Title: The Photograph as Contemporary Art Author: Charlotte Cotton ISBN: 9780500204184 Publication Date: 2014 Publisher: Thames Hudson

Introduction: • Technology was invented in the 1830’s • Since then, photography has become a contemporary art form, and in the 21st century it is embraced as a legitimate medium (like painting and sculpture) • This book intends to provide an intro and overview of photograpy as contemporary art by others defining it as a subjecy, while also indentifying its characteristic themes and features • All of the photographers in the book convey a sense of the ‘broad and intelligent scope of contemporary photography’ • Every photographer mentioned in the book shares a commitment to maing their own contribution to the culture of art photography • The photos presented in this book were originally made for galleries and in the pages of art books, so bare that in mind, as well as that each photographer is in a way being defined by one photo • The majority of art photographers have some sort of degree and craft their art for art viewers • Now that art photography is being taken more seriously, it also brings in crticial discussion which ‘tends to centre on the consolidation and qualification of the field, rather than on rethinking it conceptually’ • We have image based communication on a daily basis with the use of social media and other photo sharing platforms • amateurs are able to self-publish their own photobooks due to digital printing • Citizens are also able to get involved in documentary photography used in journalism • This all does however push us to become more specific about what qualifies as artistic photographic practise • Each category of this book is a theme, either a stylistic theme or a choice of subject matter that determines a characteristic of art photography • The chapters tend to group together photographers who share more common ground in their motivations & the way they work • Chapter 1 focuses on… ◦ How photographers devise strategies for the camera ◦ It challenges a traditional stereotype of photography • Chapter 2 focuses on… ◦ Storytelling ◦ The way that ‘tableau’ photography is prevelent in contemporary practise ◦ How a narrative can be told into a single image ◦ Relates to the pre-photographic era of the 18th and 19th centuries with their paintings ◦ How props, gestures and style help convey a sense of narrative • Chapter 3 focuses on… ◦ Photographic aesthetics ◦ ‘Deadpan’ is a type of art photography that has a lack of visual drama or hyperbole ◦ These are photos though that suffer from being reduced in size, as they are best as big prints • Chapter 4 focuses on… ◦ Subject matter ◦ How contemporary photography has bushed the bounderies of ‘what might be considered a credible visual subject’ ◦ Everything in the real world is a potential subject • Chapter 5 focuses on… ◦ Emotional and personal relationships ◦ Intimacy ◦ Some of the photographs have an amateur style to them, like ordinary family snaps ◦ Considers what art photographers add to this style • Chapter 6 focuses on… ◦ Highlighting the use of documentary photography in art ◦ ‘Aftermath photography’ - where photographers arrive at sites of disaster after ◦ Shows off political and individual upheaval ◦ Visual records of isolated communities • Chapter 7 focuses on… ◦ Expoloting our pre-existing knowledge of imagery ◦ Remaking well-known photographs ◦ Mimicking generic types of imagery ◦ By recognising familiar kinds of imagery, we are made aware of what we see, how we see and how images trigger our emotions and understanding of the world ◦ Critique of originality ◦ The revival of historical photographic techniques ◦ Understanding past events or cultures • Chapter 8 focuses on… ◦ Photography where the nature of the medium is part of the narrative ◦ Art photographers have made conscious decisions to highlight certain physical and material properties of photography ◦ Draws attention to the choices a photographer must make when creating their work ◦ How art photographers are making images that can be viewed both online alongisde art that is for gallery purposes ◦ Flourising creativity • Photography as contemporary art in the 21st century is influenced by contemporary art markets, as ell as the impacy of digital technology (for both production and viewing of images) • Also inspired by 19th and 20th century history of the medium • Experimentalism of European avant-garde photography of the early 20th century • The use of colour over black & white dominated contemporary photographic art in the mid-1990’s • It wasn’t until the 70’s that people who used vibrant colours received critical support and in the 90’s, colour became standard practise • William Eggleston & Stephen Shore were important to the contribution of colour photography becoming prominent • Eggleston created colour photos in the 60’s which was rarer ◦ In 1976, there as a exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) that displayed his colour images taken between 1969 & 1971. It was the first solo show of a photographer working mainly in colour ◦ It was an indicator of his work creating an alternative approach • In 1971, Stephen Shore had photographs printed as postcards (5,600 of them!) and failed to sell many of them, so he placed them in postcard racks (many got posted back to him) ◦ His fascination with the everyday styles of photography continued when in 1972 he exhibited 220 photos made with a 35mm instamatic camera, showing ordinary objects cropped and depicted very casually ◦ His art wasn’t well known until his book ‘American Surfaces’ which was published in 1999 • Eggleston & Shore’s contributions were also involving opening up a space within art photography to allow a more liberated approach to image making • Younger artists have followed in their footsteps • The exhibition ‘New Topographics: Photographs of a man-altered landscape’ (curated by William Jenkins) was first shown in 1975 in Rochester (New York) and is recognised as an ‘early survey of some of the most critically important and influential photography of the late 20th century’ ◦ It included Bernd and Hilla Becher (who worked together from the mid-50’s onwards) ◦ Their photos of American artitechtural structures (eg. gas tanks, water towers, blast furnaces etc) have informed the aesthetics and conceptual aproaches of contemporary art photography ◦ They stand in contrast with the previously mentioned colour photographs, but there is an important connection ◦ They’ve both been very important to adapting vernacular photography to function as pat of an artistic strategy ◦ The intent of infusing art photography with connections to history and life ◦ The exhibition brought together a wide range of work that had diverse concepts • 21st century has also been a time of the reappraisal of other histories of photography • The influence of the history of art upon present day art photographers reflects the fascination in wide contemporary art • Interest in avant-garde experimentation has made Laszlo Moholy-Nagy a very important figure ◦ Encompassd painting, sculpture, film, design and experimentational photography in the spirit of Dadaism and Russian Contructivism ◦ Epitomised the pluralistic practises associated with the German Bauhaus School ◦ He experimented with light ◦ Fused photography and sculpture • Marcel Duchamp (1880’s-1960’s) is the originator or Dadaism ◦ His collaborations with Alfred Stieglitz and man Ray resonate strongly within the field of contemporary art photography ◦ They used photography as a device to generate a visual charge & assign artistic meaning to its subjects ◦ In this context, photography is the rool of the Duchampian readymade ▪ It creates a default, manfactured object borrowed from daily life • It is not surprising that interest in the history of photography and of work from an earlier time has become more popular as art photography has been accepted as a valid medium • The second decade of the 21st century has ushered in an era of confience and experimentation • It’s different from the process in the late 20th century of validating photography • Now that photography is accepted as a fact of being a medium of contemporary art, we are now ready for new and exciting turns in the development

Chapter 1: • Photographers in this chapter collectively make one of the most confident declarations about how central photography has become within contemporary art, and how far removed it is from traditional notitions of how photographers create their work • The photographs evolve from a strategy orchestrated by the photographers specifically for creating an image • Framing those moments will always be part of the process however and the central artistic act is directing an event specifically for the camera • This means artistic creation begins before the camera is held in position, and actually begins with planning the idea • The roots of it lie in the mid 60’s and 70’s, when photography became central to the communication of artists’ performances and other temporary works of art • Conceptual art played down to the importance of craft and authorship • The style of mid 20th century photojournalism was often adopted to invest the image with the sense of it being an unplanned action • Conceptual art used photography as a mens of coveting brief artistic ideas or actions • It is both a document and evidence of art • Art was revealed to be the process of delegation to ordinary and everyday objects and photography became a tool to avoid the need to create what is seen as a good picture • The precedents for conceptual artists of the 60’s and 70’s were created in the early 20th century by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) ◦ Submitted a factory made urinal to the Armory Show (New York) because art could be anything the artist chooses it to be ◦ All he did was rotate it and sign it ◦ Only photos taken by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) remain, 7 days after the piece was rejected ◦ Contains mystical symbolism ◦ The photos composition compares it to Budda and Madonna statues • French artist Sophie Calle (1953) ◦ Blended artistic strategy with daily life to create a compelling realisation of art photography ◦ She came across a stranger twice in one day in Paris, and actually spoke to him the 2nd time ◦ She followed him to Venice (1980 - Suite Venitienne) & documented it without him knowing by taking photos and notes ◦ In 1981 she worked as a cleaner and read through and went through personal items of guests and took photos ◦ It’s a mix of fact and fiction ◦ She also collaborated with Paul Auster who wrote a character based on her named Maria. They set tasks for each other to complete as well • Performance played a huge part in Chinese art in the 1980’s and 90’s due to the political climate where avant-garde artistic pracctise was outlawed. ◦ Temporary theatricality of performance based art provided an opportunity an outlet for revolutionary expression ◦ Many members of these artistic groups were trained as painters but used performances of blurred life ◦ These performances were staged in small audiences in houses or out-of-the-way places ◦ The human body was tested to its limits and artists endured both physical and psychological suffering ◦ Photography was always part of the process • Ukranian artist Olek Kulik (1961) staged animalistic protests and zoomorphic performances ◦ These were to suggest that we are the alter egos of animals and they are ours ◦ Politically confrontational ◦ Includes acting like a savage dog and attacking police ◦ Not jus a persona but a way of life ◦ He formed an ‘Animal Party’ to give his ideas a political platform ◦ He references Joseph Beuy’s protests againt the Vietnam war where Beuys was locked up with a coyote and their ‘bond’ was photographed ◦ Kulik is photographed naked with a dog, and the photos are placed into frames like family photos in a room where the furniture is slightly too small • Melanie Manchot (1966) ◦ Series ‘Gestures of Demarcation’ shows the artist expressionless as the 2nd figure pulls on her neck skin ◦ Grotesque —> known in the 60’s ◦ Not a performance being photograph, the act is made more specifically for the camera ◦ Open ended, the viewer must interpret it imaginatively • Jean Dunning (1960) photographs organic mass abstracted to reference bodily organs ◦ ‘The Blob 4’ is a sack that looks like silicon implants covering a womans body ◦ It looks swollen ◦ Embodies embarrasment & the vulnerability of human physicality ◦ A video alongside the photos shows the woman trying to dress the blob, showing the human body as irrational & uncontrolled • Tatsumi Arimoto (1946) dresses as bread man ◦ He performs everyday activities with bread as a mask ◦ The photos are dependent on people being willing to be photographed with him ◦ He also takes photos with his mum with Alzheimers, as her mental reality has changed, so has his phyiscal performance appearance • Erwin Wurm (1954) invites people to participate in his odd photos ◦ Includes friends, exhibition visitors and people who responds to his ads ◦ He occasionally joins in ◦ Combination of manual sketches, indtructions and descriptions of potential performances (One Minute Sculptures) • Gillian Wearing (1963) approaches strangers in London and photographs them with a piece of white card ◦ The white card says something they have written about themselves (example given is a man holding a card saying ‘have recently been certified as mildly insane’) ◦ Self determination to the subject ◦ The capturing of these shows the focus solely on the subject, more control for the subject • Bettina Von Zwehl (1971) created a 3 part series ◦ Part 1 - wear white clothes and sleep. Photos taken when the subjects have woken up ◦ Part 2 - wear blue polo sweaters and exert yourself. Photos taken after ◦ Part 3 - Photos taken as they lay on the floor & try to hold their breath • Shizuka Yokomizo (1966) made a series of 19 portraits of single figures photographed through the downstairs windows of their houses ◦ She sent letters to the inhabitants of the houses asking if they would stand facing the window with the curtains open at a certain time ◦ The strangers are looking at themselves as the windows act as mirrors ◦ Theres a curious element of self-recognition or even misrecognition captured • Hellen van Meene (1972) photographs girls & young women ◦ Yet it is unknown if we as an audience are looking at knowingly constructed or awkwardly struck spontaneous poses ◦ We don’t know if the girls are sressed up or caught in unselfconsious play ◦ Huge ambiguity ◦ Allowing spontaneous events to unfold • Ni Haifeng (1964) ◦ The artist’s torso is painted with motifs from 18th century Chinese porcelain designed by Dutch traders to cater to the Western market ◦ The words written on the body are written as if they were museum labels or catalogue entries and show the implications of trade and colonialism • Kenneth Lum (1956) has work that implies that photos need a captio for it to elaborate its ideas or meaning fully ◦ The image alone is shown to be problematic and ambigious • Roy Villevoye (1960) represents cultural differences in an entirely visual way ◦ He collaborated with the Asmati community of Irian Jaya as part of his exploration of colour and reace in reference to Dutch colonial history ◦ He photographed the local men wearing t-shirts bought from Holland ◦ The stratedy reflects the historical trading links between the 2 cultures and implies that Westerners impose their tastes onto colonised indigenous people • The customisation of the natrual world is the signature of Nina Katchadourian (1968) ◦ Since the 1990s this has been her style ◦ She repaired cracks in mushroom caps with brightly coloured bicycle-tyre patches ◦ She also repaired spider webs with starched coloured thread ◦ Overnight, spiders would attempt to remove her artwork/repairs ◦ Her interventions into nature are a wry and feminised retorrt to grander engagements of nature made in land art of the 60’s and 70’s • Wim Delvoye’s (1965) sculptures & photos are diven by visual punchlines ◦ His photos offer an irreverent joining of the mundane and functional with the grand and decorative ◦ He uses this device to create aesthetically pleasurble and psychologically aberrant experiences ◦ Mixes civic typographies with the language of casual notes • David Shrigley’s (1968) photos and sketches take the formulas of shock and visual puns ◦ With a special nod towards surrealism in a schoolboyish way ◦ An immediate comprehension and enjoyment of their meaning ◦ Consciously unsophisticated style of sketching ◦ Not to be taken too seriously • Sarah Lucas (1962) used photography in her consciously rough & ready art ◦ Brings together cartoon language & tabloid-newspaper photo-stories ◦ Use of performances with the photographic grid in avant-garde art practise ◦ The body is usually used as a mean of reaching and signalling sensitised experience ◦ The way the body is represented in everyday imagery of magazines and newspapers is important in her work ◦ She enacts a reveral and subversion of received sexual roles & imagery ◦ Travesty more than a desirable symbol • Annika Von Hausswolff (1967) played with depictions of the sexualised body ◦ She creates a visual game where we see the actual subject of the photo and then the subject of sex ◦ Photography is both a practical way to fix the obervation but also the means by which that play btween visual registers comes into force • Mona Hatoum (1952) created a photo in which we jump mentally from the swirls of hair on a mans back to the starry skies of Vincent Van Gogh. ◦ The ‘enjoyment’ of the image comes from the recognition of Van Gogh ◦ The interplay between 2 and 3 dimensional spaces is a great pleasure of looking at photos ◦ The ability of the medium to depict solid plastic forms, fleeting events and combinations and reduce them to 2D is an enduring fascination and challenge to photgraphers • Georges Rousse (1947) works with abanoned architectural spaces ◦ Transforming the sites by painting and plastering an area so when it is photographed from a certain position it has a geometric pattern ◦ Creating an illusion • David Spero (1963) depicted locations into which he placed many colourful balls ◦ When photographed they made for comical and beautiful punctuations of the spaces ◦ They form homemade ceestial planes • The remaining photos in the chapter focus on repitition • The practise can be likened to the testing of a hypothesis to turn speculation into a proposal • Tim Davis’s (1970) series titled ‘retail’ depicts darkened windows of American suburban houses at night ◦ The windows reflected fast food neon signs ◦ The subliminal imposition of contemporary consumer culture onto domestic life • Olga Chernysheva (1962) pairs images of plants with Russian fishermen ◦ The fishermen are barely recognisable as human figures as they are motionless ◦ Cocooned in a state of suspended animation • Rachel Harrison (1966) observes a strange & obscure form of human gesture ◦ The photos are of a window of a house in New Jersey ◦ It was claimed there that there was a visitation of the Virgin Mary on the windowpane ◦ Guests to the house place their hands on either side of the window ◦ The repeated gesture remains unfathomable to us • Philip-Lorca diCorcia's (1953) work is unexpected ◦ diCorcia attached lights to scaffholding above people’s heads on a busy New York street ◦ When a person went into the ‘target’ area the light was turned on ◦ Then diCorcia would take a photo using a long lens ◦ A method of portraiture • Roni Horn (1955) had a series of photos consisting of 61 pictures of the face of a young woman ◦ The photos were taken over the course of several days ◦ Her expression changes subtly but all the photos are taken very close-up ◦ Ranges of emotions become magnified

