The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era

Form, Content, Consequence

Laurie Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000317763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia de la fotografía

This book challenges the status quo of the materiality of exhibited photographs, by considering examples from the early to mid-twentieth century, when photography's place in the museum was not only continually questioned but also continually redefined.

By taking this historical approach, Laurie Taylor demonstrates the ways in which materiality (as opposed to image) was used to privilege the exhibited photograph as either an artwork or as non-art information. Consequently, the exhibited photograph is revealed, like its vernacular cousins, to be a social object whose material form, far from being supplemental, is instead integral and essential to the generation of meaning.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, theory of photography, curatorial studies and museum studies.

1
This ‘Thing’ Called Photography

The Image as Object: Suitable for Human Consumption

All photographic images are also objects. Whether a print, a slide, magazine cover or digital selfie—photographic images always have some sort of physical presence. As evident as this seems, it nonetheless must be stated, because although we may know that photographs are objects, we do not always recognise them as such. This is due in large part to the notion of photographic transparency, which is one of the medium’s most fundamental (and perhaps also one of its most misunderstood) tenets. In ‘The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency’ (2003), Dominic McIver Lopes explains that ‘when we look at photographs, we literally see the objects that they are of’—as opposed to the objects they are in themselves, and this means that even though photographs are or can be objects, they are inherently defined more by their capacity as images (2003: 433). The abiding belief in photography’s transparency is so potent that, as Geoffrey Batchen has also noted, ‘even in sophisticated discussions, the photograph itself—the actual object being examined—is usually left out of the analysis. … All of us tend to look at photographs as if we were simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity’ (2001: 59–60). The idea of the photograph as a window is an abiding analogy similarly promoted by one of the medium’s most influential advocates, John Szarkowski, who once claimed, ‘you’re not supposed to look at the thing; you’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window’ (Myers and Christie 2013: 11). The expectation that a viewer will see beyond the photograph’s surface and through to the people, events or things depicted is not an unreasonable one, especially when the photograph in question is operating in a documentary capacity, such as in a newspaper or magazine, for instance, when its function is more informative than aesthetic.

Yet, even in its guise as an art form, photography has still traditionally been felt most effective when functioning primarily as image-content. Clement Greenberg, for example, suggested that in photography ‘form is reluctant to become content’ (1995 [1964]: 183). In making this claim, Greenberg was drawing a subtle comparison between photography and plastic arts, such as painting and sculpture, where form is crucial to content. Greenberg stressed the importance for artworks in the modernist era to orient themselves to the unique properties of their own mediums. Thus, the meaning of a modernist painting, for instance, is (or should be) located in its form—in the sum of the flat surface of the support, the size and shape of that support, the nature of the paint and its application—and not in the creation of illusionistic space and narrative subject matter, elements which characterised the realistic, naturalistic art of previous eras.¹ For Greenberg then, in the most advanced and purest paintings, form is content, but this is not so in photography—photographs are not supposed to be about their shapes, sizes or surfaces; they are about the moments captured. In other words, in photography, form is felt to be best and most effective when subordinated to the image-content. The most commonly held impression is that much more than it is a thing, a photograph is an image, and when searching for meaning, one should not look at the surface or the support, but rather through these things, treating them as transparent, in order to see the image-content. The problem with this reasoning is that a photograph actually is a physical object; it has ‘volume, opacity, tactility and a physical presence in the world’ (Batchen 1997: 2). Therefore, if we are to understand photography in a thorough and meaningful way, we must also recognise and understand its object capacity.

Just as physical objects are the conduits through which we, as humans, are able to apprehend the world around us, so too is the material form of the photographic object the conduit through which we apprehend the image. Even in a medium such as photography, where the notion of transparency—of seeing beyond the surface, beyond the material support—is so ingrained, the role played by material form is still a significant one. In photography, materiality is a choice—one which ‘constructs and responds to the significances and consequences of things and the human relations with which they are associated’ (Edwards and Hart 2004: 6), and in so doing, it becomes a vital cog in the cycle of meaning. In a photograph, the materiality is what transforms the otherwise intangible and immaterial moment captured into a tangible and material object, which in turn brings it to a human user or viewer; the materiality is what governs how the user or viewer will both apprehend and perceive the image. Essentially, the materiality is what determines the nature of the relationship between human and image.

Take, for example, vernacular forms of photography, such as lockets or photo albums. The material forms of these items—the metal case of the locket and the bound volume of the album—impose very specific conditions of encounter upon the user. The locket, as a piece of jewellery, is worn on the body of its user, becoming, as Batchen observes, an ‘extension of the wearer’ (2004: 36). As a public expression of love, mourning or memory, the locket effectively becomes the material manifestation of these otherwise immaterial concepts, and its unique material form encourages the user’s encounter with it to be multisensory, combining the visual act of looking at a photograph with the haptic experience of handling and wearing a piece of jewellery.

A similarly corporeal relationship between human user and image exists in the case of photo albums, which must be laid out flat, pages physically turned, in order for the images to be viewed. As with lockets, the user experience is an embodied, multisensory one—visual, tactile and even olfactory, when one takes into account the damp, mouldy smell that frequently accompanies a photo album (Langford 2001: 5). Yet, these carefully constructed books introduce a further level of human engagement, as one must consider not just the user’s encounter with the album but also the encounter of its maker, who ‘transforms the meaning of selected images into an intensely individualistic expression’ (Willumson 2004: 63). The creator of a photo album carefully selects, arranges and fixes pictures onto the album pages, often handwriting captions and adding small drawings or decorations. Meaning shifts as photographs placed next to one another on the page begin to inform each other, as captions and texts infuse significance that may have otherwise been absent, and as a new narrative structure takes form in the ordering of images from beginning to end. The album’s meaning is as tethered to the maker’s multisensory experience of creating it as it is to the user’s multisensory experience of viewing it.

