Ink Versus Image

Paul Munson

Photography MA Dissertation

University of Brighton September 2010

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Contents Ink Versus Image 2 The Informed Gaze 3 Ink Versus Trace 6 The Potent Image 8 Materiality and Opticality 10 The Colour of Ink 14 Closing Remarks 16

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Ink Versus Image I looked at an intensely backlit inkjet photograph of my daughter that I had taken. She was looking at the camera, her face in shadow as she gripped her blue translucent plastic cup. The diffuse light streaming in through the window beyond it illuminated the cup. As such its deep blue both represented an aspect of her cup but also captivated me with the deep blueness of its representation and I became acutely aware of its actual materiality as ink. The image of my daughter holding a cup was clear and compelling, but oddly upon reflection it was almost as though she was grasping the ink that lay on the surface of the print. I want to think about how these curiously interdependent yet utterly different aspects of ink and image relate to each other in the significance of the photograph as artwork. This interdependence is neatly summed up in Roland Barthes’ words as belonging ‘to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both’.1 Though Barthes was referring to an earlier technology of chemical darkroom printing, the issue still concerns the surface. However, as I intend to show, comparing inkjet prints with both chemical prints and paintings yields some surprising consequences for how we think about the ink in relation to the image that also has implications for photographic materiality more generally. Defining the ink is straightforward enough. It is the pigment mechanically squirted at paper while it is fed through an inkjet printer and determined by a digital file of the photograph. The paper’s surface and how absorbent it is determines the ink’s visual and tactile effect. Conversely the image is considerably more complex and comparatively difficult to define. On a very simple level, the term is often used interchangeably with ‘photograph’. This is an early indication of how ubiquitous and dominating the image is over the surface upon which it appears. I am careful to avoid this usage here in order to make the contrast between it and the ink. Fundamentally, I define the image as the scene or object(s) photographed – the referent or that which the photograph indexes.2 In contrast to the tangibility of ink the image tends to be a slippery notion, at once familiar and elusive. Firstly I will think about where it actually is and how we engage with it, secondly I will discuss why it is so potent and appealing. In terms of the ink I will compare inkjet technology to chemical printing and think about it within the discourse of modernist painting and what the implications are for the materiality of photography. I make this comparison with painting not because I think photography should aspire to be like painting, but painting set the precedent in terms of having the declaration of its own materiality bestowed upon it.

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The Informed gaze It may be tempting to locate the image on the surface of the photograph because that is where it appears. However that is an illusion using geometric perspective in which three-dimensional space, probably with three-dimensional objects contained within it, appears on a two-dimensional plane. An illusion requires the beholder’s awareness of it, otherwise it ceases to be. It is the ink and paper that reminds us that the scene or object, however realistic it may appear, that we recognise on the surface of the paper is merely a resemblance of it and for the photograph to bare its meaning or significance we have to comprehend the resemblance as the actual object or scene it resembles in our imagination. So in a sense the image is formed in the imagination. But we are still left with the distinct impression of seeing the image on the surface. Victor Burgin states: ‘The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has projected an image’.3 In this respect we can regard the image as something that is projected by use of the imagination, therefore it appears on the surface we are projecting it on to. The image is essentially constructed, not out of ink and paper but out of knowledge, experience and a basic cultural awareness. Again this may seem counter-intuitive. Surely a realistic and intricate landscape rendered in ink on a piece of paper resembles that landscape sufficiently for the viewer to comprehend it as a landscape? After all, the rendering seems ‘naturalistic’, though we cannot physically enter the space; the ink resembles the landscape. Nevertheless, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty states ‘It is a remarkable fact that the uninstructed have no awareness of perspective and that it took a long time and much reflection for men to become aware of a perspectival deformation of objects’.4 Hence what is given to us on the surface of a photograph is something that we have conditioned within our cognitive development, it is not naturalistic. As with so much of our conditioning, we are on-the-whole unaware of it and so the surface appears naturalistic, or in Merleau-Ponty’s words: ‘Thus there is no deciphering, no mediate inference from the sign to what is signified, because the alleged signs are not given to me separately from what they signify’.5 The system of representation that photographic optics is predicated upon is similar to geometric perspective developed in the Renaissance era. This is one of many possibilities for representing three-dimensions as two and it is clearly not without its deficiencies. Rudolf Arnheim outlines some of the limitations with the use of this system: ‘No more than one aspect of any three-dimensional object is visible at any place and time. In the course of his life and in fact during almost any particular episode of his daily experience, a person overcomes this limitation of visual projection by looking at things from all sides and thereby forming a comprehensive image from the totality of partial impressions.’ Obviously the capacity to do this when the object is represented on a flat service is severely limited and so Arnheim points out that ‘the tradition established by Renaissance art admitted of only one solution for this dilemma. The painter has to choose the one aspect best suited for his purpose and had to put up with whatever was hidden, foreshortened, or distorted from that particular point of view. Such styles of representation are