Chapter 2: • This part considers the use of storytelling, with obvious references to thins we know but some are more open ended and rely on the viewer becoming invested with our own narrative and psychological thought • Often described as tableau or tableau-vivant photography ◦ Pictoral marrative in 1 image ◦ Mid 20th century photographic narratives were in photo-stories or photo essays ◦ precedents in pre-photographic art of 18th and 19th century ◦ Recognise characters and props as part of the story ◦ NOT an affinity to painting as mimicry or revivalism ◦ IS a shared understanding of how a scene can be chroeographed for the viewer to recognise a story • Jeff Wall (1946) = a leading practitioner of staged tableau photography ◦ Came to critical prominence in the 80’s ◦ His art practise developed in the 70s when he was a postgrad art history student ◦ His photos are evidence of a detailed comprehension of how pictures work & underpin the best tableau photography ◦ He describes his oeuvre (body of work) as 2 broad areas ▪ 1 - an ornate style where the artifice (clever or cunning devices) of the photo is obvious. Due to digital manipulation ▪ 2 - staging an event that sppears much slighter, like a glanced at scene ▪ He sets up tension between a look and substance of a candid moment but constructed the scene ◦ ‘Insomnia’ is made with compositional devices similar to renaissance paintings ▪ We are directed through the picture so we understand the narrative ▪ The layout suggests clues about his wrestless state ▪ The scene is stylised enough to suspect it’s chroeographed ▪ An allegory of psychological distress ▪ Allegory = story/picture/poen that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning ◦ In galleries, Wall displays his work in large light boxes ▪ It gives his photos a spectacular physical presence ▪ Introduces another frame of reference to his work… Backlit & billboard ads ▪ His work requires an extented looking time of art appreciation though • The labour and skill required to reconstruct a scene in similar to a painter in the studio ◦ The photographer is redefined as the orchestrator of a cast and crew, like a film director • Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Hollywood series also has a strong & pervasive model for narrative in contemporary art photography ◦ It’s a series of portraits of men he met around Santa Monica Boulevard & paid to pose ◦ The titles tell you: name, age, hometown & how much diCorcia paid them ◦ The photos encourage you to think about what brought the men to Hollywood & that the small sum of money they were paid may mean that they are down on their luck and sort of selling their bodies in a way ◦ In one photo, a man is naked from the waist up and the photo is taken through a diner window ◦ Twilight time is significant because it is th turning point between safe and dangerous times ▪ The light is referred to as Cinematic, which is accurate for tableau photography ▪ Yet, to propose that they’re cinematic photos is misleading as they don’t seek to ape movies in order to achieve the same effect as they’d fail ▪ Cinema is just a reference point to help accept tableau photography as a blend of fact with fiction with psychological significance • Theresa Hubbard (1965) & Alexander Birchler (1962) construct photos that are ambigious in their symbolism but still emphatic ◦ In ‘untitled’, they position the camera as if splicing through the floors and walls of a house. It creates curiosity & dread of what is beyond the frame • Tableau photography can reference past, present or future similar to Renaissance and can reference specific art • Sam Taylor-Wood’s (1967) ‘Soliloquy’ shows a beautiful young man dead on his sofa. ◦ It emulates ‘The Death of Chatterton’ (1856) by Victorian painter Henry Wallis (1830-1916) ◦ She remakes a tableau from history & revives the idealism from the painting ◦ Her baroque style is used to create bohemian characterisations and even entwines aspects of her own life into the photos • Tom Hunter’s (1965) ‘Thoughts of life & death’ series presents reworkings of paintings, especially from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ◦ ‘The way home’ is a reference to John Everett Millais’s (1829-1896) Ophelia —> a recasting of Hamlet ◦ The contemporary stimulus was the death of a young woman who drowned. The work shows modern day Ophelia metamorphosing into nature ◦ The luscious colour photography on a large scale parallels the original painting ◦ This happened with a previous series, showing that historical motifs acting as confirmation that contemporary life has parallels to the past and art is a chronicler of fables • By using large format cameras, photography history is referenced • Matt Collinshaw (1966) uses outdated vernacular styles with sentimental sensibility to represent confrontational subjects ◦ In one series, he shows how our relationship with childrens bodies has shiften from sentimentality to cynicism • Yinka Shonibare’s (1962) ‘Diary of a Victorian Dandy’ is of 5 moments in a day of a dandy, performed by the artist ◦ It’s a reference to ‘The Rake Progress’ by William Hogarth (1697-1764), which is a morality take of Tom Rockwell, a young cad. 7 episodes of Rockwell’s life with vivid pleasure and consequence for the character ◦ In Shonibare’s versiom, it is set in different moments in 1 day. All victorian clothes ◦ The caucasian’s are colour-blind to the artists skin colour ◦ Hogarth’s paintings were originally published as prints, and Shonibare’s were originally commissioned to be on posters on the London Underground • Some photographers use the tableau formula for more ambigious and unreferenced narratives • A dream like quality is created when you reduce the specificity and the culture of a place • Sara Dobai’s (1965) ‘red room’ has psychological drama and is open-ended ◦ Personal effectd are absent. It is unclear if it is a domestic or institutional place ◦ The red blanket could be covering something or is a sign of a characteristic ◦ The photo was taken in Dobai’s living room, to stage her intensely psychological series with a familiar place ◦ The pose of the figures are hovering between a moment before or after a kiss or sex act ◦ The hidden faces leave uncertainty and the vest shows the unglamorous nature of domestic sex with the anxiety dream of being semi-naked in public • Liza May Post’s (1965) have a dream-like quality and use custom clothes and props to contort the body ◦ In ‘shadow’ she uses angrogynous clothes to hide age and gender ◦ One figure has stilted shoes in a precarious pose, the other has claws and wheels ◦ The photos are like a surreal dream and have open-ended dramatic narrative ◦ A great use of tableau photography • Sharon Lockhart (1964) combines documentary photography with elements that disrupt certainty ◦ She photographs an all-girl Japanese basketball team, but crops out most of the court to abstract the movements ◦ The actions become tenuous and are maybe orchestrated by the photographer ◦ It prevades the meaning of the image • One of the devices used in tableau photography to create anxiety or uncertainty is to have figures faces away from us ◦ Frances Kearney (1970) did a series of 5 people doing simple activities in sparse domestic interiors ◦ The thoughts of these people are unclear so it is up to the viewer to interpret it all ◦ Hannah Starkey’s (1971) March 2002 uses the same device to give a woman sitting in an Oriental canteen a mysterious air ▪ The possible readings can be she is between a sophisticated urban sweller and an imaginary creature like a mermaid ▪ The staged photos elaborate on observations she has made ▪ Embelleshing certain things as subtle photographic drama ◦ In both we are not given enough visual information to make characters the focal point of the image ◦ We must connect everything we can as the staging around the character is the only confirmation and clues to who they might be • Otherworldiness can be seen in contemporary life, and that is the theme of Justine Kurland’s (1969) work ◦ Her scenes are in playgrounds of nympth-like young women in places of natural beauty ◦ Modern-day staging of contemporary idylls ◦ Hint of nostalgia to the 60’s ◦ Grass is green and sunsets are beautiful • Sarah Jones portrayals of young girls posed in interiors are constructed out of the tension between authentic and projected ◦ The Guest Room (bed) I, a girl is on the bed in a faded and impersonal room ◦ The indication that she is not in her own bed becomes a motif ◦ Her long hair is naturalistic & not connected to any specific contemporary fashion ◦ Her character has ambigiuity ◦ Her pose is partly spontaneous as Jones has orchestrated the main events ◦ Can also be linked to paintings and sculptures of other women reclining • Sergey Bratkov’s italian school series was made in a reform school in his home town in the Ukraine ◦ It is pivoting of choreographing and documenting ◦ He gained the local authorities permission to photograph the children ◦ But only by agreeing that the project would include religious instruction ◦ He would direct the children, who had been interned for being destitute, stealing and prostitution, in biblical plays within the fenced grounds of the school ◦ He photographed their performances • Wendy McMurdo’s (1962) ‘Helen, backstage, merlin theatre (the glance) is an example of tableau photography where the constructed nature of the photo is key ◦ The photos are using digital technology to represent a child and her doppelgänger ◦ The girls quizzical looks at their doubles sets an allusion to the stages photo ◦ Tableau photography has an emphasis on the uncanny as well as visualised collective fears and fantasies ◦ This sort of thing is also relevent to Deborah Mesa-Pelly (1968) who recasts fairytales and popular stories with young female characters (and disturbing results) ▪ The props, sets and characters are instantly recognisable ▪ The staged situations could be scenes from the stories as how they’re typically told ▪ But dramatised and given sinister edges by the use of lighting and voyeuristic camera angles ▪ the mixtures and twists of storylines • Anna Gaskell's (1969) photos share an intense storytelling quality that contains multiple common devices of tableau photography: ◦ A cast of children (sometimes with obscured faces) ◦ Play turned nasty/awry ◦ A photo from her ‘By Proxy’ series has a literary source of a character from Rudolf Raspe’s ‘Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ and a real-life source of Geneva Jones, a nurse who was convicted of killing her patients in 1984. ◦ A mix of seductive and abhorrent ▪ Good girl & fetish status (nurses costume) ▪ Enactment of childhood games with a sinister turn ◦ There is a mix of the beauty of the prints with the moral ambiguity of the narrative ◦ Makes for an unnverving visual pleasure ◦ The uncanny = dominant characteristic of tableau photography ◦ We realise the meaning too late, after we’ve appreciated and enjoyed the physical beauty of the photograph • Inez van Lamsweerde (1963) & Vinoodh Matadin (1961) work together with creating photos for both art and fashion ◦ In the 90’s, it shared an aesthetic for digitised perfection while showing troubling narratives ◦ In their ‘The Widow’ series, there is a prepossessed girl shown to be immacuately styled into a complex character with fashionable qualities ◦ The proces of realising intense mannered art works closely to the working practises of fashion ◦ They develop intricate story lines & character descriptions before arranging and styling the shoot ◦ Fashion requires to work fast and have change ◦ Their art takes longer - unconstrained by the commissioning process ◦ Frequent reinvention of a photographic style - liberation of their art ◦ Use of tableau photography • Mariko Mori’s (1967) photos are often displayed line Jeff Walls ◦ They have the production values like luxurious commercials ◦ Often resemble architecture and point-of-sale design of contemporary fashion houses ◦ She mixes Eastern traditional arts with contemporary consumer culture —> her trademark ◦ Picks a range of styles & cultural references to bring the role of the photographer into close parallel with the visual inventiveness of fashion stylists & art directors ◦ Regular theme = the persona of the artist, who is often the central figure of her photos ◦ Her fashion-college & art-school training mixed with model experience give her the skills to create an art of spectacle ◦ One which is shaped by its reference to consumer culture • Gregory Crewdson (1962) said that his elaborately costructed melodramas are influenced by his childhood memories ◦ His father was a psychoanalyist and his office was in the basement ▪ He would press his ear to the floor to imagine the stories being told in the sessions ◦ In the 90’s, Crewdson’s photos were set in models of suburban backyards built into his studio ◦ A mix of bizzare & disturbing, but also highly camp & entertaining ◦ Stuffed toys would perform strange rituals ◦ Plaster casts of Cewdson’s body would be shown to be devoured by insects surrounded by foliage ◦ He then shifted to more directorial ◦ In ‘Hover’ he staged strange happenings in suburban housing areas and would photo them from a crane ◦ In his ‘twilight’ series he worked with a cast & crew ▪ Display rituals and the paranormal ▪ Consturction of archetypal characters ▪ Contained a bit in the back of the book to show the production process ◦ His tableau photography is a production issue • Charlie White (1972) has a series of 9 photos called ‘Understanding Joshua’ ◦ Part-human and part-alien puppet crafted out of sci-fi references ◦ Showing scenes of American teenage suburban life ◦ Self-loathing protagnist with a fragile ego manifested into his physicality, ignored by his friends and family ◦ Playful but an antidote to a strongly female bias in subject and practitioner of tableau photography • Izima Kaoru’s (1954) photography injects a different form of masculinity ◦ Adoption of strongly voyeuristic staging of beautiful & erotic accidents that lead to the deaths of women in designer clothing ◦ Seductive photographic style ◦ Narrative told from a sexualised point of view ◦ Titles of the photos give the names of the models and the designer label she’s wearing ▪ A homage to a device of fashion photography since the 70’s ▪ Pairing ideas of cultural and commercial beauty with abject social narratives • The indeterminate social and political stance of tableau photography is used greatly by Christopher Stewart (1966) ◦ In his series ‘United States of America’, he photographs a hotel room where the blinds are closed during the day ◦ A man of Middle Eastern origin is waiting for the phone to ring while surveying the outdoors ◦ It feels like a covert operation, but we’re unsure of the legal boundaries ◦ He photographs private security, finding contemporary allegories for Western insecurity and paranoia ◦ He doesn’t take the traditional route of documentary photography ◦ He instead uses tableau to give drama to the photos • The final part in the chapter focuses on tableau photography that doesn’t reply on human presence, but finds drama in architectural space ◦ Katharina Bosse’s (1968) empty interiors are legally hired venues for sexual play ▪ She daws out the generic cliched nature of sexual fantasies ▪ Inaimate to institutional spaces ▪ Architectural spaces contai na trace of an art that will generate stories ◦ Miriam Backstrom (1967) takes a different but parallel form of enquiry in her photos ▪ Of room reconstructions in museums and doemstic furnishing stores ▪ At first the images may be seen as documentary photography ▪ She asks us to engage with the plausibility of the room so we can think of the institutionalised and commercialised construct of the spaces ▪ Our display of personal indentity in homes can be reconstructed and mimicked easily ◦ Miles Coolidge’s (1963) safetyville project has an uncanny feel to it ▪ It is a depiction of an abandoned town ▪ It’s a model town in California (1/3 scale) build in the 80s to educate children on road safety ▪ The corporate and federal signage is prominent ▪ Highlights to which business and government pervases all contemporary Western life, even fake towns • Thomas Demand (1964) deals with the obstinate presence of inanimate objects within architectural interiors ◦ He begins with a photograph of a place (e.g. the place where Princess Diana was killed) ◦ He then builds a simplified version of it, leaving evidence of mistakes to prove it isn’t real ◦ The then photographs it ◦ The viewer is encouraged to figure out the significance of the place & what human acts may have taken place there ◦ Hyperconscious stance ◦ We look for narrative form despite knowing it isn’t real ◦ We’re like investigators • Anne Hardy (1970) does something very similar to Demand. ◦ She depicts interiors which appear abandoned ◦ She contructs sets in her studio with the camera angle worked out, so nothing lies beyond the frame. ◦ Avoid overloading the imagr with obvious signs and allegory, but maintain a sense that we’re looking at an observed scene (rather than contructed) ◦ She begins with finding objects discarded on urban streets ◦ Compelling as they hover between what the place actually is and an unsettling atmosphere within it. • Since the 70’s, James Casebere (1953) has build architectural models in tabletop scale in his studio ◦ His approach is about investigating institutional spaces with all paraphernalia of human use taken out ◦ His photos of prison and monastery cells reduce the scene into a monochromatic and isolated environment ◦ The sense of waiting and having nothing happen becomes emphatic ◦ Creates a sense of surreal and claustrophobic disorientation • Rut Blees Luxemburg (1963) uses lighting and water reflections to create amber imagery of urban architecture ◦ In her ‘Love Poem’ series, they are independently but aesthetically connected architectural scenes ◦ The viewer is placed into scenes ◦ Magnificent additions to the visual repertoire of night-time urban photography since the experimental use of portable flash lighting in the 1920’s-30’s ◦ When the urab night scene is illuminated in a dramatic way, the surreal and psychologically charged potential of space is emphasised ◦ Each epoch has its own artistic concerns and narrative conclusions ◦ With uncanny qualities, her photos take somrthing of the history of night-time photography but mix it with the contemporary and personal experience of the city • The pictorial conflation of an event recently passed and the history of a place form the narrative base of work by Desiree Dolron (1963) ◦ Her work ‘Cerca Paseo de Marti’ depicts a classroom in Havana (Cuba) ◦ Empty chairs face the political statements on the blackboard, with a portrait of a young Fidel Castro to the right ◦ Although more political than most other photographers, the photos still encourage us to mentally fill in the visual absense of people ◦ Displays continued politicisation of daily life • Hannah Collins (1956) has made a contribution to developing rhe phenomenological effect of architectural tableau photography ◦ Her photos are large and on canvas (either backed onto or printed directly onto) that is pinned to gallery walls ◦ The viewer is offered a physical relationship to the scene ◦ They’re large and give the viewer the feeling of approaching and being about to enter the pictorial space ◦ Another allusion could be to a stage set moments before the performance begins ◦ In the 90’s, her work was mainly about post-Communist Europe ◦ Tracing the way contemporary life is shaped by historical and recent events ◦ Containing signs of changing ways of working (and enduring) ◦ Her photos reveal and draw out history ◦ Her use of panoramic format aids her as they call for sustained looking ◦ We can decipher subtle narratives of human behaviour & history

