Exercise 1.2 Photography in the museum or the gallery?

 "I do not claim to have perfected an art but to have commenced one, the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain"

  William Henry Fox Talbot

We are asked to read the following article, summarise the key points, and add comments and reflections:

Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View
Author(s): Rosalind Krauss Source: Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, The Crisis in the Discipline (Winter, 1982), pp. 311-319

Interestingly, in light of the comment in the previous blog entry on the relevance of studying Understanding Visual Culture, the article is included in Visual Culture: the reader, a collection of articles edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. 

Krauss commences by comparing a photograph of Tufa domes taken by Timothy O'Sullivan in 1920s, and a lithograph of the image produced for a geology textbook:

 

Krauss eulogises about the photograph: "A fantastical descriptive clarity has bestowed on these rocks a hallucinatory wealth of detail.....the brilliance of this undifferentiated ground...overpowers the material objects within it...."."By comparison", she continues, "the lithograph is an object of insistent visual banality." 

The difference between the two lies not in the relative inspirations of the photographer and the lithographer but in their "separate domains of culture", or "distinct discursive spaces"; the lithograph belongs to empirical science so, we may infer, is not even an attempt to incorporate any aesthetic appeal. The photograph, on the other hand, is an example of what Krauss terms exhibitionality - in simple terms the desire to occupy gallery space -  which was manifested in landscape terms by the two dimensional image: modernism in the painting world, and landscape photography. The photograph represents aesthetic discourse. "Art has not only been intended but has also been represented", claims Krauss.

But there is a difficulty: O'Sullivan's work was available only via the medium of stereography; they were not 'published.' Lithographic and photographic equipment 'mark distinct 'domains of experience'. Krauss argues that identification by stereoscopy is by view, and identifies three characteristics of view that differentiate it from the discourse of aesthetic landscape:

• the "perspectivally organized depth" typically created by structuring the image around a vertical marker in the centre of the image;
• authorship resides with publishers rather than 'operators' as Krauss calls the photographers;
• the focal point is a singularity, "one moment in a complex representation of the world, a kind of topographical atlas."

Krauss concludes that view represents 'geographic order', landscape 'represents the space of an autonomous Art'.

There are criticisms of Krauss's thesis:

• Her argument is very specific to one photograph and seeks to generalise from the particular; this is a common problem of art discourse generally. Even if O'Sullivan's work is 'view' rather than 'landscape', where does this leave the work of other early landscape photographers like Fenton, Frith (UK photographers) Jackson or Watkins (US)?;
• It is not the image per se that defines the discourse for Krauss, but rather the method of dissemination, namely the stereoscope. Krauss does not say whether O'Sullivan's work would be aesthetic were it printed;
• Krauss writes before the advent of digital photography, most of whose output, by definition, defies 'exhibitionality. Further, digital manipulation can lead to alternative outcomes. We see this in Krauss's example: the modified version is dismissed as 'empirical science'. Her argument is led by the known outcome; would she conclude differently if O'Sullivan's image had been the one on the right above and the geological one on the left? By coincidence, at the same time as reading this, Adobe announced a new release of its camera raw software that includes a 'dehaze' function that would have worked admirably for the geologic manipulation of O'Sullivan's image in a digital environment. It would be difficult to accord the manipulated image a different discourse in today's digital age; it may be a different reality, to use the argument in my article , but that does not necessarily mean it is of an alternative discourse. 

Continuing from the specific of one image to the more general, Krauss identifies two fundamental concepts of the aesthetic discourse: that of artist with a correlative notion of career; and of oeuvre, the concept that artists create a body of work. The concept of artist implies more than authorship; it implies a vocation, which in turn implies an apprenticeship, the learning of the trade through success and failure. "Can we imagine someone being an artist for just one year?" Krauss asks, then rhetorically answers her own question by pointing out that Augusts Salzmann's photography career lasted for just that period in 1953, and that the photographic careers of LeGray, LeSecq and Fenton were short lived.

