For a large print version please contact the engage office: [email protected]
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• The Photographic
• Issue 14 – Winter 2004
• 80 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
The Photographic Issue 14 – Winter 2004
Editorial
David Campany Thinking and Not Thinking Photography
Stephen Bull Documentary Photography in the Art Gallery
Lisa Le Feuvre Cindy Sherman Revisited: conference report
Helen James In and Out of the Silver Cube: photography, education and the Arts Council too
Susan Bright The Camera at Work
Val Williams Curating the Martin Parr Exhibition
Norma-Louise Thallon You Press the Button, I’ll do the Rest: a study of participatory photography projects with vulnerable groups
Tiffany Fairey interviewed by Janice McLaren
Reviews David Green (ed) Where is the Photograph? (Richard West)
David Campany Art and Photography (Stephen Bull)
engage journal subscription form
Editorial, The Photographic
Karen Raney
The title of this issue is ‘the photographic’. It is no accident that the floating, generalised, adjectival form of the word has become current. It suggests that we are dealing with neither a discrete kind of object (the photograph), nor a discrete subject area or medium (photography), but something more like a condition or a state of being. ‘The photographic’ implies that photo-based imagery has spread into virtually all corners of life, and has become, as David Campany puts it, the ‘background condition of our visual culture.’
In the context of art, many perplexities flow from this dispersed nature of the photographic. Is photography a specialist area that needs specialist curators, commentators and educators? How do we learn about and through the photographic? What is the difference between the older notion of ‘photography as an art’ and the newer one of ‘artists who use photography’? Many artists who use photography now draw more upon the skills, references and histories of painting, literature and cinema than upon those particular to photography; Jeff Wall’s large, digitally assembled tableaux are one example. What, then, is the current state of the dialogue between art and photography?
In the opening article, David Campany offers some valuable conceptual touchpoints. The space of art, he says, currently functions either as ‘a dissecting table’ for reflecting upon different forms of the photograph (the passport photo, tourist photo, newspaper photo, family album etc.) or as a ‘set’ for reworking these forms. This is because artists who use photography must ‘enter a dialogue either with the notion of the photo as visual evidence or with the culture of the moving image, or both.’ A good example of the latter is the American artist Cindy Sherman. In another piece, Lisa Le Feuvre reports on a conference which reappraised Sherman’s traffic with the cultural forms over which photography presides: fashion, cosmetics, the portrait, and the conventions and cliches of the cinema.
But the word which hovers most over current discussions is ‘documentary’. Recent exhibitions in the UK have been full of documentary-like photographs which trade on the notion of the photo as visual evidence. Stephen Bull sketches out a useful history of documentary photography, and how it was shaped as a category. When photos are of poor or war-torn parts of the world, or of privation in prisons or mental hospitals, they invoke journalism and its assumptions: that the camera is a witnessing ‘eye’, that images of victims will lead to social reform. Bull reflects upon what happens when such images enter the spaces and discourses of fine art. One consequence is that a different kind of attention is mobilised for the images than when they are found in, say, a magazine. Susan Sontag has famously written about the ‘aestheticising’ power of all photographs - their capacity to turn any subject into a work of art. When photographs are placed in a gallery, this capacity is even more fully realised as ideas of authorship, expression, personal interpretation, and contemplation inevitably swing into play.
The current interest in documentary-like work can be set against the ideological practices of the 1970s and 80s when artists were casting doubt on the authority of the photograph as visual evidence, as a trace of the ‘real’. Artists like Victor Burgin and Barbara Kruger used photos to reflect upon sexual politics. Obviously fabricated, often collaged with words, such photoworks referred, not to the material world grasped by the eyes, but to invisible structures - ideologies embedded in the psyche. The status of a photograph as fact was either called into question or inverted. The current documentary mode trades more directly again with the idea of the photograph as a trace of the real. But what is being documented may seem, in a different way, to cast doubt on the ability of photography to reveal truth. Instead of action shots of decisive moments of war, or ‘outrage’ shots of victims, we have the unspectacular, evocative images of photographers like Paul Seawright or Simon Norfolk. Here, in what Campany has referred to as ‘late photographs’, the photographer takes on a kind of undertaker’s role, reporting not on an event, but its aftermath. The resulting images feel tentative, subjective, open to interpretation.
