A series of hand-cut photomontages, using illustrations from a copy of Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present (1937).

—- The girl Ako in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s short film Ako/White Morning (1963).

Where exactly are we, when we are looking at a photo? Asking the question is easier than providing answers. At the most, we can talk about it in approximate terms. So, instead of pretending to be able to answer the question, I would like to offer a few possible routes of thought. When I think about being absorbed in a photographic image, I am not thinking about being somewhere physically or geographically, but about being somewhere mentally. In other words, looking at photographs takes the observer into a kind of reality that differs from that of sleeping, dreaming, grocery shopping, talking to someone, etcetera. Moreover, looking at photos creates a different experience from looking at paintings or other kinds of two-dimensional images.

The almost invisible mediality of photography can give a person the sensation to be present in (or at) what is represented. This is a vital aspect of religious pictures in particular: by means of the icon, Christ is deemed to be present. Icons offer the believer a spiritual framework and an incentive to believe, regardless of whether the image is ‘photorealistic’ or not. I am not trying to claim that photos are or can be icons, nor do I think that photos may be compared to icons in the traditional religious sense of the word. However, the analogy between traditional icons and photographs is, in general, their capacity to make believe that the portrayed presents itself unmediated. Photosensitive paper is imprinted by light, and nature paints itself – that is how people regarded photography’s magic in the primeval age of its conception. As far as the icon is concerned, the reality presenting itself was thought to be a revelation of the ‘other’ reality of faith and imagination. Conversely, in the eyes of many, photography reveals reality itself. We often assume the world looks the same on a photo as it does through the naked eye. Yet the world on a photo is a photographed world – no more and no less.

The German media philosopher Lambert Wiesing introduced the theological concept of immersion in a discussion of the deceptive character of virtual realities.[i] ‘Immersive’ images, he says, create the impression that the (re-)presented is really present. In my eyes, the photographic image is located on the delicate borderline between fantasy and reality, between a reality outside us and a projected or imagined reality inside us.

Photos are projections. They bring about a consciousness that mediates between our imaginary and perceptive faculties. The British photo-historian Elizabeth Edwards situates photos in the ‘paradoxical third space’, borrowing the term form the famous psychologist Donald W. Winnicott: ‘The “paradoxical third space” being neither inside in the world of fantasy (expression) nor outside in the world of shared reality. Rather it partakes of both these positions at once.’[ii]

To this I would like to add that photos also could be situated between the material and the immaterial, and between past and present. Photography mediates, the photographer being the co-mediator. In defiance of pre-programmed camera features and visual editing software, good photographers, especially when utilizing their powers of imagination, are magicians.

In the contemporary world, flooded by more or less commonplace pictures, there is little left of the initial amazement about photography’s capacity to conjure up images as though it were sheer magic. You could say photography has become too ‘common’ to us. However, there are photographers, even if they have to call themselves artists in order to be considered as magicians, who generously employ their imaginative powers in order to create magical pictures. Jaap Scheeren and Babette Kleijn are both like this, in quite dissimilar ways. By means of their pictures, they present realities that touch on all of those fine lines – between inside and outside, present and past, fantasy and reality.

Jaap Scheeren created a series of photos inspired by Slovakian fairytales of authors such as Pavol Dobsinski and Samuel Czambel. Fairytales are worlds in themselves, brimming with imagery. Scheeren almost seems to take this literally in his photographs, which themselves could be conceived as imageries. He came up with the title 3 Roses, 9 Ravens, 12 Months for his series, referencing to the often enumerative titles of fairytales. The title alone is food for our imagination.

Scheeren’s photos leave everything and nothing to the imagination at the same time. They look immaculate; there is no photographic noise, so to speak, that could withhold a clear view of wonderland. Everything that may be seen, is to be seen. However, all that the pictures represent in such high definition, is rendered mysterious – a figure sitting, seen from the back and wearing an enormous mantle of artificial grass – and sometimes possibly alarming, such as the woman wrapped in plastic, hanging from the branch of a tree. Then again, Scheeren makes it quite obvious that he manipulated the staging of the landscape: people are posing in a forest, hidden away in a tree-stump or in a semi-subterranean hut, and a hedge of fake herons has been lined up on a hillside. Still, everywhere, Scheeren intervened only to such an extent and with such subtlety that he hardly interfered with the natural surroundings.

