Photography

RELATED TERMS: Painting; Apparatus – Dispositif; Promptography

In the context of design practices, photography is one of the many media that may be employed, often as part of a multi-media, multi-modal environment or assemblage. As the history of the cultural and artistic disruption caused by photography shows, the use of any particular medium alters the balance of roles among media in engaging with materiality through what might be called a media ecology.

(Media) History of Photography

Wallerstein describes the invention of photography as posing a serious challenge to the system of the fine arts, prompting, first, a crisis in painting. The idea of the subjective and expressive quality of image making, and implicitly the hierarchy between the artes liberals and artes mechanicae that informs the concept of ‘fine art’, underwent a profound upheaval. The question of the image began to be discused in ontological terms. Thus, the question of “what is…” was gradually seen to precede questions of beauty, composition, and so on. This precedence was, in turn, gradually generalized so as to encompass not only painting, but also sculpture, literature, music and finally art in general, becoming an essential feature of modern art, manifested as an aesthetic as well as ontological unrest.

The encounter with photography as a medium that mechanized image production was taken by some as a dismantling of subjectivity and imagination, and possibly even as the end of painting. Such a sentiment is epitomized in Paul Delaroche’s hyperbolic outcry in 1839: “From today, painting is dead”, cited by Wallerstein (2010). Others, however, saw photography as a liberation of the imagination by redirecting it toward the essentials of art.

In this context, as a response to the advent of photography as a mechanical medium, the arrival of abstraction at the beginning of the 20th century could be understood in two ways. First, as the final discovery of what painting had been since the beginning; and second, as a last stance, beyond which painting had to be abandoned in favor of other forms of practice that would be able to interiorize mechanical and serial (re)production into their very substance.

The first stance imagines the painter uncovering a primordial perceptual dimension in and through painting. Such a claim can be understood to underlie Cézanne’s claim to show us “the truth in painting” peinture”), by plunging into the genesis of the visible that takes its cues from the pure sensations of colour. The second stance, emerging in the period around the First World War, accepts that technology has deprived painting not only of its old mimetic function but also dispelled the idea that it could reach a more true, profound, or elevated reality.

To a large extent, Wallerstein, argues, modernist painting evinces the mutual implication and even inextricable entanglement of these two positions.

Ethics and Politics of Photography

The central focus of Vilem Flusser’s investigation of photography is the camera as prototype for the ontologically conditioning apparatuses of postindustrial society, the prototype for all technical apparatuses of the present-day, postindustrial world. His analysis aims ultimately at the ethics of photography (van der Meulen, 2010).

The Ideological Role of Photography

As noted in the post Promptography, photography, and the presumption of photographic realism, dominated the visual field in the early- to mid-20th century through pictorial magazines such as Life in the USA. In “Life: A New Prospectus for the Sixties”, Henry R. Luce, the magazine’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, defined the purpose of Life in the 1960s in terms of national purpose, the two main objectives being to win the Cold War and to create a better America. Luce conceived of Life’s pictures as potent weapons of the Cold War (Blakinger, 2012).

Through its images, Life magazine, under the directive of its editor, took it upon itself to reflect and reify the American Cold War consensus culture of the early 1960s. Nevertheless, as Blakinger points out, advertising also played a central focus in Life‘s mission. A typical issue of Life had more pages of advertising than editorial content. Moreover, these advertisements, by mimicking the large photograph and sparse caption format, looked very similar to photographic essays. In so doing, they lent themselves some of the unquestioned authority that the magazine’s articles were granted by the public. For example, the text of a February 1963 advertisement for supermarket goods from the Life editors states that, by purchasing the advertised products, “You’re also casting a vote for a reputable manufacturer. […] There’s nothing like an American supermarket anywhere in the world. And there’s no more of an all-American businessman than your own supermarket manager.” In other words, the magazine’s editors explicitly equated consumerism and patriotic duty as primordial American values.

Blakinger, by focusing on Andy Warhol’s appropriation and inversion of certain images from Life magazine for his ‘Death and Disaster’ screen-prints, argues that Warhol’s visual strategies reveal a violent subversion of Life‘s assumptions about photographic realism and its attempts at visual indoctrination through its editorial content and its advertisements. The screen-prints demonstrate how Warhol re-presented the familiar pictures of Life as death, and thus transformed Life’s America into Death in America. [For more discussion of Warhol’s Death in America, see the post Iconic Designs, Critical Designs.]

References

Blakinger, J. R. (2012) “Death in America” and “Life” magazine: Sources for Andy Warhol’s “Disaster” paintings, Artibus et Historiae, 33(66), pp. 269–285. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23509753 (Accessed: 27 August 2024).

Elkins, J. (ed.) (2007) Photography theory. New York, NY: Routledge.

van der Meulen, S. (2010) ‘Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilem Flusser’s Media Theory’, New German Critique, 37(2), pp. 180–207. doi: 10.1215/0094033X-2010-010.

Wallenstein, S.-O. (2010) Nihilism, Art, and Technology. [PhD thesis] Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University. Available at: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-9736 (Accessed: 6 February 2016).