Introduction to Photography as Contemporary Art

Photography as contemporary art

 Laurie Haynes   

From the point of inception the key debate surrounding photography is its position in the lexicon of Art practice. 

The writer/ philosopher Baudelaire conceded photography only one legitimate function: recording what might otherwise be lost to the human eye due to the ephemeral moment of viewing. Photography’s ability to hold that moment in detail that could be revisited after the event, serves the sciences and not Art. The direct quote is: if only you will lie down and behave dear photography. ‘If you will act as handmaiden to the arts and science, you will deserve our thanks and applause’.

Of course photography could not be restrained in this way, instead of ‘keeping its place’ photography has gone forward to literally reshape and reinvent, if not the world in which we live , at least our perception of it.

Our exposure to photography either as subject or maker has conditioned us to the point that at virtually any point in time or place we turn our rehearsed faces to the lens; the apparent objectification giving validity to our existence. This validity, this rendering, is of course under critical scrutiny, as much an abstraction as a cubist portrait. Context removed, little more than a brief moment of ‘performance’, (what the erotic photographer Bob Carlos Clark termed ‘a smug little trick’)

yet the fact that that moment is located in a real time and place serves to imbed some notion of truth to the photograph.

 Now Photographic truth is a subject that is constantly debated, and will be examined in this lecture  series. On some level of either conscious or sub-conscious thought each one of us has the echo of ‘the camera never lies’ resonating within us; which in turn can serve to transform the banal sometimes into the significant. Here lies the unshakable strength of the photographic image.

The photograph shares a birth right with the realist school of painting. The nineteenth century was also the century in which the realist painters Carot and Courbet strove to capture the exact reproduction of what the eye recollected.

Their preoccupation-to focus on the exact instant or sight-was  abducted forever by the instantaneous contingencies captured so easily by the camera. Fox Talbot, coined the term ‘Photogenic drawing’ and his first published volume of images was title ‘ The pencil of nature’  and was derived almost entirely (in subject matter and style) on established painterly conventions, but in terms of contingent realism that no painter could ever replicate.

Art photography was born.

I have to move forward quickly now stopping on my way to note significant changes in practice.  1857 saw the birth of the pictorialist school and this statement by Henry peach Robinson serves to illustrate the narrowing of the division between artist and photographer.

  ‘Any dodge, trick, any configuration of any kind is open to the photographers use… It is the photographers duty to avoid the mean, the bare, and the ugly, and aim to…. Correct the unpicturesque…. A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial’ Pictorial effect in Photography- Henry peach Robinson. 

The construction of images, unreal, but playing on the real, an artist positioning of the ‘vision’ of the maker, replicating the skill of painter.. Robinson worked in a time when the prevailing style of the arts was essentially romantic. A Polish critic announced

‘Photographers do not copy nature now, they interpret it’  

collectively they positioned themselves on higher ground’ than the realist painters, becoming more refined; their interpretation becoming more academic than Delacrois or Ingres. The first real breakthrough came at the hand and eye of an English eccentric. Julia Margaret Cameron. Obsessed with portraying the ‘inner man’ she ignored the techniques that where currently ‘a la mode’ and returned to long exposures (20 Minutes) that where agonising for the sitter; but served to strip away the artifice of performance. Techniques used sixty years later by Both Penn and Avedon to ‘get inside’ the subject.

From these beginnings Art Photography was born. Art by its very nature is contextualised by the economic-social-political climate of making, photography shares this heritage, but perhaps is more overtly effected by the ever shifting social climate.

The fundamental mechanism for viewing a photograph is ‘truth to appearance’. The viewer, that is you and I, bring to the photograph a pre-history of actual and a priori experience that conditions our response to the image. It is this factor above all else that enables the ‘Art photograph’ to play with visual and emotional perception.

 Alfred Stieglitz, who I consider to be the Father of ‘Modern Art photography’ came to Europe From America to study engineering, and whilst there bought a hand held camera, and set about capturing the ‘Life’ on the streets. On his return to the States

(1917) he embarked on a deliberate series of un-pictorial studies of a city in the midst of, snowstorms. Driving rain, bad light and shadows. He tracked the marks of man, and took these ‘impressions’ to a public unused to images of this type.

 He founded a magazine, and Gallery, the legendary ‘219’( its address on fifth avenue) and  set photography on the map as Fine, high Art, the brother of both cubism and surrealism.

(expand) For thirty years Stieglitz led a growing brotherhood of Art Photographers. The American school fundamentally different from its European counterpart( explain why), but also indelibly linked by a strand of enquiry that first and foremost examined the human condition. By the outbreak of the second world war Photography occupied an unassailable position as a medium of artistic expression, But the almost exponentional change of social status between 1836 and 1936, was nothing compared with what was to come over the next ten years.

The global nature of WW2 changed forever the strict delineation of class and status as two generation of men went to war, leaving a vacuum in the home nations that had to be filled. Women left the home and rose to the challenge forever undoing a social status quo. Life became focussed on mortality, and in so doing served to loosen moral ties and boundaries. In the midst of war and death people became aware of a new freedom, a resilience, a joy d’Vivre, that caused them to celebrate life. Photography went through a process of division, a tool of propaganda, that served to inform and misinform in the same breath. But above all render the horrific details of modern warfare forever indelible for the surviving generations.

This breaking of the final taboo, the pictorial rendition of the arena of death and destruction starting a process of de-sensitisation that continues unabated to this day. Gloves off, photography, became the key mode of representation. In the post war era virtually every aspect of life in western society became the focus for the lens. Advertising was born, and the pre-war fascination with the moving image, scaled new heights.

Now in ascendance as the dominant mode of representation, The lens strategically ate away at the spoken and written word; film and photography were central as the visual signposts of a new prosperous society, where everything and anything was achievable.

European and American photography and film making developed in tandem, like fraternal twins, sharing the same linage, but being markedly different in appearance. Europe the first born, being on the surface the quieter of the two, intellectual, reasoned, self-questioning, somehow reflecting the trauma of the war years, containing embedded within the myth of peace.

America the second born, brash, confident, but essentially a society isolated from the reality of both the horror of war and the agony of rebuilding a shattered society. Adopting the role of hedonist. From this re-birth this new beginning, the language of representation became in some ways almost diametrically opposed. The more commercially advanced America, already embracing a burgeoning commercial use of the ‘Image’ began to explore the yet as unnamed mechanisms of ‘Popular culture’.

The booming economy of post-war America still with the wraith like twin spectres, of the depression years and the War still indelibly fixed in the consciousness of the nation, dived headlong into the waters of hedonism. The pursuit of ‘leisure time’ becoming almost a national obsession (in the states above the Mason–Dixon line). The camera in turn was focused on these events, on a society freed from economic shackles, celebrating life.

Europe by contrast was still reeling from the impact of war…The economy in tatters, struggling with massive rebuilding and subsequent debt. A collective society still in mourning with a misdirected people of traumatised and displaced individuals was forced to look inward. Yes there were celebrations at the succession of hostilities, yes people danced in the streets, hugging strangers. But this euphoria was soon replaced with the stark reality of loss-poverty-the daily grind. As a post war baby I cannot comment on the reality of the situation, but life in black & white, with the colour stripped away by adverse circumstance, was mirrored in the imagery of the moment. The gritty ‘realist’ images of nations coming to terms with the loss of a generation. The contrast with post war America could not be more stark. But in that dark hour the camera turned unwaveringly toward recording the human condition. Apparently free of the strings of political motive it moved unfettered amongst the people of Europe and did find small flames of hope, love, and charity.

The post war photography of Robert Doisneau perhaps best captures the almost hidden beauty of these times.

More To Come….