The Robert Adams who took the photo shown is: THIS ONE
The Robert Adams making the statements is: THIS ONE

Writing and photography – is a picture really worth a thousand words?
by Sean O’Hagan

Photographers such as Robert Adams and Stephen Shore aren’t just fine photographers – they’re insightful critics. But is it possible to write words that keep out of the way of the pictures?

We make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honour what is greater and more interesting than we are’ … Robert Adams captures students protesting the enrollment of black pupils at West End High School in Birmingham, Alabama 1963. Photograph: Robert Adams/Polaris/Eyevine

“For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures – no text at all” photographer Robert Adams once wrote. He went on to admit that he “once worked through more than a hundred drafts of a four-paragraph statement for a catalogue, all to find something that would just keep out of the way of the pictures”.

Finding words that keep out of the way of the pictures and yet shed light on the nature of photography is nonetheless something that Adams has excelled at, in two books of essays: Why People Photograph (from where that quotation is taken) and Beauty in Photography. Like Stephen Shore, he is a brilliant photographer who also happens to be a gifted and incisive writer. Adams’s main subject is the American West, the encroachment of the man-made on the natural. In his writing, he champions clear and concise language, whether visual or in the written word. Often, he writes against the prevailing academic and curatorial thrust towards theoretically-driven conceptual photography, the kind of photography, indeed, that relies most heavily on words, whether to explain or obfuscate its meaning.

“At our best and most fortunate,” he writes in Why People Photograph, “we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honour what is greater and more interesting than we are.” I would also recommend Adams’ book, Along Some Rivers, Conversations and Photographs, in which he almost convinced me that Dorothea Lange was a better photographer than Walker Evans. Almost.

If Adams seems unconcerned with appearing old-fashioned, Stephen Shore is, for want of a better word, a modernist. His groundbreaking colour photographs from the early 70s showed us a vernacular America that was so everyday as to be almost invisible, an almost banal place of brightly lit diners and dowdy motel rooms. Shore photographed armchairs, faded lampshades, bedspreads, curtains, even the food he ate every day. The photographs in Uncommon Places and American Surfaces evoked a sad, ever-spreading hinterland that novelist Raymond Carver also mapped out in his minimalist prose.

Shore also shared with Carver a passion for fly-fishing and, in his short “artist statement” for his first book, Uncommon Places, originally published in 1982, he compared the rituals of his favourite pastime to the demands of his vocation. It remains an illuminating piece of writing:

“As I wade a stream, I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water, my attention is riveted to it. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes, I strike. Then, the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still. Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy.”

Shore is also a successful teacher of photography at Bard College in upstate New York – a secondary career of which, one senses, Adams would not approve. “When I have been asked to teach photography”, he muses in Why People Photograph, “I have found myself puzzling over three questions: ‘Can photography be taught? Ought it to be taught? If so, am I the one to teach it?’” He concludes that the doing and the teaching are not totally exclusive, but that “there are not many people in whom the enthusiasms are balanced”. Stephen Shore, though, would seem to be such a one. His text book, The Nature of Photographs: A Primer, is a kind of ideas manual for aspiring photographers. It is a somewhat (wilfully?) dry book, but it does go off into some interesting places that you won’t find in many photography primers – particularly in the third section, The Mental Level, which is a kind of Zen-like meditation on awareness and perception in photography.

For years, though, my favourite piece of writing about photography was William Eggleston’s brief but intriguing afterword to The Democratic Forest (1989). It begins with a description of what, for Eggleston, was a photographic epiphany. When out taking photographs around Oxford, Mississippi, he realised “it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there was something for someone out there.” So Eggleston simply pointed his camera at the earth and began “taking some pretty good pictures”. Later, over dinner, a friend asked him what he had been doing all day and he replied, “Well, I’ve been photographing democratically.”

Eggleston, as I have found out on more than one occasion, is a photographer who, in interviews, can often be inscrutable and/or resolutely unforthcoming about what he does, but here he gets as close as anyone to pinpointing his prevailing aesthetic. Later in the afterward, the tone of his voice changes as he talks scathingly about the “blindness” of those who use the word “snapshot” when referring to his work. “The word has never had any meaning,” he says, “I am at war with the obvious”. That final sentence has come to, if not define then at least hint at, the singular attitude that underlies his democratic way of seeing.

In the same piece of writing, Eggleston cites Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book, The Decisive Moment, as an influence. Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 essay remains one of the key pieces of postwar writing on photography. His sporadic essays and reflections are collected in the thin, but invaluable The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. “To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality,” he wrote, neatly defining the moment of suspended reality that occurs when the shutter opens and closes in an instant. “It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

There are too many great photographers who also write well about photography to cite them all here, but I would like to mention William Gedney’s journals which now belong to Duke University library. This is a different sort of writing: a mixture of insight, gossip, theorising and reflection, the flavour of which can be tasted here. The description of a dinner in honour of Edward Steichen is priceless: “I do not relate to the affair of the people, dull speeches, pompous … the self-glorification is disgusting … The Times’ cameraman sat at my table … He is such an ass.” In the next entry, though, Gedney’s tone changes to pure wonder as he looks again at E.J. Bellocq’s book, Storyville Potraits.

“How beautifully lucid and strong the pictures are … I was struck now in looking at the book how in just 34 pictures, so complete a world is rendered, an all encompassing wholeness. Each one of his photographs seems to contain the germ [of] all his work. If only one of his pictures existed (all the rest had been destroyed) you would still sense he was a great photographer, at least I get that feeling. So consistent and concisely clear is his vision.”

That sense of wonder, expressed by one photographer for another, speaks volumes about how the work of great photographers impinges on the consciousness of those that follow them. I’ll give the last word to Robert Adams. “Your own photography is never enough,” he writes. “Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too – photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.”

From The Guardian

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Grave marker in Smelter cemetery, Asarco Smelter Works. Danny Lyon, South El Paso, Texas, July 1972

Many years ago I was being driven along central park west in a NYC Taxi and talking with Robert Frank whom I sat beside. When I spoke of using words with photography, texts, as part of what were then called “photography books”, Robert said, “well, then that’s the end of it.” . The year was 1969, and it was “not the end of it.” As a young photographer, deep into a career of making picture books, with texts, I couldn’t help but feel that Frank’s comment smacked a bit of kicking out the ladder. After all, the work of Frank that had stunned the world was a virtually wordless portrait of America, done with a Leica and a couple lenses. 1

Thirty six years have passed since that conversation in a taxi cab, and as I sit here at the east end of Long Island, watching my fishing boat “the Nanook” bob and dip at its moorings, pounded by strong southwest winds, I wonder if I am recreating Frank’s error with what I am now writing.

I first began to make pictures seriously in 1960. At that time, photography appeared to me as a new art. Prior to around the middle of the 19th century, photography did not exist. In 1960, in historical terms, the 19th century seemed just around the corner. My own grandfather, who I lived with, had been born in 1871. I knew enough about Art to know that great, perhaps unsurpassed achievements in sculpture went back to the Ancient Greeks. Great paintings has been made since the Renaissance. (In fact the Romans and Greeks also left great works in painting, though I think I was ignorant of it at the time.) But photography? Photography was new. Here was a field whose great practitioners I could count on my fingers, or at least count. Frank himself, who was recognized then as having made a single enormous achievement in the field had published his book a mere six years before I was holding it in my hand. I could go out and buy one, an original of both the French and American editions for, I think they were about seven dollars each. And the other stars in the firmament of realistic photography? Gene Smith, still alive, still photographing: I recall when he got beaten into near blindness working on a story about “pollution” a word that meant little to me at the time, the early 1970’s. Walker Evans, also still alive, whose brilliant accomplishments were done in the late 1930’s, much of the work done in a couple years. Cartier-Bresson, then going back in time, Hine, Atget, O’Sullivan, Mathew Brady, none of the people or what they did seemed that long ago. And before them, nothing. The process of photography was invented in Chalon-sur-Soane, France, in 1842. I was born exactly one hundred years later in Queens.

