“IT IS AS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHEN PHOTOGRAPHY BEGAN AS IT IS TO KNOW WHEN OUR FIRST ANCESTORS OPENED THEIR EYES”

Introduction to our blog:

The topic we will be discussing for the Foto Colectania is the When of photography. This is only the second or third time ASG has grappled with this new genre (if that is what it is) called blog. (As in the blog, to blog, blogger, and so forth.) Moreover, because ASG reads few of these, and most of those she reads are produced by their home institutions, (Le Monde, The New York Times, various museum sites) it’s not clear what forms—even style—this exchange should or will generate. AS is more of a blog reader and a letter writer than a blogger. In any case, we are trying to figure out what should be our cybernetic, blogesque “voice,” while being attentive to the reading preferences of our presumed readers. A major question, then, is how to anticipate our readers’ thresholds of boredom as we natter on about photography’s When. Hopefully, by virtue of the subjects we choose, we will have interested at least some who will be prompted to reply to our virtual exchanges. Editorially, these blogs have been designated as “letters”. The scare quotes are there to acknowledge that for many readers and, indeed, writers, writing and posting online has no visceral, physical, affective, or psychological relation to writing letters by hand, sending them through the mail, and then waiting—sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer—for the reply. In any case, Foto Colectania’s recognition that time has been an essential question within photographic technologies and their discourses can be considered from many perspectives—philosophical, phenomenological, historical and so forth. As an overall subject, it remains subject to debate, evident in the increasing numbers of publications–scholarly and general—within which photography’s temporalities are addressed. But absent a template that would shape our address to one another and be useful to an “imagined community,” the challenge is to invent modes of address appropriate to the medium as well as the form Blog. Should we be “Dear Æsa and Dear Abigail? Or are we AS and ASG? Which is only to say that this blog is a work in progress although we are not sure what its “work” should be, and we will only know what has been produced when this exchange is completed.

AS and ASG, March 2016

Dear Æsa,

In a recent philosophical revision of photography’s technical history, Kaja Silverman remarks that “It is as impossible to know when photography began as it is to know when our first ancestors opened their eyes.” Well…yes, but this statement immediately reminds us that the search for origins (a constant endeavor in astrophysics no less than in evolutionary biology) includes an impulse to rethink or revise the concept of an “origin” of photography, concentrating on its plural inventions. Such inquiries are not unrelated to the profound technological and epistemological transformations in photography represented by the new dominance of digital and electronic imaging. And, on the other [chronological] hand, there are any number of books and exhibitions that refer to “post-photography”. Much follows from the perception that analogue photography is now a historical, if not archaic, object.

But this still begs some issues, even questions of definition. Is “photography” a camera that produces images, such as the camera obscura, employed since the 17^th century? What about camera-less pictures—photograms and the like—that require only light and a light sensitive surface? Must it be camera-and-film and developed image that makes “photography” photography? Is it still “photography” when it is a digital surveillance camera operated mechanically? What about Jean-Louis Commoli and Jean-Louis Baudry’s notion of “the apparatus”—the structural systems that affirm a particular subjectivity [white male European], but extend from the structure of the camera to the film industry, thus, production, dissemination, and reception of camera-made images? Which is only to observe that the way one conceptualizes the medium a priori determines what questions are brought to bear upon it.

“Since when is a temporal concept, this when can also summon up a vast literature engaging with the varieties and paradoxes of photographic time within the image itself.”

As we know, discourse defines the object. It further reminds us that in the mid-nineteenth century, what we now call “photography” had a number of synonymous labels—light writing, sun pictures, pencil of nature, daguerreotypie, heliographie, and so forth—before these were subsumed by the all-purpose word photography, the dominant term for camera-made images by the 1880s.

Alternatively, since “when” is a temporal concept, this “when” can also summon up a vast literature engaging with the varieties and paradoxes of photographic time within the image itself. These are central issues in the literature of the medium and were directly addressed by André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer (to refer only to the major historical figures in the post WWI period). More recently, these multiple aspects of photography’s temporalities have been the subject of books and essays by many scholars, theorists, and critics from phenomenological, existential, semiotic, and even psychoanalytic perspectives.

But like the “when” of photography, philosophical issues hover around the “what” of photography, what photography is. This is, in fact, the title and subject of a recent book by James Elkins. But as with the discussions of photographic time, this renewed quest to define and categorize the medium has been one of the interesting developments in the coming of age of photography-as-an-academic discipline. This, I think, is at least in part a symptomatic response to the dominance of digital technologies of instant production and dissemination that put pressure on both questions of when and what. Especially, in that these new technologies of the image retrospectively transform how we think about the previous ones.

My own preoccupations that might be said to intersect with the “when” of photography are more historiographic then philosophical. (I have something of an anti-ontological bias.) I have never really been interested in writing about photography as a “general” phenomenon, practice, or as possessing an “essence,” so to speak. (This was, of course what Barthes sought rhetorically to discover in his last book.) In other words, I have written either about individual photographers and formations with respect to their particular context. Moreover, in defining my interest as the “historiographic,” as opposed to the “historical,” I mean only to emphasize that any history of a medium is always partial and always in process. But historiography, as a body of texts, produces a discursive field that subsequently confers meaning and value (in all senses), decides what counts and does not (canon formation), invents putative traditions, categories and genres, and, finally, is the site where ideologies (of gender, class, race, nation and so forth) are inscribed, expressed, and—even—contested. In tandem with the various institutions that frame and position photographic production, these operate to construct the history of photography, even though there can never be a unified narrative about a medium that almost immediately was fully assimilated to and employed by all sites of industrialized capitalist modernity and postmodernity.

“the house of photography has many mansions”

Because I first began writing about photography or individual photographers well before photography and/or its histories became an academic discipline and while it was still a relatively marginal aspect of the art market (circa 1978), I am somewhat surprised at the speed with which it became fully assimilated to both. But in reflecting on these broad categories of when and what, what strikes me is an increasing distance between particular types of photographic discourse. There is now a significant amount of writing that can be properly considered philosoph(ies) of photography.

This is largely represented in scholarly journals, especially Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, but also such journals as Leonardo, The Yale Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism, and many others. There even exists a British journal called Philosophy of Photography that debuted in 2010. As another indication of the difficulty in constituting a unified field, we might wonder how scholars and theorists like Vilém Flusser, Ariella Azoulay, Paul Virilio, and Margaret Iversen could be considered to occupy a shared terrain, given the variety of their premises. But the point here is that critical writing that takes on “photography” as in and of itself the object of inquiry (and knowledge) does not necessarily intersect with other scholarly discourses on photography.

My teaching experience in American universities and art academies has mostly been in departments of art history, whereas photography as a practice is often taught in studio departments or art schools. Thus, on a pedagogical level, theory and practice are institutionally separate. In any case, the house of photography has many mansions: A survey of internationally circulated journals dealing with photography’s history or historiography (the French Etudes Photographiques the British History of Photography, the German Fotogeschichte, Photo Austria, etc.) is doing something altogether distinct from journals such as Aperture from the U.S., or Eikon, from Austria, both of which feature contemporary art photography and, increasingly, video, film, and mixed media. There are, of course, the legions of camera magazines that target the amateur photographer, some of whom also go to exhibitions and museums.

“how photography has been used is not separable from the when of its inception and the what of its subsequent determinations.“

Finally, there are the upscale international art magazines (e.g., Artforum, Kunstforum, Parkett, Frieze, etc.) that consider photographically generated work as simply another aspect of contemporary art. But what is significant is that for the most part, these different areas do not intersect very much. Philosophical reflections on the medium, more generalized historical or contemporary journals consecrated to photographic production, the now-professionalized research into photography’s history, and finally, the institutions, markets, and discourses of contemporary art within which photography is now art as such, are more or less autonomous and do not converse with one another.

Photography histories, however, occupy a somewhat singular position, for they have both manifest and implicit connections to these other vectors since, in the final analysis, how photography has been used is not separable from the when of its inception and the what of its subsequent determinations.

Cooperative of Photograhy

Next “Correspondence” by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir will be published on April, Thursday 14th.

