What Photography Is by Elkins James;

Author:Elkins, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

61

Fourth farewell: international fine art figure photography, by people like Struth, Wall, Ruff, Dijkstra, Catherine Opie, Gregory Crewdson, and Evelyn Hofer. It is hard, in a different way, to give up photographs of people when those photographs are intended as art, and—let’s say—do a fairly good job of being convincing artworks. Then the machinery of art theory and art history roll into place, confusing and silencing my own reactions. That machinery is loud and coercive, not unlike the “shock” effects Barthes so disliked: art historical claims on the photo’s significance remove much of my freedom to see what I might want to see. Michael Fried’s formidable propulsive arguments echo in my mind as I look at Ruff’s blank-faced sitters (supposedly connected to themes of “facingness” from the Manet of the 1860s) and Dijkstra’s self-conscious models (supposedly they work in the gap between awareness of the camera and awareness of themselves, re-energizing the “antitheatrical tradition”). (Fried, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before; “Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography,” History of Photography, 2010.)

But for me, art historical references can’t save the day. They do not always persuade me of the work’s significance, and they are often old fashioned. Jeff Wall’s elaborate staged street scenes, beginning with Mimic in 1982, are homages to street photography and to the history of painting. They reveal an erudite and scholarly devotion to the past, beyond anything any previous photographer has managed. (Some of Wall’s essays could have gotten him tenure as a professor of art history, even without his photographic practice.) Wall works very hard to achieve a simulacrum of the photographic instant and fuse it with the impacted thought and micro-management of nineteenth-century French painting. Mimic, and his other posed and composed scenes, are minutely staged facsimiles of spontaneity, achieved as if he were a painter. (It was a virtue, I think, that Cartier-Bresson was an indifferent draftsman, and did not really have a sense of drawn composition, because that lack led him to choose compositions that are weak from a painterly point of view. And does it matter that Barthes’s own paintings are all-over patterns, with no eccentric details to discover?—Roland Barthes: Intermezzo, edited by Achile Bonito Oliva.) I love Wall’s perverse artificiality as much as anyone, but why is it interesting to emulate the values of nineteenth-century painting in the twenty-first century? Why make art that draws on art historical scholarship written in the 1970s and 1980s on the subject of French painting of the 1860s and 1870s? In some thoughtful essays, Wall argues that photography has needed to remember it is a naturalistic art, and therefore not a good fit for conceptualism or minimalism, but that does not justify the exact practices he adopts. The photographs seem to be on an elaborate life-support system, intravenously fed by pure streams of academic art history.

(I find Thomas Demand’s practice much stronger because it does not need that life-support system—and, not coincidentally, it does not need people. I would have a hard time giving up Demand’s photographs, and luckily I don’t need to because they depict only paper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.