6.1 Karen Knorr, ‘The Rooftop’, from the series Villa Savoye, 2008

On and beyond the white walls

Photography as art

Introduction

Photography is ubiquitous as a means of visual communication. But the history of photography as art has focused not so much on photographic communication as upon photographs as objects, reified for their aesthetic qualities. It follows that such histories typically focus on pictures, and on the works of specific practitioners. Thus, until recently the story of photography as art tended to be presented as a history of ‘great’, or ‘master’ (sic), photographers. Such accounts not only divorce photography as fine art from the larger history of photography with its ubiquity of practices, but also rarely engage with broader political issues and social contexts.

In this chapter we use ‘Art’ to refer to the web of practices relating to the Arts establishment (galleries, museums, public and private sponsorship, auction houses …) by contrast with more general understandings of photography as an ‘art’ or expressive skill.¹ The position of photography in relation to the gallery is complex; on the one hand, photographic media (chemical or digital prints, lightbox imagery, video projection …) may be used by artists, possibly in conjunction with other media, as a means of expression; here photographic pictures or series may be made primarily for gallery viewing. Photography is thus contextualised as art through being shown in galleries, museums, and artists’ publications. Photomedia are also used by artists in contexts beyond the gallery, for instance, as billboard art, or within community arts.2 On the other hand, imagery made in other contexts, such as documentary or fashion, may later be taken up by galleries or museums. Collections at major institutions such as MOMA, New York or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London clearly illustrate this.

This chapter considers debates relating to photography, the art gallery, arts institutions and the market for photography as art. The first section focuses on nineteenth-century debates and practices, noting that from its very inception photography was conceptualised in terms of both its apparent ability to accurately transcribe from reality and its expressive potential. This acts as historical context for discussion of twentieth-century photography considered as related to Western modern, and postmodern art movements. In modernism, the emphasis was upon photography as a specific medium with particular qualities or attributes. Postmodern theory loosened the focus on the formal, viewing the photographic as a particular language or sign system. Finally, the chapter reviews current debates, practices and gallery systems, and comments on the internationalism of contemporary art within which photographic media are now ubiquitous. As with any overview, a word of caution is appropriate: this discussion should be taken as a starting point for fuller exploration of sets of debates, not as a comprehensive compendium. The chapter includes three case studies: on Soviet constructivism, Surrealism as an art movement, and Landscape. Each directly illustrates points made; they were also chosen in part as examples of the interrelation of history, politics, intel lectual debate and art, and in part to offer summary introduction to materials not necessarily easily accessible. Photographs relating to land, land scape and environment are used as illustration throughout. This focus allows more immediate comparison of form, content and subject-matter than would be the case with a random compilation of images. Landscape was selected to con trast with the emphasis on people (in personal albums, on the streets, or as ‘body’) in previous chapters.

Mike Weaver (1989a) The Art of Photography, London: Royal Academy of Arts.

Photography as art

In 1989, 150 years after Fox Talbot’s announcement of ‘photogenic drawing’ (the calotype), the Royal Academy, London, mounted its first ever photography exhibition, The Art of Photography. Arguably this represented the acknowledgement by the Arts establishment in Britain that had been sought, variously, throughout photography’s history. The first major photography show at the Tate (Tate Modern, London), titled Cruel and Tender, was not until 2003.³ Photography has fared better elsewhere with, for instance, active development of the photography collection and gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A) in the final decades of the twentieth century and the long-established collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Historically, tension between the photograph as document and artistic interpretation has been at the heart of debates as to the status of the photograph as art. Photographs have been exhibited right from the inception of photography. In Britain they were included in the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Royal Society of Arts organised its first show of photography in 1852.4 The Société Française de Photographie (formed 1854) mounted gallery shows in Paris in 1855 and 1857 (Frizot 1998: 93–5). In the nineteenth century, there were no mass media of the sort taken for granted now, so exhibition was one of the prime ways of communicating information about artistic, scientific and technological innovations. But, from very early days, critics and practitioners disagreed as to the status of photography as art.

This debate begs the question as to what is meant by ‘art’. Definitions here have been variously contested. For aesthetic philosophers post-Renaissance art relates to the sensual, the beautiful and the refined; thus, questions of taste are centrally related to expressive practices. Here, the artist is characterised as a special sort of ‘seer’, or visionary of ‘truth’, poetically expressed. In the case of photography, the artist is viewed as transcending ‘mere recording’ of events, as offering a unique perspective on or insight into people, places, objects, relationships, circumstances. But taste involves judgement, and judgement may be exercised by few – albeit, in certain political scenarios, ostensibly on behalf of the many. For example, in Britain – as elsewhere in Europe – traditionally it had been the aristocracy and the upper classes who exercised hegemonic influence through their power of patronage although, particularly since the mid-nineteenth century, city museums and galleries were opened thereby founding publicly available collections. Now, increasingly, influence and judge ment falls to curators, critics, arts educators, and the world of the media, as well as private buyers whose investment in work by a particular artist may be instrumental in supporting the possibility of the artist pursuing further projects. In the USA the arts establishment greeted and promoted modern art from Europe (and, indeed, immigrant artists from Europe) especially in the period before and during the Second World War, thus influencing debates about art including critical criteria for the appreciation of formalism or of abstract expressionism.

See also ch. 1, pp. 58–60 for a discussion of Beaumont and Nancy Newhall’s The History of Photography.

Many critics, including the influential American curator and historian Beaumont Newhall, have based claims for photography on formal and expressive qualities which accord with the Western, post-Renaissance tradition. Such claims stem from connoisseurship; that is, valuation of the sensitive and the precious. They are not necessarily intended to assert parity of status with older media such as painting or sculpture, but they do reinforce the notion of the photograph potentially offering a special mode of perception both through its ability to capture and freeze a moment in time and through artistic sensibilities. In the nineteenth century, when photography was first announced and developed, art and technology – the expressive and the mechanical – were viewed as distinct. This distinction influenced the reception of photography and attitudes towards it as many people categorised cameras and photography as mechanical. But photography also conformed to aesthetic conventions in terms of composition and subject-matter, highlighting particular features in order to stress their significance. For serious photographers, it was creative potential along with its apparent accuracy of transcription that was the source of fascination with the medium.

However, they did not necessarily see themselves as artists. For instance, British photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron or Lady Clementina Hawarden, whose work might now be viewed as art, and who certainly hold a central place within museum collections, did not themselves make this claim. As historian Margaret Harker notes, combination printing, using two or more ‘negatives’ (glass plates) in order to achieve particular pre-visualised results, was common from the 1850s. This could be viewed as an artist’s approach to using the medium. Yet she affirms that the first attempt to promote photography as fine art was not made until a Camera Club exhibition in Vienna in 1881 (Harker 1979). By contrast, Aaron Scharf, in relation to the Paris photography exhibition of 1855, describes photographers including Durieu, Nadar and Bayard as ‘“immigrants” to the Fine Arts’ (Scharf 1974: 140). As we see, historians disagree as to when photography was first viewed as an art; this not only reflects debates about art versus technology but is also influenced by differing national contexts and attitudes.

Thus, we should distinguish between claims made by photographers for themselves, or for particular movements, and claims made at a later stage by historians, critics and curators. For instance, Soviet revolutionary artists aimed to take work out from the gallery into everyday social life, viewing art as both an essential tool in the re-education of the mass of the Russian people and as ‘art for the people’. Nowadays, retrospectives of their work are curated for galleries, spaces which the Soviet artists would surely have viewed as bourgeois and elitist! Likewise, as already noted, early twentieth-century documentary, originally destined for publications in social surveys, magazines or books, now takes pride of place within the gallery and the archive. Peter Galassi, curator of an exhibition selected from the photography archive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, distinguishes between photography intended as art and ‘vernacular’ photography, noting the differing lineages of work now included within the same collection (Galassi 1995). Such a binary distinction over-simplifies a complex history. It may be useful as a means of classification for museums and archives that, since the late twentieth century, have become increasingly prominent in both the conservation of images and their interpretation. However, precisely because of the influence of museum archivists and curators in constructing what are inevitably selective histories of the medium, any tendency towards over-simplified categorisation has become a source of concern for academic researchers.

Peter Wollen (1978) ‘Photography and Aesthetics’, Screen 19(4), Winter, reprinted in Readings and Writings, London: Verso and New Left Books, 1982.

Noting a number of moments of transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which photography was central to art movements, critic Peter Wollen argued that:

For photography to be an art involves reformulating notions of art, rejecting both material and formal purism and also the separation of art from commerce as distinct semiotic practices that never interlock.

(Wollen 1982: 188)

Writing in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin likewise argued that the ‘aura’ associated with the uniqueness of the work of fine art, such as a painting, should wither in favour of the photograph, which he welcomed as a more democratic – or less exclusive – medium because of possibilities for mass reproduction (Benjamin 1936). Here it is the anti-elitist potential of (chemical) photography, by contrast with the singularity of each individual painting, that was being stressed. We can assume that Benjamin would have welcomed the reproducibility of the digital and the openness of the internet.

Early Debates And Practices

The complex relations between photography and art

Understanding the relationship between photography and painting in the nineteenth century involves a number of interconnected considerations. Photography, first announced in Britain and in France in 1839, was initially heralded for its technical recording abilities. With few exceptions, the emphasis was upon picture-taking rather than picture-making – to echo a distinction made by Margaret Harker (Harker 1979). She suggests that the development of the art of photography in the late 1850s can partly be accounted for through the increasing involvement of people trained as artists. They brought with them a concern for form and composition and, in particular, the use of light. She notes that the use of photographs as illustrations for poetry or literature, or as pictoral narrative and allegory, also dates from the late 1850s. Mary Warner Marien argues that what she terms ‘High Art Photography’:

orchestrated separate media. High Art photographs blended theater, printmaking, and painting with photography. Actors or other players were posed singly or in a tableau vivant. Interestingly, specific paintings were only occasionally replicated in High Art Photography. For the most part, these images rendered original conceptions, illustrating religious or moral precepts often in the manner of maudlin genre painting and popular Victorian prints. By partaking in the established didactic function of the fine arts, High Art photographers attempted to skirt objections to the medium’s inartistic verisimilitude.

(Warner Marien 1997: 87)

Mary Warner Marien (1997) ‘Art, Photography and Society’, ch. 3 of Photography and its Critics, A Cultural History, 1839–1900, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

In this section we consider, first, the influence of the transcriptive qualities of photography within changing nineteenth-century fine art practices; second, photography democratising art; and third, photography, aesthetics and western art. In the following section we discuss pictorialism, and claims for the photograph as a fine art made by photographers at the turn of the century. Writing on Art and Photography Aaron Scharf (1974) emphasises uses of photographs by artists; for example, as reference notes. Only in the later chapters on twentieth-century art movements does he acknowledge the photograph as art in its own right. As both Van Deren Coke and Scharf have indicated, a number of artists used photographs as study devices, eliminating the need to pay for models or to spend long periods of time sketching. For some, these photographic ‘sketches’ ultimately took over as works in their own right. For example, the French caricaturist, Nadar, first used photography as the basis for satirical portraiture, later acknowledging the photographs themselves.5 Photography also allowed painters to extend their range of references, as photographic notes supported paintings later made in the studio. Photographs could be used as research, or directly as models for painting. For instance, Scharf observes that Edouard Manet used photographs of the Mexican emperor, and of soldiers, when working on his paintings of the emperor’s execution. Scharf also includes two examples, a riverscape and a seascape, by the French realist painter Gustave Courbet, which seem to be based directly upon contemporary photographs (Scharf 1974: 127).

Aaron Scharf (1974) Art and Photography, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, revised edition.

Van Deren Coke (1972) The Painter and the Photograph, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press.

Realism and systems of representation

Courbet and Manet were prominent among artists associated with nineteenth-century Realism within which photography was implicated as an aid to painting. Discussing the implications of Realism as a historical movement in painting and in literature, in France and elsewhere, Linda Nochlin has suggested that the degree of social change experienced in Britain during the Industrial Revolution from the late eighteenth century onwards, and the political revolutions in France, induced artists to explore everyday social experience (Nochlin 1978). Noting the dominance of Realism as a radical movement from about 1840 until 1870/80, she suggests that there are a number of associated ambiguities including, crucially, the issue of the relation between representation and ‘reality’, itself a problematic concept. She argues that:

The commonplace notion that Realism is a ‘styleless’ or transparent style, a mere simulacrum or mirror image of visual reality, is another barrier to its understanding as an historical and stylistic phenomenon…. Realism was no more a mere mirror of reality than any other style and its relation qua style to phenomenal data … is as complex and difficult as that of Romanticism, the Baroque or Mannerism. So far as Realism is concerned, however, the issue is greatly confused by the assertions of both its supporters and opponents, that Realists were doing no more than mirroring everyday reality…. These statements derived from the belief that perception could be ‘pure’ and unconditioned by time or place.

(Nochlin 1978: 14)

Central to her approach is the contention that perception is culturally conditioned.

Paris underwent massive architectural and cultural change in the first half of the nineteenth century, becoming, in effect, the first modern city. Modes of vision, and subject-matter appropriate for artists, were up for debate. Writing at that time, French poet and philosopher Baudelaire argued that the painter of ‘modern life’ should focus on the contemporary, upon flux and changes that had revolutionised everyday experience. He was among the first critics to support Realism’s challenge to previous aesthetic convention through the introduction of everyday subjects and ordinary people into pictures, and through the use of less ‘finished’ styles of painting than those previously expected or in keeping with the conventions of the French Academy of Art. Yet he made no particular connection between Realism and photography, dismissing the latter as an inferior form of artistic expression due to its mechanical nature. Thus his view of the potential and limitations of the camera seems in line with that, for instance, of critics who dismissed Courbet’s series of large-scale pictures of the rural community in Ornans on a number of grounds, including not only the everyday content of the image but also, as one critic put it, its appearance as ‘a faulty daguerreotype’. Arguably, photography influenced changing ways of seeing, albeit inheriting rather than subverting formal codes of picture-making.

Aesthetic conventions reflect broader sets of ideas. For instance, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, Western art used perspective as the principal system of visual organisation. Perspective involves a single, central viewing point. As film theorist Bill Nichols has suggested, ‘Renaissance painters fabricated textual systems approximating the cues relating to normal perception better than any other strategy until the emergence of photography’ (Nichols 1981: 52).

Some critics have argued that, in prioritising a single central viewing position, this system reaffirms individualism; in other words, it reflects the emphasis on individual actions and responsibilities that emerged within entrepreneurial capitalism. This contrasts with, for instance, political philosophies that foreground community and affirm collectivity. In this respect image-making conventions reaffirm a way of seeing that emphasises humans as individuals.

daguerreotype Photographic image made by the process launched by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France in 1839. It is a positive image on a metal plate with a mirror-like silvered surface, characterised by very fine detail. Each one is unique and fragile and needs to be protected by a padded case. It became the dominant portrait mode for the first decades of photography, especially in the United States. See also p. 130.

Focus, which refers to the use of the camera lens to give a ‘sharp’ image of objects in a particular area of the picture, interacts with perspective to support ways of seeing founded on geometric mapping of space. That camera optics conform with the rules of perspective meant that photographs could support composition in painting. Indeed, since one of the claims made was that photographs had the technical ability to reproduce from actuality more definitively than any other form of re-presentation, they could be referenced to enhance accuracy of representation. Arguably photography, itself a product of scientific and technological development, fitted within the spirit of modernity, as well as offering realist possibilities for depicting aspects of modern life.

Dorothy Kosinski (1999) The Artist and the Camera, Degas to Picasso, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Photography extending art

Photography provoked artists to re-examine the nature and potential of paint as a particular medium. Artists used cameras as a method of note-taking, in effect, a substitute for the sketchbook; but also as a means of exploring the physical and social world. Photography appeared to be more successful than painting in capturing likenesses. It also had a sense of instantaneity which painting lacked. It has been suggested that photography encouraged the Impressionist painters to experiment with manners of painting which could also capture a sense of moment, and of the passage of light. It is a truism that photography ‘released’ painting from its responsibility for literal depiction, allowing it to become more experimental. The developing relationship between the two media was considerably more symbiotic.

