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Vilém Flusser: Towards A Philosophy of Photography

I ordered Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography some time ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it until recently. For some reason–and maybe I just haven’t heard about it?–Flusser doesn’t seem to have much of a U.S. following, which may have kept me from delving into the book as quickly as I should have. It’s wonderful.

For someone accustomed to the visual theory of Barthes and Benjamin, Vilém Flusser comes out of left field. His writing on photography is refreshing–it has very little in common with the other currents of photographic theory. True, the basic problems that capture his attention are mainstream visual issues. Like Benjamin, Flusser is interested in the technical reproduction of images. Like Barthes, he wants to parse the relationship between text and photography. But beyond that point, the similarities end.

Flusser builds Towards a Philosophy of Photography on the dichotomy of image and text. He sees the image as a primal unit of human understanding based on what he calls magical relationships: reversible associations that have no cause, effect, or temporality. The invention of writing, Flusser argues, applied a linear organizing force to human perception, forcing people to view life through the filter of time and history. Here’s a somewhat simplistic example: whereas once the cock crowing and dawn were magically associated symbols, the invention of writing and history helped dispel that illusion and put events in proper order: the morning light wakes the rooster and causes him to crow.

As a technical image built from grains of silver or pixels, a photograph bridges the gap between primal images and linear historicity, building images from the combination of discrete units. Flusser believed the invention and adoption of photography re-injected the magical into our historical society, causing the masses to fall under the spell of images and sink back into idolatry. To a certain extent, he may have been right, but Flusser’s ideological stance is tainted by an unnecessary fear of the dominance of images over text. He denies what (I hope) most scholars nowadays would take for granted: that images cannot and should not be reduced to legible texts, and that to do so would constitute a reductive approach to photography.

That said, Flusser was still ahead of his time. His recognition that photography marked the beginning of our transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society–a society in which the old Marxist categories of industrialists and the proletariat no longer even make sense–is brilliant. His prediction that image theorists who didn’t recognize this would get bogged down in the socio-political powers creating images has also proven tragically apt. Rather than trying to dissect images according to an anachronistic narrative of empowerment and oppression, Flusser saw pictures as just one player in an endlessly complicated series of programs. Behavior is not merely coded by major corporations or capitalist bigwigs–bigwigs create goods that contain programs for society, but the desires of consumers likewise program corporations to create different kinds of goods. It’s a two-way street. In the case of photography, cameras create ideological programs for society; society responds in turn with modified programs for cameras, whose programs are dictated both by the corporations that produce them and the photographers who use them, etc., etc. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is–but that is Flusser’s great virtue: his unwillingness to reduce the series of interactions and feedback loops to the matter of some single conniving, powerful interest. His might be the first view of the web of forces originating in and acting on cameras that feels as complicated as the world really is.

The other great contribution of Towards a Philosophy of Photography is its understanding of the way the photographic program proceeds: as a kind of game of chance. For Flusser, the photographer enters into a game played against the camera every time he/she goes out shooting. Every photograph, then, is the result of a randomized game played by the photographer involving the combination of a number of discrete elements–perspective, subject matter, focal distance, shutter speed, etc. Once these possibilities are exhausted, the photographic program is exhausted. Photographers try to beat the program by either coming up with a new combination or making a photograph that somehow falls outside the photographic program.

Flusser’s understanding of the photographic program as enormous but finite–as the sum total of all combinations of photographic variables–is a great gift to visual theory. It goes a long way toward explaining why, after less than 200 years of existence, photography feels at risk for becoming painfully redundant. On the other hand, Flusser’s competing beliefs never quite resolve themselves. On the one hand, he swears to the finite nature of the photographic program (eventually everything will have to be photographed in every possible way); on the other, he cherishes the possibility of a sort of hero-photographer who circumvents the photographic program to bring about some kind of visual revolution. The two never really come together to form a consistent whole. As a result his aesthetic philosophy becomes bogged down in the question of whether there’s such a thing as photographic free will, or merely a randomized process that we mistakenly ascribe to free will.

Towards a Philosophy of Photography only deals with a very narrow slice of the photographic world: what Flusser calls “informative photographs,” or non-redundant photography. His exclusion of snapshots, photograph albums, fashion photography, and anything that isn’t photography-with-a-capital-P means he leaves a lot of uncharted territory. But the area he does cover–and the highly original systems he invents to describe it–should have guaranteed Towards a Philosophy of Photography a slot on any photo critic’s shelf a long time ago.

