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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, Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin, Hans Haacke, Cindy Sherman, 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 Andreas Gursky, 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 hy pothesis 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.

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