Photography encroached very directly upon genres of painting such as portraiture, not only taking over some of the work of painters, but extending the compass of the work. For instance, few could afford the time and cost of sitting for a painted portrait, but the professional studio photographer could offer a similar service much more cheaply. As such, portraiture became more generally available. Both high street studios and touring ‘jobbing’ photographers were common from the mid-nineteenth century (see ch. 3, pp. 153–8). This did not prevent a continuing hierarchy; the painted portrait was still commissioned by the wealthy and the aristocracy. But photographs did allow a greater number of people the status of seeing themselves pictured.

Another respect in which photography extended fine art was in its role as the re-presenter of art objects. It was no longer necessary to travel to Florence to see paintings commissioned by the Medicis, or to Egypt to contemplate classical architecture and artefacts; you could attend slide talks, or visit an exhibition, and view reproductions. Virtual reality, with its ability to seemingly travel around a painting or sculpture, viewing it from every possible angle, now makes the 2D black and white photograph appear highly limited as a means of showing an object. But, at the time, the possibility of seeing photographs of art was highly radical. Among the first illustrated art histories was an 1847 limited edition book of Spanish Art which included 66 calotypes by Fox Talbot (Scharf 1974: 160).

calotype Photographic print made by the process launched by William Henry Fox Talbot in England in 1840. It involved the exposure of sensitised paper in the camera from which, after processing, positive paper prints could be made. Not much used in England in the early days, because it was protected by Fox Talbot’s own patents, but its use was developed in Scotland, especially by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson.

Peter Galassi (1981) Before Photography, New York: MOMA.

Photographs also mirrored drawing and painting as pictures were made in accordance with established formal conventions. Before Photography, Peter Galassi’s comparative study of photographs and paintings within the same genres, draws our attention to continuities in aesthetic convention including compositional similarities. Likewise, in a more detailed manner, Mark Haworth-Booth examined the construction of River Scene, France by Camille Silvy, which was a combination print involving staging people within the rural setting (Figure 6.2). Not only does its composition echo traditional aesthetics, but the image replicates the romantic pastoral familiar within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscape painting.

Mark Haworth-Booth (1992) River Scene, France, Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum.

Colin Ford (2003) Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius, London: National Portrait Gallery.

6.2 Camille Silvy, River Scene, France, 1858

Two exposures combined to create the idealised rural scenario.

Indeed, staged photographs depicting idealised or mythical scenes became common from the 1850s onwards. Among earlier examples is the work of Julia Margaret Cameron (Ford 2003). She invited friends, family and servants to pose for her, either for portraits or as actors within her dramatic scenarios. She moved in Victorian middle-class circles, so this legacy includes portraits of well-known artists, writers and intellectuals, including Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin, many of whom visited her at her home, Dimbola Lodge at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where Tennyson also kept a house. Her tableaux, staged using friends, servants and local people as actors or characters, have particular significance. Cameron’s photography coincided with, and in some respects echoes, Pre-Raphaelite Art in Britain.6 Arguably, through mythologising the past, the Pre-Raphaelites offered a conservative response to modernity. Cameron likewise staged mythical scenes, referencing the seasonal and the cyclical, using costumes and titles to emphasise the poetic. Continuity rather than change was emphasised, and there is no hint of the modern metropolis in her work.

Julia Margaret Cameron was one of a number of serious ‘amateurs’ who figure prominently in the history of photography in Britain. Others were professional in that photography was their source of income. For instance, Swedish painter-photographer Oscar Rejlander set up a commercial studio in Victoria, London. But he became known for his allegorical compositions, in some cases on a scale equivalent to paintings. For example, ‘The Two Ways of Life’, involving a number of models playing roles that contrasted the religious (charity) with the debauched (gambling), was nearly three feet (one metre) wide. It was made from 30 separate photographs, entailing pre-visualisation on a grand scale. Such work reflected Victorian preoccupations, including religion, class and morality. This particular picture must have accorded with social concerns acceptable to the Establishment – it was purchased by Queen Victoria in 1857.

As these examples indicate, pictures made by Victorian photographers reflected conventions and tensions in other areas of Victorian Art. Indeed, photography itself impacted on such tensions and aesthetic developments. There was an emerging schism between those preoccupied with the realist representation particularly of the effects of nineteenth-century industrialisation and those with more expressive aspirations.

Mike Weaver (ed.) (1989b) British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A collection of essays on major photographers of the Victorian era.

Photography claiming a place in the gallery

In 1892 a number of photographers seceded from the Photographic Society of Great Britain – which in the 1870s and 1880s had emphasised the science and technology of photography, offering no support for the progress of photography as art. Led by Henry Peach Robinson, they formed the Linked Ring Brotherhood (which did include a few women). Robinson suggested:

It must be admitted by the most determined opponent of photography as a fine art that the same object represented by different photographers will produce different pictorial results and this invariably not only because the one man uses different lenses and chemicals than the other but because there is something different in each man’s mind which somehow gets communicated to his fingers’ ends and thence to his pictures.

(Harker 1988: 46)

Margaret Harker (1979) The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892–1910, London: Heinemann.

Naomi Rosenblum (2007) A World History of Photography, London, New York and Paris: Abbeville Press, ch. 7 on Pictorialism.

6.3 Henry Peach Robinson, The Lady of Shalott, 1860–1

A medieval tale interpreted allegorically.

Retrospectively labelled ‘pictorialist’, typically their imagery was soft focus, with metaphoric connotations, often drawing upon traditional fable and allegory (Figure 6.3). Again, the Pre-Raphaelites may have been one source of influence. Defining pictorial photography, Mike Weaver notes the aim:

to make a picture in which the sensuous beauty of the fine print is consonant with the moral beauty of the fine image, without particular reference to documentary or design values, and without specific regard to personal or topographical identity.

(Weaver 1986: Preface)

Membership of the Linked Ring was international, with photographers in other secessionist movements in Europe and the USA joining by invitation. In France the first exhibition of the newly formed Photo-Club of Paris was held in 1894; in Germany Hamburg became the centre for art photography. The Photo-Secession in New York, which was founded by Alfred Stieglitz (a member of the Linked Ring), was not established until 1902. Its objectives echoed the emphasis on the expressive potential of the medium which characterised the European movements. However, membership was restricted to Americans. Margaret Harker suggests that this was to facilitate the raising of standards within American photography to exceed those in Europe. Indeed, Europe was a source of influence on American art (the Armory show, 1913, a major exhibition of new work from America and Europe, particularly France, included work by over 300 artists). Stieglitz organised a number of exhibitions of work by European painters, introducing the Impressionists to New York and bringing what he considered to be the best in European art to America.7 He also founded and edited Camera Work, published from 1903 to 1917, described by Scharf as ‘undoubtedly one of the most influential journals ever published to be concerned equally with art and photography’ (Scharf 1974: 240).

Given the complexity of the relation between photography and painting, and the extent to which photographers since the mid-century had sought ‘artistic results’, why was there such emphasis on photography as art at the end of the century? One factor is that secessionism coincided with the development of technologies such as roll film and the box camera, which allowed the casual amateur to take photographs. In claiming artistic status, serious amateurs were also marking a distinction between themselves and the newly emerging mass market in photography.

6.4 Thurston Thompson, Exhibition Installation, 1858

Installation shot of the fifth exhibition of the Photographic Society of London, 1858. Photographs were framed and matted but crowded in blocks, some so high or low as to render them difficult to see.

Furthermore, dissent within photography, represented by the various secessionist groups, echoed dissent more generally within the arts. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the challenge posed by the Impressionists in painting, naturalism in theatre and, indeed, the birth of cinema.8 It also witnessed the development of lithographic techniques necessary for the mass reproduction of photographs in print. It was an era of considerable change, characterised by tension, debate and dissent. The pictorialists claimed the photograph as fine art, but this claim coincided with more radical challenges to dominant aesthetics. Pictorialism appears conservative now; to many people then it probably already seemed overly traditional.

English photographer Peter Henry Emerson became known for picturing life in East Anglia. Emerson’s emphasis was upon what he termed ‘Naturalistic Photography’, which was the title of his book published in 1889. He advocated realism and ‘truth-to-nature’ as opposed to the impressionist or the idealistic. For this reason he has been viewed by some critics as a forerunner of modern photography, although others see his work as too picturesque.⁹ Indeed, his concern with composition and differential focusing, including soft focus where appropriate, would have allowed him a place within Pictorialist circles had he so desired. Well-documented disputes with H.P. Robinson were probably the main cause of his exclusion.¹⁰

Aside from illustrated talks, the exhibition was the principal space for public display for all photographs.¹¹ Claiming photography as high art did not mean seeking different forms of display so much as claiming different cultural significance. Also it should not be assumed that the Victorian gallery operated like the contemporary gallery. Display conventions emphasised quantity of work, rather than the singularity of the specific image. Paintings, prints and photographs were hung floor to ceiling, with little regard to size or frames (Figure 6.4). Since it would be almost impossible to view those hung at floor or ceiling level, certain parts of the wall were, in effect, pride of place. An example of this may be found in the Round Room at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England, which has been hung to demonstrate the style of the gallery in 1885 (although with only about 50 paintings rather than nearly 90, as originally). The legacy – and difficulties – of this style of hanging may also be seen annually, particularly in the print sections, at the British Royal Academy Summer Show. Galleries were not painted white, and lighting was limited, in contrast to the visibility standards of today. Just seeing monochrome images must have been difficult, let alone discerning the detail of resolution and tonal contrast for which the Pictorialists strived. Indeed, the Pictorialists were instrumental in introducing changes to the gallery, emphasising the presentation of the picture. British photographer, Frederick Evans, is credited with the introduction of mounts in more muted colours in order not to distract from the delicacy of detail and imagery achieved through the various photographic printing and toning processes. Photographs were framed more uniformly and less heavily than previously; more wall space was allocated to each picture, and the hanging space restricted to the central area of the wall, not too high or too low. Although the concentration of photographs would surprise viewers accustomed to late twentieth-century gallery conventions, this represented new standards of display at the time.

See www.bmag.org.uk/ birmingham-museum for a virtual tour of the round room (accessed 10 December 2013) in which we can see the paintings hung three high.

The Modern Era

Modernism and Modern Art

The Modern Movement in the twentieth century has often involved painters and sculptors in an exploration of the idea that art has a purely formal language in which meaning is conveyed by shape, texture, colour and size. This exploration has been in a shifting dialogue with the traditional subjects of art, such as landscape, the figure and still life.

(Tate Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall, 1995)

Key galleries/collections: in Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, London; Tate Liverpool. The Tate, St Ives, holds a collection of English Modernism. In North America collections include MOMA, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Check international city art museum and gallery websites such as MACBA (Barcelona) or Pompidou Centre (Paris) for information on their collections.

In his essay ‘When Was Modernism’, cultural critic Raymond Williams noted that the idea of the modern began to take on what he terms ‘a favourable and progressive ring’ in the mid-nineteenth century (Williams 1989). He adds that, in its more specific use, ‘modern’ soon developed into a categorisation of a number of art movements broadly located between the 1890s and the 1940s, so that by 1950 it was possible to contrast ‘modern art’ with ‘contemporary art’. ‘Modernism’ increasingly came to refer to avant-garde art movements within which the emphasis was on the specific medium (paint, marble, bronze, photography …) and on experiments in forms of expression. Williams cited a number of factors which contributed to making the early twentieth century a key era of artistic change. These included the growth of publishing: he noted that the Futurists, Surrealists, Cubists, Constructivists and others announced the birth of their new art movement through manifestos published in magazines or journals. There were also sociopolitical factors: the dislocation of artists caused by war and revolution contributed a sense of the internationalism of art movements as artists migrated within Europe or to North America, spreading ideas and making work which suggested new ways of seeing. This was not new; since the Renaissance it had been common for artists to travel to work and study in major centres such as Rome, Florence, Paris, Berlin. Arguably travel or study abroad induces a more particular perspective on ‘home’. Of course this is not exclusive to artists, but it further enhances the fetishisation of artistic sensibilities, including the notion of the artist as somehow outside of modern society and therefore in a position to offer a particular perspective on it. There is some truth in this. For instance, Bill Brandt was born and brought up in Hamburg (although he later claimed to have been born in London). He studied in Paris (1929–31) with Man Ray, who himself was American. On his return from Paris Brandt made a number of studies which collectively investigated Englishness, including his well-known contrast between lifestyles ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ and pictures of stately homes and parks (Figure 6.5). Likewise, some decades later, Robert Frank, who was Swiss-born and an immigrant to the United States, produced his famous study of The Americans (Frank 2008).

6.5 Bill Brandt, Prior Park, near Bath, 1942

Straight photography used with attention to depth of field and compositional effect to describe the contours of the park, whilst emphasising the presence of the sculptural urn in the foreground.

The influential American critic Clement Greenberg wrote extensively on the subject of Modernism, taking the position that art is autonomous from its social context of production. In 1939, Greenberg had distinguished between avant-garde art, and ‘kitsch’, by which he meant the popular and the commercial ‘product of the industrial revolution which urbanised the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy’ (Greenberg 1939: 533). For him the avant-garde was the historical agency which functioned to keep culture alive in the face of capitalism. At this point in his development as a critic, Greenberg acknowledged the social and historical contexts in which the experience of art occurs, asserting that the avant-garde was a type of political engagement. He particularly emphasised medium and method of expression, arguing that:

the essence of Modernism lies … in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.

(Greenberg 1961: 308)

Greenberg’s unequivocal support for abstract art contributed to the international respect accorded to American Abstract Expressionism (including painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock). He condemned the literal in painting. By contrast, he welcomed it in photography:

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial…. The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

(Greenberg 1964: 131)

In his view the photograph was transparent, documentary, and marked by speed and ease (relative to painting): ‘All visible reality, unposed, unaltered, unrehearsed, is open to instantaneous photography’ (Greenberg 1964). This view clearly prioritised straight photography, by then well established in American documentary, over American photographic formalism which, as we shall see, in its mid-century heyday, was experimental and more gallery oriented.

H.H. Arnason And P. Kalb (2004) History of Modern Art, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 5th edition. Also see H.H. ARNASON (1988) A History of Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson. This revised and updated third edition includes photography.

Modern Art came to occupy a relatively autonomous, arguably elitist position which remained unchallenged until the 1960s (see Arnason and Kalb 2004; Arnason 1988). The internationalism of Modern Art rests on this notion of autonomy. If art is viewed as not context-specific it can be assumed that it communicates regardless of national and cultural differences. Artist-critic Victor Burgin has commented sardonically on such assumptions:

Art is an activity characteristic of humanity since the dawn of civilisation. In any epoch the Artist, by virtue of special gifts, expresses that which is finest in humanity…. The visual artist achieves this through modes of understanding and expression which are ‘purely visual’ – radically distinct from, for example, verbalisation. This special characteristic of art necessarily makes it an autonomous sphere of activity, completely separate from the everyday world of social and political life. The autonomous nature of visual art means that questions asked of it may only be properly put, and answered, in its own terms – all other forms of interrogation are irrelevant. In the modern world the function of art is to preserve and enhance its own special sphere of civilising human values in an increasingly dehumanising technological environment.

If these beliefs sound familiar – perhaps even self-evident – it is because they long-ago became part of the received common-sense we in the West learn at our mother’s knee.

(Burgin 1986: 30)

Modern photography

Nowadays modern photography is central to the archive. Historical connoisseurship has created a canon of photographers whose imagery is now highly regarded. This was not always the case. As is suggested elsewhere in this book, the main impetus in photography for most of the twentieth century was in documentary and photojournalism, studio portraiture and commercial art. From about 1905 (towards the end of Pictorialism) photography had little visibility in the art gallery in Britain. The work of British photographers – such as Bill Brandt and George Rodgers, whom we now celebrate – was not made initially for gallery exhibition, nor was it necessarily widely known. Bill Brandt’s now famous collection Perspective of Nudes was not published until 1961. Photography fared better elsewhere in Europe and in the USA; as we shall see, it was central to Surrealism, and also to American formalism.

Key collections include: The Print Room, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; George Eastman House, Rochester, USA; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; MOMA, New York. Use online search engines to locate archives in order to explore work from the period.