“The last few decades have seen a reinvigorated and widespread fascination with “firsts” in the history of the medium”

Dear Abigail,

You are throwing many balls in the air for me to grab. Let´s start with the notion of beginnings. The View From the Window at Le Gras, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), taken from the upstairs’ window of his home in Burgundy in France, is now generally referred to as being the “world´s earliest surviving camera photograph dated 1826 or 1827.” Niépce started experimenting with chemical photography in 1814, and it took him more than ten years of various unstable results to arrive at a permanent, fixed image – “a copy of nature.”

Art historian and monumental photo collector Helmut Gernsheim (1913-1995), who co-authored with his wife Alison The History of Photography: From The Earliest Use of The Camera Obscura in The Eleventh Century Up to 1914 (1955), describes the hunt for Niépce´s first photograph, in the aftermath of World War II. In a much quoted article entitled “The 150th anniversary of photography” published in 1977.[1]

This “sensational story” is discussed by Jessica S. McDonald in a recent book Photography and Its Origins (2014) edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Zervigón. They point out that “The last few decades have seen a reinvigorated and widespread fascination with “firsts” in the history of the medium— from the first aerial photograph, the first photographic self-portrait, and the first photograph posted on the World Wide Web, to the earliest photos taken in New York, Japan, the North Pole, and, frankly, anywhere.”

A large number of texts have been dedicated to Niépce´s discovery. George Potonniée who wrote one of the first historiographical surveys of the discovery of photography in France: Histoire de la découverte de la photographie (1925) claims that photography “was invented by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce, in the year 1822.” He bases this date not on an image, as defined by Gernsheim, but on a letter written by Niépce to his son Isidore. In 1940, Potonniée published Cent ans de photographie, 1839-1939, where he still claims 1822 as the date of photography’s invention but also insists on the date 1839 as the official, public date of photography, that is, when Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) experimented with his direct-positive salted paper print technique, the cyanotype. However, Bayard, was unlucky, as he published the results of his findings too late, and lost the race of invention to Daguerre and Talbot. In 1840, Bayard responded to this injustice by performing in front of the camera, staging his suicide, creating simultaneously the first self-portrait, and the first “selfie”, upon which he wrote: “The corpse which you see here is that of Mr. Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen, […] To my knowledge, this ingenious and indefatigable researcher has been working for about three years to perfect his invention. […] The Government, having given too much to Mr. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for Mr. Bayard and the unhappy man drowned himself.”[2]

Neither Potonniée nor Gernsheim invented the category of “The first photograph.” It was Francis Bauer, a botanic illustrator at the Royal Botanic Gardens, who inscribed on the back of Niépce’s pewter plate in both French and English: “Les premiers résultats obtenus spontanément par l’action de la lumière. Par Monsieur Niepce [sic] de Chalons sur Saône. 1827. Monsieur Niépce’s first successful experiment of fixing permanently the image from nature.” Gernsheim, after relating his own hunt for the image, often described his emotion when he finally found himself with the object in his hands.

In 1963 Gernsheim sold Niépce’s “First Photograph” to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, along with his immensely valuable photography collection “for a figure below $500,000.” This date might possibly be considered as a symptom of a change, a “starting point” for a certain market for photography, bearing in mind that British Institutions had earlier refused Gernsheim´s offer and therefore declined to purchase the collection.

“The conflicts and debates about the birth of photography are an early example of contradictions, conflicts, good (and bad) luck, and paradoxes”

I am going into some detail in this much-repeated story, because I find it important, revealing the significance of time lapses, overlapping and intersecting “whens” in the historiography of photography. It shows how beginnings are “invented” and constructed through narratives; “discourse defines the object,” as you observe, Abigail. The conflicts and debates about the birth of photography are an early example of contradictions, conflicts, good (and bad) luck, and paradoxes – in fact, all the contingencies that have shaped the medium’s history. I am galloping ahead here, because the whens in photography – the discoveries made by Niépce, Bayard, Talbot, (and many others) must also be read as part of a large utopian project. In that context, it is worth recalling Louis Daguerre’s (1787-1851) comment in a letter to Niépce in 1823: “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature, ” written so many years before he presented his invention the Daguerreotype in front of the Academy of Science in Paris in 1839.

Clearly, we don’t have the time or space to survey how dozens if not hundreds of art and photo historians and others have constructed (or deconstructed) narratives of origins and beginnings of photography. These histories have been debated in a great number of books, academic papers, seminars, films, television programs, and survey exhibitions, such as Silber und Salz: zur Frühzeit der Photographie im deutschen Sprachraum, 1839-1860: Kataloghandbuch zur Jubiläumausstellung 150 Jahre Photographie (1989), and Le daguerréotype français. Un objet photographique au musée d’Orsay in 2003 – just to name a few.

So in order to move from these more familiar accounts of beginnings, and to consider a different approach, I would like to mention Jonathan Crary´s fascinating discussion of visual and optical precedents in his prehistory of photography, reflecting on the ways vision was refigured in European thought in the 1840s.

“the development of the black and white analogue photograph is often presented as a universal paradigm, when it might just be a sideline”

I also started reading Erkki Huhtamo´s wonderful paper “From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes Toward an Archaeology of the Media” where he discusses parallels between the development of photography and cinematography – for example the non-causal relationship between the numerous optical and pictorial and cinematographic devices of the 19^th century. By employing an archeological approach to media, he rejects the linear form of media histories: He remarks that “This kind of approach emphasizes cyclical rather than chronological development, recurrence rather than unique innovation. In doing so, it runs counter to the customary way of thinking about technoculture in terms of constant progress, proceeding from one technological breakthrough to another, and making earlier machines and applications obsolete along the way. The aim of the media archeological approach is not to negate the “reality” of the technological development, but rather to balance it by placing it within a wider and more multifaceted social and cultural frame of reference.”

The fluctuation between the still and moving, between the focus on optical research on one side and the impact of luck or chance on the other, departs from the more historiographic narratives of photography, where the development of the black and white analogue photograph is often presented as a universal paradigm, when it might just be a sideline.

When we were given this subject – the when of photography – I began by making a list, a sort of an inventory “à la Prévert” associating some of the possible whens of photography. The first is obviously the question When photography became photography, and then, successively, when photography became art, when photography became journalism, pornography, instantaneous (i.e., the snapshot), propaganda, contemporary art, digital. To which I would add when photography started in “other” places, when photography histories were written and so on and so forth.

I would once more like to return to the recent book Photography and its Origins. Here Jürg Schneider examines the origins of photography in Africa in the past and in the present in a recent paper discussing the definitional and categorical distinctions between African photography, photography made in Africa (often as not from colonial viewpoints), and photography made by African photographers. African photography (as such) was invented in the mid-1980s, and the interactivity – indeed the synergy – between historical research and the receptivity of the market is particularly striking in the case of African photography.

“The “discovery” of Seydou Keïta and the rather aggressive marketing of his photographs made in his studio in Bamako, is a symptom of this movement.

 

A great number of photographers and photographs have been unearthed since Gernsheim constructed his story, and this was in fact also the case with much that was previously ignored in photo histories, journals, publications, colloquia, exhibitions etc.. Schneider identifies the symposium “Photographs as Sources for African History,” as an important step in the process of inventing African photography, for which it provided “one of the first comprehensive overviews of the history of photography on the continent.” The “discovery” of Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) and the rather aggressive marketing of his photographs made in his studio in Bamako, is a symptom of this movement. Keïta, now considered as “one of the greatest photographers of the second half of the twentieth century” is currently celebrated in a monographic show in Paris’s Grand Palais, an event that might be considered a summa of the marriage of marketing and historiography.

In comparison, the invention of Vivian Maier was different – and happened much faster – which shows that Internet and new global markets have decisively altered the terms of both academic discourse and their production of new photographic histories. Abigail, in your Jeu de Paume magazine blog, “Inventing Vivian Maier” you raise a number of issues prompted by Maier´s work. The gender issue, of course, is evident given her job as a nanny, but nevertheless, someone who created an oeuvre. However, not all discoveries become marketable successes. If the market is not there to push, institutional “gatekeepers” of the official histories of photography might keep their gates closed. The “Vivian Maier enterprise” has in fact uncovered these mechanisms and made them bluntly visible.

