[ The Incoherent Light ]

Marcus Haydock

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:56:00 +0000

(From the series Insurrection)

A plain mystery – the closer we look the more inscrutable the object of our study becomes, porous to the gaze – something new every time; there will be an unexpected shift in the reality of things, their familiar dimensions rendered extraordinary.

The lucidity of a photographer’s attention to the world can transcend the limitations of what it is that we expect to see there. This same quality of sustained attention stands out in the work of Marcus Haydock and in bringing together those charged moments of insight he achieves a satisfying narrative density at odds with the apparent disparity of his subject matter. Those connections are what activate the particular values of each image, a certain enigmatic clarity in how they relate to each other.

His close scrutiny of what might otherwise be read as unremarkable moments reveal the capacity of photography itself to interrogate the very conditions of our awareness, indeed to create different sorts of perception from those that we ordinarily encounter, passing in front of our eyes like a screen; that sense of rupture is what seems so effective here – not that the world itself takes a strange turn, but rather that our sense of it does.

Haydock’s attention is fluid and yet specific, contradictory to the visible and faithful to its contradiction, to evasions or elisions of presence. His photography then is a measure of a pleasurable uncertainty about how we locate ourselves.

(From the series There's no Time for Art)

You can see rest on Haydock's website.

Maximilian Rossner

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:26:00 +0000

These fragments are just part of the whole, coordinates for a lost reality frozen at the very moment of its apprehension. Multiple impressions strung together in an uncertain, but somehow still rigorous fashion, hoping to discern from this complexity a pattern than is, in the end, more than the sum of its parts. But there inevitably remains a disturbing (and necessary) strangeness in the relationship between them – nothing quite fits as it should.

Let’s call it another kind of history then, one composed mostly of silence and awkward glances, the product of a very particular kind of attention to the world. In this sense the photographic work of Maximilian Rossner belongs to that other great European tradition of subjectivity, opposed – if not quite absolutely – to the pristine emotional clarity of a topographical view. These are still landscapes of course, but of a more intimate kind. Their fragmentation is not purposeful either, it is not imposed, rather it is found, and within that is the fundamental question of how we order what we find – is the shape of that order meaning in itself?

Yet the most desperate cliché of how we talk about visual art now is to say that it somehow “refuses” conclusion, to the extent that this has become a reflexive way of describing work that labours under the poetic heritage of modernism and its obsession with fracture. In Rossner’s photography, though, there is a response to the world that doesn’t preclude the chance of some incidental coherence, even if it is only possible though a photographic interaction – or perhaps especially then. Every frame is a testing of itself, its own condition.

It is work that depends not so much on a given subject, but rather the visual response to an experience suggested or provoked by a charged surface, some existential resonance. The photograph seems an unlikely vehicle for these insights, of course – they are at best insubstantial, resisting that sort of concrete expression. But the medium is also defined by an openness to the spaces between and around what is visible, at least in those cases when it is used against what we expect of it – not appearances, then, but relative positions, an encounter with the world as seen by the photographer.

Rossner has a website; have a look at this series and also this one.

Ron Jude - Alpine Star

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:57:00 +0000

The context in which we find a photograph goes a long way toward determining the way it is read. Even if the pictures are not essentially changed, the shift in context redefines their meaning. Photographs are without some obvious measure of their intent, as such, and so we are guided in our understanding of them by the experience of how they are brought to us. Altering the context of an image renders the photograph as an unstable point of contact between use and effect. In that sense, the meaning of a photograph is always semantically open.

Based on a sequence of pictures culled from the back-issues of a small town newspaper, Alpine Star by Ron Jude engages with the fictions of our collective memory. We find at work something far stranger than the standard assault on a photographic “code” that has undermined most discussion of the subject. This is not just another deconstruction of photography as if it were a kind of conceptual problem to be solved and explicated, but rather an irrational poetics of the archive. Jude has fashioned an uncanny anti-narrative, its precise structure defined by a tension native to photography itself. The result is more than just the sum of its parts – he achieves, in this minimal way, a very satisfying and provocative ambiguity.

See more here and read this interview for some more background on the series.

Mishka Henner - No Man's Land

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:59:00 +0000

There are places that we just don’t go, and this reluctance has little to do with geography – or at least, not the actual contingencies of landscape. Rather, these distances are specifically cultural; places (and people) are reduced to a state of invisibility rooted in the privilege of being seen, the often unearned right to assume one’s own visibility as a social force, and conversely, of negating the visibility of others. Mishka Henner’s fascinating work No Man’s Land deals, at least in part, with these themes. The project centres on the use of images taken from Google Street View presumably showing improvised sites of “commercial” sex along the back-roads and motorways of several European countries. These woman (and in so far as I can tell, they’re mostly women) are confined to various non-places, disposable realities captured with near manic blankness. Street View is a monument to our times, a volatile presence, everywhere and nowhere.

This invisibility is a lack of economic as well as cultural agency. People have long been commodities, but it has never been easier for us not to see that fact. The social balance is always tipped in favour of those who control the ability to define it. So when we talk about “privilege” we really mean the assumption that society is an extension of how we see the world. The order of privilege, its stability, depends on that imbalance to somehow validate it. An increasing sense of distance allowed by technology, the ease with which we can hold the world at arm’s length, is just another function of these inherently flawed and alienating structures. The women in Henner’s work remain ciphers; even at the very moment in which they come under scrutiny their identity is lost. This is, of course, a tenant of the Street View project, but it is also a rather piercing metaphorical description of the faceless lives they lead.

