art press 350 dossier

Still Images for Rethin the World Dominique Baqué

If it’s November it must be Photo Month. As Jean-Luc Monterosso, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, points out in this special section, this big Parisian event is now being emulated far and wide. But November is also the month of Paris Photo at the Carrousel du Louvre (November 13 to 16), a rich fair that usually offers a fine harvest of discoveries. Those with an interest in the more technical side of photography will find some thoughts con cerning the fragility of prints and the complexity of their conservation in the ar ticle by Anne Cartier-Bresson. As for Maja Hoffmann, who over the years has be come a key figure at the Arles photography festival, she talks to Bernard Marcelis about her plans—and not only in the realm of photography—for her Luma Foun dation, soon to be heaquartered in Arles in a building designed by Frank Gehry. Final ly, in the text here, Dominique Baqué considers recent trends in photography and its current status, and looks at ways in which some of its exponents are using the still image to analyze current realities by creating new forms of fiction.

If one of the key concerns of modernism was the dogged struggle do keep the work of art from contamination by the mass media industry, and thus to preserve its autonomy, aura and purity, then the 1980s finally put paid to its hopes of success. The extension of photography into the field of the visual arts played no small part in this. As a mass medium destined for the masses, photography, as Walter Benjamin diagnosed, proved to be one of the most powerful agents of deconstruction of the modernist mythology. And the continuing existence here and there of “pure” photographic works certainly does not inflect the way we assess the contemporary situation. Adorno’s injunctions notwithstanding, today it is well nigh impossible for a work of art to claim autonomy. Heteronomy has become the universal rule: media are constantly interacting with each other, forming crossovers and hybrids, while art itself is more and more contaminated by media culture and the culture industry. Since the 1990s, a number of issues have ceased to have any relevance to photographic practice. Nearly everyone agrees that in the field of the “extreme contemporary,” photography has entered the field of the visual arts in general, along with video and installation, and no doubt has become more prominent there than painting, a medium whose status has been pretty much downgraded in this new century. Symptomatically, none of this is much of an issue to today’s young artists, if indeed it is an issue at all. At the same time, if the 1980s witnessed the emergence of “big names” in the field—Nobuyoshi Araki, Christian Boltanski, , , Hans Haacke, , Jeff Wall, etc., then today we are witnessing a dispersion of artistic and photographic practices, or even micro-practices, and this transition from the “molar” to the “molecular” goes hand in hand with the pronounced youthfulness of contemporary artists, a fact which raises two problems that cannot be ignored: firstly, the risk of generational closure, and secondly, a lack of historical and cultural references. The latter can of course be talked up as theoretical freshness, but unfortunately it can also mean ignorance of art, and therefore a very possible loss of memory. Hence, too, the lack of historical depth in many of these new works, as could be seen in the manifesto shows L’Hiver de l’amour and Instants donnés. Another notable fact is that the 1990s saw the erosion, or even the disappearance, of certain paradigms characteristic of the 1980s. One was the depletion of neo-pictorialism, whose proponents, like Giordano Bonora, Paolo Gioli and Natale Zoppis, attempted to reinstate aura. There was also the gradual fading of “creative photography,” as championed by Jean-Claude Lemagny. Another star that waned in the 1990s and has continued to fade in the new century is that of appropriationist and simulationist practices, more often American than European. The kinds of theatricalized forms of representation exemplified by David Buckland, Gilbert & George, Les Krim, Pierre et Gilles and Sandy Skoglund, among others, have receded in favor of an overt visual poverty. Finally, the objectivist paradigm of the Düsseldorf School, with its French adjunct of “L’Autre Objectivité,” championed by Jean-François Chevrier, is running out of steam, even if it remains more powerful than the models mentioned above. Now ossified and doctrinal, it continues to produce minor masters à la Charles Fréger, but is struggling to renew itself. The big exception that proves this rule is , one of the few alumni of the Bechers who, instead of repeating the objectivist model, has reworked it into a rich and singular body of work.

What function?

