Catching Up and Looking Back: Reassessing Traditional Genres in Contemporary Photography
By Martin Barnes
Senior Curator, Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses the national collection of the art of photography in the UK. It was the first museum in the country to collect photographs, beginning in 1852, and the first to hold a photography exhibition in 1858. Since that time, the museum has formed a large and varied collection, international in scope, including many genres, and ranging from 1839 to the present. However, much of the focus in collecting now is on contemporary photography by fine art practitioners. With a desire to inspire and support creativity, and to make limited funds stretch further, I look for works by artists who may not yet have even published their first book, or been taken up by a commercial gallery. Books sent to me and links to web sites, invitations to exhibitions and portfolio reviews fill my days. As a result, I see a huge range of work. Even so, I am not convinced that I can really spot emerging trends or presume to predict the future in such an expended and expanding field. The writing of history is always after the fact, and the discourse is always behind the practice. The innovators are the artists, and as a historian it always feels like I am catching up and learning from those who make what I see.
In addition to my work as a curator, I am also examiner at some of London’s Universities. Here, I am in the privileged position of seeing the most recent works by graduates on degree and masters course of photography. At the forefront of students’ concerns today are considerations of photography’s physical practicality and of the psychological or emotional content that they can bring to the medium. On one hand, they are concerned about how their images should exist, how they will stand out, and what platform best suits the messages they wish to convey. Should the works exist as a framed print on a gallery wall, as an installation, as an image in a book, on the web, or on social media? (It is interesting to note here that the museum is only one of the many possible best outlets for a work. And while it may still convey some sense of status and institutional validation, it is frequently not the best platform). Here, they are testing the range between the embodied and the disembodied photograph. And they are challenging the differences between the constructed and the real. They are aware that photography in the traditional sense appears to be dissolving. As a corollary, their subjects are often about the shifts or breakdown of physical, real-time social relations as a result of the increasing dominance of social media, or more generally about origins, art history or personal history. Parents and partners often feature as a subject. It seems that what is most at stake for a new generation of many artists using photography is human intimacy.
It appears to me that a number of artists address the dissolution of the medium by re-assessing the traditional genres it explored at its outset: still life, landscape and portraiture. When photography was invented, it looked to these accepted subjects that were already validated for artists by painting. Now that photography itself is fragmenting, these genres once again provide a starting point for testing and questioning the medium. To give some examples: Darren Harvey-Regan’s still life image from a series, More or Less Obvious Form (2012) ties the viewer in knotted layers of representation. The classical form of a plaster cast vase is painted directly with the Photoshop checkerboard pattern to insinuate empty space. The grid is arranged in a perfectly flattened perspective to suggest that the object is in fact a two dimensional image. The painstakingly painted object is then photographed to create the finished work, offering a recognizable form, but an ambiguous framework for its interpretation. ‘Photoshopping’ is contemporary shorthand for manipulation, editing or re-contextualizing in photography. Within the computer program the checkerboard is representative of empty space, yet here it is painted onto a physical object. The finished photographic image represents a real object, while suggesting that it is not actually there. The only real object we are left with is the traditional un-manipulated photograph itself. The rest is only representation. Teetering at the edge of a plinth, the object, like its illusionistic representation, is fragile and close to shattering.
The group exhibition On Landscape # 1, at Guest Projects in London, 2014, showed the work of Minna Kantonen, Dafna Talmor and Emma Wieslander, and challenged the traditional representations of landscape. Archetypally a male domain, landscape photography was brought into question here by three women, acquiring a less descriptive, more deconstructive and psychologically charged outlook. Talmor’s work in particular elegantly deals with a sense of personal displacement. Her environments are fictional though based on real places: collaged and montaged colour negatives culled from different locations and transformed through the physical act of act of splicing them together. The resulting images create a new space that defies specificity, refers to transience and metaphorically blurs place, memory and time.
Bettina von Zwehl was inspired by the V&A Museum’s collections of historic portrait miniatures and cut paper silhouettes in her series of 34 images of the same sitter taken on different days, Made up Love Song (2011), which was created during a six-month Museum residency. Previously working at a large scale, von Zwelh reduced the size of her works to jewel-like miniatures that echoed the proportions of the keepsake portrait paintings made by Holbein in the 16th century. Von Zwehl’s use of the sitter’s profile, as in coins or medals, and her framing presentation carried historic references but created something new in the fusion of ideas. Here, the artist used the rules and devices of the past to enliven and challenge her practice.
While photography fragments, many of the best artists seem to be looking at history to provide a reliable map to help them find a way into the future. Though we may have concerns or feel destabilised about the apparent dissolution of photography in the digital world, it is worth remembering that it has always existed in a latent and invisible state. Technical obsolescence has haunted each of its decades and driven its scientific and aesthetic advancement. At its most basic, as a negative or a digital file, it is simply a mode of capture in time that lies dormant and can be activated again when developed, printed or downloaded. After all, the art in the images lies not in the skilful use of the apparatus alone, but in the marriage of the technology with the idea. A sense of nascent possibility lies at the heart of photography’s challenge and its appeal. I would also argue that still photography has great value within the age of a time-based, on demand media landscape and global economy. Still photographs – though now in a tiny and rarefied minority compared to all of the of photographic imagery produced – command a slower but rewarding space to counter-balance the attention deficit many of us we now feel as a result of modern living. As the great photographer Diane Arbus noted: ‘They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you’.
