Photography at the Tipping Point
Like painting, photography has been declared dead, but so far there has been no public fuss or outcry about the medium's demise, although the obituary was published nearly fifteen years ago. "From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989 photography was dead," William J. Mitchell wrote in The Reconfigured Eye (1992), "—or more precisely, radically and permanently displaced—as was painting 150 years before." Yet photographic images surround us everywhere and most people hardly stop and think of how they got there or how they were made or who made them. In the day-to-day world, these matters are of little consequence; the smooth surface of our image culture remains unruffled. Painting is still around, too, lately experiencing yet another comeback. It is undead even though the invention of photography in 1839 was said to make it obsolete, in the face of science, to create images with pigments and hairs attached to the end of a stick. The new technology obviously trumped painting as an engine for rendering a truthful appearance of the real world.
As it happened, painting and photography struck up a relationship almost immediately. Instead of dying out, painting absorbed not only photographic images and visual effects but also photographic thinking, and in the process reinvigorated itself. Photography, for its part, extended itself to become a malleable, plastic medium capable both of acquiring painting's scale and of constructing complete fictions. At the same time, it returned to realism as a style, restating in a different way photography's nature as a medium connected directly to the appearance of the world. Now, however, the impact of a newer technology, the so-called digital revolution of the 1990s, is making itself increasingly felt through the ready accessibility of digital-imaging technology, and thus the end of photography or "photography as we know it" is announced. Digital technology promises to change everything, not that traditional photography has led a laid-back or static existence. Tied securely to advances in camera and film technology, photography has changed dramatically over the past 166 years, but most radically and rapidly in the past fifteen. It is, of course, digital technology that has enabled the most radical extension of photography's capabilities. Although the implications, both discernible and theoretical, of digital imaging and the complexities of its uses are many, the truth is that, so far, digital photography has not broken completely with "photography as we know it." It has not yet let go its hold on the world out there, although it can alter it at will.
As though to prove the point, there was a sense of convergence in the exhibition "Real Pictures: Photographs from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft," as historical photographs met the work of artists using photography. Curated by Grant Arnold and shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in spring 2005, "Real Pictures" was a gauge of the present state of photography. More than 370 works covered the medium from the 1840s to the present. Formed by two collectors who are passionate and curious about photography in all of its manifestations—artistic and non-artistic; historical, modern and contemporary; unique and editioned prints and albums—the Beck/Gruft collection has exceptional scope. It contains most of the photographic genres and techniques in use since the 1840s, including photographic postcards, the equivalent of an instant news flash, taken in the streets by unknown photographers during the Mexican Revolution, and work by high modernists like Harry Callahan. In an exhibition hung thematically within a loose chronology, the earliest photographs were in the first gallery, although the title panel carried a digital photograph made two years ago. From one vantage point, it was possible to take in Charcoal Burners, a calotype from 1845 by the British inventor of the negative/positive process, the seed of modern photography, William Henry Fox Talbot; Man on Horse, an 1887 collotype from Animal Locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge, the British inventor of one of the first camera shutters and the chemical and mechanical means he used to take sequential photographs of people and animals in motion; and Inspecting, Allan O'Connor searches for Botrytis cinerea, a digital chromogenic print made in 2003 by the Vancouver-based artist-photographer Scott McFarland, who assembled his lush picture seamlessly from several exposures and composed it like a painting.
The three photographs have in common their realism, the prevailing tendency exhibited in the Beck/Gruft collection from beginning to end. The clear, detailed, documentary realism of the Fox Talbot somehow still carries the aura of a freshly captured, unmediated reality that we know does not exist. The scientifically staged, analytical Muybridge breaks down rapid, continuous motion into a series of sequential still images that deconstructs human perception to show the unaided eye what it cannot see, that all four hooves of a galloping horse are at one time off the ground. The McFarland, a large colour picture that makes its intense fictional reality seem the order of the day, manipulates camera vision in order to emulate what the eye sees. The triangulation of these photographs, as Arnold puts it, is "an encapsulation of the historic moment we are at now."
With the advent of digital imaging, photography as we have known it is entering its historical phase. "We're at a tipping point," says Joel Sternfeld, an American photographer with work in "Real Pictures," as quoted in the New York Times in 2004. "The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype." What is more, the core of the discourse on photography has not changed for nearly two centuries: it has centred on the medium's relationship to reality and the issue of truth, whether from the perspective of pre-modernism, modernism (photography captures objective truth) or postmodernism (all photography is fiction). This seems certain to become a non-issue as the digital era deepens.
Images that look like photographs can be constructed entirely in the computer even now. Just as Kodak put the box camera and roll film into the hands of every proud parent and tourist, now everyone with a desire to take and remake photographs can have a digital camera and "darkroom" at home. It is telling that the advertising slogan for the HP Photosmart Solution is "Click, Print, Invent." The generation that has grown up on the computer is hardly likely to find a compelling debate in the truth or falsity of photography. It distributes the photographic images it "invents," a verb that stresses concept over process, by e-mail or posts them on the Internet. Kodak recently announced the advent of a digital camera that will transmit images wirelessly from the camera to its printer or to any e-mail address. The photograph has been dematerialized.