[1] Helmut Gernsheim, “The 150th anniversary of photography,” History of Photography, Vol. 1: issue 1, pp. 3-8, 1977. DOI:10.1080/03087298.1977.10442876. A French translation is available in Helmut Gernsheim, “La première photographie au monde”, Études photographiques, 3 | Novembre 1997, URL : http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/92.

[2] Translation in Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire. The Conception of Photography, MA: MIT, 1999, p. 167.

Next “Correspondence” by Abigail Solomon-Godeau will be published on April, Thursday 21th.

Dear Æsa,

Apropos of Vivian Maier, it’s funny that you mention this newly minted photographic “genius” as an instance of marketing, and, as you remark, if the market doesn’t push at the museum’s doors, its gatekeepers may be slow (or disinclined) to confer their imprimatur on an unknown candidate. In fact, I think that John Maloof—one of the major players in the Maier enterprise—tried to interest New York’s MoMA in her work early on. But the museum wasn’t—at least then—interested.

Of course, this was before he had shepherded his holdings of her work into a significant market niche, created through publicity, electronic media, exhibitions, an Oscar nominated documentary, and an irresistible story line.(e.g., “Recluse Nanny Turns Out To Be Photography Genius,” a headline in The New York Post). This was also before all the legal problems popped up, with other claimants to her estate climbing out of the woodwork. Or, to be more precise, a lawyer coming forth with a remote relative of Maier who might be legally considered as heir to the rights of her photographs.

“I would say that “fine art” photography has always been a collectable, going back at least to the 1850s, but this was a decidedly rare, indeed marginal phenomenon”

As we both agree, the multiple “whens” of photography offer us a daunting range of choices on which to focus (no pun intended). But with reference to one of your “whens”—when photography became an art commodity—I would say that “fine art” photography has always been a collectable, going back at least to the 1850s, but this was a decidedly rare, indeed marginal phenomenon—the affair of a small number of connoisseurs and the amateur photographers who exhibited, exchanged, and occasionally purchased work.[1] The market for such art photography grew in Europe and the U.S. with the advent of Pictorialism, the Photo-Secession, and an increasing number of exhibitions. I think it was the Wadsworth Athenaeum in New Haven that was the first museum to acquire photographs as art. Alfred Stieglitz was a major figure, through his galleries, his publications, and his international connections.[2] And, in any case, certainly by the 1920s there was a widespread recognition internationally that photographs could be art despite, or accompanied by, endless and endlessly boring debates about whether photography was or was not, could or should be considered as an elite art form. On the other hand, as Christopher Phillips noted in his indispensable essay on MoMA’s photography department, when the museum tried to sell photographs in the 1950s to the public at a very low price, there were few takers.[3]

“The forms of critique that simultaneously emerged in this period were equally concerned with what Douglas Crimp identified as the transformation of photographs from discourse value to exhibition value”

But when we talk about markets—I mean real money here, as well as all the requisite apparatuses of an art market—it seems that there are two different “whens” involved. These were, at least initially, largely European and American phenomena, but this is only to signal that “uneven development” is as much a factor in economies of art as they are in industrial and technological terms. In all these respects, I like Rosalind Krauss’s notion of a “second invention of photography,” as she proposed in 1978—where she indicated something like an epistemological shift in the way photography was being “thought,” and needless to say, reconstructed simultaneously as an aesthetic object as such.[4] (Interesting, in this regard, to recall that the title of Victor Burgin’s important 1982 anthology was Thinking Photography.) And because the medium was being thought differently, it generated, in turn, new discourses within which it could be reconsidered. These included critiques of the ways that historically, photographic practices based on the notion of documentation (the empirical rationale for nationalist, geographic and ethnological surveys) were instrumental in the exercise of governmental power and imperial domination, while providing as well the “scientific” support for sexual, racial and ethnic hierarchies.[5] The forms of critique that simultaneously emerged in this period were equally concerned with what Douglas Crimp identified as the transformation of photographs from discourse value to exhibition value. In his essay on this subject, this shift was exemplified in the detaching of photographic imagery from its embeddedness in books, folios, and albums, to be repositioned (quite literally in the case of the New York Public Library) under the aegis of the author. By institutionally creating an autonomous department of photography, the images would now be organized and classified under the name of the photographer, rather than the photographic subject. This was just another symptom of the “art historicization” of photography’s plural histories, which despite a few departures or thematic organizations of the subject still remain the prototype for what I call the “disciplining” of the medium.

“you might say that conceptually oriented practices were the forerunners of what I think of as the second “when” of photography”

This is one of the reasons why photography-as-art in its institutional senses expanded so conspicuously in the 1980s. Moreover, because an un-aestheticized form of photographic use was so prevalent in conceptual art (e.g., Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari) and its brethren and descendants (e.g., the Bechers, certain of the so-called Pictures generation, explicitly political and oppositional practices, such as those of Hans Haacke, in the work of British conceptualists like Victor Burgin, etc.) and even more importantly, in the work of women artists influenced by feminism (Hannah Wilke, Valie Export, Martha Rosler, Ana Mendieta, Jo Spence—these are just a few), collectively these seeded the ground for all forms of photography that would be eventually assimilated into contemporary art markets and institutions. As these artists and practices were undeniably situated in the contemporary art camp (and altogether outside the orbit of fine art photography), you might say that conceptually oriented practices were the forerunners of what I think of as the second “when” of photography. By which I refer to the subsequent period—approximately, the mid-1990s—when the medium was absorbed into the domain of contemporary art. If you look at prices at auctions, the gold standard, so to speak, for determining the photographic marketplace, rises to a peak in 2008, and then with the crash, it drops precipitously. But its art world integration was further prompted by the institutionalization of “post-media,” inter-media, and trans-media, all of which were the anti-formalist practices that are now routinely grouped under the rubric of postmodernist practice.

When in the 1980s I wrote about the distinction between “art photography,” a form of practice I considered to be an exhausted lode, and (postmodern) artists’ use of photography—a distinction that involved quite different means and ends—it was close to the crest of the art photography boom (in the U.S.).[6] At that time, the first half of the 1980s, photography departments in museums, galleries, and photographic publications were decidedly not interested in Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Louis Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth, etc. What I did not anticipate was that, mutatis mutandis, these artists would be accepted into the domain of art photography, while conversely, almost every form of photographic practice—fashion, photojournalistic, documentary—would be considered as simply another aspect of contemporary art as such. (When Berlin opened its new National Gallery in Dahlem, the opening show was Helmut Newton.)

Of course, I am generalizing, and my observations are principally based on the New York art world in the 1980s and 1990s, and may not describe the situation elsewhere. Be that as it may, I think it’s fair to say that by the turn of the 20^th century, art photography’s assimilation into all art (and art historical) institutions, markets, and discourses was the culmination of the medium’s quest for upper mobility and final aesthetic legitimation.

Next “Correspondence” by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir will be published on April, Thursday 28th.

[1] This is, of course to distinguish the vernacular collecting of photographs, i.e., the family album, the stereoscopic collection, the carte-de-visite album, etc., from the production, circulation, and collection of photographs as art objects in their own right.

[2] Stieglitz’s galleries in NYC were first, in 1905, The Little Galleries of the Photo-Succession, and in 1907, its successor 291. At its opening, the former garnered print sales that totaled $2,800, a lot of money at the time. See Sarah Greenough, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, exh. cat., (Washington D.C., The National Gallery, 2000). See as well Allan Sekula’s “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” and “The Currency of the Photograph,” both in Sekula, Photography Against the Grain (Halifax, N.S., Canada: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984).

[3] Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed., Richard Bolton (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989). Footnote 50, p. 44.

