Eloise cleared her plywood-panel desk and lay out the twelve 8 x 10 inch photographs of her grandmother’s life. One picture was a solemn, window-lit portrait of her elder seated in a floral, deep-buttoned silk damask armchair from the nineteenth century. Eloise remembered having seen such furniture listed on the Christie’s website; it sold for £950 at the hammer. Another image was of an hexagonal, oak table-top, geometrically lit by a minute seeping of light through a yellowing net curtain: the shape and form of this elderly woman’s possessions coming conspicuously to the fore. The image had little meaning to Eloise, other than its seeming ability to go beyond the raw documentation of everyday things into that world of ‘the aestheticised object’; a concept, despite her training in art school, despite her relentless studies of the sublime and the banal, she could not seem to fathom. Criticality had come easily to her; she knew when she was on the mark, when an image had its punctum, and when she needed to forget something for the good of her practice. What was her practice, though? Was she an artist? Despite there being references between her work and the work of others, it was unclear in which direction exactly it should develop. What made her photographs art? What was it that stopped them being moribund documents?
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Photography has a particularly intimate relationship to the viewer. This shouldn’t be understood as prevalent because of its ability to capture that which is actually there, it, in fact, has this ability precisely because it constantly renders untruths. It is this realistation, be it conscious or otherwise, that has led many practitioners to inscribe upon their photographs a series of concepts: those ideas that turn an image of the world as a fractured fable, into an object with commodifiable direction, academic meaning and intellectual status. Photography has, in short, and put rather crudely, moved from a documenter of profound ‘truths’ (19th Century anthropological practices in the manner of Bourne & Shepherd), through a period of progressive twentieth century development (photography as art; photography as critical practice), to a malleable and gaseous vessel for the claws of post-1960s art practice. This history is best described by the continual turn of the photograph from revelatory document to self-purporting artwork.
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[...]
Photography has a particularly intimate relationship to the viewer. This shouldn’t be understood as prevalent because of its ability to capture that which is actually there, it, in fact, has this ability precisely because it constantly renders untruths. It is this realistation, be it conscious or otherwise, that has led many practitioners to inscribe upon their photographs a series of concepts: those ideas that turn an image of the world as a fractured fable, into an object with commodifiable direction, academic meaning and intellectual status. Photography has, in short, and put rather crudely, moved from a documenter of profound ‘truths’ (19th Century anthropological practices in the manner of Bourne & Shepherd), through a period of progressive twentieth century development (photography as art; photography as critical practice), to a malleable and gaseous vessel for the claws of post-1960s art practice. This history is best described by the continual turn of the photograph from revelatory document to self-purporting artwork.
[...]
Excerpt from Some Fiction and Two Polemics on Photography.
All text © Daniel Cambell Blight.
Full version can be read in the soon to be released catalogue.
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