2008 08 15 291 Academia
Visual Theory
Reviews
Books

Two Discussions and Brief Hiatus

Summer has been slow, and it’s about to get slower…I’ll be out of contact for about a week and a half beginning today. In the meantime, a couple of interesting photography-related discussions have been surfacing around the web. Ed Burtynsky’s proposal to establish a permanent gallery in the 10,000-Year Clock in Nevada asks what a long perspective of human artistic endeavor would look like and how it would be stored, organized, and curated from now until end-time. As a part of his proposal, Burtynsky has updated the carbon transfer photographic printing process and created prints that should last 10,000 years in archival conditions without any deterioration. Not bad. But detractors say that the artist’s use of rare ores undermines his supposedly environmental stance. Check out the comments on the post for more details. (via MAN)

In other news, 2point8, the street-photography blog, recently posted an essay announcing its boredom with the majority of contemporary street photography. When the most prominent blog devoted to a specific genre pronounces the genre in critical condition, that can’t be good news. I haven’t been a fan of street photography for quite a while–it strikes me as mostly formulaic and not really conveying any new ideas or information. 2point8 thinks that a shift away from the decisive moment is the solution. I think that shift has been explored, and I’m not sure that’s enough. The decisive moment has been overdone, the indecisive moment is more or less there…what’s left? I’m not sure. When your genre depends on finding new subject matter or new ways of approaching subject matter, you will eventually run out of options. To paraphrase Vilém Flusser, the possibilities of the photographic program are finite. But a lot of people are weighing in in the comments section, and it’s worth a read and a ponder. (via Conscientious)

See you again in mid-August.

2008 08 04 291 Artists
Pop Culture
Galleries
Photographers

Review of Bruce Yonemoto in ART PAPERS

I posted a very short recommendation for Bruce Yonemoto’s NSEW at Alexander Gray Associates back in February (here). The brand-new just-hit-newsstands-everywhere July/August issue of ART PAPERS carries my more extended reflection on Yonemoto’s work. To read it, you’ll have to buy it–so get a copy at your local bookstore and check it out. If you don’t, you may never know what connects Bruce Yonemoto and Tom Cruise, how NSEW casts new light on 1860s portrait studios, or how Yonemoto managed to turn a venerable Hollywood institution into a sneering racial pun. If that sounds like worthy food for thought, pick it up at a bookstore or newsstand near you.

2008 07 30 291 Self-promotion
In Print
Site News

“Circumscription Drawings” at the Menil Collection (Houston)

Max Neuhaus is best known for his sound installations–a term he coined himself–that involve concealed speakers generating intermittent and overlapping tones in public places. What brings him within the purview of this visually-oriented blog is a show at the Menil Collection entitled “Circumscription Drawings,” after the name Neuhaus gives to the visual aspect of his installations.

Since he began his sound works in the 1960s, Neuhaus has been creating drawings and short descriptions that document each of his ephemeral sonic projects. The Menil Collection has lined a small gallery with these diptychs, which are done in colored pencil on translucent paper and framed by project, with each illustration on the left and its corresponding handwritten description on the right.

These works share the same sparse, zen-like aesthetic that characterizes the artist’s aural installations. Many of his descriptions read like haiku, or like a poem by Pound from his Cathay period. They are wonderful meditative works in their own right. Connected with the projects they are intended to document, they also beg the question of how, exactly, Neuhaus conceives of his sound work. His drawings make his installations clear in a way that they could not be conceived from experience alone, illustrating the shapes and colors into which Neuhaus crafts his sound to generate unique sonic overlaps. They seem to hint that he designs most of his sound installations with visual, rather than just sonic, principles in mind–although piecing together the visual organization is virtually impossible to anyone experiencing the sound. Neuhaus’s drawings are generally completed some months after his installations, making his mental interchange of visual and aural elements all the more impressive.

Given their dual nature, the pieces initiate an interesting dialogue about the strengths and weaknesses of each means of human perception. The drawings and the sound jostle for importance, begging for separation but also for equal attention. Neuhaus’s visual documents (or post-production plans?) are beautiful, and they spark that little a-ha! of intellectual understanding absent in his sound work. They provide the big picture, but they can’t provide the sensual experience of the sound itself; they leave you jealous of anyone lucky enough to experience all the projects firsthand. “Circumscription Drawings” argues eloquently for the value of both aspects of Neuhaus’s work. It seems Max Neuhaus should be understood not so much as a sound pioneer but as a pioneer of synesthesia, carefully mapping the complementary interplay of the senses.

