Modernism – The Photograph Itself
24th of June 2019
Read Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Evans & Hall (1999) Visual Culture: The Reader (also available online).
What do you think about Benjamin’s Viewpoint? And Kracauer’s?
Modernism paved the way for complete change in many aspects, like in literature, architecture, and in art. It is not based on one characteristic but covers a range of contributing ideas. Following the Second World War, there become a universal need for ‘healing’. People believed this could be achieve by a new outlook, this manifested in at first a change to the design of basic items like clothing. It induced a utopian feeling. This then moved into the art world. One aspect of modernism is nihilism, which rejects moral and religious doctrines. So basically a completely new tradition that anything before. Artists would experiment with new materials and techniques, in an aim to explore form. Modernism promoted a new world view, one which was simple and uncomplicated, the perfect world, a utopia.
Benjamin starts by stating that “a work of art has always been reproducible” (Benjamin, p. 72). This is true, nowadays it is common to see images of a piece of art everywhere from a book, to on the television, and especially on the internet. Images tend to be copied to share around the world, even images of cave paintings are widespread, but art in the form of artefacts or idols are slightly more difficult to replicate. Reproduction has always gone on, but it has taken different forms. Painters would practice by copying their mentors work. Over time, it has taken forms in engravings to lithographs to printing and now photography. By the twentieth century, it has been possible to reproduce all available pieces of art. This method itself has also managed to have a hold in the artist’s process.
According to Benjamin, these reproductions have one main fault. They lack presence. They can not replicate the originals authenticity and presence. “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (Benjamin, p. 74). Perception has also changed over time. For example in the art from the fifth century was very different from art that came before, this was brought about by a different type of perception. Traditions changed. These traditions aid in the artworks ability to be unique.
At the beginning art tended to be for ritual purposes. These took two forms, the first being magic, the second being religion. These roots can be found in artwork today, they come from a tradition, which hasn’t completely vanished. To successfully analysis art, in light of reproduction, you need to be aware of these traditions. Mechanical reproduction has allowed art to be liberated from its roots. It is not depend anymore. The art is also now destined to be reproduced, it is inevitable.
The value of art is variable. On one hand is has cult value, on the other is has exhibition value. Today it is more common for art to hold a value for exhibition. Photography is a good example of this. This is also seen in film. Film is able to produce two representations, one in how the person is presented and second, how, due to the mechanical equipment, the person can embody the environment. Photography can show what we cannot see.
Benjamin believes art has an aura, which is linked to its ritual purpose. But this aura is diminished the more it is reproduced mechanically and the more it is looked at out of context. As I said earlier, our perception changes, our culture and social changes also alter our perception, this is why the exhibition value holds more stead. The exhibition value over time becomes more important that the artworks aura. Whilst by mechanical reproduction, art can be reproduced, these reproductions lack the authenticity of the original, it lacks the presence of the original, but it also has created something new. The more a piece is reproduced, the more it’s aura is chipped away. Photography does not have the same aura that is able to be diminished.
Not everyone agrees with Benjamin’s view. Some believe that mechanical reproduction strengthens the aura by preserving it, for example Mary Warner Marian I one who holds this belief. I agree with Benjamin that the more reproductions that are made, causes a decreases in the artworks presence. It places a different value on these reproductions. But I do not think that is does distract from the original. We all know that the reproductions are just that, they are copies of the original, whilst they do not process the originals authenticity, they give us a chance to see it p, they are available worldwide to all, but they do not have the wow factor that the original has. There is a different feel from seeing an original to seeing a copy. The problem is that if you see a copy of the original, are you going to go and see the original, for the majority, the answer is probably no. So it does have an effect on the originals, but in today mechanical reproductions are so common, we see them all the time but we don’t really take much notice.
Siegfried Kracauer believes that the more we become familiar with an object, over time it loses its authenticity and originality. He makes a point that memory can be effected by things like camera, which capture a scene. I believe he has a point, whilst photographs have the ability to trigger a memory, they also do not promote us remembering the exact event, as people’s recollection varies. Often photographs are becoming our memories, we do not need to remember because we have it on film (Kracauer. p. 58). Sigmund Freud commented on memory and issues that surround it. He cited two types of memories, natural and artificial. A photograph would count as artificial memory. In his essay, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, he states, “In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possessed of recollection, his memory” (Freud (1930), cited in Bate (2010). This is similar to the point Benjamin made about the camera capturing the unseen things. Freud’s essay was published in 1930, whereas Benjamin’s was published in 1931, so only a year apart. Photographs can aid in memory and at the same time contribute to its destruction.
