Review of Literature and Artifacts

Review of Literature and Artifacts

Currently there is no place in contemporary photographic discourse for a critical inquiry into material-driven photographic practice. The focus of most photographic discourse lies in the analysis of the photographic images and its indexicality. Early postphotographic discourse which emerged out of a need to critically respond to new imaging technologies primarily focuses on how these photographic simulation technologies disrupt and discredit photographic "truth".

The anxieties that surround new photographic simulation technologies are tied to the belief that our collective faith in photography's indexical relationship ito the real (and truth) will be diminished and ultimately lead to the death of photography as an autonomous medium. _{Each Wild Idea-ch 5}

Batchen believes that a change in imaging technology will not in itself cause the disappearance of the photograph and the culture it sustains. "photography has never been just any one technology; its nearly two centuries of development have been marked by numerous, competing instances of technological innovation and obsolescence without any threat being posed to the medium itself". _{Each Wild Idea-ch 6}

Mather Rosler suggests that decades of semiotic analysis have already undermined photography's links to truth and discredited its indexical relationship._{Virtual Anxiety} Martin Lister is critical of analysis that places too much emphasis on the evident technological differences between photography and digital processes since it "obscures important elements of continuity in the cultural meaning and uses of technologies"._{Photography: A critical introduction}

"The difference between analogue and digital image technologies is only one factor within a much larger context of continuities and transformations "._{Photography: A critical introduction}

Batchen points out that even if we do identify photography with particular technologies such as film and cameras, that these technologies themselves embody the idea of photography as an economy of photographic desires or concepts. "The concepts inscribed within this economy would have to include things like nature, knowledge, representation, time, space, observing subject and subject observed. Photography is the desire, conscious or not, to orchestrate a particular set of relationships between these various concepts"._{Each Wild Idea-ch 6}

Just as Howard Halle suggests that painting is a "philosophical enterprise that doesn't always involve paint"_{Painting at the Edge of the World}, Batchen perhaps identifies that photography is a philosophical enterprise that doesn't always involve photographs, photographic images, subjects or mediums. For Batchen photography exists as a rich vocabulary of conventions and references which he refers to as postphotography - "after but not yet beyond photography"_{Each Wild Idea-ch 5}

For Batchen, postphotography is most vividly articulated in arts practice as work that reflects "objectness". "It begins by miring the preseumed distinction between taking and making, and goes on to undermine photography's privileged relationship to the world outside itself"._{Each Wild Idea-ch 5}

Jennifer Boland is associated with postphotographic practice and inparticular the erosion of boundaries between photography and other media. Her work, Orange Photograph derived from a piece of billboard advertising "Kodak" that fell down on her one day in New York. She exhibits this strip hung from the wall, which drapes down across the floor, asserting itself as a three-dimensional object. "Kodak's high-tech sublime is brought down to earth andd with it the equally overwrought rhetoric of photography". Batchen explains that we are forced to look at the photograph and photography rather than merely through it. "As a consequence, the photograph's two-dimensionality is revealed as a fiction that always requires a suppression of a third term"._{Each Wild Idea-ch 5}

A second example of Boland's work highlights post-photographic practice as one that can be about photogrpahy even when no photography is present. Milk Crown is a porcelain version of Harold Edgerton's famous 1936 photograph of a milk splash. Edgerton's image gives us an image made visible only by the high speed workings of the camera apparatus. Although absent, Edgerton's photograph hovers somewhere between the viewer and the sculpture. Batchen describes this work as neither sculpture nor photography, more of movement between the two._{Each Wild Idea-ch 5}

Jacky Redgate's practice often involves a dialogue with photographic history and is another example of postphotography. Redgate's explorations "are subtle inquests into what can be perceived, known and communicated". In _Untitled (from Fox Talbot 'Articles of China' plate and 'Articles of Glass' plate 4, in The Pencil pf Nature, 1844-460 _, Redgate engages with Talbot's inability to photograph china and glass together due to their differing luminosities. Redgate commissioned craftspeople to make conjoined pairs of glass and cermainc objects based on those once photographed by Talbot. They are three-dimensional replicas for our contemporary consideration.

This displacement of the photographic from one set of dimensions to another draws our attention to, among other things, the problematic identity of the photographic medium. It is precisely this sort of questioning that makes post-photography a phenomenon worth investigating . _{Each Wild Idea-ch 5}

For David Tomas "postphotography is based on the premise that critical and strategic transformations in the cultural dimensions of photographic modes of production lead to the development of alternative representational practices"._{Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation} But as Batchen has already alluded to, "Even if a computer does replace the traditional camera, that computer will contine to depend on the thinking and worldview of the humans who program, control, and direct it, just as photography now does."_{Each Wild Idea-ch 6}

So for Tomas, the practical application of a postphotographic theory requires a gestalt shift in traditional photographic relationships. Tomas argues that a culture of photography does not necessarily have to be defined in terms of the images that have come to embody much of its current historical and social value. Photography's historical-epistemological identity can also be defined in terms of cultural dimensions of its processes of production - "after all, photographs do not simply appear; they are produced by a complex transformational process that might also be impregnated with a range of symbolic values."_{Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation}

The foundation for Tomas' postphotography lies in a strategic inversion of one of the primary oppositions governing a photographic culture : the traditional heirachic opposition between the product of phptographic activity and the process of its production.

