HISTORY AND AESTHETICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Batangas State University - Lipa Campus

BY

THEORIES
GROUP 4

2020

OFPHOTOGRAPHY
 Today's Discussion
TOPICS TO COVER

“The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of

Photography” edited by Richard Bolton
“In the American East: Richard Avedon Incorporated” by
Richard Bolton
L'Amour fou : Photography and Surrealism by Rosalind
Krauss, Dawn Ades, Jane Livingston
“The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” by Rosalind
Kraus
“Corpus Delicti” by Rosalind Krauss
Douglas Crimp “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism”
by Douglas Crimp
The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject by Douglas
Crimp (1981)
Christopher Phillips: The Judgement Seat of Photography
 Richard Bolton
Richard Bolton is an artist and
writer who has exhibited and
published widely. He has taught in
the Visible Language Workshop at
MIT's Media Laboratory and at the
Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester.

ARTIST AND WRITER

The Contest of
Meaning
It is a fourteen essays, with over 200
illustrations, critically examine
prevailing beliefs about the medium and
suggest new ways to explain the history of
photography.

The Contest of Meaning summarizes the

challenges to traditional photographic
history that have developed in the last
decade out of a consciously political
critique of photographic production.
 Douglas Crimp,
Catherine Lord, Deborah Carol Squiers, Esther Rosalind Krauss, Martha
Christopher Phillips,
Bright, Sally Stein, and Parada, and Richard Rosler, and Allan Sekula
Benjamin Buchloh, and
Jan Zita Grover Bolton
Abigail Solomon Godeau
Bolton’s own assessment of the status
of Photography in 1987 reads,
“We no longer need to argue for photography’s
acceptances as a form of art… we no longer need to argue
for the establishment of a distinct history of
photography… but the social function of photography and
the social role of the photographic artists have been
ignored… By analyzing the material, institutional and
ideological influences on photographic practice, these
writers create a new understanding of the role of the
photo within modernity within the modernization that has
transformed twentieth century life. These essays
describe not only the politics of photographic
representation but also the politics of meaning itself.”
 In the American East:
Richard Avedon
Incorporated by Richard
Bolton

A Review of Richard Avedon's

"In the American West"
 In the American West
Bolton discusses Richard Avedon's career and method of
photographing the socially marginalized "types" of people in
the 1960s and 1970s American West. Bolton then traces Avedon's
technique in presenting his work at blockbuster exhibitions
for public mass consumption and personal recognition. The text
both celebrates Avedon's work and criticizes his methods.
 Avedon photographed his
subjects for this project
“studio-style” against a white
seamless backdrop, in the
shadows with a narrow depth of
field using an 8 x 10 camera.
The white backdrop served to
remove the subjects from any
context and the 8 x 10 camera
served to exaggerate any
abnormalities or
idiosyncrasies that the
subject may have had.
 Bolton critiques
Avedon's photography,
which he claims lacks
depth or insight into
the lives of those
imaged. Bolton briefly
discusses Avedon's
methods of photographing
his subjects without
background,
intentionally flattening
the depth of field, and
muting the colors
palette of his image.
 Rosalind Krauss
Rosalind Krauss was a critic and
contributing editor for Artforum and
one of the founders of the quarterly
art theory journal October.

She has been a highly influential

critic and theorist in the post-
Abstract Expressionist era.  Krauss
still teaches Art History at Columbia
University in New York.
ART CRITIC AND WRITER
 1969
Krauss earned her Ph.D. from Harvard, but
1971 she had been writing art criticism for the
Krauss was promoted to contributing journal  Artforum  since 1966. In her first
editor for Artforum. That same year, year of writing for the magazine, Krauss
she divorced her husband and published a well-received article entitled
published her first book, an expanded “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd.”
version of her Harvard dissertation,
entitled Terminal Iron Works: The
Sculpture of David Smith.
1972
Krauss left M.I.T. to take a position
1975 at Princeton University, where she
lectured regularly and directed their
Krauss left Princeton and became an
visual arts program.
associate professor of Hunter College in
New York City. The following year, Krauss
left Artforum and together with her
former Harvard classmate, Annette
Michelson, started the arts and culture
quarterly journal October.
 L'Amour fou:
Photography and
Surrealism
Rosalind Krauss, Dawn Ades, Jane Livingston
 L'Amour fou  is the first book to study the
crucial role photography did in fact play in
the Surrealist movement. It shows how
photographers enlisted into the service of
'subjective' Surrealism their medium's very
claim to 'objective' reality.

