Getting beyond: is photography a lost tradition?

Poststructuralism, postmodernism, postmorality--the question of whether "post" is an accomplishment or merely an operative word seems to be an enduring dilemma. The question for photography since World War II has been whether the medium can excel to overcome a precluding rejection of the modernist era. The 1980s exacerbated this concept through its practice and term--postmodernism. Perhaps, then, a diarrhetic generalization of Modernism's claim for medium dominance is a type of media enlightenment that might be a historical occurrence that is applicable to photography with distinction.

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An academic complaint in photography exists. Digitization, pixelation, and other means of capturing the imaging process and a more sculptural, three-dimensional, or "real" effect, have reduced the magician's chemicals to virtual reality. Beyond Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Strand, another question to ask may be, "To what degree does a 'post-photography' era have the stamina to survive in a manner that can transform modernist photographic traditions and aesthetics, otherwise considered as classic?" (1) It seems to present a practical and philosophical debate, given some current work.

Perhaps the best method for response is to examine photography's parturition as a plural (meaning "photographies"), recognizing that even since photography's beginnings in 1839, there was a seventeenth-century origin that would allow photography to exist in more than one form. (2) Inventions such as the Claude glass and the camera lucida, in conjunction with the camera obscura, are known predecessors. By 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot's invention in England proved another form of chemical process that precluded the announcement of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre's invention by eight months. The extent to which photography (in any form) could be used, however, depended on notions of clarity, documentability, and authenticity. In England, all three were high constituents and still persist in the use and understanding of the medium. The capturing of public consciousness through photography was a main grounding point for its production and publication, mostly through newspapers and magazines. Realist aesthetics hovered mostly in English photographic styles, usually called a "documentary" aesthetic. Documentary "style" versus "practice" arose from the age of Weegee to sustain magazines such as LIFE and Look, as well as the Magnum consortium during the 1940s. Coming from Albert Renger-Patzsch and the New Objectivity movement of the late 1930s, elements of artistic design for photography established a tone that represented growth and industrial reform. Using mostly black-and-white photography and complicated Bauhausian angles, photojournalism was adorned with a designer flair to address a modernist edge by mid-century. In England, the landmark Bill Brandt retrospective presented at Hayward Gallery in London in 1969 was curated by John Szarkowski and influenced a new generation of photographers that focused photojournalistic styles on street life and landscape views, capturing the textural grit of life at the time. In the name of social reform, photography was to represent cultural changes and transgressed traditions, but the appeal documented an overall nationalism.

Style morphed into abstraction through an institutional employment that was ultimately for nationalistic ends--war reportage, documentation of street life during a time of necessary urban renewal, and the use of landscape that drew from the nostalgia of early English gentry. English projects such as the Mass-Observation Archive (1937-53) and Granada Television's 7-UP (1964) demonstrated that a photographic eye existed as document. Particularly in the United States, artists after the 1950s reacted in an opposing manner, infecting a new liberal spirit gained from the Civil Rights Era that accepted a conscious defecation of artistic mores for conceptual art. Happenings, geological alterations for the betterment of industrial and institutionally "protected" landscapes, and attempts to shatter the two-dimensional plane of photography and painting, were the new practices that began to shape the coming millennium by the 1970s.

Stieglitz is probably seen as the most hybrid, progressive advocate for photography prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Already looking past two-dimensional meanings, series such as "Equivalents" (1923-31) and photographs such as Sunlight and Shadows-Paula (1889) introduced an avenue for photography that implies artistry without the facade of painting aesthetics. Early morning clouds or sunlight cascading through venetian blinds--either experienced in the exterior or in the interior--may not represent those titles. Emotions, affiliations, or general mood may subjectively weigh against objectivity, changing a straight scientific, photographic role into expressionistic ambiance. Portraiture, which is essentially Steichen's contribution to the field, meant photographing not only the person, but the being of a place, spirit, or moment caught in time. Steichen's achievements through the Pictorialist period, LIFE magazine era, and with the "Family of Man" (1955) are a holistic testimony to the power of photography. This can also tell a story or assist in fragmenting a story for someone to better understand his or her self. Photography in this manner works much like Walter Benjamin's idea of "allegory"--where the observation of particles taken from one area combined with particles from a different area may be closer to looking at the truth than looking at the original sources. (3) Photographic, empirical truth, according to Benjamin's definition, was not scientific but artistic to the point of mutation.