Broadly speaking, modern photography sought to offer new perceptions, literally and metaphorically, using light, form, composition and tonal contrast as the central vocabulary of the image. As Wollen noted:

During the 1910s the pictorialist paradigm began to crack. It moved, however, not towards greater intervention, but towards less. The straight print triumphed, shedding at the same time its fin-de-siècle aesthetic pretensions and overcoming its resistance to photography of record. Not only was the gum process rejected but also softness, darkness, blurriness and flou altogether. Following the crucial innovations of Strand and Sheeler, ambitious photography accepted illumination and sharpness. The way was cleared by the new machine aesthetic of modernism, which gave fresh confidence to the photographer and validated clarity and precision … pictorialism transmuted into a new modernist photography of geometrical compositions, machine forms, hard-edge design and clear delineation of detail.

(Wollen 1982: 180–1)

Wollen also observed that this was the era when the pictorial and documentary came together under the influence of new principles of composition. Photographers such as Florence Henri (France) or Paul Strand (USA) seem to have echoed the Cubists in their concern with form. In the case of many of Strand’s more famous photographs, people are depersonalised to the extent that they become anonymous figures in the cityscape (see, for instance, ‘Wall Street’, or ‘Central Park’, both 1915/1916). Wollen engages with the aesthetic implications of this new photography, arguing that the camera as machine does not in itself make the photograph more objective (and therefore less amenable to the expression of particular perceptions), ‘it simply substitutes discovery for invention in the traditional categories of classical aesthetics’ (Wollen 1982: 182). Here it is the process of realisation of the image which is at stake. Put more bluntly: creativity resides in the artist, not in the technology.

Photographers move geographically and aesthetically over a lifetime, changing their style and subject-matter, their work reflecting differing political contexts. Photography figured extensively within European avant-garde movements of the 1910s to 1930s, but in ways which did not necessarily pose images as art or lead to gallery exhibition. Reconstruction in Europe, subsequent to both the First World War and the Russian Revolution, offered obvious social and political context and a sense of immediacy. Photo-montage was commonly used as a means of direct political comment or more general reflection on social change. For instance, Herbert Bayer’s montage of hands and eyes within an urban setting might be interpreted in terms of supplication, or of constant surveillance, as well as referencing the hand and eye, observation and crafting, central to art (see the frontispiece to this book, p. xxii).

Discussing photography and architecture in Europe between the wars, Ian Jeffrey describes 1920s photographic modernism in Europe as engaged with social totalities and worthy of respect, ‘premised on selflessness, transcending local and even national affiliations’ (Jeffrey 1991: 60). By contrast, he notes more archaic subject-matter in the 1930s, with more romantic focus on secret worlds and marginalised people within the city. The imagery of Krull, Atget, Brassai can be viewed as more conversational, in a classic documentary manner, less experimental and less inclined to celebrate the promise of a new social order so eagerly supported in the first half of the 1920s. In effect, reminding us of the changing European political circumstances, Jeffrey proposes that optimism in the 1920s was superseded by a retreat into romanticism in the 1930s and, crucially, that this can be discerned in the shifting subject-matter and style of the image. Furthermore, work was made for publication in the then popular picture press (see ch. 2, p. 80), not for the gallery. The formal concerns and documentary subject-matter of the period were only later taken up by museums and art galleries.

Photo-eye: new ways of seeing

Shifting political circumstances were specifically reflected in the fortunes of the German Bauhaus (1919–33), which was founded in Weimar under the leadership of Walter Gropius. It moved to Dessau in 1925, by which time Herbert Bayer, photographer and typographer, was a key influence; and to Berlin in 1932, before disbanding in consequence of the election of Hitler’s National Socialists.12 The Bauhaus was a clear response to the destruction and dereliction witnessed during the First World War. ‘Bauhaus’ literally means ‘house for building’. Although multi-disciplinary, and concerned to integrate art, design and social purpose, architecture came to be the central concern. Taking the notion of reconstruction as the central tenet, Bauhaus theorists emphasised the relation between form and function, and stressed what they saw as a potential unity of art, design and the everyday (see Rowland 1990; Willett 1978). László and Lucia Moholy-Nagy were perhaps the best-known photographers associated with the Bauhaus. They stressed ways in which use of light, mechanical reproduction and the possibility of sensitive printing expressed the machine aesthetic of the Modern Age. In parallel with the Soviet emphasis upon photo-eye as the modern method of communication, Moholy-Nagy emphasised the relation between the mechanical nature of the camera, form, angle of vision, the use of light and visual perception, arguing that photography enhances sight in relation to time and space. Their radical approach was not uncontroversial. For instance, Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin expressed impatience with such experimentation, accusing the ‘new objectivity’ photographers of the Bauhaus of making the world artistic rather than making art mundane.¹³ As already noted, Benjamin was interested in photography as a democratic means of mass communication; he opposed formalism and abstraction because, he argued, experimentation in visual languages tends to be exclusive, and therefore elitist. The Bauhaus theorists viewed radicalism in photography in different terms. Like Benjamin, they opposed the reification of the individual artist. Unlike Benjamin, they stressed aesthetic experimentation, viewing this as central to new (and contemporary) modes of expression.

John Willett (1978) The New Sobriety, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, London: Thames and Hudson.

The following case study briefly considers the example of Soviet Constructivism in which art was seen as playing a role in building a new post-revolutionary society.

Case Study: Art, Design, Politics: Soviet Constructivism

A brief background

Discussing experimentation in Russian art from the 1860s to the early 1920s, Camilla Gray traces a number of strands within Russian Modern Art, ranging from spiritual interest in medieval icon painting to a realism which mirrored developments in other parts of Europe (Gray 1962). In the mid-nineteenth century, ‘The Wanderers’ – a group of Russian painters who, like their contemporaries in France, had broken from the Russian Art Academy – committed themselves to developing art which was about the everyday. Links with Paris, Munich and Vienna, especially immediately after the failure of the 1905 Revolution, led to a number of major exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg wherein Russian artists showed alongside their Western European contemporaries. By the time of the 1917 Revolution there was an identifiable avant-garde which, in the paintings of Kasimir Malevich, Livbov Sergeyevna Popova, El Lissitzky, paralleled Cubism in France in exploring the surface of the canvas and the nature of artistic language.

Christopher Phillips (ed.) (1989) Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings 1913–1940, New York: MOMA.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991) ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style’ in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Experiments in the social role of art

The success of the 1917 Revolution led to a new political context, one in which the nature and social role of art was hotly debated. A number of artists, led by Malevich, stressed the formal and spiritual supremacy of art in itself. A Russian form of Modernism! Others emphasised proletarian culture advocating a social role for artist-workers in the vanguard of Revolutionary change (see Phillips 1989; Solomon-Godeau 1991). The new situation encouraged a radical aesthetic. Painter-photographer Alexander Rodchenko asserted that:

Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception…. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium…. Photograph and be photographed.

(Rodchenko 1928)

For Rodchenko and the other Constructivists, new art involved, first, the depersonalisation of practice, that is, taking art out of the realm of individual artistic expression; second, logical laboratory study of form and composition; and third, analysis of rules governing the nature of artistic communication. Photography as a technological medium seemed particularly appropriate. Art set out to renegotiate itself as a type of practice which was utilitarian in foregrounding design and function, and selfless from the point of view of the artist. As such it represented the socialist ideals of the Revolution. Soviet Constructivism flourished for about a decade, before being superseded by Socialist Realism with its focus on glorification of the worker, the peasant and ‘heroes’ of the Revolution.

Constructivist photography

The Constructivists saw photography as a popular form which, through its usage in posters, magazines and publishing, could be at the forefront of taking new ideas to the people. Emphasising art’s post-Revolutionary responsibilities, Rodchenko stated that he was fed up with ‘belly button’ shots, by which he meant photographs composed conventionally, shot from waist level through

6.6 Alexander Rodchenko, White Sea Canal, from USSR in Construction 12, 1933

One example of the geometric style and the commitment to a new angle of vision, literally and metaphorically, that characterised Constructivism.

cameras with their viewfinder on top.14 He argued for full exploration of the geometry of the image which would, literally and metaphorically, engineer a new angle of vision (see Figure 6.6). Indeed, for Rodchenko photography was the true modern art. He argued that, unlike painting and sculpture, which he viewed as outdated, photography could express the reality of post-Revolutionary society. Thus, in Soviet Constructivism, the issue was not one of photography attempting to claim status as Art, but rather of a democratisation of artistic practices in the service of social and cultural revolution within which photography, by its enquiring nature and its ubiquity, could play a leading role.

Emphasis on form

The above case study offers an example of links between aesthetics and politics. Other links emerged, for instance, photography was implicated within Surrealism as an art movement (see case study, pp. 315–19). The modern emphasis on photo-eye, and on exploring the potential of camera vision, was also characterised by emphasis on form, in Europe through ‘New Objectivity’ particularly – although by no means exclusively – associated with German photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Here, as with Soviet Constructivism, photog raphers were exploring what could be revealed about objects, people and places, through new angles of vision and through experimenting with the possibilities afforded by film chemistry, camera and darkroom technologies (exploring the effects of aperture, or double exposure or direct print methods such as photograms, and so on). Through different uses of lenses and lighting (whether natural or studio set-ups) and also exploring fragmentation, photo montage, or trompe l’oeil (wherein an image tricks the eye) they sought to extend image-making potential. Within this, some artists specifically experimented with the qualities of natural and artificial light, testing effects and affects. Hungarian artist, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, emphasised photog raphy as a means not only of reproduction but also of discovery through detailed observation. He viewed light sensitivity, rather than pictorial representation, as the key characteristic of photography – literally ‘writing with light’ (Moholy-Nagy 1967). He invented photograms made by direct contact between objects and chemically sensitised paper that was exposed to light (Figure 6.7). Such imagery may be seen within a lineage dating from the early Victorian era wherein English photographer Anna Atkins first used contact photography for illustrating flora and fauna, and, as we shall see, contemporary cameraless photography. Moholy-Nagy was working at the Bauhaus in Germany at the same time as American photographer Man Ray, then living in Paris, developed ‘Rayograms’, using solarisation as a key element within the process. This simultaneity testifies to the experimental approach to photo graphic media, still images and moving imagery, that typified the European avant-garde of the era.

6.7 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, ‘Flower’, c. 1925–7

American formalism

Concern with form and precision can be seen at its extreme in what became characterised as American formalism, for example, in the work of the West Coast f/64 Group, founded in 1932 by a number of American photographers, including Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams, which was so-titled precisely to stress visual clarity. Their approach emphasised photography as a specific type of medium with its own optical, chemical and consequent aesthetic properties.¹⁵ This approach became – and remains – highly influential: it was mirrored in the work of East Coast photographers such as Harry Callahan and Minor White. Here European influences are also relevant; for instance, in 1946 Callahan went to teach for Moholy-Nagy at the ‘New Bauhaus’ in Chicago.¹⁶

The specificity of photographic seeing was commented upon by curator John Szarkowski in his discussion of the properties of photography wherein he

6.8 Edward Weston, Dunes, Oceano

Photographic seeing with emphasis on visual form and rhythm.

Unlike other photographic movements of the time, formalism sought gallery exhibition. Indeed, work by these photographers is now highly prized (and priced) and is included in all major photography archives as examples of one of the most significant photography movements of the twentieth century.17

Formalism could be defined as a tendency in American art, one that was taken up by the Art establishment. It was not announced as an art movement; rather the label is retrospective. The following case study considers photography in relation to a specific art movement, one which was constituted through manifestos – namely Surrealism. Intellectual currencies which informed Surrealism, its multidisciplinary nature, and subsequent comments and reappraisals, are noted. The case study offers an example of ways in which photography within specific broader movements may be analysed and contextualised. It also draws attention to the emphasis on aesthetic radicalism which typified Modern movements.

Case Study: Art Movements and Intellectual Currencies: Surrealism

What was Surrealism?

In pursuing academic analysis it is always relevant and interesting to trace links between the general intellectual climate of any era and aesthetic developments. Surrealism took the idea of the individual psyche as its theoretical starting point, thus particularly reflecting the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. Surrealism emphasised artistic processes whereby the imaginary can be recorded through automatic writing or drawing which would thus offer insights into the world of ‘thought’ and therefore disrupt taken-for-granted perceptions and frames of reference. For the surrealists, the artist was the starting point or material source of what was to be expressed. Freud had distinguished between the Id, the unconscious instinctual self, and the Ego, the largely conscious socialised self. Likewise, surrealists distinguished between ‘thought’ and ‘reason’, and aimed to bypass what they saw as the repressive nature of reason in order to express natural desires.¹⁸

Surrealism has been regarded as attempting to replicate the world of dreams. This is premised directly on Freud’s dream theory wherein he argued that analysis of the manifest content of dreams offers perception on subjective responses to experience. However, this is to oversimplify, as the aims of Surrealism were complex and, to some extent, changed over time. They included a direct attack on the nature of art; many of the early surrealists had also been involved in the First World War anti-art movement, Dada (Ades 1974). Both Dada and Surrealism were interventionist in challenging what was happening in the gallery. For instance, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in the gallery claiming that the location made it ‘Art’.

French poet André Breton described ‘A desire to deepen the foundations of the real; to bring about an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses’ (Breton 1978: 115). In the late 1920s, surrealists, led by Breton, called for adherence to Marxist dialectical materialism and to the ideal of revolution. This caused splits in the Paris-based group. But fundamentally, Surrealism was premised on challenging philosophical distinctions between interior experience and exterior realities. The radicalism of Surrealism lay in its aims: to disorient the spectator; to push towards the destruction of conventional ways of seeing; and to challenge rationalist frameworks. Surrealist aesthetics were not based on intention to shock, as has occasionally been suggested, although this was sometimes the effect.

Fine art movements transcend national boundaries, albeit reflecting particular national features. It is necessary to take into account the interplay between that which characterises specific social and political circumstances, and more general international contexts. For instance, the first Surrealist Manifesto was published in Paris in 1924, but the first International Surrealist Exhibition in Britain did not take place until 1936, by which time, arguably, the movement had lost its more experimental edge.19 Furthermore, a number of the original Paris-based group became members of the Communist Party. In Britain, with Roland Penrose as the key surrealist artist and exponent, the emphasis was more on visual form and psychoanalytic references than on political revolution.

Surrealist photography

How does lens-based imagery, including photography, fit within Surrealism? For Dali, the mechanical nature of the camera was liberating: ‘photography sets imagination free’, he claimed. Breton stated:

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought.

(Breton 1978: 7)

He also noted approvingly that ‘belief in an absolute time and space seems to be vanishing’, a reference to the photograph’s ability to picture the past, or the geographically distant, and welcomed the fact that ‘today, thanks to the cinema, we know how to make a locomotive arrive in a picture’ (1978: 7). Despite the involvement of artists such as Herbert Bayer, previously associated with the Bauhaus, where the emphasis was on observation, rather than on interiority, Surrealist photography clearly differed both in principle and in vision from the formalist ‘new objectivity’ of the Bauhaus or of Soviet Constructivism. Stressing the imagination as the source of insight on experience, the surrealists used photomontage, double exposure, rayographs, or solarisation, in order to pro duce disorienting imagery. Key surrealist artist-photographer, Man Ray, remarked that he painted that which cannot be photographed and photographed that which cannot be painted. The realism associated with the photograph was utilised, more-or-less playfully, as a tactic to contribute to the Surrealist provocation of new insight as objects, persons or locations were rendered in unexpected conjunctions or distortions or particular motifs doubled within the image.

6.9 Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, near Siwa, Egypt, 1937

An example of a Surreal juxtaposition of interior/exterior to achieve a dreamlike effect. Mirrors frequently feature, referencing reflection and also the self as source of angst, trauma and artistic creativity.

photomontage The use of two or more originals, perhaps also including written text, to make a combined image. A montaged image may be imaginative, artistic, comic or deliberately satirical.

rayographs, solarisation Aesthetic techniques associated in particular with the work of Man Ray and Lee Miller. Solarisation involves brief exposure to light during printing thereby altering tonal contrast. Rayographs or photograms are cameraless photographs, made by placing objects on photographic paper then exposing to light.

