In previous postings, I have been sniping, obliquely, at the photographers shown on the DVD series ”Contacts” which purports to show the “world’s greatest contemporary photographers”. Yesterday, I remembered that I own a book (purchased at deep discount from Daedelus books) that includes most of these same photographers, and to which I had the same negative reaction when I got the book a few years ago.
The book is called “Subjective Realities: Works from the Refco Collection of Contemporary Photography”. You may remember that this collection was sold after Refco went into bankruptcy. If you do a Google search, you’ll find that the art community didn’t think much of the quality of the photographs that it included, though, as I’ve said, it has works by almost all of those shown on the DVD series of “great” photographers.
The introduction or forward to this book was written by Dave Hickey. You may be familiar with him as he is a fairly well-known writer on modern art as well as being a professor of art and a curator of art exhibitions. I find his writings interesting and I think I agree with much of what he has to say. Which leaves me confused in finding him writing an introduction to a collection of what I think is the worst kind of current photography. On the other hand, he does avoid direct reference to pictures in the collection, so maybe he just enjoyed the opportunity to be published.
Which finally gets me to the point of this posting. I want to quote rather extensively from what he says in his introduction to “Subjective Realities” because what he says is thought provoking.
“At any given moment, we can identify objects that are not“aesthetic” without really defining what “aesthetic” is. As a consequence, the simplest way of describing such objects (without defining them) is to characterize them as objects in search of a function — as propositional objects sent into the world, which, should they be fortunate enough to find a function or to find people for whom they have a function, will almost certainly survive whatever importance we might attribute to their subject matter. In this sense, such aesthetic objects function like “wild cards” in the hand that culture deals us. They do what we need them to do in the moment that it needs doing. They make us happy, correct mistakes, right perceived wrongs, remember that which has been forgotten, notice the unnoticed, redirect misguided practices, and fill voids in the contemporary cultural repertoire — blank spaces in the hand that culture deals us that need to be filled.”
[He then goes on to quote Leonard Meyer's statement or contention that art history is not necessarily linear; that various styles and schools continue to exist simultaneously, rather than one after another.]
“We are describing a delta effect in which a relatively coherent tradition, at a critical moment, splinters; it begins dividing and subdividing, fanning out into a spreading delta of simultaneous tributaries and sub-tributaries, making increasingly delicate distinctions, all moving forward simultaneously along broad historical fronts.”
“… let me suggest that the splintering of photographic practice in the wake of its Modernist apotheosis and the splintering of painting idioms in the mid-nineteenth century derive from similar crises of function. Up until the 1950s photography was regarded as the classic bourgeois medium. It told the truth and was presumed to. One picture was worth a thousand words. Then, after 1950, what we now call “chemical” photography came under pressure from electronic and then digital media. These new technologies demonstrated photography’s artificiality and gradually undermined its claims to telling the “truth.” “
“This is the moment in which we discovered that the formal virtues of a photograph by Walker Evans were somehow dependent upon our belief that Evans was endowing the truth with elegance. This was the moment, analogous to the moment of Impressionism, at which we stopped trusting photographs and started loving them.”