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committed to the object or situation as such, not any one of its views’.6 It may seem obvious, but photography cannot show us the object in its entirety, but then nor can our own perception. We are always limited by our aspect in relation to the object or scene and any group of objects seem to change their spatial relationship to each other as we change ours to them. A boat ride along the River Thames as it curves around Canary Wharf shows us a multitude of views of that glistening London business district each with the buildings in different positions to one another and we can never comprehend its totality from any one position. Merleau-Ponty ponders objects ‘which we perceive but one of whose sides we do not see’ and asks ‘how should we describe the existence of…the nonvisible parts of present objects?’7 His scenario is the unseen sides of a lamp. First of all he rejects these sides as being imaginary because they are ‘only hidden from view (to see them it suffices to move the lamp a little bit), I cannot say that they are representations’. Moreover, as for the notion that the unseen sides are ‘somehow anticipated by me, as perceptions which would be produced necessarily if I moved, given the structure of the objects’ he rejects this also, because anticipation is based on a truth that the lamp has a back or that a cube has another side: ‘But this formula, “it is true,” does not correspond to what is given to me in perception. ‘Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences’. Finally, ‘I do not affirm that the back of the lamp exists in the same sense that I say the solution of a problem exists. The hidden side is present in its own way. It is in my vicinity’. According to Merleau-Ponty what these three rejected hypothesis have in common is that they are determined through an ‘intellectual synthesis’ which would freely posit the total object that I am led from what is given to what is actually not given; that I am given together, with the visible sides of the object, the non invisible sides as well.’ Instead, what is required is ‘a kind of practical synthesis: I can touch the lamp, and not only the side turned toward me but also the other side; I have only to extend my hand to hold it’.8 This ‘practical synthesis’ means we can touch the lamp from all sides, but with a photograph of it we are confronted with the stark reality of paper, ink or a chemical residue. In Burgin’s words ‘facts intrude to deconstruct the initial response: the eye (I) cannot move within the depicted space (which offers itself precisely to such movement), it can only move across it to the points at which it encounters the frame’.9 In this sense it is actually the ‘intellectual synthesis’ that is required. After all, Merleau-Ponty’s problem of perception is based on that of a three-dimensional object. However, regarding a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object we can take some key aspects of his first and third rejections and apply them as affirmations (his second rejection cannot be applied in this way because the lamp’s representation only exists in two-dimensions, so we can’t anticipate walking around it and encountering its other sides). Regarding the first, all of the hidden sides are imaginary (as a three-dimensional object the whole lamp is); as for the third we can affirm that the back of the lamp exists in the same sense that we say the solution of a problem exists, for the problem is one of representation (though not necessarily an ideal solution). This last one is perhaps the more tenuous and what I mean to say is that the back of the lamp exists in as much as the solution to its apparent absence does. In other words we know it is

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not really there, but we are expected to accept that it is within the system of representation that is being used. In other words, the hidden side is clearly referred to. Consequently, in an interesting way, more liberties can be taken with the perception of representation compared to the perception of the object represented. Somehow in the space of the lamp we have more responsibility to be ‘realistic’ about it and to walk around it and touch it because we can, hence Merleau-Ponty’s call for a ‘practical synthesis’. But upon the picture of a lamp, knowing it is not really a lamp, we can enter into an illusory world in which so much more is possible with the force of the imagination without having to physically go anywhere or touch anything. However, the idea of taking liberties implies the need to escape the problem of absence or at least to somehow deal with it, but in photography it is more something to be embraced (or at least the idea of it is). In a sense absence and photography are synonymous. With deft cropping and aspects of the scene referred to not being shown on the photograph, we are shown the force of what remains. After all, in Arnheim’s words, ‘if we wish to make pictures on a plane surface, all we can hope to do is to produce a translation – that is, to present some structural essentials of the visual concept by two-dimensional means.’ It is the ‘structural essentials’ that photography is so capable of rendering and ‘Photography is indeed more authentic in the rendering of a street scene, a natural habitat, a texture, a momentary expression. What counts in these situations is the accidental inventory and arrangement, the overall quality, and the complete detail rather than the formal precision.’ By ‘complete detail’ Arnheim does not mean the hidden side of a lamp, but the sides we can see – the complete detail of the representation. In effect the denial of the whole thing focuses our attention on the particular qualities that we can see. It reveals an impression of ‘lampness’: ‘pictures give us the thing ‘itself’ by telling us about some of its properties: The characteristic outline of a bird, the colour of a chemical, the number of geological layers’.10 This presents us with a dual thingness of the photograph and the image it supports. The question that has vexed theoreticians is how these two relate to each other. One theory posits that strictly speaking, they do not. We actually see ‘through’ the photograph to what appears to be an image. This idea is taken up at the beginning of Barthes’ Camera Lucida in which, ‘overcome by an “ontological desire”’ he ‘wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself” by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images’.11 He states that ‘A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)’. He does not entirely condemn the photograph to inevitably bond with its referent though. He seems to leave the door ajar by implying that it is possible to ‘perceive the photographic signifier’ and suggesting that the photograph ‘is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent’ [my emphasis]. But this ‘requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection’.12 I will now discuss how ink may promote that secondary action.

