Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access. This introduction, taken from the book Why Art Photography, examines the different contexts in which photography operates as art. This text questions the purpose of art photography as described by critics and art historians. Although necessary for understanding the field, these issues are rarely discussed directly in texts on photography.

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Contemporary art photography has a number of tangled strands that are difficult to tease apart and often overlap in the work of a single image-maker. The different practices are categorized partly by the way they look and also by the constantly shifting ways they are framed by language and institutions. As with all other forms of art, the chief characteristics that define art photography are the intentions of the maker, its similarities to other forms of art and the context in which it is presented. The distinction between art photography and photography-as-art has now largely collapsed, but it is still useful to identify some of the different ways in which photographers have engaged with the idea of art historically, as they provide points of reference for many of the works that will be discussed in the following chapters.

Since the 1830s, photographs have been made by established and aspiring artists who have attempted to make them look like art and placed them into art contexts. One of the most basic strategies for photographers wanting their work to be read as art has been the use of traditional genres from painting, including portraiture, the nude, landscape and still life. The term “genre” refers not only to subject matter but also to a set of pictorial conventions that allow audiences to recognize a particular type of image as art. Would-be art photographers in the nineteenth century also concerned themselves with many of the same debates that preoccupied painters, around issues such as beauty and truth. Artistic subject matter and elevated ideas were not enough in themselves to validate photography as an art form. Throughout the twentieth century, a small but steady procession of photographers, curators and critics on both sides of the Atlantic wrote persuasive essays on the subject. In the USA, this strand of modernist practice was spearheaded by Alfred Stieglitz and came to be known as fine art photography or simply art photography.*1

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In fine art photography, subjects from the most exalted to the most banal are transformed into pictures via the special properties of the photographic medium. This mode usually privileges the sensibility of the individual photographer, his or her own unique vision. Some photographers still work proudly within this modernist tradition, placing an emphasis on the formal and expressive properties of their images and the technical excellence of their prints.*2 When images originally made for some other purposes are drawn into an art context, it is often because they are seen as overlapping with the values of fine art photography.

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Bauhaus

While some art photographers have focused on photography as medium, many artists using photography have felt no need to isolate it as a separate form or activity. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, photography was part of a larger explosion of creative experimentation. Surrealists such as Man Ray or Hans Bellmer mixed photography with painting, printmaking and sculpture, creating single images, collages and composites that challenged conventional art forms while also confronting the conventional manners and outlooks of their day. Some of the most important, influential artists to work with photography in the twentieth century have been opposed to the very notion of art, explicitly rejecting fine art traditions. The language associated with photography by Soviet constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko or Bauhaus instructor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy related to the medium’s uniqueness, modernity and objectivity, rather than its merit as an art form. These avant-garde practitioners provide a touchstone for contemporary figures who prefer to frame themselves as artists using photography rather than as photographers.

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Anti-aesthetic

The conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s embraced photography specifically because they did not associate it with art; they were looking for a kind of image that would be deliberately dull and ugly. If fine art photographers particularly value the viewer’s aesthetic experience of the work’s visual form, conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry or John Baldessari asserted an anti-aesthetic in which form was secondary to idea-as-art. There is a vast, complex literature about the role of the aesthetic in art. A key issue for this book’s discussion is whether the aesthetic should refer primarily to the satisfactions we obtain from the visual properties of work (sidelined in much concept-based art), or whether it might be extended to other aspects of the works, such as the way they inform, transform, reveal, challenge, etc. The latter view, that ideas themselves may have aesthetic merit, has been prevalent in ambitious contemporary art since the 1960s.*3

The artists and art historians who developed theories of postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1970s and 1980s followed in this path. Under the influence of German theorist Walter Benjamin and French post-structuralist theory, writers such as Craig Owens, Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau argued that the crucial task of art in the moment was to reflect back on the way that images make meaning.*4 As artist and writer Victor Burgin put it in his 1977 article, “Looking at Photographs:” “the photograph is a place of work, a structured and structuring space within which the reader deploys, and is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense”*5 Cut free of its modernist baggage, photography was seen as a perfect medium for enacting postmodern critiques of representation. Race, gender, sexuality, consumerism and various other cultural constructs came under scrutiny as part of this project. Work made with these ideas in mind asks viewers to develop a more active, combative relationship to official and commercial culture.

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Postmodernism

Postmodern theories brought a new level of seriousness and academicism to the study of photography. There was also playfulness in the postmodern embrace of eclectic styles and genres and in the transgressive shock of appropriation - images stolen from the culture and re-presented as if in quotation marks. A market for modernist art photographs had begun to develop in the 1970s. Large, colourful, visually dramatic and expensively framed, the postmodern work of the 1980s fed an exponential rise in the prices of photography as an art form. At the same time there was a puritan aspect to postmodernism, a purging of the modernist values of originality and authenticity, accompanied by a rejection of preciousness, craft and markers of personal expression. Although many of them work exclusively with photographs, artists working in this mould are not generally referred to as photographers, a distinction that marks their distance from a fine art photography tradition. The labels of “artist” or “photographer” are constructed by institutions and academic discourse. They can be seen as a form of cynical branding but also have a certain usefulness; they give us a sense of context and allow us to consider how different works are intended to be read - even if we choose to read them otherwise.*6

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Large-scale images

Another key development in art photography in the late twentieth century has been the rise of large-scale images offering hyper-detailed and seemingly neutral serial views of categories of people, places and things. Technically, this work involves both a step back to large-format view cameras typical in the late nineteenth century and a step forward to the most state-of-the-art commercial printing and mounting facilities to produce images several metres across. Grounded in the influential teaching of Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher, these works are often discussed within the discourse of postmodernism. As we will see, there is debate as to whether images by Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Frank Breuer, etc., should be read in relation to modernist visuality, postmodern criticality or in other more layered ways.

