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Walead Beshty, Three Color Curl (CMY/Four Magnet: Irvine, California, January 1st 2010), © the artist.

Fotomuseum Winterhur’s candidly titled blog Still Searching does – as its title suggests – take a hopeful, open, perhaps at times perfunctory look around various theoretical and historical approaches to discussing photography and its related cultures and technologies.

A number of writers, academics, scholars and artists – since the website’s beginnings in January 2012 – have been asked to contribute a succession of written blog posts on a chosen topic. At the time I write this, the current list of contributors include: Bernd Stiegler, Aveek Sen, Walead Beshty, Hilde Van Gelder, Geoffrey Batchen, Kelley Wilder and Martin Jaeggi. In addition to this a number of other commenters were invited to respond to the central texts by one or more of the aforementioned authors. These individuals include David Campany, Charlotte Cotton and any other member of the wider photography community that wants to participate in the conversation through the open comments form.

The writing ranges in style from the concise to the discursive, and in doing so, covers plentiful ground. With this in mind, I will go over what I see to be two key theoretical positions, with the hope that I might draw out both some of the strengths, and the limitations of, what we could clearly refer to as an example of current writing on photography. In order to focus this review somewhat I have selected two of, what are in my mind, the most interesting posts that have appeared on the website – if not always in their form and approach, certainly in their content.

The two following essays look at photographic realism in two different guises, one aesthetic and one political, by reading some of Bernd Stiegler and Walead Beshty’s contributions to the blog. I hope the reader, as I have done, will work through these texts before reading my analysis, which can be seen both as a reflection and an elaboration on some of the ideas therein. The essays focus on realism and the real as theories, but also on the reality of photography theory and education today. Although not by any means expansive, I hope that the two texts at least allude to some of the key concerns within photography theory and education one might consider relevant, if not important, today.

Imperfecting the real: Some preliminary thoughts on the use of axioms and imperfections

Bernd Stiegler begins his writing with an approach to photographic realism. His intention is to ‘Explore options beyond familiar theoretical trajectories, such as the indexical nature of photography or photography as social documentary’[i]. The notion of a theoretical option here is paramount to understanding the logic of his intentions: Stiegler successfully manages to highlight a series of nebulous “options” for a theory of photographic realism while avoiding directly citing much already-established thought on the subject. I will briefly focus on the author’s first blog post, which posits a notion of imperfection as an example of the real, in order to explain what I see as a series of theoretical problems.

In the opening paragraph of Imperfection, Stiegler states that imperfect photographs are the new ‘ideal of contemporary photography’ and that ‘imperfection serves as the contemporary modus of the real in photography’. The author’s statements are somewhat unclear. One reflection of this opacity is the metaphrasing of Jaques Ranciere’s concept (originally formulated by Plato) the “ethical regime of images”.[ii] This section of the text can be boiled down to a kind of skewered, unannounced reading of Ranciere where the author ambiguously phrases the original term, in casual gesticulation[iii]. Stiegler’s thoughts are philosophical, but lack the necessary unpacking.

The author states that ‘Imperfection transforms every object into a photographic reality, which emphasizes a different regime of images precisely by eschewing and renouncing the perfection of technology.’ There is no following definition of this regime of imperfect images – which unnecessarily expands formal imperfection to the level of some fundamental renouncement of technology’s strive for perfection – or of his notion of the perfection of technology (presumably a reference to Benjamin or indeed Heidegger, but this much is unclear). Furthermore, the text lacks a definite theoretical framework regarding realism, reality and the real – which are three quite distinguishable terms. What might their differences be?

What appears as blur, a scratch on a negative or over-saturated colour, may be the photographer ignoring technical conventions in order to make an image that is, to all intents and purposes, as natural and intuitive as possible. This way of making a photograph might see the photographer capturing the impressionistic, non-pictorial state of what he or she photographs – the way a body moves and blurs; the way light dances about the place – instead of an evenly framed, seamlessly composed image. Such technical imperfections are a type of formal embellishment: they serve to signify the difference between what is in front of the camera at the point of photographing, and how that is represented in the supervening photograph. The difference between the thing that is photographed and the resulting picture is the difference between reality and realism. Reality is what we think exists and realism is the, in this case photographic, representation of it.

The real is something altogether different. Lacan’s real resists signification altogether, while Stiegler’s real posits imperfection as the distinct signifier of a composed realism (the imperfect picture). Stiegler’s real fails because it enables a form of representation. In order to properly theorise the photographic real Stiegler’s concept would need to avoid symbolising or signifying any single aesthetic, including the examples he gives of photographic imperfection (technical errors, deficient cameras and snapshots). The real is beyond the symbolic and is not composed of discrete signifiers.

Lyle Rexer’s book The Edge of Vision (2009) charts a particular rise in abstract photography, many of whose visual signifiers can be compared to Stiegler’s imperfect pictures in as much as they incorporate similar visual traits, for both formal and conceptual reasons. However, as Rexer notes this is no new enterprise: one might follow an obfuscatory line between abstraction and imperfection from Fox Talbot to Penelope Umbrico and beyond. Obfuscatory strikes me as an apt way to describe the gap between reality and photographic realism. But how can that gap be conceptualised?

In order to properly root the argument within a discussion of the difference between reality, realism and the real, it might be more useful to consider the recent re-appearance of imperfect images as an example of Roland Barthes’ reality-effect: a detail within a text that does little to develop its narrative. Like Stiegler’s attempt at a theory of photographic realism, reality-effects are a feature of literary realism, but with so many of Barthes’s concepts, the way text informs image is of paramount importance. As Barthes states: ‘For at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it.’ (Barthes 1982: 16) Imperfect images provide an ‘index of atmosphere, and their function is to state ‘we are real’, and thus to signify the category of reality…’(Macey 2000: 325)

Imperfect details do this by embracing the logic of visual abstraction (blur, colour shifts, emphasis on texture) as actual components of a form of photographic reality. This form of photographic representation embraces imperfection and abstraction as an actually existing, almost quotidian component of both photographic reality and photographic realism. As Rexer states: ‘photography is simultaneously an investigation of reality and of the means of investigating that reality.’ (2009: 11)

This form of realism does not reproduce reality, but instead, its form – one of its many significations. As John Tagg asserts in his essay The Currency of the Photograph ‘realism is defined at the level of signification.’ (1982:111) Imperfect images exist within the space between reality and realism: imperfection and abstraction are axioms of photography; they are ways of visually signifying the complicated nature of this gap. Contrary to what Stiegler states, imperfect images are not an example of the real but rather, to return to Ranciere, and to conclude this line of thought, “the representative regime of art”.

Rather than reproducing reality, works within the representative regime obey a series of axioms that define the arts’ proper forms: the hierarchy of genres and subject matter, the principle of appropriateness that adapts forms of expression and action to the subjects represented and to the proper genre, the ideal of speech as act that privileges language over the visible imagery that supplements it. (2004: 91)

The author goes on to add to his developing theory of photographic realism by writing posts on reflection, order, practice, form and invisibility. The comments, especially following the post “Order,” are often more interesting than the original statements. One example includes David Campany’s highlighting of the problematic use of the term photobook in as much as it doesn’t accurately describe a form of photography, despite its widespread use as a term within the recent resurgence of interest in photographic books: ‘This is the teeming chaos that has led to the word ‘photobook’ to be taken up as a handy catch-all in this renaissance. It’s barely a category.’

A note here must be made about some of the particularities of tone and style adopted by blog writers, often and specifically within comments forms. The still often-casual nature of publishing theoretical writings in this accessible and free context, allows certain authors a wonderful pliability in the pace and humour of their prose. Various contributions contain a soupçon of disagreeing humour, to intelligent effect.

Why collapse a discourse for the sake of education? Photography, use-value and capitalist realism

Walead Beshty ups the contextual ante with a series of posts not always about photography. However, his surveying of other pertinent subjects that should very much concern photography as a ubiquitous discourse is highly interesting. Although Beshty considers a wider set of problems relating to the notion of a medium, the role of the institution and art’s relationship to capital, I will try and propose some hopeful points of departure for making sense of photography’s specific role in what the author outlines here as the ‘collective understanding of a medium’ (Beshty 2012), institutional values and photography education.

In Beshty’s fourth post for the blog he begins by considering the constitution and naming of a medium. According to the author, a medium is inextricably tied to two things: its use and its position between ‘Some agents in a transaction.’ (Ibid) The author locates the inventing of a medium dialectically between applied use and technological development. In doing so, he reveals a contradiction in the way in which we name things and then go on to use them. He then defines the institution (museum, university etc.) as the location par excellence for the creating and establishing of mediums: ‘It is the institutional act, that which makes the institution concrete, like air made solid.’(Ibid)

This post – of little more than 1500 words – is adventurous to say the least. It gains proper traction as it concludes with three numbered points, all of which I will try to describe and respond to here. The text moves quickly, sweeping from point to point and heightening the sense that blog writing in this context can vacillate between theoretical precision and rampant esotericism, at the level of both style and structure.

1. There is no such thing as an art which is untainted by the market economy and that in no way means that art either supports or rejects the notion of a market transaction but is simply, by definition, based in market transaction. (Ibid)

In simple terms, Beshty asserts here that all art is made under the rubric of capital. Whether directly engaging with the market economy (through commercial sales) or refusing to take part in it, all art is made in response to the social conditions at the time of its creation. Under political dictatorships, art will be censored and created within the confines of state control – ‘State mechanisms are frequently able to restrict the photographer’s field of vision’ (Azoulay 2012:219) – and under capitalism, the monetisation of art practice is a long and convoluted one which represents an equally repressive set of conditions for making art to that of state control, one might argue.

