Conceptual photography is a recent approach that regards the medium as
a way to make statements about itself rather than about the ostensible
subject before the lens. It is based on the belief that photographs are,
in essence, uninflected records of information rather than emotionally
nuanced experiences or works of art. One way to suggest this idea is to
present photographs in pairs or sequences. This presentation not only
parallels the way that photographs are commonly shown in picture journals
or in advertising but also serves to underline the point of view that how
reality is framed in the camera depends on the inherent properties of the
medium and on where the photographer is stationed. The photograph, some
seem to be saying, is whatever the light reveals, the lens embraces, and
the chemical substances make visible. It has little to do with ultimate
truths; change the position of the camera, and another angle—just as
truthful—will reveal itself. In presenting paired views of the same scene,
Eve Sonneman (pi. no. 734) suggests that there is not just one "decisive
moment" in documenting reality. With die passage of time or a shift in
vantage point, the same situation will take on a different
appearance—neither especially decisive.
Producing a series of uninflected images of objects of the same sort
arranged in an arbitrary sequence—some-times called a
"typology"—constitutes another approach that avoids making a personal
comment about the subject matter at hand. Referring to a series of his
deadpan photographs of parking lots in a book entitled Thirty-four Parking
Lots in Los Angeles—exemplified by die single frame shown here (pi. no.
735)—the California painter-photographer Edward Ruscha claimed to be
providing "a catalog of neutral objective facts." The images
themselves—suggestive of attitudes implicit in the "new topographies" (see
Chapter 11)—also bring to mind the repetition used in advertising
photography to emphasize the abundance of material goods. Besides Ruscha,
this approach has attracted the American photographers Judy Fiskin and
Roger Mertin; the German photographers Thomas Struth and Bernd and Hilla
Becher; and the Canadian Lynne Cohen. In addition to achieving their
stated goal of description, many typological images are also appealing for
their architectonic qualities, which relate them to the work of the
Minimalists, who were engaged in producing serial, geometric paintings and
sculpture during the 1960s.
Concentrating on size, shape, materials, and topography in their
photographs of industrial structures in England, France, Germany, and the
United States, the Bechers claim to be documenting similarities rather
than celebrating distinctivencss (pi. no. 736). Moreover, their images,
arranged in configurations that juxtapose from three to eight photographs
and at times measure some six feet tall or wide, demonstrate that camera
images can provide the kind of visual detail that the human eye might be
able to take in only over a long period of familiarity with an object. The
makers of such informational images, whether they be parking lots or
cooling towers, disavow aesthetic intentions, but the appeal of these
works undoubtedly is due to their artistic character radier than just to
the information they provide.
In fact, it is doubtful that any two-dimensional translation (whether
painting or photograph) of the complex interaction of space, volume, and
atmosphere that constitutes an architectural experience can be accepted as
accurate documentation. Despite the tact that the specialists who document
architecture and interiors—notably Lizzie Himmel and Ezra Stoller—have
taken views from various angles and in differing light conditions in order
to re-create a sense of the actual space, the physical and psychological
aspects of the architectural experience cannot be fully apprehended
through a photograph. Perhaps that is why contemporary architectural
photographers such as Judith Turner deal with the abstract beauty of
geometric shapes and forms rather than with the actuality of spatial
entities.
Photographers also use sequences, at times combined with texts of their
own devising, as a way of communicating subjective experience or
commenting on cultural attitudes. Like a significant number of other
photographers who wish to reveal private realities, Duane Michals uses
himself as model or directs others in staged, preconceived sequences such
as Chance Meeting (pi. no. 737)—six visually unexceptional shots that use
for private expressive ends the narrative technique common in
photojournalism and advertising. Inspired by Surrealist ideas, in
particular those of the Belgian painter Rene Magritte, and by the cool
irony of Robert Frank's imagery, Michals emphasizes the primacy of
subjective vision; his embrace of the sequential format has struck a
sympathetic chord among many young photographers in the United States and
Europe. A creator of fictions rather than of documents, in the mid-1970s
Michals first began to write and then to paint on his photographs, thereby
suggesting that the artist may have to go beyond what the camera lens sees
in order to deal with phenomena such as chance and death.
Clarissa T. Sligh combines images and texts in her series of montages
dealing with black childhood experiences (pi. no. 738). The texts she
derives from Dick and Jane school readers, in conjunction with family
snapshots of children at play, bring together concepts of innocence,
deception, and falsehood. A seemingly unmanipulated but in fact artfully
staged series of images by Carrie Mac Weems (pi. no. 739) includes key
words in boldface type that bring to mind billboards. Their ironic
messages commenting on black family relationships are aimed at putting in
place "a new documentary" style that "champion[s] activism and change."