In the apartment that I grew up in, at the corner of Metropolitan Avenue and Park Lane South, in Kew Gardens, Queens, my father Ernst, a doctor and an immigrant, kept a small darkroom in a closet at the end of the hall. He had been making pictures since he was a teenager across the ocean, in Germany. Like most photographers he pictured most of the things around him and then using paper photo corners, preserved his small silver prints in photo albums. These pictures include what he saw when he leaned out the window of his bedroom in his village, from the third floor above the shop that was owned by his father, Eugene Lyon. And what Ernst saw as a teenager leaning out of his apartment, is what we see today when we look at his little album prints. Below him and down the street was a photography store with a large “Agfa” sign hanging out onto Keiser Strasse, a street that even more distant relatives, that lived in the same building left written accounts of having seen Napoleon Bonaparte ride down as he entered Germany. When Ernst made his little prints, or any prints, the room smelled of Dektol, or the Agfa equivalent, and when I made my 8 by 10 prints in Chicago, the ones of bikers and tough kids standing by stained city walls that later became so valuable to collectors, I smelled of Dektol too. I also used Agfa paper because at the time, the mid 1960’s, I thought it was the richest paper you could buy. Last week Eastman Kodak announced that it would immediately cease manufacturing silver gelatin printing paper. Agfa has also stopped making silver paper. Recently I did series of pictures in China, and have made all the prints on a paper in France. This month I heard that the factory that makes that paper has closed.

I am also a filmmaker. Recently I completed my eleventh film. I mean a 16mm film shot on B&W Kodak negative, Double-X and Plus –X, which at the time of this writing is still being manufactured. Most of the sound for these films was recorded on a Nagra 1/4 inch reel to reel tape recorder and then mixed and appears as an optical audio track on the edge of the final composite print of the film. When my last film was finally mixed and printed , I screened it with a professional timer. The timer is the person that looks at the print and the negative, shot by shot, and sometimes frame by frame, and adjusts the exposures to get the maximum result from the negative, not unlike the calculations a printer makes when he exposes paper in a darkroom. This particular timer used to work at another lab I had made films at in Manhattan, called TVC, that has been closed for years. “When I was at TVC (in the 1970’s) we had 3,500 members of our union” the timer said to me. “Now (in 2005) I am president of the Union, and we have fifty members.”

All over New York City, once the center of photography for America, and the major center for motion pictures, outside of Los Angeles, digital is replacing film, and everyone who made their living as printers, or worked with film, or sold paper and chemicals, are losing their jobs. Film and photography labs have been closing or falling by the wayside for years. Few remain. A world, the smell of Dektol, the sprocket driven technology that went back to Edison who invented it in New Jersey, the world of Gene Smith, of Frank, silver gelatin prints, mounting tissue, negatives, drying racks, and small black and white things of enormous beauty and power, that until now has had an unprecedented life of six generations and has altered how the world is seen and known for all time, is coming to an end. It is the end of the age of photography. It is an undeniable fact. Just look around.

The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says “no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras.” They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rollieflex and when you strike someone with one, that is take your camera and use it as a weapon, they know they have been hit with something substantial. When I was a civil rights photographer (two Nikon Reflexes), I recall a news camera man who had a 16mm (wind up) cast iron camera. When I admired it he said it was “good to hit people with”. That’s a camera. When my twenty-one year old daughter went, along with 25 other students to Athens, I sent her off with a small (black!) Nikon Reflex. When she phoned from Greece she said “Dad, I think I’m the only one here with a real camera.”

I have always admired real professional photographers, the journalists who sometimes on a daily basis go out into what we used to call ‘the real world” and photograph the mess around us. Years ago I argued with a colleague over the fact that she was shooting 35mm chromes, not B&W. “That’s what Time magazine wants,” she said. Now it is routine for most journalists to shoot their work with digital cameras and submit what they have done over the internet. When the actor-assassin that had murdered Lincoln was finally captured (Booth himself was murdered by a shot in the back in a burning barn by a trigger happy and out-of-control soldier), his body was transported back to Washington on a ship that also carried the great Scottish born photo-journalist Timothy O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan, who used a large view camera, made a picture of the assassin’s body. He made a glass plate negative. One. The military caught him, broke the negative and threw it over board. Whomever our next major assassin will be, their will be no negatives made of him.

Is this kicking out the ladder? Film and photography have for me always been a form of realism. That is the invention that shook the world six generations ago. What Neipce and Daguerre had done was to invent a way to replicate and to capture reality absolutely.

Once a year in Sandoval County New Mexico, Chuck Kelton, the B&W printer, and I teach the Willie Jaramillo Memorial Documentary Project Workshop. The students are all teenagers from the Jemez Pueblo, one of the oldest occupied villages in North America. The Jemez tribe predates the European invasion of North America by five centuries. Digital still cameras are prohibited at the workshop, and all the students are given either Nikons and Pentax Reflexes or Polaroid cameras. The darkroom work which Chuck teaches them is B&W printing from negatives. We are teaching these children a craft that is completely obsolete.

Cameras are machines, and almost all accomplishments in the field can be discussed in terms of the technology used in the work. The civil war photographs, can never be separated from the large plate process that was used by Gardner, Brady and O’Sullivan. Robert Frank’s use of a Leica and fast film cannot be separated from his, then, revolutionary social and visual aesthetic. Arbus used a medium format hand held, a Weegee-like camera and bounce flash and her pictures show it. Nan Golden’s use of color is part of her realism. Now comes before us the digital age. The three chip digital video camera, with which the camera-person records his own audio simultaneously with recording his “film”, is an absolute revolution in the process of filmmaking. In the past there have been many examples of filmmakers taking their own sound as they used a motion picture camera, and the process was always extremely challenging at best. The digital video camera is both a motion picture and audio recorder in the same instrument.

The internet and movement of pictures as electronic data similarly trumps the magazines, which have not been much good for the last thirty years anyway, as few important works have penetrated the archaic minds that have usually controlled them. While websites are not exactly on a level playing field, they do represent a revolutionary access for both contributors and viewers to a global audience.

The one survivor, for now at least, in this digital holocaust, are books. Scanning and the use of digital technology to reproduce photographs using printers ink in books has made quality reproduction more spectacular and more widely accessible for publishers than it has ever been. People no longer purchase picture books, they “collect” them. The very word implies that they know that we are on the edge of a vanishing world and that their own personal libraries might one day serve as museums. That is truly ominous, for as every street photographer knows, there is nothing as boring as a museum.

Part Two: The Age of Realism…

One would like to think that the age of photography, ushered in something new, and good, and that it is something will continue, as long as cameras are used, no matter what medium that light passing through a lens falls on. I have always thought of it – that period that began with the invention of photography, as an age of realism. For from then going forward a person could operate a mechanical device that permitted them to pick and choose from reality. The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble. The word history was first used by Herodotus, over two thousand five hundred years ago. It means “investigation”. Herodotus was a Greek from Asia Minor, who was not permitted to live in Athens, and spent his life in an Athenian colony in southern Italy. He created by himself the History of the Persian Wars, As the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski brilliantly points out, Herodotus traveled to as many as twenty countries, interviewed hundreds of people, then wrote his 600 page History, in a room lit by an oil lamp. He did all this without Microsoft Word, electricity or a bicycle.

Herodotus’s book of 600 pages is the single oldest volume, to survive in its entirety from Ancient History. One reason it survived is no doubt because it was a very popular read, and many copies were made. It remains a very exciting read today and predates all our so called fields of anthropology, sociology and oral history, and history itself, all of which he invented or practiced without Goggle.