Chapter 3: • More photography has been created for gallery walls in the last decade than ever in the mediums history • The deadpan aesthetic is probably the most frequently used ◦ Cool ◦ Detached ◦ Keeny sharp type of photography ◦ The reader is a the mercy of the levelling out that occurs when these photos are reproduced into a book ◦ The monumental scale & visual clarity that predominate when one experiences a photo print needs to be kept in mind • The adoption of the deadpan aesthetic moves art photography outside the hyperbolic, sentimental & subjective ◦ These pictures may engage us with emotive subjects ◦ Our sense of what the photographers’ emotions might be isn’t the obvious guide to understandin the meaning of the images ◦ The emphasis is seeing beyond the limitations of individual perspective ◦ A way of mapping the extent of the forces (invisible from a single human standpoint) that govern the man-made & natural world • Deadpan photography may be highly specific in its description of its subjects, but its neutrality and totality of vision is of epic proportions • The deadpan aesthetic became popular in the 1990s, especially with landscapes and architectural photos ◦ It’s clear that this form of photography contained elements that matched the gallery and collecting climate of the decade ◦ So much so that it shifted photography to a more central position in contemporary art ◦ The drive within art to define new trends played in photographys favour in the 90’s ◦ Photography that ofered an objective (almost clinical mode) had a freshness & desirability after a heavy concentration in the 80’s on painting and Neo-expressive subject art-making • The increased scale of photo prints since the 1980’s not only took photography to the same league as painting, but also commanded space in the increasing number of new art centres and galleries ◦ The subjects of these photos (manufactured locations - industrial, architectural, ecological and leisure-industry) close to being the perfect, self-referential art that contemporary art was now being shown • Deadpan photos, so technically well done & pristine with their presentation, rich with visual info, commanding presence, lent themselves to new sites of galleries to be a place for seeing photos • Although the art world’s acknowledgement of the new approach dates to the 1990’s, many practitioners were working out of the limelight for at least half a decade before • Todays deadpan aesthetic is typically characterised as ‘Germanic’ ◦ Refers not only to the nationality of many of the key figures ◦ Also that a number of them were educated under the tutelage of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany ◦ Instrumental school in unshackling photography education from teaching vocation & pro skills, such as photojournalism, and instead encourage its students to create independent & artistically led photos ◦ ‘Germanic’ characterisation refers to the traditions of the 1920’s & 30’s German photography known as ‘New Objectivity’ ▪ Albert Renger-Patsch (1897-1966) ▪ August Sander (1876-1964) ▪ Erwin Bulmenfeld (1897-1969) ▪ Most frequently mentioned forefathers of modern deadpan photography ▪ They created typologies of nature, industry, architecture and human society ▪ Through sustained photographing of single subjects, their most resounding influence on contemporary art photography • Bernd and Hilla Becher have been and continue to be highly influential in shaping contemporary deadpan photography ◦ Many photographers mentioned in the chapter are their students ◦ The Bechers’ collaboration on series of b&w photos of pre-Nazi German industrial and vernacular architecture began in 1957 and is ongoing ◦ Each building in the series is photographed from the same perspective, notes were taken and a typology is created ◦ Their work appeared in ‘New Topographics: Photographs of Man-Altered Landscape’, an exhibition that began in America in 1975 ◦ The show was an early attempt to mark European & North American photographers’ reinvestment of the genres of topographical and architectural photography ◦ With the implications of contemporary urban generation and the ecological consequences of industry ◦ Significant - these social and political issues were raised in the context of the art gallery ▪ In this social & political light, it’s understandble that what at the time were seen as individual photographic styles would be abandoned ▪ Abandoned in favour of a neutral and objectifying approach • A photographer who has come to stand as the figurehead of contemporary deadpan photography is Andreas Gursky (1955) ◦ He moved to large prints in the late 80’s ◦ His photos now are often 2 metres high and 5 metres wide ◦ Imposing objects, pictures to stop you in your tracks, and has become synonymous with works on this scale ◦ His photos bring together traditional & new technologies, with a fluidity that has been the preserve of commercial advertising photography ◦ He creates photos are not primarily contingent with being viewed as part of a series ◦ He adds to his work with each complete picture, like a painter ◦ Meaning he can contribute to the reputation of his work, avoiding a riskier strategy of having a whole series needing to be consistent and isn’t compared with earlier works ◦ His consistency is undeniable as an element towards his commercial and critical success ◦ His importance comes from more than just the surface perfection ▪ It comes from his capacity to travel, find his subjects and then convince us that each scene couldn’t be more perfectly described than from his chosen perspective ▪ His signature vantage point is looking out over distant landscapes and sites of industry, leisure or commerce ▪ He places us far away from the subject — we are detached, critical viewers ▪ We aren’t asked to interpret an event, individual experience or place ▪ We are given a view of contemporary life governed by forces not possible to be seen from a position within the crowd ◦ The works he creates give us a sense of omniscience ◦ More recently, he’s created photos that bring us dramatically close to the subject ◦ He also constructs his own sets • Walter Niedermayr’s (1952) large photos have concetrated primarily on contemporary tourism ◦ A cool and unnerving sense of the degree to which our time (spent away from the workplace) is administered ◦ He photos a chalet village, by doing this from a distance, he suggests the experience of looking at a toy town or model ◦ He raises questions about our desire when on holiday, to feel like we’re in the ungovernable force of nature but always safe knowing our creature comforts are within reach ◦ The photos act as a diagram of how we might feel in individual experiences of being free in natural is in fact controlled by the same things as our everyday lives • Bridget Smith’s (1966) explorations of the architecture of Las Vegas are represented in a photo of the city’s airport with a line of casinos along the horizon ◦ The buildings are almost comically diminutive ◦ Deciding to photograph in the daylight rather than at night show it from a more unglamorous point of view • Ed Burtynsky’s (1955) photographs oilfields in California ◦ The man-made landscape is given over to industry ◦ Social, political & ecological issues are embedded into his subjects ◦ They’re visualised as objective evidence of the consequences of contemporary life ◦ Deadpan photography often acts in this fact-stating mode ▪ The personal politics of the photographers come into play ▪ Their selection of subject matter & their anicipation of the viewers analysis of it, not in any explicit political statement through text or photographic style • Takashi Homma (1962) photographs newly built suburban housing in Japan & the landscaping around it, where everything is strategically placed ◦ He gives the houses a sinister element by positioning his camera at a low vantage point, photographing only when devoid of humans ◦ The sense of recently constructed, readiness for habitation is all-pervasive ◦ He develops ideas that first emerged in the 70’s, when the dehumanising impact & politics of housing developments and the industrial use of land were raised in photographic practise • Lewis Baltz became one of the most influential instigators of critical reworking of American landscape and architectural photography ◦ His b&w photos map the uneasy enroachment of industrial and housing developments onto open landscapes ◦ The photos harness the mediums documentary capacity in its depiction of fast-changing social environments ◦ He regularly worked with research labs and industries in colour ◦ The shift to colour was necessary for him to focus attention on the spectacle of ‘clean’ industries • Matthias Hoch’s (1958) typology of contemporary life has typically centered on architectural detail & interiors ◦ Evident sense of geometry & mapping ◦ The photos were taken at signature moments of deadpan’s depiction of buildings ▪ When construction is complete ▪ Space has been designed with a purpose, but no human customisation ◦ A hint of irony in his depiction of a space with Far Eastern asymmetry, a sense of how designer Zen is made to engender calm in those who pass through it • Jacqueline Hassink’s (1966) ongoing ‘Mindscapes’ project links a number of investigations of architectural spaces for both public & private use within transnational businesses ◦ Applied to photograph 10 rooms in 100 American & Japanese coporations ◦ The acceptances & refusals are featured in a graph that accompanoes the photos of the rooms she got access to ◦ The results to her approach spell out the generic links between corporations & the values that each corporation attaches to itself through the space • For over 15 years, Candida Hofer (1944) has made cultural institutions her subject ◦ Creating an archieve of spaces in which collections are stored ◦ It wasn’t until recently that she began to work with large-format cameras so she could print larger ◦ Before, she was using a medium-format camera to work undetected ◦ Her use of the large-format camera also marked an increasingly monochromatic colour range ◦ Her photos have given her room for unexpected elements in the construction of her images ◦ Her photos have a clear and lengthy look onto an interior scene ◦ Prevented from being a deadening experience by her choosing a perspective that doesn’t edit out oddities or contradictions of the space ◦ This is done by her vantage point, very central • Deadpan photography has a great capacity for capturing the wonder of the man-made world in an elegiac manner. • Naoya Hatakeyama (1958) has photographed cities and heavy industrial spaces in Japan for over 20 years ◦ His ‘untitled’ series began in the 90’s & features views over Tokyo exhibited in a grid of small photos ◦ Evocation of the infinite photographic views onto the chaotic & unnavigable layout of the city ◦ He collaborated with architect Too Ito, featuring the buildings while under construction, engaging with conceptual thinking & structure that underpins the architectural process • Axel Hutte (1951) introduced a new element to his deadpan photography in the mid 90’s with his series of photos of cities taken at night with long exposure times ◦ Presneted as transparencies held in front of a reflective surface ◦ Creating a listening effect in the illuminated areas of the image where the mirror-like backing is visible ◦ Night-time photography tends to have a theatricality that one might not immediately be associated with the subject in this chapter ◦ It is however part of deadpans presentation of things we can’t percieve with the naked eye ◦ This quality offers heightened, protracted observations of the world ◦ A pause on a subject that will mediate the energy & chatacter of the place portrayed • Since the 1990’s, Dan Holdsworth (1974) has taken photos of transitional & architectural spaces and remote landscapes ◦ Often termed ‘liminal spaces’ — these areas exist where cracks in institutional definitions appear ◦ Our sense of place is dsilocated ◦ In his photos of a new car-parks in out-of-town shopping centre, he uses night-time as the best conditions to describe the space he depicts ◦ He sets the camera up for long-exposures, the lights of the cark park & traffic are radiating luminescence ◦ It has a non-human atmosphere — not who took it, but what took it ◦ Is it being recorded mechanically? e.g. survelliance camera • Some deadpan photographers shift the emphasis away from economic & industrial sites ◦ Towards less obvious contemporary subjects ◦ Landscapes & historical buildings are shown because of their capacity to be understood as sites where time is layered and compacted ◦ We engage with the moment the photo was taken, but also the depiction of the passing of the seasons, memories of past cultures and historical events • For 30+ years, Richard Misrach (1949) created numerous bodies of landscape & architectural photography ◦ With particular focus on the American West & the traditions of its representation ◦ His political & ecological views come through his images of sites in the aftermath of landscape devastation due to man ◦ In 1998, he was commissioned by the Nature Conservancy to photogaph the Battleground Point in the Nevada desert which had been desolated by a flood ◦ He presents the site as one tha is monumental and historical yet changeable ◦ he has borne witness to a site that has its own story to tell ◦ A site that only photography lacking in the overbearing hyperbole of a strong personal signature could visualise effectively • A big quality of Thomas Struth’s (1954) photography is the awareness it creates of the conditions that structure images ◦ Whether it’s the cameras position of street scenes, or formal photos of families ◦ His works make us conscious of looking not only at the clearly depicted subject, but also the photographic form which they have been projected with ◦ The subjects are always interesting and stimulating, but rarely proposed as an experience into which we can immerse ourselves psychologically ◦ The invitation isn’t to feel part of the scenes, but to actually wonder at their perspectives, at the pleasures of scruitinising them as photographs ◦ They reveal much about collective cultural behaviour ◦ His photos sometimes rely on a dulled, nearly monochromatic palette • John Riddy recently made a transition from working in b&w to colour ◦ His reservations about using colour for his architectural photos had been it has a tendency to root the scene in a moment ◦ He’s interested in photograph’s capacity to conflate time& to evoke the history of space ◦ He photographs his scenes from a precise angle where the architecture alls into symmetry • The conscious choice acknowledges the fact that certain angles makes the photographers perspective more evident to the viewer ◦ The architextural ruin is also found in more dramatic images, such as Gabriel Basilico’s (1944-2013) view across Beirut in 1991 ◦ The city is photographed from a rooftop and is presented as heavily populated & densely packed ◦ The clarity with which Basilico represented this scene, we’re given a view of the pockmarks made by bombing ◦ Evidence of the citys scars amongst daily life ◦ His selection of this viewpoint is important with guiding our reading of the image ◦ He found a position that places eople and the road in the middle of the photo ◦ He emphasies the sense of humanity’s resilience of this war-torn city • Since 1986, Simone Nieweg’s (1962) photos have concentrated on the agricultural land of the Lower Rhine & Ruhr districts of Germany ◦ She’s occasionally worked with other landscapes, but prefers those close to her so she can study them over lengths of time ◦ The deadpan aesthetic that she prefers, with its signature clarity of vision & diffused light is perfectly matched to her thoughtful & subtle observations ◦ She’s conscious of impressionist paintings, and looks for repetitive forms that appear in the landscape ◦ There’s a special emphasis of the qualities of the banks and woodland and the linear organisaion of plough furrows and crops ◦ Embedded in the land are directions tha not only create the structure of the photos, but also provide the vantage point from which she takes the photo ◦ Her images often include a small disruption of agricultural order where the traces of contaminated parch of crop are presented in the foreground — a subtle allegory of nature’s resistance to farming • Yoshiko Seino’s (1964) photographs often show places where nature has begun to reclaim a landscape ◦ Her choice of non-specific and marginal spaces means that it’s not so much he decay of an architectural space that is emphasised ◦ But allegories of how human neglect can give rise to a transformation back to nature • Gerhard Stromberg (1952), show man-made landscapes without the trappings of invidual photographic style ◦ Our engagement with the subject feels remarkably present ◦ It’s condition as a landscape scene, a traditional subject in art & a site of metaphorical meaning ◦ The photo offers potential narrative in the brutality of tree stumps in the foreground & the dense barrier of the woodland behind • Jem Southam’s (1950) ‘painters pool’ is a series of photos set in a woodland & looking onto a pond that were made at different times of the year within a 25-metre radius ◦ The area looks overgrown & uncultivated, but it’s a site in the south west of England that a painter once dammed to create a pool & where he worked exclusively ever since ◦ He sets up a parallel photographic investigation of the site over 1 year ◦ Only small signs of the painters visits are visible ◦ The photos seem to respod to the quandary faced by the painter who worked in the space for more than 20 years but was only able to finish a painting of the pool ◦ The seasons & weather constantly change, each visit offering a new photo ◦ He spends a great deal of time in the places he photographs ◦ Each photo conveys the wonder of approaching the place & seeing it afresh each time • Boo Moon’s (1955) series of photos from the late 90’ss of the East China sea are similar to ‘painters pool’ ◦ They deal with how our sense of place is governed by permutations of light and movements of water ◦ The series intensifies the idea that natural forces have an infinite momentum and are governed by no- one ◦ This type of photographic stratedy contemplates the unknowable and uncontrollable character of nature ◦ They’re consciously out of time, nt relian on visual signs of contemporary economics or even of the past ◦ But signs that bring us into contact with profound concepts about our perception of the world • Clare Richardson’s (1973) ‘sylvan’ series was made in a farming community in Romania ◦ The have a disconcerning impacting because they’re contemporary photos of a world that has changed little for centuries ◦ Because of the clarity of her vision, her images, while revealing the strong visual links these isolated but functioning communities have with premodern living ◦ They’re free from being overtly sentimental or mocking ◦ Fine balance between sublime and romantic capacity of a landscape subject ◦ And a style of photography thats clear-cut and not obviously subjective • Lukas Jasansky (1965) & Martin Polaks (1966) ‘czech landscapes’ concentrate on land use and ownership in the post-communist Czech Republic ◦ These photographers work in b&w which has more currency today than in the most commercially developed Western art centres, Where colour photography is more common ◦ Their surveys of Czech architecture and landscape have a similar duality to the Bechers’ practise since the 60’s of being relevant both to art in their conceptual framework ◦ And to conservation moments as documents of a changing country ◦ The sense of a land administered in ways thats changed little ◦ But on the threshold of late capitalism echoes through the photos • Now looking at photographers who use the deadpan style in portraiture • One of the most influential was Thomas Ruff (1958) ◦ Practising for over 20 years ◦ Architecture, stellar constellations & pornography ◦ Brings a spectrum of imagery into play ◦ Raises the issue of how we comprehend different subjects through the photographic form ◦ Experiments with the way we understand a subject because of our knowledge of how it is presented pictorally ◦ In the 70’s, he photographed head-and-shoulder images of his friends in passport image style ◦ He allowed them to choose a colour background and they remained expressionless and stare straight at the camera ◦ We discover a persons character through their appearance • Hiroshi Sugimoto’s (1948) photos of museum waxworks place us in a similar position of critical self- awareness ◦ ‘Anne Boleyn’ is a brilliant summation of how we automatically search for evidence of character, even in a waxwork — because of the animated impression a photograph suggests ◦ The objectively styled photos dramatically curtain expectations that we can know anything essential about a person through their photographic image ◦ The ideas that signs of our biographical details are mapped onto our faces that are our eyes are the windows into our souls are brought into question ◦ If there are realities of truths held within the deadpan portrait, they revolve around subtle signs of how people react to being photographed ◦ The observations artists make are about how their subjects address the camera & photographer in front of them • Street portaiture is arguably the most prevalent context for deadpan portait photography • Joel Sternfeld’s (1944) portraitures do more than raise the question of what we can assume to kno about a sitter from their outward appearance ◦ They propose the facts of what has transpired ▪ That he has negotiated with a stranger to photograph them at a polite distance ▪ The subject’s reaction to what is happening, includes their resistance & their ambivalence to the brief break in routine, is visible on their faces ▪ What interested Joel to take photos of that person? • The search for sutble visual interest is a guiding force for Jitka Hanzlova (1958) ◦ Her ‘female’ series is photographs of women from different ages and ethnic backgrounds taken in various cities she visits ◦ In her selection of subjects, there is a developing typology ◦ Individual styles & characters seem to become legible because of her serial and systematic approach ◦ How each woman reacts to the camera gives us info about her state of mind ◦ Transparent testimony to the photographic encounter ◦ Our imaginings about the sitters pivot, reinforced bt the similarities and differences between the images of a single series • In the late 90’s, Mette Tronvoll (1965) moved her portraits from the studio to into the open air ◦ Taking a systematic approach to portraiture she developed in her studio ◦ Produced a number of series of photos in remote communities in Greenland & Mngolia that portray the people & their environments ◦ The streets become the backdrop ◦ The vantage point is straight onto the figures ◦ Convention of photographers working in the deadpan aesthetic — the choice of camera angle by selecting the most simple and neutral stance ◦ We feel our relationship to the people portrayed is direct and that as we look at them • Albrecht Tubke’s (1971) ‘celebration’ series takes place on the sidelines of processions at public festivals ◦ His subjects step out of the crowd to be photographed, and they cease their revelry for a moment ◦ Sometimes, the only parts of their body not in costume is hands and areas around the eyes ◦ Sense of the subjects being hidden goes into the metaphorical ▪ Little of our true identities are ever visible ◦ Celine van Balen’s (1965) photographs of young Muslin girls living in temporary accommodation in Amsterdam work on the same level ▪ Unlined faces of youth mixed with mature self-possession and confidence • Rineke Dijkstra (1959) has also focused on the above. ◦ She photographed young teens & children on beaches as they came out of the sea ◦ She captured the vulnerability and physical self-consciousness of her subjects ◦ The choice of a particular moment or space in which to portray her subjects is a governing element of her work ◦ She also photographed 3 women: the first an hour after birth, the second within a day, the third within one week ▪ Unsentimental approach — representation of maternity focuses on the impact of pregnancy and labour & the women beginning to recover ▪ The profound shift in the women’s changing relationships to their bodies ◦ Something we might never have observed without such a systematic and detached photographic style