Curatorial presentation too shapes the way documentary photography is experienced. Val Williams writes about curating the Martin Parr exhibition at the Barbican Gallery as a process akin to staging a theatrical production, with a designer, a ‘colour palette’ and special lighting effects. For each room, the walls and carpets were carefully chosen to resonate with the photographs shown there. Three special installations were built: a 1970s sitting room complete with TV, armchair, curtains, and plaster flying ducks; a reading room set up like a gentleman’s study which doubled as a browsing area for visitors; and a studio in which visitors could have their portrait taken. These decisions were wholly in keeping with the nature of Parr’s work, and provided a lively, ‘narrative’ way of understanding it. And, as Williams points out curators are more aware of audiences than ever before. The need to keep old audiences and find new ones, in order to justify the expense of a big exhibition, means that visitors have to be seduced and entertained. In the age of the spectacle, curators have to tread a line ‘between over-presentation and orthodox traditionalism.’
It is interesting that many of the contributors to this issue work freelance rather than being attached to one institution, and many refer to themselves as curators, as well as practitioners, educators, writers. Perhaps the role of photo- commentator now is as floating and unfixed as the nature of ‘the photographic’ itself, and perhaps curating photography is a way of consolidating new identities and purposes for it.
Helen James compares the educational approaches of some photo-based galleries in the UK, and considers the complex relationship of public funding to photography’s changes in fortune. There is a distinction to be made between education programmes which aim to analyse photography, and those which use photography as a learning tool. Within these, there are differences in emphasis. London’s National Portrait Gallery favours skill-sharing through practitioner’s testimonies, while The Photographer’s Gallery leans toward cultural analysis. The Tate Modern has been using a theme-based approach; Site Gallery and Ffotogallery use photography and digital techniques as a tool to understand culture and the place of photography within it. Increasingly in gallery education, it seems that the photographic specialist is not distinguished from other kinds of artists or educators. James observes that at present there is an invigorating overlap of roles in the photography arena, as ‘curators educate and educators curate.’
Photography is the medium of popular culture, non-art, the everyday. Photography is everywhere and belongs to everyone. Hence the frequent reference, particularly by educators working with non-artists, to its ‘familiarity’ and ‘accessibility’. In contrast to other kinds of images, photographs are said to be unthreatening, liberating, easy to relate to. Susan Bright describes how a public programme was devised to accompany Tate Modern’s Cruel and Tender show. Here it seems that the familiarity of photographs dovetailed with the evocativeness of the ‘work’ theme to produce a varied programme which drew upon both ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ expertise.
However, the very familiarity of photography can also lead to trouble. Norma- Lousie Thallon describes two projects in Glasgow, one with homeless people and the other with elderly hospital patients. Her experience runs against the common perception that photography is an easy medium to use with vulnerable people. Thallon found that the notion of a photograph as an accurate depiction of reality - as visual evidence - led to many confusions and difficulties. Questions arose as to the authorship of the work when the participants required a great deal of help in making it. There was uncertainty about the fate and ownership of the images after the workshops were over. And misunderstandings arose as the photographs were moved from private home or hospital settings to the public space of the gallery, where different expectations came into play.
The interview with Tiffany Fairey of PhotoVoice, also suggests the sensitivity of photography to context. She describes a project with young girls in Kabul who were encouraged to take their own pictures. The work was then exhibited and sold, both in Afghanistan and London. How were photographs taken by girls in Kabul being read by buyers in London? PhotoVoice considers the explanations written by the participants to be as important as the photographs, perhaps to do the job of ‘anchoring’ as the images move from one setting to another. To Fairey, the results of giving to people (who might normally be on the other side of the documenting camera) the means to speak and represent themselves, overrides the conundrums of audience. ‘I teach them how to use a camera,’ she says, ‘and they teach me how they see and understand the world.’
David Campany points out that photography has had its most profound effect on art in its silent, mediating role - providing a record of art made through other means. Virtually every work of art can be, and sooner or later will be, offered up for our inspection in photographic form. ‘The tension’ he writes ‘between the ambitions of self-conscious art photography and the artless photography of art can never be entirely reconciled.’
