Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.     

Photomontage in the Present Perfect Continuous

In its first instance as art practice among the historical avant-garde, photomontage was considered indispensable for its claim to intervene in perceptual processes, stimulating a critical mode of apprehension that would redirect the viewer away from conventions of aesthetic experience and towards a lived reception of art with pronounced relevance to the sociopolitical landscape. The effect was understood as structural, that is, activated not so much by direct political content, but by the stark and shocking effects of juxtaposition. By this measure, one challenge to contemporary photomontage is clear: in a postindustrial and postdigital visual landscape dominated by the structural fragmentation of the attention economy, the ‘simultaneity of the radically disparate’ (as Peter Bürger put it) might no longer present as heterodoxy but rather threaten to sink into invisibility. Yet with the migration off-screen of the effects of electronic media, a new urgency around moving photomontage structures into physical, public space is rising in contemporary practices. Shannon Ebner’s multi-part project A Hudson Yard (2014–15) is emblematic of the new ways in which artists are manipulating photomontage as a form of fully sensory experience that gives the medium room to play critically in both virtual and material space. By constructing subtle interruptions of naturalised commercial space, A Hudson Yard activates a détournement of instrumentalised language, using structures of juxtaposition to divert the discursive surfaces of public space away from consumption and towards what could be called a public poesis.     

The Snapchat Monteur? New Platforms for Photomontage

‘It is important to note that a photomontage need not necessarily be a montage of photos’, the Constructivist writer Sergei Tretiakov declared in 1936. ‘No’, he clarified; ‘It can be photo and text, photo and colour, photo and drawing’. In 2019, ‘photo and smartphone’ might also appear in Tretiakov’s list. The volatile image, filtered through applications and shared across shifting platforms, is far from a new phenomenon. Networks of photographic dissemination and manipulation, traceable to the medium’s origins, have long precluded the possibility of a still photograph. As digital processes abstract cutting and pasting from scissors and glue, avant-garde photomontage offers a useful model with which to regard today’s unprecedented fluidity of images.     

Sheida Soleimani,Cyborg: Photomontage in an Expanding Network

This article examines the photomontages, photo-sculptures, installations, and videos of contemporary artist Sheida Soleimani in light of earlier Dadaist practices. In particular, it focuses on similarities and differences between Soleimani’s work and that of Dada artists John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, demonstrating how Soleimani has evolved Dada photomontage and performance strategies in novel and important ways. Soleimani’s development of earlier avant-garde strategies with the help of digital technologies, I argue, proves the continuing relevance of photomontage today. In addition, it also reveals Soleimani’s interest in combining a Dadaist approach to photography, which – through photomontage – emphasizes the artist’s position as a social critic and commentator on reality, with a Surrealist attitude, one that mobilizes the indexical aspects of the photograph to disclose the uncanny and mysterious aspects of the world.     

Between orientalist clichés and images of modernization

Abstract

In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East it has become almost a cliche to describe many of these images as ‘Orientalist’-that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’. Most of these scholars draw on Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, which traces how Europe manufactured an imaginary Orient through literary works and the social sciences.¹ For example, Nissan N. Perez writes in his book Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) that ‘Literature, painting, and photography fit the real Orient into the imaginary or mental mold existing in the Westerner's mind .... These attitudes are mirrored in many of the photographs taken during this time [the nineteenth century] ... Either staged or carefully selected from a large array of possibilities, they became living visual documents to prove an imaginary reality’. ²     

Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience

Over the past thirty years, the city as represented by art photography has been shown as progressively empty and alienating. While the emptiness of nineteenth-century streets was due to the limitations of photographic technology, it was actively pursued as a formal device by the New Topographics photographers. Recent art photography shows an even more pronounced trend towards showing the city as vacant. This contrasts starkly with the densely populated, bustling, urban environments typical of twentieth-century street photography. This essay argues that images of an empty contemporary city can be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form, and as a consequence of art photography's distancing of itself from vernacular representations of the city when the distinction between art photography and vernacular photography is at risk of collapsing. Empty urban images tell us about modes of experience in the contemporary city and about photography itself. This essay uses the trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’ that typifies the contemporary photographic discourse of the street. Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot both address the everyday street as an acute site for understanding the negotiation of public space and contemporary experiences of the city. Both refer to yet go beyond the dichotomy of the city as empty or full and reveal a different set of relations to the street through photography.     

The Sign of Stieglitz,the Art of Evans

This essay examines how Walker Evans evolved his documentary style in response to what he saw as Alfred Stieglitz's overbearing aestheticism. It begins with their first meeting and Evans's ‘rejection’ of this father‐figure, a rejection which became generalised in the history of photography on the grounds of a dichotomy between photographic art and social documentary. Evans came to represent this latter tendency despite his own wishes. With the help of friends like Lincoln Kirstein and Bernice Abbott, Evans claimed a different artistic genealogy, via the Civil War work of Mathew Brady and his teams and Eugène Atget, neither of whom were working in the same vein of documentary as Evans might have imagined. He attempted to remain the independent artist, all the while taking advantage of his various photographic employments and the directions in which they pushed him. In the end, history made him famous and influential as the champion of social documentary, a genre which coincided neatly with his own desire for a ‘lyric documentary’ for only a few years. In his desire to be an artist free from a social agenda, in his resistance to branding, he is a maverick bohemian much closer to Stieglitz than has been supposed, and he seemed to recognise the fact in his last comments on his predecessor.     