Of all the recent projects in this idiom, No Man’s Land seems to me one of the most effective, in so far as it links the new technology with a relevant social context (Doug Rickard’s work is also exemplary for that reason). If the aim of Street View is, in a pseudo-imperial way, to make the world “visible” then surely it also succeeds – as we can see in Henner’s work – at revealing the limits of that visibility, because it occurs under a paradigm of tacit and ultimately, false authority. It is as if we cannot see these things, except at a costly distance from them, a distance that suggests they are not part of “our” world at all. Yet this is the world that has created and now sustains the very lives these women live. The way in which they are seen embodies a social paradox; by incorporating this sense of (social and technological) distance into his work Henner achieves something unique.

You can find more here.

Uta Barth - An Interview

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:07:00 +0000

It might seem a bit perverse that a photographer should dedicate a career to what feels like a systematic effort toward destabilising all our assumptions about the visible, the exact thing to which their medium is committed. But such is one - I think quite persuasive - reading of Uta Barth's work for at least the last two decades. She seems more concerned with how meaning might be possible for an image at all, the conditions of meaning, rather than what a particular image could mean.

"Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall (contained and enclosed by a frame that demarcates the area of interest and separates it from all that surrounds it in the room), etc. This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an most visceral, physical and personal sense. Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception."

This interview, in which she discusses, among other things her series Field and Ground, dates from way back in 1996, but is none the less a great introduction to the themes Barth has long pursued in her work, so it's definitely worth your time.

Lydia Anne McCarthy - Refraction

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:40:00 +0000

Given the myriad forms of photographic practice available to us, each with multiple styles and expectations, it seems a contradiction – if not a surprising one – to say that some genres are actually quite rigid in the particular approach or quality we require of them. I’m thinking specifically of portraiture – the facile assumptions of legibility are time and again to the fore, where the picture is thought to show a “likeness” or reveal something about its subject, an easy correspondence between disparate surfaces.

To complicate that is not just to call the photographic enterprise into question, but our perceptual expectations as well. They in turn depend on the world being as it appears, with nothing at all behind the veil – or else everything, where a subject performs its absence. The portraiture of Lydia Anne McCarthy subtly locates itself somewhere within these extremes, verging sometimes on abstraction, but never quite allowing it. She deals, in fact, with the complex embodiment of vision.

These works were made by replacing the conventional lens of a view camera with a Fresnel screen, but that is in many ways incidental to their significance. Even if we know the particular kind of optical device used to produce the images, its effect is not so much material as it is in the altered character of our visual experience, which is counter to any expectation we might have of a photographic portrait. What she is dealing with then, is not a likeness of the person, not the photographic performance of their visible identity – their character – but the act of their becoming visible to the camera, the space that they occupy at the moment the picture is being made – these are, in fact, portraits of that space.

What she proposes is an activated visual experience, but it is not one where her sitters are incidental either. Theirs is the realisation of a double embodiment, first as an individual and again as a perceived subject; McCarthy articulates the distinction between those two roles as being within the photographic process itself.

See the rest of this series here and be sure to also have a look at this series, Shadows and Reflections.

Outside the Frame: Some Thoughts on the Work of Joachim Schmid

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:41:00 +0000

From the series Cyberspaces

From the series O Campo

Views of two books from the series Other People's Photographs

The staggering rate at which we now make and consume photographic images is liable to induce a sense of vertigo in anyone who thinks about it for too long. Of course, given that it is essentially a technological medium, reproduction is a key value of its nature – the easy multiplication of images, but this new, incredible proliferation of photography itself is something mostly unforeseen, because that shift in the operation of actually making a picture is basically very little, a matter of degree only. However, the implications of this jump from a chemical process to a digital one are huge, and still imperfectly understood, but there are artists who have been dealing with the issue of photographic consumption for a number of years, even before the recent explosion in technology, and perhaps chief among them is Joachim Schmid, who is a prescient observer of media culture in general. Granted he began his investigations – and that’s really what they are – into the social gravity of lens-based images long before the internet and digital technology attained their current status, but there is none the less something about all his work that cements an understanding of just what the whole mass of photographic images would eventually become, consuming reality one frame at a time.

The central aim of his diverse methods has been the remarkably consistent questioning of what is it that we do with photographs and how they shape the way in which we see the world around us, that profound conceptual disparity between representation and experience so often obscured by the multiple roles filled the photographic image. It is – no doubt rightly – an article of faith in any contemporary discussion about the medium that we cannot in any sense trust what we see in a photograph, that some essential sense of its being in reference to a real event has long since been abandoned. Yet we know although this has in a fundamental way to do with a new volatility of the photograph and the ease with which it can be manipulated, the other dimensions of this supposed shift in thinking are much harder to quantify, given the fact that images have always been subject to some sleight of hand, or at least an inherent willingness to deceive. The most remarkable insight of Schmid’s practice has been to articulate in a systematic way the far more complex social iterations of photographic meaning and how those values are tied into the imposition of a particular view of the world that is in fact only made possible by photography – its “manipulation” then belongs to a far more embedded process than the simple fact of changing appearances. It is, in fact, the ordering of our collective reality.

As a result of this particular insight, Schmid is explicitly concerned with the wider structures of meaning, those contexts in which pictures occur and are read. He does not specifically “appropriate” the images that form the basis of his work, but uses their presence in a reflexive fashion to elucidate the ways in which meaning is derived as the function of a particular image in a particular context – and by altering this context he alters the meaning of the images. It is somewhat ironic that this facility for “ordering” our sense of the world through photography depends on the ordering of the photographic material itself, in so far as the subtext of this action is to reinforce that first connection between the image and its nominal subject. This has to be taken as more than just a tangential reference – the image has to be (or is understood as) the analogue of its subject. In changing the context of the images Schmid is revealing this “double-bind” of photographic reference, the way in which it is definitively anchored to a subject – where the picture is inescapably about something – and yet the meaning of that reference is unstable, given to abrupt changes in implication depending on where we find it. The same “reference” can have an untold number of meanings. What’s at stake then is the containment of those possibilities, because it is the limit of any discourse – like attaching a particular reading to a photograph – that establishes meaning. But at the same time we cannot think of these “limits” as being in any way neutral or without an agenda. There is often some pre-existing order packaged with the photograph that demands a certain understanding of its subject (and the photograph itself, in turn). Schmid’s work depends therefore on the articulation of a singular, if paradoxically ubiquitous trope – that of the archive.

