Global Photography

A Critical History

Erina Duganne, Heather Diack, Terri Weissman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Geschichte der Fotografie

This innovative text recounts the history of photography through a series of thematically structured chapters. Designed and written for students studying photography and its history, each chapter approaches its subject by introducing a range of international, contemporary photographers and then contextualizing their work in historical terms.

The book offers students an accessible route to gain an understanding of the key genres, theories and debates that are fundamental to the study of this rich and complex medium. Individual chapters cover major topics, including: · Description and Abstraction · Truth and Fiction · The Body · Landscape · War · Politics of Representation · Form · Appropriation · Museums · The Archive · The Cinematic · Fashion Photography

Boxed focus studies throughout the text offer short interviews, curatorial statements and reflections by photographers, critics and leading scholars that link photography's history with its practice. Short chapter summaries, research questions and further reading lists help to reinforce learning and promote discussion. Whether coming to the subject from an applied photography or art history background, students will benefit from this book's engaging, example-led approach to the subject, gaining a sophisticated understanding of international photography in historical terms.

PART ONE
REALISMS

On March 31, 2003, nearly two weeks into the start of the Iraq War, staff photographer Brian Walski (b. 1958) sent a photograph to his editor at the Los Angeles Times in which an armed British soldier signals a group of Iraqi civilians to take cover. The following day, after the image circulated widely on the front page of the Times as well as in numerous other newspapers, Walski, a staff photographer since 1998, was fired. The reason for Walski’s dismissal was the discovery of a duplication indicating that he had used a computer to combine elements from two photographs, taken moments apart, in order to improve his composition. Since Times policy forbids modifying the content of a news photograph, Walski’s firing generated much discussion over the purported objectivity and truthfulness of photojournalism. We turn to this example, however, not to weigh in on the ethics (a theme taken up in a later unit) of Walski’s act of manipulation but rather to call attention to photography’s presumed indexicality.

Walski’s firing results in part from assumptions around photography’s so-called indexical relationship to the real. Unlike handmade images, which are often considered to be created not found, many believe photographs provide a record or trace of what was directly in front of the camera at a particular time and place. This means that while a painter or illustrator may invent a composition from her or his imagination, a photographer, as Francis Frith famously said in the mid-nineteenth century, “can only appreciate the difficulty of getting a view satisfactorily into the camera: foregrounds are especially perverse; distance too near or too far; the falling away of ground; the intervention of some brick wall or other commonplace object, which an artist would simply omit.”¹ Photography, in other words, shares what some—borrowing the terminology of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce—call an indexical relationship to the real. Though scholars have long debated this characteristic and Pierce’s contribution to it, what photography’s indexicality in general implies is that the medium holds not only a similarity with or a resemblance to what it depicts—otherwise known as its referent—but is also said to have been directly caused by this referent and thereby could not exist without it. The following two chapters seek to destabilize and complicate this causal relationship between a photograph and its referent through an exploration of the medium’s abstract and staged qualities.

Note

1 Francis Frith, “Introduction,” in Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described, vol. 1 (London: J.S. Virtue, 1858–9), n.p.

1
DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION

In his essay “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” written between 1893 and 1910, Charles Sanders Peirce defines an “index” as a sign that points to an actual thing in the way that a bullet-hole designates the passing of a bullet. Pierce explains, “a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign for a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not.”¹ This causal relationship between signs and their referents is especially evident in photographs known as photograms. The photogram is a camera-less, negative-less photographic process in which an object is often, though not always, placed directly onto light-sensitive material and exposed to light. The image that results is thus an “index” of the objects placed in contact with the light-sensitive material. Despite this indexicality, photograms, paradoxically, tend not to hold the same level of resemblance to what they depict as other forms of photography, especially those taken with a camera. This means that, though photograms are produced in direct contact with their referents, they hold both a fidelity to and, more significantly, a distance from observed reality. One can see this inconsistency in a photogram’s composition, which is made up of both white areas, where the light-sensitive material is covered by the objects, and dark regions, which have been exposed to light. Together these light and dark forms offer no surface details but only outlines and varying shades of grey that fluctuate according to the transparency of the objects with which they came into contact. It is this conflicting nature of the photogram—its ability to be at once real and abstract, evidentiary and evocative, literal and otherworldly—that is the subject of this chapter.

Nature

Many trace the origins of photograms and other camera-less photography to the experimentations with light-sensitive materials that Thomas Wedgwood, Humphrey Davy, William Henry Fox Talbot, and John Herschel, among others, conducted in the first half of the nineteenth century. Though scholars now date these photographic investigations much earlier, and not exclusively to Europe, one consequence of these experimentations was the widespread use of the photogram in the nineteenth century for botanical book illustration. Until this point, the recording of empirical data through drawing had played a key role in scientific discovery. But, as this form of rending “came to be seen,” as curator Catherine de Zegher notes, “more and more as too personal, idealized, and inaccurate,” other forms of representation, “in which nature seemed to draw itself,”² began to be used. These included the photogram, or what Talbot called “photogenic drawings.” In his book The Pencil of Nature, published in six installments between 1844 and 1846, Talbot promoted photogenic drawings as “impressed by Nature’s hand” and “executed without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.”³ It was this emphasis on the photogram’s indexicality—or ability to serve as a physical trace of the natural world—that rendered it a preferred medium within botanical illustration. Still, while the photogram was linked to empirical study during the nineteenth century, its lack of detail, particularity, and exactitude—or immateriality—kept it equally bound to the world of art and imagination. It is this paradoxical position that the photogram occupied between science and art in the nineteenth century that continues to inform its use today in contemporary art practices.

