8/2/2019 01_QualifyingPhotography

1/3

1

Qualifying Photographyas Art, or, Is PhotographyAll It Can Be?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD

With medium specificity a pass historical concernconfined chiefly to the pages of art history, it mayseem prosaic and anachronistic to question theposition and relative validity of a single mediumphotographywithin the world of contemporary art.In addition, the same question may seem patentlyirrelevant to those who might justifiably point outthat many of the most eminent, critically lauded,and well-collected artists of the twentieth centuryThomas Demand, Jeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla Becher,Cindy Sherman, and Andreas Gursky, to name a

fewall use the camera as their primary instrument.Furthermore, the status of photography as art is rarelydrawn into question, and the market currency of themedium is beyond dispute. But does it necessarilyfollow that the fundamental ontology of photographyas a practice has been fully interrogated, understood,and integrated into the discourse of contemporaryart, assuming its rightful place alongside traditionalmedia like painting, sculpture, and drawing, as wellas new media such as installation and video? In otherwords, does photography exist as photography inart history and criticism today? And if not, why not?

Is photographyand by derivation photographycriticismall it can be?

Not surprisingly, one of the most astute theorizationsof this quandary was offeredalbeit obliquelybyMichael Fried in a wide-ranging essay on ThomasDemand published in 2005. Discussing Demandsby now familiar technique of fabricating andphotographing sculptural models of judiciouslychosen, historically charged sites, Fried summarizesthe results of the artists exacting enterprise asfollows: Simply put, he aims above all to replacethe original scene of evidentiary traces and marks ofhuman usethe human world in all its layerednessand compositenesswith images of sheer authorialintention, as though the very bizarreness of thefact that the scenes and objects in the photographs,despite their initial appearance of quotidian reality,have all been constructed by the artist throws intoconceptual relief the determining force (also theinscrutability, one might almost say opacity) ofthe intention behind it. While seizing on a timelyvernacular to capture and critique the ineffable

heterogeneity of the world has been and will likelyremain the fundamental charge of the most ambitiouspainters and sculptors, that same world arrives in thehands of the competent photographerassuminghe or she possesses the requisite instinct for detail,composition, and topicalityas a readymade of sorts.The camera provides the language, and the world atlarge is a rich well of potential subjects. Fried seems

keenly aware of this rather problematic dialectic, andequally keen to establish photographys currency asa more determined, intention-laden industry than iscommonly presumed.

Throughout his generally laudatory account ofDemands achievement, Fried argues that the artistscritical value issues directly from his resistance tothe observational, documentary impulse. Demandsconcomitant embrace of a harder-won, multi-facetedprocess, Fried suggests, operates in arch, criticalrelation to the assumption that a photograph is an

indexical cohort with reality. Demands workingmethod interrupts this neat indexical relation, forcingthe viewer to think explicitly about the intention ofthe maker and conjurer with an additional layer ofinterpretive difficulty. Fried notes that photographyper se is not important to Demand, just the conclusionbrought to bear on the artists process. Demandsphotographic practice does not direct our attentionto the subject captured or the technical aspects ofphotography, but to the artists tyrannical controlof his process, which ultimately brings order andconceptual coherence to the project. The ultimate

referent is, therefore, not the form or content of hisimages, but the authorial concept. This being thecase, the onus on Fried to develop a sophisticatedunderstanding of the relationship of form to content,and of facture to ultimate effect in the photographsthemselves, is somewhat mitigated, since purposeand meaning have been located so convincinglyelsewhere.

