2014
Writing at the onset of 2014, when the most significant work I do as a curator is either photographic or at very least ‘photographically led’, it’s interesting to recall my perplexed reaction the first time I definitively remember encountering a photograph presented as ‘art’ – at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1988.
The significance of the fact that I had come across nothing less than Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), which at that time I was unfamiliar with, was entirely lost on me as I struggled to understand how a photograph could function as a work of art.
Armed with a wonderful but very traditional art history degree and with a very limited understanding of concepts like the multiple, the readymade and seriality, it’s also possible that my perplexed reaction to Cindy Sherman (which is scarcely believable, given the stellar contribution she has made to late 20th century portraiture) was partly the result of the late arrival of photography at the party, which has been British contemporary art in the post-war era.
In sharp contrast to the way photography has been digested, examined and understood in Europe and the USA throughout most of the last century, Britain still has an ambivalent relationship with the medium and still doesn’t have a dedicated ‘national’ museum for photography. And yet the historical uncertainty around photography’s status provides fascinating opportunities for knowing and literate audiences to develop new understandings of its role and applications as it continues to infiltrate and shape the debates around how we image ourselves and the world of our imagination through contemporary art.
In his informative contribution to the catalogue for Cruel and Tender (2003) one of Tate Modern’s first faltering steps toward addressing the photographic deficit in British visual culture, David Campany suggests that the ‘culture of modernity gave rise to mass production, also to the museum, state archives and the desire to collect – a process to which photography was central’. Photography was and remains central to the process of archiving and documenting but Campany suggests there may be profound differences between the photographers’ intention and how we now consume and understand particularly some of the seminal contributions to 20th century photographic history.
Citing the fact that major museum exhibitions are now devoted to the photographers of the Farm Security Administration (1935-44) – whose work was originally created for the purposes of taxonomy or survey – or projects like August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century which was originally conceived in book form, he asks us to remember that the act of taking pictures is fundamentally transformative. In taking a picture and carrying it with us, in placing it in an edited series in a book or gallery, we are investing it with a new context. In effect contemporary approaches to photography allow each of us (whether as a creative practitioner or an audience member) to participate in editing a ‘director’s cut’ in which seriality and typology as well as debates, narratives and contexts well beyond the frame of the photograph play an increasingly important role.
In examining how contemporary curatorial approaches can nuance an anodyne photographic archive Leipzig based photographer Erasmus Schröter describes the editing process for Bild Der Heimat (Picture of Home) his encyclopaedic curatorial survey of the picture postcard industry in the former East Germany (the GDR), as follows: ‘I always choose the motifs (which are framed, exhibited and published as part of his collection of over 40,000 postcards) with the mind set of a photographer’ (In the choices I make) uniform geographic coverage is plainly absent, as are images of castles and historical buildings. I am interested in images which convey how life felt in the GDR’. Tellingly what aren’t absent are the, communist youth centres, industrial facilities and socialist housing developments (some with notable aesthetic similarities to British new towns) that were the GDR’s shop window and which are all rendered as printed black and white photographs (rather than offset printed cards) as was the custom in the GDR.
Although clearly imbued with a new and post cold-war context Schröter’s remarkable collection conveys the astonishingly clean, uniform and antiseptic self-image of utopia as it existed in socialist Germany between 1949 and 1989, and in a form – the postcard – which in its original context, functioned as an ephemeral propaganda tool for the socialist state. The postcards also impart a clear understanding of how East Germany’s disciplined citizens were supposed to interact with their built environment – but we have no way of telling from the visual material presented the actuality of urban experience in the GDR or how people inhabit these spaces today.
By contrast, some remarkable insights into the gap between the theory and practice of urban landscape design, are provided by Archive Utopia Lina Kim and Michael Wesley’s fascinating photographic interrogation of the Brazilian capital (2010-11). An entirely utopian and arguably ‘artificial’ project Brasilia was designed and built to be the nation’s capital and to supersede the perceived decadence and corruption of Rio de Janeiro. Literally raised from the savannah of Brazil’s Central Tableland in early 1960. Brasilia was designed to a master plan in 1957 by Lúcio Costa with notable contributions from Oskar Niemeyer the poster boy of Brazilian modernism. Named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987, it is a city designed to be negotiated by, and viewed from, the automobile. Arranged in a cross-shaped formation and like many British new towns divided into sectors with different residential commercial and administrative functions, it is ‘a city designed as a park’.
