What Curators Talk About When They Talk About Photographs
(With deference to Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami in the matter of the title). Curators, which I take to include gallery owners and art-crit academics, don’t talk like you and me. They could, but that would be silly, because the job of a curator in fine art is to establish a knowingness that is precisely one grade above that of the audience. Not very much higher, because that would be elitist, which no longer means a good thing, but definitely above. Without that special degree of perception, the curator would have little to do but bother about lighting and hanging. In fact, when it comes to photographs, most of which are reproducible, we could do it for ourselves were it not for the particular ingredient of being able to interpret images in ways that others might not have thought of.
Fine art photography is intended from its conception as an aesthetic expression, and not to fulfill any other purpose — not journalistic, not commercial — and this has set it apart from the rest of photography since the beginning. In other words, it is made to be art. But three things have happened since around the 1970s to stir up the pot. One is that artists other than self-declared photographers have begun to use the camera. Another is that photography originally taken for more predictable purposes such as photojournalism has been re-assessed by the art world and re-presented as fine art. And a third is that, simply by being tied to the larger world of fine art, it too has been caught up in the conceptual and in high-powered marketing.
It’s hard to dispute that one good thing about photography-as-fine-art is that it has raised photography in the public consciousness. People in general take it more seriously than was usual before. The prices alone establish a kind of worth. And there are more exhibitions. All admirable. But this has not gone down well with many photographers, particularly professional photographers who saw what they were doing as a quite different enterprise, more to do with reporting the world and telling stories in images. Brian Harris in June gave us a taste of his reaction. Photographer Graham Harrison had this to say when I spoke to him about his website Photo Histories, which attempts ‘to communicate the photographers’ viewpoint and to investigate photography in its historical context’: “The art establishment and academics led the charge to appropriate photography once it became acceptable to call it an art form. Now it’s a free for all.”
The problem is that photography is a medium as much as an endeavour. So it really does mean different things to different people who pick up a camera. Until quite recently, there was a canon of photographic practice, and while it was always marvelously full of dissent, things operated within known boundaries. Historically, there was the Linked-Ring, the Photo-Secession, the Group f/64 and ‘straight’ photography, and so on. Thematically, there was landscape photography, portraiture, still-life, fashion, and so on. There were ways of doing things, such as in composition, lighting, timing, colour-or-not, that everyone could argue about, approve or disapprove, but which all took place in one arena.
Not quite the same now. Personally, I blame Marcel Duchamp (though that’s another story), but one thing that’s clear is that the introduction of conceptual into photography was divisive. Post-modernism made it even more so. There are those who think of themselves as photographers, working within a world of photography. Then there are others, who use (or ‘appropriate’ as Graham Harrison said) photography as a vehicle to do something else. It boils down, I think, to whether you think photography is a visual discipline, with its own standards and skills, or a technique to be picked up and used in any way you want. There is little agreement between the two sides.
Here are a few of the things that tend to drive most professional photographers (meaning those working for clients, mainly in print, either editorially in newspapers, magazines or books, or commercially, as in advertising) wild:-
- Photographs that plagiarise
- Photographs that are unskilled
- Photographs that are very boring
- Photographs that are conceptual and play games with the notion of what photography is about
- Anything post-modern (which includes some, even much, of the above)
Not all contemporary fine-art photography by any means conforms to the above. There is, for a start, co-opted photography, by which I mean photography shot commercially or editorially but then pulled into the gallery world. This applies especially to photojournalism (for instance, with the work of Gilles Peress), and fashion photography (for instance the work of Nick Knight and Rankin [aka John Waddell] at the Victoria and Albert. And more. But in the contemporary world of photography that is conceived as fine art, the intentions and tropes (a beloved term) are different. They are, for their detractors, more knowing and more sly. So what is the curator’s take on photography? That is, the photography on the other side of the divide from the traditional and published kind? What do curators talk about when they present their view of art-through-photography?
They say, for example, and forgive me for concealing the names of the artists so that we don’t get side-tracked into personalities….
“X highlights the bland and repetitive architecture of our everyday lives … we feel lost, rootless, engulfed, just looking at them.”
“X and Y photograph with straightforward honesty, devoid of any romanticism. There are no flattering angles here …. What they see is what you get, however distasteful.”
“X uses a helicopter to give him an aerial perspective on each city he photographs, and in his photographs of Z, people appear in anonymous crowds, no bigger than map-pins.”