While much photographic art made since the 1980s has been led by ideas, aspects of visual - and specifically photographic - pleasure have persisted. At the same time as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine made use of appropriation, other practitioners, less resistant to the label “photographer,” were making work that explored issues around representation while also engaging with visual aspects of photographic aesthetics. Robert Mapplethorpe, for example, took advantage of the lyrical potential of platinum printing to address issues of sexual identity. Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano, among others, forged a new aesthetics for large-scale colour photography, using big grain and large areas of shiny darkness in previously unforeseen ways, underpinning confessional or shock-based content that transgressed cultural norms. Jeff Wall pioneered a new form within photography-as-art - the lightbox - to heighten the visual appeal of his large staged tableaux. This commercial form is far removed from the subtlety of traditional silver prints, yet Wall’s work builds on modernist ambitions in claiming a grandeur and seriousness for photographs as art objects. Wall is interested in all the ways in which meaning can be constructed and communicated within photographs; he is also very much invested in the making of pictures. His conceptual framework for staging the photographs in relation to painting, social history and critical theory has allowed him to raise the production values of the work to commercial standards while projecting a sense of intellectual engagement.

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The importance of context

The context of photographic work is just as important as its appearance or subject matter in determining how it will be understood. Photographs with a more formalist, modernist orientation tend to circulate in specialist photography galleries and fairs. The broader art world regards this photographic culture as somewhat insular and limited in outlook. A successful photographer who accrues critical attention and market value may graduate from an art- photography context to the institutions that exchange and promote photography within contemporary art, generally for higher prices. There is certainly overlap between the worlds, but distinctions remain. Whether fine art photographers, or contemporary artists using photography, the majority of practitioners discussed in this book are committed to photography as a serious field of enquiry, full of visual and intellectual satisfactions. They are united in regarding photography as a medium that is tied to the world but flexible in its relationship to appearances, and independent in its production of meaning. Throughout the book I will refer to these various strands of photographic practice with the umbrella term “art photography,” though I will occasionally return to the distinctions between the different camps.

The model of art photography I have set up is very Western and operates on a New York-London-Düsseldorf axis. This has been the main orientation of photographic institutions, markets and scholarship for the past three decades. Photographic aesthetics read differently depending on their cultural context. In eastern Europe under Communism, for example, a melancholic mode of black- and-white photography was coded as a form of resistance against an official aesthetic of socialist realism. Czech photographers such as Jan Svoboda worked this way in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on both conceptual art and surrealism. A contemporary Czech photographer, Marketa Othova, draws on these precedents, and the style of her work would become difficult to read for viewers unfamiliar with a Czech context. In Japan, Iran, India or any number of other specific cultural contexts, photographic aesthetics have a life of their own. A mode of art photography that seems culturally exhausted in one place or at one moment may provide a unique way of communicating in another. Over the next decade, the conversation about art photography will become far more international. I predict, however, that many of its established terms and debates will continue to be important, even as they are transformed in various contexts.

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Art values

In his 1985 book, Patterns of Intention, art historian Michael Baxendall provides an extremely eloquent rebuttal to the oversimplified economic analysis of art. I quote at length because the web of interconnecting motivations that he describes for the making of paintings has direct relevance for the discussion of photography as art: In the economists’ market what the producer is compensated by is money: money goes one way, goods or services the other. But in the relation between paintings and cultures the currency is much more diverse than just money: it includes such things as approval, intellectual nurture and, later, reassurance, provocation and irritation of stimulating kinds, the articulation of ideas, vernacular visual skills, friendship and - very important indeed - a history of one’s activity and a heredity, as well as sometimes money acting both as a token of some of these and a means to continuing performance. And the good exchanged for these is not so much pictures as profitable and pleasurable experience of pictures. The painter may choose to take more of one sort of compensation than of another - more of a certain sense of himself within the history of painting, for instance, than of approval or money. The consumer may choose this rather than that sort of satisfaction. Whatever choice painter or consumer makes will reflect on the market as a whole. It is a pattern of barter, barter primarily of mental goods.*7

Of course, it is not only art that participates in this kind of significant, pleasurable system of mental barter. Some people spend their time thinking about poetry, ceramics, computer games or haircuts. To some extent, all of these cultural forms - along with handbags - can carry symbolic as well as exchange value, can relate both to everyday life and to abstract ideas and can employ appropriation, intertextuality and a mixing of high and low forms of culture. But do they do it as well as art photography?

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Read more in the book Why Art Photography? Lucy Soutter

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Notes

1. Several early contributions to the art photography debate (including an essay by Alfred Stieglitz) can be found in Alan Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980). There are many excellent histories of photography providing a broader context for this discussion. See, for example, Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King, 2010).

2. For recent texts particularly sympathetic to the formal, process-based and expressive aspects of photography, see Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009) and Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Processes, 2nd edn (New York: Delmar, 2008).

3. For an accessible discussion of the aesthetic in conceptual art, see Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, “Aesthetics and Beyond,” in Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 80-107.

4. This approach was exemplified by the critical essays collected in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).

5. Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 153.

6. For a discussion of the construction of the term “art photography,” see Alexandra Moschovi, “Changing Places: The Rebranding of Photography as Contemporary Art,” in Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, eds., Photography Between Art and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), pp. 143-52.

7. Michael Baxendall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 48.