Additionally, the physical traces left upon photographs by these human engagements with them generate a further level of meaning. In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes famously describes a photograph of his recently deceased mother as a child: ‘the photograph was old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together’ (1981: 67). In this photograph of his mother, Barthes is attempting to discover (and recover) something of her essence and unique truth in the image’s indexical trace of her, but by first describing the print’s faded tones and blunted corners, Barthes also demonstrates the extent to which the print bears the traces of its use—‘it is a photograph that carries on it the marks of its own history’ (Edwards and Hart 2004: 1). Repeated handling of photo-objects—thumbing through the photographs in an archive, removing and replacing them, opening, closing, and wearing a locket, turning the pages of a photo album, occasionally removing individual photographs to see them more closely—these are examples of the tactile participation in which users make their own mark upon the photographic object. Over time, these repeated actions leave wear in the form of fingerprints, smudges, scratches, broken spines, torn pages and dog-eared corners, all of which extend the image’s meaning to include the trace left by its human users.

I offer these examples to illustrate the extent to which materiality and material form are able to generate photographic meaning by prescribing particular relationships between humans and images. It is through the material form of photographs that we, as image-makers, create meaning, but it is also through the material form that we, as image-users and viewers, consume meaning. This is as true for exhibited photographs as it is for lockets, photo albums or snapshots; however, in the photographic exhibition, the human-to-image relationship shifts dramatically.

A useful way of thinking about this changed relationship is to draw a distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘things’, where items such as photo albums or snapshots are objects, and exhibited photographs are things. In ‘Thing Theory’ (2001), Bill Brown recognises and explains this difference between objects and things, pointing out the ambiguity and generality inherent in the word thing, as opposed to the relative conclusiveness of object. The term thing, he suggests, is often used as a placeholder when a more appropriate descriptor is unknowable or unnameable (the thing in your eye) or to designate an indeterminate quality (there’s something out there) (2001: 4–5).² An object, on the hand, is more definitive; it has function and purpose. More importantly, however, Brown stresses that objects and things are also crucially distinguished by different relationships with humans:

We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy. … The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then is the story of a changed relation to the human subject.

(2001: 4)

For Brown, an object stops being an object when its normal function is somehow impeded, forcing the human subject to confront it now as a more ambiguous thing, whose function is vague and less defined. Putting this in terms of the previous examples, vernacular photographic forms, such as photo albums and lockets are objects in that they insinuate themselves easily into daily life. Their roles as physical representations of love or memory are clear; their material forms define the ways in which we consume them—by sight, certainly, but also necessarily by touch and feel. This tactile relationship means also that over time, we leave our own physical traces on these objects—in short, we use them as much as we view them. The same arguments can be applied to other examples of vernacular photography, such as snapshots and newspaper and magazine images, but our relationship with exhibited photographs is very different.

Although their material forms also define the ways in which we approach and experience them, we are not usually allowed a tactile relationship with exhibited photographs; we do not—or so the museum or gallery hopes—leave our own physical traces upon these images, and, in fact, we are typically expected to maintain a respectful distance from them. Furthermore, showcased as they often are on a spot-lit wall, mounted and possibly framed or otherwise displayed behind protective glass, exhibited photographs do not slot seamlessly into daily life and their functions are less clear. Are the images themselves part of some larger narrative or message that we are to receive? Are they pristine artworks to be viewed and appreciated for their aesthetic qualities? Or are they both? Using Brown’s reasoning, when compared to the more definitive objects of vernacular photography, we more easily define exhibited photographs as ambiguous things.

That photographic images can exist in a variety of physical forms means that we will always have necessarily different relationships with those images. Their unique material properties and our engagement with those properties define the ways in which we approach, consume, and comprehend the images themselves. However, on a more fundamental level, this variety of different physical forms demonstrates and calls attention to the material aspect of photography. As much as it is an image, the photograph is also a thing or an object. And even though this fact is sometimes overlooked, the notion of the image as object is not particularly revelatory. Photography did, after all, begin its life as two distinctly different physical objects.

Early Photography: Metal Versus Paper, Commerce Versus Artistry

The year 1839 is recognised as that of photography’s birth, not because this was when the desire to capture and fix an otherwise elusive and fleeting moment was first realised—this had actually happened more than a decade earlier with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View From the Window at Le Gras (c.1826), a heliograph made on a polished pewter plate widely considered to be the first camera photograph. Rather, 1839 is accepted as the year of photography’s invention because this was when the two separate processes for fixing the transient image reflected in a camera obscura—the daguerreotype and the photogenic drawing (which was patented in 1841 as the ‘calotype’)—were both unveiled. Louis Daguerre announced his daguerreotype process in Paris to the Académie des Sciences and Beaux-Arts at the Institut de France on 7 January 1839,³ while Henry Fox Talbot followed closely with the announcement of his photogenic drawing on 25 January 1839 at London’s Royal Society (Thomas 1964: 4–8). It can be debated whose process was officially first in terms of successful results, announcements delivered, papers presented and patents granted,⁴ but the real significance here is the fact that the photograph entered the world not as one singular thing, but two—two independent processes, manifest by two distinctly different material forms: the shiny me...