Cut and Paste

Published posthumously, this article begins with a discussion of the historiography – and a related exhibition history – of the terms collage, photo-collage, and photomontage; and of the criteria that have been used to distinguish them as techniques, as visual idioms, and for their political implications and resonances as images of fine or applied art. The article then moves on to the work of two living artists who have been cutting and pasting photographs for more than forty years, Martha Rosler and John Stezaker, and the ambiguities of their being described as collagists, monteurs, or photomonteurs. In rethinking these categories, Evans argues for an expansive history of photomontage and collage that has continuing resonance today.     

Photo-Graphy, “The Shadow In The Cave,” Its Pain And Love: The ethics of photography

This paper maps out photography’s newer ethics by examining Boris Mikhailov’s Case History that often stirs controversy over its bold depiction of human misery. The paper criticizes the idea that photographers should not represent “the other’s pain”: an idea that has sabotaged the medium’s inherent visual desire in order to prioritize its moral responsibility. In that idea is found a resilient Platonic antagonism against image, a logo-centric prejudice that marks a biased demarcation between art and politics in photography theory. The paper challenges this photographic Platonism through recent arguments that illuminate the medium’s inter-regimic, dialectical, redemptive roles (Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay, et al.). With this theoretical challenge, the paper aims to outline a new ethics of photography for an era in which the image’s “pandemic” growth is resetting the mode of human communication and the role of photography.     

Witnessing and Untimely Images: Anne Ferran's ‘Lost to Worlds’

This article examines ‘Lost to Worlds’ (2008), a series of thirty photographs by the contemporary Australian artist Anne Ferran. The series depicts a historically significant site where there is almost nothing left to see. All that remains of the former nineteenth-century female factory are minor marks in the earth. By showing the viewer almost nothing, ‘Lost to Worlds’ raises a number of questions about what can be known or communicated about the past by photography. In particular, the traditional understanding of photographic witnessing is transformed by Ferran's subtle evocation of the history of a site by images of emptiness. The article considers the recent rise of scholarly interest in the idea of witnessing and how Ferran's series can provoke a deeper understanding of such depictions of the past.     

‘Cyclo-Photographers’, Visual Modernity,and the Development of Camera Technologies, 1880s–1890s

The intertwined development of popular photography and cycling in Britain was felt so close that, in the 1880s, contemporary commentators could write of ‘cyclo-photographers’. The camera apparatus available at this time, bulky and fragile, was largely impractical to carry on a ride, and thus cyclo-photographers joined outdoor photographers in asking manufacturers for simpler and easier to operate cameras. However, a close reading of primary sources reveals that such demands were also the result of a new engagement with the possibility of seeing enabled by cycling itself. What was the cyclo-photographers’ experience of visual modernity? This article explores whether, and in what ways, the parallel emergence of a desire for compact cameras was linked to the new, and interconnected, ways of moving and seeing that the engagement with these two modern cultural technologies had made possible.     

Recent Publications

This article examines the absence of atrocity in the photographic series The Course of History by the Belgian-born, New York-based photographer Bart Michiels (1964–). It shows, in beautiful, large-format prints, seemingly innocent landscapes and confined views of nature. Only when viewers read the titles of the photographs do they become aware of the violent history of the sites. These turn out to be the fields of fierce European battles such as Verdun, Waterloo and Stalingrad. The present article reviews recent trends towards using place as a motif in contemporary art photography and focuses on the ‘empty’ landscape as a pictorial strategy that opens up a narrative space, one that needs to be completed by the viewer. The absence evoked by the image is treated as antithetical to the conventional ethos of photography, which canonically stands as the evidence of an occurrence.     

The World of Michael Fried's Antiquity

Antiquity occupies a surprisingly central role in Michael Fried's account of contemporary art photography. More specifically, on Fried's account, photographs of antiquity by Thomas Struth and Patrick Faigenbaum stand at the vanguard of contemporary photographic practice. This essay examines the place of these photographs in Fried's work. The essay suggests that close attention to them can illuminate not only unclear turns in Fried's otherwise stunning argument, but also our understanding of the phenomenology of ‘beholding’ in antiquity, a problem that recent work in ancient aesthetics has made considerably more philosophically fraught.     