This is not just a system of ordering information according to certain rules, the strategies of an archive, or its incidental style, more than that it is the assumed privilege of controlling the meaning within it, setting the terms of that meaning. This is in fact the effect of a super-structure that determines how that content is read, the true intent of which is to shape larger narratives – telling us this is how it was, a kind of proof. The archive is not just order then, but the appropriation of meaning beyond the factual as a projected image of authority. All of which is not to suggest of course that there is some clear intentionality behind such a process, a will to control meaning in itself – and Schmid is not so naive as to imply that in his work. Rather “the archive” is shaped by a gravitational pull between images; the logic imposed on them is subject to a certain kind of irrationality, even in those particular cases where the aim of a collection is to reinforce a specific viewpoint. His series Other People’s Photographs, involving the process classifying amateur pictures into thematic groupings is emblematic in that regard; the mass of visual material with which we now live is clearly another sort of archival practice – it has, for want of a better word, gone viral and Schmid deals with the change in a particularly acute way.

He also has a comprehensive website.

Barbara Ess - Interview

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:37:00 +0000

Barbara Ess is a veteran artist using the proto-photographic technology of pinhole cameras to make work that persuasively comments on the embodied construction of visual experience, its distortions and various frailties, integrating those elements into the conceptual effect of her photography. Although her pictures are indeed dream-like in nature, they have at the same time an underlying rigour.

"I think of my work as an investigation and it's always concerned with the same question: Exactly what is the true nature of reality?" says New York artist Barbara Ess of her darkly disturbing photographs.

"I don't know if there's an essential reality it's possible for us to get a grip on," she adds, "but I know I don't experience life primarily in terms of the physical world--my emotions and memories play a much larger role in shaping my experience as a human. I know there's a me that's more solid than this body I move through the world in."

This interview, although it is several years old, does a great job of outlining what she's interested in and the evolution of her work. (It also contains an inexplicable moment of confusion on the part of its author between a pinhole photograph and a photogram, but aside from that is well deserving of your time).

Mariah Robertson

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:48:00 +0000

Mariah Robertson is another artist who uses a reclaimed vocabulary of modernist aesthetics, in collision with any number of other cultural reference points, to examine the increasingly displaced material presence of the photographic image. The result is surprisingly, well, funky is the best word, I suppose, but it's also serious in engaging with the abstract qualities of vision, right at the point where they merge with the psychological. See also this.

Here is a short video that shows Robertson at work:

(via)

Fleur van Dodewaard - Sun Set Series

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:43:00 +0000

The conventional tropes that would overtake the photographic image existed even before the medium came into being, so that certain things were understood as "beautiful" and others not, mere happenstance absorbed by the indifferent lens. These conventions are pictorial of course, but they are also social, creating limits to what could be seen. Fleur van Dodewaard's playful work is about exactly this kind of "negative" visibility and although the pictures are themselves quite restrained, with their limited palette and staging, the effect in sum is unexpectedly critical. She is taking the "beautiful" image apart and has found only this rigid set of archetypes, a repression of the visible.

See more here.

Josh Brand

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:08:00 +0000

Josh Brand makes subtle and evocative photograms that utilise a clear set of references to modernist abstraction, but at the same time bending them to new conceptual ends, in particular having to do with the substance of the photographic image and also the way in which the specific constraints of a process help to determine meaning.

This article by Fionn Meade is a great introduction to the scope of his work, as are these videos, which date from when he was shortlisted for the Grange Prize in 2010:

Michelle Kloehn - Unseen

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:05:00 +0000

It’s commonplace to say that there is now a certain ambiguity in how we think about and use photography, given that the thread of reference that once defined the medium has been so undermined by changing technology. Yet the very individual work of Michelle Kloehn treats this quality as if it had always been present in photography, a sort of enigmatic reticence whereby the medium becomes a complicated surface for meaning, one that is never quite revealed.

Working for the most part with large tintypes she has created a body of images that successfully integrate this dimension of photography back into its history, both materially with regard to the technique she uses, but also in a conceptual sense, because although the images are themselves concrete they manage not to fully resolve into any particular sense of what they are about or what is happening within the frame. Kloehn suggests an alternative trajectory for the development of photography, one grounded in a disappearance of her subject into the process by which it becomes visible.

Though she risks an understanding of her work as somehow nostalgic, just in the simple comparison of its hand-made qualities to the more disembodied process we’re now so familiar with, Kloehn avoids this reading by a clearly systematic approach to her subject matter, studio constructions mostly, without any overt emotional content. This suggestive emptiness inevitably turns us back to our experience of the medium and indeed the contradictory nature of visual perception itself.

See more here.

Marcus Erixson - Interview

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:46:00 +0000

Check out this interview with Marcus Erixson. The site is worth keeping an eye on too for an an interesting mix of new photography.

Art and Capital

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:48:00 +0000

A gilded trinket for the speculative investor; doesn’t hurt that it’s easy on the eye – and everything else as well. Of course people are entitled to spend money however they see fit, and maybe it was love at first sight with this (inescapably minor) work, but the pernicious assumption that its price is somehow a measure of what the photographer has achieved is one that undermines the potential of the medium as a whole – perhaps it is better to be outside the Academy than smothered by it, because if we accept that “art” inheres in that class of objects designated as art, then we are bound to an unnecessarily limited view of what it can be, at best a set of object relations and their effect – little more than the stuff of art, and whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

The commodity value of an artwork depends on any number of factors, but not at all on its discursive potential, the ability something has to acquire meaning apart from its status as an object – art exists in the scope of that discourse for which the artwork is merely a catalyst. Ideas and aesthetic experiences don’t come with prices tags, or at least they shouldn’t, because art has nothing to do with its institutions and less still to do with any sense of terminal anxiety about what art is besides a good investment for the obscenely rich, no more significant than last season’s designer handbags. If Gursky is to be remembered it will be because the best of what he achieved was able to make visible a particular cultural moment, and indeed the nearly unique way in which he was seen to embody something of that in his work – what his prints sell for at auction is perhaps not incidental to his status as an artist, but it is certainly not a meaningful index of what his work is about or how it will be seen in the future.