Critical reappraisals

Debates relating to (photographic) representation of the real, distortions, and emergent surreal effects, have figured within critical reappraisals of the movement. Asking ‘What is a surrealist photograph?’ David Bate argues that the ‘surreal’ refers not to a type of picture but to a type of meaning, an enigma (Bate 2004: ch. 1). This usefully reminds us that the surrealists were concerned to explore new ways of looking at the world that could draw attention to disturbing tensions or contradictions. In line with their interest in the everyday, their work was published in popular forms such as pamphlets or films as well as through exhibitions; indeed, as Bate notes, it was only in the 1930s, with several international surrealist exhibitions, that a perception of surrealism as primarily an art movement was consolidated (Bate 2004: 240). Nowadays installations of surrealist work commonly include displays of more ephemeral materials alongside paintings and larger-scale photography, making the point that Surrealism aimed to be a total revolution. Some critics, including Rosalind Krauss, focused on taken-for-granted realism of the photographic as the source of the coup d’oeuil effect which often operated to disorient the spectator. Krauss notes meta-phoric effects: ‘we see with a shock of recognition the simultaneous effect of displacement and condensation, the very operations of symbol formation, hard at work on the flesh of the real’ (Krauss and Livingston 1986: 19). In this formulation the shock emanates from the refusal of the transcriptive realism expected of photography. Ian Walker has argued that this position is problematic as it rests on a distrust of ‘straight’ photography, with its claims to authenticity as source of authority, and reflects a binary opposition between art and documentary still current in North America in the 1980s (Walker 2002). He suggests that in Europe documentary has never been polarised from other areas of practice such as Surrealism and argues that critical focus on a surrealist realism concerned with photography of the city (in their case, Paris) can contribute to more comprehensive evaluation of the import of Surrealist photography. This is further pursued for example in a collection of essays on Czechoslovakian surrealism (Fijalkowski et al. 2013).

David Bate (2004) Photography and Surrealism, London: I.B. Tauris.

Rosalind Krauss And Jane Livingston (1986) L’Amour Fou, London: Arts Council of Great Britain.

Ian Walker (2002) City Gorged with Dreams, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson And Ian Walker (eds) (2013) Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia. London: Ashgate.

Feminism also contributed to reappraisal of Surrealism, drawing both on debates about patriarchal attitudes in psychoanalysis and, more specifically, through new art history. Women figured in Surrealism as artists but, until recently, their position and contribution has been largely ignored (see Chadwick 1985, 1998). Reinstatement has focused attention on the work of many women surrealists, including photographers Lee Miller and Claude Cahun. Indeed, allegedly Lee Miller ‘discovered’ solarisation by opening a darkroom door, not realising that Man Ray was printing.

The feminist critique drew attention to the role of woman as muse. Considered from a feminist perspective, the expression of unconscious desires, central to surrealist imagery, seems merely an excuse for male heterosexual fantasy. ‘Woman’ is objectified. The distorted or fragmented female figure is a common motif. Hans Bellmer’s female dolls most obviously degrade and violate woman through her disfiguration or dismembering. Surrealists viewed such imagery as an expression of innate but repressed desire, but also used this to challenge bourgeois boundaries of permissibility and draw attention to the violence of war (ch. 4, p. 219 and Figure 4.11). Such images were thus simultaneously revolutionary and, in the light of feminist analysis, misogynistic.

Rudolf E. Kuenzli (1991) ‘Surrealism and Misogyny’ in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Owen Raaberg Surrealism and Women, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Late Twentieth-Century Perspectives

The American and European Avant-garde art movements of the 1960s emphasised idea and process over the conventions of painting and sculpture. The war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement in America, the development of feminist politics and theory, and the student protests of 1968, were reflected in works that were challenging to the status quo, to ideas about the artist as apolitical and working alone, and to art institutions.

(Comment and Commitment: Art and Society 1975–1990, Tate Gallery, London 1995)

A number of shifts occurred in the second half of the twentieth century which had ramifications for gallery practices. From the 1960s onwards the image world of the media became increasingly influential within art practices. Second, as art retreated from modernist preoccupations with form and medium, it once again engaged with social and political landscapes so that national and international developments such as civil rights movements, feminism, war, first world/third world relations figured as themes. Third, postmodern theory became a source of influence upon conceptual and interpretative processes, that is, the making and the reading of pictures.

Conceptual art and the photographic

Photography in the 1960s was centrally implicated in the expansion of the mass media, including fashion shots, album covers for long-playing (33⅓) records, photojournalism (the British Sunday Times colour supplement was launched in 1962). Two parallel developments in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to shifting the position of photography in the gallery. First, pop artists such as Andy Warhol (USA), Roy Lichtenstein (USA), David Hockney and Richard Hamilton (both British) started to use the photographic in order to reference and comment on lifestyles and consumerism.²⁰ But, unlike now, with photomedia (chemical or digital, still or time-based) taken for granted as media of artistic expression, photography then was still seen as inherently different (commercial, popular, documentary) from more established art forms such as painting and sculpture. This was no doubt in part because, to echo Roland Barthes, many elements within their pictures were déjà-lu (‘already read’). But this was the whole point. Raymond Williams suggested that the two dimensions of the modern, radical aesthetics and technological change, came together in the pictures of artists whose work engaged with the 1960s revolu tion in mass culture that was consequent upon developments in technology and communications such as broadcast television (Williams 1989). Arguably photography had contributed to creating a more visually sophisticated audience than had previously obtained: ‘that painters have used photographs does not legitimise photography; on the contrary, such cross-pollination has primarily helped painting remain a vital and effective medium’ (Coleman 1979: 121). Through Pop Art the photographic gained a presence in the gallery (see Alloway (1966) for an account of British Pop Art).

Second, in Conceptual Art the photographic became accepted as a valid medium of artistic expression. It was in the 1970s that American Art magazines, including Artforum and Art in America, took photography into their remit. As phototheorist John Roberts has argued:

Photography was the means by which conceptual art’s exit from Modernist closure was made realisable as practice. Yet photography itself was of little interest to most conceptual artists, producing a situation in which critical agency is given to the photographic image without photography becoming theoretically self-conscious as a medium. Photography, then, had an indirect function: it allowed conceptual art to reconnect itself to the world of social appearances without endorsing a pre-Modernist defence of the pictorial.

(Roberts 1997: 9)

Modernist theory had focused on the medium. By contrast, Conceptual Art stressed ideas. Artists were concerned to draw attention to the manner or vocabulary of expression; also, to contexts of interpretation, that is, the influence of the situation within which the spectator responds to the image or art object. Indeed, in a number of instances artists placed a statement about an art object in the gallery, thereby focusing attention on the idea, rather than the object (which might never have been actually made). From recent theoretical perspectives the notion of explicitly requiring spectator interpretation comes as no surprise. But, at the time, Conceptual Art, especially in its more critical or political forms, constituted a challenge to the art establishment (see Harrison and Wood 1993; also Green 1984). In conceptual photography the characteristics of the medium could be used as a part of the means of expression of an idea. Thus, for instance, Keith Arnatt’s sequence of digging himself into a hole in the ground (Figure 6.10) is obviously, at one level, a metaphoric reference to the well-known phrase. But the documentary idiom secures a sense that this event literally did take place.

Jonathan Green (1984) ‘The Painter as Photographer’ in American Photography, ch. 9, New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Conceptualism challenged the dominance of abstract formalism. It was not that it denied the significance of form. Rather, form was brought into play differently with a view to social, political, metaphysical, or simply humorous, comment. However, as photography became accepted within Conceptual Art, so attention came to be paid to photographs (pictorialist, formalist and documentary) and to photography history. In effect, Conceptual Art offered photography a bridge into the gallery.

6.10 Keith Arnatt, Self Burial, TV Interference Project, 1969

on paper, 467 · 467cm. The humour of the piece of work emanates from the realism attributed to photography. One way of testing the implication of choice of specific medium, and therefore the implied comment on the nature of the medium, is to imagine what interpretational shift might occur if the sequence had been, say, painted.

This era featured other challenges that, although incorporating some of the aesthetic characteristics of formalism, took for their starting point ideas that were anchored socially (rather than aesthetically). For instance, the ‘new topographics’ photographers, including Lewis Baltz (USA) and Bernd and Hilla Becher (Germany), explored the act of looking, as well as topographic features, through the detailed mapping of industrial edifices, or of locations.²¹ In the Bechers’ work similar images are blocked next to one another, thereby bringing to attention differences between examples within a particular type. Clearly this work drew on the emphasis upon detailed seeing typical of, for instance, the f/64 group and, as Susanne Lange argues, the Bechers did pay attention to aesthetics, but the new topographics, in charting the industrial landscape, implied a social and environmental questioning which did not figure in American formalism (Lange 2006). Land art also dates from this period. Here, the photograph is the record, and the final product, of an engagement with or intervention within the rural. Work by British artists, including Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, became well known not through direct experience of the results of their investigations and interventions, but through their photographs. The artist’s journey takes place in specific time. A sculptural intervention ameliorates, deteriorates, and becomes reabsorbed within the environment. Ultimately only the picture remains.

Photography and the postmodern

From the 1970s onwards there were significant developments in art practices founded in a new centrality of critical ideas to the visual arts, and in what was often referred to as a ‘return to the figurative’. Of course the figurative had never entirely disappeared. The ‘return’ was more a question of a regeneration of interest in the representational on the part of curators and critics, now moving beyond modernist preoccupations with the specificity of each medium. New art also posited questions of representation. By the 1980s art had ceased to be self-obsessed, was looking outward beyond the boundaries of the gallery, taking on contemporary issues and making a range of references that ruptured modernist assertions of the autonomy of art.

Critical theorist, Douglas Crimp, suggested that photography contributed centrally within this challenge to the museum and gallery:

From the parochial perspective of the late-1970s art world, photography appeared as a watershed. Radically reevaluated, photography took up residence in the museum on a par with the visual arts’ traditional mediums and according to the very same art-historical tenets. New principles of photographic connoisseurship were devised; the canon of master photographers was vastly expanded; prices on the photography market skyrocketed. Counterposed against this reevaluation were two coincident developments: a materialist history of photography and dissident photographic practices … taken together and brought into relation, they could tell us something about Postmodernism, a term coming into wide use at just that time.

(Crimp 1995: 2)

Thus, from the 1970s on, emphasis upon conceptual ideas and critical practices contributed to creating a place for the photographic within the gallery. Furthermore, photography contributed to the regeneration of art practices. The sources of this shift are complex. First, the radicalism of 1968 in Europe heralded a Left cultural agenda in the 1970s. This underpinned critical interrogation of dominant cultural practices. Examples may be found in the art of Victor Burgin and Mary Kelly, both of whom, notably, wrote about photographic practices as well as using photography as a medium. Second, and as a part of this, modern theory had begun to be questioned across many realms of academic enterprise, from the scientific to the aesthetic. In art theory this questioning took off earlier in North America than it did in Europe. Thus a further influence was new American art, including photographically based work by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. (See Nairne 1987: ch. 4; Kruger 1983, 1990; Sherman 1997.) Fourth, developments including community arts, performance art and ‘happenings’ signified a broadening of art practices. In addition, particularly in Britain, there were energetic claims from within the documentary movement for the artistic integrity of the medium, and such claims were further fuelled by the commercial success of leading British 1960s photographers (such as David Bailey and Cecil Beaton).

David Campany (2003) Art and Photography, London: Phaidon.

David Campany’s Art and Photography (2003) focuses on photography within art practice from the late 1960s onwards and brings together images, sources and documents in order to interrogate and reflect upon late twentieth-century histories and developments. The book offers a very useful compendium of materials and images marking the diversity of issues, styles, methods and content that characterised the era; over 160 artists are included, almost all of whom are based in Western cultures, and work is situated through reference to then contemporary documents and debates. For instance, documentation includes an interview from 1989 by photography historian and critic Steve Edwards with Martha Rosler, originally published in Ten/8 magazine. The book opens with discussion of the contradiction between deploying popular media – film, video, photography, postcards – in order to effect political intervention yet showing work in the (privileged) space of the art gallery. Campany suggests that ‘every significant moment in art since the 1960s has asked, implicitly or explicitly: “What is the relation of art to everyday life?”’ (Campany 2003: 11) and that photography as an everyday medium has lent itself to such explorations. As a compendium it is useful for his introductory historical and critical overview, although there is no sustained address to issues of aesthetics, to the social role of the artist, or to the changing status accorded to photography as contemporary art – a point to which we shall return.

Developments in art education also reflected an era of change. For instance, in England in the 1970s, incorporation of art schools within the polytechnic (later university) sector involved changing the erstwhile ‘liberal studies’ agenda to a more purposeful critical appraisal of art history. Art school graduates, who subsequently formed the new generation of gallery curators, were increasingly well informed and interested in exhibiting a greater range of ideas-based work. A number of new degrees in photography became established wherein ‘theory’ meant thinking about photography semiotically, and in relation to questions of identity, gender and representation.22 Not only had photography moved into the art gallery but critical ideas had moved onto the agenda in photography education; an agenda that was increasingly influenced by then radical feminist and post-colonial perspectives and critiques that linked to everyday themes and concerns. By the 1990s the implications of the digital were also central.

Discussing pluralism in American art in the 1970s, critic Corinne Robins comments on the increasing eclecticism of photography, noting:

Photographers concentrated on making up or creating scenes for the camera in terms of their own inner vision. To them, reportage as such had become the job of the video artist, who had the heritage of cinéma vérité behind him [sic]. To the 1970s camera people, realism belonged to the earlier history of photography and, as seventies artists, they were embarked on a different kind of aesthetic quest. It was not, however, the romantic symbolism of photography of the 1920s and 1930s, with its emphasis on the abstract beauty of the object, that had caught their attention, but rather a new kind of concentration on narrative drama, on the depiction of time changes in the camera’s fictional moment. The photograph, instead of being presented as a depiction of reality, was now something created to show us things that were felt rather than necessarily seen.

(Robins 1984: 213)

Central to these developments was an emphasis on construction, the forging, staging or fabrication of images. Such pictures are preconceived by the artist. Constructed photography included photomontage, staged imagery, image-text works, slide-tape installations, photographs derived from land art; indeed, any photographic imagery wherein the conceptual engineering of the artist is clearly evident. Artists as divergent in concerns as Bernard Faucon, Andreas Gursky, Mary Kelly, Peter Kennard, Barbara Kruger, Richard Long, Mari Mahr, Cindy Sherman, Susan Trangmar, Jeff Wall and Joel-Peter Witkin all fall within this broad category. The notion of construction derived from two sources: first, the idea that art can intervene politically, as in the example of the Soviet Constructivists or of the German monteurs. Second, in postmodern terms, ‘construction’ directly related to deconstruction theory and practices. Both approaches refuse to take the world at face value. Constructed imagery in effect critiques what critic Andy Grundberg defined as ‘concentration on the literal surfaces of things and on subject matter that seems to speak for itself’ (Grundberg 1990a: 82).

fabrication The crafting of images which have been staged or appropriated and adjusted for the camera. The term is more common within American photography than European, referencing the craft base of the medium. It stands by contrast with ‘constructed’ imagery, which inflects the directorial approach in more political terms through referencing both Soviet Constructivism and theories of deconstruction.

staged images Described by American critic A.D. Coleman as ‘falsified documents’, this refers to the creating of a scene for the camera (as in staging within theatre).

image-text Pictures within which visual imagery and written text are juxtaposed in order to effect a play of meaning between them.

For instance, in the example of Karen Knorr’s series Villa Savoye, which forms part of a larger collection of Fables, the artist explores bourgeois lifestyles (Figure 6.1, p. 290). This is obviously a carefully planned image (we would not just come across this scene, with these particular lighting conditions, and capture it photojournalistically – although, of course, the birds in flight must have been opportunistic). It represents something of the architecturally constructed atmosphere of the Villa, and the bird, looking out of the photograph, stands in metanymically for humans enjoying the view. This is underscored by the pictorial effect of the framing of the trees through the rooftop wall. The image uses the indexical qualities of the photographic – that is, the way in which the photograph draws upon actuality – as part of its vocabulary of expression, but only a part of it. It invites the spectator to actively read the image and implicates questions of ownership, locality and identity through its reference to the mansion and the landscape. The title merely indicates location, leaving the reader to respond to the picture within the picture.