In New York City, where Scheeren made a series of pictures for the project Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered in early 2009,[iii] he worked the other way around, emphasizing the mythical natural origins of an almost entirely man-made urban ‘jungle’. Pseudo-natural elements, such as fur coats or a stuffed beaver on a city roof garden, take the lead here.

Babette Kleijn’s photos are more pensive, quieter, and darker. Their tone is cool, with shades of black, blue and green being the predominant colors. Her individual pictures seem to be less singular; they rather come across as stills from long, silent and mysterious movies, or as photos out of lost family albums. The landscape and natural setting is of equal importance as it is in Scheeren’s work, but in a more melancholic way. Decay, traces of a lost civilization, reflections in water, or a bouquet gone to seed set the tone here. The pictures allow a more explicit photographic interpretation: grain is visible, their color scheme is out of balance, their saturation is low. This intransparency intensifies their romantic sense of loss and their illusory quality.

Kleijn explains that she based her series on sensations of sleeplessness and lack of clarity. In the course of the series, she is becoming better rested. The cloudiness in her head disappears, which creates an almost threatening kind of realism. Photography is able to offer us a virtual escape from harsh and unwanted realities, just like stories, verbal or visual, and particularly fairytales have done since times immemorial.

Both Scheeren and Kleijn do play with narrative elements. For them, stories aren’t so much meant to be told, but rather to be shown. Kleijn’s mystifying images seem like illustrations of stories yet to be told, or stills from non-existent films, while Scheeren’s crystal-clear photos are freely engrafted onto – or at least they suggest being illustrations of – folktales, origin myths and fairytales. His series looks like it’s drawn from magical stories, even if still untold.

Scheeren told me how several Slovaks, after seeing his work, said they recognized themes from their mythical traditions. “Everybody has their own cultural baggage of fairytales and other stories which they can bring into play while looking at the pictures,” Scheeren explained. “I wanted to keep them open to interpretation, so everyone would be free to imagine what the people and things in the landscape are doing, and how they might relate to one another.”

For Slovakian observers, the familiar atmosphere of the landscape and the humans or animals living there, must have been a significant factor in their identification with Scheeren’s work. Still, his photos are just as much invitations to make up new tales. It is of no importance whether they were taken in Slovakia or in New York; what matters is that they speak to us about connections between the natural and the artificial, which gives them a universal appeal.

——-

Notes:

[i]. Lambert Wiesing, Artifizielle Prasenz: Studien zu Philosophie des Bildes, Frankfurt am Mein, 2005, pp. 110-112.

[ii]. Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology’ in: Rethinking Visual Anthropology, Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (eds.), New Haven/ London 1997, pp. 53-80, p. 56.

[iii]. Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered was realized by the Museum of the City of New York and Foam on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival on the island of Manhattan. The exhibition, curated by Kathy Ryan, photo editor of the The New York Times Magazine, was shown last summer in the Museum of the City of New York.

——–

This essay appeared in print in Fw: #9 Off the Wall (Amsterdam 2010)

(Translated from the Dutch by Sanne de Boer)

As an alternative to facsimiles or reprints, New York City-based publishers Errata Editions came up with the idea of issuing studies on photobooks. Since 2009, they have published  four titles annually in a series called Books on Books, each time in a combination of two classics and two lesser-known books. They come in standard portrait format (octavo size), in which the photobooks being studied are represented with “every double-page spread of the original, including texts, so the reader has a comprehensive ‘illustration’ of the original.”[i] The result is a complete visual representation of a book within another book, accompanied by an essay that examines the photobook in question in its historical context as well as a short text about the circumstances pertaining to the original printing.

