WHY IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE IN FOCUS a WHY IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE IN FOCUS MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY EXPLAINED JACKIE HIGGINS PRESTEL MUNICH • LONDON • NEW YORK CONTENTS Introduction 6 CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TwO CHAPTER three PORTRAITS / DOCUMENT / STILL LIfES / SMILE SNAP fREEZE 8 42 78 Self-Portrait Behind the Gare Saint Lazare Premiere Antichambre Andy Warhol 10 Henri Cartier-Bresson 44 de Madame Victoire Robert Polidori 80 Provincetown, Cape Cod, Every Building on the Sunset Strip Massachusetts Ed Ruscha 46 E. Horsfield, Well Street, Lee Friedlander 12 East London, March 1986 Wrong John Baldessari 48 Craigie Horsfield 82 Self-Deceit 4 Francesca Woodman 14 Untitled (Ishinomaki) Erotos Nobuyoshi Araki 84 Daido Moriyama 50 Second Beauty Composite Attracted to Light #1 Nancy Burson 16 Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi) Doug and Mike Starn 86 William Eggleston 52 Spain. Benidorm. Autoportrait Untitled Adam Fuss 88 Martin Parr 18 Untitled (from the ‘Subway’ series) Bruce Davidson 54 Hearts Are Trumps Portrait of Something (Sir John Everett Millais) That I’ll Never Really See Greer and Robert Emmanuelle Purdon 90 Gavin Turk 20 on the Bed, NYC Nan Goldin 56 Poll Thomas Demand 92 Lorna (Simpson) Chuck Close 22 Untitled (Cowboy) Every . Bernd and Hilla Becher Richard Prince 58 Gable Sided Houses Head #8 Idris Khan 94 Philip-Lorca diCorcia 24 Galleria dell’ Accademia #1, Venice Thomas Struth 60 Untitled Rinko Kawauchi 96 Shirley Gary Schneider 26 Encounters with the Dani . Flower 014 James Welling 98 Susan Meiselas 62 Self Portrait at 17 Years Old Blow Up: Untitled No. 5 Gillian Wearing 28 Untitled (12 September 1998) Ori Gersht 100 Gerhard Richter 64 Mirror Ball Breeze Blocks with Hare Anne Collier 30 ffolly Richard Learoyd 102 Rut Blees Luxemburg 66 Marriage I Amor Revealed Sally Mann 104 John Stezaker 32 Shinjuku #1 Collage 3 Mariah Robertson 106 Esteban Pastorino Díaz 68 Marat (Sebastião) Full Moon Cloud Shoreline Vik Muniz 34 jpeg nt02 Thomas Ruff 70 Susan Derges 108 Black Square I, Bill Gates Untitled (Girl with Arm in Tetrarch 3.08pm 29th June 2009 Taryn Simon 36 Front of Face) Birdhead 72 Christopher Bucklow 110 Ah Jing Zhang Huan 38 Brandee (Midnight Flight) Apples Sharon Core 112 Ryan McGinley 74 Giovanni Maurizio Anzeri 40 Untitled #23 Laura Letinsky 114 Dawn Surf Jellybowl Filmstrip 1 and 2 Hommage à William Henry Jennifer West 76 Fox Talbot . Floris Neusüss 116 CHAPTER FOuR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX NARRATIVE / LANDSCAPES / ABSTRACTS / ACTION LOOK DISSOLVE 118 150 186 Trouser-Word Piece World Trade Center Japanese Sky I (‘I’m a Real Artist’) Hiroshi Sugimoto 152 Robert Rauschenberg 188 Keith Arnatt 120 99 Cent Andreas Gursky 154 My Vows Untitled Film Still #48 Annette Messager 190 Cindy Sherman 122 Man on Sidewalk, Los Angeles, 2000 Paul Graham 156 Ground #42 Picture for Women Uta Barth 192 Jeff Wall 124 Jokla series Olafur Eliasson 158 #44 Laundromat-Locomotion Gaston Bertin 194 (Horse & Rider) Battersea Power Station, XI: July 13, Steven Pippin 126 2004 Vera Lutter 160 Shadow #79 Naoya Hatakeyama 196 Strip Untitled Richard Misrach 162 Jemima Stehli 128 New Year’s Day #4550 The Museum of Modern Art, Bill Jacobson 198 Untitled #70 New York (9.8.2001–7.6.2004) Bill Henson 130 Michael Wesely 164 Travelling Landscapes Gábor Ösz 200 Untitled Untitled, from the series ‘Rain’ Gregory Crewdson 132 Abbas Kiarostami 166 Untitled #105 Victor Schrager 202 Part (14) Diorama Map, New York Nikki S. Lee 134 Sohei Nishino 168 Damage/drown/canal, 168 hours June 2003 #111 Night 22 Catherine Yass 204 Anna Gaskell 136 Michael Wolf 170 A Different Kind of Idol Frank, b. 1956 Fullmoon@Dunluce Sara VanDerBeek 206 Katy Grannan 138 Darren Almond 172 Renaissance # 1022 The Queen Plays with Her Corgis site specific_LAS VEGAS 07 Bill Armstrong 208 Alison Jackson 140 Olivo Barbieri 174 The Press Conference, June 9 Untitled, September 2008 uncharted dangers . Adam Broomberg and Hannah Starkey 142 Thomas Joshua Cooper 176 Oliver Chanarin 210 Lucky Tiger #8 Fernweh Tacita Dean 178 Memento (Survival of the Fittest) Laurel Nakadate 144 Christian Marclay 212 Untitled (Academy of Arts, R 217) Deborah Andreas Gefeller 180 Orange Aqua, Late Summer Alex Prager 146 Garry Fabian Miller 214 Sunburned GSP #386 Parasomnia (Pacific Ocean) Six-Sided Picture, Viviane Sassen 148 Chris McCaw 182 March 24th 2010 Walead Beshty 216 Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #3 Freischwimmer 204 James Casebere 184 Wolfgang Tillmans 218 Index 220 Picture credits 223 6 INTRODUCTION “It’s time, then, for [photography] to return to its true duty, INTRODUCTION which is to be the servant of the sciences and arts—but the very JACKIE HIGGINS humble servant.” French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote these damning words in 1859, only a few decades after William Henry Fox Talbot began his pioneering photographic experiments at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. From its very