Archive Utopia is comprised of two distinct elements which combine to unite the utopian idealism of the original designs with a proper understanding of how utopia is inhabited today: an archival project which has seen the restoration of 1400 (of an original 100,000) negatives that document the ‘gold rush spirit of the of the city’s construction and early years, it also includes a series of Wesley’s unique photographs created using fixed analogue cameras and 12 hour exposures at socially, politically and economically significant locations throughout the city. The shadow-less exposures that result combine theory – the depopulated cityscapes and featureless skies of architectural modelling with the practice – an unfocussed blur, which is the impression that the urban maelstrom makes, when it lingers long enough to leave an impression on the photographic emulsion. As Emilia Stenzel and Gabriel Dorfman put it in their contribution to the exhibition catalogue, ‘Brasilia must be perceived not through a multitude of individual attractions, but as a unity’ and if this unity includes both Niemeyer’s magnificent modernist vistas and the cardboard cities, housing the urban poor, which surround the city’s manicured Superquadras then the artists have gone
someway toward evoking this unity.
Although driven by entirely different political motivations, post-war British reconstruction (principally 1945-51) was a similarly utopian undertaking, and represents by any measure the most ambitious public building program in British history.
Much maligned after the initial rush of post-war optimism, British modernism was motivated by the desire to replace bombed-out cities and industrial landscapes with spacious, pleasant and ergonomic places to live and work.
Remaining one of the most widely discussed and highly regarded moments in British architectural history, Modernism was substantially ‘anglicised’ – integrated with the landscape and ‘regionalised’ using local materials to create different regional styles.
London Overspill, James Smith’s extensive survey of Britain’s post-war architecture references both the innovative designs that were the thumbprint of British Modernism and the way these structures are inhabited and experienced in the here and now.
Just as American photographer Lewis Baltz referenced the uneasy co-existence between man and nature in the bluff ends of car parks in Californian shopping malls and industrial centres in the mid 1970s, James presents a series of often contradictory impressions ranging from elegant brickwork details, to the ‘art deco’ styling of Hatfield Technical College (Easton and Robertson 1952 – now the University of Hertfordshire), toLuton’sdegraded hoardings, car park fascias and 1980s architectural interventions. Like Baltz James Smith’s impressions are ‘devoid of figures but speak of human presence’ and of the multi-layered fabric of the living cityscape – hybrid, plural, adaptable and above all ’lived in’– a series in, which the details, reference the whole.
It seems remarkable in 2014 that the unity of purpose generated by utopian optimism and the desire to move on from the past was able not only to plan but also to realise hugely ambitious construction projects based on largely experimental principles. It is equally notable that the principle and outcomes generated spanned different cultures and oppositional political ideologies. As Michael Wesley puts it: ‘Brasilia is synonymous with the utopian urban designs of the 1960s when all kinds of Utopias appeared close to becoming a reality’
Photography, in this evolving artist-curatorial idiom, can transport us into the past allowing us to experience the excitement and the spirit of post-war renewal. It can also provide telling insights into the way that human culture responds to and adapts built environments created by social experimentation. This is not architectural photography it is a director’s cut created by artists, photographers, curators, psycho-geographers (amongst many others) and their audiences.
Campany, David ‘Almost the Same Thing’ Some Thoughts on the Collector – Photographer in Dexter, Emma & Weski, Thomas (Eds) Cruel and Tender The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, Tate Publishing, 2003 pp33-35
Schröter, Erasmus Achtzig Prozent Sonne – Regen Nie! In Schröter Erasmus (Ed) Bild der Heimat, Die Echt- Foto-Postkarten aus der DDR, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag, Berlin 2002 p6. (for a brief overview of this project in English please see Shaul, Matthew (Ed) Architecture and Ideology Hiding in Plain Sight, CUBE, Manchester, 2004 (ISBN 0-9546750-1-0)
Stenzel, Emilia & Dorfman Garbriel, Brasilia or the City as a Work of Art in Hüsch, Annette (Ed) Archive Utopia, Project Brasilia by Lina Kim and Michael Wesley, Kehrer Verlag, Berlin 2011 pp 49-55
Ibid
Hatherly, Owen, The Brutishness of British Modernism, lecture notes Royal College of Art 3.2.2012
Manchester, Clare referencing Baltz’ series The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine California, 1974 in Dexter, Emma & Weski, Thomas (Eds) op cit p 297
Wesley, Michael Interview with Annette Hüsch in Hüsch, Annnette op cit p 36