By Trevor Paglen Published: 3. March 2014 A few years ago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a conference about photography – for a photo conference, it had the odd title “Is Photography Over?.” Curators Sandra Phillips and Dominic Wilsdon posed the question as a challenge to panelists, audience members and the world at large. The two-day symposium was an attempt to shake up conventional institutionalized discourses about photography and to be an opportunity to think about what, if anything, has “changed” about photography over the last decade or so. From my point of view, the fact that the world’s leading photo-curators would even pose such a question turned out to be more illuminating than most of the symposium’s content. Wilsdon and Phillips’ provocation reflects a deep-seated uneasiness among photo-theorists and practitioners about the state of their field. To me, traditional approaches to doing-photography and thinking-about-photography feel increasingly anachronistic. Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us – the world of images and image-making that we inhabit – it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition. These changes are difficult to make sense of within photo theory’s existing critical and practical framework; hence the question “is photographer over?” In the first instance, the rise of digital photography and image-processing software has fundamentally altered the craft. Digital cameras are cheap and ubiquitous; image-processing software (whether on-camera firmware or applications like Photoshop and Instagram) has made it extraordinarily easy to produce an image-quality that was previously only possible with years of specialized training in equipment, shooting technique, and printing methods. The de-specialization of photography is an area of much concern among curators responsible for sorting out what’s worth paying attention to, and to practitioners who’ve seen their ability to make a living get much, much harder (witness the near collapse of photo-journalism as a profession). In this sense, perhaps the advent of digital photography and automated image-processing means that the traditional craft of photography is largely “over.” On the cultural side, the digital “revolution” has meant an upheaval in the photographic landscape. What is the place of photography in society when there are now well over 250 billion photographs on Facebook (<http://tinyurl.com/k57gzwq> with an additional 350 million added daily), where the average person sees over 5,000 advertisements a day <http://tinyurl.com/l3vzx3g> , and where photography has come to inhabit the very core of our “technological a priori.” Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that “photography” and “seeing” are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics. Why look at any particular image, when they are literally everywhere? Perhaps “photography” has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps “photography,” as a meaningful cultural trope, is over. The landscape of traditional photography theory and criticism is in a similarly contorted shape. On one hand, the digital revolution and landscape of ubiquitous image-making has created a situation where curators and critics specializing in photography have to define the field exceedingly narrowly in order to have an ‘object’ of discourse at all. In order to have anything to curate, critique, or discuss, a very small slice of the photographic landscape has to be carved out and isolated for discussion, such as “fine-art” photography, “documentary” photography, “historical” photography, even “analog” photography. As a consequence of narrowing the objects of inquiry so dramatically, the critical discussion around photography ends up inevitably admitting only a very small range of photographic practices into its purview. Consequently, critical discussions take shape around a small range of photographic images and practices which are extreme exceptions to the rule. Photography theory and criticism has less and less to do with the way photography is actually practiced by most people (and as well will see, most machines) most of the time. The corollary to this narrowing of the field is that traditional conversations and problems of photo theory have become largely exhausted. Simply put, there is probably not much more to say about such problems as “indexicality,” “truth claims,” “the rhetoric of the image,” and other touchstones of classical photography theory. And what remains to be said about these photographic “problems” seems increasingly extraneous to the larger photographic landscape that we inhabit. As a matter-of-course, the state-of-the-field that I’ve described in a few hundred words here is blunt, without nuance, and bombastic. There are, of course, numerous exceptions to the broad outlines above. My point in doing this is to simply sketch out some possible reasons for photography’s leading thinkers and practitioners to ask whether “photography is over.” Given the dramatic changes that have taken place in the photographic landscape over the last decade or so, it seems perfectly reasonably to ask whether a traditional notion of “photography” is over. But if a traditional understanding of “photography” is ill-suited to making sense of the 21st Century’s photographic landscape, then how do we begin to think about what “photography” has become and is becoming. Over the next few weeks, I want begin thinking about how to begin thinking through the 21st Century’s emerging photographic landscape, and the ways both photographic practices and photographs themselves are changing. To do that, I want to start from the beginning by developing an expanded definition of photography, and exploring the implications of that expanded definition. I’ll start by introducing the idea of photography as “seeing machines” and explore questions such as: How do we see the world with machines? What happens if we think about photography in terms of imaging systems instead of