[4] “Like printers in a darkroom, we are watching the development, in sharpened and proliferative detail, of a structured field in depth. Photography. Pursuing this dazzlingly obvious simile one turn further, we are surprised by that now coming into view. We had thought Time captured, arrested, but it is History, embedded in the economy of production, that emerges as the shaping, compositional subject of that presumed arrest. There is, in all the current literature, the sense of an epiphany, delayed and redoubled in its power. Only now, we are instructed, is Photography truly “discovered,” and now it is that we must set to work, establishing an archeology, uncovering a tradition, constituting an aesthetic. It is to be redeemed, by the scholarship and speculation of our time, from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it had been consigned.” Rosalind Krauss, “Photography: A Special Issue,” October 5, (Summer 1978), pp. 3-5. P.3

[5] See, for example, John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1988); Allan Sekula, “The Body in the Archive,” in Bolton, op. cit.; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Winter 1986).

[6] I described this development in the essay, “Winning the Game when the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism” in Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

Lev Manovich: “The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic”

 

Dear Abigail,

The pace of the market was a bit different in Europe, and European photographers came later to the race. As Quentin Bajac points out in his book, Après la photographie ? De l’argentique à la révolution numérique (2010), European initiatives, such as the public photography auction organized by André Jammes and Nicolas Rauch in Geneva in 1961, were commercial failures. Still, the markets were changing rapidly, and in 1976 Hilla and Bernd Becher entered the German Kunstkompass’ world ranking of artists at number 100, the first photographers to make the list. By 1980, about 15 photographers were listed, increasing with the emergence of the so-called Düsseldorf School, which broke into the booming international art market of the 1990s. The work of some of Bernd Becher´s 87 students fell under this category, with the students studying at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie from 1976 to 1998. Amongst them were Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. Influenced by commercial photography, the students distanced themselves from the Bechers’ systematic, deadpan, b&w documentary style, and embraced large format color photographs. The first was made in 1986 by Axel Hütte and Thomas Ruff. Their prints, produced using the latest digital techniques from the laboratory at the Grieger advertising firm, could be enlarged to large-scale dimensions. They also used the patented “Diasec” technique, which bonded the print directly to the support, with no space between, giving them a sleek and object-like quality. (News agencies and commercial advertising were always at the forefront of technical transformation). The market interest in large format photographs and in the Bechers’ circle, helped propel their former students to commercial success.

In general, the photography market mirrors other traditional fine art markets, based on notions of the masterpiece, the signature, and the vintage print.

Here, there were a number of intersecting phenomena. The mechanisms of Neo-liberal urban development and cultural politics combined with the increasing dominance of digital technologies at the time, to forge new ground. There were various forms of sponsorship (including from private corporations such as banks and other enterprises) as well as cultural activities, festivals and photographic events, culminating in the biennial phenomenon and success of global fairs like Paris Photo, which celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year.

In general, the photography market mirrors other traditional fine art markets, based on notions of the masterpiece, the signature, and the vintage print. Limited editions have replaced the medium’s normative condition of easily reproducible unlimited prints. Nevertheless, the development of art photography markets was much slower in several “other” parts of the world, that is to say, everywhere except Europe and the U.S. Even so, the Tate museum did not put on a photography exhibition until 2003: Cruel + Tender. The real in the twentieth century photograph. It is only quite recently that the market has begun to absorb “other” artists whose work developed in parallel to these mainstream markets. Latin American conceptual artists, as well as so-called street photographers, have recently been featured in Europe as part of such retrospective exhibitions as América Latina 1960-2013 at Fondation Cartier in Paris. Similarly, photographers from the former Eastern block, and other peripheral regions, are only now in the process of being recognized and exhibited.

As you mentioned, Abigail, the institutional integration of photography as art occurred through parallel channels (e.g., university programs, museums, photography festivals, specialized publications and so forth). However, the focus on new media in Harald Szeemann´s Documenta 5 (Questioning Reality—Pictorial Worlds Today) is often considered to signal the institutional shift, promoting an acceptance of different media, including photography.

In their 2012 essay, “Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy”, Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen note that “From an art historical point of view, this is ironic, given that photography …first entered the mainstream-fine art canon when artists turned to the medium to exploit those very features of its process that appear, from a philosophical point of view, to be in tension with its status as art. Such artists were interested in the nonart nature of photography… as a new resource or horizon of possibility for avant- garde artistic practice in a climate of increasing commercialization.”

The importance of the dialectic of skilling and de-skilling is demonstrated by differentiating the separate photographic worlds of the 1970s. It can be split into that of “fine art photography” and of two generations of artists, none of whom were trained in art photography, employing the medium for quite different purposes. Abigail, I know you wrote a number of essays on this subject in the 1980s, and therefore I am curious to hear your interpretation of this period in photo history. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh defines deskilling as the “persistent effort to eliminate artisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity from the horizon of both artistic production and aesthetic evaluation.”[1] Deskilling as a creative option was exemplified in Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, but it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that his concept was variously assimilated to photographic practices.

Vito Acconci: “Walk in the street trying not to blink. Each time you blink, snap a photo”

 

Historically, it appears that it was Lawrence Alloway, in his exhibition Artists and Photographs (1970), who first presented the photographs of conceptual and land artists. He comments that “One thing everybody has in common should be noted: there is an anti-expertise, anti-glamorous quality about all the photographs here. Their factual appearance is maintained through even the most problematic relationships.”[2] Most of these artists used the camera as a medium of transmission and reproduction, documenting events, happenings, actions and creating images that were somewhat autonomous. In this respect, Denis Oppenheim’s definition of his photographic practice as a “secondary statement …after the fact,” is exemplary of this form of photographic use. Paralleling these practices were other non-photographers, artists such as Vito Acconci, whose work in the 1970s was informed by Fluxus-like instructions: “Walk in the street trying not to blink. Each time you blink, snap a photo.” Acconci questioned the notion of artistic subjectivity while suggesting that the open shutter replaces his closed eyes. In Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966) Bruce Nauman turned the photographic image into a form of speech act; simultaneously performance, sculpture, and image, one version of which was published in his 1970 collection Eleven Color Photographs 1966-7/70. In an article in Artforum in 1976, Nancy Foote characterized these artists, as, “anti-photographers,” and their use of photography as being somehow ‘unphotographic.’[3] As you did in the early 1980s, she describes the discrepancy between “so called serious photography” and the use of photography in conceptual art, “setting itself apart …by a snapshot-like amateurism and nonchalance.” However, at that moment, ‘fine art photography’ was effectively limited to its own institutions, the most influential being the Photography Department of MoMA. She ironically described the situation: “For every photographer who clamors to make it as an artist, there is an artist running a grave risk of turning into a photographer.”[4]

Photographic histories published in the 1970s did not address this division between art photographers and artists using photography. These issues were first discussed as part of a photo historical survey in Michel Frizot´s New History of Photography (1994/98). It seems, however, that these distinctions between art photographers and artists making use of the medium, from conceptualism to the so-called “Pictures Generation” have been rendered moot by the integration of photography into the art world as well as the consequences of digital technologies.

In his paper “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” that accompanied the exhibition Photography after photography: memory and representation in the digital age (1995), Lev Manovich analyzed the paradoxes inherent in the digital image. As he remarked, “The logic of the digital photograph is one of historical continuity and discontinuity. The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture – and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger. The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic. In short, this logic is that of photography after photography.”[5]

“Photography After Photography,“ in Manovich’s analysis, suggests that the distinctions that have been drawn between these two camps – art photographers and artists using the medium – are made obsolete by the new dominance of digital technologies, electronic communication, increased hybridity and ‘new media’ in general. These new technologies have integrated the optical features and cultural characteristics of photography, producing the effect of the analogical image in order to make us believe we are still looking at a photograph, an observation explored in Martin Lister’s The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1995).

Next “Correspondence” by Abigail Solomon-Godeau will be published on May, Thursday 5th.

[1] Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism/Antimodernism/Postmodernism, 1900 to 1944, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004, p. 531.

[2] Lawrence Alloway, “Artists and Photographs” (1970), The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, Douglas Fogle (ed.), Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2003, p. 20-21.

[3] Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Photographers”, Artforum, September 1976: 46-54. For a survey of photographic debates taking place during the 1970s, see the exhibition catalogue The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, Douglas Fogle (ed.), Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2003.