“Circumscription Drawings” runs through August 10 at the Menil Collection. All images © Max Neuhaus.

2008 07 30 291 Artists
Reviews
Museums

Related…

291 recently wrote about “Click!” and “The Golden Calf.” I was glad to see that, despite the summer slowdown (mine included), both shows have led to interesting stories elsewhere.

Here, Leon Wieseltier rages against Hirst’s “Golden Calf” on the pages of The New Republic. The first section of his story is pretty typical Hirst-bashing. Yes, Hirst is the widely trumpeted stunt- or even con-man of the art world, but it’s writing like Wieseltier’s–furious, polemic and cynical–that keeps Hirst in the headlines as a public controversy. (I’m so tired of hearing people bash “art-porn,” “food-porn,” “real-estate-porn,” “travel-porn,” and every other kind of porn. It’s B.R. Myers-like intellectual posturing. To attack something on the basis of a metaphorical relationship to pornography is intellectual slacking: all the titillation of debate with none of the analysis. Or, put more simply, it’s “thought-porn.”) Wieseltier gets to the meat of Hirst’s work on the second page of his piece, but he still ends on a moralistic note that cuts his critical analysis short. I assume that most thoughtful people can see what’s money-grubbing and spectacular about Hirst’s work, but not everyone can delve into its art-historical background and tease out its relations with older works and the initial golden calf story–something Wieseltier does, but always with condemnation as the driving force of his prose. Too bad.

i heart photograph’s Laurel Ptak noted today that she was one of five curators asked to comment on “Click!” for ArtInfo in a series of three- to four-question interviews. The interviews are good, brief but informative, although the pullquotes are a little misleading (as pullquotes often are). The overall response could be distilled into a quote along the lines of: “I think anything that gets people thinking about art is good, but I’m reluctant to praise the show too highly.” That sounds like the same response a pro curator would give to any smalltown art show featuring amateur work, which is unfair, given the conceptual rigor of “Click!”. But then, these are also short interviews; taken collectively, they at least touch on most of the strengths and weaknesses of the show. Certainly a worthwhile read.

2008 07 23 291 Interviews
Artists
In Print
Museums

Nothing New: Eliot Porter’s Birds

In an attempt to expand 291’s scope beyond reviews, interviews, and links dealing with contemporary visual culture, I’m instituting the blog’s first monthly feature: Nothing New. Nothing New will discuss photography and other visual artifacts that I feel have not been given the recognition they deserve. That may include underappreciated portions of the body of work of a major photographer, the entire body of work of a relatively unknown photographer, or particular kinds of visual media that–for whatever reason–haven’t gotten their dues.

Do a Google image search for “Eliot Porter” and you’ll be rewarded with page after page of boring, restaurant-wall-worthy photographs of nature: leaves and grass growing over an old log, water blurring as it trickles in little cascades through a canyon, or a tree bursting into the first orange of autumn. These are all “nice” images, and Porter–thanks to his early adoption of color film–was one of the first to capture these sorts of pictures and make them available to a widespread audience. Porter’s first book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, was published by the Sierra Club in 1962; it was such a major success that it helped catapult both Porter and the club into the international limelight.

Still, from a fine art perspective, Porter’s nature work hasn’t aged well. It’s become a victim of the aesthetic it helped create, which is now so thoughtlessly reproduced that it’s hard to see Porter’s work as anything but a symbol of “quietly tasteful nature photography,” the sort of muted, inoffensive “art” that puts the finishing touch on many a 21st-century waiting room. One sizable chunk of Porter’s photography manages to escape this pitfall, however: his color photography of birds. Porter was the father of all bird photography, inventing the techniques that allowed him to photograph birds at an intimate range with a clunky 4×5 camera. In his book Birds of North America: A Personal Selection, he intersperses jaw-dropping color plates of birds with essays that describe the extraordinary lengths he went to in order to get his pictures. Like many preservationists and naturalists before him, Porter tackled his quarry with a tenacity and inventiveness that seems like disregard to anyone sensitive to the tenets of modern-day conservation movements. He saws off nest-bearing limbs and clamps them into new locations to bring them within range of his camera; builds enormous metal scaffolding and shines bright lights on tiny chicks; and pokes his fingers into nests to see what will come flying out.

