Susan Sontag & Insincere Photography

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those in situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841 was the calotype: from kalos, beautiful.) No body exclaims, "Isn't that ugly! I must take a photograph of it." Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: "I find that ugly thing . . . beautiful." - Susan Sontag (opening paragraph from the chapter The Heroism of Vision in the book On Photography.

The suggestion that a photograph's content is entirely mediated by the photographer's own perception of beauty is a particularly bold statement but one to which it becomes difficult to disagree with. However, the decision process a photographer follows can present problems in terms of sincerity. Even when a photographer finds an image worthy enough of a section of film or memory space on a card they want it to be perfect. This can therefore have an effect on the eventual perception of the image, presented in a medium recognised to be a true-to-the-eye form.

The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings or drawings are. - Susan Sontag (Taken from the chapter In Plato's Cave from the book On Photography.)

This quote provides the thought that within modernist photography and within the case of Walker Evans etc, in terms of objectivity, the images taken with the intention of documenting the heartache of the great depression have successfully done so. However, in learning that each image was almost staged in order to present such heartache, it hinders the viewer's subjective and emotive response and therefore possibly dampens the integrity of the image somewhat: It's initial purpose is compromised.

Although the way in which the image is captured may be in some way false, it asks the modernist question of "Do photographs need to be contextualised and interpreted in order for them to have an effect?" My immediate response would be "No". Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation elaborates upon this suggestion. The idea that a photograph or piece of art can be simply seen as just an image, disregarding the usual conventions is an interesting and broad suggestion. One to which i can see both an agreement and disagreement for. Removing all context and the interpretation by artists and critics alike would definitely give people more to talk about rather than discuss the theories of others but at the same time i feel creating a base of ideology allows  a starting point from which to build on. Regardless of which the majority of people prefer, neither point of view remove any interest from the art industry and only act to create interesting controversy . However i do feel removal of context and interpretation is an ideology that defines the modernist movement and modernist photography.

Roland Barthes' Latin

After reading an excerpt from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, I realise it presents numerous challenging ideas. Firstly, the obviously bereft mindset of Barthes and his apathetic approach to the majority of photography. I do believe, however, that Barthes tries to find a point of interest within all photographs and simply has a particularly selective taste. This taste seems to be drawn to images with a distinct sense of realism and sadness. However, the sadness is not always present within the images themselves but the 'punctum' within the context.

For example, he explains how photographs of the past present the 'punctum' of unavoidable death: the death of the subjects that has already occurred and therefore we are looking back with nostalgic sentimentality but with an unnatural feeling of omniscience. This idea suggests we can never approach a photo without feeling this contrast in emotion, well, not those who have read the same excerpt from Camera Lucida anyway. For the rest of the population, they recognise a certain over-shaddowing feeling of a tainted memory but this to them is inexpressible and the thought inevitably passes them by.

     

This apathy towards photography, Barthes describes in a singular latin word: studium. Studium is the general subjective response a photograph without any specialised or previously learned contextual knowledge (in terms of photography). It allows someone to like, dislike or be immersed in a photograph without any in-depth knowledge as to the context: political, religious and ethical references etc

Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. - Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida)

A particular modernist sensibility is in fact that the image and aesthetics are presented and contemplated before the context (if the context is even necessary). This presents the idea that modernism conforms to Barthes theory of 'studium' at least. As for 'punctum', the stark realism of modernist photography often lends itself to the presentation of particularly emotive subject matter. And so the connection begins to unfold. However, the photographs Barthes talks of in the excerpt are by the Dutch reporter Koen Wessing and are documentary, un-staged images. This, therefore, sets it apart from Walker Evans' portraits.

A photograph taken from Koen Wessing's Nicaragua 1979 selection; one of the photographs Barthes talks about when explaining his theory of studium and punctum.

This photograph is them contrasted when compared to Walker Evans' work surrounding the great depression as although they are both of similarly distressing circumstances, the process hinders the context and gives a certain feeling of insincerity.

