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Magazine
Aura of photography
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Just like a modernist painter, Woodman transmutes his subject matter. This is the closest photography will get to modern painting without actually being like it, says SHANKAR NATARAJAN reviewing an exhibition of George Woodman's photographs in Chennai.
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Extraordinary visual effects ... an example of George Woodman's work.
THE photo exhibit "Truths and fictions" by American George Woodman was shown recently in Chennai. The novel aspect of the show was the artist's formal strategy — Woodman had made photographs of photographs. He writes: "To photograph a photograph is to quote it, and just as quotation marks transform an utterance into text, a photo of a photo shifts our attention away from the subject of the picture toward the picture as an object among other objects. I would also hope that it places the subject of the picture in "another" world more appropriate to contemplation."
There was a time when the photograph naturally inspired an attitude of contemplation and wonder in the viewer. The Daguerreotype, one of the earliest forms of photography was one of a piece, laborious to make and required prolonged exposure times. They were fragile and prone to scratches and had to be covered in velvet and stored in ornate cases. Viewing them was an event in itself. They could be seen only in the daytime, and at a precise angle to the light source. Photographic practice in the 19th Century has always appeared to subsequent generation to have involved more "authentic" and artistic processes of making. In Woodman's work, the nostalgia for an earlier period of the photograph, he has experimented with all kinds of primitive photographic techniques, when it was as much an object of contemplation as it was a carrier of information that comes allied with a historically more self-conscious emphasis on the autonomy of art.
In a slide lecture that he presented titled "Photography, art and literature: an autobiography," we saw that the photographer had started his artistic career as an all-American hard edge abstractionist. In his early geometrical works we saw the epitome of the modernism that we have now come to associate with Clement Greenberg, the influential, and, some might say, dogmatic theorist of Modern American art. Greenberg was of the view that all visual art should tend towards self-reference by purging all reference to an outside world in an act of self-purification and by asserting its "cardinal norms"; its flatness, and its chromatic aspects. There was no room for narrative qualities or aspects of representation in this scheme of things. In fact modernism's circle of pleasure was its automony, which also implied a notion "authenticity'' — the now popular perception that the artist willed the image onto a surface and that this was a unique act that produced a singular artifact.
While such a theory of self-reference can quite convincingly be applied to abstract art, there might be some resistance when trying it with the other visual arts. As for photography, it simply subverts such high expectations set forth by the fathers of modernism. This is because the "cardinal norm" of photography is its illusion and its indexical capability and of course, its reproducibility. Photographs are always about something else, they are incessantly pointing to objects in the outside world that once stood in front of the camera. Moreover, there can also be no one "authentic'' print because from a negative an infinite number can be made. If under the logic of modernism photography tries to be itself (illusionist/indexical) it goes against the dictum of autonomy (an indifference to an outside world). If it tries to be autonomous it cannot ever be photography, at least not in this world. It is to this other world that Woodman transports his phographs. He drives a wedge between the image and its referent, between the photograph and its subject, intending not to leave it ambiguous — ``truths and fictions,'' but to turn our gaze exclusively to the image. The subject matter then becomes the excess that could produce all kinds of meanings.
Looking at Woodman's work, questions begin to arise about their relation to American art after the 1960s, their obsession with classical art and their representation of women; For these are the other discourses that the photographs point to even if the aesthetics may perhaps only be gained, as the artist desires us to do, by ignoring them. This divide is wilfully set up by the works themselves; the discourse of formalism in Woodman's phogotraphs stands deliberately at odds with the subject of the work almost like provocations. This is especially so when we consider them in relation to the critique of representation mounted by feminist photographers in the 1970s and the 1980s. Indeed, Woodman reinforces traditional notions of female beauty and casts the woman as Muse — that preferred trope of western painting from the Renaissance onwards. The strategy is clear though, the more deliberately banal the meaning, the more the gaze of the viewer is directed at the formal qualities of the work.
Just like a modernist painter would take a subject and re-create it anew, Woodman transmutes his subject matter. Characteristically flat and not given to painterly manipulation, the photograph along with the subject it points to is reinvented exclusively in formal/visual terms in the sprit of modernist painting. This is the closest photography will get to modern painting without actually being like it. The visual effects are indeed extraordinary and of a virtuosity where technique itself aspires to become the subject matter. Quite simply, Woodman brings photography into the fold of Greenbergian modernism. But is there a reason for obsessively photographing and transmuting photographs? Is it other than to offer them as mere aesthetic delectation in an attitude or revivalism that aligns these pictures with the tradition of the archaic in modern art?
Perhaps the answer likes in some recent trends in the photography market: At few weeks ago the first photograph ever made (in 1825) by Niepce, the father of photography, sold for a staggering half a million dollars. A year back, The Bettman archive of some 17 million photographics, a collection of enormous historical importance, which was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1935 and now in the possession of Corbis, a company owned by Bill Gates, was to be sunk 220 feet into the ground. It will be housed in a high-tech deep freeze protected from earthquake, hurricanes, nuclear explosions and historians. Access will only be possible through a digital archive of the photographs on the surface. Obviously, we have gone beyond Benjamnin's "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'' to "the photograph in the age of digital prolifertation".
This is the contemporary context in which Woodman makes photographs of photographs. Photographs relicate what we have lost, betraying a deep psychological need to classify what has gone before. Woodman paradoxically does this to photography itself but under the embalming gaze of modernism. Now, what is modernism, if not a tomb? We have seen how it propounded a notion of divorce, from life and from the world. Could it be possible that Woodman, by employing the aesthetising techniques of modernism, seeks to lovingly entomb photography for good? It is to lay tor est this truant child of painting? Is this extended burial rite for the photograph given on behalf of modernism, even as, in the outside world the digital image dances on the grave of photography and the passage of time has already bestowed it with its very own "aura"?
The show was sponsored by the Media Development Foundation and held at the Amethyst in Chennai.
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