The bond between art and wealth is an historical fact, but it need not be an inevitability.

For some artworks comparative rarity determines their price; a painting is a unique object, the product of intense labour that requires both an overall vision and daily commitment. That fact alone is enough to make a painting the object of speculative interest, at least when it is the work of an artist who is clearly sanctified by the market – in other words, a safe bet. Those anti-establishment practices that were supposed to obliterate the stranglehold of economic forces in the distribution of art have now safely entered the cannon. Installations and video routinely sell at auction for prices much the same as those achieved by painting or sculpture and if a mere photograph can be sold for as much then it surely is as important.

All of which is not to suggest of course that an artist should not be paid for their work or that it doesn’t have some monetary worth, but rather that the value of art is – maybe somewhat paradoxically – unrelated to the work itself. Meaning is not for sale.

Past Tense: Michael Ackerman's Fiction

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:51:00 +0000

Most often we take our certainties for granted. Places or names appear to us as comprehensible, being exactly what they are and no less. A broader sense of the world is held together by that fundamental assumption, shading the contours of an unchanging landscape where dark still opposes light, but is never equal to it, where there is no likely slippage between who you are and the image you have of yourself. All of this is not exactly a lie, it’s just not the world we fully belong to or are capable of making. The illusions we build our lives on are fragile and grasped with too much force they shatter.

If Fiction is a perfectly apt title for this body of work by Michael Ackerman it is because in refusing one narrative he finds others just as troubling, a labyrinth. His is a world of forgetting (and conversely, a world where forgetting is impossible), of questions that cannot be answered, hungers that cannot be satisfied. He charts a near hallucinogenic passage through some blasted, seemingly post-historical nightscape; everything is received at the most piercing frequency, nerves raw, attention pulled in every direction. Here there are no sure coordinates by which to navigate, no anchor save for the act of photography itself – notations on the void.

The images fall into an associative and distinctly non-linear rhythm that carries the momentum of the book forward, a densely rendered stream of consciousness building upon itself, spreading out, revealing layers, currents of meaning. Its structure is actually quite elaborate, a trademark of Ackerman’s that might well be unconvincing in lesser hands. He is all the while unwavering in his determination to cross into (or out of) some desolate territory of the soul, and although not necessarily distant, these are definitely states of awareness on the outer edges of our familiar existence, all those things from which we ordinarily seek shelter, that threaten the comfortable reserve we put between ourselves and the world for fear of being overwhelmed by memories too viciously barbed to handle, or by the fevered pursuit of oblivion, pleasure and despair intertwined, the crashingly sensate. Even the light, when we find it, is a blinding absence, and whatever it touches is scorched beyond recognition, leaving only the bones, a trace of some encounter that has been and gone. Everything here exists emphatically in the past tense, now becoming then, and the future never happens, because we can only live it through the lens of the past – and of the camera.

For all its ostensible roughness, there is an insistent purity to Ackerman’s photographic vision, the dark really is dark and the light is just another kind of emptiness, no less cruel. Everything is haunted, tragic – and it is, convincingly so. This happens in the materiality of his pictures, which is not just a stylistic choice, but a set of values inseparable from their meaning. In many ways, Fiction is an important milestone in Ackerman’s continuing evolution as a photographer. It develops on the immediate observational context of his earlier pictures, but here he begins to favour those aspects of his work that are less obviously descriptive, which had always been present of course, but in Fiction they are no longer grounded, spatially or psychologically. It is a body of work that depends wholly on the sort of atmosphere it manages to create, a formal consistency that subsumes all of Ackerman’s experiences into a single thread, winding together the events of his life with the particularity of his own response to them – telling the story is a manifestation of the story itself. His encounter with the world is shaped by the need he has to articulate it photographically and yet the more descriptive elements of his work are progressively stripped away, leaving a core of determined expressiveness, where the feeling of a picture, its emotional affect, counts for more than anything.

There is an inherent creative danger, though, in the sort of landscape that Ackerman has claimed for his own. At any time he might fall into a theatrical despair that makes little more than a fetish of the human struggle, with no reflection at all on what exactly that might be, besides a stagey backdrop for the angst-ridden demimonde – life in the raw. Truthfully, Ackerman’s is hardly a vision broad in scope; some will no doubt even find it hollow romanticism. But his sustained pursuit of a personal ideal is considerably more than the sum of its parts, and the cumulative effect of his photography is one that seems to offer genuine insight about the times in which we live.

More than that, there is a pervasive sense of historical resonance to this work, the way a charged past seeps into our understanding of a place, and it is in this context that Ackerman’s deeply felt style makes the most sense. It was conflict that drew the map of Europe, terrible loss and blood-shed. In his nocturnal wanderings Ackerman uses his own peeled sensibility like a gauge for past tragedy and finds it everywhere, the wind-blown streets, the emptied landscapes and solitary figures blurring into the dark – infected by history. This awareness is what crystallises his own existential drama; the sense of a horizon wider than just his inner turmoil and the always hectic urge to make pictures, a need to connect with what is happening around him.