But Porter’s writing also reveals that, however his actions might look, he was deeply dedicated to the well-being of his subjects, often using the same ingenuity that he employed to find birds in his attempts to save them from any disturbance or danger. He patches up nests using Kotex when he fears he may have damaged them, and he thinks nothing of taking cold chicks temporarily abandoned by their fearful parents into his own home, sheltering them in a handkerchief and warming them in his hands until their metabolism speeds up enough that their parents can feed them again. In the process, he made some 8,000 negatives and transparencies, producing beautiful images of birds brooding, feeding, and on the wing. By today’s standards, his accomplishment is remarkable; considering that he was doing his major bird work between the ’40s and the ’70s, it’s nearly unimaginable. His bird photography was highly prized in his own time–he won a Guggenheim to pursue color bird work in 1941, and MoMA staged an exhibition of his birds in 1943–which makes it all the more bizarre that this, his best body of work, has fallen out of public favor recently. From a purely technical perspective, Porter’s images awe: his prints are all dye transfer, which meant a lot of work for the printer but equal reward in the tonal richness and density of his prints. I first saw them in person at the Getty Museum in 2006, where they were on loan from the Amon Carter Museum. They’re truly unforgettable. Porter left his archives to the Carter museum when he died in 1990, and they maintain a wonderful online archive of his work here.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Porter’s bird work is out of print. The only Porter title readily available is Aperture’s The Color of Wildness, but it’s worthwhile to seek out an original or a reprint (I have the 1992 Arrowwood Press edition) of his Birds of North America: A Personal Selection if you want proof that straightforward animal photography, without ever resorting to cheap visual puns or anthropomorphism, can still attain the highest levels of aesthetic achievement.


All images © The Amon Carter Museum.
2008 07 18 291 Nothing New
Books
Museums
Photographers

Links


Image via WebUrbanist.
  • For those who somehow missed it, the Iran missile photo debate. Also, (via Notes…) Errol Morris’s take.
  • In other foreign visual manipulation news: in Egypt, the news that the news may no longer control the news is top news. That includes visuals and audio.
  • Art to Go on surveillance. An artist I would add: Jill Magid.
  • What color was T-rex? We may soon have the information to figure that out.
  • Eight beautifully decrepit theatres.
  • That’s A Negative wrote a birthday post for Minor White that includes lots of background and images that I, for one, never knew about before. White was definitely something of an itinerant preacher, leaving little whorls of inspiration in his wake. TAN never mentions my closest connection to White: in the seventies, White visited Duke University and helped organize a show and catalogue that eventually resulted in a photography magazine (much less impressive than Aperture) called Latent Image, which is still produced today. I edited it for two years back in the good ol’ days of my undergraduate career, and it certainly helped nurse my nascent photographic interest. Thanks, Minor.

2008 07 14 291 Visual Science
Artists
In Print
Pop Culture
Photographers

The Golden Calf versus The Gallery System

AFC pointed me toward this great story: The Art Newspaper reports that Sotheby’s and Damien Hirst are planning an exhibition and auction of new work by Hirst this September, bypassing the traditional gallery system and heading straight to the auction block. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the centerpiece of the show (entitled “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”) is–wait for it–”The Golden Calf.” This new work consists of a calf with gilt horns, hooves, and halo preserved inside Hirst’s signature tank of formaldehyde.

So why does this have me so wowed? If you’ve ever read visual theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, you know that the golden calf plays a major role in his symbolic universe. For Mitchell, the Biblical story of the creation of the calf represents the birth of the image and the greatest position an image could ever aspire to–the golden calf is literally worshiped as a god. Of course, this worship is condemned in the Old Testament as idolatry. Mitchell reads this condemnation as the first example of an argument over image reproduction rights–which the Old Testament God proclaims uniquely His. The calf also features in Mitchell’s iconology as an animal/image that goes before man, both created by and creating humanity. In short, the calf is a prime example of what WJTM calls “the surplus value of images,” or their ability to be laden with meanings and interpretations almost ad infinitum. (See What Do Pictures Want? for a more eloquent and detailed discussion.)

What does it all mean? Is Hirst reading Mitchell? Not that I know of. The golden calf story is famous and loaded enough that Hirst probably became interested in it on his own. (Maybe their similarity is what drew him to the story, since Hirst is also famous and loaded…) What I wonder more about is whether Mitchell is reading about Hirst, and what he’d make of this whole affair. Feels like a scholarly essay in the making…

2008 07 11 291 Visual Theory
Artists
Books
Galleries

“Click!: A Crowd-Curated Exhibition” at the Brooklyn Museum

Since March, 291 has been dedicating posts to each individual stage of the “Click!” exhibition process. Now that the show is actually mounted and hung, I’d love to write an in-depth review of the results. At the moment, however, I’m talking with an editor about covering the show for a print venue, so rather than tipping my hand here, I’ll just make some brief notes about it.