In planning this volume, we considered upping the quality of the images with better paper or reproduction methods. In the end it was decided that the aim was not to let photographs ‘speak for themselves’, but rather to reflect on the nature of the photographic. For this, one can illustrate a photograph in the way one illustrates a painting, performance or sculpture. In a sense it was a decision to use photography in its mediating role, to illustrate itself.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email [email protected]
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• The Photographic
• Issue 14 – Winter 2004
• 80 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
The Photographic Issue 14 – Winter 2004
Editorial
David Campany Thinking and Not Thinking Photography
Stephen Bull Documentary Photography in the Art Gallery
Lisa Le Feuvre Cindy Sherman Revisited: conference report
Helen James In and Out of the Silver Cube: photography, education and the Arts Council too
Susan Bright The Camera at Work
Val Williams Curating the Martin Parr Exhibition
Norma-Louise Thallon You Press the Button, I’ll do the Rest: a study of participatory photography projects with vulnerable groups
Tiffany Fairey interviewed by Janice McLaren
Reviews David Green (ed) Where is the Photograph? (Richard West)
David Campany Art and Photography (Stephen Bull)
engage journal subscription form
Editorial, The Photographic
Karen Raney
The title of this issue is ‘the photographic’. It is no accident that the floating, generalised, adjectival form of the word has become current. It suggests that we are dealing with neither a discrete kind of object (the photograph), nor a discrete subject area or medium (photography), but something more like a condition or a state of being. ‘The photographic’ implies that photo-based imagery has spread into virtually all corners of life, and has become, as David Campany puts it, the ‘background condition of our visual culture.’
In the context of art, many perplexities flow from this dispersed nature of the photographic. Is photography a specialist area that needs specialist curators, commentators and educators? How do we learn about and through the photographic? What is the difference between the older notion of ‘photography as an art’ and the newer one of ‘artists who use photography’? Many artists who use photography now draw more upon the skills, references and histories of painting, literature and cinema than upon those particular to photography; Jeff Wall’s large, digitally assembled tableaux are one example. What, then, is the current state of the dialogue between art and photography?
In the opening article, David Campany offers some valuable conceptual touchpoints. The space of art, he says, currently functions either as ‘a dissecting table’ for reflecting upon different forms of the photograph (the passport photo, tourist photo, newspaper photo, family album etc.) or as a ‘set’ for reworking these forms. This is because artists who use photography must ‘enter a dialogue either with the notion of the photo as visual evidence or with the culture of the moving image, or both.’ A good example of the latter is the American artist Cindy Sherman. In another piece, Lisa Le Feuvre reports on a conference which reappraised Sherman’s traffic with the cultural forms over which photography presides: fashion, cosmetics, the portrait, and the conventions and cliches of the cinema.
But the word which hovers most over current discussions is ‘documentary’. Recent exhibitions in the UK have been full of documentary-like photographs which trade on the notion of the photo as visual evidence. Stephen Bull sketches out a useful history of documentary photography, and how it was shaped as a category. When photos are of poor or war-torn parts of the world, or of privation in prisons or mental hospitals, they invoke journalism and its assumptions: that the camera is a witnessing ‘eye’, that images of victims will lead to social reform. Bull reflects upon what happens when such images enter the spaces and discourses of fine art. One consequence is that a different kind of attention is mobilised for the images than when they are found in, say, a magazine. Susan Sontag has famously written about the ‘aestheticising’ power of all photographs - their capacity to turn any subject into a work of art. When photographs are placed in a gallery, this capacity is even more fully realised as ideas of authorship, expression, personal interpretation, and contemplation inevitably swing into play.
The current interest in documentary-like work can be set against the ideological practices of the 1970s and 80s when artists were casting doubt on the authority of the photograph as visual evidence, as a trace of the ‘real’. Artists like Victor Burgin and Barbara Kruger used photos to reflect upon sexual politics. Obviously fabricated, often collaged with words, such photoworks referred, not to the material world grasped by the eyes, but to invisible structures - ideologies embedded in the psyche. The status of a photograph as fact was either called into question or inverted. The current documentary mode trades more directly again with the idea of the photograph as a trace of the real. But what is being documented may seem, in a different way, to cast doubt on the ability of photography to reveal truth. Instead of action shots of decisive moments of war, or ‘outrage’ shots of victims, we have the unspectacular, evocative images of photographers like Paul Seawright or Simon Norfolk. Here, in what Campany has referred to as ‘late photographs’, the photographer takes on a kind of undertaker’s role, reporting not on an event, but its aftermath. The resulting images feel tentative, subjective, open to interpretation.
Curatorial presentation too shapes the way documentary photography is experienced. Val Williams writes about curating the Martin Parr exhibition at the Barbican Gallery as a process akin to staging a theatrical production, with a designer, a ‘colour palette’ and special lighting effects. For each room, the walls and carpets were carefully chosen to resonate with the photographs shown there. Three special installations were built: a 1970s sitting room complete with TV, armchair, curtains, and plaster flying ducks; a reading room set up like a gentleman’s study which doubled as a browsing area for visitors; and a studio in which visitors could have their portrait taken. These decisions were wholly in keeping with the nature of Parr’s work, and provided a lively, ‘narrative’ way of understanding it. And, as Williams points out curators are more aware of audiences than ever before. The need to keep old audiences and find new ones, in order to justify the expense of a big exhibition, means that visitors have to be seduced and entertained. In the age of the spectacle, curators have to tread a line ‘between over-presentation and orthodox traditionalism.’
