Andreas Gursky: Photograph Er of the Generic City Steven Jacobs

osure 2004 The Society for Photographic Education Volume 37·1 osure 2004 Volume 37·1 l Editors Note Joel Eisinger 3 Photography and Painting: The Evolution of Modern Picture Making in France c. 1860-1880 Carl Chiarenza and Alisa Luxenberg 17 The Postcards of O.S. Leeland: South Dakota Photographer Cynthia Elyce Rubin 25 Andreas Gursky: Photograph er of the Generic City Steven Jacobs 34 Contributors Publications Committee: Diana Gaston , Chair ; Steve Benson; Carol Flax, Mark Rice; Vagner veil, Whitehead , Carla Williams ; Joel Eisinger, Editor , exposure. Copy Editor: Jeanne C. Maki. Design and Layout: Noah Wenz. Editor's Note Joel Eisinger e live in an era in which , for good or painting and photography is an integral part of a Will, many of the boundaries by which long evolution, beginning in the Renaissance, of our culture had customarily oriented itself have artistic vision mediated by optical devices. They become smeared or irrelevant. A concern for this describe this vision as "camera vision ," which instability of cultural boundaries serves to unite may be understood as the assimilation by artists loosely the three essays in this issue. Steven of the visual discoveries made possible by optical Jacobs addresses the matter through a discussion devices , and eventually by photography , such that of Andreas Gursky 's photographs of the urban artists learned to see and record the world in terms (or post-urban) landscape. Jacobs explains that of these discoveries independently of photographs the shift toward globalization and post-industrial or any optical device. In their essay , Chiarenza service economies in the dominant world cultures and Luxenberg trace camera vision from Jan has brought about dramatic changes in cities that Van Eyck through Albrecht Diirer, Jan Vermeer , are, in tum, reflected in new photographic visions. Andrea Mantegna , and others to focus finally on a The street photography of the 1950s and 1960s that discussion of the impact of photography on Manet treated the city as "a stage for spontaneous human and Degas. interactions" is no longer salient in urban areas that Ultimately, Chiarenza's and Luxenberg 's have been gentrified , mallified , and Disneyfied, topic is the concept of influence . Their foil is and where the distinctions between center and Kirk Varnedoe who , in two widely read articles of periphery , between city and countryside, have all the 1980s , rejected the claims for photography 's but disappeared . influence on Degas 's modernist inventions . Jacobs regards Gursky as a prime photographic Varnedoe operated with an idea of influence that commentator on these shifts in the urban demanded one-to-one correspondences between environment. In his enormous color prints - which a work of art and its influencing source, and he sometimes represent direct records of the urban found no photographs that fit the bill for Degas 's scene and, at other times , constructed or digitally paintings. Chiarenza and Luxenberg reject this manipulated ones-Gursky shows us such subjects notion of influence in favor of a much broader as shop windows, stock exchanges, transportation one that allows for a process of "indirect seeping infrastructures , and ambiguous peripheral spaces. and gleaning from [the] cultural environment ," an His work variously speaks of the simulated environment which, for Manet and Degas, most urbanism of contemporary downtowns, the crushing certainly included the long heritage of camera scale of urban structures , the consumption of the vision and photography itself. natural landscape , and the absorption of individuals Cynthia Rubin writes of the photo postcards of into huge networks that both connect and isolate us 0. S. Leeland , a Norwegian immigrant who set up through the abstraction of social relationships. shop in South Dakota and photographed the frontier Perhaps Jacobs's most subtle and incisive point (another boundary) and its daily life and notable about Gursky is that the artist deliberately blurs the scenes: grazing buffalo , sod houses, the Mitchell distinction between representation and reality in Com Palace. his photography as a way of mirroring that blurred With consideration of such issues as postal distinction in the design and presentation of the regulations, the vicissitudes of small-town urban landscape itself. commercial photography , and conventions for Carl Chiarenza and Alisa Luxenberg are postcard collectors , Rubin outlines the rise of the also interested in the crossing of boundaries. In nineteenth-century "postcard craze ," which made their case it is the boundary between painting this photographic format as important for its time and photography. With a point of view similar as the stereograph. to that of A. D. Colemann and David Hockney, In her analysis of Leeland , Rubin looks these authors contend that the interaction of particularly at his postcards of frontier women 1 exposure Volume 3 7: 1 and the attendant concepts of home, romance , and labor. These images are of special interest for their gentle humor. And with regard to yet another form of boundary , that which circumscribed the lives pt, of women , the images are noteworthy for their unusually liberal, although often conflicted , point of of view . The articles in this issue attest to the significance Carl of shifting and dissolving boundaries for scholars writing in the postmodern environment. Together the essays remind us that while we may wish some Ever boundaries to become irrelevant or disappear, the are loss of boundaries is complex and problematic , this leading as often to destruction or alienation as to scie, freedom or connection . oper, an phyj Th bea1 ..