Focus on Photography

Focus on Photography Focus on Photography: Recent Acquisitions Karen K. Butler Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Doug Aitken screens, 2005 4 Focus on Photography: Recent Acquisitions Karen K. Butler Focus on Photography: Recent Acquisitions the limits of conventional genres such Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2010 draws together a selection of some of the as portraiture and landscape, to critique international symposium Is Photography significant photographs that the Mildred political and institutional structures Over?, point to the myriad positions Lane Kemper Art Museum has acquired and mores, and to explore questions of assumed and methods employed to through gifts and purchases in the last identity, subjectivity, and the very nature analyze the state of contemporary photog- five years. The exhibition presents a range of representation itself. The array of works raphy.1 Many of these critics have gone so of photographic practices, from historical on display in this exhibition, while varied far as to suggest that photography as it has works by photographers who defined the and unique, offers a lens through which traditionally been defined—as a modestly standards of the discipline to an interna- we might address a question weighing on scaled, handmade, black-and-white tional array of contemporary practitioners the minds of many artists and critics alike: print—is in a state of crisis or even, as who examine and expand the conventional what is photography today? the symposium title suggests, over. While parameters of the medium. In the work of there are certainly artists still working in artists such as Doug Aitken, Sophie Calle, The provocative and pointed nature of more traditional forms, photography for Andrea Fraser, David Goldblatt, John some recent book and symposium titles, many contemporary artists has become Stezaker, and Wolfgang Tillmans, to name including Michael Fried’s Why Photography large scale, intensely colored, theatrical, only a few, photography is used to probe Matters as Art as Never Before and the San and often intermingled with other mediums 1. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as recent prominent discussions of the state of photography, Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, see George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” 2008). For more on the symposium at the San Francisco October 114 (Fall 2005): 120–40; and Matthew Witkovsky, Museum of Modern Art, see http://www.sfmoma.org/ “Another History,” ArtForum 48, no. 7 (March 2010): 213– pages/research_projects_photography_over, including 21, 274. See also Rosalind Krauss’s influential essay from statements from thirteen artists, curators, and critics the late 1990s, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry responding to the symposium’s central question. For other 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 289–305. 5 Doug Hall Times Square, 2004 such as performance and cinema.2 Some life-size, black-and-white photograph. object-centered approach to photographic attribute this to the influence of the digital Sophie Calle receives an upsetting email production. Rather, these artists work image, whereas others cite the impact of from a boyfriend, sends it to 107 women, in what art historian George Baker has performative and cinematic modes or the asks them to respond in their professional termed “photography’s expanded field,” or trend toward installation-based practices.3 capacities, and then films and photographs photography filtered through a wide range What critics do seem to agree on is that the them performing their responses according of artistic practice such as film, video, apparent “crisis” in photography today has to their chosen métier. Andrea Fraser and performance, as well as a variety of significantly altered the nature of photog- borrows slides of well-known paintings by modes of display, including installations, raphy as we know it. renowned male artists from a slide library, magazines, books, the Internet, and the superimposes two of them, photographs museum or gallery space.4 What is contemporary photography? Let us the resulting juxtaposition, then enlarges start with three very different examples. it and prints it out in luminous color. All THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION Wolfgang Tillmans takes a photograph of a of these artists use photography, but man walking through a forest, photocopies none of them applies it in what we might By the end of the nineteenth century, it so it becomes dark, flat, and blurry, then consider a “traditional” way—that is, photography had taken on a powerful social scans it, enlarges it, and prints out a single, with a seemingly objective, nonreflexive, role that derived in part from its mechanical 2. Perhaps in response to the loss of the traditional phenomenon, see Lyle Rexer, Photography’s Antiquarian 3. For a variety of positions on the topic of recent trends in photographic object, contemporary artists have also begun Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (New York: photography, see the collection of essays in The Meaning to turn to antiquated techniques, such as the camera Harry N. Abrams, 2002). of Photography, ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson obscura, the daguerreotype, the tintype, the photogram, (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art and the photogravure, among others, as a way to counter Institute, 2008). See also Baker, “Photography’s Expanded the expansion of contemporary practice into other modes Field.” and return to photography as craft. For a discussion of this 6 Edward Sheriff Curtis Edward Sheriff Curtis Pottery Burners at Santa The Apache Reaper, 1906 Clara, 1905 ability to register the physical world. The such as President Theodore Roosevelt science, part art—in the first decades indexical promise of photography offered and financier and banker John Pierpont of the twentieth century: he employed a means of knowing the world that was Morgan, Curtis visited more than eighty photography to record and reveal informa- thought to be objective and could be used tribes across the United States and Canada tion, and yet many of his photographs are to record aspects of nature and society in order to document, through photog- deeply influenced by aesthetic conven- that were disappearing due to the rapid raphy, sound recordings, and written tions borrowed from traditions of painting. progress of modernization and industry. accounts, the customs and traditions of Although he set out with ethnographic Native Americans. The North American ambitions, the works he created are Edward Curtis’s monumental and by Indian, published between 1907 and 1930, mediated though nostalgia for a preindus- now historic project to photograph and consists of twenty volumes of explana- trial, Arcadian existence. For instance, the preserve the culture of disappearing North tory text and photographic illustrations large portfolio plate The Apache Reaper, American Indian tribes engaged with this and twenty portfolios of larger, individual a photograph taken in 1906, shows a man history of objective observation just as its photogravure plates that complement leaning forward in the act of cutting a field promise was coming to an end.5 Working the text volumes. Curtis’s complicated of wheat, and yet the gradual blurring, alone or with various assistants, and project illustrates, among other things, the the subtle tonal contrasts, and the artful with support from prominent individuals conflicted nature of photography—part lighting that highlight the figure against the 4. For an intriguing look at the way in which photographic 5. Two contemporary photographers in this exhibition are are being razed for modern developments (such as the practice has expanded beyond the concept of the motivated by the same sense of historical urgency. Howard 2010 World Expo). MacWeeney creates semidocumentary photographic print, see the Guggenheim Museum’s 2010 French and Alen MacWeeney both use the photographic scenes of Ireland that are highly composed, cropped, and exhibition catalog, Haunted: Contemporary Photography medium to preserve cultures and traditions that are color-enhanced, yet intended to provide unfettered access / Video / Performance, ed. Jennifer Blessing and Nat threatened by modernization. In his project Disappearing to the essence of the sitter or scene. Trotman (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010). Shanghai (2007), French, an American photojournalist, records scenes of life in Shanghai’s old quarters, which 7 David Goldblatt Abandoned farmhouse near Molteno, Eastern Cape, 25 February 2006 dark hills and the setting sun monumen- capture the psychological essence of an thereby aligning himself with international talize and idealize the anonymous figure individual. Influenced by his friendship with developments in the field, in particular in a way that recalls nineteenth-century Picasso and the theatricality of Surrealist with what some art historians have called painted depictions of rural peasant life. art and photography, Clergue consciously “the tableau form,” or large-scale work engaged with a fine arts tradition rather designed for the wall that summons a Almost a half-century later, in France in than a documentary one by, for example, confrontational experience on the part the 1950s, Lucien Clergue was intent on supplanting the painted portrait with of the spectator.7 Goldblatt’s subtle escaping the conventions of photojour- the photographic image. Yet, his position message of political and economic critique nalism in the first half of the twentieth still relied on a belief in the photographic is

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