This is not to say of course that the value of Ackerman’s work is to be found only in tracing the emotional overlap of past and present; clearly it stands on its own terms as something fully realised. It is actually the world that fits his vision and not the other way around. He shows that our past is nearly always tragic, just because it is past and so far beyond where we can reach. The immediacy of Ackerman’s own feeling is projected from the page; we can share in it or at least occupy a roughly comparable space for the duration of our viewing. He is not just showing a moment, but wants us to exist within it as he did and his willingness to collapse those boundaries is ultimately what makes the book such a rewarding experience.

(Ackerman's work is not very usefully represented online, losing much of its tactility. You'll find more on the Agence Vu website, but really the best thing is try to get a copy of the book. I previously wrote about Ackerman here).

Jessica Labatte

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:19:00 +0000

The still-life is a pictorial genre that may seem at first to be relatively innocuous – nothing moves, and yet the unlikely collision of matter that Jessica Labatte uses to make her work belongs very much to this tradition. Her approach is admirably diverse, if not a little scattershot; some pictures are made of elements that seem never intended to resolve, or settle into a cogent reading. Each part stands in relation to the larger whole, speaking in turn of a narrative other than just what is seen. Looking beyond the surface we see implied complexities of possession and attainment, that stuff on which we build our most durable illusions.

There is also a sophisticated humour is at work in Labatte’s pictures, a willingness to embrace contradiction that helps to render the objects as permeable spaces for meaning to spread across, a game of shifting categories, playful but dense, one that slips between an amused disregard for semantic clarity and the purposefully obtuse, knowing in advance that the parts won’t connect. We have on the one hand the tactile pleasure of these images, a riot of colourful allusion, sensuously visible detail, and on the other there is the intractability of their meaning that almost constitutes a refusal, casting doubt on the reasons we might have for expecting their significance to be a given value.

Her arrangements resonate in startling ways, they have a logic all of their own. Yet an important distinction has to be made between the pictures themselves and the assemblages or collections that Labatte takes as her subject. The very act of making the picture transfers their meaning over to a discourse that is more about spectacle – about looking – than the specific presence of what it is she chooses to photograph. The wayward encounter between a presumed, but in no way apparent, conceptual destination and an intriguing optical effect, the ambiguous territory of the still-life, is what makes this work such a pleasing challenge.

Her website is here.

Edward Mapplethorpe - The Variations

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:10:00 +0000

Skittering, free-form lines splinter into blurs of metallic light; part alchemy, part action painting – this is chaos, barely controlled, and without the burden of photographic appearance these images become a trace of their own creation. Each is an acutely sensitive record of the particular moment in which it was made, crystallised as these singular objects at the conceptual limits of the medium. The Variations is a relatively recent body of work by New York artist Edward Mapplethorpe.

You may well recognise the name; he is the younger brother of Robert, a one-time assistant and collaborator who brought technical polish to what had been a previously rough-hewn vision. This family association left a deep artistic confusion, however, and that, coupled with an addiction to heroin set Mapplethorpe’s creative development back for many years. He has gradually been reasserting his own identity though, with a convincing study of the photograph as a material presence, something approaching the sculptural in its understanding of weight and density. His work belongs to that rare order of photographic experience that stands entirely on its own terms. They are not images of something, not spaces for content, but the naked architecture of a process becoming an image, the fact of its visible existence.

It’s something of a risk even to call this work photography, breaching as he is our (already tenuous) expectation of how pictures function. Of course it is photographic, almost explicitly so, and not just because of the materials, but because of how they are used. This is what undermines the seemingly inevitable (and not precisely unfounded) comparison of Mapplethorpe’s work with painting. The image is the result of a directed chemical action, there is a knife-edge of chance involved and a willingness to incorporate that, which admittedly can be seen in other graphic arts as well. The differences are important though and revealing, because whereas in painting the action is mostly linear – that is, a decision happens before and after the mark is put down – these are not marks made. Rather they are expressions of an open-ended process, formed by a totally different relationship to the intentionality of the artist. Painting is an accumulation in time; it stands in layers as a kind of sediment. Mapplethorpe’s use of photography (a writing in light) suggests an action that is instantaneous, but expanded outwards – the proliferation of a dizzying optical complexity.

His work exists in a very provocative space, being defiantly abstract in its articulation and yet having an utterly immediate perceptual effect. What he produces is not an image describing the contours of a prior reality, but an encounter that is in itself real, being without reference, a closed realm of forces activated by looking, by the nuance of attention. In this way they are incomplete, lacking the sufficiency of an image, in exchange for something that is in its way just as commanding, formed by a tension between a set of values that are at once the antithesis of photography and its daring confirmation.

See more of this work here, and try this article for more background on Mapplethorpe.

John Stezaker - Artist's Talk

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:16:00 +0000

Given that he is probably one of the most featured artists on this site it was a real pleasure to find a two-part interview with John Stezaker. He leads us on a conversational tour of his recent exhibition at MUDAM, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Luxembourg. You can read what I last wrote about him here.

Diane Arbus: Some Thoughts on the Problem of Biography

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:20:00 +0000

A Portrait of Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, 1969

It is perhaps a not very surprising irony that Diane Arbus should have come to occupy a position similar to those characters that populate her work, allowing for some discrete titillation under the guise of high art – she was a slumming Jewish princess from a rich family who took pictures of “freaks” and then killed herself. You can even read the autopsy report, one of several lapses into ghoulish hagiography for the otherwise excellent survey of her work, Revelations, published in 2003. Adding to the indignity is a breathlessly tabloid account of her life from Patricia Bosworth, followed by an execrable film “inspired” by Arbus (so much so in fact that the main character is actually called Diane Arbus) and which is rife with factual inaccuracies, featuring a performance from Nicole Kidman so elegantly disaffected that it borders on the catatonic.