Early 2011, Errata Editions released a study on Czech photographer Zdeněk Tmej’s startling book relating to his conscripted labor camp experiences during World War II. Abeceda: duševního prázdna (translated as The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness) was produced in Prague in an estimated edition of 2,500 copies and released shortly before Christmas 1945.[ii] Since paper was scarce and expensive at the time, cheap newspaper stock was used for the printing of high-quality photogravure reproductions. Andrew Roth describes the gravures as “gorgeously tactile”.[iii] I have been able to verify and confirm this claim while studying two original copies with a private collector in New York City. The tactile feature is lost in Errata’s version, but their editions aim more towards representing original layout and image sequencing than at reproducing the physical sensibilities of the original object.

Abeceda collects 45 photographs of a series of 88 known photographs [iv] that Tmej took under difficult circumstances in Breslau [v], where he was conscripted for forced labor from September 1942 until he escaped in early 1944. Tmej was a talented photographer who assisted Karel Hájek in the 1930s, perfecting the technique of photographing in low-light conditions without using flashbulbs. During his time as a forced laborer, Tmej acted as a participant-observer, taking photographs in the building where the labourers were housed, a former tavern turned dormitory. The Nazis allowed Tmej to keep his photographs, which they merely deemed “souvenirs”. Most of the greyscale photographs show carefully framed scenes of men sleeping, waiting, playing cards, or else portraits of injured men. Yet the final sequence of images is for something different. They were shot in a brothel the Nazis had set up for foreign workers, in an effort to prevent non-Germans from having intercourse with Aryans. Women from countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and France were forced to work as prostitutes. In a cynical coincidence of fate, both types of involuntary labourers crossed each other’s paths in these brothels, blowing off steam from the harsh conditions of life in the camp. One of the Czech prostitutes arranged for Tmej to take pictures in the brothel. They show laughter, dancing, and prostitutes seducing men. These images aren’t sexually offensive according to today’s standards, but some of them might have been sensitive at the time.

Surprisingly, Errata’s study on Abeceda is missing four photographs in the final sequence. Errata’s source copy turned out to be incomplete. Errata’s creative director wrote me that three experts previewing this particular original all missed the discrepancy–and this despite the fact that two of the missing spreads had been previously reproduced in Roth as well as in Parr & Badger. This error is intriguing, since it heightens the notion that rare photobooks are vulnerable, and that their integrity is sometimes not even secured via reproduction. Errata’s source is one of an indefinite number of rebound versions, some of which are missing the same four photographs. Two of those show a scarcely dressed French woman, and the other two are more restrained images of dressed prostitutes in their respective rooms. Is some kind of censorship involved, demanded by (relatives of) the depicted prostitutes, or were pages at some point cut out in order to be individually sold as vintage prints? There must be a reason for the omission. At the time of writing, I haven’t been able to obtain proper answers.

This error leading to an incomplete representation of the entire original sequence revitalizes the question as to why rare photobooks like Abeceda aren’t reproduced digitally–as an iPad App for example–or, if on paper, as a well-crafted magazine? Both options would allow for easier distribution and cheaper production. There will be less confusion about the terms reprint or facsimile. Also, it will be much easier to undo potential errors, and to get an erratum out quickly if necessary. Ultimately, Errata’s books are not all too convenient material for study purposes. The hardbound books are relatively inflexible, some double pages are reproduced fairly small, and the gutter often interferes with the rephotographed gutter of the original, a feature that enhances the already mise-en-abyme experience of the ‘meta-book’. The valuable mistake that occurred in Errata’s Abeceda reflects the curly and unfathomable journeys which original copies of rare books inevitably make. In this form it won’t be reprinted, and perhaps becomes a collector’s item itself.

——-

Notes:

[i] Gerry Badger, ‘A Blessed Companion’, in: Ag Nr. 55, Spring 2009, pp. 22-29, pp. 26-27.

[ii] Officially 1946.

[iii] Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, New York 2001, p. 124.

[iv] Online at: http://www.vaclavchochola.cz/Tmej/totaleinsatz.htm

[v] After WWII part of Poland, renamed Wrocław.

——-

This book review on Zdenek Tmej: The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness (Books on Books #10, Errata Editions, New York 2011) appeared in print in Camera Austria 115 (2011), pp. 89-90.