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Ink Versus Trace I want to show that by thinking about the ink on an inkjet print in a particular way and comparing it to the residue of chemical prints, the ink can take on a value in its own right, for its own sake. I suggest that the advent of the comparatively recent technology of inkjet printing changes the relevance of Barthes’ ‘sticky referent’ and his ‘duality’ that we ‘can conceive but not perceive’. I take as my cue his statement that ‘but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does’.13 With darkroom chemical printing, the surface is essentially a reaction to light and as such it belongs to the same class as imprint, shadow or reflection. All of these are reactions as much as milk turning is. By contrast ink applied to a piece of paper is a creation and belongs to the class of painting, drawing or mark-making. Fundamentally, the mark emphasizes the presence of its own materiality, while the imprint is absence of the material object that caused it. It could be countered that the chemical remains on the paper as much as ink does, however the chemicals act to record and fix the image thus were dependent on an image or at least light being shone as well as other chemicals that have been washed away. The ink’s qualities of flatness and colour are its essential attributes that visibly remain and are independent (though these attributes are put to the service of an image, the ink could be poured onto the paper without the use of or reference to an image and still retain these attributes). The essential attributes of the chemicals are to react, attributes that are dependent on something else. The ink is merely dependent on its own being there, its own application. In other words an imprint suggests what was there while an applied mark suggests what is. As an example of this, take reflections within the same category as chemical printing. I looked down at my carpet the other day to see pink shapes, immediately upon realizing the light streaming in through the window and the unlikelihood of the pink marks actually being on the carpet, I searched for and found the cause – my daughter’s paper crown with its shinny pink stars. The point is, upon reading the shapes as a reflection, I recognize an absence and have the need to search. If I had recognized them as pink paint, I would have been content for my gaze to remain longer on the actual marks – no absence would have registered (the marks are actually there. Naturally I would have questioned the cause, but not after studying the marks themselves). Consequently the ink registers as presence not absence and offers some compensation for the absence registered by the image. The referent has gone and rather than a chemical trace we have pigment gracing the surface as much as paint does. Hence I can dwell on the pigment as something substantial. Consequently, the transformation from chemical darkroom printing to inkjet technology generates the potential to think about photography differently. Upon my stated premise that ink is more akin to the class of creative marks as opposed to the reactive imprints of darkroom printing I propose that photography is the same as painting to the extent that they both involve a substance applied to a surface. I have accepted that photography is an inherently representational medium in that it always has a referent. Even if one pixel of a digital image

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rendered the light before it and is visible on the print or screen, then the relationship is stated, however subtly. There is a causal effect based on the scene before the camera (or just light in the absence of a camera). Painting by contrast does not afford this indexicality. The most we can expect is for a painting to index the act of marking and all that it entails. It may of course also index a scene with a striking degree of resemblance, but the relationship is not causal. The scene has in no way caused the painting, even if it has inspired it. However, I suggest and will continue to argue for here that painting’s historical retreat from subject matter and the relatively new way of making photographic prints has drawn these two mediums together in unexpected ways. Moreover, to understand this we need to think about photography differently. Much of what we bring to our understanding and appreciation of a work-of-art is based on our expectations. Anne McCauly uses a scenario in which she looks at three types of photographs: a colour photograph, a miniature photograph and a gum print. Without knowledge of the processes, she claims that she would ‘perhaps pay more attention to the first image, since there were more details to be read in the picture’. However upon being aware of how they are produced she states that she ‘would immediately think about these works differently and begin to ask other questions of them’.14 In other words the knowledge of how the image is made, rather than anything inherent in the photograph changes the way the viewer thinks about it. Another example of this is that we are far more likely to consider a photograph as being out-of-focus as we would a painting. We bring with us to the photographic image knowledge of optics and their capabilities and expect a competent photographer to able to use them. Hence we expect at least some sharpness or perhaps evidence that the photographer had deliberately de-focused the lens or set a particular aperture to control depth-of-field. In all of these cases it is knowledge of the medium that changes the way we look at and think about it. So the question this generates for my purposes is: Can we bring to photography, not just an implicit awareness of the ink, or an acceptance of the illusion, but also an appreciation for it for its own sake? I have already argued here that unlike a chemical trace of an image, ink registers its own presence by being on the surface and perhaps even offering some compensation for the referent’s absence. Nevertheless, one reason to overlook the ink is the potency of the image.

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The Potent Image But why should the image be such a potent force? Throughout the 1980s photography was regarded as something constructed in terms of ‘the politics of representation.’ However, more recently contemporary artists ‘have forced us to reflect upon the very strangeness of these forms of representation and of their fundamental elusiveness in the face of our search for meaning. They have drawn our attention to the ambiguity and potential undecidability of the photographic sign, its resistance to meaning, its relationship to time and history, and its indexicality’.15 Though debates between materiality of the medium and the image have been played out throughout the twentieth century, such debates have tended towards painting rather than photography.16 One possible reason for this is that a rich convincingly iconical image has seduced the viewer and theoretician alike to see beyond the surface or through it and to engage in a discourse concerning its relationship to the ‘real’ rather than to the reality of its ink. Another is that the grand narrative of renaissance perspective was taken up by photography in order to free painting from the constraints of that cultural convention. Either way, a pertinent question is: What is so seductive about an image of the ‘real’ that we sacrifice the reality of richly coloured hues of ink before our eyes? In other words, why drift into the realms of the imagination at the expense of what is actually present? According to David Green ‘Richard Wollheim has argued that spatial illusion is dependent upon an ability to see what he calls the ‘twofoldness’ of the surface of the image: ‘of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface’.17 If there is a ‘twofoldness’ regarding the image and ink of a photograph, it is heavily biased towards the image. As we have already seen, this is to some extent based on expectations and conventions. But there is nonetheless something enticing about images that underpin these factors. Images tend to be tantalising because they are separate from the reality before our eyes but still give us a hint of that reality. We take from reality what we need for our own gratification, to smooth over the wrinkles and sharp edges of the often harsh and difficult bind of ‘real life’. This is not to suggest that we ignore the ink on a photograph for that reason, but that we have a compulsion for image-forming for that reason. We live in a world where people talk into machines as though they are talking to a person (who is actually absent); where sympathy and empathy are felt for those we never meet but encounter through the ink of text; or our very own Princess who would constantly glow on television screens; outpouring of grief and expression of emotions rarely expressed on such a public scale in Britain over an image held dear of Diana, Princess of Wales.18 Much of our time is spent sacrificing the reality of objects and situations in favour of the images that they generate. Most of us live much of our life in a virtual-reality and so it is with photography. Burgin describes the ‘point-of-view and frame’ of a photograph as being ‘intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). Accordingly ‘the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.19