[4] Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Photographers”, Artforum, September 1976, p. 46.

[5] Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”, Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, Exhibition catalog, Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1996.

Dear Aesa,

The time frame I am considering here is quite recent, the past ten years or so, when this newly minted discipline – the philosophy of photography – has been institutionally established, especially in Anglo-American scholarship. This was prompted by one of your citations in your last blurb/letter that had me scurrying to the library – actually, the computer – to read Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen’s essay.[1] I’m glad I did, because it relates to something I had written in the first of my posts, remarking on the distance between philosophical discourse on photography and those generated by photography and art criticism, history and critical theory.

Costello and Iversen’s essay makes specific reference to this non-relation in their introduction to a special issue of Critical Inquiry, one of the fruits of a three-year research project that aimed to put philosophers of photography and art historians or critics into active dialogue: “How did philosophy become,” they rhetorically ask, “- or perhaps make itself – so irrelevant to its first-order object of inquiry that almost no one in the domain it claims to analyze manifests any interest in finding out what philosophers have to say about it? Conversely, how did art historians become – or perhaps make themselves – so indifferent to advanced theoretical and conceptual analysis of their objects of inquiry as not to feel it professionally incumbent upon them to inform themselves about debates as to what counts as a photograph, photography, or a photographic process? Philosophers and art historians alike may find this a harsh assessment; if so, we suggest that this only shows how little real appreciation each discipline has of how the other perpetuates itself. It shows how little, to be blunt, either really knows or understands what the other does.”[2]

Now it is quite true that for all the years I have written on the medium, I never troubled myself “as to what counts as a photograph, photography, or a photographic process.” Perhaps naively, I considered these as self-evident. In any case, what is curious about analytic philosophy’s approach to photography is its apparent separation from that body of texts that more routinely goes by the name of photography theory. But none of what I have read thus far under the rubric of philosophy addresses this distinction between philosophy and critical theory, leaving open the question of what criteria determine the content of either field. But in asking what “counts”, whether as image, medium or technology, it seems that the stake in these philosophical debates is (yet again) whether camera-made works are admissible as aesthetic objects. That photographically-generated works have been long incorporated into contemporary art is, obviously, a fait accompli, yet these “facts on the ground” have not served to end the debate.

This is because within this discourse, the terms by which the “aesthetic object” is defined, implicitly or explicitly, turns – surprise! – on notions of authorial sovereignty, signature style, artistic intentionality (all understood as belonging to the category of agency) as pitted against the automatism, contingency or photomechanical functioning of the camera. Concomitantly, a new vocabulary for photographic art has been coined: Photography is now one of the “depictive arts”, the photograph is now christened “tableau”, and the language of [modernist] painting with some tinkering, becomes appropriate for photography.[3] Has nothing changed?

Accordingly, we might conclude that the other (unacknowledged) stake in this domain of scholarship is the revival of modernist aesthetics, now refurbished in the spectacular form of large-scale – often very large scale – color photographs generally fabricated with digital means. Iversen and others remark that these super-sized productions resemble large paintings. But, in fact, they don’t; it is patently impossible to mistake one for the other. However, in this regard, we can see how Jeff Wall’s formal allusions to 19^th century paintings would have been so enthusiastically received by those nostalgic for or actively promulgating the modernist credo of autonomous art that many, myself included, thought was dead.

Nevertheless, these kinds of claims and their related arguments clarify a number of phenomena in the past decade that I have found puzzling. In no particular order, these are the vastly inflated reputations of a number of artists working in these new photographic forms, especially that of Jeff Wall and the cottage industry of critical exegeses his work has spawned; the rapturous embrace of Wall et al by none other than Michael Fried, the bugbear of the “theatrical”, celebrant of “presentness” and medium specificity; the happy coexistence of museum, market, academic and philosophical domains in the collective embrace of “museum photography”,[4] and last, the conspicuous absence within these discourses of feminism, feminist artists, feminist theories of representation, and almost all female artists identified with any of these. To which we might also add a half-century of heterogeneous critical art practices, within which this paradigm provides no space to position the work of Hans Haacke, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Allan Sekula and Alfredo Jaar to take a few examples at random. This conservative revival of modernist aesthetics is especially apparent in the genealogy employed to trace photography’s apotheosis as “museum art”.[5] The starting point in these accounts is conceptual art, variously identified with Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler, and sometimes with the Bechers. Conceptual practices are polemically associated with (variously) de-skilling, receptiveness to chance and contingency, the legacy of Duchampian readymade, and the affirmation of automatism. From there, the narrative moves on to the so-called Pictures Generation, now pointedly detached from its earlier placement within critical postmodernism.[6]

“These particular discourses in the “philosophy of photography” are effectively complicit with the various apparatuses of the business of art, which like other “external” aspects of art production are excluded from its purview”

These artists are now re-purposed, so to speak, as the post-conceptual generation, and much of their work distilled into a ‘death of the author’ demonstration, as evidenced in their use of appropriation. Accordingly, their reflections on mass media, and in the case of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth and others, the feminist implications of their work are ignored. Significantly, those among these artists currently celebrated by Fried and his cohort as exemplars of the “pictorial” and the “tableau” – notably Cindy Sherman – are necessarily shorn of any relation to feminism, as is, in a somewhat different context, the work of Sherrie Levine.[7] In fact, feminist artists of two generations who used photography – their numbers are legion – have literally no place in this narrative, insofar as the terms of the debate – automatism versus agency – are not especially relevant to feminist-influenced production which, like so much art of the past fifty years, positioned itself outside and independent of modernist aesthetics. Thus, while one part of these debates turns on the use of photography in conceptual art employed as a “readymade,” – and the camera’s automatism deployed as a blow to modernist conceptions of art – the centrality of photography in the service of anti-aesthetic of specifically critical ends is relegated to the past, if even acknowledged.

All of which is to say that these particular (and extremely insular) discourses in the “philosophy of photography” are effectively complicit with the various apparatuses of the business of art, which like other “external” aspects of art production (e.g., ideology, reception, representational politics and so forth) are excluded, virtually by definition, from its purview. Affirming the status of the artwork as outside of social relations, these approaches exclude the many determinations that shape cultural production at any given time – the when of production.

Within these particular intellectual or philosophical formations that engage with this recent photographic work, it is important to note those issues and practices banished from discussion: feminist-influenced art production is only the most obvious. What strikes me in this “philosophical” discourse and its extremely specialized language is its hermeticism, its principled distance from the conflictual field of representation and its politics, its tacit endorsement of existing systems of market and institutional legitimation. And, not least, its apparent disinterest or non-recognition of the extraordinary plurality and heterogeneity of artistic practices employing photography.

Next “Correspondence” by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir will be published on May, Thursday 12th.

[1]Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, “Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry no. 38, summer 2012. For those interested, a two-day conference at the Tate Modern that was a part of this project is available online as an audio recording.

[2] Ibid. p. 683

[3] One of the first photography critics to propose this concept of photograph as “tableau” was Jean-Francois Chevrier: See, for example, “Les aventures de la forme tableau dans l’histoire de la photo­graphie”, Photo-kunst. Du xx^e au xix^e siècle, aller et retour / Arbeiten aus 150 Jahren, cat. exp., Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Verlag Cantz, 1989. “The Tableau and the Document of Experience”, in Thomas Weski (dir.), Click Doubleclick. The Documentary Factor, cat.exp., Haus der Kunst Munich, Cologne, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006

[4]The term was coined by Julian Stallabrass, see below. Michael Fried’s book is Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). Repurposing his well-known arguments about absorption (good) and theatricality (bad), he celebrates Wall as the savior of the entire Western tradition of art.

[5] Julian Stallabrass, “Museum Photography and Museum Prose,” New Left Review 65, September-October, pp 1-21.https://newleftreview.org/II/65/julian-stallabrass-museum-photography-and-museum-prose. As far as I can determine, Stallabrass’s fine essay is the only sustained critique of Wall’s career and production as well as a trenchant analysis of the interlocking mechanisms of academic criticism, the museum institution and reputation-making, i.e. canon formation. But see as well the more abbreviated remarks in Adrian Rifkin’s blog Le Gai Savoir (http://gai-savoir.net/). Wall’s most recent discussions of his own work are striking in their conservatism, affirming among other things his belief in the autonomy of the art object and the presumed self-evidence of “the judgment of quality.” That he produces singular objects, extremely labor-intensive ones, as opposed to series or multiple component work, is also significant, conforming as it does to modernist criteria.