"Without innocence, the artist is only a skilled technician," (4) commented photographer Nathan Lerner of the Chicago Bauhaus School in 1974 when reflecting upon the lessons of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Innocence is usually the last characterization discussed when approaching a photographer's oeuvre, but the tendency for inspiration is a type of experimentation of ideas or concepts that may dissuade a preproduction schedule or commercialization of intent. In considering the famed, almost infamous, exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" (1972), Bernd and Hilla Becher are usually a separate topic, particularly since their reform of the Dusseldorf School. Their analytic comparisons of communicable urban archetypes--water mills, cooling towers, industrial houses--presented in a matrix format from the 1970s, insinuate that the repetition of these structures moves beyond the industrial eye of Renger-Patzsch to something that may be more Druid-like in total observance. "All things wonderful," and perhaps captured as continuous, spiritual configurations, their photography is a powerful inspiration influencing the work of the school's students, such as Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth. Larger than neon and as hauntingly glamorous as film noir, their photographs capture another form of portraiture. Supposedly acknowledging a greater German tradition in photography, the Becher's theoretical approach surpasses archetypes to become indicators.

Ruff and Struth, for example, are two photographers from the Dusseldorf School who focus on urban buildings. Struth is particularly known for cityscapes taken in the manner of a flaneur. His cityscapes of China, Japan, and the U.S. are clear depictions of a stationed eye that looks longingly at a local intellect. The expressionistic quality that Struth gives to his printing and the perspective that he uses surpass a journalistic style or a postwar street photography aesthetic and imply the distance of the interjected viewer assuming a location. (5) For Struth, buildings and architecture are inherent to the cultural site, and the photograph is not simply an image but a tangible site to become familiar with, more coherent to residents than the traveling photographer. The draw to look and travel, "to see," is a main point of observation.

Ruff has an opposing view. His photographs of housing developments and urban feats are meant to present the strangeness of these places rather than the undertone of the perspective that the photographs present. Ruff's frame of reference stems from a principle of uncertainty where the closer one looks at an object, the less recognizable it becomes. (6) The ability to look, view, angle, and read information is actually an oblique possession that is as complicated and as mystifying as physical vision. This philosophy results from Werner Heisenberg's teachings on quantum mechanics where it is believed that a particle is only observable within a range of variables that are reached through means of microscopic analysis. Ultimately, after disputes over certainty, it was decided that nature is not decodable by analysis and that the ability to finitely see the electron or the essence of matter is actually skewed by the desires that promote its viewing. (7)

Ruff's photographic methodology, in particular as applied to his series of houses, nudes, portraits, and the project "Substratum" (2001-2003), is reflective of the ultimate view of the principle of indetermination. In his series, clear depiction is negotiated through lighting effects upon color film to include a form of visual interpretation that is not transparent through its printed surface:

  I don't think my portraits can present actual personalities. I'm not
  interested in making a copy of my own interpretation of a person. It's
  more my personal idea of photography that is accentuated in my
  portraits. I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface
  of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photos of people the
  same way I would take photos of a plaster bust. (8)