 

]]> http://tacohiddebakker.com/texts/this-is-not-a-photobook-errata-edition%e2%80%99s-study-on-zdenek-tmej%e2%80%99s-abeceda-dusevniho-prazdna-and-the-mystery-of-missing-pages/feed/ 0 http://tacohiddebakker.com/blog/a-trans-atlantic-photo-exchange/ http://tacohiddebakker.com/blog/a-trans-atlantic-photo-exchange/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:25:55 +0000 admin http://tacohiddebakker.com/?p=226

In her magnificent 2008 study The Civil Contract of Photography, an attempt to synthesize philosophy, theory, politics, the arts, and social history of photography into a new ethical groundwork from which to rigorously rethink the status and claims of photography in a hypermedial world, Ariella Azoulay interprets several examples of (press-) photographs made in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that need to be turned into “emergency claims.” Azoulay uses the French word énoncé (what is said) to describe the statement (announcement) that can be made through photographs, in order to attest spectators. At best, spectators who aren’t indifferent consumers of photographs, being led by the often misleading captions and contexts in which photographs tend to be framed, but active and critical spectators that deeply question the photographs and what can and cannot be seen in them. To do so, photographs need to be cleared from overt politicization, and it needs to be admitted that photographs are essentially unstable and inconclusive of every meaning that can be read into them.

Palestinians living in the territories occupied by Israel, a democratic nation, though in a state of emergency already since its inception in 1948, are not just victims of a disaster confined by temporality (earthquakes, wars, et cet.), instead they are, in Azoulay’s words, “permanently living on the verge of catastrophe.” The intentional (and unintentional) emergency claims of those victims, without granted citizenship under the ruling powers to which they are subjected, is that they should be treated as citizens. By coming into existence through the means of photography they instantly become a member of the citizenry of photography. In that citizenry a sovereign is not an invisible superpower, but a party to negotiate with in becoming politically equal among equals. “Everyone is equal before the photographic technology,” writes Azoulay. An unwritten yet intuitively felt existence of a civil contract of photography might therefore be an impetus for a true democratization of politics and representation. A promise ever since the French revolution of 1789 and the public release of photographic technology in 1839. Yet, when democracy and the way it is represented is under threat of corporate interests and an increase of authoritative regimes, photography could be “a place of refuge from which the discourse on the res publica may be revived.” In reconsidering concepts like Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer (bare life), and by re-appropriating Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of action to the theory of photography, Azoulay weaves a socio-political discourse on human rights and photography that  is highly idealistic. She should be praised for bringing ideas back into the theoretical and ethical discourse on photography that go beyond a usually too superficial handling of photography’s social and political implications. However, it’s not easy to think of how a civil contract of photography would take effect in reality, where violence and injustices seem more rule than exception. Nonetheless, her arguments are based on a realistic understanding of how photographs are too often negatively exploited by political apparatuses that aim at alienating human beings from each other, leading citizens to regard non-citizens as enemies who should be degraded, abandoned, or even killed for no valid reason.

How then, can a spectator become an active and responsible actor within the citizenry of photography? Perhaps we should start by looking and criticizing the way artists (re-)use photography, and trying to understand the questions they pose regarding photographic representation. In a collection of nine short essays, Photography between poetry and politics, several authors examine the malleabilities of photography’s poetic and political stances by analyzing the medium as it is being employed in multimedia installations. One of their starting questions is whether photography has been surpassed by film, television, and video and thereby lost its alleged ‘transparent’ character. If so, one of the dangers lurking is that photography within art contexts becomes entirely self-referential, without any aims at raising political debate. The multimedia works of artists like Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand are used as examples photography’s potential to show its own ambiguousness and lack of potential to reflect socio-political realities. While at the same time new political questions are raised, particularly by Demand, about the way we experience newsworthy events through industrialized mass media. All human mediation of ‘reality’ is limited by nature, but photography, due to its so-called indexical qualities, is often being experienced, and, paradoxically thought of as a ‘medium without mediation.’ Debates concerning the documentary and evidential qualities of photography are going back as far as the conception and invention of the medium. However, the ongoing intervention of artists and theorists in this debate is essential for a society of democratic pluralism in which a constant struggle over political and poetic representations of ‘reality’ ultimately defines a democracy’s state of health. For this reason alone, it is necessary to reconsider concepts like property and ownership of images, as these are, according to Azoulay, “foreign to the logic of photography.”