It is possible to trace a history of twentieth century Western art that sees it firmly placed in market transactions (and photography, in this century, gathers pace in this regard). However, there is a potential second history; what we might call a history of ideas within photography that possesses more emancipatory potential through a particular set of educational strategies. This history might take a stance against Beshty’s capitalist realism: his assertion that ‘there is no place outside of economic transaction.’

Beshty approaches a vast but really very fascinating problem: art’s role as political emancipator through aesthetic education; a function for, in this case photography, to create a space that not only pushes up against the current restrictions of the educational institution, but also against the logic of labour and value in capitalism itself.

Tackling this huge question is to begin with a photography that possesses fundamentally civil attributes; it is to begin with a photograph that ‘is not a representation’ (Azoulay 2012:222) in order to free it from Barthes’ latent “this is X” description of objects, tied to a reality, represented in photographs. Photography would need to invent a system of political engagement that sits outside of commodification and photographic representation: a non-commodifiable, non-representational photography that embraces both aesthetics and politics.

Photography is an art of ideas: its relative closeness to reality, but failure to completely represent it, offers the medium a unique philosophical position which calls to mind Francois Laruelle’s “The philosopher as self-portrait of the photographer.”[iv] Although it is difficult to remain entirely persuaded by Laruelle’s intention to conceptualise photography as completely abstract (no eyes, no cameras, no techniques), his theory of photography – which seeks to read historical attempts at a theory of photographic realism as fundamentally flawed – leaves us with an interesting predicament: how to think a difference in society through an abstract form of photography, not just visually, but in terms of a political abstraction derived from the two Marxian terms exchange value and use value. This is what Azoulay might call photography’s “civil imagination” and what Laruelle might refer to as photography’s ‘insertion into a horizon of images, and from this its communicational value or its pragmatic dimension…’(Laruelle 2011:61).

From this gallimaufry of theoretical ingredients we might summarise the following things: Photography is an art of ideas; all photography is conceptual in as much as it is always both an image and a text[v]. Photographs are an abstraction of reality. ‘The logic of the abstraction is the reduction of four dimensions to a two-dimensional surface.’ (Beshty 2009:303) In light of these things, photography finds itself in a position of privilege in as much as it has the possibility to think a new reality using its already accepted ‘communicational values’, to paraphrase Laruelle. Photography is fictional and it can invent spaces and worlds, including one that might exist outside the restrictions of current institutional values (a value system which makes a commodity of education itself). In order to do this photography theory would need to develop its own principles of emancipation and institutional critique and to some extent it already has. The question is this: where do these emancipatory values currently lie, and what would one might do to begin realising their value within the context of photography education?

How to sell a politically radical photograph for profit

2. This does not mean that art is incapable of progressive political change despite its dependence on the marketplace for there is no place “outside” of economic transaction. Yet, the radical proposition is art’s greater capacity for transparency (as transparency is a core artistic value). (Beshty 2012)

In 2009 Zer0 Books published Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Its central provocation is to argue that the very problem with society’s attitude to capitalism is that it lacks the ability to think outside it: that capitalism is the only possible political-economic system. The first chapter of this short book is titled It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (which is a phrase borrowed from Fredric Jameson, as Fisher himself acknowledges). Within this phrase lies an important logic: the current atmosphere capitalist realism creates is so all-encompassing, very few people, aside a few radical theorists, want or have the ability to think outside of it. Capitalism is the natural state of play in this regard: the art world continues to rely on its ability to monetise politically left-leaning artworks, in order to ensure the maintenance of a system of commodification that benefits the growth of capital and therefore the art market itself.

Where emancipatory, anti-capitalist thinking does arise within the art world, it is done so in an ironic fashion that often reduces political critique to the exchange value of an object within a commercial gallery, or a public institution such as a museum. The artist is willing to exchange a political artwork for a living, therefore offering what might have been of some wider social benefit over to capital in return for cash. After all, what other system for earning a living is currently available to artists in the UK?

Capitalism had created a scenario – based on itself as the only possible reality – in which it rewards radical or emancipatory thinking with income that can then be used to live and produce more work to feed back into the same system. Aie Weiwei’s practice is the ultimate example of this: political dissidence turned to art world marketeering and profitability. Commercial galleries support the careers of an incredibly small number of artists in this way and public institutions, because of drastic cuts in public funding, are forced to exhibit artists that might draw corporate or private funding and therefore essentially engage the same system. Photography – in a state of perpetual crisis as to the state of its own identity – is actively band-wagoning the workings of the wider art world in this way. More and more photographers seek gallery representation and a place for their work in the holdings of major museums. The price of photography in both primary and secondary market contexts is rising and major commercial galleries and art fairs embrace it like never before. Photographs are relatively cheap to produce, can be sold in editions and therefore create maximum profit.

What about the university? The university lies outside of the immediate art world but regularly engages and informs it. The art department within a university is a curious place: although students sometimes produce political work, they may also be obsessed with the relationship between some niche theory (perhaps Deleuzian) and its often-tangential relationship to the objects they produce. This might be combined with a conscious decision to produce an object that is adroit, attractive and potentially salable. Why is this the case?

These approaches form a discourse that speaks inwardly to the rest of the art world, as opposed to wider society. Within this meta-discourse the artist is pressured to think about the intellectual and formal cache of his or her work, and what it might be worth to the art world on the basis upon which it currently sells objects. The artist’s concern is the art world, not the ‘sphere of daily life’. (Ibid)

3. This proximity or “coming to terms with the exchange rate of objects” is in essence one of art’s most radical potentials. It contains the possibility to leverage the world of progressive philosophical, intellectual, and political thought into the sphere of daily life, and collapse the idea of “meta” discourse, or critique, to make all discourse continuous with the world it is meant to describe. It is the destruction of the fantasy of an outside. (Ibid)

Ariella Azoulay, who is currently pointing to an alternative to this inward way of thinking within photography theory, notes that photography’s own theoretical discourse fails to problematise the ‘identification of the representation with the essence of photography’. (2012: 223) This notion of representation attributes the essence of photography to that of inherent determinism (it is fully fixed by what has gone before it). Conversely, one discourse of photography, established largely by John Tagg in the 1980s as photography’s relationship to the discourses of power, is the location at which Azoulay makes the following assertion: ‘Viewing photography as a non-deterministic encounter between human beings not circumscribed by the photograph allows us to reinstitute photography as an open encounter in which others may participate’ (Ibid). This is where photography’s potential to create an emancipatory politics, beginning with a different form of education, might arise.

It seems clear that a photography of emancipatory value must start with the question of photography education – and what better time to consider this than now, when the entire notion of education in the UK is undergoing a serious onslaught of intimidation by the current government. The artworld and its exchange rate of objects is a place seemingly untouchable to radical politics, but university education has a duty to remain open to new forms of political discourse within the arts.

On what terms do we measure education?

Every couple of years for the last two decades, I confront the task of explaining to a new group of graduate students that, although the difference between use and exchange seems immediately available to intuition, use-value and exchange-value are in the same form: the value form. To put something in the value form means to abstract it, so that it can be measured. (Spivak 2012:191)

This brings us back to Beshty’s use of the term “exchange rate”. As mentioned previously, the collapse of a fixed exchange rate system in the 1980s led to a more ‘volatile currency exchange system,’ (Harvey 2011:24) which in turn led to the emergence of hedging and its contribution to the financial crash of 2007-8. The problem with Beshty using this term within the context of art objects and their discourse (a discourse I take to be one of education), is that it alludes to the, as he puts it, ‘daily life,’ not of educational accessibility, but of exchange value in capital: the daily life or normative value of capitalism itself.

In the above lines, Gayatri Spivak talks of the relationship between education, its value – both in terms of use and exchange – and the proceeding abstraction that creates. This is a direct reference to Marx’s theory of labour and value, viewed within the context of education.

On this basis, we might consider the following two scenarios:

1. A student pays a great amount for education and it is offered at a fixed exchange rate – let’s say £27,000 for an undergraduate degree. The emphasis by the university is on what the student will receive through a process of exchanging money for education (a lecturer’s labour): what she will get for her money; what her education is worth as a commodity. In this sense the student is forced to play the role of the capitalist and ‘capital consumes by measure’ (Ibid) so her education must be measured in terms of what it is worth. In this case education is made, ‘not to be consumed, but to be sold on the market’ (Callinicos 2010:137). Clearly this is the wrong way to consider education. Education, like air and water, must be consumed so an individual can learn. ‘Exchange values reflect what commodities have in common, rather than their specific qualities.’ (Ibid:138) Education, exchanged as a commodity on a university market, reflects what it is worth, not what value it possesses.

1. A student pays nothing for education as it is subsidised by the government using a special rate of tax every worker pays for the education of others. The emphasis by the university is on what the student will understand through a process of using education (a lecturer’s labour-power): what she will need in order to gain a degree; what her education is worth in terms of its (non-commodified) use-value. The value of education is important because it allows a student to understand the power of their own labour and of what it is to possess a body of knowledge. Instead of exchanging money for labour (something measurable) we must understand the power of this labour in terms of use value.

By this insight, use-value, generally a fiction, is not a fiction for capital. Capital consumes by measure. This is labor-power, not labor. It is the use of the use-value of labor, not the use of labor…

And then comes the other lesson, better known but commonly left unconnected with the first one: that the capitalist pays back less value (in the money-form) than s/he borrowed (in the labor-power form). This is because when labor-power is used, it produces more value than its concrete pre-measurable personal base requires to reproduce itself potentially as measurable into use-value for capital: labor-power. (Spivak 2012:191)

Money for old rope: politics in photography education

It is simply not sufficient to rely on this somewhat classic Marxian position on labour and value (the cornerstone of his work Capital), for there are one thousand other subtleties, nuances and variations that contradict and displace the simplicity of combining Marxian analysis with photography (and cultural) theory. Spivak acknowledges this herself in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. However, at the risk of forming yet another meta-discourse by elaborating so much on two simple distinctions between an education system that values profit and a system that values knowledge (because this is essentially all we need to bear in mind), I will try to keep things as uncomplicated as possible here.

