“In what might now have become a post-medium condition for art, photography is so often the medium of choice”.
Photography’s journey from discovery to dominance has been speedy, and this is what David Campany sets out to chart in Art and Photography. The introductory essay “Survey” identifies central themes, tracing photography through conceptualism, Pop art and performance, moving onto street photography, “perhaps the only genre entirely specific to the medium”.
Photography has proven to be not only a flexible method of image-production, but also its subject. One of the first uses of photography was in knowledge creation, as a tool for documentation and memory. This institutional knowledge has been subverted by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems in her series of photographs of slaves, taken for their owners’ and buyers’ use. Archives created from groups of photos demonstrate how photographs and the information they seemingly possess are malleable concepts, subject to change through re-organisation and unexpected juxtapositions.
Campany charts how photography began to be recognised through publications, museum shows and dedicated galleries during the second half of the 20th century. Gradually the discussion of the role of photography moved away from the initial questions about whether photography will supplant painting – with Marcel Duchamp as photography’s early cheerleader – to an exchange between the two, as seen in the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter.
After the introductory essay, eight illustrated chapters focus on themes that characterise recent thinking in art history and the multiple functions of photography. The chapter “Memories and Archives” looks at how artists study the notion of the archival collection and investigate the production of knowledge with examples drawn from Andy Warhol’s photo booth strips to the archive created about an imaginary Hollywood actress by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye. The following chapter “Objective Objects” discusses how photographs operate as definitions of things. The immediacy of an unfiltered, objective image brings up questions about the authenticity of photographs and whether anything can truly be recorded objectively.
“Traces of Traces” looks at photography as a witness to an event or its aftermath. It functions differently in seemingly similar situations: Vito Acconci’s blurry photographs capture the moment his feet hit the ground after jumping in the air while all that remains of Carolee Schneemann’s performances are the photographs. Both series of images are of performance art but in the former, the camera is inherent in the act while in the latter the camera is an observer, a recorder. “The Urban and the Everyday” chapter focuses on how photography documents Western urban life, and this filters through other practices and knowledge, such as Cindy Bernard’s images of sites where feature films have been shot and Lee Friedlander’s unexpected street landscapes.
“The Studio Image” goes back to the birthplace of photographic practice. The formal qualities of the studio are echoed in Urs Lüthi’s self-portraits, more performance than portraiture. Traditional studio settings are subverted by Gregory Crewdson and James Casebere, who produce sets and models that are built for the purpose of photography only. The use of the studio as a subject becomes an encounter with the process and history of photography itself.
“The Arts of Reproduction” investigates the ways in which artists try to make sense of the visual world, or the ‘society of the spectacle’. From Chuck Close’s photorealism to Robert Heinecken’s anti-war collage and Andres Serrano’s confrontational Piss Christ, artists play on the visual knowledge we participate in by referencing well-known artworks, religious imagery and the language of advertising. They also investigate the hierarchies and methods of the visual ordering of the world, such as the museum storage photographed by Louise Lawler in Pictures That May or May Not Go Together.
“Just Looking” discusses the meanings of looking and seeing, with examples ranging from Victor Burgin’s panopticon-inspired work – with its contemporary echoes in our age of webcams and reality TV – to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seemingly blank cinema screen. The chapter “The Cultures of Nature” examines photography’s encounters with our relationship with nature, illustrated by Allan Sekula’s series of images of sea exports, and Stephen Shore’s Yosemite National Park where nature has been reduced to a leisure facility.
The scope of Art and Photography is ambitious, encompassing a range of themes and a large number of photographers, but the focus never wavers. In-depth and smoothly readable, it is also a good reference book with its artist biographies and a bibliography. The design has clarity and a sense of purpose, effortlessly managing to squeeze in an enormous amount of information.
Since we are now at a point where photography is almost completely interwoven into contemporary art practice, we must wonder what comes next. Although Art and Photography has been revised between 2003 and 2012, there isn’t much content relating to new technologies, and no recent artworks. If artists are using photography by default after rejecting other, traditional techniques, what will happen with the arrival of digital possibilities? Hopefully the sequel to this book has the answer.