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However, if we accept the desirability of image-forming and projecting, we are still left with the question as to why they are so desirable. One theory is that we seek identity in the images we create. As Burgin outlines ‘An analogous imaginary investiture of the real constitutes an early and important moment in the formation of the human being, described by Jacques Lacan: between its sixth and eighteenth month, the infant, which experiences its body as fragmented, uncentered, projects its potential unity, in the form of an ideal self, upon other bodies and upon its own reflection in a mirror; it is the other (separation will come later through the knowledge of sexual difference, opening up the world of language, the symbolic order); the idea of a unified body necessary to the concept of self-identity has been formed, but only through a rejection of reality (rejection of incoherence, of separation).’ A possible implication regarding image-forming is that, as adults, even though we regard our projected image as something distinct from ourselves (the world ‘of language, the symbolic order’ has been opened up), the early desire to seek identity was so potent and profound, it remains, albeit in a more sophisticated and stealthy form. Hence we use textual information such as photographs to fulfil the desire to identify with something or somebody. Further evidence of the potency of infant image-forming is in the ‘observed correlation between the formation of identity and the formation of images (at this age the infant’s powers of vision outstrip its capacity for physical co-ordination), which led Lacan to speak of the ‘imaginary’ function in the construction of subjectivity’. Moreover we have, ‘the fact that the child’s recognition of itself in the imaginary order, in terms of a reassuring coherence, is a misrecognition (what the eye can see for its-self here is precisely that which is not the case)’.20 Consequently, I suggest that image-forming is a deeply ingrained motive to make sense of ourselves in our world to seek a ‘reassuring coherence’ and that this subsumes and to some extent disregards that it is a ‘misrecognition’ of what is really there. The advantage of photography over painting in image-forming is both its privileged relationship to the real and its often realistic representation of that elusive entity. Hence it stokes the imaginative forces that seek depth from flatness. This is perhaps why we have seen a technological drive for ever finer resolution in photographic technology, with a continuous reduction in grain of film technology and now a desire for digital images to be ‘noise’ free. It is as though the materiality of the medium interferes with the image or that we are aware of something up the conjurer’s sleeve that interferes with the illusion. After all, the artefacts of grain and noise draw attention to the surface.

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Materiality and Opticality Richard Shiff discusses materiality in the context of modern technology and its limitations. He stresses the limits of a medium in terms of how it represents nature. He compares strokes of paint with the binary of digitisation with its ‘switch that can be either on or off, their number can always be increased and their order adjusted’. But what matters is ‘how many bits will fit into a functioning switching box that can actually be built. So it matters also of what material these switches consist, their physical form and substance.’ Shiff tends to concern himself with the conspicuous materiality of impressionism with its heavy brush marks that seem to stridently mark out the canvas as much as they suggest an image: ‘Paul Cezanne possessed a will severe enough to contribute to his isolation: “I have only painting to do,” he announced later in life. Perhaps his extreme determination should have led him to some final success at imitating the appearance of nature. But his was material, the medium of paint; and materiality interferes with representation’.21 How can materiality ‘interfere’ with representation? As noted there are the material artefacts of grain and noise that are often considered as interference with the image. Yet another way to think about this is that in painting especially and to a lesser extent in photography, the paint marks, grain or noise are expressive of the artist’s ‘hand’ or of what they feel about a scene even if only as an inevitable side-effect of the ultimate goal of a purely visual experience of it. Hence the intention is to represent a scene but it is inevitable that the artist will also represent how they feel about it. Regarding Cezanne, this ‘feeling’ translates into a particular way of articulating the surface. Hence materiality can interfere with representation because of the duality between the artist’s desire to represent and their desire to express. Shiff goes on to declare that ‘representations readily assume features of their own’. One reason he offers is that ‘In forceful acts of aesthetic and physical coordination, painters gesture toward a comprehensive visual experience and signify it as an ideal; but the goal itself, the raw and total experience of the eye remains untouched’.22 In what way do artists gesture towards ‘a comprehensive visual experience’? Shiff equates this ‘ideal’ with in John Ruskin’s words ‘the innocence of the eye’. I suggest that it is akin to the innocence of anticipating, imagining or indulging in the three dimensional reality represented on a planar surface. As such it exploits the imagination to visualise a flat surface as three-dimensional depth with objects positioned within it. It carries an awareness of the conventions of perception such as geometric perspective thus considers the medium as an aid for looking, comprehending and imagining something else rather that something to look at for its own sake, it is something to see through and beyond. This is also to recognise the limitations of any medium to this task. Ruskin suggests that ‘the only obstacle to the success of painting is, that many of the real colours are brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas: we must put darker ones to represent them’.23 Hence if the medium’s sole purpose is to represent something, it will be judged on how successfully or otherwise it achieves that, justifying the drive for high resolution in photography mentioned earlier.