Tomas states the logic behind this inversion is a Nietzschean strategy of historical and cultural amnesia, inasmuch as this strategy can be used to subvert the traditional values that surround products of conventional photographic activity. Tomas states, "as a product of this Nietzschean strategy, postphotography operates under the guidance of an art of forgetfulness, and initially and continuously oscillates between the historical post_photography_ and the unhistorical _post_photography".

A strategic inversion in the process/product hierachy that governs current photographic practices clears the way for the development of an ecological approach to the production of images in a culture. _{Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation}

Tomas believes this ecological approach broadens the boundaries that have traditionally define photography. And instead of a narrow, institutionally sanctioned history of photography as a history of subject/image, post photography seeks to "trace the networks of its cultures and operational logics throughout broadly conceived spatial, temporal, social, and environmental contexts". _{Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation} It is possible then, to enter the various worlds of photography's contexts of production, through the photographic process.

This approach , Tomas points out produces a number of important changes in the relative values that have been traditionally grantedto traditional photography. for one, in a postphotographic culture, conventional photographs have no hegemonic role or position because they no longer serve any of their traditional functions. _{Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation}

Postphotographicarts practice then becomes a practice that challenges traditional photographic relationships and goes on to reflect, articulate, critique and redefine its own processes of production. Tomas' ecosystemic approach involves a denial of the grand narrative of a given subject/image culture coupled with an inversion in the traditional oppositional hierachy of product over process. Abstract photography, for example, can be viewed in terms of a postphotographic critique. Through abstraction, Roy Exley believes that photography is "free to transcend the play of the real".

Abstraction, of course, usurps the traditional identity and ontology of the photograph, destabilising it, and shifting its parameters a process reflecting, perhaps, the concurrent renegotiations of our world-view sponsored by the digitisation of communications and the attendant ascension of the digitally manipulated image - but at the same time asserting the need for a hands-on approach to the creation of the image. _{Towards Abstraction: The Painterly Photograph}

Viewing an abstract photograph becomes an infinitely more active experience - as we strive to relate to it. As a process, abstraction also exists in varying degrees. For example, artists like Michel Rover and Uta Barth, investigate the relationship between abstraction and figuration through enlargement, digital manipulation and focus. David Hiscock and Robert Davies, on the other hand, create abstract images at the point of exposure.

Hiscock and Davies have been associated with Process photography. Exley describes process photography as a mode of photography where the nature of the eventual image is manipulated and shaped by photographic processes. It shares common features with the process painting of Jason Martin, Callum Innes and Alexis Harding - in which paint is more that a facilitating medium, the nature of paint acts as a catalyst that determines the outcome of the painting itself. In process photography then, the product/object exists ``as-evidence-of the process. ``These images are essentially investigative: dissecting layers of indexical familiarity, giving reality a make-over, shifting perceptual paradigms, questioning mechanisms of operation. _{Process Photography}

Current examples of process photography seem to pursue process through conventional photographic materials. However, an example of Andre Muller-Pohle's work can expand this engagement to encompass a more contemporary process of production. Andreas Muller-Pohle's 1995 Digital Scores (after Nicephore Niepce) - is a digital code generated by Niepce's 1827 heliograph View from the Window at Le Gra spread across eight panels (each panel representing an eighth of a full byte of memory). As Batchen points out, the Scores are less about Niecpe's photograph and more about their own means of production - ``we see not a photograph but the new numerical rhetoric of photography. Aesthetic decisions become those of a machine, and are dependant on Muller-Pohle's choice of fonts, resolution, file format, printing size or program. `` The resulting images are therefore unpredictably different in every manifestation, a product of orchestrated randomness and electronic cross-fertilization._{Each Wild Idea-ch 9}

Mick Finck points out that, within arts practice, "the larger issue that photography needs to address is that it is a medium - it mediates to arrive at a representation just like any other medium"._{New Technology, New Painting?} Through a postphotographic practice that critiques the processes of its own image production, photography can be addressed as a medium. My research aims to pursue a critical inquiry into material- driven practice that is guided by postphotographic discourse and practice. It is hoped that this approach will continually critique and redefine photography through its various processes of image production and in trun parallel broader cultural, historical, and philosophical inquiries into photography.

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