‘A Pointer for Beauty’: Photography,Ekphrasis, and the Aesthetics of Attention in Johannes Jaeger’s 1866 Photobook

This essay inquires into attention and detail as aesthetic categories in the nineteenth-century reception of photography in Scandinavia. It circles around what is generally considered to be Sweden’s first book with original photographs, Johannes Jaeger’s Molin’s Fountain in Photographs, with text (1866), read through two articles on the aesthetic potential of the photographic medium written by two contemporary Scandinavian art critics. In seven albumen print photographs, the book documents a fountain sculpture by Swedish sculptor Johan Peter Molin, exhibited at the first Scandinavian Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1866. However, the book also includes poetry; each photograph is juxtaposed with a poetic stanza that describes the part of the sculpture that the photograph reproduces. This paper studies the close relation between image and text in Jaeger’s volume. It argues that a contemporary view of the photographic image, also articulated by the Scandinavian art critics, can be discerned from the layout of the book – namely, that photography produces images too distractive and oversaturated with insignificant details to be aesthetically valuable. The visual and verbal framework for the photographs, then, arguably aims to overcompensate the distractive qualities of the image, by regulating the reader/viewer’s attention towards the sculpture and its significant details. In this ambition, Jaeger’s photobook anticipates a future aesthetic appreciation of the photograph in its own right.     

Max Penson in Uzbekistan

Photography reached the Ottoman Empire soon after its invention, at about the time that painting began to be practised there as part of a broader project of assimilating aspects of European culture. This was in marked contrast to the situation in Europe, where photography had to contend with visual traditions from which it adopted pictorial conventions and subject matter. Instead of supplanting existing traditions of realistic visual representation, photography in the Ottoman Empire served as a discrete source of inspiration. This paper examines how this inversion of European experience within the Ottoman Empire provides an alternative to dominant narratives of photographic history. If one of the salient characteristics of modernist movements in Western art is their ability to break with tradition, then the adoption of Western practices of representation by artists within the Ottoman Empire may be viewed as a radical modernist success.     

Sparks of Discomfiture: On the Promise of Photomontage (or Back to Suture)

Far from being ‘over’, photomontage has proliferated in our digital age, most commonly as meme. Although seemingly based on wit’s lowest common denominator, memes illustrate the mass reach and cohesive function of the medium but also tell us something about the mood of the moment. It is the untapped potential of the medium that interests me here. Drawing on the anticipatory history of Marxist practitioners in the 1920s and 1930s, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and John Heartfield, this article traces the coordinates of a potential radical practice that sparks discomfiture and cognitive reorientation. Rather than reproducing knowledge, photomontage can produce new forms of understanding; it can do so in complex and continually generative ways that remain underexplored in the digital age, in which an epistemology of suture predominates.     

OTHER PHOTO-GEOGRAPHIES

When the aim nowadays is to write history, in this case, to explore a certain period in the history of Contemporary Portuguese Photography, we will always encounter the problem of what to frame and what to illuminate. Walter Benjamin wrote that history was like a “mosaic” or the result of “illuminations”, while Bruno Latour spoke about the opposition between the modern and the primitive that seems to reflect the way history of art, especially that of photography, has evolved in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This article aims to disclose the more hidden and lesser-known history drawing upon Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal history to trace a view of Portuguese photography in the 1990s and 2000s and to describe the manner in which Portuguese artists came to assert themselves. It will contextualize the way their photographic language began to distance itself from the narrower practices of photography with which they had at first been linked.     

Rephotography and the Era of Witness

The unprecedented significance attributed to witness and testimony in diverse aspects of contemporary culture has shifted focus away from the idea of history as an objective account of past events, to personal narratives characterized by emotion and personal memory. By examining Gustavo Germano’s series of family rephotographs “Ausencias (Argentina)” (2006), this article addresses how the emphasis on witness in contemporary culture is reshaping our conceptions of photography and how photographs are used to relate to others and the past. Germano’s series uses rephotography as a tool to raise critical questions about photography, absence, testimony and history in the wake of the disappearance of tens of thousands of Argentinian citizens during that country’s military dictatorship (1976?1983). As the series simultaneously critiques and revives myths of photographic truth and presence, it signals an important change in contemporary culture that gives notions of the photographic witness and photography’s links to history new meaning.     

Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.     

New York and Photography

Abstract

This exhibition catalogue about the New York School of photography, begun long before 11 September 2001, fortuitously lifts up the city as both image and source of visual ideas. Comforting in this accidental homage, the book also offers significant essays that explore the reasons for the flourishing of photography in twentiethcentury New York. New York: Capital of Photography offers some especially thought provoking explanations. Max Kozloff, art historian, critic and photographer, traces the development of a particular way of seeing that evolved from the early years of the century in the Reform Movement through the ‘made-to-order Surrealism’ of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Five of his six essays approach a textbook treatment of this art form in this period and place. The sixth, ‘Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York’, poses the intriguing thesis that the aesthetic of New York photography as a whole is a Jewish one. This idea may not be accepted as fact in actual photography history texts until another hundred years have passed, but is worthy and fascinating, in Kozloffs telling, of consideration.