There are a number of methods whereby the interpretive latitude of an image may be contained. These include photomontage, sequencing and image-text techniques. We also have to take account of factors beyond the image itself. The mounting and framing of pictures – whether single images, or series, or sequences – is not neutral. Framing contributes to the rhetoric of the image through delineating the edge of the picture, that which is put into the frame. It also acts as a margin between the work and the wall on which it hangs. The established convention in post-Renaissance Art of framing paintings means that the frame also signifies the special status of a picture. However, the meaning of the frame is ambiguous: from the point of view of the gallery wall it is a part of the picture, but from the point of view of the picture it dissolves into the wall. In relation to the single image, this ambiguity is relatively clearly comprehended. Within sequences, or blocks of images, the play of the frame is more complex: the frame not only plays between the setting and the image, but also interacts with other frames within the grouping of pictures.

Written text commonly accompanies both single pictures, and series, groups or sequences. Written text includes titles, captions, artists’ statements, poetry, or forewords which accompany an exhibition or book publication. Titling, and the signature of the artist, contribute to the claim for the status of the image as art. Titles may be cryptic, or metaphoric, operating to extend resonances, or they may be primarily descriptive. For instance, a title such as Rome, 1975 or Waiting Room specifies place or type of location. However, the caption does not simply anchor; writing constitutes a further signifier within the complex interaction of discourses with which the spectator engages. For instance, the title Rome at the very minimum means something different to an Italian than to someone of another nationality. Titles, or captions, simultaneously anchor, and become implicated in, play of meaning. The refusal of a title, as in Untitled, is likewise not neutral. This implies that the image is to ‘speak for itself’.

Writing operates complexly. This is often particularly so in constructed imagery within which text is montaged as an integral element. Here the verbal is articulated not only as a poetic reference but also as a visual element. Colour, handwritten or typographic style, placing, scale, prominence – all contribute to how we read the overall piece. Likewise, artists’ statements do not simply contextualise, or determine a position from which the work is to be read, although, of course, they do offer this. If an artist is viewed as a special sort of seer, offering particular insights into the world of experience, then his or her statement contributes to this claim for authority.

Developments do not proceed in an orderly and coherent fashion. Whilst digitally produced work takes its place alongside the straight photograph and constructed imagery, the relative lack of photographs in a number of major museum collections indicates that photography is still seen by some as a lesser art. The corollary of the new emphasis upon ideas and critiques was that, from the mid-1980s onwards, straight photography found itself positioned ambig uously. On the one hand, museums established photography sections.23 On the other hand, it became more difficult to maintain independent specialist spaces and organisation; the foothold established in the 1970s had come to seem precarious. This was expressed partly in the practical issue of scale. Photography galleries had been designed to accommodate the standard-format image. A number of the newer photo-media galleries, which were larger scale (often converted from disused industrial buildings), became key institutions within the new debates. The standard photograph became harder to show, smaller pictures being dwarfed within cavernous ware house – now, gallery – spaces (many of which subsequently embraced video installation and digital experimentation).

Women’s photography

The mere mention of the phrase ‘women’s art’ sends shivers down the art establishment spine – more radical feminists on the war-path! Feminism, advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of equality, is usually misinterpreted to mean exclusively female, probably radical and, more than likely, shaven-headedly lesbian. It’s curious how this misconception perpetuates!

(Libby Anson, Untitled #7, Winter 1994/1995)

The resurgence of feminism in the 1970s challenged the patriarchal establishment. This challenge included a set of questions about women, representation and art, which led to critical work on three key fronts. First, examination of ways in which women have been represented in Western art. Within patriarchy, active looking has been accorded to the male spectator. ‘Woman’ becomes the object of his gaze. Although this does not only concern ‘the nude’, the representation of naked women for visual consumption formed one obvious focus for accusations of sexism in visual culture. It was argued that the term ‘nude’, central to the visual arts tradition, lent a guise of respectability to the practice of naked women being objectified for fantasy libidinous gratification. Second, feminist art historians pursued the archaeo logical project of rediscovering and drawing attention to the work of women artists, previously ignored or marginalised. Third, women in art schools, galleries and publishing asserted a right for space devoted to contemporary women artists. The revolution took several forms. In art education the art history curriculum was brought under scrutiny, and various guises whereby sexism figured in studio relations and practices were challenged. Alongside this, the demand was made that galleries and publishers should examine their record in exposing the work of women artists – and set out to rectify it. Protests were mounted against exhibi tions showing work deemed offensive to women.

*Question:*	Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
*Answer:*	Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female

(Guerilla Girls)

Key resources: IRIS International Centre for Women in Photography, www.irisphoto.org/live/index.asp; Women in Photography International, www.womeninphotography.org.

This revolution obviously influenced photography, itself forging space in the gallery. Three projects stand as key examples. They relate, respectively, to the diverse history of photography, modern aesthetics and postmodern gallery-based practices. First, in Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present, writer-curator Val Williams traced and surveyed a range of British work, from high street studio portraiture to fashion photography, from the documentary and photojournalistic to the snapshot, and to contemporary feminist practices. The purpose was to expose the names and work of women photographers, previously hidden from history, and to demonstrate the diversity of practices within which they had been active. The exhibition, with its broad remit, opened in 1986 at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the NMM); significantly, a media organisation (as opposed to an art gallery). It contrasts with the second example, Constance Sullivan’s selection, also entitled Women Photographers, which took an international approach (albeit with some emphasis on North American artists) and more specifically recuperated women as artists in terms of the precepts and principles of modern photography. From the point of view of considering photography and the art gallery in the context of contemporary, postmodern practices, the third example, Shifting Focus, curated by Susan Butler, was of central import for both its focus upon contemporary work made for the gallery and its internationalism. Most significantly, Shifting Focus posited the question: What happens when women look? If, traditionally, women have been the object of the gaze, the viewed rather than the viewer, the represented rather than the author of representation, what happens when she takes a more active role? Butler was concerned to explore ways in which, in exercising the right to look, women alter the terms of visual culture which, as feminist art historians have argued, was premised upon unequal viewing relations.

Val Williams (1986) Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present, London: Virago (second edition published as The Other Observers: Women Photographers 1900 to the Present). This was researched and curated for the National Museum of Media, Bradford, Yorkshire as a touring show with accompanying book, although it is the text which has become the classic introduction to the recuperation of a range of types of work by women.

Constance Sullivan (ed.) (1990) Women Photographers, London: Virago. This book concentrates on high-quality reproduction of photographs by women historically, with a view to reclaiming their work for the canon.

Susan Butler (1989) Shifting Focus, Bristol/ London: Arnolfini/Serpentine. The catalogue comments internationally on contemporary work by women.

Also Diane Neumaier (ed.) (1996) Reframings, New American Feminist Photographies, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

It has become commonplace for exhibitions to include work by women artists. But perhaps the strength and confidence of women’s work was most evident in a shift to more specifically themed exhibitions, for example, self-portraiture, war, the family, lesbian identity. The presence of women photographers in the gallery is now taken for granted. Furthermore, the shift in focus influenced new themes within the work of male photographers.24

The influence of women’s photography thus went beyond simply securing a rightful place for work by women. Feminist theory posed a more fundamental critique of aesthetic conventions and practices. This led to determined retrieval of the terms of visualisation. As American artist Barbara Kruger asserted in one of her renowned photomontages, ‘we will not play nature to your culture’. Women’s photography moved beyond critiques of representation to exploration of relations of looking and questions of identity.

Questions of identity

Poststructuralist thinking opposes the notion that a person is born with a fixed identity…. It suggests instead that identities are floating, that meaning is not fixed and universally true at all times for all people, and that the subject is constructed through the unconscious in desire, fantasy and memory.

(Bailey and Hall 1992: 20)

One of the functions of art is to explore and comment upon individual and social worlds of experience. Historically art has been understood as contributing to the myths and discourses which inform ways of making sense of and responding to cultural phenomena. From medieval church frescos to academic history paintings artists have told stories which help us to interpret our world of experience. Stories – such as the religious or the historical – help us to locate ourselves within sociopolitical hierarchies.

David A. Bailey and Stuart Hall (eds) (1992) Ten/8 2(3), Critical Decade.

Psychoanalytic theory suggests that images, through offering points of identification, offer fantasy resolutions for subjective angst. Identification, in this context, refers to processes whereby the individual subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of that which is seen, and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model which the other – in this instance the image – provides. Personality is constituted through such imaginary identifications. Thus art may be seen as feeding our need for a clear sense of identity and of cultural belonging. This is most evident in portraits that show us to ourselves as well as to a wider social world. As a genre, historically portraiture also testified to the status of the person(s) depicted, since only those of relative wealth could afford to employ an artist for the several days required for making a painting, In the formal portrait the skill lies in representing something of the looks and character of the portraitee(s). As David Bate has remarked,

If the photographic portrait is a shorthand description of a person, then portraiture is more than ‘just a picture’, it is a place of work: a semiotic event for social identity. Portraits fix our identity in what is essentially an art of description.

(Bate, 2009: 67)

How someone is depicted influences their sense of self. Likewise, the contexts within which people are represented suggest something of social place and hierarchies. Identity is neither uniform nor fixed; rather it is subject to challenge and shift leading to desire for reassurance within a continuous flow of apprehension, uncertainty and (temporary) reassurance of social role, status, location and belonging.

The emphasis on the body in 1990s gallery art seemed also linked to issues of identity in a changing world wherein communications are increasingly virtual and global. Cyberculture, with its related dislocation of place and location, seemingly enhanced curiosity about actual physical space and presence. For example, Boris Mikaihlov’s lifesize pictures of people caught in the effluent of the post-Soviet economy attracted international attention not only because of their photographic realism but also because of a type of exoticism of degradation. Rineke Djikstra’s photographs of bullfighters stained with blood or of naked women who have just given birth, with their babies (Figure 4.18, p. 230) tell of real physical exertion in an era of prosthetics. Cindy Sherman’s more recent masquerades, perfomances which take the body as a starting point for construction of the image, arguably link to similar concerns.

Identity and the multi-cultural

Issues of identity are of double relevance to people who see themselves as outside of dominant culture, if not marginalised by it. For instance, in Britain, in the early 1980s context of Thatcherism, and inner-city racial tension, key exhibitions and initiatives included Reflections of the Black Experience (curator, Monika Baker, Brixton Art Gallery, 1986); as a primarily documentary show, it offered evidence not only of the diversity of black experience in Britain but also of the presence of good black photographers. The Association of Black Photographers, later Autograph, was formed soon after this to promote the work of black photographers across a range of fields. Meanwhile, D-Max (curator, Eddie Chambers) showed work by British Afro-Caribbean photographers made for the gallery.

Eddie Chambers (1999) ‘D-Max: An Introduction’ in Run Through the Jungle, Annotations 5, London: INIVA.

Sunil Gupta (ed.) (1993) Disrupted Borders, London: Rivers Oram Press.

Racism, the post-colonial context and the desire to explore ethnic difference, meant that questions of identity figured centrally in Black art – and continues to do so. Obvious avenues of exploration include the dislocated family, diaspora, internationalism, and media representation of ‘the Other’. Exhibitions which explored such themes included Disrupted Borders, which connected work from widespread parts of the world – including Finland, India, North America – all of which in some way engaged questions of cultural integration or marginality (Gupta 1993); and Mirage, which included work, in a range of media, by black artists from Europe and North America (Bailey, ICA, 1995). A number of British-based photographers became prominent within new Black art practices. These include Ingrid Pollard, whose work posed questions of history and heritage (see p. 308), and David A. Bailey, now senior curator at Autograph, whose 1987 series on the family album was the subject of the following evocative description:

Against the background of a ‘Made in England’ clock and a montage of snapshots, a family album is displaced by a Black magazine which in turn is displaced by the screaming headlines of a tabloid newspaper. As the clock ticks on, marking the shifting historical context, the changing assemblages of images address the contradictions between private and public representations of race.

(Tawadros in Haworth-Booth 1988: 41)

British explorations of post-colonial identity typically interlinked the political and personal. Two themes predominated: first, the legacy of colonialism; and second, what it is to be British, regardless of ethnic identity, given ‘New Europe’.

Key resources in Britain: Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA), London, an umbrella organisation coordinating multi-cultural initiatives now working in tandem with Autograph. The Stuart Hall Library at Rivington Place, London, offers a specialist library and archive.

Post-colonial preoccupations are clearly marked in Black art, but likewise figure within Scottish and Irish art. To take an example: black artist David Lewis pictured the map of Africa as a chessboard for a game played by European players (D-Max). Scottish artist Ron O’Donnell depicted a map of Scotland with a noose round the Highlands (I-D Nationale, Portfolio Gallery, Edinburgh, 1993). The point is similar. Likewise in North America, Afro-American photographers have been concerned to trace particular heritage(s) exploring visual iconography as well as personal and political histories. For example, Stephen Marc’s project, ‘Awakened in Buffalo’, traces escape routes for slaves seeking freedom by reaching the northern states or Canada; his related series, ‘Soul Searching’, which is digitally montaged, acknowledges his African American heritage and identity by including himself somewhere in each picture. The story is told; the aesthetic allows the particular personal resonance to be incorporated.

Wendy Watriss and Lois Zamora (eds) (1998) Image and Memory: Photographs from Latin America 1866–1994, Austin: University of Texas Press. Drawing from the more than 1,000 images exhibited at Houston’s FotoFest in 1992, this book documents the work of 50 photographers from 10 countries. The photographs range from the opening of the Brazilian frontier in the 1880s to documentary images from El Salvador’s recent civil war to works of specifically aesthetic and experimental nature.

Given current global tensions and mobility, there is now increased interest in work by – sometimes exiled – artists from Asia and the Middle East, as well as from former Soviet bloc nations. In North America, the end of the twentieth century also witnessed developing interest in Latin American photography. This partially reflects increasing Hispanic population and influences, especially in the southern states of the USA. But the interest in what the New York Times, in reviewing Image and Memory by Watriss and Zamora, described as ‘vast national subconscious made visible and waiting to be fathomed’, begs more complex explanation. Arguably it also reflects neo-colonial concerns with identity; Latin America geographically is both the closest threat to the USA’s political supremacy and also offers the nearest exotic from the point of view of commerce, travel and fascination with other cultures. Research, exhibition and publishing of historical and contemporary photography from Central and South America feeds this fascination in the USA.

Case Study: Landscape As Genre

I make landscapes, or cityscapes as the case may be, to study the process of settlement as well as to work out for myself what the kind of picture (or photograph) we call ‘landscape’ is. This permits me also to recognize the other kinds of picture with which it has necessary connections, or the other genres that a landscape might conceal within itself.

(Wall 1995, in Morris 2002: 2)

In offering a brief overview of one genre of practice, we not only trace historical developments but also draw attention to ways in which clusters of themes and concerns, none of which are exclusive to any specific genre, come together to characterise a particular genre.

Genre

Developed within film studies to reference groups of movies of a similar sort (such as the Western, melodrama, film noir), the term ‘genre’ refers to types of cultural product. But genre is not simply a classification. Genres carry with them specific sets of histories, practices, ideological assumptions and expectations, that shift over time to take account of changing cultural formations. We have chosen the example of landscape, but the principal point about change and continuity can be examined in relation to any genre.

Landscape as genre

There is a key distinction between ‘land’ and ‘landscape’. In principle, land is a natural phenomenon, although most land, especially in Europe, has been subjected to extensive human intervention (creating fields, planting crops, shoring up the coastline, and so on). ‘Landscape’ is a cultural construct. It dates from seventeenth-century Dutch painterly practices, but became central to English painting and also became a method for artists and topographical draughtsmen to explore territories elsewhere. Eighteenth-century English landscape painting did not simply echo the Dutch, but re-articulated the genre to incorporate the increasing emphasis in Britain on technological achievement (Bright 1990) – a clear example of accommodation to particular cultural circumstances!

Landscape can be defined as vistas which encompass both nature and the changes that humans have effected in the natural. Broadly interpreted, this includes sea, fields, rivers, gardens, buildings, canals, and so on. It thus encompasses emblems of property ownership (such as fences), or of indus trialisation (such as mines or factories). Landscape pictures rarely depict work or, if they do so, they romanticise the rural labourer. For the English aristocracy, landed gentry and nineteenth-century industrialist, land ownership symbolised heredit ary status or entrepreneurial success. As John Berger has argued, landscape paintings operated to reassure this status (Berger 1972a).