Since 2011, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky (b. 1980) has collected leaves perforated by ravenous caterpillars as part of her ongoing series Fotogramme. But, unlike nineteenth-century practitioners who would rest their botanical specimens on top of a sensitized surface and then expose them to direct sunlight, Kovacovsky places her leaves in the negative holder of an enlarger and then exposes them in an analog color darkroom. To manipulate the formal outcomes of these images even further, Kovacovsky also prints multiple exposures of the holed leaves, both enlarged and cropped, on the same piece of paper and uses filters to either add or subtract color in between exposures. Through this printing process, which takes place completely in the dark, Kovacovsky relies on chance and instinct to transform these botanical specimens into fantastical shapes and patterns that are beautiful, whimsical, and, even, hallucinogenic. In so doing, she both upholds photography’s indexical capacity and undermines expectations about its visual outcome, which is dictated as much by her performative actions in the darkroom as by the physicality of the leaves themselves. To further heighten such tensions within her images, for the 2014 exhibition Midsummer Night, organized by artist Sara van der Heide, Kovacovsky hung her photograms within a lush botanical garden that belongs to Vrije Universiteit in the Netherland’s capital of Amsterdam (see Fig. 1.1). Through this act of staging her photograms outdoors amongst actual vegetation, instead of on the customary white walls of a gallery or museum, Kovacovsky encouraged viewers to contemplate the formal structures that make up the natural world in ways that are associative, expansive, and unfamiliar.

Figure 1.1 Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Fotogramm/Würmer, 2013. From Midsummer Night by Sara van der Heide in conjunction with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, VU Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, 2014. © Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky. Courtesy of the artist.

The natural world, especially water, is also the subject of the camera-less photography of Susan Derges (b. 1955). A number of scholars have discussed Derges’s photograms in relation to science. They have noted, for instance, how her interest in ideas such as the visualization of sound waves and the life cycle of frogs share parallels with scientific investigation. But, while Derges has clearly adopted the techniques of empirical study in her practice, her attention to the natural world is informed as much by aesthetics and philosophy as by science. In the late 1990s, after producing works largely in a studio-laboratory environment, Derges began to work directly in nature through her series the River Taw (1997–8). For this series of photograms, Derges visited the River Taw, which runs through Dartmoor in Devon, England, near where she has lived since 1992. After examining the river during different seasons and weather conditions, Derges sought to document its ebb and flow. To accomplish this aim, she took large sheets of colored photographic paper out at night in an aluminum tray, which protected it from light, and then submerged the tray just below the water’s surface. Using a flashlight, she then exposed the paper to light, capturing imprints upon the surface of the paper of the varied formal patterns of the water’s movements—waves, ripples, and drops—which, at times, are overlain with more solid organic shapes made up of floating leaves and branches overhanging the water.

The resultant images mesmerize in their evocative documentation of the unseen, macrocosmic forces of water’s movement. To further engage viewers with these hidden energies, Derges prints her photograms life-sized (roughly 5 × 2 feet), a format that recalls Japanese scroll painting, which Derges studied alongside Zen philosophy when she lived in Japan from 1981 to 1986. While Japanese aesthetics and philosophy have clearly influenced the scroll-like design of Derges’s photograms, the severe verticality of these images responds as well to Derges’s ongoing interest in natural theology. According to curator Martin Barnes, Theodor Schwenk’s 1965 book, Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms inWater and Air, has been critical to Derges’s thinking about water’s movement. In this book, Schwenk connects the forms of water’s ebb and flow to the structures of such things as the bones of the human body, the flight of birds, and the patterns of the weather to argue that there are fundamental, unseen forces that unite all natural and living things. Derges uses her series of river photograms to make a similar set of associations. Through these human-sized camera-less images, she seeks to dissolve the boundaries between science and aesthetics as well as science and spirituality and thereby encourage viewers to begin to understand how everything and everyone in nature is connected.

Like Derges, Kunié Sugiura (b. 1942) has also been influenced by Japanese aesthetics and philosophy. But for Sugiura, this inspiration is distinctly personal. Born in Nagoya, Japan, Sugiura moved to the United States in 1963 to study photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). At SAIC as well as in New York City, where she moved after graduating, Sugiura took up an experimental practice whose blurring of the distinctions between photography and painting as well as realism and abstraction came about in part through her interest in Eastern aesthetics. “In Asian art,” Sugiura explains, “there has always been a co-existence of the real and the abstract; for example, flowers and birds are rendered realistically in a simplified space, painted in one color. It is a partial realism, pointing out the ephemerality of living.”⁴ This tension between the representational and the abstract, or a “partial realism,” is evident in some of the very first images that she made. For these works, Sugiura brushed emulsion onto raw canvas in the darkroom, and then used an enlarger to expose the canvas to her own photographs depicting close-up patterns, mostly from nature, of tree bark, pebbles, leaves, and rocks. Printed large-scale and sometimes embellished with acrylic and pencil, these formalist yet surreal images are hybrids of drawing, painting, and photography.

In 1981, while attempting...