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from The Next Big Picture: With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography
But isn’t the problem here, as ever, one of redefining photography to fit the categories of the museum, instead of examining the way in which those very categories operate?The author makes reference to “what critics have, at times disparagingly, called ‘the judgment seat’” of the museum and it appears as if little in the field has changed, at least in terms of those institutional structures themselves - the term comes from Christopher Philips’ seminal essay The Judgement Seat of Photography, which first appeared in 1982.*
Speaking about the supposedly new landscape of photography and how museums are reacting to it, Quentin Bajac, the Museum of Modern Art’s recently appointed chief curator of photography, seems unconcerned by this, as he continues, “‘Today, MoMA is only one of the judgment seats […] ‘We’re writing one history of photography, while other people or institutions are writing simultaneous histories.’” However, it strikes me as a mistake to assume that this diffusion of what is (essentially) the same model for thinking about photography will somehow constitute a “definite change” in how museums treat the medium just because the specific institution is different.
To question the nature of photography only makes sense within the institutional frame of the museum; it already has a fixed, a-historical definition of the medium in place, which it forever needs to reaffirm against the general mass of imagery beyond its walls. Any supposedly new understanding of photography in this context must proceed from that institutional categorization and can only react against it, but never go beyond the limits set by the museum. This is perhaps why so much of the work featured in the exhibition What is a Photograph? appears only to challenge the history of photography and not its present state – it questions photography as an institutional artifact, rather than a living practice.** This is not specifically a problem of the work itself or with the curation, but of the way in which the medium is understood.
Everyone else seems to know perfectly well what photography is, but photography-as-art can only be thought of as art if it is not counted among those vernacular uses - “distinguishing serious photographic art making within the vast, visual cacophony of image-making. What criteria are to be applied to what is called a ‘photograph’ when digital technology has revolutionized where, how and how often pictures are viewed?” That is to say, outside the confines of the museum. I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that new technologies haven’t radically changed our relationship to photography in terms of how it can be used or how we interact with it, but that is an entirely separate (and far more important) question to asking what photography might be in itself, one that has not been adequately addressed by those - we assume - representative opinions in the above article or even by the work featured in the exhibitions mentioned.
The conventional narrative has increasingly become that the shift to digital technology undermined the sort of qualities that had previously seemed so definitive of photography. But there is at work here the assumption that these were already unchanging values, regardless of the other, often considerable ruptures that make up the history of the medium. It is, in short, precisely the kind of modernist precept regarding photography’s “essential” qualities that conceals the way in which the uses of photographic representation are constructed along ideological (and institutional) lines.
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*This essay can be found in Richard Bolton’s anthology The Contest of Meaning, along with several key texts by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Allan Sekula and others. It is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in these issues.
** Admittedly, I have not seen this exhibition in person, but am familiar with most of the work featured and actually admire quite a bit of it. The issue here is with how we conceptualize the place of photography in the museum.
(via theincoherentlight)
Agreed. Photography at places like ICP or MoMA truly seems to be over, stuck as they are in ideas mostly rooted in the 1970s (at best).
And even if you take that ICP show at face value, given the history of photography (for example, the experimentation around the medium and its inclusion in graphic design etc. during the 1920s, just think about the Bauhaus or surrealism) it just seems so weird and out of touch. Out of touch not just with how all non-curators see photography, but even out of touch with the medium’s history.
(via conscientious)
[JSP - great starting/discussion point. i wasn’t a huge fan of the ICP exhibition.]
(via jesuisperdu)