Chapter 4: • The photographs in this chapter show how everyday (non-human) objects can become extraordinary • These photos retain the thing-ness of what they describe, bt their subjects are altered conceptually due to how they are represented • Common objects are given a visual charge and imaginative possibility ◦ Luscious & sensual treatment ◦ Shifts in scale or typical environment ◦ Simple juxtapositions ◦ Relationships between shapes & form • The iconography includes: ◦ Objects balanced/stacked ◦ Edges or corners of things ◦ Abandoned spaces ◦ Rubbish & decay ◦ Fugitive or brief forms (e.g. snow) • One must be cautious about thinking of this type of photogrphy as being primarily concerned with making visible non-subjects (or things without visual symbolism) ◦ No such thing as an unphotographed/unphotographable subject ◦ It is for us to determine its significance • If the artist photographed it, then it must have had some significance • Encourages us to contemplate the things in the world around us in our daily lives • Since the mid-1960’s, the playful conceptualism of still-life photography has had an important parallel practice in post-minimalist sculpture ◦ Has been driven by related attempts to make art from daily life by breaking down boundaries between the studio, the gallery & the world ◦ Work in which the artists skills may be absent? ◦ The viewer then has a different response, questions asked are: ▪ How did this object come to be here? ▪ By what chain of events or acts brought this into focus? ◦ Photography can activate the same conceptual dynamics as Marcel Duchamp’s work: ▪ Create puzzles ▪ Confound our expectations of: ▪ Weight ▪ Scale ▪ Permanancy of the work ▪ Destabalise the notion of an object as a plastic form without connections to its surrounding environments • One influential series that playfully questions our expectations of works of art was the ‘Quiet Afternoon’ series by Peter Fischli (1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012) ◦ They photographed table-top assemblages of mundane items ◦ Creating sculptural forms by fixing & balancing these objects together & then photographing them against dull backgrounds ◦ Shadows creating comic drama to their unsophisticated temporary sculptures ◦ These photos in a way relate to documentary photographs of minimalist sculptures & land art to create a long-term record of the works ▪ Much of the art of Robert Smithson & Robert Morris is only understood & experienced through photography ◦ Using photography in this way creates a sense of ambiguity or irony that has been exploited and reinvented in contemporary art photography • A main protagonist of contemporary still-life photography is Gabriel Orozco (1962) ◦ His art is full of impossible, witty & imaginative games ◦ Exciting & playful conceptual journeys ◦ He began taking photos as records of fund scultures he disovered lying in the street & reinstalled in galleries ▪ The photos acting as diagrams of the spatial relationships & elements he was reconstituting ◦ His work at first seemed to be a functional record of his working process ◦ It extended further to be his oeuvre & became one of his most exhibited and published art practise areas ◦ He questions the status of art as a vehicl for ideas — with photography we’re asked to pay attention to the nature of the images & the hovering between being the medium & the subject ◦ He wants to activate particular trains of thought onto the viewer ◦ With ‘breath on piano’ he uses the breath as a form on the surface ▪ The blurred trace of breath is framed within a photograph ▪ The slight gesture & medium of photography become something within art • Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s (1957-96) use of photography encouraged sensory & playful participation of the viewer ◦ Used objects from everyday domesti or social life & recontextualised them for the gallery ◦ His untitled billboards (first exhibited in NY in 1991) showed an unmade bed with only traces of the couple by their imprints on the sheets & pillows ◦ An intimate scene given drama by being placed into a public context ◦ Originally displayed at the height of AIDS awareness in the West ▪ The works sense of loss and absence took on an added social and political significance • Richard Wentworth (1947) photographed the signs and debris of urban streets ◦ His photos set up a visual pun ◦ Objects left redundant from their original function ▪ Then given new purpose or abandoned completely ▪ Through photography, they gain comic characterisations ◦ His photographs draw on our natural inquistiveness ▪ To understand alernative values or meanings of things ▪ Through touch, texture & weight ◦ His artistry lies in his finding and focusing on curious forms in urban detritus • Jason Evans's (1968) b&w series ‘New Scent’ shows a strange sculptural form in silted sand build-up over a drainage grid after a large rainstorm ◦ The photo shows how a fragile & fleeting phenomenon can be mad to resonate through photography ◦ Weather caused this temporary physical effect, and has a magic quality to it ◦ Being in greys rather than colour is a nod to the traditions of street photography ▪ But is also a graphic wau in which a sight can become photographically most resonant ◦ These easily missed details become charged with visual intrigued by being framed and photographed in such a subtle manner • Nigel Shafran (1964) works with a more intimate environment of an interior ◦ In his ‘sewing kit (on a plastic table) Alma Place’, he invites a primary investigation ▪ Initiated by the placement of the sewing box on the side table ▪ Creating a balancing act, a totem of domesticity ◦ He typically uses forms found in daily life, mixed with an understated photographic style, ambient light and relatively long exposures ▪ And can transform these scenes into poetic observations ▪ About the ways we conduct our lives through the unconscious acts of ordering and stacking and displaying objects ◦ Highlt intuitive ◦ He resists the urge to construct a scene to be photographed ◦ Staying attuned to the possibilities of everyday subjects as a means of exploring our characters & ways of life • Jennifer Bolande’s (1957) ‘globe’ series similarly contemplates innocent yet meaningful placements of objects in unexpected positions ◦ From street level, she photograped globes stored on window ledges of homes ◦ Our perception & understanding of the world is brought into consideration ◦ Draws attention to the way we recieve knowledge about the world from a small, simplified model ◦ Our perspective is partial ◦ Framed by the windows we look into and out of ◦ A sense of constrained human understanding ▪ Visualised through simple and subtle observations ◦ The repetition of an observation of human behaviour ▪ Makes a visual commentary on culture • The photographs in ‘Something is Missing’ by Jean-Marc Bustamante (1952) were taken in multiple cities ◦ Their locations aren’t revealed in their titles ◦ But worked out through street signs, car number plates and other things ◦ Not finding factual info about a specific location, but finding simple forms that resonate pictorally ◦ Searching for pictures within landscapes (on the edge of cities & other man-made places) has been a theme in his photographt for 25+ years ◦ The subject is the entire picture & its layered complexity ◦ Drawn out of the process of walking & weeking pictures in the flow of daily life • Wim Wender’s (1945) photos have a related sense of the pictures within our environments being recognised and formalised ◦ He is better known for his feature films, but uses still photography when a site carries its own story ◦ ‘Wall in Paris, texas’ shows cracks in the road and the plaster on the side of a building that has fallen away, revealing brickwork underneath ▪ It creates an allegory for the deterioration & fragility of the place ▪ Emphasised by the fraught diagonal lines of the power cables dissecting the image • In the context of this chapter, architecture tends to be photographed at the point where buildings have deteriorated/outlived their original purpose ◦ Anthony Hernandez’s (1947) work in the 80’s & 90’s focuses on these architectural spaces ▪ ‘Landscapes for the homeless’ — photos of the temporary shelters made by homeless people ▪ Movements and characters of the makers visually retrieved in what they leave behind ▪ His later work focuses on places about to be demolished or in the process of deterioration ▪ He photoraphs what is usually overlooked in these decaying fields of emotional emptiness ▪ Observing haunting evidence of previous inhabitants of places such as low-income housing estates, where he himself was born & raised • All the photos in this chapter attempt to shift our percepions of our daily life ◦ Something anti-triumphant, open ended and yet still resonant in this form of photography ◦ Tracey Baran’s (1975-2008) sensual ‘dewey’ photo is of an etched glass still wet with moisture placed on a window sill, light falling through it ▪ It is a classic still life ▪ Sense of physicality in a contrived combination of planes and forms is delicately mapped ▪ The image is reliant on our comprehension that we’re looking at a composition within traditions of still life ◦ Also found in the ‘materials’ series by Peter Fraser (1953) ▪ A close-up swirl of synthetic dust in the image configures as a vortex ▪ A micro-universe ▪ His intense photographic consideration of this subject converts a scattering of waste into something with the magical connotations of a starry constellation • Manfred Willmann’s (1952) ‘Das land’ series draws out rituals, idiosyncrasies and passing of easons within a community in Germany ◦ He took 60 photos within a 12 year period (starting 1981) for it ◦ Found still lifes, landscapes & portrait aspects of a rural lifestyle, conveying a pungent sense of his experiences of the place ◦ Could be a diary of the community ◦ But his way of photographing doesn’t hold chapter 5’s sense of subjective narrative or intimacy ◦ What is conveyed in the final selection is the pictorial charge that can be found in any place ◦ Subtle drama of exposed wood in trees shows a trace of a past event ◦ Parallel to the representation of abandonded and deteriorating architecture discussed previously • Roe Ethridge (1974) shifts between photographic styles ◦ Depending on the nature of the subject ◦ Varies between portraits staged in white-backdrop studios, deadpan architectural photographs and brashly coloured snaps of still life ◦ Definite indication that his confident & diverse photographic practise is about finding twists on the image types we all see ◦ Drawing our attention both to subject and to generic/familiar modes of representing them • Artistic dialogue with photographs relationships to its subjects is explored by Wolfgang Tillmans (1968) ◦ Since the late 80’s, he has edited together found and stock images, photocopies & his own photos ▪ Displaying them in several printed forms from postcards to inkjet prints ◦ He has worked across various concepts ▪ Magazines ▪ Art galleries ▪ Books ▪ Landscapes ▪ Portraits ▪ Fashion shoots ▪ Still life ▪ Abstract photography (triggered by darkroom mistakes) ◦ He sometimes has pieces (such as suits) show sexual intimacy • James Welling’s (1951) practise ofte meditated on the ways that photography can give any subjecy form and intellectual substance ◦ He expores the infinite range of possibilities by repeatedly photographing a subject from different vantage points ◦ Questioning the belief that to see something from a single point is to know it ◦ He photographs multiple different light sources too (in his light sources series) ▪ Activate ideas about perception & subject matter ▪ A prime example of the harnessing of photography documentary role within a framework of repetition ▪ Pushing the work beyond being a sequence of observations & towards a conceptual territory ▪ Where the subject isn’t quickly deciphered but is gradually made recognisable through its range of possible states • Laura Letinsky’s (1962) photographs simultaneously contemplate the still life as representing the nature of human relationships through the vestiges of domestic life ◦ Makes us hink about this act of pictorial representation ◦ Her photos of tables immeditely after & between meals have compositional references to 17th century Dutch still-life paintings ▪ Yet she is not aiming to introduce us to the symbolism of different foods ▪ She is drawing our attention to the metaphorical & narrative potential of domestic objects when represented pictorially ◦ The combination in her photos between flatness and plasticity creates tension, it dismantles the moocular vantage point ◦ She uses shifting multiple perspectivs & picture planes of still-life painting ▪ Where objects are propped at angles and strategically placed ▪ So we can see narrative potential ◦ Her use of Baroque sensibility creates photos of great beauty ▪ Precarious viewing positions ▪ These viewpoints within narratives of domestic still life suggest fraught emotional states, ending & falling apart • One of the most dramatic uses of perscpective in still-life contexts occur when photographers place emphasis on the ways in which we do or do not see things around us ◦ It is our perception of our environment rather than the things contained within that are being scrutinised • Uta Barth's (1956) series ‘nowhere near’ pares down its subject matter to the spaces between things ◦ She focuses on a window frame & the view beyond ◦ Blurred forms mark the boundary of what’s outside the photos visual range ◦ We’re made hypersensitive to what we don’t look at — so we don’t define as a subject or concept that can be seen ◦ The space between viewer & photo (when in a gallery) become part of the interplay between space and subject ◦ Seeing & not seeing • Elisa Sighicelli (1968) uses back-lighting to create a sense of deja vu ◦ Not the objects that feel familiar, but the ambient sense of the places they’re set ◦ Illuminated areas of the image have a emporal tension from having 2 light sources ◦ She uses this to represent the details in interiors that are visually resonant but non-specific ◦ We contemplate the feel of the space instead of trying to picture its specific use or the characters of the inhabitants ◦ She encourages us to recall from our own memories the places of which we have hightened perception • Sabine Hornig’s (1964) use of photography also concentrates on the spaces between the image & object ◦ In ‘window with door’, there are two ends of a room photographed through a window from outside ▪ This means the trees behind the camera also appear ◦ She builds her photos into free-standing blocks & shapes that evoke corners and eges of minimalist architecture ◦ Taking the images away from the gallery and into 3D space ◦ Her work takes our familiarity with everyday sights & invites us to think about the way we see/ experience our environments ◦ Offering rich and imaginatives glimpses of the world around us Chapter 5: • This chapter looks at how narratives of domestic and intimate life are presented in contemporary art photography • Contrasting everything mentioned previously • A starting-point is to consider how intimate photography is constructed & borrows langiahe of domestic/ family photos ◦ But of course the presence of loved ones at events in the photos is the most important thing, not other technical aspects ◦ Yet some of these art photos contain elements of casual family snaps: ▪ Out-of-kilter framing ▪ Blur ▪ Uneven flashlight ▪ Colouration of the machine-made print ◦ The technical shortcomings are employed as the language through which private experience is communicated to the viewer ◦ Use of unskilled photography — intentional device that signals intimacy of the relationship between photographer & subject • We tend to take photos at symbolic points in family life, and acknowledge family bonds or social achievements ◦ However, the things we consider taboo (eg. sadness, disputes, addiction & illness) tend to be absent from these photos — not the case with art photography ◦ Art photos also tend to be of things we consider mundane parts of everyday life (eg. sleeping, travelling etc) • Intimate photography is a reconstitution of the subtexts in family snaps ◦ We can find signs of undercurrents of specific family relationships in our private photos ▪ Who stands next to who? ▪ Who is absent? ▪ Who is taking the photo? ◦ We search for clues to later events ▪ e.g. Can we see the signs on a wedding day of later divorce? ◦ Intimate photography is an exercise in pathology ▪ An editing and sequencing of seemingly unguarded private moments that reveal manifestations and origins of the emotional lives of the subjects • An influental photographer - Nan Goldin (1953) ◦ 30+ year exploration of her selected ‘family’ of friends and lovers ◦ Chronicles the narrative of her circle ◦ Sets the standard by which intimate photography & its creators are judged ◦ She began taking photos in the 70’s but gained international acclaim in the 90’s ◦ The start of her practise is highly significant because it is constantly retold in the literature of her work ◦ Her first photos were documenting the daily lives of 2 drag queens she lived with ◦ She began to use colour for her photos after taking a years leave from school (so no access to a dark- room to develop her b&w film) ◦ Even when moving she continued to take photos ◦ First public showing in New York Clubs - 1979 — alongside music ◦ She was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial in NY which was her first high-profile institutional interest ◦ 1989 - published her book ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ ▪ She directs the viewer to think beyond the specifics of her subjects ▪ To think about general narratives of universal experience ▪ A personalised contemplation of the nature of subjects ▪ Sexual relationships ▪ Male social isolation ▪ Domestic violence ▪ Substance abuse ▪ She explains her psychological necessity for her to make photos ▪ The effects of her sister suicide aged 18 (Nan was 11) ▪ A way of holding onto her own version of history ◦ By the 80’s she was doing more exhibitions and even solo ones ◦ Counterbalance of celebration & loss ◦ Records the impact of HIV, AIDS, drug addiction and rehabilitation within her friends ◦ But now she has broken her own drug addiction cycle, her photos seem to be happier, including children, healthy relationships, landscapes and baroque still life ◦ Her openness with discussing her traumatic childhood & battles with addiction & destructive relationships show her work is a genuine record, not faked ◦ She never went for success, she took the photos for herself • Intimate