Bibliography
Bate, D. (2010) ‘The Memory of Photography’ In: Taylor & Francis Online. 6th of September 2010. [Online]. At: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609 (Accessed on 17th June 2019).
Benjamin, W. (2007) ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ In: Evans & Hall (ed.) Visual Culture: A Reader. London: Sage Publications Ltd. pp. 72-79.
Kracauer, S. (1995) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. London: Harvard University Press. p. 58.
Marien, M. W. (2006). Photography: A Cultural History (2nd edn). London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd. pp. 302.
MDC. History of Modernism. At: https://www.mdc.edu/wolf son/Academic/ArtsLetters/art_philosophy/Humanities/history_of_modernism.htm (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Tate. Art Term – Modernism. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism (Accessed on: 19th of June 2019).
V&A. What was Modernism? At: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/what-was-Modernism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
V&A. What is Postmodernism? At: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/what-is-postmodernism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Postmodernism – What surrounds the photography
25th of June 2019
Read Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodern controversialism’ on the OCA-Student Website. This essay was first published in October 15 (Winter 1980) and is also available in Crimp, D (1993) On the Museum’s Ruins. Massachusetts: MIT Press. As with all the readings you’ll be asked to do for this course, make notes on what you‘ s read – and it’s relevance to your practice (if any) – in your research folder. See also: www.afterwalkerevans.com/ and www.aftersherrielevine.com/
Postmodernism is a controversial movement, which is hard to pin point a definition. It spanned around two decades from the 1970s up until the 1990s. Similar to Modernism, it changed art completely, but in this instance it was a force against the modest ideals. ‘Anything goes’ is a saying that comes to mind with postmodernism, there was a complete mix of ideas. One characteristic was the bringing together of ‘cultural hybrids’, this created unique artworks. If Modernism is a utopia, postmodernism is a dystopia. Postmodernism become the norm for consumerism, this was its downfall.
Postmodernism is a rift that has emerged from modernism. According to Douglas Crimp, “Photography had overturned the judgement – seat of art is a fact that modernism found it necessary to repress, and so it seems that we may accurately say that postmodernism constitutes a return of the repressed” (Crimp, p. 108). Postmodernism is about ‘plurality’, it is diverse. It is about plurality but not pluralism. Pluralism is a fantasy, it promotes the thought that art has been liberated. Crimp wants to discuss ‘plurality of copies’.
During the 1970s postmodernism took one form in performance art. It was made for the viewers not for the artist. It was the ‘suggested aesthetic mode’. Crimp wanted to explore the shift from the presence, similar to that in performance art, to the presence that is achieved by absence. Which becomes representation. The author, Henry James, is able to use this latter, in his ghost stories. Even though the ghost is there, but it is actually an absence. So it is present and absent at the same time. This presence by absence can be achieved by representation, by using technology, something can be reproduce so it is present by in itself absent. This can be seen in the Two Fencers by Jack Goldstein and also in Surrender by Robert Longo. The use of holograms created a presence which was lifelike but it was also eerie absent figure. There is a distinction from the original. “Such presence is what I attribute to the kind of photographic activity I call postmodernist” (Crimp, p. 111). Crimps view is different from Walter Benjamin’s, in the sense of the quality of the presence. Benjamins aura relates to the presence of the original work. For Benjamin aura is diminished when more copies are made. Benjamin believes that only particular photographs have aura. Mainly photographs from its discovery, before around 1850. The aura comes from firstly the exposure times and secondly the subject. Aura is not really effected by the photographers presence but rather in the subject being present.
Many have tried to get aura back. This has been tried using two forms, the first in expressionist paintings and the second in photography being recognised as art. But Crimp states that what is needed is a Connoisseur. Photographs don’t always get into museums. A connoisseur can authenticate a photograph. “The photographic activity of postmodernism operates, as we might expect, in complicity with these modes of photography-as-art, but it does so only in order to subvert or exceed them” (Crimp, p. 117). This is related to aura, but it doesn’t bring it back, it changes it. Mass-advertising has effected our culture by manipulation. It is able to disguise its direction. “In our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost” (Crimp, p. 124).