One of Walker Evans' photographs of The Great Depression

Although their seemingly candid nature, in order to capture the appropriate emotional distress and 'realism' Walker Evans took numerous shots. This idea of 'setting up' a shot asks questions about the objectivity and subjectivity within modernism which is viewed almost with a kind of worthiness in comparison to post-modernism and its well documented irony and subjectivity.

Composition Exploration - Lewis Baltz

In order to find out just why Lewis Baltz’s photographs worked so well in terms of composition I decided to analyze a single photograph and deconstruct its composition. Firstly I wanted to look at how the horizontal lines were arranged so I used a light box, placed another piece of paper over the top, drew across all the horizontal lines then used this new composition to create a monochrome painting. For the second piece, I wanted to understand how the boxes worked within the composition in terms of positioning and alignment. So for this I decided to print off a copy of the original and paint the whole thing black, leaving only the boxes. By only using black and white to create the painting, it retained the intentional minimalist, stark and geometric presentation of the original photograph.

Both exercises allowed me to physically see clearly the composition and in turn showed that, regardless of content, the composition Lewis Baltz has created would work on its own but coupled with the content it allows for a very effective and bold piece of art. Also, the composition clearly presents an indefinite sense of modernism with the almost grid-like structure, which is something I intend to look for.

Public Places, Berkeley, 1972

As you can see from the image, the horizontal composition is very formal and uniform. Compositional balance is something that is clearly evident within this piece and is generally a common focus in most modernist work.

New Topographics article from The Guardian

It is 35 years since the term "new topographics" was coined by William Jenkins, curator of a group show of American landscape photography held at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal.

"What I remember most clearly was that nobody liked it," Frank Gohlke, one of the participating photographers told the LA Times when the exhibition was restaged last year at the LA County Museum of Art. "I think it wouldn't be too strong to say that it was a vigorously hated show."

The exhibition's clunky subtitle was "Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape", which gave some clue as to the deeper unifying theme. What Jenkins had identified in the work of US photographers such as Gohlke, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz and Nicholas Nixon was an interest in the created landscapes of 70s urban America. Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental. In one way, they were photographing against the tradition of nature photography that the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston had created.

Adams, who is now perhaps the most well-known chronicler of America's disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity. Baltz made stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County. Nixon concentrated on innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.

Coolly architectural ... a detail of Hilla Becher's series of Pennsylvania pit head photographs (1974)

Jenkins also included American work by Bernd and Hilla Becher in the show. The Bechers' stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.

Only one photographer, Shore, shot in colour. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in his photographs of anonymous intersections and streets. Shore was influenced by Ed Ruscha, the conceptualist of Californian cool, who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist's books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The show also nodded obliquely at the later work of Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop fronts.

Evans's images now carry the romantic undertow of an almost vanished America. The work of the photographers in the New Topographics exhibition, now collected in an austerely beautiful book of the same name by Steidl, still looks, for the most part, contemporary – and still seems troubling in its matter-of-factness, its almost dull reflection of the uniform and banal. A friend of mine who works in publishing dismissed the book outright, saying: "If I were to commission a bunch of authors to write essays on boredom, I would not expect the result to be a bunch of boring essays. Nor would I give it a pretentious postmodern title." Outside the rarefied world of art photography, many would, I suspect, agree.

The influence of the New Topographics movement, however, has been pervasive. You can detect it in the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham and Candida Höfer. Indeed, Donovan Wylie's clinical approach to photographing the empty Maze prison in Northern Ireland, currently shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse prize, could easily have been a contemporary addendum to the Steidl book.

The New Topograhics exhibition in 1975 was not just the moment when the apparently banal became accepted as a legitimate photographic subject, but when a certain strand of theoretically driven photography began to permeate the wider contemporary art world. Looking back, one can see how these images of the "man-altered landscape" carried a political message and reflected, unconsciously or otherwise, the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development and the spread of cities.