inception, photography has fought to earn recognition as a form of art. To many its mechanical, automated nature rendered it no more than a mere transcriber, which left no scope for artistic skill and interpretation. Pictorialism, one of the earliest international photographic movements, did little to help the medium’s cause. Its adherents believed that before photography could be seen as art, its origins in the mechanical and chemical had to be disguised. Pictorialists deliberately defocused their images and invented ingenious methods of printing, with the sole intention of emulating the aesthetic of painting. As a result, photography came to be regarded as a mere surrogate of the established order. Today, photography has come full circle. It has at last been embraced by the art world as an art form in its own right. Encouraged by a growing community of collectors, more artists are turning to it than ever before. National art galleries that previously had dismissed the medium are now prompted to reexamine their photographic holdings and retain specialist curators. Yet despite this, we appear to be witnessing a resurgence of the out-of-focus aesthetic popular at the turn of the 19th century, but for radically different reasons. Why It Does Not Have to Be in Focus analyzes one hundred photographs by one hundred, mostly contemporary, artists. For example, Uta Barth makes only defocused imagery. She treats with disdain claims that her work is modern-day Pictorialism, asking in response why a photograph must aspire to the attributes of painting in order to justify itself as art. She uses camera focus to interrogate notions of perception. “I value confusion,” she claims, adding that it underscores the “activity of looking.” Chuck Close is one of a growing number of artists turning to antiquarian photographic techniques—he is drawn to the daguerreotype by the sculptural quality of its shifting focus—whereas Ryan McGinley repeatedly creates blurriness in his imagery of leaping and running bodies, thereby softening hard lines in a technique comparable to Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato. INTRODUCTION 7 Contemporary artists are experimenting with photography in diverse ways other than through focus. This book considers a whole litany of what might be called “photographic errors.” When Taryn Simon made a portrait, she chose to underexpose, and therefore erase, her subject. In direct contrast, Paul Graham’s landscapes are so intentionally overexposed that a number of readers returned his book to the publishers convinced that there had been a printing problem. Ed Ruscha’s series, taken from a moving car, features skewed horizons and cropped subjects, whereas Daido Moriyama, whose aesthetic has been labeled “blurry, grainy, and out of focus,” barely stops walking to capture a frame. Portraits are equally mishandled: Lee Friedlander obscures his face with a light bulb, Anne Collier fractures hers in a mirrored disco ball, John Baldessari is portrayed with a palm tree sprouting from his head, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia catches his subjects unawares, showing slack, adrift expressions. Some artists desecrate the photographic surface by scratching GUIDE TO SYMBOLS and smearing it with a cocktail of substances: Jennifer West opts Explains why the for whiskey, sunblock, and nail polish, Robert Rauschenberg uses photograph is an bleach, and Gerhard Richter finds paint left over in his studio. important work ? of art. Other artists go to more extreme lengths. Martin Parr and Gavin Turk abdicate authorship by enlisting a third party to take their portraits, whereas Andy Warhol delegates this responsibility to a machine, posing in an automated photobooth. Describes the artist’s approach, process, and technique. This book reveals why a photograph need not be crisply rendered or “correctly” exposed, color-balanced, framed, or even composed by the photographer in order to have artistic Locates the image in its historic and artistic context. merit. Artists are pushing the boundaries of photography in so many ways that their efforts are arguably redefining the medium. Art historian Geoffrey Batchen notes, “There can be no Unattributed quotes are by the such thing as a singular photography at all, only discontinuous, photographer featured. myriad photographies.” Critic Gerry Badger adds, “We think of i photographs as fact, but they can also be fiction, metaphor, Provides additional incidental or poetry. They are of the here and now, but they are also information. immensely potent time capsules. They can be downright utilitarian or they can be the stuff of dreams.” Why It Does Not Lists examples of similar images Have to Be in Focus reveals how Baudelaire’s “humble servant” by the same photographer. has undoubtedly earned the right to be promoted. Photography is not simply an art form but is one of such shape-shifting variety Type of camera used that it is possibly the most important art form of our time. CHAPTER ONE PORTRAITS / SmIle We expect a self-portrait to be an act of introspection, to somehow reveal the artist’s psyche.