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