Bibliography
Crimp, D. (19993) On The Museum’s Ruins. Massachusetts: MIT Press, p. 108-124.
Irvine, M. Approaches to Po-Mo. At: faculty.georgetown.edu/Irvine/theory/Pomo.hmtl (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Tate. Art Term – Postmodernism. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
V&A. What is Postmodernism? At: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/what-is-Postmoderism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Poststructuralism – and the language of photography
26th of June 2019
Read ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ by Roland Barthes in your course reader. If you want to take your study of semiotics further you could so worse than reading Daniel Chandler’s book Semiotics: The Basics or look at the web version at: www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.htm/
The poststructuralism movement came in response to the structuralism movement, it arose in the 1960s in France, it started as a movement in philosophy and literature. It began emerging in other art forms over time. It came together using the deconstructional ideas of Jacques Derrida, anthropological theories of Creuda Levi-Strauss, and the linguists from Ferdinand de Saussure. It declares that a code of principles, will allude to a meaning, they act together without any input from a world outside.
Barthes started by discussing the origins of the word ‘image’, which is from imitari, meaning to imitate. According to Barthes, an image will contain three messages. He uses a Panzani advert to illustrate this. The first message takes its form as linguistic. This is basically the text that supports the image. This message takes two forms, connotational and denotational. Often what is signified can depend on the viewers interpretation and our culture. The second message is iconic. Which is to do with the signifiers, mainly what is photographed. The third message is to do with the relationship between the signifiers and what is signified. So the three messages are linguistically, a coded iconic and non-coded iconic message.
Text is an aid in deciphering an image. Sometimes it describes the scene, other time it elaborates it further, it is a form of direction, it leads the viewer to discover the signified parts of the image. But the text holds control over the image, this is its anchorage. This is found in main types of images, in particular in adverts. Relay is found more commonly in comic strips. These two functions are capable of working side by side. According to Barthes, it is a “matter of a denoted description of the image” (Barthes, p. 37). This relates to the anchorage of the many meanings. When looking at the symbolic message, this restricts the connoted meaning, it is down to interpretation now. Barthes believes it is impossible to find an Images literal message in its pure state. Photographs appear to be a ‘message without a code’. On the other hand, drawings are coded. They have three levels, to replicate a scene using ruled transpositions, the coding requires the differentiation between the insignificant and significant, and lastly they need an apprenticeship. But in photographs, the transformation part, isn’t that, it become a recording function. It promotes the idea of realism, one which is taken mechanically. Our input into taking a picture, for example the lighting, the focus, the speed is the connotation, which comes from a cultural code. “Only the opposition of the cultural code and the natural non-code can, it seems, account for the specific character of the photograph and allow the assessment of the anthropological revolution it represents in man’s history” (Barthes, p. 40). The denoted images therefore, does not hint at a code, but plays an important role in the structure of the iconic message.
Bibliography
Barthes, R. (2007). ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ In: Evans & Hall (ed.) Visual Culture:A Reader. London: Sage Publications Ltd. pp. 33-40.
Encyclopaedia Britannica. ‘Poststructuralism’. [Online]. At: https://www.britannica.com/art/poststructalism (Accessed on 19th of June 2019).
Photography and Reality
27th of June 2019
Read ‘Photography’ (Chapter 2) in Howells, R. (2011) Visual Culture on the OCA-Student website. Note down your own response to Howell’s arguments.
The relationship between reality and photography is a complex one. It is difficult, in the arts, to depict reality. Technically, with photography it is a given. Howells takes us through history, starting with prehistoric paintings. But photographs history is only over 150 years old. The first photography is dated back to 1827. It was known as painting with light. It has taken centuries for the techniques to come together, you need both chemistry and physics. Physics allows the creation of the image, whereas chemistry allows us to preserve said image. The physics side was born with the camera obscura. This technique has been around since the tenth century, where a dark room would have a small hole that allowed light in, this would allow images to be depicted on the wall. But they were upside down. When a lease was added to this method, the images righted themselves, this happened during the Renaissance. This then developed into a box instead of a room. But none of these images were permanent. But due to chemistry advancement during the eighteenth century, Johann Heinrich Schulze found that some chemicals were photosensitive, namely certain types of silver. A few tried to make the images permanent, some failed, but Joseph Nicephore Niepce succeeded. Niepce then worked with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, together they made a quicker easier method to preserving an image. They became extremely popular. This technique produced an image of reality, they could not be copied either, so where unique. William Henry Fox Talbot used paper which was sensitised with silver chloride, he would place objects on the paper, these become the first contact prints. Talbot also developed the positive and negatives. This paved the way for being able to produce copies. By placing a negative image on another paper, another print could be fixed. This allowed unlimited positives to be made from one negative. It wasn’t until 1888 when Kodak created a camera that would be available to the general public. Leica went on to release their 35mm in 1925. Colour images were developed in 1935 by Kodak. But it wasn’t until 1994 when Kodak created the first digital camera, which was available to the public from 1996.