photographers are protected by serious & negative criticism due to the links between the photos and the photographers personal life. To address something as a failure would be to make a comment on the life of the photographer • Another important intimate life photographer is Nobuyoshi Araki (1940) ◦ Came to prominence in the 60’s with his grainy, dynamic photographs of Japanese street life ◦ He was part of a daring & experimental period of photograph in tandem with graphic design ◦ He is best known or his sexually explicit photos ◦ In the 90’s be became famous outside of Japan due to the boldness of his work ◦ The photos of young Japanese women is seen to be a diary of his sex life (as he claims to have had relations with most of the women in the photos) ▪ The lack of men involved highlights this ◦ The relationship between photographer & model can sometimes be collaborative ◦ He claims as well that the photos are part of these womens sexual fantasies ◦ Pornographic to some extent — if just photographing women he desires or has had relations with ◦ Brings up debate about these types of photos • Larry Clark's (1943) explicit portrayals of teens & young adults have also been highly influential on contemporary photography ◦ A few of his books cenre on the self-desctructive combination of sex, drugs & guns in the hands of out-of-control young people ◦ Mostly autobiographical works ▪ Diaristically document his and his friends youth ◦ Later on, his portrayals of youth were transferred to a younger generation of rebels (emphathised as well as socialised) ◦ Recording a teenagers nihilistic progress into adulthood — detailed in an essay about his experiences from his own life that mirrors the photos he wished he made as a child ◦ He recieved some recognition in the 80’s, but moreso when his independent film ‘Kids’ released in 1995 • In the mid-1990’s, moral implications of photographic realism weren’t focused on the art world but that of fashion photography ◦ As photography developed in the art market & contemporary art become more popular, it was typical that fashion photography would take these styles and use it themselves ◦ The rise of intimate photography meant that fashion photography used it to add a gritty realism into fashion images ◦ Grunge fashion began to appear in magazines ◦ Thinner, younger models were used, and people saw this as promoting drug abuse, child abuse and eating disorders ◦ Even Bill Clinton was involved and claimed it was glamorising heroine (a popular drug at the time) ◦ Proves that without the biography of the photographer being involved, the photos can be criticised by social campaigners • Juergen Teller (1964) begun to traverse the fashion & art worlds before Clintion’s involvement ◦ Took casual-looking photos with a 35mm camera which began to meet some critical appreciation ◦ His capacity for creating intriguing photos & editing his work eloquently wasn’t in question ◦ The priviliged lifestyle of his models & popstars was thought to be too glamorous to be taken seriously ◦ In 1999, he produced his ‘Go sees’ project: short film, book, various exhibitions ▪ A ‘go see’ is where a model is sent to see a photographer by her agent in the hopes of booking shoots ▪ He photographed the models who came to see him, recording the unglamorous false hopes of the girls ◦ He showed that he could critique the industry ◦ His later work inolved him turning the camera onto himself • Corinne Day (1965-2010) chose not to re-present her fashion photos of the 90’s into the art world ◦ Her first involvement in photography was as a model ◦ She then took photos of her fellow models (which they used in their portfolios) ◦ She has knowledge of both sides of the camera ◦ She used her commissions to debunk the glamorous myth-making of fashion photography ◦ Her movement into art was enhanced by her biography rather than made difficult ◦ Declines to offer her best-known photos as parts of the art-world, acknowledging that what stood as a radical gesture would be lost in the gallery ◦ She published a chronicle of her life, focusing on when she suffered a seizure that lead to the discovery of a brain tumour ▪ Her diary shows images of her in hospital leading up to the operation to remove the tumour & her recovery ▪ Appearing as staccato notes in the books sequence of photos showing the highs and lows of her social circle ▪ The writing was handwritten ◦ Her willingness to photograph vulnerable & intimate moments in her life and her friends lives related to the tradition of this depth of human emotion you narrate, a tradition established by Goldin. • The rise of Richard Billingham (1970) began in the early 90’s when he began to create a memorable record of his family life ◦ He was studying fine art (specialising in painting) at the time ◦ He took a series of photos of his parents and brother as ‘sketches’ for his paintings ◦ A visiting examiner (who happened to be a picture editor of a newspaper) saw the photos in Billingham’s studio & told him to consider those instead of his paintings as an expression of his family ◦ A book of his work was published in 1996 ◦ Written accounts of the work focus on his youth, guileless manner & naivety, as well as the poverty of his background ◦ He had no idea that they’d be on the walls of London’s Royal Academy ◦ It is hard to believe that he was just ‘taking snaps’ of his family, as he was using the photos to find compositions he could transfer into paintings ◦ This was the stance of someone who looked for a more critical understanding of the daily reality of his life • Nick Waplington’s (1965) complex and energised sequence of images & handwritten notes in his book ‘safety in numbers’ was an ambitious and high-momentum look at youth culture ◦ In an intense period of global travel ◦ It was a collaboration with magazine ‘Dazed & Confused’ — which committed to publishing the project in instalments in the form of a supplement ◦ Shared attitudes as well as the particulars of social groups is captured in two styles ▪ Casual photographic style ▪ High-impact book design • Aspects of social behaviour are also revealed in Anna Fox’s (1961) recent work ◦ Her best documentary work was done outside of the home ◦ Yet she also captured moments of her family life ◦ The photos provide the opportunity to acknowledge & celebrate particulars of domestic life ◦ She turned earlier photos of making single images of things her children have made or abandoned into more action-based narrative series’ ◦ She documented her eldest son’s creation of a model Santa over the course of a few days ▪ The sculpture takes shape throughout the series ▪ Recording not only the product but the affinity between play and creativity ▪ Casual and intuitive • Ryan McGinley’s (1977) exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NY (2003) was advertised in terms that suggested that intimate photography was now an established genre ◦ He was fully aware of the traditions within contemporary art of this type of work ◦ He met Larry Clark and had taken up photography while studying graphic design ◦ This meant he knew that there was a possibility that his photos would gain public attention ◦ His work was also featured in the same places as Nan Goldin’s early work ▪ Perhaps an indication that that his version of photography of intimate life was a response/ rephrasing of a recognised heritage ◦ New in his work is lack of angst and pathos, substituted by playfulness in collaboration with his subjects ◦ This helped shape narratives for the public context of the art world • Hiromix’s (Toshikawa Hiromi) (1976) snapshot photos including self-portraits, photos of her friends & domestic life have bought her cult status in Japan ◦ Her diary-like photos centre on their being the offerings of a new generation of photographers who adopted the spontaneity and immediacy of Nobuyoshi Araki ▪ But have new attitudes and stories to tell ◦ Her gender, beauty & youth match the profiles of many of Araki’s models ◦ She delivers a sense of the artistic liberation that imtimate photography can offer ◦ The persona of the photographer being bound in the description of their life ◦ Rather than in more stereotypical notions of age and gender • Some intimate photography is a group effort ◦ Yang Yong (1975) photographs friends to evoke attitues of young urban people in China ◦ Taken mainly at night in the streets of a financial centre ◦ Staged in collaboration with his subjects ◦ Not highly performative, boredom is usually the focus ◦ The combination of their own lives mixed with attitudes and postures end up referring to fashion and lifestyle magazines, especially those that represent youth culture in the 90s • Alessandra Sanguinetti (1968) did a 4 year project ◦ She photographed 2 of her female cousins who lived in Argentina ◦ The collaboration centred on the girls’ decisions on how to represent themselves & often involved theatrical performances & dressing-up ◦ The photographers role is one of recording or facilitating the girls self-expression, not being a choreographer ◦ What developed from this close relationship was being able to capture images that caught the girls outside of their performed characters • For 20+ years, Annelies Strba (1947) has photographed her immediate family, her 2 daughters and her grandson ◦ There is a sense that her family are used to her photographing their daily life ◦ The tilted camera angle & image blur indicate that she captures them quickly ◦ She is rarely shown in the photos but her presence & point of view are felt in the observations ▪ Experienced through subjects facial expressions ▪ Her place within the family is implied in her choice of when to photograph them ◦ In her book she interweves her domestic images with landscapes as well as old family photos to give context for the depiction of her family • Both Ruth Erdt’s (1965) & Elinor Carucci’s (1971) photographing of their families sensuously emphasise the archetypal narratives of personal lives ◦ E.g. bond between mother and daughter, or a child on the cusp of adulthood ◦ Neutrality in their techniques ◦ Search for a form of photography that triggers in us a sense of universality of the bonds of famliy life ◦ Symolic and non-specific readings of their depictions of their personal relationships to the fore • The photography of private & daily existence has often been realised with a snapshot aesthetic to represent the spontaneity of domestic life ◦ This is not what Tina Barney (1945) does ◦ Her long-term photographing of her family creates a benchmark for art photograph’s capacity to visualise family bonds outside of snap photography ◦ She describes it as being akin to an anthropological survey, her photos define the rituals, gestures & environments that act as clues to cultural constructions of personal relationships & social positioning ◦ Her photos look staged ◦ The composure of the subjects are a simple reflection of the acknowledgement to being photographed ◦ She rapidly changes film cases & composes her shots and subjects suspend their animation as she works ◦ It is different to a casual style, but still hinges on her perceiving how a subjects gesutres & demeanour display the nature of personal identity & relationships ◦ Spatial connections between her subjects become pronounced ◦ Signs of psychological closeness/distance between family are revealed in some elements (eg. who loos at/away from the camers) ◦ Careful containment of the group within the frame ◦ Impression is one of the individuals making a family unit ◦ Dynamics between them are contained • One of the most influential & comprehensive portrayals of dynamics within family relationships was made by Larry Sultan (1946-2009) ◦ His book ‘pictures from home’ was published in 1992, but he began the project 10 years prior ◦ It is a study of his parents ◦ Some photos are posed — described as images he traded or negotiated as he won their agreement to be photographed while they did household chores ◦ Others are casual observations — he remained emotionally involved in his parents daily routine ◦ The book also contains family photos & sequences of stills from film footage ◦ Selection includes photos of his parents and professional & social gatherings (things he wasn’t involved with as a child) ◦ Photos and footage of him and his mother, taken by his father also included ◦ Emphasising how images innocently reveal relationships between loved ones ◦ A sense of family history being retrieved also comes across in transcribed conversations between the three about the project • Mitch Epstein’s (1952) ‘Family Business’ is a 4 year documentation revolving around his father ◦ The beginnings of the project were prompted by him returning home to support his parents through a crisis that jeopardised his fathers livelihood ◦ He used photography & a DVD camera to investigate how his fathers hard-working & honest ethics had almost resulted in personal & familial tragedy ◦ It has a number of visual elements ▪ Photos of the interiors that were spaces of his fathers life (home, business, country club) ▪ Portraits of people (family, employees, friends) ▪ DVD recording key moments of his fathers life ▪ Recuperation from heart surgery ▪ Taking stock before a liquidation sale ◦ The intensity comes from the sense of a photographer visualising a subject from a position of intense emotional knowledge ◦ Capturing things that are symbols of what may seem like unexpressive details ◦ Compelling blend of a photographically distant perspective with an intimately known subject • The role of the camera in Colin Gray’s (1956) relationship with his parents has taken on multiple forms in his long-term documentation of their family life ◦ He describes the camera as being a symbolic control over & way of visualising bonds within his family ◦ Beginning in the 80’s — returned to their home and involved his parents as subjects and performers in staged dramas for the camera ◦ Including reenacting shared past memories ◦ Later (2000) he documented the emphasis on his elderly parents physical deterioration ▪ Shifts in routines — more hospital visits, church ▪ Changes in the role of his mother after a stroke & having his father be her primary carer ◦ The project is a way of engaging the viewer in his own private agony (he is helpless at the decline of his loved ones) ◦ Used to communicate the shared experience of gradual personal loss ◦ A means of catharsis for the photographer • The darker themes of life are recurring in Elina Brotherus’s (1972) photos ◦ She photographed at times where she felt her life was uncertain or unstable ◦ ‘Suites Francaises’ was a series created while she was undertaking an artists’s residency in France in 1999 — while struggling with the separation from her normal life & her inability to communicate fully in French ◦ Post-it notes of phrases she was learning were placed in her accommodation ◦ They show the techniques she employed to learn the language with touching & comedic effect ▪ Some phrases were practical ▪ Some were put together by her and she acted them out ◦ Playfully pointing out her state of being able to communicate only blatantly ◦ With enforced childishness that comes from learning a new language • The photographers emotional state is also conveyed by Breda Beban's (1952) series ‘the miracle of death’ ◦ Captures a profound sense of loss experienced after the death of her partner in 1997 ◦ The box containing his ashes is photographed in their home ◦ Rooms still contain his personal belongings — evidence of their cohabitation ◦ Series documents the moving of the box — unable to give it a fixed place ◦ Indicating her inability to reconcile herself to her loss ◦ Epitomise the capacity of intimate photography to describe a detail of life simply ◦ And to invest it with the profundity of human emotion

Chapter 6: • This chapter considers how photography can bear witness to the ways of life & events of the world • How do photographers move from a critique of image-making that implies loss of the documentary power of photography to a practice tha utilises art strategies to maintain the social relevance of the photo? • There was a gap left by the decrease of commissioned documentary projects & the usurping of telly & digital media as the most immediate carriers of info • Make an asset out of the different climates & contexts that art offers • Contemporary art photographers have taken an anti-reporttive stance ◦ Slowing down image making ◦ Arriving after the decisive moment ◦ Remaining out of the hub of action ◦ Using edium and large-format cameras ◦ Photographers framing the social world in a measured and ontemplative manner ◦ Rather than being caught up in the action, they capture what is left behind in the wake of tragedies ◦ With styles that propose a qualifying perspective • One of the most influential photographers is Sophie Ristelhueber (1949) ◦ Visualised the tragic repetition of the destruction of nature & civilisations ◦ In the wake of the 1st Gulf War, she took aerial photos of the traces of bombing and troop movements ▪ Photographing poignant residues of combat: abandoned clothing & mounds of spent explosive shells ◦ Burnt tree stumps act as metaphors for loss of life & ecological richness of the region • Willie Boherty (1959) has made Northern Ireland the central subject of his video & photographic work ◦ He uses audio to establish different voices for different political standpoints ◦ He uses photography to present corroded and abandoned spaces ▪ A sense of the economic & social scarification of Northern Ireland as a consequence of political & military turbulance ◦ He typifies mournful desolation ◦ Some linked to original sin • Zarina Bhimji (1963) works with film & photography to recount the physicality & time of unidentified spaces ◦ She considers the ways in which images can resonate with general narratives of elimination, extermination & erasure ◦ She chooses forms that function as allegories that remain open-ended and unresolved ◦ In one series, she composes a still life that acts as a metaphor for an altered and suspended situation where everyday logic no longer applies • The use of allegory is shown in the work of Anthony Haughey (1963) ◦ Who photographed territorial borders ◦ His ongoing project ‘Disputed territory’ began on the borders of the Republic and Northern Ireland ◦ A sense of place or culture, changed by traumatic events ◦ Utilises an iconography of slight/ambigious traces of past acts of violence • Ori Gersht’s (1967) ‘Untitled space 3’ is part of a series he made in the Judean Desert at night ◦ Beyond the beams of the photographers lights, darkness engulfs the way ahead ◦ A metaphor for uncertainty and exodus ◦ Binding Israel to the Old Testament ◦ Darkness is a visualisation of void, inhuman nothingness & loss ◦ An allegory of the problems faced by photographers documenting war ◦ How to visualise the enormity & complexity of human suffering & conflict ◦ Artistic conventions used to translate social events & consequences of history into visual forms • Paul Seawright’s (1965) ‘Hidden’ series is a mournful generalised view of the futility of war ◦ It was produced when he was one of the artists commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to respond to the conflict in Afghanistan ◦ He uses the twisting hill road littered with artiliery shells in a compositional manner similar to one of the earliest photographers of conflict zones, Roger Fenton (1819-1869) ▪ Whose photos of the Crimean War included desolated landscapes littered with cannon balls • The mediation of contemporary world events through pre-existing image-making is clear in Simon Norfolk’s (1963) photos of Afghanistan ◦ Skeletons of bombed-out buildings are shown as romantic ruins on deserted plains ◦ Reminiscent of late 18th century landscape paintings ◦ There is reasoning behind this return to a pictorial style of the past ▪ Ironic reference to the fact that the decimation of war has made this ancient and culturally rich region return to a premodern state • Deadpan style (used in chapter 3) is use a lot in these types of photos ◦ Allows the subjects to control their representation ◦ Photographer bearing witness to their existence & self-possession ◦ Essays & captions needed to carry factual info about the subjects and background information ◦ Quotes from the subjects also used to give them a voice & confirm the role of the photographer as their mediator ◦ Group or community photos take longer so the photographer can spend time with the subjects and find the right moments to photograph from an informed outsiders position • Fazal Sheikh (1965) has primarily photographed individuals & families living in refugee camps ◦ He uses b&w photography as resistance against the seduction fashion in art & colour prints & identifies the photos as documentary portraiture with serious intent ◦ He focuses on mainly female refugees ◦ And recorded the human-rights abuses they suffered ◦ Singling out people gives the photos a signified and quasi-timeless quality in the use of b&w together with texts that detail their individual stories ◦ The photos hover between portraits and portrayals ◦ He goes to great lengths to make sure we know about the histories of each subject • Chan Chao’s (1966) ‘something went wrong’ is a series of portraits of Burmese refugees who fled Myanmar ◦ After the State Law & Order Restoration Council took repressive power in 1988 ◦ Single figures conducting their lives in displaced communities are shown temporarily halting their routines (in jungle squatter camps) to be photographed ◦ One photo is of a young man who was a former ABSDF member ◦ Implication of the caption shows that textual info is important for understanding the image ◦ But also that documentary photography is no more than a sign of someone’s survival & an indictator to their story • Visualising the maintenance of identity & self-respect in challenging circumstances is strongly present in the photos of Zwelethu Mthethwa (1960) ◦ Extensive documentation of the homes & people in shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town ◦ The increased toleration in the 80’s of black people’s migration out of apartheid systems lead to rural blacks being in search of work in these makeshift communities ◦ The settlements remained relatively unchanged ◦ He documents the homemade individuality of the shanty houses ◦ And involves his subjects in the way they’re depicted ▪ They choose what to wear ▪ How to pose themselves ▪ How to arrange their personal effects • Adam Broomberg (1970) & Oliver Chanarin (1971) gained access to different international communities in their roles as photographers & creative editors ◦ With ‘colors’ magazine, they edited issues on social themes such as: ▪ Treatment of mental illness ▪ Refugees ▪ The penal system ◦ The subjects were named & had quotes ascribed to them ◦ The activity in the prison was edited out & slowed down ◦ To be visualised on their large-format cameras, relating to 19th century documentary photography ◦ Also serving to detach it from the conventions of photojournalism • Deirdre O’Callaghan’s (1969) portrait of a resident in a men’s hostel in London with a subject having a string of pearls functions as a sign of his wilful determination ◦ Her ‘hide that can’ project took 4 years and she spent time photographing in the hostel ◦ Many of them were irish men in their 50’s/60’s who came to London as young adults to work as manual labourers ◦ She also moved to London in the early 90’s along with many other men & women, which shows her own connection to the hostel ◦ She photographed the men only occasionally, spending more time becoming a familiar face in the hostel ◦ Her project beccame part of the men’s routines and she’d talk to them about their personal histories • Trine Sondergaard’s (1972) photos of women sex workers (either with their clients or off duty) were taken in 1997-98 ◦ The lack of glamour is a poignant vision of the reality of the woemsn situations ◦ The project is well balanced in the sense that it doesn’t concentrate on the moments of their working lives, but also focuses on their daily life and environments ◦ We come to understand how they survive the dehumanising aspect of their work • Dinu Li’s (1965) ‘secret shadows’ series was originally meant to be of portraits of Chinese immigrants in the north of England ◦ But was not an option since the identities of these people needed to be kept secret ◦ Instead, their personal items were the subjects ◦ As a way of visualising the values, practicalities and memories that form these workers identities • Margareta Klingberg’s (1942) approach to the unseen & unprotected workforce of immigrant labouters was to seek out Thai & Eastern European fruit pickers working in forests in northern Sweden ◦ The workers are aware that they’re being photographed ◦ The casualness in composition suggests the photos were taken quickly ◦ As setting up with a tripod and composing the photos may have suggested that there was an official reason for her to be there & may have raised concern ◦ We are looking at a social group we don’t notmally see in our daily lives or in visual representations • The depiction of marginalised groups that are socially overlooked has been a concern of documentary photography since the 1920’s ◦ These images are more likely to appear in artist’s books & exhibitions than magazines or newspapers ◦ Showing a shift in the context of photography ◦ Documentary is by no means the dominant photographic form in the art world ◦ It however remains an important social & political view for some photographers • For 25+ years, Allan Sekula (1951) has put forward a strong argument for how & why art can accommodate thorough & politicised investigation of major economic & social foces that shape our world ◦ He resisted being consumed by the art market while still governing a prominent place in international exhibition programmes ◦ He examined the realities of the modern maritime industry ▪ Slide sequences & texts interweave the history of sea trade routes with the problems facing his industry today • Paul Graham’s (1956) ‘american night’ series was made over 5 years, beginning in 1998 ◦ Most of the photos are disarmingly bleached-out images of roadsides & pedestrial walkways where barely visible Afro-American figures walk ◦ Dramatic bleaching/mistreating of these photos is suggestive of the political invisibility & social blindness to poverty and racism in America ◦ Clear colour-saturated photos of wealthy suburban homes are also in the series ◦ Reflecting starks visions of contemporary American society ◦ Representation of a social divide is clear in his use of obvious aesthetic difference that frustrates our expectations of photography’ documentary style & capacity ◦ A metaphor for American social divisions ◦ All documentary photography is to some extent, a subjective and partial vision of one social world • Martin Parr (1952) also tested the boundaries of documentary style ◦ He has employed a number of visual formats for his documentary projects ◦ Began using a hand-held camera with a flashlight in combo with a macro-lens ◦ Creates a brash & graphic depiction of everyday objects & observations for which he is well known ◦ The theme of the series is the vernacular fashioning of junk food, tacky souvenirs and package holidays ◦ His voice of subjects has a British appeal ▪ Chequered tearoom tablecloth ▪ Old man’s flat cap ◦ He’s suggesting that these are cultural idiosyncrasies that are dying out ◦ Every subject is given the same visual treatment ▪ Closely cropped ▪ Flash-lit ▪ Heightened colour of a snappy snap ◦ In his editing skills he shapes the narrative of a project ▪ Treating his photos as a collection of photographic memorabilia & postcards ▪ Vernacular visual records that he compiles into groups, justapositions and rapid sequence ◦ Epitomises photographic promiscuity ◦ He sent images to multiple galleries around the world, allowing them to choose their own way of installing the images • Luc Delahaye’s (1962) ‘history’ series stands in opposition to the previous approach ◦ He began his photos in 2001, selecting to date an average of 4 images per year to include in the work ◦ All of the photos have a panoramic format (2 and a half meters in length when printed) ◦ The photos revolve around military conflict, including war zones such as Afghanistan & Iraq and showing consequences of war ◦ He takes what is ostensibly the archetypal subject of photojournalism & represents it in the tableau format ◦ Some photos are very shocking, where a group of men even pose for the camera with corpses, and those photos are composed ◦ He takes a subject more familiar in photojournalism & creates a historical tableau ◦ Making the materiality of traumatic recent history strongly resonant and haunting • Ziyan Gafic’s (1980) photos made in Bosnia-Herzegovina during 2001-2002 in the aftermath of civil war often capture the return to ordinary life ◦ While the results of the genocides is still present ◦ In one photo, the Commission for Missing Persons organised an excavation of the bodies of massacred Muslims, laid on white bags behind a mosque for identification ◦ The dissonance between the skeletons & beautiful view and signs of comestic acitivity is profoundly shocking • Andrea Robbins (1963) & Max Mecher (1964) consider the residue of historical events on contemporary society ◦ They documented Germanic styles of houses of the former German colony of South West Africa ◦ In the texts for the exhibitions, it contains brutal facts of the colonisation • The idea in documentary photography of the realities of societies being shown to contradict generally held preconceptions ◦ Visual proof of things being different to what we imagine — being fertile ground for exploration ◦ Shirana Shahbazi’s (1974) photos of daily life in Tehran cut across our expectations of what is considered a more exotic culture ▪ Mosaic-like installations of her photos & large paintings of her images by Iranian painters ▪ Uses and confounds the stereotypes of Islamic art & daily life ▪ Proposing that a culture of such size & complexity cannot be represented in one visual form • Esko Mannikko’s (1959) photos focus on the particularities of the Finnish rural culture ◦ Are displayed in secondhand frames that emphasise the handicraft lives of his mainly male subjects ◦ His images of farming hamlets along the coast outside of the city are both humorous and strange ◦ Depicting the isolated existence of mainly male inhabitants in the face of environmentally harsh conditions ◦ Consciously proposes photography as being capable of a level of unpretentiousness ◦ In an art context where high production values dominate ◦ Sensitive to his subjects’ modest lifestyles • In 1982, Roger Ballen (1950) began photographing the homes and people of smalltown South Africa ◦ Observing and photographing his many Boer subjects as inviduals, but also archetypes of introverted communities ◦ By the 90’s, it was clear that his relationship with the people there had changed ◦ His photos became more staged, the compositions of people & animals, as well as the interiors they inhabit ◦ Describes the Brechtian theatricality of these photos as being jointly directed by him & his subjects — many he had photographed for years ◦ A shift to a more aesthetic and depoliticised territory was seen as innappropriate by some — an innappropriate visualisation of post-apartheid South Africa ◦ He photographs in b&w — greater affinity between his images and photographic painting/drawing than to photographys social history ◦ He seems drawn to forms that are constructed rather than seeking to represent his values & beliefs in the subjects he photographs • Similar discourse and interest has been generated by the photos of Boris Mikhailov (1938) who has been a photographer since the 60’s ◦ Doing engineer photography, photojournalist & now a prominent figure in contemporary art ◦ Reflect the possiblities of being a photographer in Communist & Post-Communist Ukraine ◦ He began one project of over 500 photos in the late 90’s ◦ He recorded homeless people in his hometown, paying them to pose for him ◦ They re-created scenes from their own histories, Christian iconography or undressed to show the ravages of poverty & violence on their bodies ◦ His photos are collaborations and the frank & intense depictions of those he considers to be his anti- heroes are a combo of his emotional closeness to his subjects ◦ Critical detachment of a photographer of brutal realities ◦ His work is seen as voyeuristic ◦ His payment of his subjects to pose and perform for him is littl more than a mirror image of the degrading reality for the disenfranchised of the former Soviet Union ◦ It is a self-conscious act that reminds us that photography mediates life & society through the motivations and subjectivities of its makers Chapter 7: • Since the mid-1970’s, the theory of photography has been concerned with the idea that photographs can be understood as processes of signification & cultural coding • Postmodernist analysis offered alternative ways for understanding the meaning of photos outside of modernist perspectives ◦ Modernism had predominantly considered photography in terms of authorship & aesthetics which was seen to have a secrete & inner logic ◦ The effect of modernist criticism was to create a nanon of master practioners (a history of trailblazers driving photographys capacities) ◦ In photography’s modernist canon there are those who typify forman and intellectual transcendence over the: ▪ Functional ▪ Jobbing ▪ Vernacular ▪ Popular anonymity of most photographic production ◦ Postmodernism considered photography from a different standpoint — one that wasn’t intended to serve the construction of photographic creators that mirrored those established for painting & sculpture ▪ Instead it examined the medium in terms of: ▪ Production ▪ Dissemination ▪ Reception ▪ Engaged with its inherent reproducibility, mimicry and falsity ◦ Rather thab being evidence of the photographer’s originality or statements of authorial intention ◦ There was a theory that the meaning of any image was not of its authors making or under their control, but was determined only by reference to other images or signs • This chapter will look at contemporary art photography that has been born out of this way of thinking ◦ When viewing the illustrations, they offer experiences that hinge on our memory’s stock of images: ▪ Family snaps ▪ Magazine adverts ▪ Stills from films ▪ Surveillance and scientific studies ▪ Old photos ▪ Fine art photos ▪ Paintings ◦ There is something deeply familiar about these works ◦ The key to their meaning comes from our own cultural knowlege of images ◦ These are photos that invite us to be self-conscious of: ▪ What we see ▪ How we see ▪ How images triger and shape our emotions & understanding of the world ◦ Postmodernist critiques of photographic imagery has been an invitation to both practioners and viwers to acknowledge the cultural coding that photography mediates • The work of Cindy Sherman (1954) with her cinematic stills, fashion photography, pornography and painting is the prime examplar of postmodern art photography ◦ Her ‘untitled film stills’ series was heralded as a seminal and early realisation of self-consciously postmodernist artistic practice ◦ All of her photos show one woman portrayed in a scenario that evokes enigmantic yet narratively charged moments from 50’s and 60’s b&w films ◦ There is an ease with which each feminine ‘type’ is recognisable ◦ Because of our familiarity with the coding of these types of films, we begin easily to read the implied narratives ◦ It is a demonstration of the argument provided by feminist theory that ‘femininity’ is a construction of cultural codes, not a quality that is naturally inherent or essential to women ◦ Sherman is both photographer and model ▪ She is both observer and observed ▪ It shows that femininity can be performed, changed and mimicked ◦ Her being both photographer & model confronts some issues raised by images of women: ▪ Such as who is being represented ▪ By who is this projection of ‘femininity’ ▪ And who for ◦ Much of her work examining image and identity is reached through visual pleasure ◦ The satisfaction & enjoyment is part of the viewing experience • Another well-known artist to be working in a manner like Sherman’s is Japanese Yasumasa Morimura (1951) ◦ Who began dressing himself for an ongoing project ‘self-portrait as art history’ ◦ The first work in the series shows hm as Vincent Van Gogh ◦ Fame is the theme of the photos ◦ He produces the alignment of his own malleable identity with arts most glamorous archetypes and artists/actresses ◦ The photos still hinge on our understanding of the idea of beauty and glamour within Western popular imagery, despite the photographer not being a Westerner ◦ His photos direct us to the 2 roles he takes on: ▪ The playful ego of the photographer ▪ The cultural status of particular artists and actors • A mix of observation, performance & photography can be seen in the work of Nikki S lee (1970) ◦ Her bodies of work ‘projects’ ◦ Conveys the degree of research & preparation that underpins her photos of the artist as becoming a member of a range of social groups ◦ Includes: hispanic, strippers, punk, yuppie, wall street broker ◦ She scrutinises the social conventions, dress and body language of the groups ◦ Then changes her apperance to become a plausible member ◦ The photos are either taken by a friend or a member of the group ◦ Includes her even changing her weight • Trish Morrissey’s (1967) ‘seven years’ provides a link between her own family experiences and the common tropes of domestic photography ◦ Family snaps can trigger reremembering and reappraising identities and familial relationships ◦ She collaborated with her elder sister and attempted to make the subject the subtexts of relationships that are embedded in family photos ◦ The props and clothes are a combo of objects found in her parents’ attic and secondhand items she collected for staging each photo • Gillian Wearing’s (1963) ‘album’ series also engages with family history ◦ An unsettling restaging of a small number of photos of her parents, brother, uncle and herself ◦ Including photo-booth portraits of her as a teen, a snap of her brother in his bedroom, and a studio portrait of her mum before she was born ◦ She also adopts the identity of her father as a young man, with custom prosthetic masks ▪ Made with facial features and expressions depicted in family photos ◦ In her images, she has left one pointed rupture in the seamless mimicry ◦ The edges of the eyeholes in the masks are undisguised ◦ She is literally trying on these identities — subtle but powerfully conveyed • The remaking of iconic popular images has also been common in contemporary art photography, evidenced by Jemina Stehli (1961) with her 'after helmut newton’s here they come’ ◦ Shows the artist posed as one of the figures in fashionn photographer Newon’s (1920-2004) 1981 diptych — showing.4 models stepping towards the camera ◦ In one photo, she is fully clothed, but naked apart from high-heels in another ◦ She emulates the position of one of the models in the original photos, as well as the stylistic b&w signature ◦ Her authorship is made evidenct with the shutter-release cable that she presses with her left hand ◦ Her strategy for critiqueing and Newton’s images hinges on her being both subject and object ◦ Generates its own form of objectification & visual stereotyping ◦ And marks the shift in the years between Newton and Stehli’s photos from the magazine page to the gallery wall • Hans Namuth’s (1917-90) iconic 1950 photo of painted Jackson Pollock creating his action paintings is immediately recognisable ◦ Like a blurred, badly printed reproduction ◦ In Vik Muniz’s (1961) ‘Action photo I’, he has redrawn the composition of the Namuth photo by using chocolate syrup ◦ A portrait he then photographs ◦ He does this with other photo to create highly skilled illusions • The artistic appropriation of visual styles & stereotypes is used by Zoe Leonard (1961) & Cheryl Dunye (1966) ◦ With ‘the fae richards photo archive’, they created an archive of photos of a fictional woman called Fae Richards, who is meant to be an early 20th century black film & cabaret star ◦ They were created for Cheryl’s ‘watermelon woman’ film, and they are careful corgeries of signed publicity shots, film stills & personal photos, complete with creases and stains of tattered vintage prints ◦ The photos were then displayed like historical ephemera in glass-topped cases ◦ The biography was constructed as a combination of events from the lives of real 20th century black artists, but her portrayal as a successful, creative, wealthy & happy lesbian who died peacefully in old age is deliberately a contrast to the tragic lives of many famous black singers and performers of the era ◦ The photos are plausible enough for the viewer to be unsure as to whether they’re real or not • Collier Schorr’s (1963) ‘Helga/Jens’ project portrays a German schoolboy named Jens in poses and scenarios in th German landscapes and interiors ◦ These poses are taken from the ‘Helga’ paintings & drawings by Andrew Wyeth, made public in 1986 ◦ Which showed Wyeth’s sexual fascination for the woman ◦ Schorr’s previous photos centred on the representation of youthful masculinity, offering bodies of work that concentrated on young female subjects ◦ It offers critical twists