
and contingencies of the real world. As reactionary as Stieglitz's Pictorialism
now seems, is it really so very different from the current art world situation?
Is it any surprise that as photography flourishes cheaply and easily everywhere
else that the galleries are showing enormous color pictures (often staged or
otherwise manipulated to demonstrate artistry), printed in small editions and
sold for astronomical prices?
For much of the 20th century to self-identify as a photographer (rather than an artist) was to take a deliberate political stance, and remarkably, it still is, despite the enormously important role photography plays in both the art world and the real world. It is photography's nagging relationship to the real world that has always been the stumbling block for art critics from Charles Baudelaire to Michael Fried. Photography is, however, different from most other forms of image-making, not just in its special representational qualities, but also in practical terms - it has always had a rich and vigorous life outside the narrow confines of the art world. After years of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling we find ourselves back where we started, still without a language that embraces photographic production in its exquisite complexity, that recognizes it as a practice as well as a medium, that privileges neither its technological foundations nor its formal qualities, and that does not treat photography as merely a theory, but also acknowledges it as a body of objects with a 180-year history of its own. Even beleaguered Alfred Stieglitz, after nearly four decades of championing photography, finally concluded in Yoda-like fashion, "Art or not art. That is immaterial. There is photography."
Douglas Nickel
Douglas R. Nickel is the Andrea V.
Rosenthal Professor of Modern Art at Brown University, where he teaches
photographic history. As a curator in SFMOMA's photography department from 1993
to 2003, he organized the exhibitions Carleton Watkins: The Art of
Perception and Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll.
From 2003 to 2007 he was director of the Center for Creative Photography at the
University of Arizona, Tucson.
Is photography over? At the risk of
sounding like a lawyer, the answer to that question depends on what we mean by
"photography" and what we mean by "over." Observers have
wrestled with a definition of photography for the better part of 175 years now.
Technically, it is accepted as a process that uses light-sensitive materials to
register an image. To the layperson, that registration further entails
deployment of a lens or other optical device, and that image is supposed to be
a recognizable picture. (Manufacturers use stencils and light-sensitive
coatings on copper laminates to produce electronic printed circuit boards, but
while the result is an image of the original pattern, and so by definition
photographic, it is not a recognizable picture and therefore would not qualify
to the average person as an instance of photography.) But since the everyday
use of light-sensitive surfaces and optics to register images appears to be in
no immediate peril, we must assume that, by "photography," the
question wants to point to something more sociological than technical in
nature: a collective faith in the authenticity of images made by photographic
means, the "analogic," or an historical era that is characterized by
that faith, or perhaps more narrowly, an era in the artworld in which the
philosophical and esthetic issues raised by concern for that authenticity are
brought to a condition of singular prominence.
By "over," then, we must
decide whether we wish to discuss an epistemological question of Western
modernity -- where did faith in the seemingly unique veridical nature of the
photograph come from, and what conditions would come to alter or undermine that
faith? -- or if we want to analyze what conditions in painting and sculpture in
the late 1950s could propose the mass circulation of photographic images (in
print media, advertising, scientific documentation and snapshots) as
iconoclastic vehicles for cultural critique, and why that critique may or may
not now seem exhausted to artists and those who follow them. To put it another
way, the question "is photography over?" requires a second question --
"and for whom?" If "over" in the artworld operates
according to a logic different from "over" in the larger culture, we
must still entertain the possibility of overlap in the belief systems of artists
and the general public. We must also ask what it means for a museum of modern
art to be the cultural entity posing the question. But it would help to begin
any conversation with agreement on what question we are actually addressing.
Joel Snyder is a professor in and chair
of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago and is co-editor
of the journal Critical
Inquiry. He writes on photography, the theory of representation, and the
history and theory of perspective and optics.
Some
Elegiac Stanzas
Photography, understood as a still
evolving and expanding set of materials and a flourishing market for them, is
more vital than it has ever been. Chemical photography, even in its present
attenuated condition, survives and will probably be in use for at least another
score of years, while the growth of digital photography is and will continue to
be explosive in terms of the sheer number of still photographs taken daily; in
terms of the already vast and constantly growing number of home-made and
laboratory-produced prints; in terms of Powerpoint and other digital projection
technologies, and finally and most importantly, in terms of the wide-ranging,
on demand availability of countless photographic images (refreshed minute by
minute) and circulating freely on the internet.
I take the question framing this
conference as being aimed specifically at photography comprehended as
a medium. While the commerce in photographic materials is burgeoning, the
interest many people took in the medium of photography has been shrinking -- in
a state of atrophy for nearly two decades. Photography as a medium with a past,
and crucially, a present, and a future is over and in my view is
irrecuperable, even (and ironically) as the use of photographic materials
dominates contemporary art production. And yet, little will change immediately:
curators of photography in museums of art in the United States will keep on
mounting exhibitions of photographs; galleries won't miss a beat selling
photographs dating from the 1830s and onward -- while collectors, for their part
will continue buying them (and the prices will rise); and students will still
be taught the use of photographic materials in the setting of universities,
colleges, and art schools.
What is in the process of fading
away is the sensibility that was informed by the foundational groundwork and
the above-ground scaffolding of the medium of photography and with their loss,
the loss too of an audience for photographers who produce pictures that center
on photography, reflexive pictures that simultaneously exemplify and expand
what were once called "the peculiar possibilities and limitations of
photography." What has been called "pure" photography continues
to have its defenders and collectors, curators and historians, but the audience
it has today is generally limited to the audience it had. Some curators and
critics want to believe that contemporary, photographically based art
production is continuous with the old practices, traditions, and norms of the
photographic medium and attempt to put, for example, the work of Nadar and
Watkins, Evans and Sander in relation to Georges Rousse and Walid Raad,
Wolfgang Tillmans and Candida Hofer. This sort of exercise corrupts our
comprehension of both photography as medium and photography in the service of
contemporary art. It bends history, undermines understanding, and blocks
feeling, replacing vexing complexity with a smooth linear narrative. This is
not the moment for anodynes.
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