That leaves the ultimate question, the question of principle: what function should be assigned to photography in its present phase? For while it evident that contemporary photography no longer provides a template for artistic practices, it does retain considerable vitality. I would like to put forward two hypotheses. Firstly, today the gaze is modeled not by photographic images but by the screen. Whether it is a television, computer or video screen, this is what the gaze measures itself against today, as if its shifting, quivering and pixelated surface now provided the most effective reflection of the real. In addition to the exponential development of video—in art and in surveillance—we must take on board new regimes of the gaze that the photographic medium cannot match. Acute, repetitive, catastrophic and fascinating, the looped images of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers were incontestably bound up with the nature of the screen. Ultra- contemporary wars are no longer photographed—or, if they are, very little and very poorly—but are transmitted by satellite. The trembling, threatening sil houette of Bin Laden is also screen-like in its indeterminacy and its embodiment of a perpetual potential danger. The second hypothesis is that for all this photography is still very much there, and if the expression were not so hackneyed, I would say that today it serves as a conveyor of meanings and images, a go-between among images. Increasingly “lightweight,” fluid and labile, it moves between video, installation and performance, like a fine thread without which contemporary art would lose its flexibility and coherence. The dichotomies of the 1980s have been replaced by other oppositions: not between pure and hybrid photography, or between creative photography and photography in art, but between what I shall call the Promethean fictions of the post-human and other iconic strategies that include the revival of photographic and filmic documentary. Here, in other words, are two antithetic, irreconcilable poles that seem to organize the deployment of artistic and photographic practices: on one side, as gelatin-silver gives way more and more to digital, we are seeing a fetishization of technology on the part of many artists, one that sustains a neo-futurist mythology which reactivates the avant-gardist myths of the New Man. Most of these practices point up the obsolescence of the human body and invoke a mutant replacement with prosthetic, biological and fantastic extensions. On the other side, and its polar opposite, we have what Jean-François Chevrier and Philippe Roussin have referred to as an insistence on the document as a way of countering the suspect futurism of the post-human and against the concept of simulacra derived from the philosophy of Baudrillard. This undeniable return of the document can be explained in a number of ways: by the fact of the post-human as a doxa of contemporary art; by the need for a prudent, lucid return to the real; and by what some have called the return of history, notably through anti-globalization guerrillas implying new forms of struggle against the purportedly irresistible advent of liberal capitalism— “the end of history.” Other reasons can be invoked, too: the unprecedented crisis in information and mass media, and the suspicion that now hangs over the once dominant journalistic model.