It seems that we are far happier to let Arbus live on in the popular imagination as a tortured, (irredeemably female) genius than we are to seriously examine the deeper challenge of her work, a situation provoked in no small part by the famously intransigent keepers of her estate, whose defensive attitudes have discouraged many. Their strategies are understandable, given the sensationalism that has come to surround her life, but it remains to be seen if they are really effective, as the more conspicuous exceptions so far have been those biographers determined to tell all, with little or no reference to a major achievement in photography, other than the suitably grotesque encounters with the demimonde it provided.

If we discount an obvious temptation to conflate the sad facts of her life with the kind of pictures she made, the next critical trap is to think of Arbus as just a predatory voyeur, manipulating her vulnerable subjects into revealing the most blatantly damaged part of themselves, especially when those parts are there for all to see, or in fact to heroically ignore. However it seems to me that the unique strength of her work is in having the courage to be so nakedly voyeuristic, to stare and to be complicit in her staring with all those people that we are told never to stare at, so as not to make “them” uncomfortable and while Arbus herself might have been predatory (in the way that photographers often are) looking at these pictures we become the prey. It is that moment of awful fission when the stare is returned and we are reminded again of the positions we so carelessly inhabit, the way we can bring the “other” into being just by the tacit assumption of our privilege.

Any reading of her work must inevitably focus on the perceived otherness of those she photographed and this fact is then cited as the clear proof that she exploited her helpless subjects. It is there in the perverse authority of how she makes visible their strangeness, their difference, or somehow projects it onto everyone who appeared before her camera, regardless of who they are or what they look like. But paradoxically it is our willingness to regard these people as other and our denial of agency to them that is truly exploitative. Arbus seems to have regarded them as equals precisely by acknowledging their difference and photographing them anyway, by treating them as individuals worthy of attention. Their otherness rests with us, the conviction – in keeping with the dominant values of our culture – that it is only proper for certain people to be seen at all. If her pictures were of those we deem socially acceptable then there would be no question of whether or not the photographs are “exploitative” in nature. It is only when those boundaries are challenged that such questions arise. In a strange, but none the less pronounced way these are portraits that reveal more about the audience – and the very act of looking itself – as they do about the people in them.

Having just (briefly) examined the perils of biography it would clearly be unwise to speculate now on the kind of intention that drove Arbus to make this work, but I think there can be no doubting her deep study into the complexities of photographic portraiture as an act, the extent to which it is tied up with social hierarchies and how the sort of roles we inhabit in turn define those relationships. The transgression that Arbus perpetrates is of a more fundamental sort than a well-brought-up young woman in that time and place keeping outrageously bad company, because although it has proved irresistible to biographers and critics alike (most of whom should know better) even that is not what we would like to think.

The photographic encounter she has with the dwarf or the transvestite seems (and is) on a par with that of the respectable ladies, their hats just so, or the genial pro-war demonstrator. All are seen to have a frighteningly equal vulnerability; her embrace of difference is without boundary, suggesting that we all pretend, that we all play the role we’re given, but actually live inside of them, as something, or someone else – something impossible to ever really see. She addresses herself then precisely to the gap between those two roles. Her “freaks” don’t have a choice in the matter; their difference is an accident of birth and can’t be hidden. It seems the polite thing would be not to stare, or even look, but for Arbus it is necessary to acknowledge the shared otherness of just being human and in her photography no less a thing is at stake.

In the forty years since her suicide it is somewhat tragic that Diane Arbus has been accorded little of the profound empathy that she herself was so capable of – it is, no doubt, a familiar reluctance to let the truth get in the way of a good story, and her life was in that sense almost archetypal. She is supposedly the innocent abroad, whose destructive level of identification with others shattered an already fragile sense of self. Given that she was so obviously troubled it seems a fair conclusion that her state of mind influenced in some way the photography she made. Her courageous attempt to penetrate the turbulent surfaces of identity is not as easy to account for though and so is not likely to be found in any biography, no matter how scrupulous. The mistake is in thinking that we can ever really know someone, even when they are completely seen, or perhaps especially then.

Mark Kessell - Video

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:01:00 +0000

This short video is an introduction to the work of Mark Kessell (discussed previously here) and is taken from a documentary exploring the use of alternative photographic methods by contemporary artists. This site has further details and a number of other videos.

Jessica Eaton

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:15:00 +0000

A slight-of-hand, that’s the work of Jessica Eaton, whose lightness of touch belies a range of profound, even disturbing concerns to do with the insistently fictive space of photographic images. Eaton’s elegant, discursive pictures have a wry humour that softens our descent to those other, less comprehensible precincts of meaning. These pictures evoke the complex mesh of perception and visibility that is the latent value of a process implicated in the seemingly “neutral” field of photographic representation. The nominal subject is fatally tangled in the very structure that allows it to be seen, an act of repeated disappearance. Although elaborated with a combined rigour and playfulness Eaton’s work has a deep measure of this uncertainty; her conceptual games reveal the material intersession of photography.

Elements of pictorial structure are disclosed as the subject of these works, their exposition of process becomes another meaning. Within this rhetoric of formal gestures a distinct sort of vocabulary emerges, one that breaks the image down to the slightest degree by which it might still function. Concentrating for the most part on a studio practice Eaton offers a layered reading of photographic history, qualities specific to its development as a medium. Her manipulation of given forms has an idiosyncratic cast, they become an acutely charged surface for the problem of photography, those uncanny distortions of time and space that we so easily take for granted. In fact Eaton’s work is driven by a precise use of these two variables, producing structures that exist only in the composite dimension of the photograph itself. Many evoke the particulate duality of light, indeterminate states that seem conclusively frozen, but which are in fact the product of an accumulation, time flattened and becoming multiple. We see then none of its aspects as decisive, they are all disturbingly real, because our sense of the world as a visually cohesive experience depends of the modes of perception that create and maintain its singular appearance.