It seems certain that one day, not soon, photography will no longer hold on to its connection to the world out there that we refer to as reality. The medium is being transformed by innumerable combinations and permutations of technology— by the manipulation of analog technology by digital technology, by the capabilities of digital cameras and printers, by the computer-manipulation of digital photographs, by the enlarged scale that digital technology permits, by computer-generated images or CGIs and so on. Not as troubling to the computer-raised generation as to older folk, digital manipulations of photographs—rearrangements of the elements in images, collages of images from different exposures or sources, erasures, colour changes or enhancements, added or subtracted shading—are invisible to the eye.
One of the instructive pleasures of an inclusive array of photographs like "Real Pictures" is the great variety of processes on view: calotype, woodburytype, salted paper print, carbon print, collotype, cyanotype, silver albumen print, platinum print, photogravure, silver gelatin print, offset lithograph, azo dye print, Polaroid SX-70 print, dye transfer print, ink-jet print, chromogenic print and digital chromogenic print. This recitation of the names of processes might seem to be one of strange alchemies, but the distinctive characteristics of each, which cannot be experienced in reproductions on the pages of books or catalogues, emphasize the fact that photographs are material objects whose physical properties are defined by processes. The glassy transparency of digital photography erases the trace of process and leaves the viewer to fall back on perception, intuition and knowledge of the way camera optics work and the way the world looks to interpret its images.
But what will photography be when it is no longer connected to the world out there as a material trace? Will it be photography? We will need a new definition, something else to call it. It is not surprising, then, that aspects of digital imaging and the society that has created it have become the medium-critical subject or undercurrent subject matter of both analog and digital photography. At the present moment, photography has never been so elastic or inclusive in its references to the histories of photography, art and technology. This is due not only to the uses of digital technology but also to developments in art and photography since the conceptualism of the 1960s led to neo-conceptualism, picture theory, staged photography and the new documentary realism. However, this is realism with a twist. "Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality anymore, but images we have of that reality," says Thomas Ruff, quoted in the catalogue to the exhibition "The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982."
Evan Penny's No One—In Particular (2001), a chromogenic photograph in "Real Pictures," is the image of one of his own sculptures, a portrait bust from a series of portrait busts distorted by camera optics, whose features were cobbled together, eyes here, nose there, from media images and observations of people on the street. Penny has made up the physiognomy from details detached from specificity, whose randomness signals that this is not a portrait. The photograph, an image of an image, takes the format of the ID photo, matching the work of the German photographer Thomas Ruff, but the ironic "original" refers to the hybrid, unfixed, even alien nature of identity in the digital era (especially on the Internet, where it is commonplace to assume personas in chat rooms and avatars in games).
Thomas Demand's chromogenic prints, some of which were recently shown in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, are images of images of images, photographs of life-size coloured-paper and cardboard models of newspaper and magazine photographs. The Demands seem realistic from a certain viewing distance but on closer approach their artificiality becomes apparent. Their images are precise descriptive renderings stripped of the details that are characteristic of photographs and that give specificity to the places and objects they portray. Sites charged with significance and reproduced in the media—Hitler's bunker, the kitchen of a farmhouse where Saddam Hussein hid, Jeffrey Dahmer's hallway—are reduced to no place in particular. Their depleted value as information is exchanged for aesthetic value. With their pristine, smooth-surfaced objects, structural clarity and heightened, airtight visual atmospheres, they might be CGIs.
For the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, who is sometimes called the philosopher of new media, the invention of photography was the most important cultural invention since linear writing in the second millennium BCE. The photograph, which Flusser theorized as the first technical image, overcame "the artificial separation of culture into science, technology, and art," as Andreas Ströhl, the editor of Flusser's book Writings, explains. In the early 1980s, Flusser proposed that the crux of photography criticism was not the relationship between an object and its representation. "Truth is a relationship between a statement and its meaning," he wrote. "Photography turns the relationship between statement and meaning completely around. The photograph does not discover meanings, but rather, it gives them. It does not matter if they are true or false—even if this could be established. The critical question is, Which meaning does it intend to give according to which criteria? The criterion 'true'—the value 'truth'—is no longer operative in photography and must be abandoned."
Many artists using photography in the early 1980s were abandoning truth in photography in different ways. But whether art photography will ever completely sever its direct connection to the world, and abandon the notion of truth or reality as something to embrace or something to work against, is debatable, although digital imaging is already doing it in the commercial world. In the meantime, at the tipping point, digital imaging has struck up a relationship with both photography and painting. Picture-theory artists and photographers in Düsseldorf and Vancouver have shown that a photograph can be an autonomous object, pure picture. The tipping point is a rich place to be for photography, filled with potential that will be worked out in the evolving practice of artists.
Winter 2005
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