[6] See, for example, Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti–Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port. Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. See also Douglas Crimp’s essay The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism http://www.jstor.org/stable/778455?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents and my own “Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics.”

[7] For those not wedded to intentionalist notions of art making within which the artist’s account of his or her work constitutes its “true” meaning, I would merely observe that Levine’s appropriations of canonical photographs in the early 1980s were exclusively those of male artists. The classic critique of intentionalist interpretation remains W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in their book The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).

Dear Abigail,

It seems we should now raise the question regarding when feminism intersected with the history of photography and art production. Especially now, given that there have been a number of exhibitions, such as Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? 1839-1945, which seek to resurrect the often forgotten women who worked in the medium from the 19^th century onwards. If nothing else, these exhibitions and the corresponding scholarly research remind us that through archival research, we can not only rediscover this ‘hidden’ history, but also begin to challenge the inferior status of women in art institutions, history and, it goes without saying, markets.

In her recent article, “Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes”, Maura Reilly analyses the “major systemic problems” that affect women’s visibility within the art world. “The more closely one examines art-world statistics,” she remarks, “the more glaringly obvious it becomes that, despite decades of postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and queer activism and theorizing, the majority of [successful artists] continues to be defined as white, Euro-American, heterosexual, privileged, and, above all, male. Sexism is still so insidiously woven into the institutional fabric, language, and logic of the mainstream art world that it often goes undetected.” Reilly’s statistics encompass all art forms represented in contemporary art — photography included — and a closer look at the prices of work by women artists and photographers in the recent Kunstkompass figures confirms her results.

As it happens, from the mid-19^th century onwards, photography was considered to be an acceptable profession for women. Legions of women throughout the Western world took up the medium as a profession (especially for studio portraiture) or as an amateur artistic practice. As early as 1913, Imogen Cunningham published an essay affirming “Photography as a Profession for Women”.[1] Women’s photographic practices have recently been historicised once again in catalogues and exhibitions such as in Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? 1839-1945, as noted above, and in a research seminar at the Tate Modern, in November 2015, entitled Fast Forward: Women in Photography. Both make reference to an important, but often overlooked, bibliography on women and photography.

Why has it taken so long for cultural institutions to tackle women’s photographic practices and make their work visible, particularly since historians and curators have been pursuing this research since at least the 1980s?

One might ask why we still need exhibitions and seminars that focus on this subject. Why has it taken so long for cultural institutions to tackle women’s photographic practices and make their work visible, particularly since historians and curators have been pursuing this research since at least the 1980s? I am referring to well-known photo-historical accounts such as Val Williams’ Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present (1986), Naomi Rosenblum’s A History of Women Photographers (1994), not to mention the landmark travelling exhibition Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen. Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik, curated by Ute Eskildsen at the Museum Folkwang in 1994 and her important contribution to the history of women and photography in the Weimer republic.[2]

I would also like to mention Scandinavian scholars such as Sigrid Lien, Lena Johannesson, Gunilla Knape and Anna Tellgren, among others, who have researched women’s history in photography. Important photo-historical research is also ongoing in Poland, the Baltics and Latin America; that is to say, in ‘other’ places that are often ignored by the English-speaking world. These are just a few examples of recent historical research focusing on women photographers and the importance of integrating them into the history of photography; or, as the Musée d’Orsay’s website has it: “reassessing women’s extraordinary contribution to the growth of the medium”. This exhibition is so significant because of the way in which it provides an impetus for the study of how gender factors have served to obscure the presence of women in photography, whether as ‘commercial’ practitioners, as in the case of women who operated photography studios, or as the ‘New Women’ of the 20^th century who contributed to the ‘New Photography’ — as described in further detail in the volume, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s.

It goes without saying that the issue of “women in photography” is by no means the same issue as that of “feminism within photographic practices”

It goes without saying that the issue of “women in photography” is by no means the same issue as that of “feminism within photographic practices”. Given that feminism is explicitly a political identification and, by definition, a critical practice, it is important to keep these categories separate insofar as those that could be justly designated as feminist deployments of photography could only emerge when women artists, identified following the re-emergence of feminism in the late 1960s, defined their practices in relation to feminist politics. I think it is important to maintain the distinction between women as cultural producers and feminist practices in photography, which, understandably, were only possible within the more limited domain of artistic production. As they emerged internationally in the late 1960s, critical feminist practices were, for the most part, completely outside the art market, which, compared to the situation nowadays, more closely resembled a cottage industry.

We should remember that the works of women artists whose medium was photography were diffused through posters and magazines long before the works entered commercial galleries, despite the fact that they are now being integrated into the global art market. Some aspects of this critical history were discussed in a catalogue following a group show made for the festival PHotoEspaña in 2013: Woman. The Feminist Avant-Garde from the 1970s. Curated by Gabriele Schor, director of the Sammlung Verbund, and Alexis Hunter, it showcased photographs and video-based work by pioneering feminist artists including Helena Almeida, Eleanor Antin, Renate Bertlmann, Suzanne Lacy, Birgit Jürgenssen, Martha Rosler, and Nil Yalter, all works selected from the Sammlung Verbund’s collection in Vienna.

Many of these women were using their own bodies and photography was merely the medium — not an aesthetic or philosophical field as such

Schor described these artists as “Feminist Avant-Garde”. She believes that “many of the Feminist Avant-Garde artists and their works are yet to be discovered”. But a new history of “Feminist Avant-Garde” should also include lesser-known activists such as the Belarussian Ludmila Rusava (1954-2010) or the Icelandic-born Róska (1940-1996), even though their main medium was not photography. Both belong to a generation of radical women artists in Europe who were politically active in the 1970s and 1980s. Róska’s work has not been included in any feminist art histories or historical group shows. Her artistic works comprise films and photography, political posters and revolutionary ephemera, as well as documentation of revolutionary slogans and graffiti from Italy, where she spent most of her artistic life. When looking at the work of this feminist generation, we realise that they used photography as a tool; therefore, the when in question refers (as we have, in actual fact, already discussed) to expanded practices and not, as such, to photography. Many of these women were using their own bodies and photography was merely the medium — not an aesthetic or philosophical field as such. In many cases, photography was used for documentation purposes and not as the medium for artistic expression. Abigail, you have discussed these issues in a number of articles and Gabriele Schor included many of these first-generation feminist artists in her travelling exhibition on the Feminist Avant-Garde. The influence of feminism, a truly international phenomenon, is exemplified by artists such as the Viennese Valie Export and the American Martha Wilson. Her emblematic work, A Portfolio of Models (1974), featuring a set of six black-and-white photos, depicts her in the roles of “Goddess”, “Housewife”, “Working Girl”, “Professional”, “Earth Mother” and “Lesbian”. “These are the models society holds out to me,” she wrote, adding: “At one time or another, I have tried them all on for size, and none has fit”.

I don’t want to produce a linear narrative here by which ‘first generation’ begets ‘second’ or ‘third’ generation, but these gender-based self-representation strategies have their own trajectories and developments. The critical narrative might be blurred when we try to contextualise so-called ‘third wave’ feminist theories with contemporary practices of a younger generation of women using photography as an art form. Indeed, feminist photography is not about subject matter; instead, Elina Brotherus (b. 1972), like many Scandinavian female artists working in photographic media, explores her identity and interrogates the nature of the private, the domestic, and the determinations of gender by using her body — often naked — as both model and material for her work, which [variously] reflects affective states of melancholia, subjective experiences and the presence and absence of love.

Finally: “Can taking a selfie be a feminist act?” Professor Peggy Phelan argues that Cindy Sherman’s work anticipated the selfie. Digital feminism and popular culture is a challenging issue for the feminine gaze in photography, influencing a new generation of women artists and cultural producers.