Eaton’s photography feels like an engagement with that synthetic process, but there is a refusal to let it be sublimated, transparent, revealing instead its fixed co-ordinates and ellipses – how the illusion is worked, or at least some of the ways. She has moved still deeper into this imagined territory of the photograph, to deal with shapes that are increasingly meticulous and yet more elusive than ever, despite the bristling internal proliferation they depict. The effect is cerebral, but rarely distanced; it is the product of an open, sophisticated formality. Her latest work exists squarely in the presumptive, unstable space between it and the viewer, a challenge to the habits of perception. Both full and empty, these pictures work to define the process of their making, just as they are unmade when we grasp exactly what that is, breaking apart the certainties of photographic time. By taking a late modern fascination with geometric density to these unexpected philosophical depths, Eaton’s work is a glimpse of another future for the medium and a challenge to our understanding of its past.

Find more here.

Stephan Tillmans - Luminant Point Arrays

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 12:53:00 +0000

Often the limit of what is visible seems to be, as in this case, the limit of what photography is capable of, its zero degree. In a way these pictures by Stephan Tillmans are just documents of that conditionality, moments when the “image” is something hardly even seen. They are the artifacts of a process beyond the frame, imperceptible durations rendered tangible. Indeed, certain technologies have changed (and are changing) our perception of time, they extend or distort it, creating new divisions – its fractions become nearly infinite. Tillmans reveals something of what might happen in those transitional moments; structures with no interior, the medium has a shape and a logic all of its own. Made by photographing the few brief seconds of illumination just after a television has been switched off, we can clearly see the machine as imposing a set of values and not just as a portal, or the mute carrier of data. He uncovers a strange complexity in this seemingly passive surface. Of course his intentions are more formally complex, so there is also a rewarding play between the visual abstraction of the images and the fact that they have been produced by directly observational means. But as strategies of mass communication become ever more physically diffuse, and so more adept at concealing the mechanics that control the ways in which information is distributed, Tillmans’ work feels like an important (if perhaps somewhat oblique) reflection on the origins of that change.

See more here.

John Stezaker: Surface Tension

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:15:00 +0000

John Stezaker is not a photographer in a conventional sense, but his use of the medium is by far the most perceptive of anyone working today. He functions covertly, like an archivist in the unconscious pathways that images lay bare, forging connections that trouble and beguile. Photography is a medium that conceals, even as it appears to show us everything and Stezaker brings that quality of elusiveness out into the open, making it explicit. His practice is a distinctive form of collage that seems at first to be unworthy of the name; images merely overlap each other, two or sometimes more, some cut at angles and others straight across. These simple gestures soon reveal themselves to be hugely resonant. The collision of different photographic states, with a kind of delicately orchestrated violence, is by now his trademark.

In these works the whole image acts as a surface or a screen and cannot be decomposed into its elements – there is instead a vocabulary of photographic codes, a set of assumptions about how the medium works that we use to negotiate the space of photographs, and these are in no way self-evident. All photography is a kind of abstraction – its codes are not about reality, but in fact are reality. Stezaker shows them to be fractured and deceptive, psychologically fraught – hierarchies of meaning that open into fault-lines. These breaks are literal of course, he physically cuts the image, but they are also figurative, to do with the fictive visual space of photographs, a continuity that acts as a real space. These illusions are maybe as much cultural as they are perceptual or material, but depend on a deep understanding of how the specific presence of the image shapes our reading of it. For Stezaker it is a kind of meta-study into the conditionality of meaning.

The raw material for his work draws on a vast amount of photographic ephemera from that precise moment up to and around the mid 20th century when strategies of mass communication had just begun to categorically redefine our social landscape. This is the golden age of picture magazines and movie starlets; new kinds of photographic reality begin reshaping the culture – we now definitively lived (and saw ourselves living) in the images that we made. Of course this is no coincidence. The questions that are most pressing for Stezaker deal with how a given image might fail the experience it depicts, rendering it ineffably strange, and the way in which that strangeness is not just a quality of the medium, but a fundamental disorder implicit in the social structures of late capitalism. He quietly interrogates the pervasive assumptions – psychological, political, economic – implied by photographic representation, that of the whole world seemingly reduced to little more than a (visual) commodity.

Stezaker’s response is not just theoretical, however. Instead, it is practical, destroying the coherence of images to open a filmic reach of unrealised desire, the endless blind stream of pictures falling into and out of our lives. He deals with photographs as agents of unexpected complexity; they become fields of engagement. The image is forcibly dematerialised; or rather our reading of the image is driven back to how the qualities of the material shape our understanding of the image as a bearer of content, an unstable system of references. Breaking that surface tension renders it, somewhat perversely, impenetrable, and so beyond whatever expectations we might have concerning a photographic reality, while at the same time being explicitly about that same question; meaning is not only rendered conditional, here it is actually set adrift.

These gestures that confuse the stable dimensions of photographic reality fall into a number of different categories, all related to the same basic vocabulary and each with its own particular effect on how the “new” image will be read. What they have in common that is that they seek to provoke some failure in the continuity of depicted space, which is both visual and psychological, an unravelling of the photographic code caused either by brining two opposing images together or by cutting into a photograph to expose the image he has placed beneath it, in a literal (but often dazzlingly effective) act of rupture.

What defines Stezaker’s use of collage as a practice is his determined reluctance to make (or even re-make) a cohesive visual space. Of course, collage has always been a tool for disturbing those expectations, but in Stezaker’s hands it is perhaps the conceptual disturbance that matters most, he neglects to (visually) unify these intersecting elements precisely because the total meaning of his work depends on the disjuncture between them. It is not only some facile notion of the “marvellous” then (as in the surrealist ideal) that drives these stylistic choices, rather it is a deeply understood relationship between the materiality of photographic images and their cultural significance, how it is the process itself that shapes meaning. Cutting into the photograph emphasises its surface, a perceptual fact (where the image adheres) and a metaphor.