We might divide the system of photography education as we see it presently, into two concerns, which are taught in university classrooms: practice and theory. Practice is taught by locating current photography within a trajectory of historical practice, with attention to changing visual forms and the way in which photographs are made (technical processes) and made to look (visual tropes) today. Most students are awarded a degree on their ability to understand and mimic an already existing form of photographic practice. Very few produce original work and less still produce work that is politicised or socially concerned. There are of course a few exceptions.

Cultural theory is taught via its relationship to photography theory (and the way in which key thinkers within photography theory have taken it up). It is clear, that although interested in photography theory and its cultural implications, most photographers coming out of universities are not politically engaged, nor are they taught politics other than in the way it relates to the same, long-established historical and critical studies reading lists. My simple question is this: what if economic and political theories were taught to photographers? What if the model became, instead of “practice and theory” the more expansive “practice and politics”?

The changing nature of the way universities are funded – less public money and more emphasis on private investment and profiteering – endangers the future of theory, including the way in which it might activate a student politically. Current changes in political tactics in the UK, what we might call the development of neo-liberalism, directly effects our university education system, right down to the level of what the students want in exchange for the fees they pay. Capital, in this way, effects the attitude students have to education. It is my view that now more than ever, students must be taught the value of education per se, alongside the usual content of a photography degree programme. The value of education is a fundamentally political issue and therefore politics should be actively taught to students in the arts.

In Victor Burgin’s introduction to Thinking Photography (1982), the author communicates his position on photography theory by offering two distinctions between vocational training and a second form of training in which the student is asked to ‘consider photography in its totality as a general cultural phenomenon, and to develop his or her ideas as to what direction to pursue.’(1982:3) The conversion of former polytechnics into universities in the UK changed the face of photography education in this country and in quite a clear sense has led to the disappearance of the old models of vocational training for photographers.

Recent government initiatives have turned once again to the idea of vocation. Within the arts we see a more rigorous and constant focus on a student’s professional practice, so that the student can have the “best chance” of being employed after university. Of course we know this doesn’t function the way it should within the context of photography, because there are very few jobs available in the field after completing a degree relative to the amount of students graduating, but none-the-less the rhetoric continues. Perhaps, for today’s photography education, the word cultural should be replaced with the word political in Burgin’s above lines. This might collapse the meta-discourse of theory and return thinking to the ‘sphere of the everyday’: that of politics. To cite Burgin once again and to conclude: ‘We cannot go around these debates, we must go through them.’ (1982:9)

References

Azoulay, A. (2012), Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, London: Verso.

Barthes, R. (1982), The Reality Effect in French Literary Theory: A Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beshty, W. (2012), Aesthetics and Distribution Case (1): Preliminary Notes on Art’s Ability to Radicalize Academia, http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/05/4-aesthetics-and-distribution-case-1-preliminary-notes-on-arts-ability-to-radicalize-academia/

Beshty, W. (2009), Abstracting Photography in Words Without Pictures, New York: Aperture.

Campany, D. (2012), in the comments feed at: http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/01/3-order/

Laruelle, F. (2011), The Concept of Non-Photography, London, New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press.

Macey, David. (2000), Dictionary of Critical Theory, London: Penguin Books.

Ranciere, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum.

Rexer, L. (2009), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, New York: Aperture.

Spivak, GC. (2012), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Stiegler, B. (2012), Imperfection, http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2012/01/1-imperfection/

Footnotes

[i] Unless otherwise stated, I cite Stiegler from the blog post Imperfection.

[ii] This term can be found outlined in the much-cited text The Politics of Aesthetics (2004).

[iii] Metaphrasing is the theoretical term equivalent of name-dropping: an author, instead of paraphrasing – which is to properly restate the meaning of a text in other words – will metaphrase a theoretical term by making a passing, unexplained reference to it in such a way that sees the original term’s formal equivalent being used without any of the original meaning.

[iv] This is the title of the opening chapter of Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography, Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011.

[v] Victor Burgin asserts this clearly, using the analogy of indistinct, but nonetheless audible, blood flow in the opening paragraph of Seeing Sense in The End of Art Theory (1980).

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Justin Coombes, Egg Thieves, 2012, Lightjet photograph, 100 x 237cm

Completed in 1820, The Regent’s Canal enjoyed a somewhat restricted period of usage before having its traffic subsumed in the 1840s by the faster and more efficient London railways. By the middle of the nineteenth century much of the canal’s potential cargo was being transported by train, and the canal itself – the hopeful project of notable architect John Nash (responsible for the conservatory at Kew, Royal Opera Arcade and Regent’s Park), with support from Prince regent George IV, from whom the waterway gets its name – was already undergoing an identity crisis. There were several attempts to transform the canal into a railway, with no success and a gunpowder barge explosion at Macclesfield Bridge in 1874, several previous water supply shortages, a badly designed lock and a bout of funding embezzlement, marked a series of despondencies in the canal’s somewhat frustrated history.

It wasn’t until the latter part of the Second World War that traffic was increased on the canal to take pressure off the over-capacity railway system. By the 1960s, commercial traffic had almost completely disappeared, leaving the waterway as predominantly a leisure facility, relished by many Londoners for daytime excursions, boat trips and all manner of unhurried activities. Canals have celebrated a long and successful history, but comparatively The Regent’s Canal, built in the later period of British industrial development and therefore soon-overshadowed by greater technological achievements such as the railway, paled in comparison to the success man-made waterways had relished in England since the 1750s and elsewhere for, in some cases, thousands of years. Indeed, the earliest irrigation canals date back to 4000BC Mesopotamia.

The canal is undoubtedly an invention of ingenious proportions; not just for its speed compared to often badly-surfaced roadways, but also for its relatively quiet, mellifluous nature: canals are places that accommodate both commercial and cultural pursuits simultaneously. It would seem, however, that from one point-of-view The Regent’s Canal was more suited to leisure than commerce, as its difficult history reveals.

Canals have formed the subject matter for a number of notable artworks from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including Turner’s Chichester Canal(1828), Monet’s The Grand Canal, Venice (1908) and somewhat more exactly related, Algernon Newtons’ The Regent’s Canal, Twilight (1925), which can be found housed in the Government Art Collection along with Coombes’ own work. A number of Romantic and Impressionistic paintings and drawings can be discovered of canals in the last two hundred years of Western art history: they form what one might call a quintessential or even somewhat predictable subject for fine and folk artists alike. The appearance or aesthetic identity of the canal, as quaint and beguiling waterway, is well developed art-historically.

Justin Coombes, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 2012, Lightjet photograph, 60 x 142 cm

Such subjects are ripe for further exploration by contemporary artists and, as Justin Coombes’ project Halcyon Song shows us, the canal as a place of study for artists is far from dead. Coombes’ series of photographs transform an idle, somewhat clichéd subject into a revitalised and perceptive tale of non-human photographic perspective, iambic pentameters and post-structural complications within the language of photography itself.

The photographs that make up Halcyon Song can be viewed in both book and exhibition form. The works, within the context of a gallery, appear as large, panoramic canalside-views loaded with saturated, resplendent colour, hazy, abstracted surfaces and picturesque views of egg-stealing boaters, balloon-carriers and other bon vivant subjects. The images are accompanied by a series of sonnets written by the artist, which along with the pictures themselves, were created from the viewpoint of a halcyon bird, a genus of kingfisher. Through the eyes of this bird and the medium of photography we are offered a neoteric view – both visual and literary – of The Regent’s Canal as it winds its way through Hackney, collecting rubbish at its banks and playing host to both human and animal visitors alike.

Song of My Womb

Ri-ri! Ri-ri! Ri-ri! Ri-ri!
My halcyon song stretches proud, shrill, long
and my unborn darlings echo the call
in canal
and river and city and sea!
That swirling soup of refuse that I spied
this morning as the lock rose up
reminded me, as all things do in
pregnancy, of my divine insides.
Reader, take these musings lightly,
but see that home looked for when cruising
can shift like silt: nests when floating
can drift away towards cloud sightings
updownupwards, where the mind sings,
from trails of swirling trash where it all begins.

The Sonnet, a form of poetry written famously by Shakespeare and Milton, has fourteen lines in iambic pentameters. A sequence of sonnets, as is the case with Coombs’ Halcyon Song, often makes up the over-arching narrative of a single poem. A sonnet, not really functioning as a stanza within a poem, feels more akin to a poem within a poem, one might say. In Song of My Womb, the first sonnet in the book the artist produced for this project, we hear the shrill of the halcyon as she flies pregnant over The Regent’s Canal, spying collections of litter in the sullied water. This and other sonnets seem to have a dark humour to them; one line swears nonchalantly while another speaks of ‘lack’ and ‘dismemberment’. Coombes’ use of language is varied, allowing the narrative both a distinctive and vernacular quality throughout: the halcyon is a cynical bird in this poem, one who passes comment on her everyday experiences of the waterway, without restraint or any particular esteem for the presence of humans on the canalside. The poems offer a descriptive accompaniment to the large photographs, allowing the viewer a chance to put himself or herself in the position of this kingfisher as she sarcastically wings her way about the waterway.

Coombes replaces his own position as photographer with the view of the kingfisher, seeking to understand photography as a way of capturing the world from the point-of-view of an existence outside of human consciousness: instead, the halcyon appears to be photographically documenting the canal through her own unique gaze. Here, photography becomes Orwellian fiction; these images offer an insight into a particular character in a fabled, anomalous world that exists as metaphor for our own. As the artist states, ‘I’m interested in the idea of “seeing lyrically”…I limited myself to one “voice” and one poetic form: the sonnet.’ This is essentially a way of conceptualising the act of photographing in a manner that does not, despite surface-level appearance, appear as realist; even the bird’s skewered viewpoints and poetic descriptions of the canal are littered with both visual and literary abstractions. For Coombes, the language of photography is a fictional one. In this sense reality as it appears in the artist’s photographs, could be seen to provide a somewhat fabled quality, which has therefore led Coombes to consider photography as necessarily fictive, compounded by its relationship to poetry and narrative in these works.