6.11 Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993

Jeff Wall’s landscapes (Figure 6.11) are staged images, usually shown as large lightboxes, which reflect upon landscape as a genre within fine art. His digitally assembled pictures are meticulously staged in accordance with standard conventions of perspective and the ‘golden rule’ (strictly applied this refers to the one-third/two-thirds horizontal division of the canvas between sky and land/water, designed to induce a sense of harmony). Often they reference other traditions in landscape imagery, for instance, the woodcuts of Japanese artist, Hokusai. But Wall’s images always include the unexpected; in A Sudden Gust of Wind it is the uncontrollable effect of the wind as papers are thrown into the air. The gesture interrupts the serenity otherwise implied.

Landscape photography

In considering landscape as an example of a genre within photography, we are concerned first to identify typical aesthetic and sociopolitical characteristics of landscape imagery; and second to explore ways in which the genre has accommodated change, reinvented and reinvigorated itself over time. Landscape photography has largely inherited the compositional conventions of landscape painting. Typically, landscape photographs are a lateral rectangle – it is no accident that ‘landscape format’ has come to describe photographs in which the width is greater than the height. Compositionally, the ‘golden rule’ of one-third/two-third horizontal proportions is usually obeyed, as are the rules of perspective.25

Landscape photography is founded as much in the documentary endeavours of travelling photographers, at home and abroad, as in the gallery. Thus there are two key lines of inheritance within the genre: on the one hand, straight photographs, topographical in intent, on the whole echoing the composition of the classic landscape painting, and, on the other hand, more pictorial images constructed in accordance with a preconceived idea, be it poetic, mythological or critical in import. As with all genres, landscape also reflects new aesthetic ideas; for instance, surrealist dreamlike states (Figure 6.9, p. 317) or the Constructivist compositional radicalism based on the ideal of a new angle of vision (Figure 6.6, p. 311).

Historical development and change

By the nineteenth century, especially in Europe, ‘landscape’ also stood as an antidote for the visual and social consequences of industrialisation, offering a view of nature as therapeutic, a pastoral release from commerce and industry. Art movements such as Romanticism and Pictorialism reflected such changing attitudes, ignoring ways in which the industrial actually impacted on the visual environment. Romanticism in painting reified the rural idyll, albeit emphasising the spiritual and the metaphysical. This reification is reflected in photographs of the time, for instance, early mountainscapes. On a less sublime scale, pastoral imagery such as Camille Silvy’s River Scene, France (Figure 6.2, p. 299) made from two separate exposures and using people as models, offers a carefully staged myth about the calm, leisure and pleasure of the countryside. There are several examples of seascapes, for instance, by Gustave le Grey (also French) wherein combination printing has, similarly, been used to effect pleasing scenes; for instance, clouds above serene waters. Both examples invite the viewer to reflect upon the rural or seascape and both reflect idealist notions of harmony.²⁶

As we have seen, such stagings are taken further in Pictorialism, within which people were frequently depicted in close relation to what was perceived as ‘natural’ environment, with no stated documentary or topographic location. Thus, for instance, The Lady of Shalott is re-presented by Henry Peach Robinson as a picturesque tale (Figure 6.3, p. 301). Here landscape becomes the background against which a story is staged.

Unlike most of Europe, the American West is characterised by vast open spaces. Nineteenth-century pioneers, such as Carleton Watkins, whose work is now central to the photography archive, were employed to chart land prior to its opening up by, in this case, the laying of the Pacific Railroad. Mary Warner Marien notes the differing cultural contexts within which European and American landscape photography developed:

Where English and European amateurs might craft an antimodern, picturesque photograph that lamented the decline of an agriculturally based society, Watkins synthesized a soaring sublime based on wilderness…. The viewer of his photographs is often flung out over and above dizzying, deep chasms. The immediate sensation is one of transcendence and invincibility, a feeling profoundly different from the quiet reflection and nostalgic passivity evoked by much European amateur landscape photography. Indeed, a sense of the sublime, vested in natural wonders like Niagara Falls and Yosemite but transferable to human works like the railroad, is characteristic of nineteenth-century American cultural life.

(Warner Marien 1997: 95–6)

New aesthetics

Modern landscape photography remains particularly associated with American photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White and Edward Weston, who subscribed to the notion of pure photographic seeing. Modern photographers stressed the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of landscape, producing elegant and elegiac abstract imagery. Edward Weston’s images, in which the sharpness of the realisation of the photograph is tempered with the rhythm of form, offer prototypical examples (Figure 6.8, p. 314).

Genres typically are characterised by continuity through change, by an ability to re-form in order to incorporate new aesthetics and circumstances. Landscape is no exception. Now fences, the railway, brick walls, motorways, pylons, signs and hoardings have all, variously, become rendered as a part of traditional imagery and myth. Of course, ‘translations’ are involved: landscape photographs are often monochrome, the countryside represented in terms of shape and tonal gradings. The fundamental point is that the photograph re-inflects subject-matter in terms which reflect current cultural currencies. In this sense, the modernist landscape, with its emphasis on aesthetics, was one moment in the regeneration of the genre. The focus upon more obviously intrusive cultural elements, or industrial legacies, for instance, in the work of British photographers Ray Moore or John Davies offers another.²⁷

The modern and the postmodern

The Land: 20th Century Landscape Photographs, also by Bill Brandt, was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975.

Analysis of aesthetic and ideological change involves engagement with broad socioeconomic and political circumstances as well as with aesthetics. But genre analysis is always best pursued through comparison of specific examples. For instance, in this chapter there are two photographs, by Bill Brandt (Figure 6.5, p. 305) and Karen Knorr (Figure 6.1, p. 290). Both use photographic techniques and conventions to effect a sense of harmony. Yet they are different in import. Brandt’s image is a documentary statement, the location is given. Knorr’s, through the presence of the bird and the framed view of treetops, offers a conceptual comment upon French culture with its formal gardens, one which provokes critical interpretation. Difference between the modern aesthetic and the postmodern critique is evident, albeit subtle. It is not the image in itself so much as its broader context that adjusts our response.

6.12 Ingrid Pollard, from Pastoral Interludes, 1987

Landscape and heritage

A number of contemporary photographers in Britain, including John Davies, John Kippin, Ingrid Pollard and Jem Southam, engage in critical terms with notions of landscape, commenting, for example, on the legacy of industrialisation whether it be rural industry such as tin-mining (Southam) or the Northern industrial landscape (Davies), or on the implicit racialisation of pastoral imagery (Pollard). Fay Godwin’s work on land, access and property rights offered a further significant example. Landscape imagery reflects and reinforces particular ideas about class, gender, race and heritage in relation to property rights, accumulation and control (see Taylor 1994; Wells 1994, 2011). Several contemporary photographers have made it their business to question this. The contrast between this type of contemporary emphasis and the nineteenth-century idyllic image is obvious from a comparison of the work of Pollard (Figure 6.12), with that of Silvy or Peach Robinson. Such critical engagements offer an example of ways in which genres may renew themselves hegemonically; where photographs of decayed rural areas or abandoned industrial sites once seemed radical (Kippin 1995), as we shall see, they may now appear highly aestheticised as ‘industrial sublime’.

Liz Wells (2011) Lands Matters: Landscape, Photography, Culture and Identity, London: I.B. Tauris.

Such concerns are culturally specific in a range of respects. For instance, Norwegian landscape photography tends to dramatise the mountains and fjords of the north. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Norwegian landscape painting and photography is clearly influenced by the Kantian sublime (best typified by German painter Casper David Friedrich). The Norwegian mountain became a national icon – especially prominent at the turn of the twentieth century when Norway was seeking independence from Swedish rule. In effect the mountain for Norwegians became an equivalent to the Wordsworth country of the Lake District for Englishness. Thus when contemporary Norwegian photographers focus upon a more ordinary, everyday landscape such as lands used for recreation close to urban and suburban spaces, there is an implicit questioning of myths of Norwegianness. The iconic is culturally specific; it follows that art which challenges established attitudes to some extent relies upon audience familiarity with particular national themes and aesthetic histories.

Many artists working with land and landscape are less concerned with the overtly sociopolitical, working in terms which echo earlier formalist preoccupations but which may also reflect current ecological curiosities and concerns. Within a few years of the foundation of photography in the nineteenth century, Anna Atkins was using the cyanotype process to make detailed images of flora and fauna. Artists continue to use photograms and other contact printing methods to register nature. For example, using natural and artificial light, Susan Derges places sensitised paper below the surface of water to register the effects of reflection of plants and trees and the movement of, for instance, grains of earth or sand in rivers or waves breaking on the seashore (Figure 6.13). Others have critically explored issues of perception, subjectivity and the gaze, employing a range of tactics to dis-locate our sense of ourselves in relation to space depicted.²⁸

Recent decades have witnessed particular concern with environmental change and with the politics of environment. Prominent twentieth-century examples of work questioning uses of land included Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos (1979–99) in which he investigated (mis-)uses of the Nevada desert. Some decades ago, the American photographer and critic Deborah Bright argued that ‘whatever its aesthetic merits, every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time’ (Bright 1989: 126). Her point was that much of the so-called natural landscape has been organised and re-shaped in ways that remain visually marked. For example, the hedgerows that characterise much of the English landscape result from property owners demarcating their territory (whether agricultural or domestic). Bright also pointed to the commoditisation of landscape as an antidote to politics and as tourist destination, both of which operate in part through ways in which pictorial composition aestheticises the rural, often distracting us from environmental realities.

cyanotype (blueprint), ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide are applied to a surface and dried. An object or negative is placed on the treated surface, then exposed to the sun.

6.13 Susan Derges, ‘Larch’, from The Streens, 2002

Fay Godwin’s extensive explorations of Land (1985) and Our Forbidden Land (1990) invite us to pause to reflect on the British landscape. Her pictures often work through incongruous juxtapositions, for example, a sheep pictured through metal fencing below the barbed wire that indicates that this land belongs to the Ministry of Defence, or a sign stating ‘private’ on apparently open undulating hillsides that, as she indicates in the picture title, are part of the British Duke of Westminster’s estates. In exploring the countryside she had an eye for the improbable. Through her photography (and her association with the Ramblers organisation in the UK) she campaigned for public recreational access to rural areas. Other photographers have focused on edgelands, over-looked spaces such as areas bordering rivers, canals, roads, motorways and parking lots, drawing attention both to detritus and to ways in which little areas of wasteland function as natural oases of vegetation encouraging animal and insect habitat.

In parallel with this more overt questioning are many examples of artists exploring particular sites in relation to specific social and personal histories, for instance, returning to explore, remember and revisualise places familiar from childhood (Figure 6.14). For example, in her series Between Dog and Wolf, Chrystel Lebas explored the forest area in her home region, focussing in particular on ways in which the light and atmosphere of the woods changes at dawn and dusk (Figure 6.14). Her interest is in the relation of humankind to nature, in our attitudes to nature, and in ways in which the natural is managed for our benefit. She has also pursued residencies in places such as the Risjnak National Park, northeast of Rijeka, Croatia, and at Bel-Val in the Ardennes, France. Like Susan Derges, she pays detailed attention to specific effects of light and season, reminding us of complex and subtle ways in which our environment affects us.

6.14 Chrystal Lebas, ‘Blue Hour’, untitled no. 4, 2005, from Between Dog and Wolf

Reflections on the Contemporary Sublime

In considering landscape as genre and in characterising landscape photography from the first decade of the twenty-first century we see many strands of development. Environmental issues have been particularly addressed, including ways in which they relate to shifts in centres of industrial production (from Europe and North America, to Asia and South America). For instance, British photographer, John Kippin has long been concerned with the impact of industrial decline and the shift to a service sector economy in the northeast of England, formerly a region particularly known for coal mining and ship yards. In recent decades, container shipping and mechanisation has replaced dockland labour. The West has become a net importer of goods produced more cheaply in new industrial centres elsewhere. Industrial edifices, now redundant, symbolise a regional economic structure that no longer obtains (Kippin 1995) (Figure 6.15).

6.15 John Kippin, ‘Monument’ from Futureland Now, 2012.

Kippin’s focus is on the region where he is based, but the issues resonate globally as the impact is not only in the former industrial centres in the UK, the

6.16 Edward Burtynsky, SOCAR Oil Fields #9 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006.

USA, and elsewhere, but also on the regional economy and work conditions of those employed in factories in current boom areas, particularly the new Asian economies. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has contributed significantly to debates about shifting economic centres, industrial working conditions and uses of natural resources. For instance, in his series Oil (2009) he travelled to North America and Asia exploring global chains of production, use and disposal characteristic of contemporary industrial capitalism, particularly the motor industry with its dependence on oil as a primary energy resource involving drilling for oil, piping it to oil refineries and then on via pipes, ships or land trans portation to points of consumption. Each picture is carefully composed, often from a high vantage point offering an overview of a scene or situation, for example, the patterns of intersecting highways in Los Angeles. Several of the individual pictures are sublimely memorable, for example, a sea-based oil rig in Socar set against a cool pink sky or great mounds of discarded tyres in California (www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/Photographs/Oil.html). Others are more topographic in idiom (Figure 6.16). In both examples, Kippin’s monument to the past and Burtynsky’s contemporary scenario, the geometric construction is orderly, with a horizon and a central line (the coal tower pointing upwards, or the road taking the eye through the centre before sweeping off on a diagonal), the aesthetic form contributing to constructing an apparent harmony of human artefacts and the natural environment

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Irish political writer and philosopher, author of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher, author of Critique of Judgement, 1790; Part I is concerned with aesthetics.

There has been much debate in recent years relating to the notion of industrial sublime. This debate draws on eighteenth-century concepts of the sublime wherein philosophers including Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant related the notion to that which is awesome or frightening yet, because we are experiencing it through a picture (or a poetic description), perversely pleasurable, since there is no danger of pain or death as would be the case were we to encounter the actual circumstances depicted. In the Kantian model the sublime relates more to comprehensibility, that which cannot be understood through rational measure ment or debate. For Burke, the key emotion is astonishment. In exploring the visual import and environmental consequences of industrialisation, Burtynsky offers us a series of pictures that we may find astonishing in terms of the impli cations of the content of the image, yet, at the same time, poetically appealing.

There has been extensive debate as to the political impact and import of such photographic projects. Deborah Bright (1989) also remarked on the ease with which single images from series intended as investigative nonetheless could be seen as testaments to transcendent notions of ‘Nature’. In other words, individual photographs may seem celebratory even when an overall series conveys more critical perspectives. We are reminded that meaning does not reside in images themselves, but rather derives from situations in which they are viewed, how they are contextualised through associated images, texts or other related information, and the interests and experiences influencing the viewer. Three decades later this last point remains salient. For example, Burtynsky’s Oil, when seen in exhibitions or publications, has a cumulative impact as photograph after photograph come together to suggest dysfunctional effects of global dependence on oil in terms of the cultural impact of industrialisation, the visual changes wrought through extensive roadways and other modes of transportation, and the human and environmental costs of industrial waste. Taken overall, his work can be interpreted as questioning the consequences of Capitalism and globalisation. However, paradoxically, pictures viewed in isolation risk being construed as an ode to industrial success.

Similar questions apply to investigations of remaining wilderness landscapes. Photographers are often interested not only in exploring and documenting places but also in questioning consequences of human presence for erstwhile remote environments that may previously have been uninhabited or sparsely occupied (by regionally based groups such as Inuit or Sami peoples). Take, for example, the fact that there is now a space observatory at the South Pole, until only very recently viewed as a wilderness area (Figure 6.17). There are several telescopes, people live there, planes fly in and out, provisions arrive, waste has to be removed, the Americans have built a roadway across the Antarctic ice which can be re-opened each Southern summer for transporting provisions and equipment, and laying power lines. The purpose of the Hubble telescope is to investigate and document outer space – arguably, the landscape frontier of our time. As with the opening of the American West in the nineteenth century – in which landscape photog raphy was centrally implicated as one means of documenting the nature of new-found lands – picturing significantly contributes to coming to terms with regions new to us. Digital data facilitates visualisation, but information generated may be used for a range of purposes, not only exploring and mapping the unknown, but also surveillance, security or inter-planetary expansion. For instance, in The Other Night Sky, California-based photographer Trevor Paglen tracks satellites, debris and other objects identified within the orbit of planet Earth, thereby reminding us that outer space is the geographic frontier of the twenty-first century (Figure 6.18).