The question confronting a young photographer today is not a technical question, but an ethical question. Man has made unlimited progress in science and no progress at all emotionally, socially, or ethically. That would help explain the fact that we sit here in the wealthiest society the world has ever known which simultaneously is a war society that, it is beginning to seem, is constantly at war, and conveniently these wars only occur on our soil via television. We don’t actually see or feel or smell the civilians that are blown apart, maimed, raped and burned as a result of our intelligent democratic decisions.

Further we are conveniently able to blame this unpleasant situation entirely on one man, who was elected, or his administration, which he appointed. America sits across a vast empire, like Athens, and later Rome, and wars and brutality are routinely used to try to retain that empire.

So this is the setting for the question of digital verses film.

The real question faced by a photographer or journalist today is not of course the type of film that is inside their camera, although that matters. The real question is what’s inside their head. That has always been the question and will always be the question.

Every project that I choose, either in publishing or film had an ethical and ideological motive that was built into the project, and that mind set continues for me to this day. I don’t have to tell you that this country is quickly going down the shit hole of history, and it is not possible to pick up a camera, or a pen, for that matter, without taking this into account.

Because my own choice made many years ago, was to enter what is now called “the media” I naturally blame the media for the disaster that this country has created for itself. I have never personally be able to understand how the people that directly contribute to bolstering up and supporting a criminal government and political positions that bring misery to other human beings, can live with themselves. The list of people in the media who “are the problem” as they used to say in the sixties, rather than being “part of the solution” is endless. The obvious answer to the question of why intelligent and educated people would sink so low, is of course money.

Money has corrupted virtually every field in this country. But in addition to money these people seek Fame, which ultimately amounts to the high esteem they are held in by the people around them, and even by people like us. Though we cannot do much to deminish the money they receive, we can make it clear, and must make it clear, that these are people we do not esteem.

I will give two examples, however strange they may seem. The first is from the sixties, a time when I was active or witness to many of the social and political movements that created this age. The first is Walter Cronkite – I always felt that Walter Cronkite was a war criminal. Because, when it mattered, in 1965 and 1966, he was perhaps the most visible figure rallying this country into a murderous and senseless war. He had lots of company by the way. Don’t believe the bullshit that contemporary news media bombard you with about how the media helped stopped the war. They helped create the war. Then when it was absolutely unavoidable, some of them, including Cronkite said “Gee, maybe isn’t such a great thing after all.”

My second victim is Ken Burns. What in the world does he think he is doing? This media darling has re-created a war that we actually won (without the Russians, who only had 20 million casualties), and has now managed to get a picture of a handsome young GI that we can adore and root for on the front page of USA today, and every other newspaper. In the midst of a real military and murderous social and economic disaster, Ken Burns has handed us 15 hours (Cronkite was only on for 15 mins), of All American Victory that will be piped into every home, not only for fifteen hours this fall, but probably for years to come.

So whatever you do with your digital cameras don’t model yourself on Ken Burns. It is much better to wake up in the morning and not want to vomit when you look at yourself in the mirror. And if you survive and, and make silver prints and wash them a long time, if you then live long enough, you will have plenty of fans, and can sell your silver prints for much more than they are worth. This is a big country, or what the people like to call “a big market”. You are also much more likely to be listened to, gain respect and an audience doing something that you believe in, and not something you think people want to hear. The more unfundable the project is, the better.

I close with this story. Forty years ago inside a Texas prison cell I made an analogue recording on quarter inch tape of a man singing a song about facing the electric chair, which the inmate called My Last Mile. Billy McCune had been sentenced to Death in Fort Worth,Texas, in1952, but after many miserable years the sentence was reduced to Life. After many years in prison, I met him, and recorded him, Billy was set free, and for the final 30 years he lived his life alone, and in freedom, far from the torment of his Texas jailors. Then about three weeks ago, in Kansas City, Billy McCune, age 78, died. Three days later National Public Broadcasting played the recording of Billy singing his song. On October 6th at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, forty years after I recorded it they broadcast Billy McCune singing My Last Mile. Thirteen million people heard it.

Danny Lyon, Stanford, Oct 20 2007

1 The first French edition of Les Americains, by Robert Delpire had a paragraph of text facing each picture. The subsequent first American edition, by Grove Press, which no doubt Frank preferred, and which has been re-issued many times, dropped the text, and used only Kerouac’s brief introduction.

Bleak Beauty

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The limitations of photojournalism and the ethics of artistic representation
by Christy Lange
(Links added by me)

On 12 May 2009, the front page of The New York Times featured an image of three soldiers seen from behind, perched behind sandbags on a rocky lookout over a lush green valley in eastern Afghanistan. All three soldiers wear helmets and flack jackets and are gripping their rifles, looking down on an invisible attacker below. The soldier on the left, however, 19-year-old Specialist Zachary Boyd, is wearing flip-flops, a bright red T-shirt under his camouflage vest and pink boxer shorts patterned with the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo.

The Associated Press (AP) photographer David Guttenfelder shot the photograph when the US Army troop he was embedded with came under attack and Specialist Boyd leapt out of his bunk, not yet fully dressed, to man his post. In this sense, Guttenfelder’s picture delivers classic reportage: a candid, immediate view of the heat of battle. But the photograph can also be interpreted as deeply reassuring. Media reports of the image focused on the patriotic message emblazoned on the soldier’s boxer shorts, while Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly praised Boyd’s bravery, declaring: ‘I can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban.’ The photo instantly sparked a Google trend for ‘pink boxers’, and Guttenfelder was subsequently awarded second place in the ‘people in the news singles’ category in last year’s World Press Photo competition.

But the image is also a proxy for the front-page photographs we haven’t been able to see in the American press over the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq: those that depict American soldiers who have died in battle. While images like Guttenfelder’s are seen as affirmative, images of dead soldiers are criticized or censored. When the AP released a photograph of a mortally wounded marine in September 2009, Gates condemned the agency’s decision. Only in February of last year did he lift the 19-year-old ban on publishing images of US soldiers’ coffins returning from battle. The classic idea of war reportage (epitomized by Robert Capa’s 1936 photo, The Falling Soldier) has changed in this war.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who have been photographing zones of conflict since 2000, have written extensively about the contemporary limitations of photojournalism due to the restrictions of being embedded and censorship by photo editors. After serving as judges of the World Press Photo competition in 2008, they wrote critically about the clichés and compromises prevalent in today’s war reportage, and the inherent contradictions of evaluating such photographs. They described their experience of sitting in a room for up to 20 hours a day scanning thousands of photos, using a buzzer designed for a game show to ‘keep’ or ‘kill’ each image after just a few seconds of viewing them without captions. The winning photograph that year, selected from 81,000 entries, was Tim Hetherington’s photograph of a US soldier in combat in Afghanistan, in which a young man is shown leaning against a rock, helmet in one hand and the other hand covering half of his face in a mixture of shock and exhaustion. For Broomberg and Chanarin, Hetherington’s picture ‘represents a nostalgia for the days of photojournalism at its sexiest, most lucrative and effective’.1 Their experience revealed the prevalence of what they considered a ‘particularly sanitized depiction of war’, while also exposing the problems of applying aesthetic criteria to such images. In response, while embedded in Helmand Province in 2008, they created the video and photographic series ‘The Day Nobody Died’, for which they enlisted the help of the British Army in shipping a 50-metre roll of photographic paper from London to Afghanistan. They then exposed strips of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds during events they normally would have photographed – from a visit to the troops by the Duke of York to the deadliest day of fighting – resulting in a series of monumental photograms showing abstract swathes of colour.