on gender dynamics and sexual projection ◦ She uses the ‘Helga’ paintings as a cue to think about the relationship between artist & model in the original paintings ◦ They’re more concerned with dialogue than mimicry ◦ Become a way that she can actively investigate to the point where desire & projection of the artists come together • The delivery of counter-memory or history through a fictionalised account is the basis of ‘the atlas project’ by Walid Ra’ad (1967) ◦ The work is an artistic testimony of the human-rights abuses & social consequences as well as the role of the media in the the Lebanese Civil War ◦ The mixed media project includes slides, video footage & the notebooks of Dr Fadi Fakhouri (the foremost historian of the war) ◦ Ra’ad presents the project through screenings, photographic reproductions & slide lectures ◦ It’s not apparent if the work is real or not (it isn’t) ◦ It examines how the idiosyncrasies of archieve material can trigger partial & emotive understandings of social unrest & history • The use of fantasy in the construction of fake archives has been used sparingly to address serious political issues, but is more often used as a comic fabrication of an archive that is too good to be true • Joan Fontcuberta’s (1955) ‘herbarum’ series depicts surreal plant forms ◦ Elegantly & sculpturally photographed against white backgrounds in the style of early 20th century photographer Carl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) ◦ On closer inspection, the plants turn out to be collages of different plants & matter (including animal parts) ◦ He also played with the conventions of exploration and anthropological photography (in another series) ▪ By constructing the archive of fictional German science-explorer Peter Amersen-Haufen ▪ Including the discovery of giant bats & flying elephants • Aleksandra Mir’s (1967) ‘first woman on the moon’ involved constructing a fake lunar landscape on a sandy strip of the Dutch coastline — for the 30th anniversary for the lunar landing ◦ It included fake publicity images for the group of all-female astronauts ◦ Representing them as a cross between stereotypes of air stewardesses and wives of austronauts waving their spouses off — a cheerful version of the performance art of the late 60’s • 19th century photogrphic processes and formats have been utilised by several contemporary artists • Tracey Moffatt’s (1960) ‘laudanum’ series of 19 photogravure prints (a subtle photomechanical printing process developed in the mid-19th century) created a vivid and fantastical narrative ◦ Presented in the physical form of the past ◦ A strong influence she draws upon is popular Victorian melodrama — which would have been presented in lantern slides or stereoscopic photos for parlour entertainment ◦ She refers to the dramatic use of shaows in early 20th century German Expressionist film ◦ The two characters in the photos are of a caucasian lady & an asian serpent ▪ The psychodrama stages centre on slavery in terms of colonialism, class, sexuality and addiction ◦ Her approach to representing the conditions of history gives us an experience of how sociohistorical issues (normally explored through writing & anthropology) can be imaginatively addressed through art • Another unexpected use of traditional forms of photography to explore a subject has been used since the mid 1990’s by Cornelia Parker (1956) in her ‘Avoided objects’ series ◦ She selects the relics that survived as the physical manifestations of history’s most important events & figures ▪ Such as equations calked onto a blackboard by Albert Einstein ▪ Or the record collection of Aldolf Hitler ◦ She uses microphotography (more commonly used in scientific research) and photographs at close range ◦ So objects are visually transformed into abstractions ◦ We’re invited to comprehend these remainds of history through metaphor & intuition ◦ We think about the history of the objects, when and whom • An early and more basic form of photographic device that has been used by contemporary art photographers is the camera obscura (which came into Western use by painters during the Renaissance ◦ It consists of a large boxlike space, within which an inverted image of the scene outside is projected onto a wall via an aperture on the opposite wall through which light can pass ◦ Vera Lutter (1960) made her own version of the device ▪ She hung sheets of photographic paper on the back wall of a chamber & made a pinhole aperture on the opposite wall through which the illumination of the scene outside penetrated and exposed and upside-down & negative image on the paper ▪ The shadows and other dark areas of the scenes are represented as glowing illuminations ▪ The blurred, ominous, darkness of the image is caused by the camera having mapped the comings & goings • Photographic processes from the late 1830’s and 1840’s have been revived in recent years as a way of returning to early photography's magic in tracings of living things ◦ The earliest photographic process was the photogram (photogenic drawing) — small objects placed on light-sensitised writing paper & exposed to the sun ◦ When washed, a negative silhouette of the objct was left on the paper ◦ Utilising only the chemical element of photography without the optical equipment of a camera ◦ The photogram was a way of making a representation & one that didn’t mirror human perception • Susan Derges (1955) has used the photogram process to record the movement of river & seawater ◦ Working at night, she places large sheets of photographic paper, held within a metal boc, beneath the surface of a river or sea ◦ Then after taking the lid off the box, flashes the paper with light so that the movement of the water is captured on the surface of the paper ◦ She sometimes positions the light above the branches of trees that have grown over the river’s edge so that they are held like shadows over the water ◦ The colour of the prints depends on 2 key factors: ▪ The amount of ambient light from towns and villages contaminating the night sky ▪ The temperature of the water as it changes through the year ◦ The photos are at human scalr and size, so create a powerful phenomenological effect ◦ Reconstituted in contemporary art the kinds of experimentation that galvanised photography’s earliest practitioners ◦ By taking her darkroom into the nigh landscape and using the flow of rivers and seas as a quasi strip of film ◦ She offers a reminder of the responsive and intuitive manner of photography’s early history ◦ Its pertinence in communicating artists’ ideas today • Adam Fuss’s (1962) photograms have been mainly made in the studio ◦ Where he has photographed rippled water, flowers, rabbit entrails, wafts of smoke, flight of birds ◦ He has also been one of the very few contemporary artists to revive the first paented photographic process — the daguerreotype ◦ It is a one off image ◦ Is a process in which the photographic image is etched by light-sensitive chemicals onto a silver- coated plate ▪ The areas where the ight most strongly hits the plate becomes frosted ▪ The early ones are smll and obscure ▪ They have their own revelatory quality as the viewer moves their body and eyes to see the ghostly image ◦ He used the process dor suitably elegiac subjects ▪ Such as lace christening dresses ▪ Butterflies ▪ Swan ▪ A faint self-portrait • Contemporary art photography’s appropriation & reworking of imagery can also be achieved by collating existing photos into grids, scemes and juxtapositions ◦ The role of the artist here is like that of a picture editor or curator ◦ Shaping the meaning of the photos through acts of interpretation ◦ John Divola (1949) has collected and archive of continuity photographs made on film sets in the early 1930’s ▪ The photos were originally taken to record the exact position of props, lighting & actors within film sets ▪ Scenes documented are entirely artificial ▪ They offer a meditation on the historical fictions of domestic or normal life that cinema has created • Richard Prince (1949) is an artist who emerged within the first wave of postmodernist use of photography in the late 70’s ◦ He takes photos of billboard advertisements but crops out the branding and texts ◦ The photos both critique and champion the seduction of advertising ◦ Its lifting of popular imagery and storytelling — his pan-media practice is witty, deft and subversive • Hans-Peter Feldmann’s (1941) principle output is books of photos which come in a range of sizes ◦ To make playful juxtapositions & repetitions of found, stock and gathered anonymous images ◦ Without dates or captions, the experience of the sequences is of viewing photographs free of function and history ◦ A context-less context — dependent on the triggering of thought processes through the relations between images within the sequence ◦ The experience of looking at the non-hierarchical approach to photographic imagery — drawn from the gult of vernacular and popular imagery of the 20th century ◦ Highly effective in reminding us how subjectively and subconsciously we interpret photos • Susan Meiselas (1948) initiated one of the most monumental projects of archive-retreval in 1991 ◦ She was well known for her photojournalistic projects ◦ After the first Persian gulf war, she began to photograph the mass graves & refugee camps in Northern Iraq ◦ She activated a re-finding of personal photos, government documents and media reports that had been dispersed internationally within the Kurdish diaspora • Tacita Dean’s (1965) ‘the russian ending’ series developed from her finding some early 20th century Russian postcards at a flea market ◦ Some depict events that are easy to read (funeral procession, aftermath of war) ◦ Others represent strange performances (their significance hard to discern) ◦ She re-presents the postcards enlarged and softly printed as photogravures ◦ Each image is shown with her handwritten annotations ◦ These notes are scattered throughout the images’ compositions — reading like a film director’s directives for how the narrative of each scene will cinematically be developed ◦ She pays special attention to the range of dramatic endings to the screenplay she describes ◦ Examines how uncertain & ambiguous our understanding of history is when gleaned from fictorial forms ◦ And how heavily implicated the director or image-maker is in the fictionalising of history • Joachim Schmid (1955) salvages discarded photographs, postcards and newspaper images ◦ He organises these items into archives & recycles their meaning in a quasi-curatorial practice ◦ By creating taxonomies of the most artistically under-valued types of photos ◦ He began is ‘pictures from the street’ project, consisting of almost 1000 photos found in different cities ◦ The only criterion for a photo to be added to the archive is that he must ave found it discarded ◦ By being discarded, the photos represent the loss of personal memories and also their active rejection ◦ These differing processes of archive-construction emphasises that what is being retrieved from the picture (status as evidence) ◦ The continguity between image & object can be shaped to create a re-engagement with forgotten histories ◦ Also our projected fantasies of their historical and emotional resonance • While reclaiming to retrieval of existing photos creates a reinvigoration of the subjects they explicitly or implicitly denote ◦ An area of contemporary art photography queries whether reality is immobilised when photographed ◦ Pertinent dialogue with the ideas prevalent in late 1970s postmodern photography ◦ That is an image of pre-existing image & not an unmediated depiction of its given subject • As soon as the first photos were made, all photographic practise after was created & understood in comparison & relation to earlier images ◦ On the basis of invidual practice, other phtoos became the hurdles over which to jump ◦ The standards to meet and the discourses to counter ◦ Susan Lipper’s (1953) ‘trip’ sequence of 50 b&w photos of small-town America ▪ The artist identified various sites but also the heritage of their representation within American documentary photography ▪ She finds these contemporary places connections with pre-existing images ▪ A photograph that has come to embody a key moment in photography’s modernist history • Marketa Othova’s (1968) conceptually driven use of the monochrome has been controversial in her native Czech Republic ◦ Where b&w photography as opposed to colour remainds the currency of most artistic and documentary photography ◦ She photographs in an unauthored and historical style ◦ She took photos of the villa of a film director, and the room had remained very similar to how it was when the widow of the film director died ◦ She responded to the sense of time’s standing still by photographing it in a way that mimics the style of documentary photography ◦ Reinforcing the sense of the place’s history • Torbjorn Rodland’s (1970) depictions of Nordic landscapes show the sublime beauty & cliches of landscape art ◦ The composition of some images ape the conventions of how to represent a beautiful landscape ◦ Including the choice of misty sunrise or sunset — handed down from landscape painting to professional nature photography & to that of our holiday snaps ◦ He is conscious of the irony that in order to experiece the sentimental emotions of these landscapes — the viewer recalls other images that function in the same emotive ways ◦ Portraying a subject through a pre-existing style of a photographic genre • Vibeke Tandberg’s (1967) ‘line’ series has a suggestion that the photographers relationship would be intimate, professional, detached or a simulation of all of these ◦ She used digital manipulation to blend fragments of her own facial features with those of her friend ◦ Illustrating how a photographic print, is partly the photographer’s projection of herself onto the subject ◦ At the heart of this lie the possibilities that postmodernist practise represents for contemporary art photographers ◦ To be able to knowingly shape the subjectts that intrigue them ◦ Conscious of the heritage of the imagery into which they are entering ◦ To see the contemporary world through the pictures we already know

Chapter 8: • Title of the chapter comes from a short essay by Tacita Dean to accompany her film ‘Kodak’ ◦ She quotes the manager at the factory who says that no-one notices the difference between analogue and digital photography anymore (when asked why analogue film stock will become obsolete) ◦ This chapter concerns artists who notice the difference, and consciously fold the shifting meanings and associations of photography into the narrative of their work • Digital photography has radically reshaped photography’s commercial industries and the way we use photography in our professional & personal lives ◦ There’s been a shift in the current understanding of what photography encompasses & what it means to propose photographic works as art ◦ It involves some disclosure of the context & conditions that have shaped the completed artwork ◦ Contemporary art photography has become less about applying a pre-existing, fully functioning visual technology ◦ More concerned with active choices made in each step of the process ◦ Tied to an enhanced appreciation of the materiality and objecthoodof the medium — reaches back to early 19th century roots of photography • It’s in this climate that some artists explre our increased consciousness of the physical characteristics of photographic prints ◦ No longer the default platform for photography ◦ Increasingly rareified craft divorced from our day-to-day experiences of the medium • Some artists in the chapter look at the vast amount of visual information that affects our reading of (and relationships betwen) the images that we see ◦ Others capitalise on the resonance of photography’s analogue past — made weighty by the ever- present nature of digital photography ◦ The desire to hold onto enduring elements of analogue photography’s history is a partial explanation for the relative caution some photographers have made when introducing digital technology ino their practice ◦ Art schools and the art market haven’t chosen to diverge radically from the conventions of making, printing & selling photography ▪ Perhaps caught between the quality of affordable digital capture & printing, and the expense of commercial post-production ◦ The prophecies about the complete extinction of analogue photographic paper & films has dissipated ◦ Outside photography’s commercial industries (fashion, advertising, journalism) where they were embracing new technologies ◦ The late 1990’s and 2000’s saw a period of hybridisation between analogue technology and digital techniques • Sherrie Levine (1947) & James Welling are 2 pioneering artists who drew attention to the role of materiality in photography in the 1980’s ◦ Both played a part in laying the groundwork of current trends in contemporary art photography ◦ Levine’s appropriation of classic photos by Walker Evans (1930-1975), Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Eliot Porter (1901-1990) serves as a starting ppont for the ideas outlined in the chapter ◦ There is an enduring boldness to the way Levine rephotographed images made by canonical photographers rom printed pages of exhibition catalogues and presenting them in contemporary art galleries ◦ Her work is neither an attempt at forgery or an ironic gesture ▪ Direct appropriation of an object calls forth as its subject the power of a photo to convey emotions & the invesitgative curiosity of the photographer ◦ Her treatment of the photos was no different from the motivation of any photographer, but also not dissimilar to Duchamp’s granting of iconic status to found objects ◦ Her work was provocative — because Evan’s photos weren’t anonymous or vernacular, or the conventional image material for new artistic thinking ◦ Her project forgrounds her — responses are led and determined by their intentions and authorship ◦ It is sited in her role as editor, curator, interpreter and art historian • James Welling (1951) was associated in the 80’s with Levine & other postmodernist appropriation artists ◦ But he has always created work on a different plane from that of his generation of critical photographic thinkers ◦ In the early 80’s he created a series of over 50 small b&w photos of creased aluminium foil ▪ The photos were displayed in a modernist style with mounts & black frames ▪ Hung in a linear sequence on white walls ▪ In a provocative gesture that made the viewer aware of the unreconstructed pleasure in ejoying the prints formal qualities & the conscious modernist conventions that operate within them ◦ He knowingly straddled 2 positions with his practise ▪ He is a photographer who explores the medium through experimentation & the crafting of prints in an age-old fashion ▪ And a postmodernist with an understanding of what he appropriates and the manner in which he cites • One of the predominant strands of contemporary art photography concerns the rejection of a continuous, recognisable technique ◦ Or style to declare the voice of the individual photographer ◦ Many photographers now rely on the use of a range of photoraphic conventions & languages • Christopher Williams's (1956) photos at first seem to be of different subject matters and styles ◦ However, there is also a palpable sense of a coherent visual langiage being set up by the dynamic between his photos ◦ Rather than primarily appreciating the virtuosity of the artist’s aesthetics or exploring a narrative of personal expression — we are encouraged to try to break the code of each photo & the relationship between the photos ◦ Behind the surface of his photos lies much researh & layering of a meaning that is in its simplest form ◦ In one commonly discussed example, he was taken with how corn byproducts figure in every aspect of our daily lives & even in photography itself ▪ Corn can be used as a lubricant for cleaning photo lenses and in the chemicals of fine art photographic prints ▪ Corn byproducts were also used to make the artificial corncobs that he photographed ▪ Corn & photography are therefore a subject and material of his photos ◦ His decision to use the style & production value of a still-life photographer serves as a way to direct the viewer away from searching for a signature & personalised narrative of the subject ◦ This trend became well established with more recent contemporary art photographers ▪ Mark Wyse (1970) ▪ Roe Ethridge (chapter 4) ▪ Elad Lassry (1977) ◦ It inspired practitioners in the mid 2000’s to reject a single photographic language in favour of a varied lexicon of signs, conventions & cliches • Photography’s mediation, dissemination & materiality are