Back then, Jenkins seemed to have anticipated what the public reaction to the show would be. University students were on hand at George Eastman House to interview visitors for their reactions, most of which were negative or dismissive. One man was surprised to find his own truck in one of Adams's photographs, and had this to say: "At first they're really stark nothing, but then you really look at them and it's just the way things are. This is interesting, it really is."

This piece was taken from an article written on The Guardian's website by Sean O'Hagan and I feel particularly outlines the origin of the 'new topographic' movement, it's influences and it's pioneers. It also explains the initial reaction towards the movement, which I find to be interesting but somewhat expected as with any frighteningly bold ideoligical movement.

Glossary

Quotidian: Of everyday occurrence, especially when considered mundane.

Ideology: The ideas and manner of thinking within a group or an indevidual.

Aesthetics: A set of principals concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially within art.

Conventional: Something that is generally acceptable with a disregard for indeviduallity and sincerety.

Photographs of a man-altered landscape: The subtitle of the 1977 exhibition held at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York in which William Jenkins first coined the term 'New topographics' to describe the new modernist movement.

Romanticisation: To portray something in a romantic manner and add sentimental value

Brutal landscapes: A term often used to describe a harsh-looking landscape, one which is depicted in a more realist style in comparison to the typically romantic style.

Realism: A more bare, 'warts and all' and sometimes pessimistic approach to the depiction of something.

Punctum: A latin word used by Roland Barthes to describe a 'sharp prick' within a photograph that is unavoidably interesting:
1. A small, distinct point.
2. The opening of a tear duct

Bernd & Hilla Becher and Daniel Slater



Bernd & Hilla Becher - Wassertürme (Water Towers)

After looking at the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher and their modernist presentation of industrial aesthetics, compositional balance and a very bold yet simplistic photographic style are key features made obvious throughout their work. This style of photography has influenced many artists from the students of Bernd Becher to more contemporary artists all over the world. Some students of Bernd who have visibly taken inspiration include the likes of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer and Elger Esser, consequently, I intend to research further these iconic artists and their indevidual yet similarly inspired work.

     The idea of compositional balance and bold simplicity can also be found within the work of Daniel Slater, a contemporary photographer and Goldsmiths graduate:

Joinery Shop Composition No. IV
Daniel Slater

Joinery Shop Compositions
Daniel Slater

This piece is very much a focus on such ideologies. Both the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher and Daniel Slater present buildings and building-like structures in physically and metaphorically 2D manners and question the structure's purpose.

     In conclusion i feel both pieces have indefinite modernist/postmodern sensibilities. I definitely enjoy the aesthetics of both and wish to take inspiration from their styling.

Lewis Baltz

Southwest Wall, Ware, Malcolm, and Garner, 16722 Hale, Irvine 
Lewis Baltz
1974

In an interview in which Lewis Baltz talks about his earlier work, he explains how he purposely intended to present the most typical and quotidian scenes in the most typical and quotidian way. His early work is very much a focus on conventional formalistic aesthetics and presented in an almost documentary way, however, a lack of colour (perpetuating this suggestion of mundanity) and visually pleasurable composition it allows these images of 'quotidian scenery' to be the focus of a certain unexpected beauty. I am very much inspired by the work of Lewis Baltz and intend to bring certain aspects of his modernist ideology and visuals into my own work.



Lewis Baltz is considered a pioneer and his work; key examples of the New Topographic movement. His work is very much a reaction towards the established popular landscape photography in America of that period and by presenting 'man-altered landscapes' in a particularly bold and stark manner, it greatly contrasts the typically romanticist style previously used. Romanticisation was a style in which the more conventional photographers used to depict the American landscapes, however, modernist photographers such as Baltz intended to subvert the stereotypical and instead, depicted brutal landscapes. An indefinite realism is prominent in such work; a style in which I aspire to follow and experiment with.