As an artist embedded with the British Army in 2003, Steve McQueen encountered some of the same restrictions that Broomberg and Chanarin reacted to. After just six days in Basra, during which he was rarely allowed to leave his bunk without an escort, McQueen abandoned the possibility of making a documentary film. ‘It was too hostile an environment,’ he said. ‘Obviously for the military you are just a token artist. You’re just in the way.’2 Instead, he created ‘Queen and Country’ (2006–ongoing), a series of postage stamps featuring portraits of British soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. McQueen’s project employs vernacular photographs chosen by the soldiers’ own families, but within his conceptual framework, these private portraits demonstrate the obstacles of visually representing war. (The Royal Mail still refuses to accept the series as commemorative stamps.)

The winning press photos by Hetherington and Guttenfelder on the one hand and McQueen’s art work on the other can be seen as two poles defining the spectrum of possible representations of war with a camera – one employs the rhetoric of reportage, the other uses a conceptual strategy, or the rhetoric of the metaphorical. Arguably, the photojournalist has a professional and ethical imperative to capture the immediate circumstances, while the artist has the license or luxury to turn his camera away from these events, even to question the photograph’s ability to accurately represent them. Does one approach function more effectively than another? And by what criteria can we judge their effectiveness? When it comes to images of the events and consequences of war, how close is too close? And how much distance is too much?

As Susan Sontag points out in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), written in response to the events of 9/11, observing atrocity or making images of suffering is a privilege, if not a luxury. Both the photojournalist who tries to make a ‘realistic’ image of war and the artist who refuses to must ‘finesse the question of the subjectivity of the image-maker’.3 When it comes to picturing atrocity, any authorial impulse is inherently conflicted: ‘The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!’4

Particularly since 9/11, the paradox of the spectacular image has sharpened the line between classic reportage and artistic approaches. The majority of the immediate images of that day’s events were taken by amateurs, while the photojournalists who arrived later focused on the aftermath – a form of reportage that writer and artist David Campany has termed ‘late photography’.5 This strategy consciously turns the camera away from immediate and obvious events, and concentrates instead on their traces. According to Campany, such post-spectacular imagery is characterized by its cool, forensic look at the evidence of violence, which comes to stand in for what we don’t see. Photographer Richard Mosse adopted this approach in his series of large-scale photographs, ‘Breach’ and ‘Nomads’ (both 2009), which he shot while embedded with the US army in Iraq. ‘Breach’ exposes the makeshift headquarters of US soldiers constructed in seven of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. These colour photographs show the ironic contrast between the grandiose marble palaces and the flimsy, provisional American military accommodations erected inside. The monumental images in ‘Nomads’, taken with a large-format camera in the Iraqi desert, show cars so riddled with bullets that only their mangled shells are left. Both series are self-conscious about the limitations of reportage – the destroyed cars left abandoned on the field of battle don’t attempt to picture the war’s immediate drama, but they do evoke its human victims. Mosse sees his work as operating between the two poles of contemporary art and photojournalism: ‘The documentary photographer has a terribly difficult life compared with the conceptual artist. But, like Prometheus and Loki, we’re both tied to the same rock.’6 ‘Late photography’ incorporates the seriality of Conceptual art while consciously keeping imagery of disaster at bay. It constitutes what Campany calls ‘a second wave of representation’. How does our impression of the war change if we only see ‘traces’ rather than the ‘faces’?

Alongside aftermath photography, another group of images falls outside the usual spectrum of war reportage – those not made by photojournalists or artists: the views of Saddam’s hideout, snapped by the soldiers who first raided it; the unauthorized images of soldiers’ flag-draped coffins returning home, documented by a private contractor on a cargo plane; and the photographs taken by military personnel of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This last group of images were taken by amateurs, staged for the camera, and not intended for public viewing. Once leaked to the media, their photographs were supplied as evidence of torture perpetrated by American military against detainees at Abu Ghraib, and resulted in prison sentences for many of those directly involved. In an essay titled ‘The Photographs Are Us“, published in The New York Times in 2004, Sontag argues that these pictures show how the act of photography itself at Abu Ghraib became immoral: ‘The horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs themselves were taken.’7

Though these snapshots do serve to condemn those who appear in them and took them, their shift of context from the private sphere to the media complicates their story. For all the gruesome details they expose, they conceal others. In Errol Morris’ 2008 documentary film, Standard Operating Procedure (and the book of the same title, written with journalist Philip Gourevitch) the documentarian set out to frame the infamous images in the context of the statements and motivations of the people behind (and in some cases in front of) the cameras at the prison. Examining all the primary source images, Morris goes behind the lens to try to fill the gaps in our knowledge. He focuses on Specialist Sabrina Harman – the young MP who, in 2003, took the notorious photograph of the hooded man standing on a box, and was herself photographed flashing a ‘thumbs up’ beside the corpse of a detainee. Interviews reveal that Harman started documenting her experiences in Iraq long before she focused on tortured Iraqi prisoners. Although she joined the Army Reserve, she originally wanted to be a forensic photographer and work for the police force, like her father and brother. While in Iraq, she took as many photographs of sunsets, local people and children as she did prisoners. Harman also took a series of 90 photos featuring the same mummified cat’s head, which she pictured in a variety of settings, including ‘on a bus seat with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie hat’.8

In frequent letters to her girlfriend, Harman – who was eventually sentenced to six months in prison and discharged from the army – stated that she began photographing the detainees ‘to “record” what’s going on’. When she discovered the corpse of a prisoner who had supposedly died of a heart attack after being interrogated, Harman peeled his bandages off and photographed ‘everything I saw that was wrong’. Afterwards, still wearing her turquoise latex gloves, she posed for a snapshot giving the thumbs up next to the man’s dead body. Does the meaning of this picture shift when we learn that she appears in almost every photograph, no matter what the background, flashing the same cheerful smile and thumbs up gesture? Morris’ investigation acknowledges that these images don’t amount to photojournalism and should not be treated as such. How does our image of the photographs Harman took change when we become aware of their context and of her sense of authorship? Do we read Harman’s images differently when we learn of her ambivalent relationship toward the events in front of the lens, and her desire to create an ongoing, personal forensic record?

The strategy employed in Standing Operating Procedure – that of giving form to the massive archives of amateur images that were not intended to have a form – is also employed by Sean Snyder in ‘Untitled (Archive Iraq)’ (2003–5), a compilation of 98 photographs circulated by soldiers and veterans on the Internet. While Snyder extracts the most banal images for display, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Incommensurable Banner (2008), an 18-metre-long banner bearing images of war also found on the Internet, delivers the kind of gruesome and morbid imagery that Snyder withholds from us. Both the explicit and the banal appear in artist Monica Haller’s book, Riley and His Story. Me and My Outrage. You and Us (2009), produced in collaboration with her friend, Riley Sharbonno, a nurse at the Abu Ghraib prison who took more than 1,000 photographs on his tour of duty in 2004–5. Haller assembles a selection of them in a thick hardback tome, interspersed with Sharbonno’s own testimony about his reasons for taking photographs, which gives shape and meaning to the images. In the book’s first sequence of photos, taken on a trip to get medical supplies, Sharbonno’s camera is poised directly over the barrel of a gun mounted on the vehicle. As the landscape goes by, both lens and gun aim at the rubble of former houses, then at a shepherd passing with his flock. Many of the images have the sense of someone seeing something for the first time or photo­graphing things as if to verify them for himself.