The Civil Contract of Photography and Photography between poetry and politics are thought-provoking studies in which photo-theoretical, ethical, and socio-political issues are being discussed very seriously. Azoulay’s exposé unfortunately is very long (appr. 500 pages), and in some central arguments repetitive, which could be discouraging for potentially interested readers. I sincerely hope that in the near future she will publish a more concise volume with her deeply impressive, and, above all courageous, reading of photographs from “the verges of catastrophe.” For a large part, both publications frame the ethics of photographic and political representations within one of today’s most heavy debated conflicts, namely Israel vs. the Palestinians. After reading essays by Simon Faulkner and T.J. Demos on photographs from the West Bank, or Azoulay’s painstakingly detailed descriptions of the restricted life conditions and inhuman treatments Palestinians have to deal with, an image of Kafka’s penal colony comes to mind, a colony in which its inhabitants are always immediately found guilty. Fighting against injustices by claiming (more) freedom in the uses, appropriations, and interpretations, of photographs is one of the main imperatives these books are able to teach us. Photography does not exclude anybody. Everybody is able to join the citizenry of photography, in which no absolute power exists.

——-

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, New York 2008.

Hilde van Gelder, Helen Westgeest (eds.), Photography between poetry and politics: The critical position of the photographic medium in contemporary art, Leuven University Press, Leuven 2008.

——-

This book review appeared in print, in a slightly altered version, in Camera Austria 106 (2009), p. 75

Light, writes Geimer, is the premise [Fall] of photography, too much light, its accident [Unfall]. To fix a photographic image means to (attempt to) stop the natural process of its disappearance. The images of many of photography’s incunables we know of are long faded, and ironically conserved through the means of photographic reproduction. Unexpected phenomena entering photographic images do make us aware of photography’s photographicness. By reappraising the functioning of noise in photographic processes, Geimer criticises common theories about photography outlined along dualities and assuming transparency. Think of John Szarkowski’s influential metaphors of photography as window or mirror. But photography is not just an image of nature, it is itself part of nature, hence subject to material transformation and physical decline.

André Kertész - Broken Plate (Paris, 1929). Gelatine silver print.

Photography’s unstable nature was turned into an advantage by adventurous scientists and artists in the later decades of the 19th century, as Geimer describes in two case studies. One of them about photography of effluvia emanating from human beings, as developed by Jules-Bernard Luys. The other one about the first photographing in 1898 of the shroud of Turin, which is believed to show the real image of Christ. In the photographic negative a positive image of a body appeared. Thus the cloth was assumed to be an imprint of the real Christ. The struggle of interpretations that followed has far-reaching implications for an epistemology of photography. Following this, Geimer convincingly argues to think beyond classical dichotomies (like nature vs. culture) in theorizing about photography and to acknowledge it as a unity of seemingly conflicting characteristics. In experimental settings the unexpected (and unimaginable) has been deliberately used in bringing to light matters previously without contours. Distortions turned out not to be a negative modus of the visual, but to offer a particular potential of photography. Moreover, not only light seemed to work on photographic emulsions, but also radio waves, electricity, warmth, and X-rays; its discoveries contributing to the making visible of the invisible. This does not mean that the invisible was lying in wait latently until its visibility would be discovered, instead its visibility had to be imagined and arranged.

Geimer suspends any final conclusions of his theses, but his original and fresh re-evaluation of the debates around early artistic and scientific experimental photographic practices demonstrates to us that we shall perhaps never be able to fully comprehend the inner workings of the black box, which the entire photographic process ultimately is. Neither will we be able to gain full control, not even in the digital era, over the photographic image, hence we can never be the sole “authors” of our photographs. For those still believing in Szarkowski’s mirror and window theory, they now can learn that photography once and for all will be an inextricable mingling of art and artefact, of science and art, of visibility and becoming invisible, and of seeing and believing. What we see in photographs is only partly what we get.