Next “Correspondence” by Abigail Solomon-Godeau will be published on May, Thursday 19th.

[1] First published in The Arrow, vol. XXIX, n°2, January 1913, pp. 203-209.

[2]Ute Eskildsen, “A chance to participate. A transitional time for women photographers.” In Marsha Meskimmom and Shearer West (eds.) Visions of the Neue Frau. Women and the Visual Arts in Weimarer Germany (Menston: Scolar Press, 1995) pp. 63-76.

“Wolfgang Ernst: At the turn of the millennium, the archive transforms the questions of memory, recollection, and the preservation of traces into a cultural obsession”

Dear Aesa,

I thought that for our last exchange we might take on the “when” of the archive, given its widespread use in contemporary photographic artwork within which archival materials are variously appropriated, re-purposed and re-signified. (Of course, a related issue is the use of archival sources to resurrect forgotten photographers, especially women, but this is only an instance of how archives can be employed to shine a light on what has been obscured.) However, as Wolfgang Ernst observes, “The topic of archives has never been as inflationary as it is today. At the turn of the millennium, the archive transforms the questions of memory, recollection, and the preservation of traces into a cultural obsession.”[1] Although in practical terms there’s no unified entity that can be justly called the archive, it has nevertheless been securely established as a theoretical object, one that overarches its particular manifestations, including its electronic and cybernetic forms. The difficulty in “mapping” what precisely an archive is, establishing its boundaries and contours, is noted by Jacques Derrida in his study Archive Fever. Here, he insists that there exists no adequate concept of the archive that can be applied: “We have no concept, only an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word. To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness of the open imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. ‘Archive’ is only a notion associated with a word and for which, together with Freud, we do not have a concept.”[2]

Nevertheless, it is obvious that in current art and photography there is significant engagement with its many incarnations. Paralleling this “archival impulse” (the term is Hal Foster’s[3]) that runs through contemporary art, a substantial bibliography exists on the subject and, individual artists’ usages aside, acknowledgment of the archival turn has been thematically deployed in numerous exhibitions, including “Dzcumenta XI”.[4]

This particular turn seems to have gained momentum in the 1990s, although Michel Foucault’s theorization of the archive appeared as early as 1969.[5] For Foucault, the archive was not identified with any particular type of content, be it official, administrative, historical, bibliographic, nor defined by any function. Rather, he characterized it as “first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”[6] The archive is thus associated with, and inseparable from, apparatuses of power, surveillance, and control, and in its various applications “it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection.”[7] As Cheryl Simon usefully glosses Foucault’s argument, “key to the relationship between power and knowledge, the archive constitutes a site—more imaginary than real—through which social relations are regulated, enacted by way of the discursive practices of specific institutions. Hence, if the archive represents the historical parameters of specific systems of knowledge, defining what has been said and can be said, it also dictates by, for, and about whom knowledge is exercised.”[8] Despite the more or less abstract quality of Foucault’s reflections on the archive, his arguments have been enormously influential for critics, historians and scholars investigating the history of the medium. Important work by John Tagg, Allan Sekula and Christopher Pinney, to give just three examples, takes its cues directly from Foucault’s arguments.[9] Thus, the colonial archive, the criminological archive, the sociological archive, the “sanitary archive” and so forth, are understood to be agencies of official power and domination within which photographic technologies have played a crucial role. Drawing on a number of books by Foucault, in his influential essay The Body and the Archive Sekula observed that photography developed historically as a double system: “A system of representation capable of functioning honorifically and repressively.”[10] Thus, on the one hand, the photographic portraits of the respectable bourgeoisie; on the other, the mug shot of the criminal or the deviant. Similarly, Tagg remarks on “a vast and repetitive archive of images…accumulated in which the smallest deviations may be noted, classified and filed.”[11]

In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression of 1995, it is Freud’s theories and a text by one of his interlocutors that provide the material for his discussion. But while much of the discussion turns on the place of Judaism in the Freudian archive, there is also a consideration of the technological forms of inscription that distinguish new and old forms of archival registration. In this regard, Krzysztof Pilarski remarks on the role of the archive as it mediates between memory, history and the question of technology, a constellation of factors that is ever more important in the age of electronic communications and the enormous power of media: “Many things have also been said about the memory structure of the archive, the archive as a supplement of memory and its status as a source for history. The acknowledgment that the event is being produced in the process of archiving to the same extent that it is preserved also compels us to recognize that changes in the technologies and strategies of archiving may fundamentally refine our understanding of the possibilities of evoking and narrating what is past.”[12]

Be all this as it may, the efflorescence of artwork drawing on various archival sources that emerged so conspicuously in the 1990s cannot be adequately accounted for by the influence of the work of these philosophers. In this respect, it seems evident that the translation of Walter Benjamin’s writings into English beginning in the 1970s, as well as a revived interest in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas begun by him in 1927—itself an iconographic archive comprising something like a thousand images—have collectively contributed to the archival turn. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the artistic use of archival materials integrated into or informing artworks has precedents well before the 1990s: many of Hans Haacke’s works are based on archival research, for example, his 1974 Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus or his 1982 Der Pralinenmeister / The Chocolate Master. One might also consider in this context an artist like Hans-Peter Feldmann, most of whose work is drawn directly from the inexhaustible archive of mass visual culture.

However one wishes to think about the nature of the archive as an abstraction, or the nature and terms of specific archives of one kind of another, they are also repositories of history, and thus cultural and historical memory. Perhaps this “archival turn” needs be considered in relation to the informational economy spawned by the Internet, including the digitization of archives, the availability of limitless images online and the new search engines facilitating research, all of which have obviously been propitious for archivally based artistic practices. This does not explain why so many artists would look to the archives of various kinds for the “raw material” of their work. Anecdotally, it does strikes me that this deployment of archival materials is most in evidence in the work of artists whose work is predicated on various subaltern histories—racial, ethnic, post-colonial—for which an existing archive is a kind of discursive ready-made. Thus, whether we consider such photographic practices as those accompanying imperial conquest and rule, the “scientific” documentation of the criminal body, or even more broadly, the body of the other, its agency in visually establishing racial and other hierarchies, the expansion of regimes of control and surveillance, one can understand how photographic archives could provide the raw material for counter-discursive, de-legitimizing or other critical practices.

As it happens, there is another kind of archive that I haven’t the space to touch on here. I am referring to the individual photographer’s own archive which, as I mentioned previously with respect to Vivian Maier, can run into the tens of thousands of both prints and unexposed film. There are also the very large archives of Eugène Atget, of Garry Winogrand, and no doubt many others. This type of archive poses very different kinds of issues, prompting questions about authorship, signature styles, intentionality and the like. Perhaps you would like to take these up, but one way or another it seems that any consideration of photography now, of any genre, analogue or digital, needs to consider archival practice and archival function as shapers of photography’s “when”.

Next “Correspondence” and last by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir will be published on May, Thursday 26th.

[1]Wolfgang Ernst, “Archive in Transition” in Interarchive, eds. B. Von Bismarck, H. -P. Feldmann, H. U. Obrist, D. Stoller, and U. Wuggenig (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung, 2002).

[2] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29.

[3] Hal Foster, “The Archival Impulse”, October, Vol. 110 (Autumn), pp. 3-22.

[4] Okui Enwezor was the director of the exhibition. He also published a book entitled Archive Fever, featuring artists working with archival documents. (New York: ICP and Steidl, 2008). See also The Archive, ed., Charles Merewether, Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art Series (London: Whitechapel Ventures, 2006). Exhibitions invoking the archival include Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art, eds. Ingrid Schnaffney and Matthias Winzer, exh. cat. (New York, P.S. 1, 1998); Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field (Koln: Walter Konig, 2002). This is a small sample of a larger phenomenon.

[5]Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 129.

[6] Foucault, p. 119

[7] Foucault, pp. 191-192.

[8] Cheryl Simon, “Introduction: Following the Archival Turn”, Visual Resources 18:2, 101-107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973760290011770

[9] Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”, October 39, Winter 1986; John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1988); Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011.)

