Art Still Matters: Art in the Contemporary Australian ContextShepparton Art Museum2015

LECTURE 2: ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Bill HensonParis Opera Project, 1990/91

Photography

The decisive moment

Eddie Adams, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém on February 1, 1968, 1968

The Punctum

Indexicality

The Index

Photography's truth claim

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wild Fennel c.1840-41, 2009

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Communion, circa. 1870

Francis Galton, Composite portraits showing

"features common among men convicted of crimes of violence,”

c1885

Walker Evans Subway Portraits c1930s

Walker Evans Subway Passengers, New York 1938

Manipulated photograph of Hitler with Goebbels removed

Manipulated photograph of Stalin with a commissar removed

Geoffrey Ratchen’s “crises of photography”

1. Technological threat of digitisation

1. Theoretical crisis around our understanding of culture and knowledge and ethics

The death of print imaging

• Proliferation of images in contemporary culture

• The history of photographic image making to the present day is grounded in the agency of light

• Print imaging has no one fixed or linear history

• Instead this practice embodies a multiplicity of meanings

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980

“I wanted to explore photography not as a question or a theme, but as a wound.”

Studium Punctum

William Klein, Little Italy, New York, 1954

“He is dead and he is going to die…”

Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne, 1865

William Yang, About my Mother, No. 25 of 30, 1989

Woman in a Veil, 5th Avenue, NY, 1968

Diane Arbus

Child with a toy grenade, Central Park NY, 1962

Girl with a cigar, Washington Park Square, NY, 1965

Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967

Anne Ferran, Lost to Worlds, 2008

Warwick Baker, Images from Balango, 2015

Nan Goldin, Suzanne in the bed of her parents, Swampscot, MA, 1985From the series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin, One month after being battered , 1984

Nan Goldin, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991

William YangAllan from the monologue Sadness 1992

Patrick Pound, People Who Look Dead But (Probably) Aren’t, 2011-14 (detail)

Charles Kerry, Various Portraits, c 1880

Leah King Smith, Patterns of Connection, 1992

Sanja Pahoki, My Family, one of them is dead, video still, 2009

Art in the Post Medium Age

“…where the boundaries between disciplines is so blurred that the aesthetic qualities of the medium have been annihilated.”

-Anne Marsh, “The Digital Menace” Photofile, no. 91, 2010, pp 52-57: 52

Types of Images

• Analogue: an image that is exposed on light sensitive material and developed in chemically emulsive form which shows the physical forms (traces) of its making

• Digital: an image that is produced through the electronic recording of light that is calculated as bits of ones and zeros

Hiroko Ocado, Future Plan #2, 2003

Gabriel Orozco, Breath on piano, 1993

Gabriel Orozco, Waiting Chairs, 1998

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991