Correspondencias – FotoColectania
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Well, what is
PHOTOGRAPHY? WHEN
ABOUT
Abigail Solomon-Godeau Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
WHERE
Urs Stahel Hester Keijser
CORRESPONDENCE
APRIL | MAY 2016
JUNE | JULY 2016
Correspondence is an online project that aims to reflect upon the
relevance that photography has had in contemporary society and the
DIALOGUE BETWEEN ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU ÆSA SIGURJÓNSDÓTTIR
visual culture of our times. The program will be extended
throughout the year following three
conversations that will be published weekly. Read more
APRIL | MAY 2016
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
In collaboration with
7 April, 2016 CONTRIBUTORS
to Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
“IT IS AS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHEN PHOTOGRAPHY BEGAN AS IT IS TO KNOW
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Æsa
WHEN OUR FIRST ANCESTORS OPENED THEIR EYES" Introduction to our blog: The
Sigurjónsdóttir, Urs Stahel, Hester
topic we will be discussi...read more
Keijser, Joan Fontcuberta, Geo"rey Batchen. Read more
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
14 April, 2016
to Abigail Solomon-Godeau
FOLLOW US
“The last few decades have seen a reinvigorated and widespread fascination
with “firsts” in the history of the medium” Dear Abigail, You are throwing many
#CorrespondenceFotoColectania
ball...read more
#WellWhatIsPhotography @FBSabadell
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
21 April, 2016
to Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
SUBSCRIBE
Dear Æsa, Apropos of Vivian Maier, it’s funny that you mention this newly
minted photographic “genius” as an instance of marketing, and, as you remark, if
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the market...read more
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
SUBSCRIBE
28 April, 2016
to Abigail Solomon-Godeau Lev Manovich: "The digital image annihilates photography while solidifying,
FIND US ON
glorifying and immortalizing the photographic" Dear Abigail, [caption id="attachment_...read more
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Correspondencias – FotoColectania
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to Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir Dear Aesa, The time frame I am considering here is quite recent, the past ten
years or so, when this newly minted discipline - the philosophy of photography has been inst...read more
12 May, 2016
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
to Abigail Solomon-Godeau Dear Abigail, It seems we should now raise the question regarding when
feminism intersected with the history of photography and art production. Especially now, given that t...read more
19 May, 2016
to "Wolfgang Ernst: At the turn of the millennium, the archive transforms the questions of
memory, recollection, and the preservation of traces into a cultural obsession" &n...read more
26 May, 2016
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
to Abigail Solomon-Godeau
“THE LAST WHEN IS THE QUESTION OF WHEN PHOTOGRAPHY BECAME A GHOST MEDIUM THAT HAUNTS US.” Dear Abigail, Indeed, as you discuss in your latest blog, artists use the archive (in still
photography, video and film) in multifaceted ways, and the active relationship
between photography and the archive has been a recurrent theme in critical art practices (and studies) of the medium. For many of these ‘archival’ artists,
photography is invaluable as a raw material because of its complex indexical status and its fictional relationship to various political and historical realities.
You mention Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Haacke and others, but I would like to enumarte other artists who have worked with photographs as source material;
artists such as Joachim Schmid, Christian Boltanski, Anna Artaker, Cheryl Dunye, Lorna Simpson, and Walid Raad, to name but a few that I have followed in recent years. These artists have been using found photography or archival
footage to create critical fictional narratives or, alternatively, employing press and propaganda photography in their work to focus on specific historical or
geo-political contexts. I am thinking here of the Lithuanian artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas’ multimedia installation DRUZBA (Friendship]. This is an ongoing research project based on texts, interviews, and photographs. It is
constructed as a “reading device [for] a psycho-geography of the oil network (Druzba – the biggest oil pipeline built by Soviets)” in order to study the
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Correspondencias – FotoColectania
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Christian Boltanski, “Menschlich”
“DIGITAL ARCHIVES, ONCE ONLINE, ARE NOT SEPARATED FROM THE ‘PRESENT’ ANY MORE (WOLFGANG ERNST)” You also suggest that “…this ‘archival turn’ needs be considered in relation to
the informational economy spawned by the Internet, including the digitization of archives, the availability of limitless images online and the new search
engines that facilitate research, all of which have obviously been propitious for
archival-based artistic practices”. Wolfgang Ernst, whom you also cite, described this transformation of the archive, its consequences and new potential in an
interview with Geert Lovink: “digital archives, once online, are not separated
from the ‘present’ any more. In a way, of course, this means the disappearance
of the emphatic notion of the ‘archive’; it dissolves into electronic circuits, data flow.”[1] Indeed, the creation and/or opening up of closed or silenced archives, such as several US governmental archives (via legal processes made possible
through the Freedom of Information Act), the assembling of Holocaust archives, the digitalization of the Cambodian genocide photographic archives or the
archives belonging to the Stasi Records Agency, has accelerated the process of mediated memory transmitted through photographs, television, and films – as well as in many art works, some of which we have already mentioned.
We might return here to the “paradoxical logic” identified by Lev Manovich,
whereby digital technology e"ectively supplants the physical archive, yet, in the process, contrives to solidify, glorify and immortalize the photographic: “The digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and
patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture – and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger.” Several artists have captured the powerful
e"ect of the discontinuous, ruptured nature of the still and moving archive in their works such as, for example, Johan Grimonprez’s films Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Double Take and, of course, Christian Marclay’s epic 24-hour work, The
Clock.
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Johan Grimonprez : dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y - part01
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Johan Grimonprez : Double Take - part01
Christian Marclay The Clock 10h15 Nuit Blanche ...