In the context of the present essay it is important tocite Michael Fried, who, for many contemporary artcurators, has offered a convincing and select entrypoint into the vast and diverse terrain of photography.Frieds emphasis rests upon intention. For althoughwe as an art critical community no longer use artisticintentionthe most outmoded of methodologiesasthe infra-logic for interpretation, we do place animplicit premium on intentionality, and we take it forgranted that an object arrives in a gallery or museumsaddled with some degree of authorial purpose, evenif that intention does not figure vitally in the meaningof the work as enumerated by the viewer, critic, orscholar. Demands work is thick with explicit indices

8/2/2019 01_QualifyingPhotography

2/3

2

of intention, intellectual reflection, and consideredaction, all of whichin a sensemimic the minutedecisions and adjustments that take place duringthe execution of a painting, for example; everydetail, therefore, may be understood as intentionaland vigorously interpreted as such. This, of course,leads to a rich critical record, but Frieds emphasison Demands pre-photographic processes also leads

the reader further and further away from the specificobjecthood of the photograph.

So what is lost in this interpretive account? Friedsessay is characteristically suggestive and fertile,but it rests on issues removed from a close analysisof photography as a specific technical practice thatmediates and directs understanding. How Demandsphotographic methods actually operate in the contextof his conceptual scheme gets distinctly short shrift.Instead, the currency of his practice is defined bythe various stages of production that precede the

execution of the photographic image. In effect, it isthese discrete, mappable phases that make Demandsphotographs intelligible and critically potent; thereis no need to look carefully at the image itself.Demands photographs, then, achieve legibilityand encourage art critical exegesis principally as aresult of their non-photographic features. Demandis just one example of an artist/photographerotherobvious examples include Cindy Sherman and JeffWallwho has achieved prominence and whosework generates interest because process and conceptcan be located in the work that precedes the moment

a photograph is taken. The photograph is simply theincidental conclusion, the polished index of a morecomplex backstory to be researched and unpacked bythe viewer/critic. In this sense, the photograph is notindependently productive of meaning but is ratherthe document that records and implies the extendedprocess behind the image.

Frieds account of Demands work is an unusuallysophisticated and provocative example of artcritical writing on photography. More often, whatpasses for photography criticism in major artmagazines discounts issues of facture and ontologyentirely in favor of a descriptive mode that slylyignores questions raised by medium. Generallyspeaking, the nuances of the photographic processare poorly understood in the art critical communitythe present author includedand this shortfallradically limits the discourse. The effects of thissituation can be measured through brief referenceto the discourse surrounding painting in thetwentieth century.

Through the 1960s, Clement Greenbergs Kantianunderstanding of the central imperatives of modernistpainting remained the yardstick against whichcontemporary abstraction was measured. Accordingto Greenberg, the essence of modernist paintinglay in the use of the characteristic methods of [the]disciple to criticize the discipline itself, not in orderto subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in

its area of competence. As a result of Greenbergsposition, critics and artists were compelled toevaluate the fundamental ontology of painting, acompulsion which resulted in a hermetic, highly self-reflexive discourse that bore down ruthlessly on therelationship between a given canvas and Greenbergsmaxims. This contention framed the discoursearound painting for at least two decades and set thestage for the Minimalists, whose principal goal wasto subvert the logic of Greenbergs system throughobjects that relied not on the relationship betweentheir constituent parts, but on the interaction between

object and viewer. Though medium specificity is nolonger a salient issue in contemporary art practice,the discourse of Greenbergian modernism, and thevarious dissenting positions that emerged in its wake,have provided todays critics with the language andcritical tools to describe and evaluate an artists useof media, and to apply this understanding wheninterpreting the way a given object makes meaning. Inthis sense, the inheritance of Greenbergian discourseis both obsolete and invaluable.

Unfortunately, no such model exists for evaluating

photography as a specific medium in art criticalcircles, and so the majority of art critics writingtoday lack the requisite descriptive vocabulary andtechnical understanding to account for and evaluatethe appearance of a photograph, and to relate thoseobservations to the critical rhetoric of the image.This deficit in understanding is readily explicable,deriving in part from the simple fact that the technicalaspects of advanced photographic practice are elusiveto all but those who consistently operate a cameraand produce pictures. More importantly, perhaps,the relative opacity of facture in photographytheabsence of the artists handmeans that the much-vaunted consonance (or dissonance) of subject andform, so often the lynchpin of successful paintingand sculpture, is much harder to bear down on andevaluate in the case of a photograph. While there isroom for improvisational descriptive language andspeculation in characterizing the way a painting wasexecuted, no such possibility exists when describing,for example, a photograph by German-born FlorianMaier-Aichen, whose large-format photographsare obviously manipulated, but utterly opaque to

