The Canon And The Mundane Friday October 7, 2005
Photography is now an established topic for Art History and critical discourse, and because it’s a quintessentially democratic activity – especially with digital workflow and the internet – it’s a medium and a practise with special interest.
In art, theory, and photography, there’s usually a canon of accepted work central to any discussion. Postmodernism supposedly deconstructs what Lyotard called the Grand Narrative, the interpretations and definitions of acuity, style and accomplishment that became the established tradition. But to adopt the postmodern methods, the deconstructive critique, you have to read the high priests that teach it. There’s a fatuous element to the most revered and abstract dimensions of academia, that ultimately refers back to the people that adopt it: and, critically, their inability or unwillingness to locate their own cognitive process in a philosophical context. Thus, the nature of mind, of their mind, is an inherent and important aspect of such theory, but the theory never includes that. They make patterns in the sand, but fail to consider the nature of pattern making.
Most photography is conducted in real situations, and practical contexts, very distant from academic theory. It’s the millions of families recording intimate and domestic life, the professional concerned only with graphic impact, and the amateur or semi-professional who admires Ansel Adams as a craftsman with beautiful images, not as a sociological example of Romanticism. In fact, I’d suggest that photography theory is mostly quite weak, predictable, and even boring. It complicates what is essentially uncomplicated, makes political and sociological what is ultimately uninteresting. Thus you will sometimes see work that is inherently dull, made relevant and lively – supposedly – because of what you can say about it. The word, more so than the image, is infinitely flexible and creative.
Some forms of photography are traditionally excluded from serious discussion, as if disciplined study in the academy requires a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable forms of photography, the ‘essential’ and the ‘supplemental’. The intellectual danger is that within the secured boundaries of the discipline, further enquiry is prejudiced and compromised. This is exactly the position of postmodernism, in relation to the modernist and pre-modernist attitudes built on the sands of hierarchical discourse. When the critical analysis of photography is based on the assumptions and concerns framed within a series of canonical works, established genres, and assumed histories of professional accomplishment, the understanding of the nature and role of photography, photographers and photographic practice is constrained and distorted. In that respect, giving time and attention to work traditionally and routinely rendered invisible becomes ‘subversive’ and thus political. The same occurs in art, beginning with Duchamp and culminating in the sharks, kebabs and domestic detritus recently deemed worthy of academic appraisal and serious money. Tracey Emin, who despite her artistic success surely no one regards as an intellectual force, is currently a staff member at one of the most interesting academic/internet ventures, the European Graduate School (here), alongside people like Baudrillard and David Lynch.
The politics is readily understandable, even laudable: why should we be so concerned with Ansel Adams, Avedon or Capa? Except when the famous had access to genuinely interesting content – sociological, artistic or otherwise – what’s the big deal with the big names? The fact is with modern technology much of the craft of photography has been removed, replaced with automatic processes and pixels offering a standard of reproduction that was formerly possible only with considerable technical expertise or investment. And who is to say, in any case, that an interpretation of Yosemite is qualitatively or inherently superior to a shot of street graffiti, or a coffee mug, or an empty room?
What you are thus left with is the dimension of subjective and affective value, a domain almost entirely ignored by the academy. It would traditionally have been the area for aesthetics to explore, but no one today is interested in examining why Yosemite mountains are superior to a coffee cup: they don’t think they are, and will reject any suggestion otherwise with the full weight of fashionably accepted theory.
However photography is different, unlike the rest of the art world, in the sense that it’s always been and always will be located in a vaster context which is its popular and widespread practise. The successful practise of Art inevitably revolves around the expensive galleries, the Guardian reviews, and who wins the Turner Prize. There are parallels in the photographic domain, but they always have a background status against the foreground arena of millions of treasured family albums, the millions of happy-snappers enjoying 2D pictures of past and present life. Photography was democratic, as soon as the early plate glass equipment became affordable. And as the technology evolved, so did its democratic spread. In that respect an academic reconfiguration of what is and is not relevant, a deconstruction of the hierarchy in accordance with contemporary sensibility, is both fatuous and unnecessary. Essentially, it’s an attempt to define or re-define meaning in relation to a creative, technological and social activity that is not and never will be defined by academia, galleries, or market valuation. The album, wedding and holiday photographs are loved and cherished, regardless of what academics or theorists say about them. An American academic called Greil Marcus attempted to link punk rock back to the French Situationists, and surrealism. John Lydon himself, the central protagonist, once said: “What on earth is that man going on about? I’m music hall. That’s what I am….you’re brought up with it, and you’re carrying on a tradition” (Sunday Times Culture 2.10.05 page 8). It’s the same idea: highlighting the tenuous, make-believe link between cultural theory and reality – raw and musical, or photographic.
Which brings me to my final point, namely the insertion into academic contexts, of the daily and typically ignored photographic fare of amateurs and holiday snappers. We already know those pictures are immensely meaningful for those involved; it needs no affirmation. The conclusion is, this mode of academia is self-referential in relation to an intellectual gestalt that has a tenuous link to the real activity. It’s solipsism, that when examined reveals the inability and irrelevance of academic theory to photography. Not to suggest that all theory is irrelevant, but that much of the current work is unsatisfactory. In my opinion what we need is a theory that incorporates all aspects of photography, i.e. that has a universality making it applicable to all of it: not specialised compartments of idea-theatre, interesting for the learned few.