The first images of Abu Ghraib that appear in Sharbonno’s archive show the prison from outside – a perspective rarely seen in coverage of the scandal. Many of us will be surprised to see its resemblance to a sprawling parking garage, always engulfed in a yellowish dust cloud and lit by a hazy white sun. His texts reveal what the camera can’t show: ‘The prison is built on a mound of human remains.’ But the bulk of the book is composed of photos taken in the ER tent after mortar attacks on the prison. These snapshots reveal a palpable sense of chaos in this makeshift hospital, which is accentuated by the dust particles that blur the lens. At times, Sharbonno’s camera scans the room taking in the activity: the injured are treated by nurses and doctors wearing sweat-soaked army T-shirts and running shoes whose reflectors flash back at the lens. Sometimes his focus comes in close to capture forensic details: a piece of shrapnel covered in blood, freshly removed, or gaping holes in patients’ flesh. These have the ‘authenticity’ and ‘immediacy’ that photojournalism requires, but taking them was an automatic response for Sharbonno: ‘We were just like, “Holy shit, is this really happening?” So I just snapped pictures.’

These first-hand statements and views are no doubt arresting, but presenting them has its own limitations; it is hard to separate the original photographer’s authorship from the artist’s own. Haller’s text on the front cover frames her as a kind of therapeutic collaborator: ‘Right now, I am the artist. I want you to see what this war did to Riley.’ Also, the book’s heavy-handed graphic design repeats certain images and statements to heighten their effect. But the experience of flipping through the photos and reading Sharbonno’s statements eventually supersede the marks of authorship. One thing still screams behind all the pictures – namely, their relationship to the Abu Ghraib pictures we are all-too familiar with. Sometimes the similarities between Sharbonno’s pictures and those of Sabrina Harman are striking, not only in what they show but also in the way both soldiers impulsively used the camera to defer what was happening ‘now’, as if to create a distance between themselves and what they were witnessing, and to form a record, no matter how horrific, for an unknown audience in an undefined future. But the consequences the two groups of pictures suggest is clearly at odds – in these pictures, the soldiers are fighting to save the detainees.

In contrast to the sincerity and indignation of Haller’s work, Omer Fast’s complex four-channel video The Casting (2007) is more layered and ambiguous in its framing of representations of war. Fast’s work is based on an interview he conducted with a young US Army Sergeant on leave who describes an incident in Baghdad in which the sergeant’s squad shot a man in an oncoming Iraqi vehicle. Fast filters the story through a casting scenario in which an actor retells it, intertwined with an unrelated narrative, as if auditioning for a role. The events are reconstructed as highly artificial tableaux vivants, based on images the artist found on the Internet. The scenes from the incident in Baghdad were filmed in the Mojave Desert in California, using stage make-up and cinematic effects, with Fast casting himself as ‘director’. His method is essentially the same as Haller’s but The Casting relies on reconstruction and artifice to elude any claims of trying to accurately represent the events as they may have occurred. But what are the consequences of transforming an eyewitness account of war into a highly stylized and even ‘performed’ work of art?

Though Fast’s work aims to interrogate conventions of war reportage as well as films about war, it buries any possibility of a truthful account of the events under layers of representation. Fast’s simulacral constructions, as familiar as they are within contemporary artistic practice, throw every primary source about what took place into question, suggesting that there can be no faithful record. From the artist’s position as both real and fictional ‘director’ of these events, it is too easy to be cynical about the veracity or sincerity of images of conflict or violence that took place far beyond the artist’s view. Granted, we are bombarded with images of war, with varying degrees of intention and authorship, but some of them are bound to be more telling or more significant than others. Artists have the license to frame this kind of reportage – or to manipulate, mediate and interpret it – but they still rely heavily on amateur images, vernacular photos and photojournalism as the basic vocabulary of this language. Someone had to be there first.

According to Sontag, ‘real wars are not metaphors’ and if this is the case, perhaps they shouldn’t be treated as such. When artists apply an all-too constructed or allegorical framework to the first-hand accounts of suffering or violence in war, they also risk undermining the possibility of any truth at all. At some point we have to turn our attention towards what the photographs depict. ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us,’ wrote Sontag.9 By the nature of the atrocities they show, they will always be conflicted images – but it would be worse not to see them at all.

Christy Lange

Christy Lange is associate editor of frieze, based in Berlin, Germany.

See the essay at frieze HERE.

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin, 1936

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931
Le Conquete de l’ubiquite

Preface

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

I

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence:

“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

II

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films… all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions… await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.”

Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation.

III

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way – to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

IV

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

V

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

VI

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

VII

The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early theories of the film. Abel Gance, for instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: “Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians … Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses.” Or, in the words of Séverin-Mars: “What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be allowed to enter its ambience.” Alexandre Arnoux concludes his fantasy about the silent film with the question: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given amount to the definition of prayer?” It is instructive to note how their desire to class the film among the “arts” forces these theoreticians to read ritual elements into it – with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were published, films like L’Opinion publique and The Gold Rush had already appeared. This, however, did not keep Abel Gance from adducing hieroglyphs for purposes of comparison, nor Séverin-Mars from speaking of the film as one might speak of paintings by Fra Angelico. Characteristically, even today ultrareactionary authors give the film a similar contextual significance – if not an outright sacred one, then at least a supernatural one. Commenting on Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel states that undoubtedly it was the sterile copying of the exterior world with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, motorcars, and beaches which until now had obstructed the elevation of the film to the realm of art. “The film has not yet realized its true meaning, its real possibilities … these consist in its unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.”

VIII

The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

IX

For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. “The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence …. The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.” This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible … ” In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw “the latest trend … in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and… inserted at the proper place.” With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.

X

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has an opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin or Ivens’Borinage. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature.

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.

XI

The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. – unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician – who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

XII

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.

Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.

XIII

The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science. Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

XIV

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions – though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp’s or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation as one would before a canvas of Derain’s or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public.

From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.

XV

The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.

The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Epilogue

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic … Accordingly we state:… War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others … Poets and artists of Futurism! … remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them!”

This manifesto has the virtue of clarity. Its formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians. To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

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Whitehall Magazine, Volume 6 2007

Thomas Struth

Gil Blank: I’d like to begin by asking how you perceive the nature of subjectivity within contemporary imagemaking. The concept of subjectivity, and even the word itself, is a loaded one within current artistic discourse, so I think it would be a helpful point of departure for us to tease apart the conflicts that it presents to someone attempting a means of making images now.

Thomas Struth: Well first of all, in terms of an artistic practice, I can clearly only comment on something that exists, or that I encounter by direct experience. I think that my switch to photography from painting, for example, came about because I realized that I was more interested in working on things that resided out in the world, and were not restricted to my own psychological field. I realized I was more of a social and political person, and that I was more fascinated by analytical processes. It also bears saying that every part of my work reflects the position of a human being who actively takes part in life, which maybe sounds very banal and general to say expressly, but that is nonetheless what I’m interested in.

In the beginning I was also interested in the relationship of the individual to the larger historical time span into which he’s born, and the responsibilities of what might be called one’s heritage. So, for instance, my specific experience at that time entailed an analysis of urban structures in the postwar German landscape, or the result of all that came after the Holocaust at that time, or more specifically, of being a witness to the emblematic structure of postwar German cities.

This led to a curiosity about other places and other patterns of historical heritage, and then more or less by intuition or accident, to looking at another type of structure, that of the family. Those pictures were a starting point for an analysis of the social group, of the way individuals learn about the group dynamic or group activity. Because this family unit is the elementary social structure, it sets part of the patterns for how you behave in life, where you learn your first steps as a social being. Essential to the function of those pictures though is an understanding that they are only emblematic, that in making family portraits I was seeking something like an emblematic platform for a play of thought about something common, that we all share. Even if you look at the narratives of families as different as from, let’s say, Ghana, Finland, Mongolia, or Germany, the fact of a family dynamic built through a history of generations is a shared experience.

