Illuminations

Women Writing on Photography from the 1850's to the Present

Liz Heron, Val Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000324686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Fotografía

This selection of women's writings on photography proposes a new and different history, demonstrating the ways in which women's perspectives have advanced photographic criticism over 150 years, focusing it more deeply and, with the advent of feminist approaches, increasingly challenging its orthodoxies. Included in the book are Rosalind Krauss, Ingrid Sischy, Vicki Goldberg and Carol Squiers.

POSTMODERNISMS AND THE POLITICS OF LOOKING

Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

(First published in New Mexico Studies in the Fine Arts, reprinted in Exposure 231, Spring 1985)

This article was published at a point when a number of photographic artists were rising to prominence under the sign of postmodernism, including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince. Abigail Solomon-Godeau succinctly traces the genealogy of this generation back to the mid-’60s and the crisis of the modernist aesthetic. Art photography’s determined self-elevation and its isolation from wider cultural connections have doomed it to decline; by contrast, artists using photography to engage with the power and multiplicity of the image in society have sought to return it to what Solomon-Godeau calls its ‘primary relationship’ to the world.

I WOULD LIKE to begin this discussion with a brief consideration of two images: one, a canonical photograph of high modernist art photography made in 1926; the other, a work made in 1979 by a postmodernist artist with no allegiance - either pedagogical, formal, or professional - to art photography per se. The first is Edward Weston’s study - one of a series - of his son Neil; the second is a rephotograph of the Edward Weston by Sherrie Levine, an artist whose practice for the past six years or so has been to rephotograph photographs or, more recently, paintings and drawings by German Expressionist artists, and to present them as her own.

We may begin by legitimately asking what is the difference between the two works. When reproduced, there very obviously is no difference whatsoever. Were we, however, to put the actual vintage print of Weston’s Neil next to Levine’s rephotographed print and examine them side by side, a certain amount of difference would be apparent. Variations in tonality of the prints, amount of detail, sharpness and delicacy of the forms and shadows, etc., could then be easily distinguished. But inasmuch as most people who can immediately recognize Weston’s study of Neil are likely to know it from reproductions in books and magazines, we might also say that the difference between the photograph by Weston and the photograph by Levine does not in any way represent a fundamental or essential one.

What then is the difference between these two images? We might begin by stating that while Weston is the author of the portrait of Neil, Levine is the thief, or, put somewhat less baldly, the confiscator, the plagiarist, the appropriator, the pasticheur. But to have said that is really to have said very little, because the theft of this particular image is in every sense both obvious and transparent. Even with Sherrie Levine’s name typed neatly below the image when it is exhibited, who after all would mistake Levine’s purloined Neil for the real thing?

But what do we mean when we talk about the real thing? Were we referring to Manet’s Olympia or to Vermeer’s View of Delft there would be little ambiguity. The real Olympia is installed in the Jeu de Paume, in Paris; the View of Delft in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Both are singular, unique. The real thing in reference to Olympia would never be taken to refer to the actual model - Victorine Meurand - any more than it would be confused with Manet’s conception of a Second Empire courtesan. Still less would the real thing be conflated with the reproduction of it in Janson’s History of Art. Similarly, although Vermeer’s View of Delft is a minutely detailed view of the city, we know the real thing is not the city, but Vermeer’s rendering of it. Are these notions of authenticity and singularity the same when we speak of Weston’s study of Neil as the real thing?

To answer this query we must begin by acknowledging that although there is but one negative of this individual study of Neil, there are any number of prints made from the negative by Weston himself. Additionally, there exist prints made by Cole Weston bearing the imprimatur of the estate, and presumably printed with the privileged knowledge and insight regarding Weston’s formal intentions that such an enterprise would imply. There is also a limited edition of prints made by George Tice some years ago, commissioned (I believe) by Lee Witkin and the Weston estate, of an extreme exquisiteness that would have made Weston père quite happy. Finally, there are the scores of reproductions of Weston’s Neil gracing everything from the cover of The Male Nude to the various monographs and exhibition catalogues on Edward Weston or the f/64 group, or the art and history of photography itself. Where then are we to locate the real thing in relation to this particular image?