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So what exactly is the goal that remains untouched, ‘the raw and total experience of the eye’? Perhaps the best way to define it is in opposition to the ideal of ‘a comprehensive visual experience’. So the ideal is not to be comprehensive but instead very specific and raw – uncultured or not dependent on a conventional way of looking. Moreover it is ‘total’. I take this to mean an experience that relates to a kind of contentment with the way things are. I was content with the blueness of my daughter’s cup for its blueness; I did not need it to be a cup. Therefore my experience was complete or total. If there is something more to the blueness, if it belongs to something else that isn’t there anymore, then I have to imagine because my experience of what is there is incomplete; but it is in a sense comprehensive in that I am now using a fuller range of my perceptual faculties: I am projecting the idea of a three-dimensional cup onto a flat surface. Even if the blue was not a representation of a cup, but a dripped streak of blue paint expressing a sweeping gesture of the artist’s arm, I am now imagining the artist’s movement – again, a more comprehensive perceptual experience but not a total one. So with this insight of what the ‘goal’ is, I will now consider how it manifests itself because to some degree it justifies the ink of the cup as being something more than an image. Shiff describes a ‘resistance to the independently meaningful mark’ that developed through practice and theory during the 1950s and 1960s in which artists either ‘deliberately ironised their Abstract Expressionist predecessors’ emphasis on personally assertive gesture’ or used ‘repetitive marks that, by comparison to other handmade marks, lacked distinctive character and seemed anything but singular’. As such the ‘mark without character affords a perverse kind of self-consistency: like the grainy emulsion of a photographic print’. He invokes the phrase that it ‘just gets it all down’.24 He then suggests that ‘ “it” might refer to nothing beyond the mark of paint, graphite, or ink itself, neither the internal emotions of the artist nor the specific qualities of some specific object.’ (Indeed, “it” does not refer to the specific qualities of an object; it just has them). As such, this ‘neutralising type of mark acquires a distinction and a liberating force of its own. By avoiding the usual connotations of personality, emotion and expression, it breaks not only with tradition but with the established counter-style of cultural resistance – Abstract Expressionism’.25 Clement Greenberg celebrates the ‘revelation’ of colour-drenched fabric, which can also be understood as an act of defiance of the highly textured surface of Abstract Expressionism with its gestural paint marks. In referring to the so called colour-field paintings of such painters as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski he declares: ‘The more closely color could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations; the way to achieve this closer identification was by adapting watercolour technique to oil and using thin paint on an absorbent surface’.26 Importantly, both Shiff and Greenberg are positioning a more automated mechanically produced mark in opposition to the expressive, gestural mark. Shiff elaborates on his use of the term “mark without character” (or “characterless mark”)’ by describing it as ‘perverse because a “mark” is a “character”. This redundancy in terminology (a pleonasm) reflects the fact that marks are assumed both to reveal character and to have character. The mark

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becomes the indexical or metronymic representation as well as the iconic metaphoric representation of the character of the artist, mover of the mark.’ I suggest that photography produces the ultimate ‘marks without character’ because they are mechanically produced and that is perhaps why the ink only holds currency for its utility. It only has character for the image it stimulates, thus its purpose is to serve the image, and so the tendency to over-look it is hardly surprising. However, even though the mark itself may be characterless, its colour and tonality both serve the image and the photograph’s objecthood. This is something I will pursue in the next section. But for now, suffice to say that colour-field paintings assert their objecthood because in Greenberg’s words ‘‘The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint itself, color itself’. 27 We can also apply this same principle of objecthood to inkjet prints in contrast with chemical printing methods. There is a wider range of more absorbent papers available for inkjet use such as thick and fibrous fine art papers and dead matt papers. Though they are not as absorbent as canvas, the basic principle remains that in varying degrees the paper is absorbing the colours, so more than lay flat on an imperious surface, the paper absorbs the ink. Most chemical printing methods however depend on a resin-coated surface to resist water-logging, hence the image sits on the surface. One difficulty with this argument is that the rear surface of a paint soaked canvases adopts the colours, which is not the case with the photograph. So it is important to note that the argument is based on the degree to which inkjet paper’s objecthood is enhanced compared to that of resin-coated darkroom paper. Moreover, it is not merely a material fact that divides the two processes. Visually, the sheen on even a matt chemical print tends to render a more vivid sense of depth than an inkjet matt print does, which more readily reveals its flatness. I suggest that this one of the reasons why Wolfgang Tillmans’ ‘Ostgut Freischwimmer, right (2004)’ is so successful as an abstract photograph even though it is essentially ‘of’ something. It is an inkjet print measuring 231.1cm tall and 607.8cm long. From a comfortable viewing position it easily occupies ones entire field of vision in the way a large Jeff Wall photograph does. Unlike a typical experience of the Wall however, we are not encouraged to go anywhere. We are not asked to imagine a space far removed from the one in which we stand. We remain firmly in the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park for the Tillmans’ Retrospective (2010). We may question what these hair-like strands and dappled spots really are as they seem to fade in and out of blurry oblivion in a curiously photographic way, but there is also a distinct sense that it does not really matter. What matters far more is the encounter with this thing. Unlike a Jackson Pollock with its dripped articulated surface of paint, we are not even encouraged to attend to the process or a performative gesture, but merely to encounter. We find ourselves with no wall in our peripheries, no body, thing or activity to be referred to but just this thing to look at and be in the presence of, in this regard there is a reassuring sense of unity. There is no need to enter its imaginary space in order to identify with it, instead we can engage with it for what it actually is and who we are. Even though our identities are fluid, there is contentment to be there as we