Justin Coombes, Ghost at the Feast, 2012, Lightjet photograph, 100 x 237cm

As opposed to accurate representations, photographs could be described as interpretations of the world at various subjective distances from it. Often, the gap between what is thought or even seen by a photographer, and what is actually captured by his or her photographs, is distant – a space shrouded in complex layers of difference, intentionality and interpretation. Like verbal or written languages, the visual language of photography is often allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic. Photographic images allude to so much more than just simply what is pictured at a given moment, which is precisely why, tied-up in mystery and illusion, photographs so often enthral.

Halcyon Song would suggest Coombes seems to recognise that within the history of photography theory, the language of photography has moved from describing photographs as realist or mimetic, to understanding that there is an identifiable and intriguing space between the photograph itself, and the thing it depicts (its referent). After developments in linguistics and philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, artists and writers such as Victor Burgin and Umberto Eco described photographs and their difference to the world with vehement interest and concentration. Specifically, the articulable distinction between a photograph and the world is a clarity offered to photography by semiotics.

Due to these developments in theory, the practice of photography has changed too. Photography has now become a complex art form that cannot help but “think” its way around aesthetic, cultural and political phenomena. In fact, the medium is somewhat bound to thinking itself. Photography doesn’t just simply show things any longer, devoid of analogy or interpretation, it often explains how it shows and why it shows. By representing rather than accurately depicting, photography trades places with various things in the world in order to describe them. There are myriad ways it can do this, but perhaps they all boil down to the unfenced relationship between four essential elements that make up the language of photography: a human subject, a camera, a photograph and the world around them (the key here being that a photograph and the world are not one in the same thing; their difference must be acknowledged).

There are a great number of ways in which photography can change depending on the emphasis placed on one or more of these four elements. Photography can be cameraless, an object might be alone within an image – enlarged and hyperbolic – or there might be many objects simultaneously in view. Indeed, an entire landscape can be panoramically captured, or a photograph can be completely abstract. Each one placing concomitant demands on the viewer, these variations effect the extent to which a photograph can be seen as “different” from the thing it depicts.

What if another scenario, for example an intrigued, voyeuristic animal were to anthropomorphically replace a human photographer? What happens to the language of photography when one of its four standard elements is replaced, or removed altogether? In Coombes’ Halcyon Song, a bird’s point-of-view replaces the traditional human viewpoint; the halcyon seemingly takes on the ability to photographically document what she sees. Therefore, a strange new photographic language is constructed. As two separate but interrelating forms, the photographs and the sonnets are poetic representations of a world created by the halcyon bird. The combination of the images and the halcyon’s poetry forms a strange metaphor for seeing photographically. This metaphor, and thusly the work itself, states that seeing in this way is necessarily poetic, fictional even. As Coombes states ‘I am fascinated by the apparent irreducibility of one form from the other. Where the combination works best, there is a kind of tension that keeps the whole thing alive.’ This tension is the observable difference between the world we think we recognise in the photographs and the actual photographs themselves as photo-poetic descriptions.

In what way can the difference between the four elements (bird, camera, photograph and world) that make up the photographic language inHalcyon Song be described? This difference is best articulated by considering the idea of whose gaze we are seeing at work within the images themselves. The language these photographs speak in is an unusual one where traditional conceptions of the gaze are concerned. We are seeing the bird seeing; or rather, we are seeing as if we were the halcyon herself. Coombes successfully replaces the more traditional human-centric gaze with an anthropomorphic one; these works show a kind of intra-diegetic gaze with the exception that the point-of-view shot of the bird looking at the world does not show the bird itself precisely because the bird’s point-of-view becomes our own. When looking at these images we become a bird, or to put it somewhat philosophically, we “become animal”. In this sense Halcyon Song offers a literal take on Derrida’s idea of “the animal that therefore I am”. ‘As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.’

Coombes’ project can be seen to comment on the end point of being human which, within the specific context of photography, would surely describe the limit of the human gaze in photographic seeing. This mixture of theoretical basis and aesthetic accessibility makes for a novel, and at points incredibly interesting, way of thinking through what it means to “see” or “gaze” photographically, from a truly atypical point-of-view.

Justin Coombes, Where the Heart Opens, 2012, Lightjet photograph, 100 x 237cm

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There are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth.[1]

Åsa Johannesson’s photographic portraits pair visual accessibility with theoretical maturity. She has developed a practice that, whilst remaining comprehensible, investigates the complex subjects of self-image and gender. In this new and incomplete project Belonging, Johannesson compares the identity of one subject to another, in order to develop a conversation specific to the language of photography that questions the politics of seeing.

We cannot take these photographs at face value. On the one hand they show us a considered meditation on two contrasting male identities; but on the other hand they propose a bigger, more oppugnant conundrum: the two photographed male subjects are politically irreconcilable – they represent two very different social identifications.

Åsa Johannesson presents us with two protagonist subjects: Nelson, identifying as transgender (female to male) and Linus, the biologically born man who – quite clearly in reference to the problematic notion of the “Aryan ideal” – appears to resemble Arno Breker’s Die Partie sculpture, produced to sit outside Albert Speer’s chancellery and represent the spirit of the Nazi party in the 1930s. These two subjects operate in a hugely divided, dialectical positioning between, depending on your political convictions, two notions of “socially acceptable”.

In the two Polaroids taken in Växjö, Sweden, in August 2010, both characters directly address the camera, resulting in two, extra-diegetic gazes. Both Nelson and Linus demand the attention of two different audiences, but what kind of audiences do they seek and are they aware of each other’s presence? In asking these questions I want to suggest that these two images in particular, considered within the context of Johannesson’s so far incomplete project Belonging, attract two radically different politicised gazes, and that these gazes reveal an abstraction paramount to the meaning of the images.

In order to understand what kind of photographs these are, a distinction between two types of gazing needs to be ascertained, to reflect the difference between the two photographed subjects. Johannesson’s project requires a consideration of the relationship between the ways in which we look at Nelson and Linus differently. The political implications of this difference are central to the meaning of the photographs.

Theories of the gaze in photography, coming to the fore with feminist theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s, and derived from the thought of Sartre and Lacan (via a French reading of Hegel), prioritise an understanding of age, ethnicity and gender difference with regard to photographic seeing. When considering this theoretical development key terms include “the phallic gaze of the camera”, the “gratification of the male spectator” (Mulvey) or the “refracted gaze of the other” (Lutz and Collins).

However, despite astute theories of the gaze within photography theory since these decades, a more extreme politics of looking takes a secondary position within the canon at large. It might be said, then, that although previous conceptions of the gaze in photography theory have approached a number of definitions of the politicised image with fervour and precision, the discourse – perhaps excluding elements of Ariella Azoulay, which I will reference here with specific attention to her Arendtian notion of the third form of the gaze – does not often enough include a theoretical consideration for the sort of political extremism we have witnessed in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Johannesson’s Belonging attracts two politicised gazes: one tolerant and one fanatical. As Azoulay herself notes, ‘Every gaze is always exposed to the gaze of the other and its sense changes in accordance with their reactions.’[2] Belonging is made to be viewed by individuals with dialectical political convictions, so that a conversation between their two opposing gazes can appear: Johannesson deliberately requires the presence of two politically contrasted spectators in order for the work to function. In this sense Johannesson is speaking directly to those that she wishes to criticise, as well as those with which she politically aligns herself. She is, in quite a clear sense, speaking to everyone (or, at least asking her protagonists to acknowledge their Other).

In light of the ideological disposition of certain individuals, however small in number, that align themselves with the unfortunate recent reappearance of extreme right-wing politics in Scandinavia, Johannesson asserts that, where a politics of photographic representation is concerned, we are all, in a precisely Sartrean definition of the gaze, being-for-others. This is essentially Azoulay’s concept of the third form of the gaze – a Sartrean notion of being-for-others offered within the context of the relation between visual culture and photography, via some, perhaps unnecessary, Arendtian complication[3].

To reduce this idea to the impossible disassociation between Johannesson’s two protagonists, and at the same time to give it proper clarity, Sartre might be cited: ‘This relation, in which the Other must be given to me directly as a subject although in connection with me, is the fundamental relation, the very type of my being-for-others.’[4]

The two politically irreconcilable characters both undergo the pressure of a certain form of the gaze: one given by a moderate viewer and the other by a fanatic. One can’t help but give an example of a fanatic, in a Scandinavian context, as Anders Behring Breivik, whose alarming composure reflects Alberto Toscano’s notion of a fanatical subject: ‘Beyond tolerance and impervious to communication, the fanatic stands outside the frame of political rationality, possessed by a violent conviction that brooks no argument and will only rest, if ever, once every rival view or way of life is eradicated.’[5] The moderate gaze is of course the position that there are no rival ways of life.

The fanatical gaze stands in opposition to the moderate gaze, but both must exist in dialogue for these images to become political: as Azoulay suggests, the gaze itself must enter a political dimension and form a mediation between itself, speech and action. Thusly, Nelson and Linus are forced into a kind of mandatory conversation: their simultaneous extra-diegesis (their confronting of the camera) that we witness as spectators – to paraphrase Sartre – reflects that they have an immediate and nonpositional consciousness before each other. This consciousness is political.