images? How can we think about images made-by-machines-for-other-machines? What are the implications of a world in which photography is both ubiquitous and, curiously, largely invisible? Without question, the 21st Century will be a photographic century. Photography will play a more fundamental role in the functioning of 21st Century societies than 20th Century practitioners working with light-sensitive emulsions and photographic papers could have ever dreamed. So while in one sense photography might be “over,” in another, it’s barely gotten going. And we haven’t seen anything yet. Stay tuned. FOTOMUSEUM.CH © by Fotomuseum Wintherthur. >>> SEEING OUT LOUD: JERRY SALTZ ON THE BEST BOOTH AT THE INDEPENDENT ART FAIR By Jerry Saltz 3/8 If all songs are love songs, then maybe all stories of obsession are stories of love and doom, from Sentimental Education and Lolita to Horse Crazy and Moby-Dick. I saw two magnificent tales of photographic obsession this week at the Susanne Zander Gallery booth at the Independent, one of three art fairs I visited in four days. They’re in a compact four-person show titled “artist unknown,” and it contains only work created by anonymous makers. Sinking into it, letting myself be taken up in its intractable magic I remembered the Velvet Underground's lyric in “Some Kind of Love”: "No kinds of love are better than others." Whoever the anonymous makers were, regardless of their motivations and compulsions, I saw art driven by inner necessity, elaborate imagination filled with pathos, intensity, something pitiable but incredibly celebratory. First, there are eight pictures out of an incredible cache of 380 small-scaled color photos, mostly Polaroids, found in a suitcase in Germany. All we know is that they were made between January 1988 and July 1995 by a Hamburg cross-dresser who called himself Martina Kubelk. In all of them we see Martina home alone in her parlor, kitchen, or boudoir. In four of the images she's dressed as a middleclass hausfrau, a woman of about 50. She wears grandmother dresses, sweaters, skirts, micromesh black nylon stockings. Nothing that sexy. Always posing demurely, never in any sensational or exhibitionist way, she wears cheap wigs and unfashionable glasses, holds a timer, and looks directly into the camera. We can't help but notice her over-size head and almost anorexic mien. This makes the pictures deeply disjunctive, a dance between fantasy, love, pain, and absurdity. In one picture of Martina in a floral silk blouse, aqua skirt, and white pumps we can see something like family pictures visible in the background. A life that probably none of these people knows about takes unfolds before us, an enigmatic crack in a crystalline life. Against this picture of someone you’d pass in the market or waiting for a bus comes the Mr. Hyde side of Martina: a series of photos of her in black bras and panties, garter-belts and latex lingerie. The pictures are not sordid or perverse. They're images of need, _expression_, a someone prying herself open. It's like those online pics of teenage girls posing in their daily outfits just to see how they look. Here, we see Martina seeing how she'd look to someone who might desire her simply as she is. If there's any perversion to these pictures it's the stricture against someone simply being able to dress the way they like. Perhaps this is why all of Martina's p m in either Shirley Temple poses or ballerinas. After this dip into the deep end of need, you can go even deeper, as you move over to a grouping of vintage prints from a man we know only as Gunther K. They are from a cache of 350 similar images and documents all recording an affair that took place in 1969 and 1970 in Köln between Gunter, who was 36, and his secretary Margret <http://tinyurl.com/kpnelrq> , who was 24. As with Martina, there's nothing sexual or sordid going on in these images. Nothing smutty or very seductive. Here, we're in the presence of two detached people, isolated in their own world in private and public. It's almost an image of an otherwise empty place—the way the world can sometimes seem when we're in the grip of an obsessive affair like this. In the pictures we see only Margret, the object of Gunter’s fascination and compulsion. He records her sitting in beds and cars, getting dressed, washing up, smoking, putting on make-up, at tourist attractions, in restaurants. The color is washed-out, that of another time; the settings are secluded in some middle Alpine landscape, along roads, in fake Tudor hotels. One tantalizing image of Margret her in lace panties and bra comes as close as we get to seeing Gunter: His reflection is there in the bathroom mirror behind here, but it’s obscured by the blast of a camera flash. Her always-perfect, carefully quaffed strawberry-blonde bouffant, simple white dresses, flowered robes, and vacant expressions create an incredible counterpart to his almost scientific indexing of her every move. This counterbalance shatters in the accompanying paraphernalia collected by Gunter. He kept an index of almost everything that he and Margret did and had an obsession with anything she touched. We see clippings of her fingernails and pubic hair, discarded birth-control dispensers, and hotel bills. He notes their lovemaking in exacting detail, recording duration of sexual acts, angles of penetration, how he cupped her breast, the way she washed herself after sex. It's not smut but more like science. (And it's in German.) It's all just facts that add up to the doom that awaits these lovers. We learn at the end only that Margret became pregnant and then got an abortion, and the affair seems to fade after that. The last entries record how they lay in beds just holding one another. This is what makes these two unknown artists great: complex visions replete with an abject, demonic need, psychosexual drive, humor, and excruciating consciousnesses enslaved to love. Many of us are dragged down and blown out by art fairs. This week alone, New York saw more than a half-dozen of