Haus Nr. 31 (1988), Haus Nr. 71 (1988), and Haus Nr. 91 (1989) are photographs that linguistically translate to "house," but upon inspection, the houses are more like projects rather than homes that read similarly in geometry and architectural construction. The views are angular and direct, but the perspectives do not insinuate poetic expression. The photographs are primarily flat and do not offer a humanistic view except for the fact that they are recognizable as housing projects that seem somewhat desolate. As a group, they are overcast by the available light and suggest the possibilities for varying accommodations that are somewhat the same. In more recently exhibited series, such as "Nudes" (1999-2004) and "Substratum," Ruff is observably commenting on surface. The prints are blurred or presented with an analog vision that alters photography's reputation for clarity. Videos by Woody and Steina Vasulka and innovations during the 1970s come to mind. Video offered an alternative, and photographic--if not filmic--way of seeing. Technical video equipment proved that light stimulus can be reduced to various wave patterns that are signals dependent upon movement. Physical presence and locales are translated as fluid patterns that interlock and interchange to present an abstracted realism that may be closer to the truth of what we see and how we belong in spatial planes. (9) Ruff's "Nudes," such as nudes pi 08 (2001), nudes ma 21 (2001), and nudes an 40 (2000), are not necessarily akin to "ceci n'est pas une pipe" but are perhaps similar to Ruff's d.p.b. 08 (2000), which captures a fast-moving landscape through a slower shutter speed. The Internet also presents this conception that pixelized viewing offers an enhanced view that is closer to a sculptural or atomized awareness of representation. Source material for "Substratum" was taken from the Internet while photographing "Nudes." Downloaded images were electronically reduced to phosphorescent light permutations and emanating fields of energy for a single image. The result is a small series of inkjet prints that depict the aura of and energy released from the act of sex, suggesting that aura is another manifestation of representation.

Gerhard Richter is a favored inclusion in this forum for the manner in which he breaks down painting by fusing it with photographic approaches. If Ruff is presenting a closer definition of photography as a stimulus, Richter is exhibiting painting as an interfused medium without autonomy. Renowned for making paintings of photographs, such as Betty (1988), his work is understood more along the lines of John Berger's lecture series and publication Ways of Seeing (1977). Berger described the introduction of linseed oil as a painting material that better encapsulated light and portrayed cultural production during the 1400s with scrupulous detail. (10) A Dutch or Spanish still life or portrait may seem banal, but in turn may actually depict the affluence of a region or a person of a particular life condition. Without the clarity of vision and textural opticality that linseed oil offered, Jan Van Eyck's dense symbolism in The Arnolfini Wedding (1434), for example, would carry the opaque expression of a Titian painting. Richter carries a similar affinity in his work that is understated, commented as cool, and somewhat without authorship. Richter is an interesting inclusion with Ruff because paintings such as Lesende (1994) and Kerze (1982) do not fall into the category of photorealism, but the surfaces of his paintings are almost void of a painterly signature and faintly suggest the power of optometric interpretation that is photographic but vague to its particular medium. Ruff, in comparison, treats photography almost as a means of discussion about abject appropriation but within a scenic proportion that reverently treats photography's ability to skew technical affinities. Other projects by Ruff, such as Zeitungsfotos (1991-92), Fuck Contemporary Art (1998), and Plakate (1996-98), make similar suggestions.

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia's New York photographic project in 2000-2001 is another series dependent upon the semiology and technical affluence of photography's lighting effects. People walking under a scaffold or along street corners were selected based upon their accoutrements. After reaching a determined point, a strobe flashed, causing a blackened background that isolated the person from the waist up as a cultural character. Other photographs from an earlier series, "Street-work" (1993-97), presented a strong light with graphic effects that newly animated average-day street dynamics. Rather than an individual portrait with nostalgic ideals, diCorcia's portraits used a strobe to reverse the effect of translating typical signs and symbols to comment on an outer ritual of culture. The effect shifts from Strand's use of black contrasts to cast a scale of white light effects that outline not just forms and figures, but also enhance unpredictable aspects of the overall scene. The street scenes, in particular, read graphically, but with a dimension that suggests a layering of facades and unusual backlighting.