Carrying the inquiry a bit further, we might here examine the nature and quality of Weston’s photograph, which may be justly described as a virtual icon of photographic modernism, an exemplar of Weston’s mature style, and a monument to the rigorous and controlled perfection of so-called straight art photography. Certainly the authority and classical beauty of this photograph derives in part from our knowledgeable recognition of precisely that source of beauty Weston drew upon. It is, of course, the stylized perfection of Praxiteles’ or Phidias’ marble nudes that we see in Neil’s living torso: the flesh made art as much as the three dimensions of the body have been transformed into two. Headless, armless, legless, even genital-less, this fragment of Neil speaks primarily of pure form. Its eroticism, while present, is tamed - subordinated to the aesthetic which, in any case, constitutes the historic ground rules for the presentation of the nude. But must we not, in the final analysis, consider the real thing to be, at least in part, the living Neil in the year 1926? And does not this final acknowledgment that this originary point must be - as it is for all photography - the living world which has been imprinted on paper further problematize the search for the real thing? Sherrie Levine in fact remarked that when she showed her photographs to a friend he said that they only made him want to see the originals. ‘Of course,’ she replied, ‘and the originals make you want to see that little boy, but when you see the boy, the art is gone.’ And elaborating on this comment, Douglas Crimp has commented:

For the desire that is initiated by that representation does not come to closure around that little boy, is not at all satisfied by him. The desire of representation exists only insofar that it never be fulfilled, insofar as the original always be deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation may take place. And representation takes place because it is already there in the world as representation. It was, of course, Weston himself who said that ‘the photograph must be visualized in full before the exposure is made.’ Levine has taken the master at his word and in so doing has shown him what he really meant. The a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world and Weston only copied it.¹

But Sherrie Levine is concerned with more than making a point about the conditions of representation, more too than underscoring the murky notion of what constitutes an ‘original’ within a technology of mechanical reproduction. Like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, Levine’s critical stance is manifested as an act of refusal: refusal of authorship, uncompromising rejection of all notions of self-expression, originality, or subjectivity. Levine, as has been pointed out often enough, does not make photographs; she takes photographs, and this act of confiscation, as much as the kinds of images she takes, generates a complex analysis and critique of the forms, meanings and conventions of photographic imagery (particularly that which has become canonized as art) at the same time that it comments obliquely on the implications of photography as a museum art.

In earlier work dealing with photography, Levine made copy photographs of reproductions of photographs printed in books or posters, as in the case of the Weston studies of Neil. Alternatively - for example, in her rephotographs of Walker Evans’ FSA photographs - she made copy prints of copy prints. Thus, while conceptually creating a photographic hall-of-mirrors effect, Levine cogently demonstrated the contradictions implicit in the assimilation of photography into traditional art discourse. Inasmuch as appropriation functions by putting visual quotation marks around the stolen image, its critical application lies in its ability to compel the viewer to see dialectically. In Levine’s rephotographs of Eliot Porter’s trees, the mere act of their confiscation, displacement, and re-presentation enables the viewer to grasp immediately the wholly conventional (and, as Roland Barthes would have said, entirely mythological) scheme in which ‘Nature’ is made to be seen as ‘Beautiful.’ Unlike the international typologies of industrial structures made by Hilla and Bernd Becher, the Porter photographs are revealed as unintentional typologies; artifacts of culture no less than the Bechers’ steel mills and water towers. Similarly, the rephotographed Walker Evans photographs, whose graininess and obvious screen clearly attest to their already-reproduced status, underline the cultural and representational codes that structure our reading of (respectively) the Great Depression, the rural poor, female social victims, and the style of Walker Evans.

Levine’s refusal of traditional notions of authorship has social and political implications as well. The word ‘author’ is etymologically linked to that of ‘authority’ just as it is to ‘authorize.’ Historically, the concept of the author is linked to that of property. Copyright legislation protects the property, and in fact Levine’s Weston and Porter rephotographs are quite literally illegal works of art. Too, the notion of the author is integrally linked with that of patriarchy; to contest the dominance of the one is implicidy to contest the power of the other. Enacted against the larger art-world context characterized by the cynical (and as has been often noted, predominantly male) effusions of neoexpressionist macho pastiche, Levine’s acerbic and deadpan confiscations serve efficiently to expose the hollowness as well as the specious atavism of such work. To refuse authorship itself functions to puncture the ideology of the artist as the bearer of a privileged subjectivity. Levine is thus a kind of guerilla feminist within the precincts of the art world - a position shared by a number of other artists using photography within the postmodernist camp.