them. I had enough trouble just looking at three. But even though they're guided by finance and networking, they can still be places where—if you really look and stay open—you can be caught off guard and discover deeper meaning. I left the Independent reminded that we should never count anything out, even if we think we're above it all. Copyright © 2010 - 2014, New York Media LLC >>> CHARLES HARBUTT, A PHOTOGRAPHER CAPTIVATED BY MAGIC IN PICTURES By Holly Bailey March 3, 2014 Charles Harbutt has always been fascinated by magic, dating back to when he performed tricks of illusion for his friends as a kid growing up in Teaneck, N.J. By the time he got to high school in 1949, Harbutt had long grown out of the idea that he might become a next-generation Houdini. But he was still different from the other kids at his school, where sports was almost a religion. Either you were on a team or you stood in the stands cheering — and Harbutt wasn’t interested in either. But he found an out by signing up as a photographer for the school paper, and soon, he was on the sidelines making pictures. It was the first time Harbutt had ever seriously used a camera, and, as he recalled in a recent interview, “It changed my life.” At first, his decision to take pictures was a little about vanity. Harbutt liked seeing his images alongside his name in the paper. But soon, he realized photography was also a way for him to continue exploring the themes that had captivated him about magic, including the idea of reality versus perception and how what you see in pictures wasn’t necessarily the original intent of the photograph. Those themes are on display in “Departures and Arrivals,” a retrospective of Harbutt’s career on display at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson until June 1. The exhibition includes what Harbutt describes as his “favorite photos” from his nearly six decades of working as a professional photographer, including a stint as president of the renowned photo agency Magnum. It includes photos from all over the world — from a desolate highway in rural New Mexico to the packed streets of Paris, where Harbutt took a picture through a car window of people outside the Gare Montparnasse railroad station. The resulting photo, titled “Mr. X-Ray Man,” is a riddle for the eye. There’s a balance of dark and light, forming different shapes. There are competing reflections of buildings and people, and it is also a self-portrait of the photographer at work. It is Harbutt’s favorite photo of his long career — in part because the end result was so different than the picture he thought he was taking. “I thought it was a straightforward image, but I hadn’t noticed the details,” Harbutt recalled. “But many times, you don’t. Sometimes you don’t see what the picture really is until after you’ve taken it.” Harbutt almost didn’t become a photographer. In high school, he won awards for his photos — including an honorable mention in a national high school photo contest sponsored by Kodak. (One of the other winners was Bruce Davidson, who later went on to be one of Harbutt’s colleagues at Magnum.) But Harbutt still believed he was destined to be a writer — and he focused as much on words as photos during college. Then in 1959, when he was 23, Harbutt, who was then working as a writer and photographer for the Catholic magazine Jubilee, was invited by supporters of Fidel Castro to come and document the Cuban revolution. Harbutt, who didn’t speak Spanish, immediately jumped on a plane and arrived in Havana just two days before Castro ascended into power. What he found was chaos. He saw dead bodies for the first time — of fallen Castro supporters killed by government troops. He spent a night in jail after being arrested for being a member of the press. And he was overwhelmed that it was people his own age who were fighting to change their government. For Harbutt, it was the most exhilarating moment of his life, and he knew he couldn’t go back to being a writer. He wanted to be on the front lines, documenting those stories with images. “This was living,” Harbutt recalled. “If being a photographer could bring me to all this, I would become one.” Within a few years, Harbutt had joined Magnum and had photographed everything from wars to Woodstock. He became a legend in New York, working with celebrated photographers like Garry Winogrand — who, along with Harbutt, taught photography to young up-and-comers at a time when people could still meet and learn from the industry's greats. But during the turbulent politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Harbutt began to feel disillusioned about his role as a photojournalist. To him, it seemed more and more events were being staged — including an incident in the spring of 1970 in which federal agents posed as hippies trying to incite violence during a Black Panther protest at Yale University. “It made me question everything I was doing,” Harbutt recalled. “I’m supposed to be impartially documenting reality, but I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.” So Harbutt began focusing increasingly on his personal work — which was less about reportage and more about the scenes he saw from day to day. To some, they might have been images of the ordinary — cigarette smoke rising in the sunlight, the reflections on storefront windows, people walking to work. But to Harbutt, his focus wasn’t about subject matter; it was about how a single picture could be perceived differently though shapes and reflections and the looks on peoples’ faces. It was about illusions and perceptions — the same kind of magic that had fascinated him as a kid. Soon, he had a new mantra about photography. “I don’t take pictures,” said Harbutt, who, at age 78, is still working the camera. “Pictures take me.” <http://tinyurl.com/kvvc54l> Art Faul The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Art for Cars: art4carz.com Stills That Move: http://www.artfaul.com Greens: http://www.inkjetprince.com Camera Works - The Washington Post . |