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Gillian Wearing, another contemporary photographer, draws from England's history of mass observation surveys. Her color portraits and still images of people whose faces are obscured by oppressive, suspect skin are existential expressions. In a similar manner to diCorcia, Wearing expressionistically connotes the facade or face of a person to suggest that the epidermal mask--like diCorcia's investigation of accoutrements and appearances--is closer to representation than the naked realist depiction. Ultimately, some of the major streams in current photography openly discuss "surface" as a means to better present photography in a "post" discourse. Instead of looking to dissolve the lens' frame or the two-dimensional plane, the tension of vision and the technical ability to refract light and penetrate a less focused, but perhaps clearer view, is closer to ascertaining photography as a current foray. Perhaps this describes a "post" for photography's previous positivist applications. An earlier "post" attempt, conceptual photography--which included the work of Yves Klein, Bruce Nauman, and Charles Ray--tried to abolish the high resolution practice of modernist photography by focusing on concept and performance rather than the camera's ability and printing aesthetics. Representation was applied to the genesis of the performed moment or the flight of the idea rather than to an object, expressed or felt from behind the camera's shutter. DiCorcia, Ruff, and Wearing are examples of artists examining the skins through which people see as well as exploring photography's ability to print those layers of vision that allow for another lean toward interpreting "ways of seeing." (11)

Giovanni Anselmo's Entering the Work (1971), a lust and longing for artists like Anselmo, re-enters current discussions in another fashion that still moves past a brick wall, which is what dealing with a surface as content may primarily imply. Hybridity, particularly as described by photographer Jeff Wall, and the need to journey and walk past a scene that might inspire, are not excluded instincts in current practices as well. (12) Wall's A Fight on the Sidewalk (1994) or Gabriel Orozco's work in his monograph Trabajo (2003) are still exemplary of the surveyor, but perhaps with a more comedic and translucent eye. Wall's work speculates that dealing with spatial relationships--not only from photograph to viewer, but also from character to character--creates causal behavior under unusually casual circumstances shown in familiar environments. Wall offers commentary on the spaces the photograph presents, and frames the contained, encumbered character within those spaces. The amount of emotional tension presented in A Fight on the Sidewalk, Untangling (1994), Invisible Man (1999-2000), or the famed Insomnia (1994) are demonstrative of the waking observer in an unlikely situation that is otherwise common, implying yet another type of surface.

In contemporary photography, itinerancy gives way to process. When the photographer is freed from photography, photography is also freed from "realism." Not necessarily scientific, or chemical--and perhaps more printerly in the liquidation by digitization--photography presents itself within another vein, mainly optometrics. (13)

Determinate markers to bracket a photographic currency seem equally unnecessary when photography's vitality is the main quest. The technological developments that have fostered greater emphasis on the photographic surface filter a newer clarity that the illusion of raw or even translated sight can offer--an accomplishment that photography can bear, if not revise. In the twenty-first century, realism can be found in color and is printed in large scale for a Gurskian awakening. It seems that with digitization and the breakdown of photography into theoretical use--which allows for innovations in painting, video, and digital art--photography has reopened its eyes, relearning a new distinct place for itself that is undefined because prior roles have been appendaged. This is the post-realism in which photography seems to be; it is neither a place of stasis nor of flux. As experimental as its historical traditions, photography remains true to its amorphous, experimental self.

SARA L. MARION is a freelance writer and independent scholar in Cincinnati, Ohio.

NOTES

1. This question is largely based on a 2002 conversation with Richard Flood, former chief curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the finding of the following quote by Theodore Roszak, from The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 156: "If we accept the proposition that the counterculture is, essentially, an exploration of the politics of consciousness, then psychedelic experience falls into place as one, but only one, possible method of mounting that exploration. It becomes a limited chemical means to a greater psychic end, namely, the reformulation of the personality upon which social ideology and culture generally are ultimately based." If surface is ultimately the answer for a new direction in photography and looking from within a new "skin," what is the psychedelic sense that brings these new conclusions? Any or all of Carlos Castaneda's writings could easily be read as well.