By Martin Barnes
Senior Curator, Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses the national collection of the art of photography in the UK. It was the first museum in the country to collect photographs, beginning in 1852, and the first to hold a photography exhibition in 1858. Since that time, the museum has formed a large and varied collection, international in scope, including many genres, and ranging from 1839 to the present. However, much of the focus in collecting now is on contemporary photography by fine art practitioners. With a desire to inspire and support creativity, and to make limited funds stretch further, I look for works by artists who may not yet have even published their first book, or been taken up by a commercial gallery. Books sent to me and links to web sites, invitations to exhibitions and portfolio reviews fill my days. As a result, I see a huge range of work. Even so, I am not convinced that I can really spot emerging trends or presume to predict the future in such an expended and expanding field. The writing of history is always after the fact, and the discourse is always behind the practice. The innovators are the artists, and as a historian it always feels like I am catching up and learning from those who make what I see.
In addition to my work as a curator, I am also examiner at some of London’s Universities. Here, I am in the privileged position of seeing the most recent works by graduates on degree and masters course of photography. At the forefront of students’ concerns today are considerations of photography’s physical practicality and of the psychological or emotional content that they can bring to the medium. On one hand, they are concerned about how their images should exist, how they will stand out, and what platform best suits the messages they wish to convey. Should the works exist as a framed print on a gallery wall, as an installation, as an image in a book, on the web, or on social media? (It is interesting to note here that the museum is only one of the many possible best outlets for a work. And while it may still convey some sense of status and institutional validation, it is frequently not the best platform). Here, they are testing the range between the embodied and the disembodied photograph. And they are challenging the differences between the constructed and the real. They are aware that photography in the traditional sense appears to be dissolving. As a corollary, their subjects are often about the shifts or breakdown of physical, real-time social relations as a result of the increasing dominance of social media, or more generally about origins, art history or personal history. Parents and partners often feature as a subject. It seems that what is most at stake for a new generation of many artists using photography is human intimacy.
It appears to me that a number of artists address the dissolution of the medium by re-assessing the traditional genres it explored at its outset: still life, landscape and portraiture. When photography was invented, it looked to these accepted subjects that were already validated for artists by painting. Now that photography itself is fragmenting, these genres once again provide a starting point for testing and questioning the medium. To give some examples: Darren Harvey-Regan’s still life image from a series, More or Less Obvious Form (2012) ties the viewer in knotted layers of representation. The classical form of a plaster cast vase is painted directly with the Photoshop checkerboard pattern to insinuate empty space. The grid is arranged in a perfectly flattened perspective to suggest that the object is in fact a two dimensional image. The painstakingly painted object is then photographed to create the finished work, offering a recognizable form, but an ambiguous framework for its interpretation. ‘Photoshopping’ is contemporary shorthand for manipulation, editing or re-contextualizing in photography. Within the computer program the checkerboard is representative of empty space, yet here it is painted onto a physical object. The finished photographic image represents a real object, while suggesting that it is not actually there. The only real object we are left with is the traditional un-manipulated photograph itself. The rest is only representation. Teetering at the edge of a plinth, the object, like its illusionistic representation, is fragile and close to shattering.
The group exhibition On Landscape # 1, at Guest Projects in London, 2014, showed the work of Minna Kantonen, Dafna Talmor and Emma Wieslander, and challenged the traditional representations of landscape. Archetypally a male domain, landscape photography was brought into question here by three women, acquiring a less descriptive, more deconstructive and psychologically charged outlook. Talmor’s work in particular elegantly deals with a sense of personal displacement. Her environments are fictional though based on real places: collaged and montaged colour negatives culled from different locations and transformed through the physical act of act of splicing them together. The resulting images create a new space that defies specificity, refers to transience and metaphorically blurs place, memory and time.
Bettina von Zwehl was inspired by the V&A Museum’s collections of historic portrait miniatures and cut paper silhouettes in her series of 34 images of the same sitter taken on different days, Made up Love Song (2011), which was created during a six-month Museum residency. Previously working at a large scale, von Zwelh reduced the size of her works to jewel-like miniatures that echoed the proportions of the keepsake portrait paintings made by Holbein in the 16th century. Von Zwehl’s use of the sitter’s profile, as in coins or medals, and her framing presentation carried historic references but created something new in the fusion of ideas. Here, the artist used the rules and devices of the past to enliven and challenge her practice.
While photography fragments, many of the best artists seem to be looking at history to provide a reliable map to help them find a way into the future. Though we may have concerns or feel destabilised about the apparent dissolution of photography in the digital world, it is worth remembering that it has always existed in a latent and invisible state. Technical obsolescence has haunted each of its decades and driven its scientific and aesthetic advancement. At its most basic, as a negative or a digital file, it is simply a mode of capture in time that lies dormant and can be activated again when developed, printed or downloaded. After all, the art in the images lies not in the skilful use of the apparatus alone, but in the marriage of the technology with the idea. A sense of nascent possibility lies at the heart of photography’s challenge and its appeal. I would also argue that still photography has great value within the age of a time-based, on demand media landscape and global economy. Still photographs – though now in a tiny and rarefied minority compared to all of the of photographic imagery produced – command a slower but rewarding space to counter-balance the attention deficit many of us we now feel as a result of modern living. As the great photographer Diane Arbus noted: ‘They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you’.