Of greatest interest, of course, is the

book's abundant reproductions of the
fantastic and distorted photographic
creations that must be acknowledged as an
important part of the Surrealist oeuvre.
 The Beginning of Surrealism
Surrealism is an artistic movement that has had a lasting impact on painting,
sculpture, literature, photography and film. Surrealists—inspired by Sigmund
Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious—believed insanity was the
breaking of the chains of logic, and they represented this idea in their art
by creating imagery that was impossible in reality, juxtaposing unlikely
forms onto unimaginable landscapes.
Andre Breton
Surrealism officially began with
Dadaist writer André Breton’s 1924
Surrealist manifesto, but the movement
formed as early as 1917, inspired by
the paintings of  Giorgio de Chirico,
who captured street locations with a
hallucinatory quality.
After 1917, Georgo de Chirico
abandoned that style, but his
influence reached the Surrealists
through German Dadaist Max Ernst.

Ernst moved to Paris in 1922 as

the Dada movement ended and was
crucial to the beginning of
Surrealism, especially because of
his collage work at the time.

The disorientating illogic of

Ernst’s collages fueled Breton’s
imagination as he became more
entrenched in Sigmund Freud’s
ideas.
The Photographic
Conditions of
Surrealism
Rosalind Krauss
Krauss compares two images:
a photograph by Man Ray
"Monument to de Sade" and a
"Self-portrait" by Florence
Henri"

Man Ray's image has a double

frame: rectangular canvas
and phallic crucifix.
Florence Henri's "Self-
portrait" is framed both by
the picture plate and by the
mirror in which her face is
reflected.
 Krauss also discusses the Freudian and
sexual imagery of surrealist photography.
Freud posits that sexual images and
thoughts underlie daily actions,
routines, and objects. Surrealist
photography aims to articulate this
subconscious through use of framing and
photo manipulation. Henri's self-portrait
is subtly phallic, Man Ray's explicitly.
Krauss links surrealist photography to a
discussion of surrealist writing. Both
mediums, visual and literary, have an
indexical quality, where elements of the
subconscious are exposed through artistic
practices. Through random word choices,
closely cropped images, or unusual photo
angles, surrealism attempts to access
emotions and thoughts not articulated in
daily life or other genres.
Corpus Delicti
Rosalind Krauss
LE VIOLON D'INGRES
BY MAN RAY

Krauss discusses some of the

defining aspects of surrealist
photography. Through closely
cropped images, a body part can
simultaneously denote its
corresponding part of the human
body or connote something else
entirely.
 Surrealism employs photography as an
"associative medium" where an image has
both denotative and connotative
qualities. Images of the nude in
particular are sexually charged, though
the use of odd angles and close cropping
makes the nude form seem surreal, even
evocative of other items found in daily
reality.
 Douglas Crimp
An American art historian, critic, curator,
and AIDS activist. He was known for his
scholarly contributions to the fields
of postmodern theories and
art, institutional critique, dance,
film, queer theory, and feminist theory. 

His writings are marked by a conviction to

merge the often disjunctive worlds of
politics, art, and academia. From 1977 to
CRITIC, CURATOR AND WRITER 1990, he was the managing editor of the
journal October.
The Photographic Activity
of Postmodernism
Doulas Crimp
Crimp (1993:109-112) starts off by
identifying three kinds of presence,

the presence where the observer is

undeniably there like in performance
art,
the presence where there is an absence
seeming like a presence and
the type of presence where there is a
presence and an absence.
 The aura of a work of art is intrinsically
linked to modernism. The presence/absence
combination Crimp talks of that is inherent
in photographs reproductions of works of
art belongs to postmodernism.