[10] Sekula, p. 6

[11] Tagg, p. 64

[12] Krzyztof Pijarski, “The Archive as Project – The Poetics and Politics of the (Photo)Archive”, in The Archive as Project, ed. Krzyztof Pijarski (Warsaw: Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii, 2011). Derrida is quite clear on this: “The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.” Derrida, p, 17.

“The last when is the question of when photography became a ghost medium that haunts us.”

Dear Abigail,

Indeed, as you discuss in your latest blog, artists use the archive (in still photography, video and film) in multifaceted ways, and the active relationship between photography and the archive has been a recurrent theme in critical art practices (and studies) of the medium. For many of these ‘archival’ artists, photography is invaluable as a raw material because of its complex indexical status and its fictional relationship to various political and historical realities.

You mention Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Haacke and others, but I would like to enumarte other artists who have worked with photographs as source material; artists such as Joachim Schmid, Christian Boltanski, Anna Artaker, Cheryl Dunye, Lorna Simpson, and Walid Raad, to name but a few that I have followed in recent years. These artists have been using found photography or archival footage to create critical fictional narratives or, alternatively, employing press and propaganda photography in their work to focus on specific historical or geo-political contexts. I am thinking here of the Lithuanian artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas’ multimedia installation DRUZBA (Friendship]. This is an ongoing research project based on texts, interviews, and photographs. It is constructed as a “reading device [for] a psycho-geography of the oil network (Druzba – the biggest oil pipeline built by Soviets)” in order to study the disintegration of this infrastructure of power, and its social meanings for those populations living in the vicinity of the pipeline.

“Digital archives, once online, are not separated from the ‘present’ any more (Wolfgang Ernst)”

You also suggest that “…this ‘archival turn’ needs be considered in relation to the informational economy spawned by the Internet, including the digitization of archives, the availability of limitless images online and the new search engines that facilitate research, all of which have obviously been propitious for archival-based artistic practices”. Wolfgang Ernst, whom you also cite, described this transformation of the archive, its consequences and new potential in an interview with Geert Lovink: “digital archives, once online, are not separated from the ‘present’ any more. In a way, of course, this means the disappearance of the emphatic notion of the ‘archive’; it dissolves into electronic circuits, data flow.”[1] Indeed, the creation and/or opening up of closed or silenced archives, such as several US governmental archives (via legal processes made possible through the Freedom of Information Act), the assembling of Holocaust archives, the digitalization of the Cambodian genocide photographic archives or the archives belonging to the Stasi Records Agency, has accelerated the process of mediated memory transmitted through photographs, television, and films – as well as in many art works, some of which we have already mentioned.

We might return here to the “paradoxical logic” identified by Lev Manovich, whereby digital technology effectively supplants the physical archive, yet, in the process, contrives to solidify, glorify and immortalize the photographic: “The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture – and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger.” Several artists have captured the powerful effect of the discontinuous, ruptured nature of the still and moving archive in their works such as, for example, Johan Grimonprez’s films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Double Take and, of course, Christian Marclay’s epic 24-hour work, The Clock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cOhWtyXGXQ

So, on the one hand, there are critical and deconstructive uses of institutional and vernacular photographic archives encouraged by the cultural digitalization of historic material; while, on the other hand, there is the monstrous (partly invisible) ongoing digital archive constructed by amateurs online through social media. And then there are the myriad of interventions and use of these unlimited image and textual materials by artists. The exhibition “Beastly/Tierisch” at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2015), featured an innovative approach towards this experimental remix of amateur and artist digital production by means of posing the question: “How is animality reconfigured today through everyday photographic practice?”

The importance of this exhibition lies in how it approached digital culture by demonstrating not only how technology transforms photographic practices, but also the profound changes in image uses and diffusion, including the effect on displays in the museum space. Analogue metaphors are embedded in the museum in a similar way, as they are in all camera devices and software, such as Instagram, iMovie and Photoshop. The “digital paradox” has only recently impacted on museum practices by blurring exhibition codes with such technologies as the projector, the screen and the ink-jet printer.

The exhibition, “Pandora’s Box”, curated by the Dutch conceptual artist, Jan Dibbets, and currently on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, raises similar issues that focus on the impact of software and digital reproducibility of photography. Dibbets aims to break down postmodern historical photographic discourses and to eliminate the ‘cult value’ of the photographic print, not only by mixing and juxtaposing well-known vintage prints (Solar Effect in the Clouds – Ocean by Gustave Le Gray) paired with brand new ink-jet prints, but also by blurring the institutional difference between scientific photography, documentation and art. Exhibited together, with little or no information about the purpose or category of any particular image, the spectator will not know what kind of image he or she is looking at.

“It is the scientifically oriented photographers of the 19^th century who emerge here as the true visionaries in experimental photography (Jan Dibbets)”

Dibbets’ exhibition is a non-linear, yet still chronological, survey taking Vilém Flusser’s theories of the apparatus as its conceptual point of departure. Coincidently, it provides images that are representative of the whens we have been discussing here in our blogs: the origins of photography; the discursive meanings of the photograph; tensions and shifts between photography as art, as documentation or as science; photography and conceptualism; photography and the archive; and last but not least, questions of digitalization in post-photography.

According to Dibbets, the most significant when in experimental photography had already taken place shortly after the invention of photography: “It is the scientifically oriented photographers of the 19^th century who emerge here as the true visionaries, paving the way for entire output of the 20th century.” By juxtaposing the fragile, delicate but entirely scientific cyanotypes made by Anna Atkins (1799–1871) in her encyclopaedic survey of British algae, with lush computer 3D alumide negative prints of plants made by Spiros Hadjidjanos (Scabiosa Columbaria) and with, for example, Thomas Ruff’s large format, digitally constructed and computer-generated images, the spectators’ cultural understanding of what is a photograph is turned upside down. Similarly, by insisting on scale and counterpointing the infinitely large in Ruff’s images and the infinitely small represented in the 19^th century scientific images of Andreas Ritter von Ettingshausen and Auguste Adolphe Bertsch, Dibbets draws the spectator into a visual pattern of “scientific imagination”. He considers the photographic experiments undertaken by natural scientists in the 19^th century as a new paradigm that provided inspiration for avant-garde artists from the beginning of the 20^th century (e.g. Man Ray and Ródchenko, both included in the exhibition). Dibbets’ approach refers directly and indirectly to Richard Feynman’s remarks in his Lectures on Physics of the early 1960s. In a chapter titled “Scientific Imagination”, Feynman rhetorically asked what one would see if one were able to see electric and magnetic fields: “What do I actually see? What are the demands of scientific imagination? Is it any different from trying to imagine that the room is full of invisible angels? No, it is not like imagining invisible angels. It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels.”

The exhibition “Pandora’s Box” also demonstrates how digital culture has transformed the curatorial relationship to photography as such, and how digital practices undermine the differentiation of ‘image’, ‘object’ and ‘art-piece’, both on or off the screen. Thomas Ruff, Wade Guyton and Spiros Hadjidjanos (all included in the exhibition), participate in this extreme hybridisation of the image. Still, “What happens”, asks Lev Manovich “to the idea of a ‘medium’ after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Or do we now find ourselves in a new brave world of one single monomedium, or metamedium?”[2]

The last when – (we might not have space to answer) – is the question of when photography became a ghost medium that haunts us. In fact, Abigail, you have already addressed this issue of ‘haunting’ in a few essays, but it seems that the most contemporary manifestations of art based on photographic media relate to the ‘haunting’ of the brave new digital world by the still potent effects of analogue technologies.[3] This is the medium that, for everyone born before the 1980s signified ‘photography’ as such, and its transformation into a form with no necessary link to its referent is one the consequences of which are only just beginning to be assimilated and analyzed.

[1] Archive Rumblings. Interview with Wolfgang Ernst by Geert Lovink (2003). Available on http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302/msg00132.html

[2] Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 4

[3] Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Ghosts of Documentary”, Heterotopien

Perspektiven der intermedialen Ästhetik, Nadja Elia-Borer, Constanze Schellow,

Nina Schimmel, Bettina Wodianka (eds.), Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013, pp. 303-326