This certainly relates to the use of films stills in the construction of Stezaker’s work, which have reoccurred frequently. In spite of an apparent (formal) disparity between successive projects this common source material is one of the things that draw all of them together. These images already form a surface or a cultural screen for a collective psycho-social dynamic and deconstructing that fictive space is really the core of his work. The projected (or rather performed) images of cinematic narrative become an interior projection, a dream-life for the society that created them. He systematically excavates anxieties and contradictions having to do with gender roles and political structures, forces that shape the landscape of contemporary life. It is because cinema is so obviously about how we would like to be seen – or see ourselves – that these images have provided such an important resource for Stezaker’s meditations on the complexities of perception, on the images we fashion and, with a kind of recursive density that in turn fashion how we live.

There are a number of specific themes that reoccur, all of which are realised in tandem with (or under the rubric of) Stezaker’s well established repertoire of collage techniques. It is this especially dynamic relationship between the process by which his work is realised and the conceptual heft of its effect that makes Stezaker such a significant artist. He forcefully suggests that what is real exists right at the edge of our capacity to make it visible, and must instead persist as a deep absence in every attempt to do so. In some cases this absence is a literal one, cut directly out of the photograph, collapsing space. The excisions form an alternate (and unexpected) narrative from the image, one at odds with how it might have been read before; once again it is a material intervention that reveals an otherwise unseen force in the currency of images to do with the exchange of meaning.

This near forensic study of the photographic medium is of consequence in so far as these images are an analogue for the assumptions we make about reality itself. Stezaker knows of course that we do not treat photographs as being interchangeable with their nominal subject, but that through a system of representational codes read the image as nothing more than what it is a picture of, as though the image was a screen and not explicitly a kind of material (or cultural) surface. It is through willfully complicating that expectation of a screen-like transparency that Stezaker’s work reveals itself as being very much about how those codes might fail, in turn showing the covert architecture that allows them to function, throwing our focus back to that ever-shifting distance between the world and whatever image we might have of it. His forced exchange between the photograph and the act of reference itself is at heart a philosophical question having to do with the "reality" of images, how photographs might exist more to validate appearance than to challenge it. In this way Stezaker’s interventions, his cutting into or across the image, aims to openly provoke a reality that is of an altogether different order than that of the photograph in itself, an unstable, often perverse reality that our expectations of the medium will not otherwise permit to be visible.

Richard Prince - Steal This Picture

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:17:00 +0000

Most accounts of Richard Prince’s recent legal trouble have been coloured with more than a hint of venom – as though he had, finally, gotten what he deserved. Of course this is nothing new for Prince who has long traded (or profited, as many would argue) on the kind of controversy that his work generates. Seen by the old-guard photographic establishment as little more than a thief hiding behind the slick patter of academics, he seems to justify in every way the suspicion that contemporary art is a racket. Indeed the specious and dismissive way he attempted to rationalise the use of Patrick Cariou’s original photographs will probably do nothing to dissuade many people of the opinion that both Prince is a cheap huckster out to make a buck.

Yet all this attention being given to his methods rather than the content of those images he is so often accused of stealing conceals the rather inconvenient fact that his best work issues a daring set of challenges to our understanding of photography as a social currency. In dealing variously with cowboys, girlfriends and celebrities Prince reaches into the most profound archetypes of American culture, seeing how the proliferation of such images, their endless reproduction, effects how we might build a particular vision of ourselves – and how that vision inevitably becomes a commodity understood in photographic terms. He speaks for and to an age that is fully characterised by media saturation; identities are shaped by the images we consume, they perpetuate themselves in this way.

His cowboys are defined by roles of traditional masculinity, which in turn are utilised to encourage the sale of a product because it is so identified with those principles – to use that product (cigarettes, in this case) is then to be cast as synonymous with that “masculine” role. Prince turns the language of advertising against itself, exposing both the thoroughness with which it is concealed and the persistence of its influence. The girlfriends too are an archetype reduced to mere commodity status, the female role defined by a nominal (male) author. Prince undermines the pernicious assumptions of this photographic trope just by showing how the trick is worked, repeating the cultural exchange that allows it to function – and the celebrities don’t even need to be explained. I mean, everyone wants to be “famous” now, right?

It is the perverse insistence on appropriating overtly authored work that most gains the ire of his detractors. By comparison no one really questions the use of anonymous press photographs in Warhol silk-screens, or even John Baldessari’s film-stills. In both cases found images are presented with minimal alteration, but this draws little comment – it is certainly not regarded as outright theft. The specific nature of an appropriation determines fair use, but the difference is more than just a conceptual one, it is also financial. In making these works Prince significantly reduced the worth of the actual photographs by Patrick Cariou and then, most damningly, tried to refuse his culpability by denigrating them as “genre” pieces of no intrinsic value. On the whole Prince is a highly inconsistent artist who doesn’t often hit where he is aiming and this is one of those times.

This article offers some useful background on the case.

Update: Joerg at Conscientious has a post summarising reactions to the Prince-v-Cariou debacle, including my own. As far as I'm concerned appropriation is only a valid strategy when used to purposefully alter the meaning of an image. Prince's cowboys are of value in a way that Canal Zone can never be simply by the fact that he uses those images in a consciously reflexive way. This is not just a matter of changing the function of an image, but of getting inside how it works. He repeats this trick with the girlfriend series, but in many ways it is a game of diminishing returns. Canal Zone falls outside of appropriation (as I've defined it here at least) not because of how Prince altered Cariou's photographs (in fact he altered them a lot more than the cowboys, for example) but because the conceptual distance they travel is so negligible.

Doug DuBois - Interview

noreply@blogger.com ([ the incoherent light ]) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:22:00 +0000

An insightful interview with Doug DuBois on the complexities of photographing family and the importance of book-making as a way to realise a project. You can find it here.

(Incidentally, DuBois is in conversation with Richard Hines, who is a photographer himself).