It is interesting that many of the contributors to this issue work freelance rather than being attached to one institution, and many refer to themselves as curators, as well as practitioners, educators, writers. Perhaps the role of photo- commentator now is as floating and unfixed as the nature of ‘the photographic’ itself, and perhaps curating photography is a way of consolidating new identities and purposes for it.
Helen James compares the educational approaches of some photo-based galleries in the UK, and considers the complex relationship of public funding to photography’s changes in fortune. There is a distinction to be made between education programmes which aim to analyse photography, and those which use photography as a learning tool. Within these, there are differences in emphasis. London’s National Portrait Gallery favours skill-sharing through practitioner’s testimonies, while The Photographer’s Gallery leans toward cultural analysis. The Tate Modern has been using a theme-based approach; Site Gallery and Ffotogallery use photography and digital techniques as a tool to understand culture and the place of photography within it. Increasingly in gallery education, it seems that the photographic specialist is not distinguished from other kinds of artists or educators. James observes that at present there is an invigorating overlap of roles in the photography arena, as ‘curators educate and educators curate.’
Photography is the medium of popular culture, non-art, the everyday. Photography is everywhere and belongs to everyone. Hence the frequent reference, particularly by educators working with non-artists, to its ‘familiarity’ and ‘accessibility’. In contrast to other kinds of images, photographs are said to be unthreatening, liberating, easy to relate to. Susan Bright describes how a public programme was devised to accompany Tate Modern’s Cruel and Tender show. Here it seems that the familiarity of photographs dovetailed with the evocativeness of the ‘work’ theme to produce a varied programme which drew upon both ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ expertise.
However, the very familiarity of photography can also lead to trouble. Norma- Lousie Thallon describes two projects in Glasgow, one with homeless people and the other with elderly hospital patients. Her experience runs against the common perception that photography is an easy medium to use with vulnerable people. Thallon found that the notion of a photograph as an accurate depiction of reality - as visual evidence - led to many confusions and difficulties. Questions arose as to the authorship of the work when the participants required a great deal of help in making it. There was uncertainty about the fate and ownership of the images after the workshops were over. And misunderstandings arose as the photographs were moved from private home or hospital settings to the public space of the gallery, where different expectations came into play.
The interview with Tiffany Fairey of PhotoVoice, also suggests the sensitivity of photography to context. She describes a project with young girls in Kabul who were encouraged to take their own pictures. The work was then exhibited and sold, both in Afghanistan and London. How were photographs taken by girls in Kabul being read by buyers in London? PhotoVoice considers the explanations written by the participants to be as important as the photographs, perhaps to do the job of ‘anchoring’ as the images move from one setting to another. To Fairey, the results of giving to people (who might normally be on the other side of the documenting camera) the means to speak and represent themselves, overrides the conundrums of audience. ‘I teach them how to use a camera,’ she says, ‘and they teach me how they see and understand the world.’
David Campany points out that photography has had its most profound effect on art in its silent, mediating role - providing a record of art made through other means. Virtually every work of art can be, and sooner or later will be, offered up for our inspection in photographic form. ‘The tension’ he writes ‘between the ambitions of self-conscious art photography and the artless photography of art can never be entirely reconciled.’
In planning this volume, we considered upping the quality of the images with better paper or reproduction methods. In the end it was decided that the aim was not to let photographs ‘speak for themselves’, but rather to reflect on the nature of the photographic. For this, one can illustrate a photograph in the way one illustrates a painting, performance or sculpture. In a sense it was a decision to use photography in its mediating role, to illustrate itself.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
engage is a registered not-for-profit educational association which promotes access to and understanding of the visual arts through gallery education and cultural mediation nationally and internationally.
engage has a membership of over 1000 worldwide, including galleries, arts centres, museums, artists studios, artists, curators, teachers, students as well as gallery education and cultural mediation staff and freelancers. engage works in three key areas: action-research (including the Collect & Share lifelong learning network in Europe – see www.collectandshare.eu.com), professional development, advocacy (see www.engage.org).
engage is building an international online case study database, and a resource and library of relevant reports, evaluations, and research. engage welcomes offers of material to make available to the sector through these channels.
To enquire about copyright, to subscribe to the engage journal or join engage, or to offer material for the database or website, please email [email protected]
engage is grateful to the Arts Councils of England, Scotland and Wales, to the Depts of Culture and Education in England, to the British Council and the European Commission, and to the Esmee Fairbairn and Baring Foundations for ongoing support.