• t1 theo 2 Photography and Painting: The Evolution of Modern Picture Making in Francec. 1860-1880 Carl Chiarenza and Alisa Luxenberg Everyone has seen daguerreotype portraits that his article aims to offer a perspective on are very lifelike and others that are not . .. For Tthe ongoing debate over the relationships this reason, . daguerreotypy, despite being a between French painting and photography from scientific instrument of precision , requires its the 1860s to the 1880s. It seems especia lly operator to have skills of interpretation [and] timely to reconsider this long-standing issue in an understanding of effects, lighting , [and] light of the recent splash made by the ideas of physiognomy, qualities [that are] inherent to art. the artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco. 1 The issues raised by Hockney's Secret That daguerreotypy is capable of rendering the Knowledge. Rediscovering the Lost Techniqu es of beautiful or the ugly is an incontestable point; the Old Masters (2001) made clear that the many .. the choice is in the hands of the artist; now, a publication s of the last half century that focused theory of daguerreotype aesthetics is needed. on the visual relationships between painting and photography are being overlooked, perhap s Francis Wey (1851) becau se of increasing theoretical investigations into the cultura l and institutional structures of photography, and, therefore, its relationship to Figure 1 Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde, (Viscount Lepic and his Daught ers Crossing the Place de la Concorde), 1875, oil on canvas, 46 1/4 x 30 4/5 inches. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. 3 exposure Volume 37:1 was occu ~ mecl -~ ... indu ,::. d 'C. ~ .._ ::.. invei .>;:i i:;:-( migf ~ a d2 who ~ ·j '4 a sii ..- ':i wou -r:-- c -w- as h ~ l::i. ~ of ( - the F F5,., '=+ phot -=- ~ ~ ~" thei1 phot Yarn hav< Figure 2 H. Jo uvin, Gare de Strasbourg, c. 1860, stereo photograph, approx. 6 x 3 inches . The George Eastman Ho use, phol International M useum of Photography, Rochester, N.Y. mor1 uses systems of power.2 It i s our intent to seize the of photography on pamtmg as part of a longer prot opportunity that Hockney 's book has created to tradition of something we will call "camera vision," cent continue the di scussion of the photo graphy-paintin g a way of seeing that began to emerge as early as the loo relationship , and to bring back vi sual sensibility fifteenth century through the u se of optical device s sten and working practice into a balanced , less value and, later, through observation of photographs . as charged under standing of pictures. By doing so, we Camera vi sion consists of artists ' incorporatio n of pap, hope to offer an alternative to the "modernist" and the visual discoveries made through optical device s ste~ "not mod ernist" camps that have generally lined and from photographs , such that the se di scoveries enc, up whenever a fresh examination of the painti ng may be manifested in their pictorial work even dim photography relationship ha s appeared, as with without using those devices or referring to specific jus~ Peter Gal assi's exhibition and catalogue, Before photographs. 5 In other words , as artists assimilated doe Photography (1981).3 camera vision, they began to see the world in the Our point of departure is the analysis made terms of it. French artists of the second half of nim by Kirk Varnedoe in two articles pub lished in Art the nineteenth century inherited camera vision, not in America in 1980. 4 There , Varnedoe criticizes but further shaped it as they re sponded to their ma1 previous scholars for giving undue credit to environment, which produced new and ubiquitou s the photography for the moderni st innov ation s optical device s and experiences. tryi1 of painter s s uch as Dega s (Figure I) , whom In his discus sion of Degas 's Place de la cho Varnedoe sees as having deve loped his innovation s Concorde, Varnedoe is clearly looking for the the independently of photography, indeed, before they smoking gun, a photograph that offered large , int appeared in photo graphy . Varnedoe 's rejection cropped, disjointed figures against a telescoped sou of photography 's influence on Dega s is ba sed or flattened background , ju st as Degas 's painting pri1 on a notion of influence as either a one-to-one offered such features.

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