What, then, is the fanatical gaze and how does it function? In Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010) Alberto Toscano cites Hegel: ‘Fanaticism, Hegel declared, is ‘enthusiasm for the abstract’. The question of abstraction is at the core of any political and philosophical reckoning with fanaticism.’[6] Abstraction is the defining factor of the fanatical gaze. Within the context of photography theory, Roland Barthes (via Azoulay) provides us with a way in which to read a philosophical, rather than aesthetic, definition of abstraction.

Much has been written about the indexical nature of the photograph. Roland Barthes gave voice to its most popular formulation: “this was there.” The “this” Barthes refers to is supposedly abstract enough to include whatever might have “been there” in this formulation…[7]

Azoulay describes Barthes position here as subordinating the photograph to one possible representation. This representation is singular and Azoulay calls for a pluralistic notion of photographic representation. In this sense Barthes’ singular representation is an abstraction as it is the abstract and general form of the caption “this is X”.

The philosophical definition of abstraction is the process of considering only some aspects of a whole. Photographs should represent more than one thing for a politics to evolve. Photography can signal a political position and simultaneously oppose one. Photography is the medium of furtive gestures.

In questioning the political implications of photographic representation, these images reference several diverse subjects: transgender, national identity, social integration and political extremism. However, they do so with a considered, deliberate furtiveness. It is the secret, probing logic of these photographs – with their quiet subjects appearing to avoid notice or attention and instead preferring the irreconcilable, the paradoxical and the abstract – that is of interest. Despite Johannesson’s quiet approach to forming these images, an extreme politics is present: one that takes the identification of an abstraction to be seen.

References

[1] Gladwell, M., What the Dog Saw, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009

[2] Azoulay, A., Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, London: Verso, 2012, p.68

[3] Azoulay appropriates Hannah Arendt’s three forms and three realms of action (labour, work and action) in her volume The Human Condition (1958). The question is, how useful is this to Azoulay’s argument in Civil Imagination, and furthermore, how useful is it to the development of a political ontology of photography?

[4] Sartre, J-P., Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 2003, p.253

[5] Toscano, A., Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, London: Verso, 1990

[6] Ibid

[7] Azoulay, A., Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, London: Verso, 2012, p.222

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Melanie Stidolph, The Fall, 2012

Melanie Stidolph, Windfall, looped digital video projection, 2011

One of these apples is no longer attached to this tree. It was thrown into the camera’s view and an image was made as it crashed through the branches and presumably fell to the ground, with some noise. The photograph was not taken by a human hand, but rather by a motion detector; triggered by a single, unattached apple moving vertically through the frame.

Looking at this picture I know it is a photograph, and therefore I know the apple tree is dead. There is an absence in this image that attracts me to it. Like other interesting photographs, this one thinks. Like all other photographs, this one lies. I enjoy this picture because I know there is nothing more difficult to photograph than an apple, but in some unavoidable way, I am lying too: if I think photography has nothing whatsoever to do with truth then any reflection upon it cannot contain a modicum of certainty.

In 1912 Gustav Klimt painted an apple tree. The tree fills most of the canvas; its rounded form practically inseparable from a background of other foliage dabbed out in oil paint. Klimt’s painting is confusing, dense, noisy even. His ritualistic brushstrokes render him present: they are incessant in some frustratingly colourful manner. The apples are alive in Klimt’s painting, as are the flowers growing in the foreground. The painting does something that a photograph cannot; it keeps the apple tree alive.

Apple maggots bury themselves in the core of ripe apples still attached to the tree. Their birthed larvae eat the fruit from the inside out, causing it to rot and bruise. When an apple is rotten, it falls to the ground. An apple maggot, now fully grown into a fly, emerges from the apple’s inside only to mimic a jumping spider – so it may disguise itself before flight. The fly emerges from the apple, denies its crime, announces itself as something that it is not and disappears.

This photograph alludes to a particular state of photography: that supposed end-point at which a photographer seems completely unable to remove their falsely trusting desire to create an unexplainable and rhetorical emotional response within a photograph; something that ‘pricks’ at its viewer. In similar words Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, called this phenomenon the punctum; in exact words Barthes also admitted that “The punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred.” Barthes offers two different types of possible expansion for the punctum as a phenomenon, neither of which helps us to understand the meaning of photography, I would argue. This photograph successfully removes the possibility of apunctum within it, and therefore its expansion, because to know this photograph is to acknowledge it exists to disrupt the reliance on emotional response we so often have when viewing photographs, and to think beyond the need for a punctum at all. By taking away something in the making of this photograph, we are offered  something dead and rotten with no sharp ends. The picture allows us to think politically: to think beyond one human and one response and instead to the wider social function of a particular form of photographic technology as it relates to the authority of images.

At the end of the First World War, Léon Theramin invented the earliest motion detector. The device, given the name Radio Watchman, was what we would colloquially now call a burglar alarm. The device that led to the development of the motion-sensor-triggered-camera-shutter was designed to alert one individual to the presence of another, possibly one attempting to steal something from the other. In this sense one could read the nature of this form of technology within the context of photography, as existing to mechanically capture, yet immediately prohibit, the long presence of an individual or object. If a subject were unaware of the presence of the device when approaching an area where one has been set-up, a brief shock or moment of surprise would ensue. Click – that sense of immediate personal insecurity that many of us experience when being photographed. When a moving subject triggers the device, an alarm is sounded – this alarm is the shutter itself. The camera as alarm: technology left to its own devices, with no human operator, wards off the presence of a moving subject. This invention, traced historically from the end of the First World War to the present day, essentially seeks to banish or inhibit the presence of human subjects: within the context of photography it seems to state: ‘Click, get away from here, your presence has been noted.’

Human agency is stripped away here in part. The photographer sets up the possibility for the camera to trigger itself with the onset of movement, but the camera then takes the timing and the image capturing under its own control. Camera technology, without the properly manual intervention of a human hand, becomes a strange mechanical-natural cause: a series of deterministic processes.

What is a photographic image rendered entirely by the technology that produces it, with no human intervention at the point of capture? Since the invention of the mechanical motion detector, this is a genuine point for photography’s consideration. As the motion detector – a small piece in the larger puzzle of technological development – has contributed to the revealing of photography as a potentially humanless form of picture making, there are further questions revealed about the state of photographic images. There are differences between an individual controlling the camera, and the camera being left alone under the stipulations of a particular mechanical or digital setting, to take a picture of its own accord.

The manual, hands-on taking of a photograph is a complicated choice; a perfect mix of individual and social determination. A person captures an image of the world beginning at a chosen time and lasting for a particular duration. This act of photographing is instigated by the individual, but carried out by the camera. The resulting picture exists as a synthesis of human individuality and social influence (agency and structure). A triangle is formed here between a human, a camera and the rest of society: human agency is mediated by technology to give a photographic impression of the (social) structure of our world. The ritual of human agency within photography is consumed by technology, perhaps to the benefit of its proper exposition. One might recall Walter Benjamin at this point: “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” If a photograph is a work of art, its mechanical reproduction frees it from its dependence on human agency. Human agency, as individual ritual, is exposed by the act of photographing. The further the auto-mechanical essence of photography is accelerated, the more this ritual is exposed, in Benjamin’s words, as a parasite.

This parasite has a name: the punctum. It is the presence of human ritual in every photograph: it obscures the proper understanding of the relationship between social and technological phenomena. To remove the affective pinprick from a photograph is to cure photography from the parasite of human agency: the punctum, as doxa, embedded under emulsion or ink. This parasite is human narcissism itself, made clear by Roland Barthes mournful, solipsistic Camera Lucida. Like the definition of a parasite, the punctum ‘eats at the table’ of authenticity, fattening itself on the meal of another. The ‘other’ in this analogy is the relationship between the auto-mechanical and society.

Photographs taken with the mechanical motion detector are photographs emancipated from their dependence on human ritual. The punctum emerges from the photograph, denies its crime, announces itself as something that it is not and disappears.

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This exhibition seems to have become the current talking-point in the needlessly ongoing conversation about contemporary photography’s supposed state of confusion. In the show’s catalogue, William A Ewing – using “scouting”, “mapping” and “terrain” as sluggish, reconnaissance metaphors for a contemporary photographic practice that still requires its slopes negotiated and its territories chartered – describes the state of contemporary photography as he sees it. Elsewhere, Sean O’Hagan, in his 9^th May article for The Guardian undertakes his usual graceless-lambasting of any photography that purports to be conceptualising, or merely even “thinking” beyond the realm of the photograph as effortless, candid document. These hit-and-miss descriptions seem to report more on his own authorial presence, than of the oft-valid intentions of the artists in question. Where O’Hagan sees dissimulation, there lies genuine intellectual capacity, and where he labels artists ‘pranksters’ (as in his description of Broomberg and Chanarin) there are actually works rooted in thorough research and thoughtful experimentation. Contemporary photography suffers not because of its overwhelming confusion, but because several of the more-established writers on the subject refuse to accept that some of the most interesting photography is, dare I say it, experimental – even conceptual.

As an exhibition, in the sense of the works being curated, the show hopelessly lacks in rigour and consistency. The title is a quick jab at experimental photography’s “out of focus” style: instead of explaining or opening-up meaningful references and relationships between the selected images, the exhibition’s title – using a colon as syntactically deductive – concludes that contemporary photography is simply and crudely the logical consequence of “out of focus-ness”. The exhibition’s hang is awkwardly imbalanced. In Gallery 1 we find too many of Katy Grannan’s San Francisco Boulevard portraits hanging dully, almost innumerably. The potency of these striking pictures might be best revealed if shown in lesser quantities, but instead an entire ground floor gallery space is given over to them. In Gallery 10 Noemie Goudal’s investigations of the nature-culture duality are dwarfed by Mat Collishaw’s Corona works. Again, this is an issue with exhibition design; Goudal’s works suffer considerably in such a relatively cramped space: these well-executed constructed landscapes or interiors would shine if better located. Despite the curatorial confusion, there is little issue with the quality of work on show here. There are a number of highly intelligent photographic investigations present, in amongst other, but certainly fewer, less successful works.