“X and Y give their subjects a timeless gravity through very rigorous and symmetrical framing. Their work has a precision emphasized by its display in typological formations.” (See Glossary below)
“X uses an asymmetric framing process to heighten the sense of discord between intent and actuality.”
“X uses the bland format of a passport photo – head and shoulders against a flat
monochrome ground, the subject looking blankly at the camera – scaled up to larger
than life-size to imply that little can be read of a person in this way.”
“X takes his camera on to the street, but the people he encounters there are no more revealed to us than those in Y’s photographs. If a painted portrait is designed to reveal something of the identity of the sitter – their emotions, the essence of their character – in X’s work we are presented with the opposite. Captured by the distant gaze of his telephoto lens, the subject is always an unwitting participant…. we will never know what thoughts are causing these emotions to fleetingly appear on their faces … We don’t know them, and we never will.”
“In X’s images, surfaces are frequently broken, disrupted, or complicated; objects jut forward, obscuring others. Mirrors and windows reflect and refract events already in flux. Through his oblique take on the social and visual fabric of townscapes, unexpected patterns and social processes emerge.” (See Glossary below)
“This book of photographs by X brought an intimate, even amateur, use of photography into the arena of contemporary art.” (See Glossary below)
“Inspired by the beauty of family snapshots, X looks at the everyday and the overlooked in order to reveal them as remarkable.” (See Glossary below)
This is an odd language. Could you imagine using it to describe your own photographs? What on earth could ‘timeless gravity’ mean? Does a lens gaze? Perhaps unkindly, it could be called a way of making excuses, on occasion, for things lacking in the art, and also a way of elevating certain images to the status of art that might not make it on their own. It’s not that hard to master, once you get used to certain phrasings and the use of some key words (see the Glossary here for a few of those). And it has one stellar advantage over ordinary ways of talking about photographs — it automatically endows importance. Actually, you can use this language to give anything importance.
And the curatorial defence? Knowingness, best tinged with irony. This is an excellent riposte, particularly when accompanied by a weary half-smile and sigh, or its written equivalent. ‘You still don’t understand, I’m afraid; we’ve moved beyond those now outdated tropes, you see. Not your fault that you missed it, of course, but photography is no longer what you thought it was’.
Did I hear someone say Turner Prize? A very good arena for this conflict, and it has furnished some beautiful set-piece defences. It gave us in photography a winner, Wolfgang Tillmans and on a shortlist, Richard Billingham. Neither could be described as, well, a photographer’s photographer. But the Tate Britain’s defence was skillful in its subtle mockery of the complaints, gathering the press reaction under the heading ‘Teach Yourself Turner Prize Criticism’. Those who criticised were acting ‘true to form’, they ‘declaimed’ and ‘claimed’, and ‘wrote scathingly’, and either ‘couldn’t resist pointing out’ (means uncovered an uncomfortable truth) or were ‘contented…with repeating’ (means got a particularly trenchant quote from someone authoritative). Read on …
Glossary of useful photo-art-crit terms:
- Amateurish. Knowing use of poor technique. Surprisingly, a term of approval.
- Ambiguous. Meaningless, or at least impossible to see what’s going on and why.
- Engage with. Either to rip off (see homage below) or to ridicule.
- Flux. Movement, as in everyday life, but sounds grander.
- Homage. Plagiarism. Always in italics to show that this is a French word, which makes the user less responsible for it.
- Paraphrase. Also plagiarism.
- Unaltered and without comment. 100% plagiarism.
- Non-judgmental. No point of view, bland.
- Overlooked. Directions in which a camera might theoretically be aimed, but which for good reasons have been ignored — until now.
- Topology. As with trope below, a word taken from another discipline entirely, with little or no justification. In mathematics, it is the study of spatial properties that are preserved under deformation, which is not the first thing that springs to most photographers’ minds. Not to be confused with topography (the study of place), though it usually is, especially when referring to photography. But it sounds good. And it helps that the Bechers used it as a book title.
- Typology. Series of photographs that catalogue similar objects. The photographic equivalent of trainspotting.
- Trope. A term pinched from lit-crit, where it means a word or expression used figuratively or metaphorically. Using it for photography is very dubious, and has something vaguely to do with ‘unexpected use’. Typically, its obscurity protects the user’s authority. Playing with tropes, of course, becomes tropology — ah-ha, a useful confusion with topology and typology. Perhaps we should coin a new term, troypology, which is convincingly meaningless.