Other examples that exploit the replication made possible by
photography are the sequential arrangements of figures favored by the
German photographers Floris M. Neusiis, Klaus Rinke, and Manfred Willman
and the grids assembled from landscape photographs by the Dutch graphic
artist Ger Dekkers. An assemblage in grid format of 36 slightly different
images of his own cast shadow by die Polish photographer Andrzej Lachowicz,
entitled Myself As... (pi. no. 740), brings to mind the multiple images of
the 19th-century carte-de-visite (pi. no. 59).
Many sequential works, which are considerably larger than traditional
photographs, have been influenced by the expanded size of high-art
canvases as well as by billboards and cinema screens. Working in large
scale has attracted straight photographers as well as those involved with
manipulation or directorial strategies. Over the last several decades,
as larger sheets of silver-emulsion printing paper became available,
Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and others have
achieved effects that are more startling for having been realized on an
expansive scale.
A large number of European photographer-artists have similarly expanded
the size of their work and also share the conviction that by itself the
single straight documentary photograph is not adequate for their
expressive purposes. Employing a variety of formats and techniques,
Gilbert and George in Britain (pi. no. 741), the Bechers and Joseph Beuys
in Germany, Arnulf Rainer in Austria, and Ger van Elk in Holland (among
many others) have all chosen to work in dimensions that range between four
and nine teet. Conceptual photographers do not always work with sequential
images. In staging his wry scenes that show a photograph within a
photograph (pi. no. 742), the American photographer Kenneth Joscphson
exemplifies those who comment on the supposed reality that the camera
captures—which, in some cases, is just another camera picture.
Investigating the relation of photograph to reality, which has become the
central theme in such works, has antecedents in Alfred Stieglitz's 1889
image Sun's Rays— Paula, Berlin (pi. no. 401). In this seemingly
descriptive scene, the photographer alluded to the characteristics and
potentials of the medium by including a variety of camera pictures of the
sitter made at other rimes and in different positions.
In the 1980s, the approach to art-making known as postmodernism evolved
from the Conceptual art of the previous decade. In photography, this
development represented, in part, an effort to counter the transformation
of the photograph from document into aesthetic commodity. At the same
time, it sought to formulate a new relationship between the camera image
and social realities. Postmodernists claimed that camera images of real
life could not claim uniqueness, in that (unlike one-of-a-kind handmade
images) they appropriate—that is, replicate—something that already exists.
Furthermore, they proposed that since neither photographer nor viewer
could reach beyond the shared cultural patterns of their time to invest
the camera image with a timeless aesthetic character or an emotional tone
that would be invariably understood by all, the photographer should
endeavor instead to provoke thought about current social phenomenal
Individuals taking this approach devised a number of different ways to
express ironic attitudes toward cultural stereotypes in general and toward
the particular claims of the photograph as a highly valued aesthetic
object. Some-— including Sherrie Levine, who re-photographed well-known
photographic images, and Richard Prince, whose subjects were camera images
in slick magazines—sought to impugn the modernist idea of the
artist-photographer as a charismatic figure with unique creative powers.
Postmodern strategies ran a gamut from mimicking films stills and
high-gloss advertising photographs, as in Cindy Sherman's portraits of
herself in a variety of guises (pi. no. 743), to arranging scenes in which
live models or dolls imitate photographic illustrations in consumer
magazines or impersonate real-life situations, as in Laurie Simmons's
tableaux (pi. no. 744).
Another postmodern approach, which recalls the idea of deforming the
image prevalent during the Sate 1910s and the 1920s (see, for example,
Hannah Hoch's Cut of the Kitchen Knife, pi. no. 486), endeavored to
"deconstruct" the myths of contemporary society by using found photographs
and attaching texts intended to make the viewer aware of attitudes
implicit in the popular media, for example, the British artist Victor
Burgin appended his own messages, set in type, to photographs of common
scenes (pi. no. 745), which he then rephotographed. All of these
photographic maneuvers were meant to reposition such imagery in the
viewer's awareness, bringing to light underlying consumerist and sexist
messages, rather than to appeal to feelings or a sense of beauty. They
helped women photographers not only to investigate the ways in which their
lives were being transformed into stereotypes in the commercial media but
also to examine their own needs and roles. Barbara Kruger denounced
cliches about women by adding her own captions, often composed of cutout
letters, to large-scale images whose graininess mimicked that of newspaper
ads (pi. no. 746). Autobiographical Stones, a semifictional series of
images and texts by the French photographer Sophie Calie, is another
visual exploration of a woman's life.
