photography , more than just a window.

Time to focus on the reason I started blogging . Photography.  

This is an interesting update about what is happening in Photography. Long, but worth  reading.

                                             Photography, a  Mirror and a Window 



Institutional discourse around photography remains encumbered by certain established strictures. These are intimately tied to a specific history of photography that is concerned with the camera’s status as a tool used to depict states of things in the world. This history could be said to revolve around confirming or problematizing Roland Barthes’s assertion that the medium’s essence (or noeme) is the ability of the photograph to testify: ‘That-has-been.’ 2 Inextricable from this history is the idea that photography acts as a kind of window onto the world, that the medium itself is a kind of transparent glass through which we see images. This tends to repress, or at least discount, several integral aspects of the medium: the physical support upon which the image is registered, myriad chemical and technical processes, as well as the numerous choices that were made by the photographer in capturing the image. This repression is present even in elaborate forms of staged photography, such as those practiced by Wall, DiCorcia and others, and the baroque digital fabrications of an artist such as Andreas Gursky. While these types of images certainly problematize Barthes’ photographic noeme and ask us to question the veracity of what we see though photography’s imaginary window, they nevertheless speak in the same basic formal language as have photographers stretching back to Louis Daguerre: they are presenting us with a view, whether credible or not.






The discussion of the intersection of photography and painting is as old as photo­graphy itself. Around the beginning of the decade, this discussion reared its head in earnest through the attempts of artists such as Wall and Gursky to create photographic works that would match painting – particularly that of the 18th and 19th century – in both scale (monumentally sized prints made possible by the advancement of digital printing) and allegorical heft (using elaborate, cinematic staging techniques and digital illusion). However, recent years have seen a resurgent interest in lensless photographic techniques and investigations of the painterly possibilities of digital imaging software that move photography into a relation with painting that is less concerned with rivalry than it is with the creation of a dialogue, or a space in which the two media can intermingle. 




The experiments of each of these artists have deep roots in photographic history stretching back to some of the foundational works of William Henry Fox Talbot in the 19th century and extending through the works of early-20th-century artists including László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, on to the more contemporary works of artists such as James Welling. However, other artists currently making work in dialogue with painting have a less direct lineage: they engage with the photographic surface not as a physical support upon which painting-like gestures can be made, but as a field of pixels where painterly marks can be simulated.





Photography is seldom talked about in terms of its relationship to sculpture, except as a method for its documentation.3 However, the recent re-emergence of studio-based photography, particularly where geared towards still life, signals a move away from this utilitarian view of the photograph’s relation to sculpture towards one in which photography is used as a site where a type of sculptural activity can take place. Key to this is a shift in the treatment of the photographic frame, which supplants the dominant analogical model of the window, through which the world is viewed, with that of the box, inside of which the world is arranged. This has an obvious relationship to still life and, arguably, to studio-based photography as a whole. However, this model of the frame as box could be extended to a type of visual strategy that has its roots in the various photographic Modernisms of the beginning of the 20th century, one that treats the photograph as a space for the construction of compositions (of objects, sections of the landscape, or even of bodies) rather than as a tool to provide information about the states of things.



But where, ultimately, might the significance of these shifts in recent photography lie? It is indisputable that we now inhabit a world thoroughly mediatized by and glutted with the photographic image and its digital doppelganger. Everything and everyone on earth and beyond, it would seem, has been slotted somewhere in a rapacious, ever-expanding Borgesian library of representation that we have built for ourselves.As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality or affect has been radically called into question. Ironically, the moment of greatest photographic plentitude has pushed photography to the point of exhaustion. It is in the face of this waning of photographic possibility that these artists are attempting to carve a way forward by rethinking photo­­graphic subjectivity. They are, in other words, working at the task of what philosopher Vilém Flusser, in his increasingly influential text Towards A Philosophy of Photography (1983), deemed to be the essence of experimental photography: ‘to create a space for human 

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/depth-of-focus/