So, on the one hand, there are critical and deconstructive uses of institutional
and vernacular photographic archives encouraged by the cultural digitalization of historic material; while, on the other hand, there is the monstrous (partly
invisible) ongoing digital archive constructed by amateurs online through social media. And then there are the myriad of interventions and use of these unlimited image and textual materials by artists. The exhibition
“Beastly/Tierisch” at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2015), featured an innovative approach towards this experimental remix of amateur and artist digital
production by means of posing the question: “How is animality reconfigured today through everyday photographic practice?”
The importance of this exhibition lies in how it approached digital culture by
demonstrating not only how technology transforms photographic practices, but
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and di"usion, including
the e"ect on displays in the museum space.
Analogue metaphors are
embedded in the museum in a similar way, as they
are in all camera devices and software, such as
Instagram, iMovie and
Photoshop. The “digital
paradox” has only recently
impacted on museum practices by blurring exhibition codes with such technologies as the projector, the screen and the ink-jet printer.
The exhibition, “Pandora’s Box”, curated by the Dutch conceptual artist, Jan Dibbets, and currently on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, raises
similar issues that focus on the impact of software and digital reproducibility of photography. Dibbets aims to break down postmodern historical photographic discourses and to eliminate the ‘cult value’ of the photographic print, not only
by mixing and juxtaposing well-known vintage prints (Solar E"ect in the Clouds – Ocean by Gustave Le Gray) paired with brand new ink-jet prints, but also by blurring the institutional di"erence between scientific photography,
documentation and art. Exhibited together, with little or no information about the purpose or category of any particular image, the spectator will not know what kind of image he or she is looking at.
“IT IS THE SCIENTIFICALLY ORIENTED PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE 19 TH CENTURY WHO EMERGE HERE AS THE TRUE VISIONARIES IN EXPERIMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY (JAN DIBBETS)” Dibbets’ exhibition is a non-linear, yet still chronological, survey taking Vilém Flusser’s theories of the apparatus as its conceptual point of departure.
Coincidently, it provides images that are representative of the whens we have been discussing here in our blogs: the origins of photography; the discursive
meanings of the photograph; tensions and shifts between photography as art,
as documentation or as science; photography and conceptualism; photography and the archive; and last but not least, questions of digitalization in post-photography.
According to Dibbets, the most significant when in experimental photography had already taken place shortly after the invention of photography: “It is the
scientifically oriented photographers of the 19th century who emerge here as
the true visionaries, paving the way for entire output of the 20th century.” By
juxtaposing the fragile, delicate but entirely scientific cyanotypes made by Anna Atkins (1799–1871) in her encyclopaedic survey of British algae, with lush
computer 3D alumide negative prints of plants made by Spiros Hadjidjanos (Scabiosa Columbaria) and with, for example, Thomas Ru"’s large format,
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insisting on scale and counterpointing the infinitely large in Ru"’s images and the infinitely small represented in the 19th century scientific images of Andreas Ritter von Ettingshausen and Auguste Adolphe Bertsch, Dibbets draws the spectator into a visual pattern of “scientific imagination”. He considers the
photographic experiments undertaken by natural scientists in the 19th century as a new paradigm that provided inspiration for avant-garde artists from the
beginning of the 20th century (e.g. Man Ray and Ródchenko, both included in the exhibition). Dibbets’ approach refers directly and indirectly to Richard
Feynman’s remarks in his Lectures on Physics of the early 1960s. In a chapter
titled “Scientific Imagination”, Feynman rhetorically asked what one would see if one were able to see electric and magnetic fields: “What do I actually see? What are the demands of scientific imagination? Is it any di"erent from trying to imagine that the room is full of invisible angels? No, it is not like imagining
invisible angels. It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels.”
Anna Atkins, “Cyanotypes of British Algae (1843)”
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Thomas Ru", “Substrat 26 II (2005)”
The exhibition “Pandora’s Box” also demonstrates how digital culture has
transformed the curatorial relationship to photography as such, and how digital practices undermine the di"erentiation of ‘image’, ‘object’ and ‘art-piece’, both on or o" the screen. Thomas Ru", Wade Guyton and Spiros Hadjidjanos (all included in the exhibition), participate in this extreme hybridisation of the
image. Still, “What happens”, asks Lev Manovich “to the idea of a ‘medium’ after
previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about di"erent mediums at all? Or do we now find ourselves in a new brave world of one single monomedium, or metamedium?”[2]
The last when – (we might not have space to answer) – is the question of when photography became a ghost medium that haunts us. In fact, Abigail, you have already addressed this issue of ‘haunting’ in a few essays, but it seems that the most contemporary manifestations of art based on photographic media relate to the ‘haunting’ of the brave new digital world by the still potent e"ects of
analogue technologies.[3] This is the medium that, for everyone born before the
1980s signified ‘photography’ as such, and its transformation into a form with no necessary link to its referent is one the consequences of which are only just beginning to be assimilated and analyzed.
[1] Archive Rumblings. Interview with Wolfgang Ernst by Geert Lovink (2003). Available on http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302 /msg00132.html
[2] Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 4 [3] Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Ghosts of Documentary”, Heterotopien
Perspektiven der intermedialen Ästhetik, Nadja Elia-Borer, Constanze Schellow, Nina Schimmel, Bettina Wodianka (eds.), Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013, pp. 303-326
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Abigail Solomon-Godeau
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Abigail Solomon-Godeau is Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara and now lives and works in Paris. She is the author of Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic Histories, Institutions and Practic...read more
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir is Associate Professor at the University of Iceland. She is curator of numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and photography. She is the author of photographic texts such as: Photographes français en Islande 1845-1900 (20...read more
...read more
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Join the discussion… Susan Muska
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2 months ago
Here's my question to Abigail: How does fine art overlap popular and journalistic photos, incorporating the strongest compositions and forms produced by photojournalists 1△
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