Key highlights include John Stezaker’s now much-cited film portrait collages. Having been featured in Whitechapel Gallery’s outstanding exhibition early last year, Stezaker is also exhibiting in this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize opening in London this summer. Additionally, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s consistently intelligent approach to photographic picture-making is confirmed once again with the display of recent works in Gallery 5: their appropriations and subversions of archival and vernacular material provide an important and relevant contribution to contemporary photography in its obstinate, yet ultimately worthwhile, quest for philosophical challenges. Marlo Pascual in Gallery 9 and Sara VanDerBeek in Gallery 7 both confirm photography’s thoughtful relationship to sculpture, assemblage and the photographic documentation associated with the days before photography was considered a legitimate art form.

These works do not evoke confused reference points, one only need look at Mel Bochner’s photographic work in the late 1960s and early 1970s to remind oneself that there is highly interesting and worthwhile historical ground already covered by photoconceptualism and first generation conceptual art, and that importantly, as Luke Skrebowski states in his recent essay Productive Misunderstandings: Interpreting Mel Bochner’s Theory of Photography, ‘His work thus anticipates contemporary debates and holds out consequences for the theorisation of photography in, and as, conceptual art that are still under-acknowledged.’ It could also be added that photography’s natural state is a conceptual or philosophical one: although not to be taken too seriously, Francois Laruelle’s position that the mechanics of photography are inherently philosophical, as the medium technologically mediates the relationship between subject and object, is an interesting one.

Notwithstanding curatorial confusion, this collection of works is a testament to the quality and diversity of much contemporary photography. If there were more concentration on the intentions and interests of the practitioners represented here, instead of sweeping criticisms of a medium that is constantly progressing, challenging and experimenting, some might find themselves less confused. For now, the art world is obsessed with photography and with that comes a duty for those that have the position to explain what is occurring, to do so non-dismissively. Photography is a practice that lends itself perfectly well to conceptual approaches and one might hope engaged descriptions of such advances would take precedence over the kind of vacuous lampooning that does little other than describe perceived rather than actual confusions within contemporary photography. After all, it was these sorts of criticisms about the status and intentions of photography that, in part, led Mel Bochner to return to painting in 1973 – now lets hope the art world doesn’t do the same in 2012.

Whitechapel Gallery presents a survey of Zarina Bhimji’s work spanning a career of twenty-five years. Born in Uganda in 1963 and expelled in 1972 along with the Asian minority from Idi Amin’s repugnant dictatorship, Bhimji’s family – like many other Indian families – moved to the UK. The artist later studied at both Goldsmiths and The Slade and has exhibited her work widely since the early 1990’s across London, Europe and the US and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007.

If one were to describe a single, important element of corporeality to Bhimji’s work it would be texture: a number of political, social and cultural observations are made using the texture of things as a foregrounding device. Works such as Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt (1998-2003), presented as an image in a backlit lightbox, have a manner of recounting historical fact through the photographing of the most banal objects or scenarios. This particular work depicts a grimy wall in what looks like the storeroom of a now-abandoned African administration building (my uncertainty of this seems apt to the experience of viewing this image; there is a subtle trickery to each and every picture, almost as if the artist seeks to play upon the presumptions of the onlooker). On the wall hangs two pairs of shoes and on the floor sit several plastic containers that look like they once contained cleaning products, petrol or grease. The entire scenario is layered with dirt, finger smears and a general sense of gorgeous grubbiness. The building was probably inhabited by Indian office employees, brought to Uganda as trained workers to administrate the running of businesses in the then-colonised African country.

Zarina Bhimji, Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt, 1998-2003, Transparency lightbox, 130 x 170 cm, Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

In Bhimji’s works, elements of colonial history are present, but in typical post-documentary fashion they are hovering in the background: emphasis instead being placed on the form or manner in which the relationship between, in this case, colonialism and personal experience can be demonstrated through textural, almost incidental observations of space and place. Aesthetics take precedence over politics in these works, but not to the detriment of the subject matter, as there is something astutely considered in the way in which Bhimji’s work exists as a kind of weird heterodox: a form of expanded documentary practice that sets itself apart from traditional documentary standards, and seems to conjure an atmosphere somewhere between mere implication and frustrating suspension in the gallery space, in her favour. Bhimji’s work alludes to an idea of historical fact in a deliberately obscured manner; bringing her own aesthetic to the fore and, importantly, avoiding simplified or even dogmatic readings of historical references within the work.

A temporary cube has been constructed in the ground floor gallery in which one can sit in an acoustically dampened, blacked-out environment to watch a film. Yellow Patch (2011), a new film work by the artist strengthens the concentration on texture with an accompanying soundtrack. The camera begins by focusing on the Princess Dock in Bombay, identifying beautiful, decaying architectural detail with slow pans and soft focus views of interior spaces, unused offices and piles of dusty paperwork. The film moves on to new locations in India while voices appear and disappear throughout; perhaps these are the sounds of political speeches, as TJ Demos describes in his accompanying catalogue essay, one man can be heard saying he was ‘made by the British’ and another states ‘the soul of a nation, long suppressed…’  These fleeting elements of aural texturing support the visual detail of the moving image: the pace at which the film progresses, the pastel colourings naturally present in the buildings studied by Bhimji’s camera and the sweeping, reverberant audio are all beautifully tied together.

There is only as much history as one wants to see in this exhibition, it is at no point forced upon the viewer. Maybe this is what good political or historically referential art does well: its politics remain quietly present, its history exists in the background, flashing up from time to time, but never to overwhelm, only to be accessed or tapped into during moments of necessity. ‘For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ Walter Benjamin states in section V of his Thesis on the Philosophy of History. Perhaps Zarina Bhimji recognises Benjamins’s description of history as the dogmatic tool of the ruling classes and recovers it here as a textural device with an altogether subtler ingenuity? We, the viewers of this exhibition are Benjamin’s “receivers” of history, and we are asked to recognise the importance of Bhimji’s refined artistic statement during a point of wider political struggle in the world today.

Zarina Bhimji, Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over, 2001-2006, Ilfochrome Ciba classic print, 121.9 x 154.4 cm, Courtesy the artist and DACS, London ]]> http://www.danielcampbellblight.com/zarina-bhimji-at-whitechapel-gallery/feed/ 0 http://www.danielcampbellblight.com/andrew-lacon-at-norwich-outpost/ http://www.danielcampbellblight.com/andrew-lacon-at-norwich-outpost/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:10:11 +0000 admin http://www.danielcampbellblight.com/?p=867 A Magnitude in Albion, Andrew Lacon at Norwich OUTPOST
Published  by This Is Tomorrow, December 2011
© OUTPOST/ Daniel Campbell Blight
Images © Neil Smallbone

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Andrew Lacon, Installation View

Andrew Lacon’s work studies social class; that…

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Elad Lassry, Devon Rex, 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (36.5 x 29 x 4 cm), © the artist, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy White Cube

Now that the colloquy on whether photography can be considered an art form is drawing to a close, concentration amongst the next generation of practitioners has turned to what kind of art photography is, and of crucial importance, what kind of pictures photographs are. Photography has established itself as a contemporary gallery worthy pursuit, and is now having conversations with, through the drawing of influence from, other practices that share its common space of presentation: Photography as sculpture; photography as painting; photography as performance – photographs as pictures and images, but not photographs as just simply photographs.

After “American cultural superiority” in the realm of the photograph as picture  (after Jeff Wall or Michael Fried) the considerations of the “contemporary photographer as verifiable artist” have turned to what mode of conceptual investigation or experimental practice can be applied to the making of photographic images. In other words; how can one make photographs really become art; first and foremost an object, but also an intellectual and economic investment. This is a process of comparison for photography; one that seeks to form the next colloquy on what photography is in light of everything but itself; in order to precisely understand its own identity. This reaffirms the reductive nature of photography: the way in which it seems to operate within the art world by wearing the mask of other art forms (sculpture, performance, painting); and also in the way that one takes a photograph by starting with the entire world and honing a reduced element of it for capture. Perhaps photography finds itself by being all other things first? In order to do this, at a single point in time photography will need to be everything, and consider everything: now is that time.

Elad Lassry’s approach seeks to fully affirm the photograph, as a picture, as an art object, whilst acknowledging its compelling relationship to the structures that make it, and physically support it. Picture making – for Elad Lassry – is considered to the point of exasperation. This is not to say that his considered, critical enquiry into photography is a negative one. One can struggle to breath whilst looking at the immensely colourful, lavish and seemingly defectless nature of these images; but when reading the work through a press release, another review, or indeed Douglas Crimp’s essay in the catalogue that accompanies the show, one will find themselves revelling in the immensely descriptive, referential yet contradictory nature of the work. Where, then, does this interesting separation between viewing and understanding come about?