Photography were used to document reality. War photographers could document the wars, other things like social change began being recorded. Photographs “had an authenticity that fine art could never accomplished” (Sekula, p. 190). Sekula states that as the camera is a mechanical recording device, it is only possible to show what is real. This is also a reason for why photography can not be viewed as art. “The photograph does not create the drama; it just reports it. That cannot be art” (Sekula, p. 191). Roger Scruton believed that if the subject is beautiful then that is where the beauty comes from in a photograph, as against in a painting which can be beautiful regardless of its subject. Sekula argues against this, as the photographer must made choices when creating an image, a beautiful Images does not come from a beautiful subject. “The eventual photograph, then, is the result of creative choices that began at the very setting up of the tripod…A photograph, after all has formal properties that transcend its subject-matter” (Sekula, pp. 193-194). Susan Sontag also comments, “Photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings are” (Sontag, cited in Sekula, pp. 196-198). Andre Bazin does not believe that a photograph shows reality, as the very action of taking an image has liberated that image from ‘time and itself’, so it cannot show reality as it’s time has passed. It instead produced an aspect of reality.
“Photography is; a meeting of the actual and the imaginary, where each adds to, rather than detracts from, the power of the other” (Sekula, p. 200). Photographs themselves are predetermine to be interpreted ideologically. Sometimes interpreting iconography is overdone. Semiotics are important for analysing as by successfully interpreting an image, you can learn and understand its value.
Many people have analysed Scruton approach. William King believes there are two chances, based on the reasons we look at a photograph. The first would indicate Scruton is right, when “our reasons for looking at a photograph coincide with our reasons for looking at its subject-matter”, but if “we look at a photograph driven by an interest that does not entirely coincide with our interest in its subject-matter, then Scruton is wrong” (King & Sekula, p. 202). Many see this as a weak view, for example Nigel Warburton. Warburton believes that Scruton is talking about ‘ideal photography’. Warburton looks at ‘individual style’. He believes we should look deeper than what is shown. It is impossible to find the style in one image, you need a series. This involves contextualisation. A style and the artists aim will become evident. “In other words, the photograph can now be seen as a work of art” (Sekula, p. 205).
Bibliography
Howells, R. (2011) Visual Culture: A Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 183-206.
Photography in the Global Age
28th of June 2019
Read Allan Sekula’s essay ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital’ in Evans & Hall (1999) Visual Culture: The Reader.
Note down your response to this essay – and your thoughts on the discussion of globalisation above.
Photography is the global age relates to my body of work as one it will be published online for all to view but also I intend to bring a local pilgrimage to a globally available audience.
Sekula states that his aims to looking into the relationship between economic life and photographic culture. Archives are important, and their forms are numerous. Archives can be personal or public, their ownership varies too. For photography, the owner of the archive and the actual taker of the picture are not usually the same person or institute. “Archives, then, constitute a territory of images; the unity of an archive is first and foremost that imposed by ownership” (Sekula, p. 182). Meaning and context are important to photographs, an Images meaning is formed due to its text, it’s format, and its presentations. These all contribute to a fuller picture. According to Sekula, “photographic archives suspend meaning and use, the archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential” (Sekula, p. 184). Archives can contradict themselves. This can be through science and art. A dualism exists in photography, which has been around from its birth. These archives preserve the relationship between power and knowledge. “Photography is an art. Photography is a science. Photography is both an art and a science” (Sekula, p. 190).
Bibliography
Sekula, A. (2007). ‘Reading an archive: photography between labour and capital’. In: Evans & Hall (ed.) Visual Culture: A Reader. London: Sage Publications Ltd. pp. 181-192.
Georgina's Contextual Studies 