Back to the document

The current interest in the documentary style of Walker Evans is no coincidence. There are a number of reasons that can be put forward for the renewal of this genre: the increasingly acute criticism of Hollywoodian hegemony, the lassitude engendered by a postmodernism that was often outstandingly arrogant and cynical, the rejection of post-human imagery, seen as the ultimate avatar of a Promethean futurism whose successive versions have all been shattered on the rocks of history, and, finally, the hope of getting back to something that resembles the truth. Here, a little caution is in order: a new taste for documentary photography may be founded on a dubious ideology of authenticity. But there can be no question of going back to the document as infallible proof. The document no more “gives us” the real than art does. Rather, it constructs it, endows it with meaning, at the risk of setting up false meanings or counter meanings. It is not and never will be the epiphany of the real. Many documentary photographers today think of their practice as the elaboration of a meaning that is never given as such, that must always be deciphered and constructed. Witness Paul Graham, Guillaume Herbaut, Jean-Luc Moulène, etc. And also Allan Sekula, whom I shall single out here because he was one of the first artists to go back to the document and invent a new form of critical realism. Best known for his Fish Story (1989–95), some hundred and five color photographs taken in Barcelona, Gdansk, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Rotterdam, San Diego, Ulsan, Warsaw and elsewhere, then presented in sequential form with accompanying texts, Sekula has built up an intellectually highly articulated body of work and, pretty much from the outset, has asked questions about the documentary function, regarding both its apparent absence of aestheticization and its critical potential. For him, the construction of the documentary implies the capture of the daily event and, simultaneously, its mise-en-scène. All the ambiguity of Fish Story lies precisely in the attempt to rethink the fishing industry in the postindustrial era as at once a gigantic universe of automation and a world of backbreaking work. Referring to Herman Melville, Sekula sets out to reveal the social dimension of the sea, thus backing up the idea that documentary is never the literal, objective description of a given reality. The return to the document is expressed through visual strategies that seek to escape the contradictions of the “intimate” image-making of the 1990 by confronting today’s world, and sometimes actually politicizing the image. Among them are the reappropriation of press imagery (the after-the-event [après-coup] and withdrawal strategies) and the theatricalization (both ironic and straight) of war. In accordance with this logic, artists often rework images that constitute the raw material of their relation to the world. The exhibition Covering the Real. Art and Press Pictures from Warhol to Tillmans (Basel, 2005) is a very good case in point. Consider in particular the career of a photograph taken by John Moore (Associated Press) during the first phase of the war in Iraq, Soldiers in One of Saddam’s Palaces. Originally published in black-and-white, it then reappeared in color, with an unusual glow. It shows several soldiers standing around the scene’s main figure, an officer sitting in a relaxed pose in a stylish chair in the middle of the image, presumably resting after an attack, looking out hazily at what we imagine to be a tranquil view of the city. The roughness of the military contrasts with the somewhat old-fashioned luxury of the palace, and the image carries a sense of history painting. In fact it echoes a canvas by Anton von Werner, Im Etappenquartier von Paris am 24 Oktober 1870. This work shows a group of Prussian officers who have taken up their quarters in a French château, where they are relaxing with wine and music. Moore’s photograph seems deeply imbued with painterliness. Hence its many different artistic avatars. One of these is the ghostly painting by Luc Tuymans, which he renders as the chromatically vague reproduction of a reproduction and titles Navy Seals. Michael Diers aptly reminds us that “grisaille”—a technique that originated in Antiquity and, as Aby Warburg points out, constitutes a “mode of detachment”—does very much represent a way of creating psychological, emotional, mental and rational detachment. Tuymans knows this, and transforms the photographic world into a world of shadows. He speaks in terms of the silence of his anti-works.” Some more examples: a press photograph showing Saddam’s sordid bolt-hole, taken when he was arrested in December 2003, is converted by Thomas Demand into a photograph of a sparklingly clean maquette in candy colors. has built up a collection of press cuttings which he uses as documentary material, integrating them into his installations, exhibitions and books. What is at play here is the general mistrust of the press image and its appropriation for critical ends. And, more than that, the revelation of its emptiness. It is as if the only thing left to do with this image is play with it in accordance with different aesthetics and combinations, without hoping for the slightest compassion. No artist will ever think of “super-sensitizing” these images. This is one of the common points in the after-the- event and withdrawal strategy practiced by, among others, , Dennis Adams, the Atlas Group and Akram Zaatari, and Michel LeBrun-Franzaroli. Rejecting the extreme patriotic and bellicose fervor inflamed by the attacks on the World Trade Center, Dennis Adams renewed his practice by photographing waste and scraps of newspaper flying through the Manhattan air after the collapse of the towers. Beirut, surely the global capital of destruction and reconstruction, of ruins and building sites, is home to the two Lebanese activists and artists (aka Atlas Group) and Akram Zaatari, whose differing approaches both involve attempts to reappropriate memory and history by redefining the reciprocal roles of artwork and document. The Atlas Group defines itself as “a project established […] to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. One of our aims is to locate, preserve, study and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that shed light on [that] contemporary history.” Using documents in various combinations, Raad not only questions their truth-value, but also reaffirms their narrative and signifying capacity. Akram Zaatari patiently collects photographs, and this action is itself his artistic method. With both men the archive regains currency and becomes part of a story. Still in the area of post-event distance, Michel LeBrun-Franzaroli uses archives from the first Gulf War to question the nature of a medium that sent out a continuous flux of images provided through the American army press service. Repeated worldwide in a loop, these images helped establish the notion of the “surgical strike.” In his War in the Gulf show (Paris, 2006), LeBrun-Franzaroli articulated two distinct aspects of his approach: screen shots from 1990–91 printed on carpet in an ironic reference to Oriental carpets, the traditional motifs of which represent an ideal garden, a peaceful Edenic enclosure. Then, images found on Internet in 2006 showing a much dirtier vision of the war than the official version. The artist blows these up so much that they lose definition and quality, and the deformations hampering their legibility become metaphors for manipulation and mendacity. These strategies of distance and delay are often found in minimalist works that use reserve, detachment and formal restraint in delivering their message.

Theatricalization

At the other pole we find strategies of mise-en-scène and theatricalization, which employ drama and excess and are often imbued with an ironic stance towards the historical events they present. The kitsch aesthetic sometimes brought into play here can be interpreted as another sign of detachment. Take the cases of Karl de Keyser, Aid Nes, Wang Quingson and Éric Baudelaire. The latter’s The Dreadful Details caused a scandal at the 2006 edition of the annual Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan. This work boldly exhibited by Baudelaire was a totally false Baghdad war scene in which every detail as well as the overall choreography was staged by the artist. Comprising two large-format color images taken with a view camera, and endowed with extraordinary luminosity thanks to the diasec process, this diptych showed what at first glance one might judge to be the traditional themes of photojournalism: distraught woman, scandalously wounded child, an angry and indignant old man, plus tense marines with guns at the ready. Baudelaire’s aim here was not to caricature the work of photojournalists, but to critically interrogate the history of the representation of truth. This image which evokes The Disasters of War originated in the recent American series Over There, a chronicle of the war in Iraq. When Baudelaire went out to Los Angeles to research the iconography that constructed such representations of war, he was unlucky: they had just stopped shooting the series, and all that remained were sets and extras. These were what he used as he spent a month preparing his photographs. Each detail of the scene was meticulously worked out. Eighteen negatives were then digitally processed to compose an image that is more Jeff Wall than photojournalism, and that drew an exclamatory “Outrageous!” from Elliott Erwitt. Reappropriations of press images, approaching the subject after the event and with detachment, ironic and un-ironic theatricalizations of war—the strategies I have tried to describe here all break with the insistence on compassion and institute a distance conducive to the work of thought. Translation, C. Penwarden