The Conclusion and Why Photography Matters as “Art”

Fried starts off with saying that works by Contemporary photographers such as Wall and Struth, among the many others discussed, are not any better than those who came before him such as Avedon, and Steiglitz and so on. He’s saying that the difference in photographs now is that they can raise the question of the limits of representation and the critique of representation.

As we all know photography is a pretty young medium and the masters he talks about in his book were exploring the techniques and the discipline of the craft. I feel like much of the early photography was about the object. They were exploring the world through this new medium and documenting what they came across, there was no big concepts or theory behind the works.

  Alfred Steiglitz on the left, Richard Avedon on the right.

With contemporary photography the artist and the art have become more complicated and complex, much like the rest of the world we live in. We have become inthralled with the meaning behind the photograph we see hanging on the wall before us, to the point where I’ve been told by teachers that if my work doesn’t have a theoretical concept behind the images then it’s worthless, those exact words weren’t used but it was the general feeling I received. I think a photograph is good if it provokes a preferable emotion or experience from being viewed, it doesn’t have to have a long theorized meaning behind it for me to consider it good art. It’s interesting how people can easily tell you what bad art is but it’s a more difficult time when explaining what art is good and I guess Fried is saying that work that can be theorized is good “art”.

I look at Jeff Wall’s work and am left wondering why I should care about the photograph. I don’t experience it and am uninterested in the concepts behind the photographs, they don’t cater to my interests in a photograph.

Fried quotes Walter Benn Michaels who says “We do not experience the fossil as a trilobite, but we do not experience it as the picture of a trilobite”. I get that Wall’s photographs often pay homage to famous works throughout art history but I honestly don’t care and for me it does nothing to enhance the photo, I’ve never been able to get into art history and I find myself bored learning about Wall and the theory behind why he is such a great artist.

When it comes to contemporary portrait photographers, like Rene Dijkstra and Tina Barney, there is this weird interaction happening now between the absorption of the subject and at the same time the intentional act of not being viewed, and Fried credits this to the medium of photography alone a for of to-be-seenness.

Tian Barney and Rene Dijkstra

With contemporary portraiture the job of the photographer is to successfully influence the viewer to see the photography itself, to show the sitters truth. In both works shown above the subjects are posing for the camera, Barney’s posed to looks like snapshots and Dijkstra’s a more formal straight on pose. I enjoy Barney’s photograph because they feel real even though I know they are posed, I am able to convince myself that this would be a natural event on any given day and as a classmate said they are the snapshot aesthetic made formal. On the other hand Dijkstra’s photographs feel so sterile and at some times the poses feel unnatural to me and I find myself again bored with the viewing experience.

Maybe it’s because Wall and Dijkstra are talking about more theory based ideas about the human condition and issues pertaining to reality but I prefer my experience to take me away from reality and into a world more like my own mind. I’ll again use Kahn and Selesnick’s work as an example.

I know they are constructed and composited photographs but at the purest level they talk about a reality that is not our own and it becomes a form of escapism for me (viewer) and for my own personal taste I enjoy the experience more than that of looking at a photograph by Wall.

I find it hard to be connected with Fried’s thoughts on the contemporary, mainly because of his writing style.

Theatricality

I just want to start out with a new word I got from this reading, Self-Interlocuture, which means someone who takes part in their own dialogue or conversation. I tend to have conversations with my brain when determining a work of art or making my own work and I can believe in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s way of coming to the Theater project.

I also wanted to talk quickly about my feelings on Contemporary portraits today and how they are comparable to those of Cindy Sherman’s “Stills”.  When I hear contemporary portrait I instantly think of a subject that is stoic in expression and overall a feeling of disconnection (a theme I see in Contemporary Photography). Take Rania Matar’s series “A Girl and Her Room” depicting teenage girls in their bedrooms.

Some of the images are of a large portion of the room, and the others are closer up, sometimes only showing one wall of the bedroom. All the images posses a subject whom is expressionless and often starting away from the camera lens, creating the feeling of disconnection. Mimicking the style of Sherman, some of Matar’s photographs have the feeling of being staged and while in Sherman’s they come off as effective, I am left feeling sort of awkward about what I am supposed to get from her photographs.

I think Theatricality is a major theme in the way we as viewers take in media today. Jeff Wall says about the cinematic experience, “The utopia of the cinema consists in the ideal of happy, pleasant lucidity which would be created by the revolutionary negation and transformation of amnesiac and monumentalizing cultural forms. Cinematic spectatorship is a somnambulistic approach toward utopia”, in other words the experience of a different reality, and escape for the human mind. Staged scenes of abnormal realities and fantasy worlds have become a growing trend in contemporary photography, giving the viewers that element of unreal, setting the scene for them to escape their own reality. Take Kahn and Selesnick for example.