The most important thing to note is that the entire exhibition is up, in a slightly modified form, online. You can surf the online component of the exhibition, which in many ways is the majority and the most important part of it, from home, or take a gander on one of the two laptops available in the exhibition. It includes the results and breakdown of the evaluation process, which aren’t available on the walls of the Brooklyn Museum’s intimate exhibition space.

It’s not really possible to pronounce a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” about “Click!” either as an exhibition or as an experiment, but it is possible to defend it. In particular, I think Jörg Colberg gave the underlying idea a bad rap when he slammed it on Conscientious for being unable to explain market bubbles or the 2000/2004 elections. Actually, market bubbles are EXACTLY the kind of phenomena that Surowiecki is interested in–in fact, he examines them as an example of crowd intelligence failure in his book. Jörg seems to take the idea of the wisdom of crowds as axiomatic, when in fact it’s simply an attempt to explain those examples that run contrary to the long-favored observation that the masses are inevitably dumber than the experts. Under certain conditions, which Surowiecki attempts to divine in the book, crowds do–unquestionably–outperform individual specialists. As for the 2000/2004 elections, those might be examples of crowd intelligence failure–but since we don’t know what would have happened in another scenario, it’s a difficult case to evaluate. Regardless, crowds acting dumb do not disprove the thesis of The Wisdom of Crowds.

Luckily, the submission and evaluation processes of “Click!” were designed to minimize the possibility of crowd intelligence failure, so the results are a relatively pure example of the wisdom (or at least taste) of crowds applied to a limited pool of photographic entries. Maybe my expectations for the pool were low, but I was pleasantly surprised.


Image © Donna Aceto.
2008 07 10 291 Visual Theory
Pop Culture
Books
Museums
Photographers

Sage Sohier at Foley Gallery

A man stands in a church, straddling the elaborate miniature landscape of a tiny Nativity scene. He is leaning on a mop with its bottom so lost among figurines that the handle looks like a wooden staff and the man like a tired traveler–the fourth Magus, maybe, or even, when compared to the tiny plastic inhabitants of the world that he maintains, God.

It’s a striking image, and it serves as the opener and introduction to “Perfectible Worlds,” Sage Sohier’s solo show on view at Foley Gallery. Many of Sohier’s works exploit the strange dynamic that turns men into giants when placed next to their miniature creations. She has become adept at plumbing the weird blend of delicacy, precision, and megalomania that causes people to build minute models of real-world phenomena. She shows us the face of a man warped through the bottle in which he is assiduously constructing a ship, Joe Fig building a tiny version of Chuck Close and studio within his own studio, and a dark hand wiping clean the glass of a museum diorama.

Close examinations of miniatures aren’t uncommon in photography. 291 recently covered Laurie Simmons’s use of figurines; Lori Nix regularly uses miniatures, as do Paolo Ventura and countless others. All these artists produce great work, but Sohier’s special angle–which she works very handily–is the visual juxtaposition of the little with the larger, of the “perfectible world” with the faces and hands of those who control it. This focus leads her to subjects that look, at first, as though they don’t belong. Among miniature sailboats, cities, and studios, there are other pictures: a family preparing their little girl to show a horse, a Revolutionary War re-enactor resting against a tree, a bodybuilder posing in a parking lot. Though the preponderance of to-scale models makes the show a bit misleading, the work is strong enough to make the metaphorical leap from miniatures to muscle men. Sohier’s excellent sense of color, composition, and humor holds the series together, buttressing the thesis that unites it: that all the photographs demonstrate different outlets of the human need for some area of complete dominance.

Nevertheless, her approach to image making is hardly conventional. Any one subject in the show may have resulted in a traditional photographic series–covering miniatures, or re-enactors, or bodybuilders. It may be best not to think of Sohier’s approach as that of a photographer at all, but rather that of a curator. If photographers traditionally explore a single subject to produce a deep and cohesive body of work, curators select and arrange disparate single works around a unifying theme, producing order and narrative where there was none before. Sohier manages this task with aplomb, effectively asserting the right of the photographer to act as a curator of psychological moments, rather than being stuck with the beat of a reporter, dryly documenting the nuances of any particular individual or community.

“Perfectible Worlds” runs through August 15, 2008. All images © Sage Sohier.

2008 07 07 291 Reviews
Galleries
Photographers