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are, at that time, without image-forming or projecting. In this sense it is a ‘total’ experience rather than a ‘comprehensive’ one.28 Lane Relyea compares Tillman’s Blushes, Peaches, Starstruck, and Freischwimmer series to ‘the color-field paintings that Greenberg and Fried rallied behind’. Notably, he also suggests that ‘the resemblance grows stronger still when Tillmans produces these images as inkjet prints in large formats (sometimes over 12 by 8 feet). Here the color runs in thin, animated strands across the length of the paper’s textured, unglossed surface; these strands, like tiny rivulets of liquid dye spreading over and into the water-soaked fabric, condense to the point of semi-blackness at the center of the individual dribbles and disperse at their edges into hazes and scrims of brighter, softer hue. The formidable size, restricted palate, and smouldering quality of the color when it turns densest and darkest – all this lends the work a grand and somber, even elegiac feel’.29 (I suspect that this sense of ‘a grand sombre, even elegiac feel’ results from the ‘total’ experience described in the previous paragraph). Finally, Relyea compares these Tillmans’ abstracts to Morris Louis who ‘was said to achieve the same effect through pouring heavily watered-down acrylics into unprimed canvas’.30 Relyea’s interpretation of Tillman’s abstracts lends credence to the arguments for photography’s materiality. I will now consider further how painting and photography converge in terms of materiality. A logical conclusion of sheer opticality in painting or ‘the raw and total experience of the eye’ is invoked by monochrome painting. David Green describes this as ‘a rectangle of a single, unmodulated colour, a flat surface that is entirely both figure and ground, devoid of all ‘subject matter’, narrative and literary connections.’ He proposes that: ‘Rigorously anti-mimetic, the monochrome would appear the very antithesis of photography. Yet curiously it is within the tradition of the monochrome that we discover points of convergence between modernist non-representational painting and photography.’ Green draws these two apparently incompatible forms together by identifying a feature that the monochrome shares with photography, that it ‘demands techniques which are both depersonalised, even anonymous and essentially repetitive’. Hence ‘by virtue of its defining characteristics, the monochrome belongs to that category of objects of serial production. For such reasons, monochrome painting might be said not only to confront the issue of painting’s anomalous existence in the era of mass reproduction but further still, to internalise the condition of photography that epitomises that era’.31 So in a sense, it is the mechanised and depersonalised process of application that is drawing painting and photography together as just two forms of mark-making. On this basis the significance of photography is in the inkjet cartridges that sit among a ‘batch of art-supplies’ that ‘already possess on their own vast potentials for creativity and beauty’; and that ‘genius, rather than a divine gift innate to those lucky enough to emerge from the womb as artists, instead wells up in this – in the historical, material, public place of an art-medium, a set of materials and techniques hypothetically available to all’.32 However while the mechanised and depersonalised process of application may draw aspects of late-modernist painting and photography together, it also distinguishes them from one another, and in my argument it hinges on colour.

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The Colour of Ink In practice, while paint is applied to the surface in a multitude of gestures, from carefully executed brush strokes to being sprayed or dripped; the ink in the cartridge is inserted into an inkjet printer that is fed rigorously strict instructions that determine precisely to a fraction of a millimetre where the ink is applied and the exact quantity of each colour to be used. Consequently, the colours on the inkjet paper have the potential to be caused by colours of the referent. The colours of the monochrome painting are of the paint whereas the colours of an inkjet print are both of the ink and also relate indexically to the colours of the referent. But then perhaps the appeal of monochrome painting is its resistance to representation or even its subversion of it thus avoiding the folly of distortion outlined earlier and promoting a more total experience as in Shiff’s ‘raw and total experience of the eye’.33 However, I argue that colour is unique in fulfilling both of these consequences while at the same time representing something. As essentially flat, colour has the capacity to retain its quality between the referent and photograph thus circumventing the visual problems of representation.34 Moreover, as colours do not have a scent or texture, we can engage with their representation on a flat surface in their totality or in the raw and total experience of the eye. To clarify, if we take as our referent an untreated plank of wood, the sensual reality of it is, is that we only have to reach out and stroke it to verify the appearance of splinters and jagged grain or we have only to smell the freshly sawn wood to confirm the sawdust on the ground, our experience is immediate and direct. The fatality of its representation on a flat surface is the denial of this sensual engagement and the pain of splinters or the pleasant memories that smells often evoke are reserved for cognition alone. We can but comprehend what those sensations entail through memory. We are to translate the representation’s smooth patterns of roughness (this oxymoron epitomises the problem) into the notion of a potentially pain inducing roughness and bridge the gap between the smell of ink or chemicals with the smell of the wood that these materials can merely invoke in their visual representation. On the other hand, the lightness of tone that fresh wood exhibits is the same lightness of tone of its representation. It is only connotation or association that distinguishes them.35 In a painting of the plank even if the artist rendered the colour with some accuracy, this is still at the mercy of their disposition. Shiff describes this in terms of the ‘autonomy’ of the artist in which ‘we presume some connection between visual image and painted image by way of the hand but subject its precise nature to the vagaries of interpretation’.36 The gap between colour and the referent is such that a referent is not even necessary. While I do not doubt the ‘vagaries of interpretation’ of the photographer and equipment manufacture in manipulating the equipment and designing it respectively, essentially the photographer uses the equipment to index the referent by setting the equipment up to react to it. The photographic process aspires to an objective standard and deviation from this or subversion of it is regarded as manipulation of the image.37 The potential is to realise the colours of the wood, not by interpreting them, but by using equipment as an objective mediator to react to them in order to reproduce them.38 However

