Modern fine art is a democratic milieu, offering a space and a semi-mystical aura
to any loosely-defined perception presented by anyone anywhere who is
interested in that place and that aura. And what medium to better occupy that
space than photography, the most democratic and ubiquitous visual medium in
the world, perhaps ever? Indeed, photographic prints, matted and framed, are
quickly becoming a dominant sector of the art market, in both volume and gross
sales, while on the Internet, every photographer has a direct and immediate
international platform to display his or her creations. And yet why is it that such
an egalitarian medium, and such an open discourse and market for fine art, have
come together in such a way that fine art photography is so frequently dull and
This is like the classic gag about how, if sex movies are usually funny, French
movies are usually funny, and comedies are usually funny, why is it that French
sex comedies are never funny? Well, in both cases, the unfunny answer is this:
too much pressure. And in the case of photography, the key anxiety of the
medium is its own transparency, the sense of constantly being an undressed
emperor. The anxiety is narcissistic, the uncanny otherworldly familiarity of the
mirror. Fine art is so hard to distinguish from anything else these days, and fine
art photographs are so hard to sift out of the ocean of photography, that the
signifiers are, by necessity, highly rigid – a rigidity the market richly rewards. So,
what are these signifiers of “photography as art?”
I see fine art photography as hemmed in by three ‘P’s: painting, poverty, and
Pentax. From its inception, photography established itself as art by trying to
move into the space abandoned by painting. Examples? The great portaitists of
our time are Dawoud Bey, Ben Gest, Carrie Mae Weems, Melanie Schiff, and
Jason Salavon, descended from Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Frank. For landscapewe had the benighted Ansel Adams, later Edward Burtynsky and Richard
Misrach and now Andrew Fladeboe, John Opera, and Anja Behrens. In the arena
of still-life we have Brian Ulrich, Jessica Labatte, Jason Lazarus, and Yosuke Ito.
And of course the nudes—from Edward Weston on up to Roe Etheridge, Katy
Grannan, and Dean Sameshima. At the fin-de-siecle, painting was moving away
from these genres, and becoming preoccupied with realizing the perceptual
immediacy and social zeitgeist of the ascendant middle class (Impressionist
liberalism) and depicting mystical animal states of sex-induced delirium
(Symbolist conservatism). So, exemplifying the crowded tableaux of Manet, but a
century post-flaneur, we have Jeff Wall and Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Struth
and Andreas Gursky. As for semi-pornographic hallucination, a la Gustave
Moreau, we started off with Man Ray, and have ended up with Miwa Yanagi, and
Francesca Woodman, Anna Gaskell and Tierney Gearon. Painting went on to its
own tightrope walk on the thin line of cultural relevance, and photography
seemingly stuck around to lap up painting’s sloppy seconds. Painters who
indulge in sumptuous outdoor scenes, quirky still-life images, bustling interiors, or
intimate and revealing head shots (not to mention naked chicks turning into
tigers) get to be the slim economic hope of whatever struggling regional
metropolis is attempting urban renewal through monthly gallery walks.
Photographers who continue flogging those forms can wind up adorning the walls
of wealthy corporate offices and the pages of international art journals.
From Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, to
contemporary work by Paul Graham, Nan Goldin, Jesse Kotler, and Chris
Verene, there may be some mumbled apologia, but the assumption is that we
are ennobled by the images of people whose bondage and suffering ultimately
undergirds our liberty and comfort – and whose misery deeply fascinates us.
“Poverty” describes a voyeuristic urge to claim that the same authenticity that is
projected on to the anguish of a suffering face applies reciprocally to the image,
its maker, and its viewer. Of course images of injustice and struggle have been a
direct call to action, but this is usually not art, as such, but widely reproducedphotojournalism – fraught with ideological baggage all the same, but generally
the macro-politics of policy outweigh the micro-politics of viewership. But then
again, the ideological role of documentary photography’s nuanced and special
moments has been considerable in the soft borderless colonialism of the postwar
years. Whether appearing in Life, National Geographic, or Harper’s, this intrusive
intimacy and false familiarity needs to be challenged at the intuitive level at which
it operates, which has been happening in recent work by Alfredo Jaar and Renzo
Martens. For the most part, however, we are treated to an endless minstrel
parade of homeless veterans, junkie drag queens, sideshow refugees,
depressed suburban loners, trailer-park residents, and various other
contemporary mutants deemed undeserving of dignity.
And, last but perhaps most widespread, “Pentax” denotes the fetishization of
equipment, techniques, and software, everything from pinhole cameras and
photograms to clever Polaroid processes to high-end old-timey analog large-
format film cameras to elaborate exposures to messing with reality in Photoshop.
Not that these aren’t legitimate ways to make images, but the same kind of
elevated cultural status is rarely claimed on behalf of a ceramicist, glassblower,
low-rider enthusiast, etc., whose skilled and/or ingenious approach to their craft
results in a remarkable decorative object (jazz is an interesting exception, but I’ll
leave music out of it). Really, this is another aspect of the obsessive quality of
photography—the desire to see and possess results in compulsive behavior. And
yet, depicting recognizable things in unusual ways does not on its own, perhaps,
equal a conceptual vision.