6.17 Anne Noble, ‘Spoolhenge’ no.3, South Pole, Antarctica, 2008

6.18 Trevor Paglen, ‘Keyhole Improved Crystal’ from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 224) from The Other Night Sky, 2011

Several photographers have visited Antarctica, remoter parts of the Arctic, and equatorial forests such as that of the Amazon region, documenting human impact as well as natural phenomena. Their reflections on extreme places invite us to reformulate notions of the sublime. We continue to wonder at the immensity of mountain ranges, tropical forests and the polar regions. But we might also ask whether our awe at natural phenomena can be uncoupled from the association of the sublime with (male) figures from the so-called heroic era of expeditions, whether seeking a North-West Passage, racing to the South Pole, or exploring rivers to sources in the jungle.

As this case study has demonstrated, landscape is not just somehow ‘there’ waiting to be observed. Rather, photographers travel to places intending to explore particular histories and issues, hoping that their work can reveal something that might otherwise be overlooked, or that they can contribute to understanding our environment and our impact on it. Unlike portraiture, landscapes are generally not staged, and unlike photojournalism, there is rarely a sense of ‘decisive moment’ (Cartier-Bresson 1952) when content and aesthetics come together to create a telling image. Landscape photographers are not simply observers of the world around us; rather they interrogate it, drawing upon their experience as photographers to enhance the manner of seeing. As photo historian, Roger Taylor, remarked when discussing Fay Godwin’s work,

An experienced photographer knows intuitively where to place the camera and which lens to use for the best effect, much in the same way a pianist arrives at the proper pitch and touch through daily rehearsal. It is all a matter of fluency and assurance.

(Taylor 2001: 13)

Of course this is not simply a matter of professional experience, but also one of personal ‘voice’. Discussing ‘Truth in Landscape’, American landscape photographer Robert Adams suggested that the best landscape pictures involve geography (the actual topography of place), autobiography (the photographer with particular interests, experiences, ways of seeing and methods of working) and metaphor (the aesthetics of the image, and also cultural resonances) (Adams 1996: 14). Whilst not all critics would agree that these are the key components – or the only components – of imagery relating to land, landscape, place and circumstance, this trinity of engagement offers a useful starting point for thinking critically about landscape practices and how they operate to engage attention, provoke reflection or alert us to environmental change.

Genres are defined not by uniformity, but by clusters of characteristic themes, formal and aesthetic concerns, and ideological preoccupations. They are revitalised through aesthetic experimentation and through new issues, often typifying attitudes and discourses characteristic of particular eras. As can be seen from the various examples of landscape included in this chapter, a range of factors and questions are in play when discussing specific fields of practice. It is productive to analyse genres in terms of both specific historical traditions within visual culture and contemporary issues and aesthetics.

Photography Within The Institution

Since the 1970s lens-based media, including photography, video, slide projection and installation have been absorbed within broader fine art practices. It is no accident that a key exhibition of contemporary British photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1988 was titled Towards a Bigger Picture. The double meaning of the title referred in particular to the extension of photography within art practices and to diversity of subject-matter. But it also referenced conceptual understanding of ways in which scale contributes to the claim for place within the gallery. For example, very small-scale work, carefully mounted and framed, inherits the sense of the precious associated with miniature painting. It demands close-up and detailed looking. Preciousness is emphasised if individual works are hung with space between them. By contrast, large-scale photographic works claim the status traditionally accorded to academic painting and other art made for public spaces. They assert their presence and, therefore, the significance of their theme or subject-matter. Such pictures engage with contemporary myth in ways that echo the ideological and political involvements typical of classical painting.

Questions of national identity are not only reflected in art practices but also in the centrality of the gallery and museum within many nations and cultures. In most nations funding for arts, both for the contemporary gallery and for heritage institutions such as museums, is a mixed economy drawing upon private, commercial and public resources – in some cases, including regional or national lottery funding as well as state subsidy.29 (Even in major national institutions exhibition organisers often rely on private or commercial sponsorship as well as revenue from admission tickets and sales such as postcards and catalogues.) In Britain the 1970s and 1980s were characterised not only by the extension of provision for photography collections and exhibitions, but also by an increase in major institutions located away from London.³⁰ By the mid-1980s there were over 2,000 museums and galleries in the United Kingdom, with new ones opening at the rate of one a fortnight. Discussing The Heritage Industry, Robert Hewison argued that ‘in the twentieth century museums have taken over the function once exercised by church and ruler, they provide the symbols through which a nation and a culture understands itself’ (Hewison 1987: 84). Museums have become key patrons of art, influencing priorities and pricing within the art market. Given the monumental dimensions of some late twentieth-century centres, for instance, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, or the Tate Modern in London, not to mention MOMA, New York, or the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, galleries also influence the conceptual scale of imagery. The photograph has been used extensively within the expanding museum to both document and celebrate the history. It has also been implicated in critiquing this ‘heritage industry’ (Taylor 1994: 240ff.).

Simultaneous with this extension of roles for photographic media within museums and other heritage sites, the advent of digital technologies facilitated the online expansion of the remit and accessibility of museum collections. In addition, museums have become increasingly inter-active in terms of audience engagement, making extensive use of photography within this. In terms of photography as art the impact of this particularly relates to the development of web-based resources by art museums, public and commercial galleries, dealers, and, indeed, photographers themselves, whereby online access to reproductions of works, statements of provenance, and critical socio-historical or biographical appraisals of the oeuvre of artists are made easily accessible – at any rate, for those with regular online access.

In addition, the web has become a site of online artworks by individual artists or collaborations involving networks of artists regionally, nationally or globally, as well as offering a resource for materials appropriated and re-purposed by artists.

Appraising the contemporary

Photography, then, is situated both within the gallery system and beyond it. In addition, previous distinctions between photography galleries, and those that include photographically produced work within their collection seem increasingly unclear as all galleries now host photography, photo-video and digital installation, and have an online presence. Remaining photography galleries may have a narrower remit in terms of focus upon the photographic, but a much broader cultural remit in, potentially, displaying and interrogating all aspects of photography as visual communication, historically and now. It follows from this ubiquity that the task of researching and mapping contemporary developments in photo-based art is daunting.

Charlotte Cotton (2004; revised ed., 2014) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, London: Thames and Hudson. A very useful view of developments towards the end of the twentieth century.

Charlotte Cotton notes that although photography historically has made varying claims for status as art, it was only in the 1990s that it achieved a confident presence within contemporary art circuits (Cotton 2004: 20). She accounts for this primarily in terms of, first, the influence of conceptual art from the 1970s onwards within which the photographic often figured, and second, the emergence of colour photography within art practice. Although this can be traced to the 1970s (for instance, the work of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore) its more general acceptance only dates from the 1990s. This is important as it contributed to blurring boundaries between art photography, with its emphasis on monochromic virtuosity, and photographic practices as critical engage ment since colour, within what otherwise appeared as ‘straight’ photog raphy, along with experiments in the grammar of scale in photography, interrupted seemingly established distinctions. In 1994, in her introduction to Documentary Dilemmas, Brett Rogers observed:

Ignored by the art world which favours big pictures and high prices, and outstripped by technology that gives the edge to television and digital developments, documentary photography has also come under harsh scrutiny from post-modern critics, who question its tendency to separate and exploit certain groups of people, serving up the poor as exotic fare for voyeuristic consumers.

(Rogers 1994: 5)

She went on to suggest that this has led to the ignoring of new rhetorical strategies in use within documentary, including fill-in flash, colour, scale, captioning, sequencing, and the use of text within the image. Twenty years later this has clearly changed. As Cotton comments, art practices such as the creation of large-scale staged photographic tableaux (Collins, Blees Luxemburg, Wall), or the deadpan, anti-dramatic scenarios associated in particular with the younger generation of Frankfurt School artists (Gursky, Höfer, Struth) presuppose the validity of a colour aesthetic. It follows from this ubiquity that the task of researching and mapping contemporary developments in photo-based art is daunting.

Brett Rogers (ed.) (1994) Documentary Dilemmas: Aspects of British Documentary Photography 1983–1993, London: British Council. This exhibition was curated for an international tour and included work by John Davies, Anna Fox, Julian Germain, Paul Graham, Anthony Haughey, Chris Killip, John Kippin, Karen Knorr, Martin Parr, Ingrid Pollard, Paul Reas, Paul Seawright and Jem Southam.

Lucy Soutter (2013) Why Art Photography? London and New York: Routledge. Soutter situates ideas about contemporary art internationally within the context of recent debates about art photography and the gallery context.

Lucy Soutter poses questions from a slightly different point of view asking Why Art Photography? as a starting point for interrogating ways in which photography within the gallery context matters to us in terms of aesthetic and social values. She opens with a more historical discussion pursued through reference to portraiture and the nude as genres that, she suggests, have become increasingly hybrid. Then, in common with Cotton, she addresses ‘deadpan’, raising questions of realism, objectivity and authenticity. She later returns to reflect on authenticity in relation to subjectivity and on photography as a perfomative process, often related to everyday experiences (for instance, in the work of Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans). She also suggests that in recent years there has been a shift from the centrality of critics and art historians, as mediators of images as texts from which meaning is to be deciphered, towards an interest on the part of artists in the direct experience of viewers.

In terms of critical methods, this shift also reflects a transition from the poststructuralist thinking that characterised debates towards the end of the twentieth century, certainly within Western art historical culture, towards more phenomenological models. This development was not simply in response to perceived limits of the legacies of the structuralist emphasis on image as text, albeit one understood as ‘read’ in specific socio-historical contexts, but also reflected the import of online viewing spaces and social media within photographic practices. Over the last decade photographs have been increasingly experienced as images that are not prints; rather they shimmer on laptops and circulate as numerically based composites rather than existing as tactile objects for which scale, surface and luminosity are contributory components. For artists these characteristics are important considerations, yet, when viewed on screen, works acquire a degree of conformity. This has contributed to a renewed interest in the constitution of photographs as physical phenomena occupying a place within the gallery and also, in the ‘dialogue’ with other artworks that occurs in exhibitions. The physicality of the encounter with the photographic object, that may be larger than us or miniature, characterised by hyper-saturated colour or by muted tones, forms part of the experience of viewing thereby influencing the way in which we respond to and are affected by art.

This relatively recent emphasis on the tactile qualities of photographs as objects is echoed in a resurgence of interest in photobooks. Photographs in folios, sold as collectors’ items, date from the very beginnings of photography. Fox Talbot’s Sun Pictures in Scotland dates from 1844, although it is not strictly a book, rather a portfolio with no text other than picture captions, is perhaps the first major example of a photographically illustrated publication.31 Badger and Parr cite Anna Atkin’s three portfolio volumes (1843–53) of cyanotypes of Photographs of British Algae as the first significant example, followed by Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, published in 5 parts (1844–46). Such collections were hand-made in that each print had to be separately developed. Indeed, arguably some of the most interesting developments in the uses and circulation of photographs occurred with the expansion of possibilities for the printed page at the beginning of the twentieth century. This facilitated photojournalism (see ch. 2) and also the presentation of photographs as books, since possibilities for mechanical reproduction allowed for less labour intensive production processes and larger editions of each book printed.³²

What is a photobook? Parr and Badger define it as:

a book – with or without text – where the work’s primary message is carried by photographs. It is a book authored by a photographer or by someone editing and sequencing the work of a photographer, or even a number of photographers. It has a specific character, distinct from the photographic print, be it the simply functional ‘work’ print, or the fine-art ‘exhibition’ print.

(Parr and Badger 2004: 6)

Parr and Badger also comment that ‘the sum is greater than the parts, and the greater the parts, the greater the potential of the sum’ adding that photobooks have ‘a particular subject – a specific theme’ (Parr and Badger 2004: 7).

Martin Parr And Gerry Badger (2004) The Photobook: A History. Vol. 1 (2006), Vol. 2 (2014), Vol. 3, London: Phaidon.

Also see Andrew Booth (ed.) (2004) The Open Book (based on The Hasselblad Center collection, and publications cataloguing a range of examples from various regions (including Latin-America, Japan, The Netherlands, Switzerland).

Di Bello, Wilson and Zamir question the notion that the ‘primary message’ is necessarily carried through photographs, arguing that the relegation of text as subsidiary fails to account for publications such as James Agee and Walker Evans (1941) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, wherein there are 31 photographs and hundreds of pages of text by Agee (di Bello et al. 2012). It also doesn’t account for hybrid photobook publications, often including poetry or interviews with portraitees, wherein meaning and resonance are clearly intended to emanate from the inter-relation of images and texts.

Whilst the history of the production and development of photobooks transcends that of art photography, there has been a long-standing relationship between exhibitions and publications, with catalogues listing pictures in exhibitions dating from the late nineteenth century.³³ Indeed, as Mary Kelly has argued, there is a sense in which the gallery itself, although of central symbolic significance, is less important in the history of artistic production than catalogues, books, reviews, and other accompanying, more permanent, forms of reproduction of work (Kelly 1981). Exhibitions are ephemeral. Critical evaluation of contemporary exhibition practices is limited by the fact that it is not possible to visit and view all shows; websites and catalogues often say little about the impact of how each show was hung within particular gallery spaces.³⁴ It is published materials, rather than the shows themselves, that reach the wider audience. Increasingly, catalogues have given way to photography books, possibly published in association with a particular exhibition, but intended as a free-standing artist’s monograph or edited collection conceived as a publication in its own right (perhaps as part of more general interests in media arts and media education on the part of publishers). Along with monographs and critical texts, several recent publications that collate examples of work by contemporary photographers indicate the extent to which the photobook has become part of an expanding market for objects and publications sold at gallery, museum and city-centre shops, as well as, of course, online. In other words, publishing has responded to audience demand for gallery mementoes (and to the need on the part of galleries and museums for additional income streams). Thus, in order to consider changing thematic or aesthetic concerns in recent years, we need not only to trace histories of exhibitions via catalogues, exhibition reviews, and museum and gallery websites, but also to consider publishers’ lists. More particularly, photography journals and magazines (including contemporary art journals and online blogs) trace debates and developments, through featuring the work of particular photog raphers, discussing contemporary issues, and reviewing shows and books, thereby marking and contributing to shaping our sense of histories of debates and practices.

Curators, collectors and festivals

Major museums not only maintain archives but also purchase contemporary work, thereby, in effect, supporting photographers. Curators may commission new work for particular shows as part of their responsibility for conceiving and organising photography exhibitions which tour nationally and internationally – and commonly feature as websites as well as physical entities. Museum and gallery exhibitions are ‘hired’ by or co-produced with other galleries; it is not uncommon for shows to be ‘on the road’ for two years or longer. Normally they are curated by one or more people, whose role includes researching the exhibition concept, the selection (or commissioning) of work, planning how the work will be hung within the exhibition space, and writing a significant part of any accompanying book or catalogue. The power of the curator, operating regionally, nationally or internationally, has been questioned. Of course, curators take initiatives which contribute to the exposure of work. But they may also regularly favour certain artists, or types of work, at the expense of others. Furthermore, it has been suggested that curators often act more as ‘creators’, putting together themed exhibitions which, however relevant and interesting, serve as much to advance themselves as to showcase the work of artists. Indeed, all exhibitions and collections reflect the particular interests of their curators and archivists as well as the mission statement, priorities and terms of reference of particular organisations (Sekula 2003).

Since the 1980s international photography festivals have burgeoned. The purpose of festivals is to offer a focus, meeting place and showcase for work. As such they contribute to raising the profile of photography nationally and internationally; indeed, many have markedly commercial dimensions. But, along with gallery exhibitions, photography magazines and books, they do indicate contemporary trends as well as foregrounding the work of particular photographers.

The first such international festival was established as an annual meeting place and showcase for photography at Arles, France, in 1970. Others, such as Fotofest, Houston (biennial since 1986), have been loosely based upon the same model involving some thematic focus, a number of lectures and events, opportunities for less-experienced or less-established photographers to show their portfolio to known photographers, critics and curators and, in certain instances, some form of schools- and community-based spin-off. Another major European festival is the biennial Paris Mois de la Photo which, since 1980, has taken place throughout the city and is now twinned with festivals in Vienna, Berlin and elsewhere as part of a European Month of Photography. Photographic work has also increasingly featured in major international art events such as Venice Biennale or Documenta, Germany.