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with inkjet technology the reactions (sensor to light, printer to digital file) are superseded by an act of creation (substance applied). So we have a process akin to monochrome painting in respect that a substance is mechanically applied to a surface, but unlike painting it carries with it the bedrock of indexicality and yet it still retains a sense of autonomy of its own objecthood.39 After all, defocus the lens and what was the light tone of fresh wood is now integrated into a penetrated surface saturated with the tone of light magnolia purely for its opticality and with its own scent of ink and texture of fluid smoothness all the more complete for not referring to something else. Hence the photographic surface matters as the arena in which the ink, referent and image can be united by colour – indelibly bound by a causal relationship of indexicality. There is an awareness of a new thing of the photograph – a magnolia ink-saturated piece of paper and an image of a wooden plank. We have the capacity to both contemplate the magnolia for its own hue and imagine it as the plank that played a causal role in the print’s creation. In an interesting way, we have a choice to either stay in the Serpentine, or wander off into the realms of our imagination. Indeed, in case we enter the gallery expecting to stay put, Tillmans intersperses his coolly objective abstracts with vivid representations of his social circle.40 The explicit scenes of genitalia may prompt us to read the hair-like strands of ‘Ostgut Freischwimmer, right (2004)’ differently, if only for a moment. It is perhaps this choice that photography affords between indulging in its referent or contemplating its surface that makes it unique among mediums. But to fulfill that ambition one has to realize the surface, and the advent of ink technology has drawn attention to the surface of the photograph as never before.

Woolfgang Tillmans, ‘Ostgut Freischwimmer, right (2004)’

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Closing Remarks It may be objected that I have distorted the issue of ink versus image by biasing it towards the more abstract qualities of photographs to satisfy my own interests in materiality to determine a particular outcome. I have tended towards abstraction to offer a reassessment of photographs as artworks more generally including those that stimulate a highly detailed image of a familiar scene. Indeed, as we have seen in the opening remarks, one of my motivations was a highly iconical image of a humble bedroom scene. Perhaps the crux is that any ‘scene’ can appear abstract by isolating particular details either by moving closer to or by concentrating perception on one small area, as I did with my daughter’s cup. I am not under any misapprehension that there is one way of engaging with a photograph. I do however think the surface of the photograph is all too often sacrificed and I hope that I have shown how it can matter for its own sake. Of course ink is but one aspect of that surface, there is a wider materiality at stake and the discourse this opens up is about more than ink and image. I have used this dichotomy as the point of entry into this discourse. If I have shown how ink not merely contributes to the formation of images but is also worth looking at for its own sake, then it follows that it is worth thinking about as well. As such, by thinking about the ink and not just seeing through or beyond it, we are thinking about materiality and how it relates to the image that it promotes. In this respect we can apply the insights gained by reassessing photographic materiality in the light of inkjet technology to chemical prints as well. However, I have noted characteristics of inkjet prints of absorption and visual flatness in comparison to the apparent depth of chemical prints. Along with depersonalised and anonymous techniques that are essentially repetitive, this feasibly places them in a discourse with monochrome painting or the unprimed paint-soaked canvases of the so-called colour-field painters. Finally, I discussed how colour unifies the referent with the photograph via the ink and that the potential for objective accuracy in the ink’s application within this casual relationship distinguishes photography from painting. Central to my thesis is that inkjet printing forms a presence on the surface in contrast with the trace registered by chemical printing. All of this places a new emphasis on the actual surface of the photograph and thus its relationship to a potent and absorbing image. As a result we can start to tease apart Barthes’ sticky referent from the surface upon which it appears to sit and the blueness of my daughter’s cup is significant for at least two reasons. 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage 2000, 1993) 6 2 For a description of Index see Arthur W. Burks, “Icon, Index, and Symbol” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 9, No. 4(Jun., 1949), pp,673-689 Published by: International Phenomenologoical Society 3 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs” Thinking Photography. Ed. Victor Burgin. (Hampshire: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982) 147

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4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception. Ed. John Wild. (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 15 5 Merleau-Ponty 14 6 Rudolph Arnheim Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. (London: Faber, 1967) 130 7 Merleau-Ponty 13 8 Merleau-Ponty 14 9 Victor Burgin “Looking at Photographs” Thinking Photography. Ed. Victor Burgin. (Hampshire: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982)152 10 Arnheim 157 11 Barthes 3 12 Barthes 5 13 Barthes 6 14 Anne McCauley “The Trouble with Photography” Photography Theory. Ed. James Elkins. (Oxon: Routledge, 2007) 422 15 Joanna Lowry, David Green & David Company Where is the Photograph? Ed. David Green. (Brighton: Photoforum; Maidstone: Photoworks, 2003) 10 16 See ‘Pollock and After. Ed. Francis Frascina. (London: Routledge, 2000) 17 David Green Full of Things which Absorb the Light: Photography and Monochrome Painting” (Creative Camera June/July 1999) 18 18 While I do not wish to belittle the tragic events surrounding the death of Diana Princess of Wales, I do think the outpouring of grief on such a mass scale is indicative of the potency of image-forming and projecting as it was largely determined by the mass-media. After all the vast majority of mourners never met her and only ‘knew’ her through the media. 19 Burgin 146 20 Burgin 147 21 Richard Shiff “Realism of low resolution: digitisation and modern painting” Impossible Presence. Ed. Terry Smith. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) 125