8/2/2019 01_QualifyingPhotography

3/3

3

the lay viewer. As a result, the meaning of a givenwork is often located in what can be easily discernedsimply by looking, leading all too frequently tofacile observational descriptions that do not accountfor the ways in which the conditions of productioninflect how we interpret content. The elusiveness ofphotography as a medium and the relative invisibilityof process, therefore, have resulted in a radically

impoverished mode of criticism.

Photographers who have been greeted with the mostemphatic critical endorsementsJeff Wall andThomas Demand, for examplehave, generallyspeaking, achieved notoriety by folding into theirphotographic programs additional processes thatmitigate the necessity to evaluate their photographsalone. Photographers who instrumentalizephotography as one component of a broaderpractice have therefore accrued far more criticaland commercial traction than photographers who

hue more closely to the essentialist, observe andrecord model of photography, simply becausetheir work is more accessible and intelligible to artcritics. The latter process of seeing, electing, andshooting is too connoisseurial, too ineffable, and toointuitive to qualify as an intelligent and intelligibleconceptual strategy according to the imperativesof the contemporary art world, where a premiumis placed on conceptual sophistication. As MauriceBerger has noted, such work is assumed to be weakin intentionality.

However, the presumption that this essentialistmodel of photographic production relies on intuitiveknowing rather than on rigorous thinking can onlyundermine the credibility of so-called traditionalor documentary photographers in the context of artcriticism because no adequate framework existsby which to measure the achievements of thesephotographers. And no commonly acknowledgedmeasure exists because the ontological understandingof photography and its methods among art criticsis far less sophisticated than is the case for painting,sculpture, and performance art. Demands work,for example, is uniquely conducive to the logic ofnarrative exegesis and seems to presupposeits own theorization; rather predictably, therefore,his photographs have spawned a vast literature.Standard photographic practice, on the other hand,is not so easily parsed and theorized; its ontology iscomparatively elusive. The key, then, is to enumerateeven the most prosaic aspects of conventionalphotography (the physiognomy of an individualphotographers practice, the ebb and flow ofintentionality through the process from choice

of film or digital back through to print type and size);to claim these considerations and procedures as thebasic ontological condition of photographic work;and to re-theorize the ways in which these factorsshape the image, direct the viewers attention, andcontribute to the production of meaning: in effect, toremake the technical and conceptual discourse aroundtraditional photography within art criticism. Such

a process would not only throw into high relief thefundamental nature and limits of the medium, as wellas the achievement of photographers photographerssuch as James Welling, Christopher Williams, Jean-Marc Bustamante, and Thomas Struth, but it wouldalso radically enhanceand perhaps recastourunderstanding of photographers already entrenchedfirmly in the canon of art history.

Ultimately, there is only one effective, long-termremedy for the instrumentalization of photography inthe broader context of art production, and that remedy

begins with the production of advanced criticism thataddresses photographs with a deep awareness of boththe technical conditions of photographic production,and the concomitant conceptual implications ofthese technical processes. If photography is to beunderstood as a medium always and deliberatelyproductive of meaning in the same sense as painting,this will require a rich and thorough understanding ofthe myriad decisions that precede the production ofa photographic image, ranging from the conceptualand obtuse to the mundane and pragmatic. Suchtechnical awareness is the necessary precondition

for the production of art critical writing that operateswith a full ontological awareness of photography as aunique medium. Only then will an advanced and, dareI say, medium-specific discourse emerge that minesthe rich territory between fact and facture, processand product, form and content, sign and signified. Thedevelopment of such a self-aware critical discoursewill signal photographys equal passage into theworld of contemporary art, and only then will theproblems and questions posed in this essay be trulyanachronistic.

WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES

27 NOVEMBER 2007