GB: But you specifically avoided the kind of examples that Steichen populated The Family of Man with, or rather, the larger assembly of your family pictures do not tend towards that kind of didactic illustration.

TS: Viewed as a single group of pictures, The Family of Man always seemed to me like an uncomfortable strategy for casting a net of illusions over peoples’ heads. One such illusion portrays the world as a miraculous place of coexistence of human beings and natural phenomena, which is understandable in retrospect as a reaction in the early 50’s to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. The photography of that time was presumably apolitical and “subjective”, but we can understand it in actuality as being highly political.

With my family portraits, I try to examine the transition between the subjective/personal and the historical/political dimensions.

GB: You’ve said that you always operate in acknowledgement of the vast archive of images that already exist in the world. And I do think that an awareness of that archive not only informs the creation of your images, but requires of their viewer a more evolved understanding of them as well.

It seems to me that your work emphasizes in particular the operational complexity of the oeuvre, proposing a corollary between the formal and organizational structure of your accumulated life’s work and the social patterns you attempt to analyze by it. So that ultimately, its greater architecture does not present a chain of interrelated depictions, but rather a functional model of experience—not merely an accumulation, but a code, one no less perceivable for being unspecified. I refute the reading of your work as a traditional body of discrete series.

TS: Yes, I hate that too. The word “series” is a diminutive attachment. A series is something that pretends as if one picture has no value and you need the series to give it that value. You wouldn’t say, for instance, that James Joyce wrote “a series of books”.

The oeuvre’s construction is indeed like that of a larger, complex building. While each room has a different size, quality, and function, and may be considered independently, all have reference to each other, and an expression and aim as a total. Every part in its own way serves the total, and without that inherent connection, it remains a merely personal statement, a matter of taste.

Thomas Struth

GB: We can however say that there are photographs of yours that are iconographic, that exist self-sufficiently and leverage the hermetic features of pictorial space, such as the image of the façade of the cathedral at Notre Dame. Its reading is beneficially complicated by considering it alongside the equivalent but differentiated flatness of, for instance, the Paradise pictures. Or, oppositely, beside the earliest street pictures, which convey a receding formal depth but the wholly evacuated sense of a social void. This wider view is critical to the possible range of meanings attainable in any single image you’ve produced, though it might not seem so far removed from the established capabilities of standard photo editing.

Yet I differentiate this from the conventional understanding of the series in two ways. The first is structural, which I’m proposing as the creation and reception of your images as a model of contemporary social experience, rather than its literal illustration. And the second is the ontological fabrication of meaning in the photographs: in contrast, the conventional imperative of the series, rooted as it was in modernist photography’s ideas of transparency and attainable objectivity, was often documentary, and at times unabashedly didactic. We could cite the photojournalistic essay as the defining paradigm of that.

You’ve rejected that teleological inclination out of hand: an equally valid positioning of either the Paradise or street pictures could be the absolute denial they propose of cognitive or emotional access to their subject matter, a result made all the more pointed in fact by the surfeit of information they provide. Eventually, an open-ended permutational understanding of the oeuvre emerges as an articulated group-of-groups, a formal summa.

TS: I would say that my interest, or my hope, or my intent, is to address something which has a larger scale, a larger value, than the specific details or locations shown. The photographs must ultimately be driven by interests on a more general level.

GB: You’re not trying to infer any conclusions about the rain forest in Peru, for example.

TS: No. That’s why I called it Paradise; it was meant somewhat to irritate the spectator. By choosing that title I wanted to ensure from the beginning that no one mistook it to be about botany, for example. That’s not my interest.

When my retrospective exhibition debuted in Dallas in 2002, I asked myself what function the room with the jungle pictures had in relation to my other bodies of work. Going to a very dense forest was an intuitive idea at first, but once I started to make the images, to show them and maneuver the pictures within a larger exhibition context, I realized that one of their abilities was to confine the individual in a meditative space. There’s no political or social context to the images. At least that’s been my own experience, which has surprised me.

It’s a bit hard to put into words without being too personal, but some of that comes from my experience with meditation practice or T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Similarly, in the course of a therapeutic workshop, you can have a moment when you look at the gestalt, or the “whole picture”. You release your detailed vision of, for instance, your partner, or your wife, or your assistant, of all the things you constantly do, of the media, the war in Iraq, the explosions in Baghdad, and the Japanese minister who offends women’s roles by saying that they’re all birth machines, of all these kinds of everyday things. You come to a certain distance for a moment, and perhaps you can try to see the basic struggle of being human. It can sound very kitschy, but there is the attempt to see the whole picture in some way.

Those results were very surprising for me, because after a number of years when there hadn’t seemed to be anything new for me to do except to expand the street subject matter to China, the idea I initially generated was to make pictures of extremely dense information, so that you could not in fact read every detail in them. When you look at one of the street pictures, you can spend time analyzing them productively. Similarly, when you look at a Walker Evans picture, you can see that there are two cars, and three houses, and the landscape, so that the hierarchy of meaning that you can relate to your own experiences is quite clear. Most of the time. But what I wanted to do was to make pictures that you couldn’t completely read in that way.

Thomas Struth

GB: Which is why they so often appear as a wall of impenetrable data, so visually flat.

TS: Yes. I was thinking of how to increase the depth of field, or how to make it such that even if you look at only one square foot of the picture, it would still take you a long time to see, or to absorb. My point though is that what ended up happening was that I photographed something that seemed, at first glance, to have no direct or obvious sociopolitical or historical contexts. At least in comparison to the other stuff that I’d been doing, they more or less left you alone.

GB: Let me try to state it in another way: by directly implicating the viewer’s encounter in the cognitive formation of this work, it once again seems that the primary action of the photograph is not a depiction, but a modeling of experience. So that if the traditional operation of photography has been to document, to point towards, or to frame, it seems that in seeking the far-off or exotic example in this case, you did so not as a consummating illustration, but rather as a way to neutralize that same territory. In making the pictures, the integral halves of the project—your actions at these locations, plus the viewers’ subsequent interaction within the newly neutralized spaces of image and exhibition—combine to synthesize or activate what I would refer to as the subjectivity.

I position this directly opposite other contemporary retreads of archly traditional notions of photographic subjectivity, such as that of Nan Goldin. The crucial distinction to be made here is between the continual replenishability of the neutralized space and the temptations of mere solipsism, or the dangers of mistaking subjectivity with one’s life story. By suppressing the local, you not only imply the global, but further, you solicit the participation of the viewer.

TS: With Goldin, and also Wolfgang Tillmans, I find it so highly personal that the door is open to just about anything. It’s all interchangeable.

GB: Precisely because it’s so specific, because it’s in a specifically diaristic mode?

TS: Yes. Besides the necessary personal involvement, the crucial question is: What’s in it for everybody? Even if it is beauty, for example, which is in it for everybody, it has to be embedded in a context, through which it can touch the viewer.

It’s true that for me things are only interesting when they’re fed by my own passion and will to go out and do them in the first place. Furthermore, it has to be something that I know by experience, because otherwise one can always just invent things, in which case nobody will be interested. But it’s always essential to address something that includes the experience of the other person, of the viewer in general. It’s crucial.

Thomas Struth

GB: It may be crucial, but you can’t assume that the nature or force of that motivation is self-evident. It seems from your earliest days when you put aside painting and a more overtly expressionist mode that there was created instead an affirmative belief in the making of pictures, in photography. But that belief was also tempered by the limitations your generation experienced collectively as postwar German artists. So that now, that super-structure of the oeuvre seems to have provided a vast architecture within which new experiences might be proposed, if not expressly retold. Subjectivity need not reside in the metaphoric expression of one’s life story, but the material enaction of that life.

TS: That’s also why it’s complicated: at the moment I’m wondering what is missing, or what the next thing is, and I don’t see it yet. It’s a bit of a strange moment actually.