——-

Peter Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen: Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen
Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg 2010 (Fundus-Bücher; 178)
528 p.
76 color and b&w illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-86572-654-4

——-

This book review appeared in print in Camera Austria 112 (2010), pp. 85-86.

David Campany, a Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, has written a short book of almost encyclopediastic scope on the interrelations of photography and cinema. Campany opens his discussion by example of the famous Lumière short The Photographic Congress Arrives in Neuville-sur-Saône (1895), in which for the first time ever still photographers were captured on film. Louis Lumière films the photographers arriving by boat, and one of them takes a photograph of Lumière filming. This is the first – mutually recorded – meeting of cinema and photography. Campany wonders if through this event cinema is paying deference to its alleged parent or is already distancing itself from photography. The reanimation of movement and option of replay (approximately in real time) are key to the cinematic. In contrast, photography’s distinquished quality is its stillness: motionless and silent. An indissoluble discussion could be held on similarities and differences. Luckily Company doesn ‘t find himself trapped in the pitfall of seeking definitions of medium-specifity by splitting hairs about photography and cinema’s ontological differences; his focus is on their “profound interrelation” instead. And there is much of interest to be found at the crossroads of still and motion photography.

Photography and Cinema consists of four thematic essays: on stillness, on photobooks edited in a cinematic mode (paper cinema, as Campany calls it, also known as ‘stream-of-consciousness’ photobooks through Parr and Badger’s The Photobook: A History Vol. 1), the representation of photographers and photographs in (and through) cinema, and a final chapter on the art of the film still, that is, photographs looking like film stills and production stills, not to be confused with the extracted film frame or the freeze frame. Each of the four parts is preceded by a short introduction and several questions regarding their subject matter, followed by a quick succession of examples (the book is somewhat overwhelming because Campany uses so many of them). Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a seminal work creating a unique borderland between cinema and photo-roman, is, despite its importance, only mentioned briefly. Since it touches on so many key themes, it could well have served as focus and as a hook for the construction of a more coherent narrative thread.

After all, Photography and Cinema is a very accessible, jargon-free written, and nicely designed introduction to a nearly inexhaustable reservoir of interesting themes. For advanced readers a critical analysis of stillness and movement is to be found in The Cinematic (2007, edited by Campany) and a collection of essays titled Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (2006, David Green and Joanna Lowry, eds.). What Company’s work should be mainly praised for is that it bridges towards a larger audience. In any regard, the realm in which moving and still images meet is a vast and fascinating territory that asks for more critical and in-depth study.

——-

David Campany, Photography and Cinema
Reaktion Books, London 2008
160 p.
40 color illustrations. 87 halftone ill.
ISBN: 978 1 86189 351

——-

This book review appeared in print in Camera Austria 107 (2009), p. 75

Installation shots of my series Grozny Memories in the Noorderlicht Gallery in Groningen, The Netherlands. This series was part of the group show Multivocal Histories, curated by Bas Vroege. This show in turn, was part of the Noorderlicht Photofestival, held in the fall of 2009. Among the other artists included in Multivocal Histories were Susan Meiselas, Andrea Stultiens, Julian Germain, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Tim Hetherington, Ales Vasicek, Vojta Dukát, Jian Jiang, Wouter den Bakker, and Florian Schwarz.

Photos courtesy of Valentijn Brandt/Paradox

It is known that the ancient Chinese and Romans were aware of natural camera obscura phenomena. But as of 2005, a very interesting thesis proposes that prehistoric peoples might have known it too, and that their cave and stone drawings of animals might have been inspired, if not guided, by what multi-media artist Matt Gatton describes as “accidental formation of cameras obscuras” in prehistoric tent dwellings. Gatton’s researches into possible prehistoric camera obscura uses is nothing less than imaginative and fascinating.

To see and learn more, visit Matt Gatton’s Paleo-Camera web site.