Certainly the technological bravura inherited from photography’s early days has
been tempered by many critiques, notably that of Susan Sontag. Her 1977
treatise On Photography informed the political aspirations not only of
photography, but also those of all consumer-grade mimetic media that followed,
via the rhetorical device of the constructed image. This is the idea that
photographs are to be acknowledged as human creations, like anyrepresentation, and should not be treated as if they contained a truth value
beyond that of written language, paintings, etc. But, while the apparent paradigm
shift of postmodernism has led to more whimsical and elaborately staged work,
the rut has in some ways been dug yet deeper.
The thing is, truth was never as important an ingredient of fine art photography
as it has been made out to be. The issue was and continues to be transparency,
a tantalizing sense of access to virtual experiences, in which validity is not
singular and transcendent, but universal and uniformly distributed— almost like
the tools of photography. A founding obsession of photography and of modernity
generally is the obliteration of enigmas, like those hovering around sex and
death. Linda Williams; writing on the transparency of women’s bodies in
pornography, links the repetitive quality of adult cinema to sadism, an analysis
that completely makes sense for the immodest eye of the still camera, a phallus
that claims as property everything its aperture can encompass. The devices that
have exposed these enigmas have not made them less monotonous, but have
spurred our desires for them immeasurably- photography’s obsession with
endlessly repeating outdated tropes could be read as a sadistic fetishism of the
lens. A nauseous and unfettered allure characterizes the viewing of much
photography – take the work of Terry Richardson or Dash Snow (please). The
abject capacity of photos to reach outside of their boundaries has certainly been
suggested by Snow’s recent passing.
Photography is unique. It is not like other art, because there is no step away from
mimesis. The image is not made of something clearly artificial, like paint, clay, or
even collage. There is no embodiment. The print or screen quality is merely a
certain kind of window. And, unlike the analogous media of film and video, there
is no time, and thus no sense of the third party – the camera and the subjects
being part of a distinct event, whether explicitly contrived or not. What
photography then offers is a pure presence, a mirror that shows us what Lacan
contends is at stake when we develop in early childhood a sense of our ownobjective existence, by not just (mis)recognizing oneself in the mirror, but wanting
oneself. The visual aspect of the psyche gets its own name from Lacan– the
Imaginary– and it is, coincidentally, the area where our bottomless pit of desire
may be found. This is an area that photography has access to, without disturbing
either our sense of what we know (the Symbolic) and what we cannot know (the
Real). The Imaginary is part of language, but not precisely rational – it contains
the image of the chair we think of when we use the word ”chair,” but not the word
itself. This is why there is no question of truth in photography. This can make it
seem problematic, and apparently pointless – also a problem of fine art itself,
thus enforcing the aforementioned discipline of rigidity. And, as with Foucault’s
sciencia sexualis, the pleasure that comes with observation is a pleasure in
control, so we will never tire of dissecting and reconstructing the abyss of the
desired object in all her glorious minutiae.
To close, I would argue that two giants of feminist postmodern photography,
Catherine Opie and Cindy Sherman, only succeed artistically in a rather qualified
and provisional fashion—by ultimately helping to bring about a more qualified
and provisional viewing experience, a compromise with the post-metaphysical
world. The self-affirming visual flourish of Opie’s lesbian subjects makes their
autonomous alterity merely interesting, just another lifestyle choice. To quote
aesthetic philosopher (and celebrated killjoy) Theodor Adorno, “The more
(modern art) aims at projecting dignity, the more it becomes tangled up in
ideology. In order to exude dignity, modern art would have to puff itself up,
posing as something other than what it is. Its gravity, on the contrary, demands
that it dissociate itself from the pretensions of dignity (…).” Yet, in an equal but
opposite deconstructive collapse, the deliberate ugliness and artifice of
Sherman’s portraits ironically but clearly embroil the critiques themselves in a
conundrum of projected authenticity far more than the airbrushed femininity
Sherman is engaged in critiquing. For both Opie and Sherman, the market
rewards them based on their academic imprimatur but largely motivated by
zoological curiosity. At the same time, the social power of viewing and beingviewed on a mass scale that gives transparency its paranoid force, “surveillance,”
exposes and incinerates the private, special selfhood that these images attempt
humanistically to preserve.
Redemption for Opie and Sherman may come in the back door, through a link
between femininity, technology, and the pleasure of language. In a sense we are
infantilized by photography – we are seeing something like a waking dream, a
scene as both a memory and an object of desire, but not an event or a thing unto
itself. And, if there’s anything to that, the profusion of photography has perhaps
made us a lot less psychoanalytically grownup, but, by that logic, a lot less
repressed. The spread of capitalism and the spread of photography on a grand
scale has meant, on the scale of the community, the deterioration of
transcendent truths (such as patriarchy), and the spread of speaking and writing
– a key element of feminine sexual pleasure, jouissance, as described by Lacan.
Sherman and Opie signify the intention to bestow phallic power on themselves
and their subjects by using photographs as wordless statements, staged and
intentional semi-enunciations, sentences needing to be finished. The identities of
the subjects can perhaps, through force of will, occasionally merge slightly with
the viewer instead of melting before his eyes. Perhaps this is the best a
narcissistic medium can do.
by Bert Stabler*