intrinsic narratives of Florian Maier-Aichen’s (1973) ‘the best general view’ ◦ The image is of the Yosemite Half Dome monolith from the perfect vantage point ◦ Realised as a large, lush, colour photo ◦ But is it not a simple photo of a mountain — its is a photomechanical print of a photo of a mountain ◦ Photography is both the mediator & subject ◦ The grand production values of his prints render photography itself an object of desire • The re-animation of existing photographic imagery is used by Daniel Gordon (1980) ◦ By using photographic imagery from online sources, he constructs elaborate scenes and 3D collages which he then takes photos of ◦ The interplay of 2D photographic depth and actual 3D space is mesmerising • Matt Lipps (1975) makes constructions akin to paper theatres which he dramatically lights then photographs ◦ He takes photos mainly from mid-20th-century magazines and books ◦ Creating sculptural photomotages that feature groups of historical & fictional characters • Sara VanDerBeek’s (1976) photographs from the mid-2000’s show sculptural forms made by the artist ◦ That create frameworks for photographic images drawn mainly from pages of magazines or books ◦ The structures are strange and idiosyncratic & obviously handcrafted ◦ By setting the found photos in 3D spaces, dramatically lighting them & then taking the image, she creates a magical interplay ◦ Between photography as a personal language of imagery and as a physical and material form • Lyle Ashton Harris’s (1965) ‘Blow up IV (Sevilla)’ is a wall collage made of his own images & found images ◦ The composition’s central photo is replicated many times in the piece and is of a french footballer having his legs massaged ◦ Formal composition resembles that of Edouard Manet’s painting ‘olympia’ ◦ He makes a map of visual and ideological connections from the central image ◦ He avoids a hierarchy that privileges his own photos over those he collected ◦ He makes an interesting restatement of postmodernist idea ▪ Blending high criticality & personal narrative to suggest that all photography carries representational meaning beyond the making or intent of the photo ◦ His work plays homage to other artists: ▪ Martha Rosler (1943) ▪ Lutz Bacher (1941) ▪ Sylvia Kolbowski (1953) • A number of artists have explored the versatile and ever-present nature of photography by using one compnent in their mixed media practise • Isa Genzken (1948) used her own photos and found photos as an element within her sculptural installations ◦ With no special privilege accorded to the medium or any barriers to its equal place within the scheme of her art ◦ She also challenges the production values of much contemporary art ▪ With her handcrafted, broken & non-functioning objects ◦ Photos embedded in and roughly taped onto the surface of the sculptures ◦ Their cheap materiality purposefully evident • Within pan-media practise, photography is used in various ways — as an ingredient that can either intentionally disrupt or consolidate the overall narrative of an installation or artwork • In Michael Queenland’s (1970) practise, photography is explored along with other art materials as. transformative took of quotidian objects & experiences ◦ He casts balloons in plaster and bronze ◦ Nade loves of bread in porcelain ◦ Constructed totem-like wooden sculptures that combine modern sculptures and their dislay plinths in single rough & oragnic forms ◦ To these playful subversions of art’s formal language he adds his photos ◦ Photography becomes just one phrase in an overall statement ◦ Subjected to a consciously ambigious but highly specified treatment • Emmeline de Mooij’s (1978) exhibitions bring together photography, print making, sculpture and textile works ◦ In gallery installations that dramatise the physical properties of the different media ◦ And collectively emphasise the idiosyncrasy of human mark-making and the ordering of things • Arthur Ou’s (1974) installation for the 2006 Taipei Biennial is dominated by the fabrication of a fireplace designed by a modernist architect ◦ Copies of which are found in countless suburban homes ◦ On the shelves are twin urns melded into one single object ◦ The ceramic works, coupled with the non-functioning fireplace facade, carry an eerie charge ◦ On the walls of the installation are framed photos — neutral dipictions of observed and assembled subjects ◦ A photo of a cabinet containing fancy china makes the contrast between the legacy of Eastern exports to the West & Ou’s subversion to it in his own ceramic pieces ◦ He characterises photography as one of the industrial processes that usered in modernity in the 19th century ◦ The use of the installation format to create an enveloping layered experience of photographic imagery is extremely rich in contemporary art practise • Walead Beshty (1976) is best known for his photograms ◦ Made by folding large sheets of photo paper into 3D shapes while in a darkroom ◦ Then exposing the structures to light ◦ The tears and creases left in the paper, as well as the shapes of colour made by the folded papers irregular exposure to light, reate strong declarations of the unique materiality of photography ◦ Fine line between presenting works of overwhelming beauty & making the conditions of the work’s production explicit ◦ Also true in the context of his more sculptural works ▪ Such as his series of double-laminated safety-glass sculptures ▪ Made to the copyrighted proportions of the FedEx boxes they are shipped from one exhibition location to the next in ▪ Some are damaged and even lost — evidence of their process of distribution becoming part of the work • Many of the most thoughtful art photographers since 2000 have made the rich history of the photographic materials & process the explicit subject of their work ◦ Beginning in 1998, Zoe Leonard (chapter 7) made a 10 year project called ‘analogue’ ◦ Documenting shop displays of modest goods & homemade advertising signs ◦ Her photos began in New York and expanded worldwide ◦ She used a vintage camera — her project elides the shifting currencies of both local commerce and analogue photography ◦ It’s not a eulogy for two fading traditions — as she follows existing trade routes that still exist ◦ Her photography explicitly delcares the continuing and meaningful status of the wandering, observant street photographer ◦ The project is sensitised to photography’s 20th century heritage ◦ Makes for a poetic reminder of the still-resonant and intelligent ways that photography can abstract and make our experiences meaningful • The calculated use of historical photographic technique & iconographic convention is deployed by An-My Le’s (1960) ’29 palms’ series ◦ Her subject is a US Marine Crops training zone where soldiers prepare for combat in Iraq & Afghanistan ◦ Her decision to photograph the behind-the-scenes in b&w with a large-format camera calls forth the history of war photography ◦ Her work makes reference to the unofficial visualisations of the ongoing conflicts that soldiers & civilians have captured digitally ◦ By adopting a laboured and archaic form of photography, she makes them speak both of contemporary and age-old enactments of imperial power ◦ As well as the role that photography has played in such conflict • Anne Collier (1970) uses photography to create witty and linguistic propositions ◦ ‘blue sky grey sky’ loses from of its potency when described — because it intentionally appears effortless ◦ There is an intelligent flat-footedness in the way she strips an image down to its leanest visual economy ◦ Partly pays homage to conceptually driven photography of the 60’s and 70’s ◦ Can be read in a specific and descriptive way ◦ The title of the work is a litral descrption — but is also an invitation to affix binary emotional values to the optimism of the colour skyskapes & melancholy of its b&w counterpart • Liz Deschene’s (1966) work explores the idea of visual perception and its intersection with the technologies & experiences of photography and film ◦ One series consists of bold, pure sheets of colour made with a dye-transfer process ◦ Using printing pigments and accurate printing matrices, the dye-transfer proces has legendary status in photographic history ◦ Her use of analogue processes to simulate digital technologies in another series is typical of her continuing investigation into the nature of image making • Eileen Quinlan’s (1972) ‘smoke & mirrors’ series is a highly self-conscious proposition about making photographs ◦ Each image is unmanipulated with an emphasis upon the mistakes & imperfections of analogue photography ◦ She offers a meditation upon photography’s enduring qualities of luck and happenstance ◦ She cites historical references — from early 20th centiry paranormal to the formal imperatives od modernism & photographic abstraction ◦ Via the seductive qualities of commercial still-life photography • An exciting rejuvenation of experimental photographic practices is happening within the sphere of contemporary art photography ◦ Jessica Eaton (1977) creates multiple exposures of a white cube in her ‘cubes for albers and lewitt’ series ◦ The project intersects with minimalist at practises of the mid 20th century ◦ To create a timely reminder of photography’s innate capacity for visual economy in an experimental mode • The duo Taiyo Onorato (1979) and Nico Krebs (1979) have developed a studio-based practice that involves constructing kinetic objects ◦ Which they then explore photographically ◦ Their work is a commentary on photography’s alchemic and mistake-prone qualities ◦ Which they approach with visual humour • Reinvigorated experimentalism is also apparent in both the intentional use of old analogue photographic technologies & the application of analogue thinking to new digital modes of capture + post production ◦ The work of Carter Mull (1977) epitomise this creative challenge for contemporary art photographers ▪ In his recent work, the hybridity of media as a subject within contemporary art is played out ▪ He connects the histor of image making with the present ▪ His images give symbolic meaning to the present by emphasising the material ways in which technologies of mark-making are overlayed ▪ The viewer is asked to trace the everyday digital image-making that characterises modern life back to 60’s pop art, 20th century avant-garde practise & 18th century roots of photography + computing ▪ His work animates our symbolic and disceral knowledge of the modern-day media environment • Shannon Ebner’s (1971) photographic & sculptural work is concerned with language ◦ Both in her depoyment of the spoken & written languages of politics, protest & experimental literature ◦ As well as her use of photography as a language of visual signs ◦ Often working in b&w ◦ She creates a diverse scheme of iterations that explore how language embodies political and social structures ◦ Strong sense in her work of photography as a metaphor for things breaking down or functioning through false claims & rhetoric ◦ The work of Clunie Read (1971), Tris Vonna Michell (1982) & Sarah Conaway (1972) has a performative sense of photographic language ◦ Expressing how an artist crafts images within a certain intellectual discipline & from individual viewpoint — while remaining attuned to the instinctive and unpredictable nature of the photographic process • Since the mid 2000’s, a wave of creativity has come from contemporary art photographers who are repositioning the cultural value of b&w photography ◦ With the current dominance of colour photography in contemporary art, commercial images & everyday life, any young artist using b&w is doing so as a conscious counter-argument to the eafault aesthetic choice of photography ◦ For instance, Sharon Ya-aris (19660 photographic book ‘500m radius’ is a sequence of 40 unspectacular b&w photos made in the 500m radius of his former studio in Israel ▪ The nod to photograph’s conceptual past as well as the current rupture between the past & mediums future is heightened by the choice of worn out modernist utopianism ◦ Contemporary artists’ deployment of b&w photography creates an important and challenging resistance to the tendency for contemporary art photography to be dictated by commercially available technologies & fashionable trends ◦ It realigns contemporary practice with an intelligent and diverse history that includes: ▪ Avant-garde photography of the early 20th century ▪ Conceptual art of the 60’s ▪ The spirit of the New Topographics that emerged in the 70’s • There are two facets to Jason Evans’s (1966) ‘NYLPT’ project ◦ 80 of his double exposure b&w street photos are sequenced in a duotone prined book — referencing the conventions of photobooks in the 80s ◦ It is also available as an app ▪ Using a randomisation algorithm typically used for generating online security codes, the app displays a randomised sequence of 600 double exposure images from the project, fixed into a landscape format ▪ When each sequence is played, it’s accompanied by a sound element (generated from scratch each time to app is started) using 16 inbuilt synthesisers whose range of frequency & duration have been set by Evans himself ◦ The experience of the app is meditative and evokes the infinite possiblities of the photographic act ◦ At the heart of the project — the enduring quality & photography (street photography in particular) as an activity governed by chance ◦ It celebrates the randomness of both lived experience & photographic observation ◦ His project represents an exciting period for photography — essentialist and symbolic notions of the photographic are creatively and imaginatively played out ◦ In new and profound ways in the digital environment • We’re seeing a shift away from the traditional emphasis on artistic authorship ◦ As expresed through a consistent photographic style & a new focus on elaborate acts of sequencing and editing images for: ▪ Gallery exhibitions ▪ Artists’ books ◦ Through sophisticated approaches of photographers such as Marie Angeletti (1984) and Hannah Whitaker (1980) — authorship of the individual photographic images becomes almost secondary (to the cumulative meaning of assembled and manipulated imagery) • Photography publishing in the 21st century is a diverse and active area of photographic creativity ◦ New digital technologies have transformed traditional trade publishing and increased the potential for self-publishing and distribution by artists themselves ◦ The creative energy around photography publishing is reflected in its increased presence at photography and art fairs ◦ Photobooks are the focus of a developing collectors’ market ◦ Tim Barber (1979) set up his website in 2005, which consists of work by a range of established & emerging artists, and also featured a place to purchase and be informed about photobooks ◦ His project reflects how the internet has becoming embedded in photographic thinking by art practioners and how it functions as the primary vehicle for contemporary art photography outside of the gallery system ◦ Highlights how the hidden realities of being a photographer (sequencing, editing, curating & being engaged with other photographers’ work) can be made a visible part of the photographic community discourse • In this publishing climate, many contemporary art photographers are creating books (often self-published & with modest print runs) as a primary creative form ◦ The artist books published by Ed Rush (1937) since 1963 continue to be important models ◦ Photographers who became known because of their artists books are: ▪ Charlotte Bumas (1977) ▪ Cuny Janssen (1975) ▪ Anouk Kruithof (1981) • Viviane Sassen (1972) creates dazzling and optically surprising photographs across multiple photographic genres ◦ Her books are self-published in small print runs and brought her acclaim within the contemporary art sphere ◦ For her innovative design concepts and her aesthetic style which is brilliantly exaggerated by the materiality of the printed page ◦ Her images confound expetations of 2D and 3D space, image orientation, vantage point and positive & negative spaces ◦ There’s something very much of the photographic moment in the way that she works with her human subjects ◦ Providing the necessary happenstance to disrupt the images • Rinko Kawauchi’s (1972) books shape subtle narratives without the aide of interpretative text ◦ Her finely edited and accumulated observations leave the reader fully nourished by the exquisite and intriguing sights she actively seeks ◦ She is far from alone in the orb of contemporary art photography ◦ In not overcomplicating photographic strategies — and in remaining true to the notion that all around us are pictures waiting to happen ◦ Photographers such as: ▪ Mikiko Hara (1967) ▪ Anders Edstrom (1966) ▪ Anne Daems (1966) ▪ Jason Fulford (1973) ▪ All create similarly subtle photographic forms out of everyday observations ▪ While reinforcing the idea that the camera gives its carrier the actual & psychological permission to scrutinise life for beauty, wonder & humour • The emerging talents who are defining the field of photography as contemporary art began their creative lives within the social era of digital photography ◦ Make works that explore how new technologies feed into the analogue-framed discources of photography as contemporary art ◦ These digital-native photographers experiment across platforms ◦ The gallery is only one of several contexts for presenting work ▪ There is also online formats ▪ As well as traditional & electronic publishing ◦ They’re agnostic in thinking about high vs low culture ◦ Yet careful about how they approach photographic language in its different contexts • Lucas Blalock’s (1978) photos knowingly draw on defeault visual settings of digital photography and post- production into the trajectory of contemporary art photography ◦ His photos can be read as offering homage to the enduring capacity of photography to give visual charge and meaning to it subjects ◦ Yet his work toys critically with that notion ◦ His images bring the language of Photoshop into the principally American story of classic art photography & its history of appropriating vernacular style ◦ He revives modernist photographic conventions in the digital era • There’s almost a Baroque quality in the degree to which contemporary art photographers including Sam Falls (1984) and Joshua Citarella (1987) compound layer upon layer of image-making into their work ◦ Photoshop techniques, analogue photographic conventions, physical mark-making and construction combine ◦ To demonstrate how overly worked the medium of photography can now become • Kate Steciw (1979) combines photography with sculptural elements in her gallery installations ◦ By assembling visual elements from vernacular photography ▪ Generic, commerical product images ▪ That she renders into exaggerated forms using photoshop ▪ With cheap seemingly mass-produced sculptural elements ◦ Her projects draw a parallel between sculpture and photography ◦ As both a physical object and cultural ciphers • Artie Vierkant’s (1986) series of ‘image objects’ transer the dyanmics and aesthetics of digital photography & graphics tools ◦ Into seductive but disarming wall-based gallery experiences ◦ His approach is provocative ◦ He monumentalises the visual language of our screen-based everyday lives into formal objects • Anne de Vries (1977) works with photography, sculpture and new media ◦ He combines the modernist conventions of sculpture & installation art with visual motifs that reference advertising & amateur photography ◦ Distills contemporary visual culture into sculptural experiences ◦ That operate as philosophical abstractions of technological experience • The photographers who conclude this chapter encourage us to engage with the wonders of life and to recognise the beauty & magic that are still to be found photographically ◦ The enduring capacity of photography to abstract and give form to our experiences is continuously reworked and revived ◦ Both through reference to traditions of analogue photography & through tools of digital photography ◦ In an era where we receive, take, tag, browse and edit photos, we are all more invested and are more expert in the language of photography than ever before ◦ We have a greater appreciation for how photography can be far from neutral or transparent for bridged and framed moments of real time ◦ The photographers in this book rephrase our material & physical understanding of photography’s past ◦ While expanding the vocabulary of photography as contemporary art ◦ They show us ways of working & thinking that have real substance and direction in a digitised sphere ◦ With its constantly shifting values & evolving sense of what it truly means to make photographs