The duo creates images of mars like planets and the alien explorers whom have found it. The work is imaginary and the images are straight from some creepy sci-fi movie, it allows the viewer to become lost in the dreams of an adventure into this unknown world, once again the chance to escape.

While I do enjoy some work like this, I think there are some artists who adopt this type of shooting when they should stick to the old school style of display, a nice framed photography hanging on the wall. I’m all for experimental methods of display and larger than life sizes but when it comes to Guy Tilim’s series “Avenue Patrice Lumumba” I am left without a fond memory of viewing his work.

His images depict rural towns in Africa, and while the images captured my attention with their desolate, almost lifeless scenes, I can’t help but discredit these images due to the size of the images. The digital noise and weird deadpan colors are so distracting to me when viewing the images that I can’t help but notice what is actually going on in the images. The images are very photojournalistic/documentary in style and I think they would have been a more effect body of work if I had seen them displayed at a smaller, more personal size.

A body of work that is effectively viewed at a large scale is the Jeff Wall series “Movie Audience”.

The images are portraits and are lit to convey the look of an audience member in a movie theater. The event is one that is shared by a majority of this works viewers and from that they are easily able to connect with their memories and feelings of going out to the movies. The large scale lends itself to the feeling that you experience in a movie theater and effectively takes the viewer back to a memory of the original movie experience. Wall envisions today’s population as sleepwalkers who aimlessly encounter the experience of a hyper-reality, a reality that is ever popular in summer blockbusters like Transformers. The experience has become quick and painless, accessible by anyone and easy to interpret. The viewer wants to become numb to reality and to have a happy experience. I feel like there are numerous artists of all mediums, filmmakers, and musicians out there who are being overlooked because they dare to push the boundaries of their art and they stand-alone in a sea of mindless consumers. From Justin Bieber, to the Damien Hurst’s and Terry Richardson’s, and movies made by super budget directors, the population is in love with this contemporary way of viewing. Gone are the days of the personal experience, the internal connection with a work of art, thrown out the window in favor for an experience that is publicly shared, one that requires little effort on behalf of the viewer.

Questionnaire on “The Contemporary”

In this article Alexander Alberro talks about his thoughts on the meaning of the Contemporary time period, the period we are currently enthralled in.

Alberro talks about how the world is being run by a dominance of market and how the act of consuming goods has become the main focus on how, we as people, live our lives. He talks about how some forms of agency will reproduce the hegemonic social order and some will develop as alternatives or even oppositions. Is he saying that if we continue down the road of consuming that the production of art will become that which can be easily sold and consumed and therefore the Fine Arts will slowly die away? It sure does seem like that could be a reality

He goes on to talk about the effects that Globalization have had on the art world and the rise of the World Wide Web. The original intention of international art shows was to expose people from other parts of the world to new and unique types of art and the message behind those art works. Now with Globalization the main focus has become the profit that can be made by the gallery, museum, or curator (among others). Artists like Damien Hirst and his Diamond Skull which sold for $100 million dollars are being shown,( http://boingboing.net/2007/06/02/damien-hirsts-diamon.html), while artists who are trying to make a change in the world, through their art, are being left in the shadows.

The internet has had a huge impact on the way art is seen in today’s world. One can instantly search and find an artists and all of their works in the click of a button, in my opinion a good thing, but the digital age also has many negative responses. As a analog enthusiast I try and keep my methods of photography as old school as I can. It’s not easy when films and papers as well as chemicals and machines are rapidly disappearing from the shelves of the local camera store as digital cameras, papers, printers, are replacing them. I see the age of technology beginning to slowly isolate the world from itself. More and more people are only viewing art online and not going to see gallery shows or museums anymore and the only negatively effects the artists. To me technology has so many positive aspects to the world but when it comes to art it seems to be hurting the different mediums more than it’s helping.

Is photography just going to become some digital art form that shuns the craft of the masters? Will it cease to exist on the walls of gallerys and museums and come to be only a file name floating around the clouds. With todays trends I wouldn’t be all that surprised.

From the “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before” I was left a tad annoyed or maybe angry? I’ve had some interesting discussions about the censorship of art in past history classes, all in all people will never have the exact same opinion and there will always be that group of people who find a reason to be offended and they will let it be known. Art is an expression of the artist, it’s their feelings on the world around them and sometimes the work is grotesque, pornographic, etc. I find it hard to not get a bit angry with close minded people, especially when it comes to Art. If you don’t like it you don’t have to look at it.

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