According to Crimp, postmodernism works

alongside this modernist regaining of aura
but only so it can subvert it and "show
that it [the aura] too is now only an
aspect of the copy, not the original."
 According to Douglas Crimp
and other postmodern
thinkers, there is no such
thing as originality; so-
called “new” representations
in any medium have many
sources. Postmodern
theorists see the artist as
a kind of magpie who gathers
from whatever he or she
admires to create a unique
synthesis.
 The Museum’s Old/The
Library’s New Subject by
Douglas Crimp (1981)
Douglas Crimp and Christopher Phillips also
investigate the interpenetration of discourse and
photographic meaning, examining two specific
institutional models: the New York Public Library and
the New York Museum of Modern Art, respectively.

Crimp’s “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,”

published in 1981 (a year before Krauss’s essay) and
then revised in Bolton’s The Contest of Meaning,
considers the then-recent recategorization of
photographs in the New York Public Library from their
various dispersed archival locations into a singular
department of Arts, Prints and Photographs.”
 The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject by
Douglas Crimp (1981)

Crimp argues that photography effectively has been

transferred from an informational category to an aesthetic
one from the library to the museum, reassigning its plural
functions in information, documentation, illustration, and so
on into a singular category of autonomous modernist art. He
considers the change to be indicative of a paradigm shift.

For Crimp, Szarkowski’s interpretation of the photograph

according to its formal qualities is a perversion of the
modernist project or photography is not autonomous, and it is
not, in the modernist sense, an art.
 Christopher Phillips
Christopher Phillips is an America
photography critic and editor.

Christopher Phillips examines how the New

York Museum of Modern Art’s Department a
Photography shapes public discourse on the
medium. Through it’s influential
exhibition and publications, has set
general ‘horizon of expectations’ with
respect to photography.

CRITIC AND EDITOR

The Judgement Seat
of Photography by
Christopher Phillips
Christopher Phillips’ 1982 essay, “The
Judgement Seat of Photography,” points out
that the museum’s authority to call attention
to photography is dependent on the trending
themes that are often set by such individuals
in institutional power.

In the essay, Phillips details a historical

synopsis of how the MoMA’s photography
department developed by examining the
ideas implemented by each director and their
impact on distinguishing the photographic
document.
 New York Museum of Modern Art’s Beaumont Newhall
Department Directors/Curators
According to Phillips, Beaumont
Newhall, the first  curator  of the
department, gave a “new outlook” on
photography and  focused on the
technical processes, specifically in
regard to optical and chemical
Edward Steichen
aesthetics. Values including rarity,
authenticity, visual stylization
Phillips notes that Steichen rejected the helped narrow scope to photography as
idea of photography as a fine art.    In his an art form.  Presentation was formal,
introduction about  the exhibition  The Family
like in the other departments of the
of Man, Steichen boldly claims this project
museum, with framed images under
as the “most ambitious & challenging project
glass.
photography has ever attempted.”The emphasis
is on every day living relationships, a
“mirror of the essential oneness of mankind
throughout the world.” 
 Edward Steichen

With  Szarkowski’s direction at MoMA came

a  return to some of Newhall’s values and
ideals.   Presentation returned to the
formal approach with images matted and
framed.   Phillips notes that Szarkowksi
wanted a return to an aesthetic with
qualities of “poise, clarity of purpose,
and natural beauty” and in order to help
with photographic discourse focused on 5
issues  described in Szarkowski’s
essay  Introduction To The Photographer’s
Eye :    the thing itself, the detail, the
frame, time, & vantage point.
HISTORY AND AESTHETICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Batangas State University - Lipa Campus September 2020

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