You spoke earlier about this idea of the super-structure, and about how it created its own context within which anything was possible, that potentially any photographic action would fit into or connect with or dock onto that structure. That’s an interesting question and something I’ve been thinking about over the past one or two years. I know, for instance, that the museum photographs will come to an end with my current work at the Prado. I feel the pictures are complete, or that they’ve fulfilled their function within the whole system.

The Paradise pictures are another example; that pillar of the larger building is nearly complete. I did two more pictures in Hawaii recently, and could already hear myself thinking “That’s all”. When you work on a building, as with your entire body of work, there’s no reason that one of the walls or segments has to be sixteen feet thick, because then the whole architecture just becomes comical.

The question I’m asking myself now is what the nature of that structure is. Is there another part of the palette of existence which I would like to and would be able to make pictures about? Again, I’m embarrassed to talk in these terms, but is there another element to one’s existence for which photographs could provide an emblematic expression?

To put it a different way: I remember that when I stopped teaching in 1996, the internet was a very tiny and new sort of thing. Now it’s begun to influence patterns of social activity—you have, for example, the Second Life website—and I think the effectiveness of that influence is only going to accelerate. Which makes me question your proposals of subjectivity at all, and what subjectivity will look like in, say, twenty years from now.

GB: Are you specifically questioning photography’s viability as what you call a relevantly emblematic expression?

TS: As a more general question, you could ask why photography became so popular in the 80s and 90s. I think Hilla Becher would probably say that once photography was invented, painting lost some of its previous functions. And as a direct result, there was an explosion of painting, though on a more scientific, or experimental, or analytical level. It tested all the possibilities of the medium at that time. Maybe photography now has also more or less lost its function, or its credibility in a certain way. There might be another two or three decades during which the whole course of practice can be reformulated in a different, more expansive mode. That could be one thesis.

Thomas Struth

TS: Mmm. . .

GB: What are the conditions as such for one who would propose a subjective system? For years, such attempts were either strictly disavowed, or else took repressed forms like Arte Povera, or Otto Steinert’s near-abstractions, forms which held themselves aloof from concerns that were at all socially contingent.

TS: Yes, that’s. . . [sighs]

I had already made the decision to photograph streets even before I knew the Bechers. But once I did come to know them, and saw the work, my first thought was “Great system. . . wrong subject matter”.

[Both laugh]

Because in the early and mid-70s, the Becher’s subject matter had for the most part lost its visibility in the landscape, and my postwar generation had a totally different turn on history, art, and politics.

I felt like the problem there was that the passion and the love that they had for these things was . . . hidden under the blanket. In order to make work like that, it’s clear that you have to love it, that you have to really love water towers and blast furnaces. But they also have. . .

[Pauses again]

You know it’s amazing, their love is really for. . . how can I say it?. . . an understanding of historical contexts in the most profound manner. . . it’s like advertising for historical awareness, in a way. If that sounds too dry, we can also think of it as a passion for the dynamics of human existence, which I definitely share. It’s so. . .

The austerity of the structure, of that archival order, it’s such a strong expression that what they mean, or what they really want to do, is kind of. . . it’s almost hidden.

GB: But what is hidden?

TS: Well, I know them very well, and what I find most inspiring when I talk to them is that they always talk about, for example, Proust and French politics and blast furnaces. They do have a very specific analytical reading of historical processes, but in the pictures. . .

GB: . . . It doesn’t come across.

TS: No, that doesn’t come across.

GB: When they first formulated their work, a diagnosis of that conflict was not permitted, or at least unavailable.

TS: Totally. I remember Hilla saying that in the first decades, in the 50s and 60s, what was forbidden as a notion in Germany was to really look at something. To simply open your eyes and look at something and talk about it. That’s what they wanted to do, so they used these different kinds of objects that could come to life, or that have a particular design without openly demonstrating a design intention. That was their choice.

I felt that making those comparisons or providing that bigger structure was a great idea, but that it was so exotic, and so far away from most people’s life experiences. . .

GB: By “exotic”, you’re referring to their designated topics or ostensible subjects. The blast furnaces and coal tipples, for example.

TS: Yes. Perhaps they’re not necessarily so exotic, but. . .

GB: Obscure.

TS: They’re obscure examples, not inclusive; they’re specialized. It’s like collecting butterflies, or snakeskins and so on.

Thomas Struth

GB: Perhaps there’s another point here by which we can orient ourselves, another teacher of yours, Gerhard Richter—both the Bechers and Richter seeking a way, to, as Adorno said, cry without tears, to seek some mode of expressionless expression.

TS: That’s it, yes.

GB: And I would add to that another viewpoint, from Camus, speaking in postwar France about the refusal to capitulate to the simpler urge for vengeance, or, in the larger sense, the easier cynicisms that ultimately dehumanize each of the actors involved. Any existence of dignity requires of its participants that they be “neither victims nor executioners”.

So that within the space marked by each of these limitations, there is still the insistence within the impossible to proceed. I don’t believe that this is a uniquely German position, though I do think that German artists of the last generation or two have addressed its conditions with exceptional candor.

It’s possible that because of the Germans’ unique historical circumstances during the last century, they have a greater wariness of the kind of persistent documentary fantasies that even now so many Americans abide by: that it’s still feasible—if indeed it ever was—to seek out distant territories like an island off of Japan or a Ku Klux Klan meeting, to pursue the quasi-mystical journey for informative subject matter. When you did in fact go to Yakushima, you closed the picture off in a way, and organized its space as visual white noise, at once plentiful in data and emptied of connotation. The point at which the photograph ceases to function as a metaphor is the point at which it is free to propose an experiential model.

Despite at first appearing as a breakdown of possibility, the greater structure effects a continual insistence on finding a tenable means, however elusive, of defining pictorial value and meaning. Now. At this moment. Here.

TS: Of course.

GB: But how can you say that, as if it was just a given?

TS: No. It’s very difficult actually. [Laughs]

Maybe the most honest thing I can say is what I said earlier, that at the moment I’m in a difficult situation finding a reason to take photographs. I’m testing myself, thinking about whether it could be necessary to go to a problematized place—say Iraq or Israel—to try to photographically capture something that’s going on there. Would there be any possibility there, is there any way to address something problematic, or would it be more generalized? I’m thinking about what’s missing, or what kind of construction could be addressed.

My goal has always been to address something more generalized than a specific historical moment. I would consider it a disadvantage if people looking at my street photographs were to think “Oh, right, that’s a car from the 80s”, for example. I’m always more interested in making a picture the central message of which is still valid in fifty years or so.

I’m sure that there were similar questions during periods of transition in the past. But it’s also important that I feel it myself. You’ll be able to see it too if I felt it, if I know it. If none of my skin has felt it, how can I judge or how can I say anything about it? It would be only voyeurism.

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Tintin Au Congo

(Or How to Photograph in Africa)

How to Write about Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

From Granita.

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So that’s been a lot to handle too.

End of year work on my school plate includes :

- Write a 20 page paper or make a photo book (must be meta…a photo book that in someway addresses the issues we have discussed about photo books).
- Make 10 exhibition quality prints.
- Finish up a few projects for Visible, Invisible.
- Write a 5 page paper / design a syllabus.
- Write an artist statement and prepare work from this past year for year-end review.

So…that’s what I have going on. Moving forward to the past two weeks…

In Digital Imaging we had to create an image that used four elements provided by the teacher: a bowl, some fruit, a table, a table cloth.