Curators, critics, archives, exhibitions, art magazines and festivals all interact with the market for both contemporary and historical photographic work. International auction houses, such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s, note the influence of exhibitions (and events, such as the death of an artist) on auction prices.35 Commercial art dealers scrutinise trends in order to maintain their position in a competitive market. In Britain, the market for both old and contemporary photography is a late twentieth century phenomenon; a response, perhaps, to both the renewal of interest in the photograph in the 1970s and 1980s and the increasing emphasis upon private commercial practices which characterised 1980s Thatcherism. But ‘collection’ as a commitment on the part of particular individuals or businesses is not new. Indeed, royal patronage for artists, since the Renaissance, has taken precisely this form. The key pur chasers may now be media stars and entrepreneurs rather than European aristocrats, but patronage through payment for ownership of the art object persists.

Photobooks have also become collectors’ items, and it is not uncommon for a book to be published in two versions, one of which is a short run, numbered, collectors edition often also including a separate print (that can be mounted and framed). As Walter Benjamin suggested in 1931, ‘The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them’ (Benjamin 1931b: 62).

The gallery as context

Charlotte Cotton remarks that ‘to identify “art” as the preferred territory for their images is now the aspiration of many photographers’ (Cotton 2004: 7). Photography now sits alongside painting and sculpture within contemporary art institutions. Commitment to working as an artist has become an accepted career objective for photography students and the gallery has become a destination for photographic imagery. But what might this mean in terms of artists engaging in the circulation of ideas? Arguably, the gallery network not only offers visual pleasures but also operates to reassure a certain sense of intellectual and cultural elitism. Part of the pleasure of looking at pictures lies in discussing images, in sharing responses. This assumes and reaffirms biographical and cultural similarities in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, education and interest or involvement in the arts. Sociologist Terry Lovell suggested that ‘the discerning of aesthetic form itself must be seen as a major source of pleasure in the text – the identification of the “rules of the game”, and pleasure in seeing them obeyed, varied and even flouted’ (Lovell 1980: 95). Galleries have specific profiles in relation to this, sometimes operating overtly as a site of political engagement or as a regional centre.

Indeed photography has been used in a range of contexts to challenge dominant aesthetics, usually with some commitment to political empowerment. Central to the politics of representation is the question of whose experience is validated. As we have seen, this motivated the work of many contemporary women and black artists, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s. The political role and significance of the contemporary gallery is complex. There is a sense in which curator, critic, audience and artist are all complicit in perpetuating an exclusive system which functions hegemonically in ways that seem relatively detached from economic imperatives. On the other hand, the private collector, and the public museum and gallery, along with commercial sponsorship and public subsidy, exercise a significant degree of economic influence on developments within the arts.36

Blurring the boundaries

Art photography is now global in terms of collections and connoisseurship, with auction houses, museums and exhibition curators operating inter nationally in response to market economics. However, in terms of meaning, shifts in cultural context influence interpretation and perceptions of significance in terms of both theme and aesthetics. What may appear exotic to those in one region may seem familiar in other areas. Of course this is not new; there has been a long-standing interest on the part of collectors and institutions in the West in, for example, photography from regions with which there were trade links in the nineteenth century. But in the twenty-first century this has become an increasingly multi-directional process, with, for example, American dealers as likely to be selling at fairs in the Middle East or China as at Paris-Photo in Paris or Los Angeles.³⁷ Reflecting on the apparently enhanced internationalism of photography and, indeed, the art market, David Bate has suggested that contemporary art photography has been assimulated within ‘a primarily photographic global economy of images’, arguing that within the global art industry ‘the legibility of local traditions suffer the easily read image of the “universal” language of pictorial realism’ (Bate 2009: 145). In other words, aesthetic and cultural differences, once manifest through pictorial form and theme, that might have fascinated viewers interested in the unfamiliar, have become subsumed within the international art market where photography now has an established presence.

There has also been a convergence, a blurring of boundaries, within art practices. As has been suggested, the inter-relation of art and photography historically was complex in terms of definitions, debates and practices. Likewise, there is a close historical relation between photography and film. Film also implicates light and atmosphere as well as an ontological relation to the external world of objects and events. Indeed, early film was based on the photographic, although, of course, soon developed as a narrative, story-telling mode drawing on theatre and music – played to accompany silent ‘movies’. In recent decades, as (digital) video has in many respects substituted for film, there has been increasing interest on the part of artists in the qualities of film as a projected medium with particular effects and affects. The installation of ‘FILM’ (2011–12, 35mm, 11 mins) by artist Tacita Dean in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, is but one of many such examples. Alongside this, given possibilities afforded by developments in digital camera technology (now usually including still and video shooting options) or in editing software, a number of photographers have turned to working in ‘moving image’ as well as still imagery. This is not a return to ‘movies’ as a narrative form so much as animation drawing on the depictive characteristics of photography. As gallery viewers, moving image has more in common with projected slide installations than with narrative cinema.38 In terms of convergence, moving image is now as likely to be constituted through an editing of still shots as originally made as video, and often programmed in short film screenings or festivals and made available on online video sites as well as encountered in art exhibitions.

Indeed, in tandem with such developments there has been an extension of online resources. The majority of artists, also commercial galleries, maintain websites as information points, profiling work, news, and projects in development. It is also common for museums, public galleries and archives to run websites intended as a first port of call detailing exhibitions or collections as well as offering starting points for research on particular artists and projects. Many profile key historical and contemporary figures. For instance, through their website the V & A Museum in London offers information about their holdings (the contents of their collection) along with selected biographical profiles and discussions of work by contemporary photographers as well as that of Victorian photographers such as William Fox Talbot or Lady Constance Hawarden; likewise George Eastman House, Rochester, USA. Indeed, our ease of access to archives has been massively enhanced through the advent of the world wide web (www.) and through digital reproduction of images from collections allowing for online viewing. In effect there has been a democratisation of access to such materials, as anyone, anywhere can now view material online (assuming access to electricity and online search facilities), whereas previously access was restricted to those who could afford to travel to print collections. Of course, what we experience is image content rather than the visual and tactile qualities of an historic or contemporary print, or a paper publication. In addition, although collections may also offer contextual information, the histories on offer are sometimes orthodox in that they deal in historical consensus and avoid controversy. This reminds us that information does not substitute for critical thinking. A description of what a photographer has achieved is not the same as an interrogation of the significance of his or her achievement; it is a starting point but does not substitute for analysis of work in relation to the aesthetic and technical modes of an era, socio-political contexts, and subsequent ways in which work has been viewed, reclaimed or re-positioned within historical and contemporary debates.

As we saw in the case study of photography and landscape, art practices shift over time, responding to changing social concerns, priorities and circumstances. Likewise theoretical and critical debates develop and mutate, taking into account shifts in aesthetics and technologies, and also new contexts. Where once photography had to argue for acknowledgement as an art form, now art photography plays a significant economic role within the international art market and is extensively profiled online as well as in festivals, auction houses, galleries and art museums.

Notes

1 The term ‘Art’ is used to indicate focus upon Arts institutions and gallery exhibition. This follows Raymond Williams’ distinction between ‘art’ as creative skill and ‘Art’, used in Britain since the early nineteenth century to refer to the Art establishment, a network of galleries, museums, funding organisations, publishing and festivals (Williams 1976). The notion of Art as a specialised field of practice has been criticised variously, for instance, in Soviet Constructivism, or, more recently, through practices such as publishing imagery on the internet, exhibiting on (advertising) hoardings, or organising community-based arts projects.

2 Community arts as a movement (for instance, in Britain in the 1970s/1980s) challenged what was perceived by some as elitism in the arts establishment through taking art to people – on housing estates, in schools, at public fairs, and so on – and through encouraging wider participation in arts events and practices. Recently, certainly in northern Europe and North America, there has been a resurgence of interest in social engagement and in site-specific practices.

3 The title references a description (attributed to Lincoln Kirstein, poet, critic, curator and founder of the New York City Ballet) of Walker Evans’ work as ‘tender cruelty’ linking photography within the gallery to social documentary. Documentary uses of photography were emphasised in this exhibition which, in common with many shows, brought work originally made for other purposes into the gallery.

4 The 1851 exhibition, a celebration of British achievements, was held at the purpose-built Crystal Palace, London. The Royal Society of Arts is also London-based.

5 This was clearly indicated in sketches, photographs and tear sheets from the collection at the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale exhibited at the Maison de Balzac as part of Mois de la Photo, 1990.

6 The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of British artists of whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the son of an Italian refugee), William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais were the most famous. Taking nature as their primary subject, they sought to retrieve what they viewed as a simplicity and sincerity in art which had been lost in the Renaissance. Examples of their work may be found in many English municipal galleries (the most extensive collection is in Birmingham City Art Gallery).

7 The Impressionists, mid-to late nineteenth century, include Monet, Cezanne, Pisarro, Bonnard, Morisot, Renoir, Van Gogh and Sisley. Relatively informal technique seemed to offer a vision of the world which was both instantaneous and subjective. Their concern to find ways of painting which reflected light, movement and speed echoed the emphasis on modernity and immediacy by critics such as Baudelaire, although the subject-matter treated by many of the artists was rural or natural rather than urban. The most extensive collection is in the Musée D’Orsay, Paris, but most major art collections (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery, London) offer examples.

8 Naturalism in painting now refers to close observation and detailed study of external appearances. Naturalism in late nineteenth-century theatre referred to drama in which social environment was depicted as the primary influence on characters, actions and events. Key dramatists include the Scandinavians Henry Ibsen and August Strindberg.

9 Defining ‘picturesque’, Harker notes ‘emphasis on acute observation and appreciation of scenery; an understanding of proportion and perspective in landscape; and the conception of architecture at one with its natural environment (not to be considered in isolation)’ (Harker 1979: 27).

10 Emerson remained in the Photographic Society and is credited with responsibility for Royal acclaim, hence the change of title to the Royal Photographic Society (RPS). Paradoxically, perhaps, the RPS became the major archive for nineteenth-century British Pictorialism, holding work by many of those who led the secessionist challenge to the Photographic Society. The collection is now housed at the National Media Museum (NMM) Bradford, Yorkshire, UK.

11 Books of photographs date from the very early days with Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature or Anna Atkins’ use of photographic illustrations in her studies of flora. Each image had to be separately hand printed, so books could only be produced in limited editions.

12 Many Bauhaus theorists were exiled to the United States where they formed The Chicago Art Institute.

13 The Frankfurt School of Social Research included philosophers, aestheticians, and social scientists, variously concerned with politics and culture, and influenced by the writings of Marx and Hegel. Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse were all associated. Many members ended up in exile in the USA, having escaped the Nazis. Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 whilst waiting to cross from occupied France to Spain (his companions made the journey the next day).

14 Cameras were very different then to the phones and light digital cameras of today, made to fit in pockets or handbags, although the legacy can be seen in the design of medium and large format cameras still in use. They were commonly designed with a viewfinder on top so the photographer looked down; the camera would be steadied at waist – or ‘belly button’ – level. Examples can be viewed in most museums of the history of photography.

15 f/64 references smallness of aperture and thus symbolises intent to maximise depth of field.

16 The work of these photographers, and other American photographers of the era, has been extensively published in histories of photography as well as in monographs or biographic essays on individual photographers.

17 Curiously, the influential photographer and curator Alfred Stieglitz never showed Edward Weston’s work in New York in his Madison Avenue gallery, named An American Place, which he ran from 1929 to 1946. However, in the second half of the twentieth century almost all major historical surveys or gallery overview exhibitions give prominence to the work of the American Formalists. The individual photographers are featured in a number of monographs so their work is easily found in bookshops and libraries.

18 Surrealists included André Breton (founder), Antonin Artaud, Luis Bunuel, Claude Cahun, Jean Cocteau, Salvadore Dali (later expelled from the movement because of his support for General Franco and the Spanish Right), Max Ernst, René Magritte (in Belgium where there was a separate Surrealist group), Lee Miller, and painter-photographer Man Ray. Surrealism was championed in Britain by Roland Penrose.

19 Held in London at the New Burlington Galleries in Burlington Gardens; that is, in a modern gallery, as opposed to an established institution such as the Royal Academy of Arts.

20 Pop Art in the 1960s essentially commented upon evidence of transformation into a consumerist society. Artist Richard Hamilton described Pop Art as popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business.

21 The term ‘new topographics’, used in the 1970s, refers back to nineteenth-century topographical work, especially the photographic charting of the American West.

22 The most prominent example in the UK was in the 1980s at the Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster) where tutors included art theorist Victor Burgin.

23 For instance, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, has a number of galleries permanently dedicated to photography; the V&A, London, opened a permanent space for photography exhibition in 1998. Some museums are entirely dedicated to audio-visual media, including photography; these include the National Museum of Media, Bradford, Yorkshire, England. See list of archives for further information (pp. 369–72).

24 Examples include John Coplan’s imaging of the male body (Tate collection), Paul Reas’ exploration of his relationship with his father (included in Who’s Looking at the Family, Barbican Gallery, London, 1994) and David Lewis’ appraisal of the black body within anthropology (The Impossible Science of Being, The Photographers’ Gallery, 1995).

25 As with all genres, there are exceptions. Aside from constructivist experiments, exceptions might include more metaphoric imagery, dealing, for instance, in landscape and memory, or pictures shot close-up which draw upon the conventions of still life as well as landscape.

26 In idealist philosophy, dating from Plato, emphasis is on measured behaviour, on civilisation as an imposition of order. The term ‘measure’ is useful here as it implies caution or restraint, whilst also implying mathematical principles. In classical, i.e. Renaissance art, this is expressed through the principles of composition, perspective and proportion (including relations between the vertical and the horizontal).

27 Work by most of the photographers mentioned in this section can be found in monographs published under their name, or in exhibition catalogues published variously.

28 It has not been possible to include full publication references for all the artists named in this chapter. Most university library catalogues offer search facilities by keyword, in this instance, the name of the artist. Many dealers, galleries and museums have websites offering information on artists and their work, sometimes including book and magazine references.

29 Funding arrangements and the relative balance of the various sources of income differ according to national fiscal and cultural policies. It is not possible to offer a full overview here.

30 Historically, developments in Britain included the opening of The Photographers’ Gallery in London, 1971, and of Impressions Gallery, York, in 1972 (relocated to Bradford in 2007). Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, was set up in 1977, and the Association of Welsh Photographers, later Ffotogallery, Cardiff, in 1978. Plans to establish the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT) in Bradford, as a branch of the Science Museum, were announced in 1980. (This is now the National Media Museum.) Also in 1980 the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) moved its library and archive from London to Bath; later to NMPFT, Bradford. The Scottish Photography Archive, part of the National Galleries of Scotland, was established in 1984 and, by 1995, included over 20,000 photographs. In 1998 the V&A opened the Canon Photography Gallery dedicated to exhibitions of the art of photography.

31 Published in an edition of 1,000, and financed through pre-subscription, it involved printing 23,000 handmade salted paper prints from calotype negatives, each pasted in by hand! See Graham Smith in di Bello et al. (2012) for a detailed discussion of the images and Talbot’s journey following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott.

32 See Richard Benson (2008) The Printed Picture for a detailed historical discussion of developments in print processes.

33 For a fuller discussion see Wells (2012) ‘Beyond the Exhibition – from Catalogue to Photobook’ in Di Bello, Wilson and Zamir (2012) The Photobook.

34 In viewing exhibitions, you should take into account particular relations set up between the work of different photographers and consider how this contributes to interpretation. One obvious question is: What work is hung at the entrance point? Does this indicate a central theme or preoccupation?

35 For example, in 1995, prior to auction, a collection of paintings and photographs by Man Ray was exhibited at the Serpentine, one of London’s higher profile public galleries for contemporary art.

36 See, for instance, Stuart Alexander, ‘Photographic Institutions and Practices’ (1998) in Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography, Cologne: Könemann.

37 For information on dealers present at the various fairs see websites for event organisers and also individual gallery websites. (Although galleries are listed, it is not possible to determine and comment on sales and turnover as this is commercially sensitive data.)

38 Slide installations used (Kodak) projectors, transparency film and slide carousels, technology commonly available in the second half of the twentieth century but now obsolete, replaced by video projection. In terms of the visceral, slides changed with a memorable clunking noise, whereas video is silent.