Oeuvre,  Krauss claims, is 'the result of sustained intention' and is 'coherent'. There is no dispute as to the copyright of the painter's work, but some photographic enterprises are large scale commissions, some of which have never been published. Furthermore, there are bodies of work that are either too small - 'can we imagine an oeuvre consisting of one work?' Krauss asks - or too large.

Krauss goes into detail as to the motives behind Atget's voluminous (10,000+) body of work. She quotes Szarkowski, who, observing the unevenness, suggests that Atget might be working 'as a servant to an idea larger than he' (Szarkowski, 1981). This, Szarwkowski admits, is 'foreign to our understanding of artistic ambition' (Szarkowski, ibid). Krauss considers the 'elusive intention' of Atget to be explained by deciphering the code he used to number the plates. The coding system was an attempt to classify topographic subjects, derived from Atget's card files. Atget's work, Krauss concludes, 'is the function of a catalogue
that he had no hand in inventing and for which authorship is an irrelevant term'. The piecemeal nature of Atget's work 'lies less in the conditions of aesthetic success or failure than in the requirements of the catalogue and its categorical spaces.' 

Krauss argues that subject is all important. Are the constituents of his photographs Atget's subjects, his choices, his thinking, or are they 'simply .........subjects, the functions of the catalogue, to which Atget himself is subject?' This concept is allied to the concept of interpellation enunciated by Althusser (1969). He discusses the mirror concept that the '[Absolute Subject] subjects the subject to the Subject." In terms of Atget's work, he is not working objectively, but is influenced by his own ideology.

Krauss concludes that early photography should be considered as an archive and subjected to examination at that level. She dismisses the attempt to dismantle the 'photographic archive' and to reassemble it 'within the categories previously constituted by art and history'.

The essay by Krauss strikes a chord in one respect: there is arguably a tendency to elevate the work of early photographers to a higher plane of achievement - whether that be aesthetic or not - simply because they were pioneers. They must be great because they were early adopters. Krauss is right to question the implicitness of this assumption in contemporary photographic literature.

Moreover, many of the early photographers were not necessarily (or even) artists. Despite Fox Talbot's claim (above) much early photography was 'on demand'. Portraiture was common place in the mid 19th century as photography became a fashionable medium for individual and family portraits. O'Sullivan was involved in a number of government sponsored expeditions to explore the scenery of the western territories of the US (Clarke, 1997, p58). Clarke (ibid, p90) describes Atget as the flâneur par excellence, the photographer as archaeologist. Atget had no particular artistic ambitions and made no artistic claims for his images, many of which were sold to government archives or private individuals (Badger, 2007, p55) Badger continues thus:

"Like literature, photography abounds in what is termed the 'intentional fallacy' which argues that an artist may intend one thing and actually achieve another. D.H. Lawrence put it differently: 'Trust the tale not the teller'. Atget may not have realized his achievement in any coherent sense - his work was an inventory of objects and not an artistic oeuvre - and yet each time he looked into the camera he knew exactly what he was doing, and that at the very least has provided photographers with an encyclopaedia of how to compose photographs in dynamic and interesting ways.."

Badger's argument is a sort of halfway point in the argument of 'art or not art': Atget was no artist - he had no ambition to be in a gallery (or even a museum) but his work demonstrated a skill, an eye, above all an individuality characterized by his attention to detail, the absence of people in his images, the lack of iconic structures in his work. We see Paris in his eyes, claims Badger (ibid). adding that:

"One feels..[Atget's] own vision of Paris rather than his clients' became increasingly important to him, until photography became the place where he most fully touched the world."

Perhaps we can conclude that whatever the relative merits of museum or gallery, then the work of early photographers should be seen somewhere. Does it really matter whether it is in the Tate, MOMA, or the City museum? I recently went to see an exhibition of Martin Parr's photographs in M Shed in Bristol, a museum owned and run by Bristol City Council with a variety of exhibits. Evidently Parr was not fussy that this is not a 'gallery'. 