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22 Shiff 126 23 Shiff 126 24 Shiff is quoting Chuck Close from an interview ‘in Nemser, “An inteview with Chuck Close,” 51’ 25 Shiff 130/1 26 Clement Greenberg Modernism with a Vengance, 1957 – 1969 Volume 4. Ed John O’Brian. (London: University of Chicago Press, Ltd, 1993) 97 27 Greenberg 97 28 See Shiff mentioned earlier: ‘In forceful acts of aesthetic and physical coordination, painters gesture toward a comprehensive visual experience and signify it as an ideal; but the goal itself, the raw and total experience of the eye remains untouched’. 29 Lane Relea “Photography’s Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction” Wolfgang Tillmans. Ed. Amy Teschner and Kamilah Foreman. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum; Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 97 30 Relyea 98 31 Green 18 32 Relyea 98 33 To describe this as folly is only one possible view. Another is that geometric perspective is a highly developed and sophisticated means of representation. 34 Arnheim: ‘If we wish to make pictures on a plane surface, all we can hope to do is to produce a translation – that is, to present some structural essentials of the visual concept by two-dimensional means.’ ‘The tradition established by Renaissance art admitted of only one solution for this dilemma. The painter has to choose the one aspect best suited for his purpose and had to put up with whatever was hidden, foreshortened, or distorted from that particular point of view. Such styles of representation are committed to the object or situation as such, not any one of its views’. 35 The redness of an attractive garment is likely to be more appealing than the same redness of the blood that seeps from a wound 36 Richard Shiff “Phototropism (Figuring the Proper)” Retaining the Original Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions. Ed Kathleen Preciado (New Hampshire: The University Press of New England, 1989) 171

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37 Compare this to painting which assumes manipulation. 38 Shiff: ‘the operation of photography seems fundamentally different from that of painting, its initial aesthetic model. Because of the standardisation of its equipment (with technical specifications applied to lenses, exposure, and development), photography immediately becomes less susceptible to the kinds of variations that arise from different kinesthetic patterns and degrees of motor control of those who paint or draw by hand. This suppression of elements often considered subjective and expressive is what makes photographic imagery “real,” relatively speaking.’ (Shiff 129) I do accept however, that in practice rendering a particular colour on a photograph accurately is fraught with difficulties. However my argument rests on the degree in which the photographic process can be standardized in terms of ‘colour management’. The result is that any variations are minor compared to distortions in perspective and unlike painting there is an objective standard. 39It may even be tempting to consider the colours on a photograph as reproducing the colours of the referent instead of representing them. However the act of reproducing colours on an artwork carries with it an array of historical and contextual codes that makes this move untenable. Hence the reproduction involves an act of representation. 40 Tillmans designed this show

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Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolf, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. London: Faber, 1967 Barthes, Rolland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage 2000, 1993 Burgin, John “Looking at Photographs” Thinking Photography. Ed. Victor Burgin. Hampshire: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982 Burks, Arthur W. “Icon, Index, and Symbol” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Providence, RI: International Phenomenlogoical Society Vol. 9, No. 4 Jun., 1949 Costello, Diarmuid, “After Medium Specificity Chez Fried: Jeff Wall as a Painter; Gerhard Richter as a Photographer” Photography Theory. Ed. James Elkins. Oxon: Routledge, 2007 Curry, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992 Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998 Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 Greenberg, Clement, “Towards A Newer Laocoon” Pollock and After. Ed. Francis Frascina. London: Routledge, 2000 Greenberg, Clement, Modernism with a Vengance, 1957 – 1969 Volume 4. Ed John O’Brian. London: University of Chicago Press, Ltd, 1993 Green, David and Joanna Lowry. “From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking Photographic Indexicallity.” Where is the Photograph? Ed. David Green. Brighton: Photoforum; Maidstone: Photoworks, 2003 Green, David “Full of Things which Absorb the Light: Photography and Monochrome Painting” Creative Camera June/July 1999 Jones, Caroline. Eyesight Alone. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005 Lee, Pamela. Uta Barth. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2004 McCauley, Anne “The Trouble with Photography” Photography Theory. Ed. James Elkins. Oxon: Routledge, 2007

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Ed. John Wild. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964 Peyton-Jones, Julia. Hans Ulrich Obrist. Michael Bracewell and Josef Strau. Wolfgang Tillmans Serpentine Gallery. Eds Sophie O’Brien and Melissa Larner. London: Koenig Books, 2010 Relyea, Lane. “Photography’s Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction” Wolfgang Tillmans. Ed. Amy Teschner and Kamilah Foreman. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum; Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 Shiff, Richard “Phototropism (Figuring the Proper)” Retaining the Original Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions. Ed Kathleen Preciado. New Hampshire: The University Press of New England, 1989 Shiff, Richard. “Realism of low resolution: digitisation and modern painting” Impossible Presence. Ed. Terry Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001 Tumlir, Jan. White Blind (Bright Red) Uta Barth. Sante Fe: Site Sant Fe, 2004 Wenzel, Christian. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics. Malden USA, 2005 Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1975

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