Elad Lassry, Gourds, 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (36.5 x 29 x 4 cm), © the artist, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy White Cube

A collection of fruits photographed on a table are flanked between two sheets of plexi-glass; trapping and freezing these objects ready for their moment of photographing. The plexi-glass and the table make the fruits what they are at the point of being photographed; they render reflections, self-awareness and a gloss on the fruit. The fruit is defined by what encases it. After printing, the photograph is then once again framed between coloured, tackily-painted wood, and therefore gives itself over to the method of its own presentation. The colour of the wood is derived from a colour tone in the picture itself; the photograph is not simply the paper document we once new it as, but instead an object that encompasses its method of presentation as one of the key elements of its own identity. This is, as Lassry himself puts it ‘a struggle between the image and the presence or physicality of it in space’[1] Lassry frames the photograph not just simply with reference to gallery convention, but with a particular interest in the way the frame ‘hosts’ the photograph as picture; as a ready-made, to put it as the artist does, in the terms of Marcel Duchamp. The frame becomes the structure in which an image meets the viewer, ‘like the frame in structuralist film, or the length of commercially available film stock.’[2]

Lassry is the moderator in a conversation between photography and sculpture. These images are not just straight pictures, nor are they sculptures. As he puts it, they are “picture-objects”. However futile this term might seem, or indeed the idea that photography might be attempting to define itself as an art form through the modes of operation of sculpture, this can be read as a logical position from which to engage with the making of photographs if not only by way of the supposed post-medium condition contemporary art finds itself in. This is the greatness of Lassry’s work: the glorious, colourful, exorbitant few moments of time spent with an image that leaves its viewer utterly exasperated. As Lassry states, these are nervous pictures: ‘A nervous picture is one that makes your faculties fail, when your comfort about having visual information, or about knowing the world, is somehow shaken.’[3]

1 Interview with Elad Lassry by Mark Godfrey, Frieze, Issue 143, Nov/Dec 2011, p.91.

2 Ibid. p. 92

3 Ibid. p. 93

Elad Lassry, White Cube, Hoxton Square, London, 23 September – 12 November 2011, © the artist, Photo: Ben Westoby, Courtesy White Cube

Elad Lassry, Pillow 2, 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (36.5 x 29 x 4 cm), © the artist, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy White Cube

Elad Lassry, Portrait 2 (Baby BLue), 2011, C-print, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (36.5 x 29 x 4 cm), © the artist, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy White Cube

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Marge Monko, I Don’t Eat Flowers, 2011, colour poster, 42 x 59cm

In 1989 a united group of people formed a human chain that stretched six hundred kilometres across the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In a move to denigrate the 50^th anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, three pro-independence groups from the three nations organised “The Baltic Chain”. Witnessed globally, the scene was a powerful act of social solidarity and mobility, preceding Lithuania’s declaration of independence by just six months. Estonia and Latvia were to follow. On the evening of August 19^th, 1991, an attempted coup (the “August Putsch”) occurred in Moscow in an endeavor to take power from Gorbachev. This contributed markedly to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. The coup, supported by the Soviet commander of the Baltics, set in motion the declaring of independence of the Baltic States. On August 20^th, as Soviet tanks approached Tallinn, the Estonian-Soviet parliament met in an emergency session to decide the fate of Estonia in or out of the hands of oppressive Soviet power. There occurred the conclusion to the “singing revolution”, as it has been named. A revolution of humility: a revolution of no deaths. The harmony and control shown in this way of overturning power is representative of an attitude that can be seen in the considered and collected nature of Estonian culture today. A calm, crisp cold grips the air in Tallinn during October…

KUMU, the Estonian modern art museum, designed by Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori

Tallinn, Estonia: the 2011 European Capital of Culture. Such an occasion for a nation with relatively recent independence is an opportunity to demonstrate the individuality and progressivity of its culture in the twenty-first century. With the same consideration and acuity as Heinz Valk’s “singing revolution” of 1991, Estonia has created a vibrant art scene in its capital that does not accede to all of the demands of the art market, instead preferring a discourse that remains on the most-part commercial gallery free, and state-supported in its activities. When few are selling and even less are buying, the discourse of art-making as an incongruous set of commercialised practices is somewhat relieved, resulting in a group of practitioners that seem to be more genuinely interested in the pursuit of art as political and aesthetic process (in-as-much one can separate commerce from these two vast areas of enquiry). For an example, see the Estonian ‘capitalist anti-capitalist’ collective Visible Solutions. It’s not that the Estonian art scene doesn’t want or anticipate a market for its artworks; it just hasn’t developed yet and there is seldom a commercial gallery showing contemporary art to be found in the city. One of the few current examples is Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, who will soon present a seminar on collecting contemporary photography.

Tallinn Photomonth took place this October, and is comprised of a number of exhibitions featuring international and local photographers, or artists, working within the field of lens-based media. The message is clear: Tallinn Photomonth seeks to address current photographic discourse internationally, while showing something original to the Baltic, and indeed Estonian photography. The festival is named “Natural Magic”, and is filed under the auspices of ‘exhibitions and events that seek to thematize the possibilities, limits and spatial relations of lens-based art’.[1] For such a huge thematic undertaking, the series of exhibitions around the city contain the usual didacticism one would assume, as well as some genuinely interesting and thought-provoking excursions into the world of Estonian and international photography. The exhibition has been incredibly well organised by Marge Monko, who is also a practicing photographer and a lecturer in the photography department at EKA, the Estonian Art Academy.

BEYOND: Solipsism and Curating

KUMU, the Estonian Art Museum, plays host to the largest and most capacious of the festival’s exhibitions. The building is a shard-like structure in the neo-modern style, jutting out of a limestone cliff. Its inside is curved as one makes one’s way up ramps and steps from level to level. It is a wonderful space for viewing art and one that is generally used to great success, particularly the exhibition The Soviet Woman in Estonian Art, which I saw on my first visit to Tallinn and which opened in April 2010, curated by Katrin Kivimaa and Kädi Talvoja. On my visit this time, I am also intrigued to see an exhibition of work by Tadeusz Kantor, polish avant-gardist and theatre reformer.

For Photomonth, the headline exhibition BEYOND (Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell), curated by Adam Budak, features a number of great and interesting works of photography-cum-sculpture-cum-mixed-media, coherently hung together under an unfortunately didactic and ostentatious curatorial proposition. This proposition could be read as really having little to do with the references and meanings behind the works themselves: A large collection of works, with a huge set of individual references and associations, are grouped together under a theoretical pennant, and flown confidently as an exhibition designed to engage the public in an accessible and clear manner (presumably?). The problem is not that theory shouldn’t lead the concept of a publicly-funded exhibition, nor that intellectualising contemporary art is a problem at all, it is just that within the discourse of contemporary curating, there seems to be a decision being consciously or unconsciously made that any theory can be paired with any set of artworks, regardless of their ambiguous connections:

‘BEYOND (Look at my face: my name is Might Have Been; I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell) is foregrounding a self-reflexive nature of the photographic medium and its current condition as well as the photography’s “conditionality” and “exigency” (what Agamben calls “a demand for redemption”, or what he perceives as an agent of the “real that is always in the process of being lost, in order to render it possible once again”). What makes photography “possible”; what makes it “work”, being “useful” and acting in a “relational” way; how photography continuously contributes to the architecture of the image and goes BEYOND (it); what does make photography “speak”; what is “gestural” about it; how to go BEYOND the medium or move AROUND while simultaneously remaining within the photographic discourse?’

The poetic title par excellence opens up the “multiple perspective” approach of much curating; a form of practice that attempts to be flexible in terms of meaning, but in fact remains ambivalent for fear of being pinned-down in response to criticism. This position allows a number of rhetorical safeguards that distract from the almost total lack of cultural engagement paramount in this publicly funded, institutionally supported show. It is the exhibition that does everything, means anything and says absolutely nothing (which seems to be a regular trait of this particular curator). It is the contribution to a discourse where an exhibition must support itself with heavyweight theory – a philosopher’s oeuvre that is being reconsidered in light of some new advancement in contemporary art. It must purport to make the grandest and most profound of statements, asking the viewer to reconsider the meaning of not just a single subject, but the whole discourse of photography itself; its history as an art from; its ‘self-reflexivity’; its ‘conditionality’ and its ‘exigency’. Exhibitions like this take theory out of context and place it in a vacuum-like space somewhere between the financial rhetoric of the art-market and the bemusement of practicing artists and theorists who must attempt to engage with, criticise, or simply “discuss” the myriad of disconnected ideas often put upon the table of exhibition-making. See here and here for other prime examples, and here and here for more contemporary elaborations.

Agamben is not known as a theorist of photography, and his short essay Judgement Day seems to fall into the same Barthesian trap that James Elkins has so well criticised Barthes himself for in his text against Camera Lucida – What Photography Is (2011). The punctum, ‘…so personal, so close to history and so close to solipsism.’ [2] Agamben reads like that, his closing remarks in Judgement Day that put affect at the centre of viewing all photographic images; almost to say all we have is this raw and unparalleled emotion and that all photographs are necessarily imbued with such conditions, such exigency. Agamben’s photography is not a photography of aesthetics (he admits this, preferring rather to see it as a ‘demand for redemption’), but a photography of judgement: the Brazilian girl in the portrait he speaks of in Judgement Day is judging him, as if her frozen timelessness could say something more profound than ‘Look at the objects that surround me. I am here, at this time, not in your time.’ Perhaps photographs have the ability to judge us only when they exist in multiplicity? Perhaps a single image is lost without other points of connection in the form of other images? That is one of the reasons why bodies of photographic work commonly exist in series: the photographer himself feeling the need to present serial images of a space, a subject, or a time, in order to make sense of it. Even Agamben speaks of more than one image, a book of images in fact:

‘Photography demands that we remember all this, and photographs testify to all those lost names, like a Book of Life that the new angel of the apocalypse – the angel of photography – holds in his hands at the end of all days, that is, every day.’ [3]

Sometimes photographs demand nothing whatsoever. They can exist entirely as images born of the often-pointless relationship between technology and human habit. Is it not the case that photography also shows a non-humanist side, one that downplays human agency?