In addition to taking issue with what some might regard as a highbrow view of the aesthetic discourse of photography, there are some further criticisms of Krauss's thesis.

Krauss evidently thinks that an oeuvre is a key part of what defines an artist. Yet there many examples of 'One Hit Wonders' in the musical world: Barbados by Typically Tropical (1975) and Pump up the Volume by MARRS (1987) are two examples of contemporary music (source: Wikipedia); Jay Ungar's Ashokan Farewell  is an example from classical music. Ignoring one's music taste, there is no question that these compositions are viewed as any less 'artistic' by virtue of being the only product of the author (who, of course, may anyway have composed other pieces that have never attained notoriety as popular culture). Moreover, as Galenson (2004) sets out, there are examples of 'one hit wonders' in the world of modern art.

By extension of this argument, one may challenge Krauss's claim that the epithet artist can be applied only to those who make a career of 'art', who go through training or apprenticeship. Where does this start and finish? Can the keen amateur not be viewed as an artist? Krauss suggests an unnessary and arbitrary barrier to entry, that in any case once one considers that 'One Hit Wonders' are capable of artistic discourse, seems not to stand scrutiny.

Similarly, the argument that an oeuvre cannot be considered as 'artistic' simply because it is too large is arbitrary. How large is too large? Krauss implicitly considers that photographic output is too 'easy' by comparison to other forms of visual art, and there is merit in this argument. It is surely stretching the definition too far to suggest that any photographic output has aesthetic qualities. More than other medium, photography (including smartphones now) is the 'ultimate democratic art form' (Clarke, ibid, p18) due to the accessibility offered by rapid technological change, notably the advent of digital photography. 

But that means only that some (probably most but surely not all) photography defies the badge of art. As Clarke argues, there is a distinction, albeit inevitably blurred at the edges, between photography as an art, and the photograph as an object. Scruton (1984) goes further, claiming that a photograph is beautiful only if the subject is itself beautiful, whereas a painting of an ugly object may, despite this, be considered beautiful. This view denies the photographer any artistic input yet there is more to taking a picture than clicking the shutter button. Exposure, composition, focus, light, shadow, and post processing if digital images are all variables that may be controlled by the photographer to personalize the output. Ask 20 photogprahers to photograph a specific landscape, and you will get 20 different responses. The relative importance of subject matter and form is distinct in the work of different photographers just as much as of different painters (Howells and Negreiros, 2012 p194). One may add that the distinction may change over time for the same author, as Badger's above quotation regarding Atget indicates.

Not only does any image to some degree or other reflect the 'I' of the photographer as well as the 'eye' of the camera (Clarke, ibid, p30), the subject itself is subject to interpretation. Roland Barthes distinguished between the denotative - the literal meaning, the objective characterstics of an image - and the connotative aspects of an image. Connotation recognizes a second level of meaning in a photograph, leading us to understand and explain the message implied by the subject(s) in the image (Barthes,. This is especially important for landscape photography; the landscape photograph may be seen not merely (or even) as a reflection of a scene, but an interpretation of it.

References:

Althusser (1969) Ideology and state apparatuses (note towards and investigation) in Visual Culture: the reader Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (eds) (2012) Sage Publications Ltd. London.

Badger (2007) The Genius of Photography. Quadrille Publishing Limited. London 

Barthes (1973) Mythologies. London.

Clarke (1997) The Photograph. Oxford University Press. Oxford

Galenson (2004) One Hit Wonders: Why Some of the Most Important Works of Modern Art are Not by Important Artists. Available from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=618522. Accessed 28 July 2015

Howells and Negreiros (2012) Visual Culture 2nd ed. Polity Press. London.

Scruton (1984) The Aesthetic Understanding.Methuen. London

Szarkowski (1981) The Work of Atget: Volume 1 Maria Morris Hambourg and John Szarkowski, Old France, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and Boston, New York
Graphic Society, 1981,pp. 18-19.