I chose to begin this essay with a discussion of Sherrie Levine’s work because it illustrates in a rather forceful and dramatic way that the methods and assumptions of traditional art photography and those of various artists employing photography outside the conventional framework of art photography have come to occupy antipodes within photographic discourse and practice. Levine’s work often provokes outrage, nowhere more evident than among the ranks of art photographers. If after a hundred and fifty years of upwardly mobile striving, art photography has been definitively validated as a ‘creative’ fine art, what does it mean that artists such as Levine should so energetically jettison those very values which elevated photography to parity with the other arts? Levine, now in her mid-thirties, has emerged from the art world, as have a considerable number of other artists using photography such as Vikky Alexander, James Casebere, Sarah Charlesworth, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, and Jim Welling. They are themselves linked to an older generation of artists such as John Baldessari, or for that matter, Andy Warhol. The list could easily be extended to include a wide range of artists using photography since the mid-sixties that would encompass artists as disparate as the Bechers, Victor Burgin, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall and William Wegman. As photography galleries have crumpled left and right (in New York in the last several years, the casualty lists include Light Gallery, Photograph Gallery, Robert Samuels Gallery, and the Photographic Division of Leo Castelli), Cindy Sherman’s star, for example, has risen meteorically. As the Photography Department of the Museum of Modem Art drifts into blue chip senility with no less than four Atget exhibitions or feeble resuscitations of formalist schema (‘Big Pictures’), artists employing photography are in increasing numbers being absorbed into the mainstream art gallery nexus.

These two simultaneous developments - the ghettoization and marginality of art photography at precisely the moment when the use of photography by artists has become a relative commonplace - deserves some scrutiny. In order to understand the conceptual cul-de-sac that contemporary art photography represents, it is important to trace the assumptions and claims that paralleled (and fueled) its trajectory and then to examine the merit and usefulness of these notions as they exist in the present.

It has long been an uncontested claim in standard photographic history that the work of Paul Strand done in the late teens - and more particularly, its championship by Alfred Stieglitz in the last two issues of Camera Work - signaled the coming of age of art photography as an authentically modernist, and hence, fully self-conscious art form. For while Stieglitz himself had for most of his career made unmanipulated ‘straight’ prints, it was Strand’s uncompromising formulation of the aesthetics of straight photography, his insistence that photographic excellence lay in the celebration of those very qualities intrinsic to the medium itself, that has traditionally been viewed as the moment of reorientation and renewal of American art photography.

Stieglitz’s epiphanous designation of Strand as the aesthetic heir apparent would seem a reasonable point of demarcation in the art history of American photography. For although the insistence that the camera possesses its own unique aesthetic has been asserted in various ways since the 1850s, the pictorialist phenomenon supplanted earlier concepts of photographic integrity or purity² and instead established a quite different aesthetic agenda. This agenda, however, had a pedigree fully as vulnerable as that of the proto-formalist one: specifically, the presumption that photography, like all the traditional visual arts, could lay claim to the province of the imaginary, the subjective, the inventive - in short, all that might be inscribed within the idea of the creative.

The specific strategies adapted by pictorialist photographers - be they the retrieval of artisanal printing processes, the appropriation of high art subject matter (F. Holland Day crucified on the Cross, Gertrude Kasebier’s Holy Families, etc.), or the use of gum bichromate and other substances, with extensive working of the negative or print and the concomitant stress on fine photography as the work of hand as well as eye - are now generally supposed to constitute an historical example of the misplaced, but ultimately important energies of art photography at an earlier stage of evolution. Misplaced, because current ‘markers’ and print manipulators notwithstanding, contemporary photographic taste is predominantly formalist; important, because the activities and production of the Photo-Secession were a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• The Nineteenth Century in Europe
• New Visions - The Avant-Gardes and After
• Distant Voices: Fashion and Portraiture in the Studio in the Inter-war Years
• Pictures and Stories: Documentary and Reportage in North America
• History Lessons
• On Photographers
• Postmodernisms and the Politics of Looking
• Decolonising the Image
• Memories and Fictions
• NOTES
• ADDITIONAL NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
• COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS