To speak of photographic ‘art’ is fraught with problems, not least because there are at least two, and possibly three, traditions out of which this category has been put together. Firstly, there is ‘art-photography’, stemming from the 1860s, which involves photographers making pictures that claim the status of art. This tradition includes quite diverse tendencies stretching from ‘trick’ photography to the injunction against any manipulation; from soft focus to technical precision; from subjectivism to objectivism. Secondly, there are lots of examples of artists using photography (though, as one colleague wryly noted, no one ever speaks of ‘photographers using art’). Thirdly, ‘street photography’ or ‘auteur documentary’ is often grouped with art-photography. In an important sense, the idea of an art of photography is an ‘invented tradition’. Powerful institutions, curators, and collectors have drawn images from contexts as diverse as campaigning publications and scientific archives to weld together a tradition and, not insignificantly, generate a commodity market. Attempts to knit this material into some coherent garment tend to unravel, as different contexts of use and value pull in different directions. Nevertheless, in the last 25 years artists have become increasingly aware of the histories of photography, and some of the most prominent artists practising today – Jeff Wall or Thomas Struth – work exclusively in photography. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the trends (and a few contradictions) in art-photography.
The 19th century
Photographers had to work hard against this conception. Here is Antoine Claudet, a French photographer domiciled in England, writing in 1861:
Photography indeed can invent, create, and compose as well as copy. In fact, particularly in portraiture, the machine copies what the true artist has invented, created, and composed, which could never have been copied or represented if the photographer had not possessed genius.
What is interesting here is the extent to which art – which for Claudet entails invention, composition, and genius – is entwined with the negative case of the document or copy. Throughout its history, photographic art has been intimately connected with this demonic twin: sometimes it has struggled to cast it off, and at others it has entered into a pact with it. In both instances, however, photographic art retains a determining relation to the idea of the automatic copy, or objective document.
Gertrude Käsebier, The Road to Rome, 1903
During the 19th century, art-photography meant, first and foremost, asserting the active presence of the photographer. The dominant historical perspective on 19th-century photography has, however, focused on the idea of a ‘new medium’; a proposition first advanced by Elizabeth Eastlake in 1857. The problem, though, is that Eastlake’s suggestion is read anachronistically from the perspective of the modernist aesthetics that held sway from the 1920s until, at least, the 1970s. Photography, modernists claimed, represented a new way of looking at things – a ‘new vision’ – that broke with traditional pictorial forms, creating new modes of composition and offering new visual experiences. The new vision, or camera vision, meant working with those characteristics that were specific to the medium of photography. This argument suggests that the camera shows things in a new and unique way: clear, precise, without selecting; with novel framing effects and new vantage points. This attitude underpins the idea that photography provided the source for the unorthodox compositions of Impressionist painter Edgar Degas, who, from the mid-1870s, often shifted the principal subject to the edge of his pictures, sliced through figures, adopted unusual points of view, and positioned objects between the viewer and the focus of attention. However, the photographic effects that are supposed to have influenced Degas really surface with the amateur images produced at the end of the century; similarly, Eastlake’s ‘new medium’ was not a new way of looking, but a rather traditional one. For her, the photograph was not a work of art, but a document that could be used by artists.
Street photography
Alongside this avant-garde project, and in many ways inseparable from it, a new documentary vision took root: this practice has sometimes been labelled ‘street photography’. This was work in the ‘documentary style’, dedicated to recording the popular life of the streets – particularly in working-class and immigrant communities – and which was largely made at the photographers’ own instigation. A much attenuated list of photographers working in this mode would include: Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Brassa¨ı , Walker Evans, Lisette Model, those associated with the US Photo League (Walter Rosenblum, Sid Grossman, Aaron Siskind, Helen Levitt), Bill Brandt, Willy Ronis, and Robert Doisneau.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St Lazare, 1932
The key form of street photography was the authored photographic book: Paris de nuit (Brassa¨ı , 1933), American Photographs (Walker Evans, 1938), The English at Home (Bill Brundt, 1936), The Decisive Moment (Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1952), Instantanés de Paris (Robert Doisneau, 1955), Belleville Ménilmontant (Willy Ronis, 1954).
Medium specificity
The central figure in this transformation was perhaps best known for his work as a curator and critic rather than his pictures. John Szarkowski was appointed curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. From this powerful institutional base, he produced a highly influential account of photography, which jettisoned the social vision of documentary.
Lee Friedlander, Hillcrest, New York, 1970
This emphasis is apparent in Szarkowski’s important 1967 show New Documents, which presented the photographs of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand as inheritors of the documentary tradition.
He claimed this work represented a reinvention of documentary. The 1930s documentary, he argued, had been associated with projects of social reform and political change. Szarkowski now claimed that photographers wanted simply to explore the potential of their medium, or express themselves through it. If these were documents, they were documents turned inwards.
The everyday and the mass media
At the same time that this later generation of street photographers championed by Szarkowski was busy exploring the particular kind of image that could be produced with a camera, artists began using photographs in an altogether different way. Many of them didn’t give a damn about which characteristics were peculiar to the medium; they cared even less about a convoluted art-photography.
Ed Ruscha said:
Above all, the photographs I use are not ‘arty’ in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes. I don’t mean cinema photography, but still photography, that is limited edition, individual, hand-processed photographs. Mine are simply reproductions of photographs. This is not a book to house a collection of art photographs – they are technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots.
This does not mean that what artists did with photographs at this time was any less complex or ambitious than medium-specific practice (Ruscha’s work is a case in point), but what increasingly mattered was photography’s ordinariness and utility.