‘Camera Lucida hides photography’s non-humanist, emotionless side. Photography is not only about light and loss and the passing of time. It is about something harder… not only a blurred glimpse of our own deaths, a sense of memory as photographic grain, a dim look at the passage of time, or a poignant prick of mortality, but something about the world’s own deadness, its inert resistance to whatever it is we may hope or want’[4]

Sometimes photographs do not contain the events we ascribe to them, or the profundity we label them with; they can also be empty and punctum-less. Such images portray the act of doing simply because one has the ability to do; building simply because one has the ability to build. And as the US housing market has recently shown us – so interestingly and subversively revealed by Edgar Martins’ Ruins of the Second Gilded Age – sometimes there is no one to use or occupy that which has been constructed. Your average person with an iPhone: click, click, and click goes the digital shutter as yet another pseudo-analogue photograph gets sent into the flickering ether. What of this huge archive of images? What are we to do with it? The advent of the “online exhibition”: curating the immaterial, a shifting, morphing subject…

Agamben cites Benjamin, but Agamben’s angel of photography doesn’t seem to view the past as a continuous catastrophe, more an exigence for the punctum itself; that spontaneous, habitual Barthesian nostalgia. Agamben’s angel of photography would not be forced by a storm into the future, but would keep photography in some crumbling idea of its own past (the punctum, a mirror; the narcissism of meaningless humanity). The angel of photography holds in her hands the whole of Flickr and Facebook; an incredible weight to bear whilst caught in a storm, moving towards the future. The images she holds do not contain a punctum, nor do they put affect at the centre of their existence, they are simply historical moments and coincidences:

‘The notion of the ‘true’ image has been blasted apart – to use Benjamin’s words – by the dynamite of the split second. No snapshot is an absolute resemblance – Rodchenko uses the example of Lenin to make his case – there are only moments and coincidences. No one photograph summarizes the essence of Lenin, for there is no essence, there is no synthesis, only a shifting subject who moves through time, modifying history, being modified.’ [5]

Like Elkins’ statement on Barthes’ closeness to solipsism, so too we see the solipsism of the contemporary curator; one who looks for meaning in exhibition making, but instead ends up back with the conclusion that only he can be proved to exist; that exhibitions must show the existence of the curator overtly. Long has a time passed when the curator lurked in the background of the museum; now he is an art-world celebrity; his name appears in matt-grey vinyl lettering across the wall of the white cube at the same scale of that of the artist. Like the angel of history, a storm pushes the relational, global, philosopher-curator (of which Nicolas Bourriad is the epitome) into the future while art history crumbles behind him in total despair.

BEYOND Mini-symposium

Daniele Monticelli delivers the opening lecture 
The Event of Language: Life In (and After) the Society of the Spectacle according to Giorgio Agamben. He succeeds at presenting an accessible and intelligent account of Agamben’s thesis adopted by the exhibition’s curator, and in doing so proves it bears little relevance to the works of art featured in the show, other than in the most profoundly general manner.

Liz Wells brings some coherence to the situation by delivering a highly interesting paper on shifting notions of the sublime, which focuses more on paintings of the polar landscape and Caspar David Friedrich than on the exhibitions concept.

The mini-symposium concludes with a group discussion with several of the artists, in which the curator explicitly refuses to answer questions about the exhibition, preferring to divert attention to the practitioners who all look genuinely perplexed by what is expected of them, with the exception of Alexandre Singh who made some lucid comments that both rightly contradicted and surpassed the logic of the exhibition’s concept. I must also use this opportunity to point to the interesting work of Dénes Farkas, the Hungarian artist who has, for a long time, been contributing to a burgeoning contemporary photography scene in Tallinn.

Moments of Reprieve at Tallinn Art Hall

Installation Photograph: Louisa Adam

This exhibition, co-curated by Louisa Adam and David Birkin, and held at the Tallinn Art Hall, contributes to an argument about the crisis of photojournalism, which could find expression, again, in Walter Benjamin’s essay The Author as Producer. Here, Benjamin rightly criticises the tendency photojournalism has to objectify suffering for bourgeois consumption, creating images that allow for too comfortable a contemplation of their content. The critique Benjamin wrote of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s publication The World is Beautiful (1928), contributed towards his wider criticism of the “new objectivity” movement in Weimar Germany at this time. The relationship between aesthetics and politics, according to David Levi-Strauss, reached boiling point in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when several writers took up their discontents with photojournalistic practice and its “aestheticisation of suffering”, including Martha Rosler, John Tagg, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Allan Sekula (one could add several others to this list).

Today, there are a number of practitioners that continue to criticise mainstream photojournalism, including David Birkin and Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin – who all feature in this exhibition – along with Indre Serpytyte, Idris Kahn, Ori Gersht and Taryn Simon, who, in a variety of ways contribute to this important discourse, where photography exists as social critique and as political engagement, which is one very good definition of art and one that perhaps Benjamin would agree with.

‘Moments of Reprieve brings together a group of artists whose work responds conceptually to the challenge of articulating loss in photography, whether as personal experience or political critique. Through a series of staged and stolen moments, the photographs in the show expand on the idea that the medium and its modes of production may point to something beyond a literal visual depiction – for instance, by highlighting how images can communicate more through what they conceal than the subjects they portray. The exhibition takes its title from the 1978 book by Primo Levi, recalling the small and often unspoken gestures encountered during his imprisonment that restored a sense of humanity in otherwise inhumane circumstances.’[6]

The idea of loss (loss of life; loss of information; loss of control) – one of the key points of consideration in any individual or society’s experience of war – is a valid and understandable concept for an exhibition. Where as BEYOND sought to obfuscate cultural engagement and demand the impossible of itself, the exhibition Moments of Reprieve succeeds in contributing coherently to Tallinn Photomonth by, ironically, disentangling a set of works that hold obfuscation (partial or complete abstraction) at the centre of their existence. The former exhibition takes a body of artworks and seeks to obscure them in verboseness, while the latter exhibition takes a body of obscure and often abstract works – with a stringent political message – and gives them relevance and a platform for accessible cultural engagement.

Installation Photograph: Louisa Adam

‘I spoke of the operation of a certain type of fashionable photography, which makes misery into a consumer good. When I turn to the ‘new objectivity’ as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has made the struggle against misery into a consumer good.’ [7]

If much mainstream photojournalism, even to this day, represents part of the ideology of “new objectivity”, then it is exhibitions like this one that seek to question it. As Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin have already expressed their objection at the way in which photojournalism comes to be seen and what it means, so to does this exhibition contribute to a discourse of photographic practice and exhibition-making that seeks to expose and criticise some of the problems inherent to contemporary photography and its politics of obfuscation (as Brecht terms photography’s obscuring ability in 1931, in the following quote). The role of the mainstream photojournalist has been replaced by the vernacular or everyday image. Technology has developed sufficiently to allow for a situation where photojournalism is rendered redundant in its traditional “new objective” function by the very apparatus (camera technology) that allowed it in the first place. Now the role of the amateur photographer or video maker, which the BBC and other news corporations will describe as “unverified footage”, has taken precedence over Brecht’s model of the bourgeois photographer:

‘The tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about conditions in this world. On the contrary photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth. The vast amount of pictured material that is being disgorged daily by the press and that seems to have the character of truth serves in reality only to obscure the facts. The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter’[8]

Installation Photograph: Louisa Adam

This ties into something incredibly pertinent Joel Snyder said in the transcription of The Art Seminar, published in James Elkins’ Photography Theory. The following quote perfectly highlights the erroneous nature of much photojournalism in its quest for accurate social depiction, or verifiable, lucid truth. Perhaps then, what Joel Snyder says here describes exactly where the exhibition Moments of Reprieve might locate itself within the context of exhibition making; and perhaps where BEYOND fails in its perverse solipsism:

‘This is the first kind of problem you run into with the index. If you try to go from what you see in the photograph to what was actually in the world at the moment of exposure, you eventually screw up the way we talk about photographs. What we see in photographs is not, either necessarily or even generally, what we would have seen in front of the camera when the picture was taken.’[9]

The first issue here is representation, in the literal sense of the word: what exists in the world at the time of a photograph is not what is recorded. Photographs can only be imbued with a minority of any given quantity of present information. Therefore the index of a photograph is only ever a small, undemocratic quantity of the index of the event it attempts to capture. I don’t agree that this ‘screws up’ the way we talk about photography; I think it concretises it. Photographs are, on the most part, lies – be them hurtful or nostalgic lies – one who sees the punctum in an image; the narcissism of meaningless humanity – or photographs as empty depictions, such as Elkins’ ‘Dim look at the passage of time’, what one is viewing is technology’s ability to lie when taken at face value; when used as intended. Art that depends upon technology in a mechanical or digital sense is best produced, in my opinion, when it criticises the very conditions that make it possible; a kind of inversion of its own logic. That is what is interesting about David Birkin’s Embedded series, and additionally – to give a different example outside of this exhibition – a number of Cory Arcangel’s videos, including this one.

Other Highlights

Sigrid Viir, Nude with Parents, 2009, 35mm slide installation

Another exhibition, Generation of the Place: Image, Memory and Fiction in the Baltics, curated by Vytautas Michelkevicius, seeks to research photography as a catalyst for discussions and definitions of national identity between the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

‘The exhibition is a part of the project Re:Searching the Baltics, aimed at reviewing photography used by Baltic artists born in the 1970–80s. Grown up in the shift of two eras, this generation still has vivid memories from the early Soviet childhood, mixed with the experience from the teen years in rapidly changing Post-Soviet environment. The experience of this local fin de siècle gave the generation a specific commonness, clearly separating them from earlier and later, entirely Post-Soviet, generations…’

Earlier in the month a solo exhibition by the Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov filled the ground floor space of the Tallinn Art Hall. The show featured two series of work: The Wedding (2005-6), which has recently been published by Mörel Books and I am Not I (1993-2002).

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[1] http://www.fotokuu.ee/en/fotokuu/

[2] James Elkins, What Photography Is, 2011.

[3] Giorgio Agamben, Judgement Day, in Profanations, 2005, p.27

[4] James Elkins, What Photography Is, 2011, p.6.

[5] Esther Leslie, Walther Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, 2000, p.210

[6] From the press release of the exhibition.

[7] Walther Benjamin, The Author As Producer, 1934.

[8] Bertold Brecht, 1931

[9] Joel Snyder, The Art Seminar in Art Theory, 2007, p.34.