Valuation Friday July 1, 2005
If you conceive of photography as a process of reproduction, then clearly it lacks creativity and thus artistic interest. The famous proclamation “from today painting is dead” was never true, although the status and career of photography as art has not been strong. In 2005 world class galleries are only just acknowledging photography in an established way, as a legitimate component of their white walls. Photography is characteristically a much quicker medium than painting, and the absence of labour suggests an absence of serious or respectable thought. Susan Sontag argued in her ground-breaking book On Photography that if a photographer wishes to establish a commercial or cultural presence they need a body of work with a consistent theme and have to represent themselves in relation to an entire collection, not just five, ten or twenty beautiful pictures. The quick snap of a shutter, even if you repeat it several times and attain some credible results, does not impress as much as days, weeks or months to create a painting. Although this is slightly different in these postmodern, unmade-bed times, partly because of the influence of Charles Saatchi and the kind of work he supported. Emin, Lucas and their contemporaries also produce photographic and video work endowed with ‘artistic’ and commercial value, not because it is intrinsically interesting or beautiful, but because it carries the brand of the celebrity artist. In that respect the more immediate and unlaboured kind of work is currently recognised as worthy according to the logic that Sontag described in the 1970s, although with a commercial and advertising-market logic, rather than a strictly artistic one. Saatchi recently ran an exhibition entitled The Triumph Of Painting and sharp observers recognised that painting never went away. His noisy presence in contemporary art was little more than a fashion that will rapidly pass, consistent with the ephemeral nature of the work he patronised. Now, it seems, he wants a commercial influence with painting (because the YBAs are now not so Y and interesting), and has to resort to slogans to attract attention. Much as he did in his other role, as international advertising guru.
Across the river from the Saatchi Gallery, you find the Photographer’s Gallery in the bustling West End of London. It is uniquely important in the UK, being the only gallery devoted to photography that has a high profile and international status. I used to visit it as a teenager when it required a journey of no more than an hour, and was last there in 2004. The Bradford Museum of Photography Film & TV was an inspiring idea, balancing the gravitational attractions of London with a Northern England cynosure. But sadly, it’s not the most impressive of ventures. They do run photographic exhibitions but it’s a distinctly museum-based venue, with a clearly educational agenda – not adult or artistic education, but for the curriculum of young people.
Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction famously considered the reproducibility of photography. If you have a carefully preserved negative you can create an unlimited number of prints, likely to have less commercial value for that very reason. Some photographers understood this, and destroyed their negatives after making ten, twenty or even just five prints, calculating very carefully what the best commercial strategy might be. Now we live in an age of digital reproduction when what Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of pictures is almost non-existent, because technologically and thus semantically, it is no more than a few pixels amidst a vast, networked, 24/7 ocean of binary code.
So what intrinsic value does photography have, if any? The more I think and write about these subjects, the more my ideas are informed by a phenomenological logic. In some respects photography concerns the object more than the subject. The camera is an inert and lifeless thing, compared to the subtle and impressionable fluidity of paint. The painter is involved in the process of creativity – literally, an act of creation – in a way the photographer is not. Conversely, however, you can say that the photographer is liberated from technical demands and the labours of craft and operates conceptually and phenomenologically, in relation to the theatrical immediacy of the environment. Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ was his attempt to formulate this into an aesthetic. It had photo-journalistic origins, but his work was and still is revered as a great aesthetic accomplishment – as fine art. The phenomenological process of photography is what makes it valuable, within which the instant snap of a shutter is but one component. And although it appears that the subject is less important because technologically speaking the image-making does not carry his imprint compared to a painting, phenomenologically speaking, the image extends the perceptions of the photographer into a symbol-making medium in a profoundly intimate way, and has a corresponding aesthetic value.