2. See Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

3. Peter Burger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde: Theory and History of Literature (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), presents the best critique and explanation of Walter Benjamin's writings on allegory. See also Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., (London: Fontana Press, 1973, 1992) or read Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1913-1940, Michael W. Jennings and Marcus P. Bullock, eds., (Belknap Press, 1996), as it appears in four volumes, for a composite understanding of Benjamin.

4. See Chicago Historical Society, The Nathan Lerner Papers. Nathan Lerner, graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago and professor of photography, originally stated this during a lecture given at the Art Institute of Design, May 11, 1974. This statement was recently quoted in the exhibition text, The Chicago School: Photography from the Institute of Design, organized by associate curator Dennis Kiel, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2004. See also Keith F. Davis, "'to Open an Individual Way': Photography at the Institute of Design, 1946-61," Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971. David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel, eds., (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2002), 73. To present another interpretation of Lerner's quote delivered by curator Dennis Kiel through his exhibition mentioned above: The meaning of any work is the relationship(s), which is what one gets from the production process. What becomes missing from photography when emphasis on process is removed is the innocence of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy--the wonder of the medium--which is the basis of the Chicago Bauhaus School using Bauhaus innovations from Germany.

5. When talking about street photography and modernist masters, it is interesting to note the changes that were made in the last phase of Harry Callahan's career. Known for his surrealist manipulations and multiple exposure prints, his color photographs from 1982 to 1985 marked a dramatic change. Taken while on tour in Atlanta, New York, Hong Kong, and Wales, the photographs demonstrate a new experimentation in depth of field, lens framing, and sensibility toward depicting a convergence between buildings (meaning city architecture) and inhabitants. In print, they share a common thread with the work of the Dusseldorf School, bridging both Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth in style. See Keith F. Davis, Harry Callahan: New Color Photographs, 1978-1987 (Kansas City, MO: Hallmark Cards, Inc., 1988).

6. Matthias Winzen, ed., Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the Present (Germany and New York: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2003), 133.

7. See David Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1992).

8. Marie Louise Syring and Christaine Vielhaber, "Thomas Ruff," BiNationale: German Art of the Late 80s (Kunstverein and Dusseldorf: Kunsthalle and Kunstsammlung NRW, 1988), 260-61.

9. Woody Vasulka may push this idea further to existentially explain that a planar existence is merely a frame of reference that boxes the reality of an abstracted life. Early work such as C-Trend (1974) and Art of Memory (1987) are demonstrative of the effects that experimentations in video provide through the reduction of visual imagery to electrical or "electron" impulses. Working with his wife Steina Vasulka, producing specific equipment such as the Digital Image Articulator, he aims to develop an alternate form of visual imagery, allowing technology to create its own patterning based on recorded electrical stimuli.

10. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1977).

11. If you examine further current processes in color film, the scale of presentation, and mounting practices (the use of aluminum backing and frameless presentation), there are other suggestions that artists using photography are increasingly interested in a mirror effect that is not about reflection of the object photographed, but the presence of the film itself and the vision that it can present. A group in Japan known as Enlightenment is a strong example of this shift. See exhibition catalog by Lydia Yee and Franklin Sirmans, One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2002).

12. Stemming from Walter Benjamin's writing on Karl Blossfeldt's photography, commenting on the critical ability of negative and positive experiences to overlap in nature, Jeff Wall defines photographic hybridity as a conglomeration of possible interpretations negated by relative experiences. See Biony Fer's "The Space of Anxiety," Jeff Wall (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995) in conjunction with Walter Benjamin, "New Things About Plants, A Review of Karl Blossfeldt's Unformen der Kunst," written in 1928, published in Germany; The New Photography 1927-1933: Documents and Essays, David Mellor, ed., (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978). See also Kerry Brougher, Jeff Wall (Los Angeles and Zurich: Museum of Contemporary Art and Scalo Verlag, 1997); Gary Dufour, Jeff Wall: 1990 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1990).

13. A standard definition of the word optometry offers the following: The measurement of the powers of vision and correction of visual defects by optical means. This term might offer the strongest definition to answer a "post" dilemma for photography.