I put the fruit in the bowl using masks and then put that on the flag which I made from the table cloth. I used the warp tool to bend it a bit. I used the table legs to make the barriers on the beach which I had turned into smart objects to scale and work with. All the other pieces are from the internet:

Fruitopia

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In History of The Book Week 27, we talked about conceptual photo books. Readings for the week:

Badger and Parr “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2“, Chapter 4
From “The Photography Reader” ed. Liz Wells:
- introduction to Part Four, pp 148 -151
- Solomon-Godeau, Abagail, Winning The Game When The Rules Have Changed: Art Photography and Post-Modernism, pp 152 – 163
- Grundberg, Andy, The Crisis of The Real, pp. 1674 – 180
- Metz, Christian, Photography and Fetish, pp 138 – 147

Additional Readings:

- Schjeldahl, Peter. “Alien Emotions” The New Yorker (New York), May 4, 2009.
- Knight, Christopher, “Interview with John Baldessari” Interview from April 4, 1992 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
- Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., et. al. Gerhard Richter. Atlas: The Reader
- A Good ArtInfo interview with Richard Prince
- Spector Nancy, Richard Prince, Guggnheim Museum catalog, read essays by Spector, Phillips and Brooks
- Lewitt, Sol, Autobiography, Multiples, New York, 1980 (find in SVA library rare books or at MoMA)
- Boltanski, Christian, Christian Boltanski, Phaidon, New York, 1997,
- Wolf, Sylvia, Ed Ruscha Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999

- Hoffman, Fred, Chris Burden, Locus + , New York, 2005
- Halbreich, Kathy, ed. The Last Picture Show, Walker Art Center, various authors and artists, Minneapolis, 2003

For Week 28, we each had to bring in a few examples of websites that we thought were in someway related to the future of photo books.

Some of the sites we looked at:

Flyp Media
MediaStorm
The File Room
We Feel Fine
ZoneZero
Natalie Bookchin
Lowfives
Oliver Laric
Bombay Flying Club

ZING!!!! – While writing this post, I have the tv tuned to The Colbert Report and there’s an interview with David Shields about his new book “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” which is made up of uncited quotes. Shields questions being bound to 19th Century literary standards and why literary works are held to stricter standards regarding appropriation than visual arts:

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In Visible, Invisible we have been given two additional projects:

1. TIME:

Address the notion of time, inspired by your: Vision, Experience, Understanding. How it resonates in your life. Any media can be employed, in time.

2. REALITY:

“Things are not what they seem nor are they otherwise.” – Buddha

“The True Mystery of the world is what can be seen and not the invisible” – Oscar Wilde

“Things are exactly the way they are meant to be” – Christopher Isherwood

A few of the images we’ve looked at:

Hyeres, France 1932. Henri Cartier-Bresson

Saut Dans Le Vide, 1960. Yves Klein (photomontage by Harry Shunk)

About “Saut Dans Le Vide” from Wikipedia:

Klein is also well known for a photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) [4] , originally published in the artist’s book Dimanche, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel. In fact, “Saut dans le vide”, published as part of a broadside on the part of Klein (the “artist of space”) denouncing NASA’s own lunar expeditions as hubris and folly, was a photomontage in which the large tarpaulin Klein leaped onto was removed from the final image.

Klein’s work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as “le Vide” (the Void). Klein’s Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to ones own sensibilities, and to “reality” as opposed to “representation”. Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art—paintings, a book, a musical composition—but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility”. Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein’s work strongly refers to a theoretical/arthistorical context as well as to philosophy/metaphysics and with his work he aimed to combine these. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be “felt” as well as “understood”.

Paris, Fallen Man, 1967. Joel Meyerowitz

New York, NY 1962. Lee Friedlander

Sul Vaporetto, Venezia 1960. Gianni Berengo Gardin

Santa Barbara, CA 1977. Henry Wessel Jr

Fountain. Matthew Baum

Diagonal Composition, 1993. Jeff Wall

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Rounding out the update is Right Here, Right Now.

Week 27 dealt with installations. Some of the artists/works mentioned:

From series Body to Body. Heliography on Sticks. Graciela Sacco

Julianne Swartz

Barry Underwood

Georges Rousse

Doug Aitken

Devorah Sperber

Pae White

Tomoko Shioyasu

Alfredo Jaar

Marcelo Brodsky

Ann Hamilton

And in Week 28 we looked at some artists from China:

Ai Weiwei

Unnamed Room no 2. Chen Wei, 2006

Red man. Chih-Chien Wang

Album of Literary Men. Hong Hao

Liu Zheng

Rong Rong

Wang Qingsong

Zhang Huan

We looked a bit more in depth at Zhang Huan, Rong Rong and the East Village scene last semester HERE.

And that is what I’ve been up to for the past two weeks!

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In Digital Imaging, we looked at the images in which we had changed seasons:

Our next assignment is to make a composite image that includes 4 elements that the teacher gave us.

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In History of the Book, we talked about archives, indexes and memory.

Essays we read:

Chapter 9 of “The Photobook: A History – Volume 2” Gerry Badger and Martin Parr

Four essays from “The Photography Reader” ed Liz Wells:

“Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State” John Tagg

“Photographs of Agony” John Berger

“Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labor and Capital” Alan Sekula

“Remembrance: The Child I never Was” Annette Kuhn

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Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we finished considering memory.

Shimon Attie

Ulrich Görlich

Silvio Wolf

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In Right Here, Right Now we talked a little about painting and photography:

Two Ways of Life, 1857. Oscar Rejlander

Beate Gütschow

Joel Sternfeld

Simon Norfolk

Collier Schorr

Vik Muniz

Roland Flexner

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I also registered for classes for next year:

Master Crit with Sarah Charlesworth

Thesis Forms with Marvin Heiferman

Critical Reading with Jan Avgikos

History of Video with David Ross

Photobook Studio with Kiki Bauer

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The highlight of my week?

The Marina Abramovic performance restrospective at MoMA. I don’t remember the last time I was so moved by an exhibition. If you are in NY in the next two months, you really should go. I’ll be returning several times before I take a seat across from her.

Visit the exhibition website HERE.

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In Digital Imaging we took a quick look at Smart Objects:

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In History of the Book we had a chat about porn. A special guest, Lorelei Lee sat in and joined the discussion:

Essays we read for class:

“Pornography” by Andrea Dworkin

Master of Taboo: Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki : The PDN Interview

“How to Look at Pornography” Laura Kipnis from “Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America”

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Wednesday morning in Visible, Invisible we talked more about notions of time. Christian Boltanski’s work really stood out:

In Right Here, Right Now we went over to David Zwirner Gallery and had a gallery walkthrough with James Welling for his new show Glass House featuring photographs of Philip Johnson’s Glass House which Welling first shot for New York Magazine:

And that was Week 25. Coming soon: End of year review, thesis advisor choices and all sorts of fun stuff.

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Lay Flat 02: Meta brings together a selection of contemporary artists whose photographs are conceptually engaged with the history, conventions and materiality of the medium itself. Photographs by Claudia Angelmaier, Semâ Bekirovic, Charles Benton, Walead Beshty, Lucas Blalock, Talia Chetrit, Anne Collier, Natalie Czech, Jessica Eaton, Roe Ethridge, Sam Falls, Stephen Gill, Daniel Gordon, David Haxton, Matt Keegan, Elad Lassry, Katja Mater, Laurel Nakadate, Lisa Oppenheim, Torbjørn Rødland, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Joachim Schmid, Penelope Umbrico, Useful Photography, Charlie White, Ann Woo and Mark Wyse are accompanied by the textual contributions of Adam Bell (Co-editor, The Education of a Photographer), Lesley A. Martin (Publisher/Editor, Aperture Foundation), Alex Klein (Editor, Words Without Pictures), artists Noel Rodo-Vankeulen and Arthur Ou, as well a conversation between Lyle Rexer (Author, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography) and James Welling, an artist who is seminal to this dialogue.

Buy a copy HERE.

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