C ONTE NT S
INTRODUCTION 1 ADAM FUSS ALEC SOTH ALEX PRAGER ANDREAS GURSKY ANDRES SERRANO ANDREW MOORE ANNE COLLIER ANNIE LEIBOVITZ BARBARA KRUGER BERND AND HILLA BECHER BRIAN WEIL BRUCE DAVIDSON BRUCE WEBER CARRIE MAE WEEMS CATHERINE OPIE CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS CINDY SHERMAN COLLIER SHOR DAIDO MORIYAMA DAVID LA CHAPELLE DAWOUD BEY DEBORAH TURBEVILLE DUANE MICHALS ELINOR CARUCCI ELLEN CAREY
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50
EMMET GOWIN GARY SCHNEIDER GILLES PERESS GREGORY CREWDSON HANK WILLIS THOMAS HELMUT NEWTON HENRY WESSEL HIROSHI SUGIMOTO INEZ AND VINOODH JACK PIERSON JAMES WELLING JAN GROOVER JEFF WALL JIM GOLDBERG JIMMY DE SANA JO ANN CALLIS JOEL PETER WITKIN JOEL STERNFELD JOHN BALDESSARI JUERGEN TELLER JUSTINE KIRKLAND KATY GRANNAN LARRY CLARK LARRY FINK LARRY SULTAN
52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98 100
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER LAURA LETINSKY LAURIE SIMMONS LEE FRIEDLANDER LES KRIMS LINDA CONNOR LORNA SIMPSON LUCAS BLALOCK LUCAS SAMARAS MARCO BREUER MARK COHEN MARTIN PARR MARY ELLEN MARK NAN GOLDIN NICHOLAS NIXON NICK KNIGHT PENELOPE UMBRICO PETER HUJAR PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD RALPH GIBSON RICHARD BILLINGHAM RICHARD MISRACH RICHARD PRINCE ROBERT ADAMS
102 104 106 108 110 112 114 116 118 120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 138 140 142 144 146 148 150
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE ROE ETHRIDGE ROGER BALLEN RYAN MCGINLEY SALLY MANN SAMUEL FOSSO SARAH CHARLESWORTH STEPHEN SHORE STEVEN MEISEL SUSAN MEISELAS TARYN SIMON THOMAS DEMAND TIM WALKER TIM DAVIS TINA BARNEY TREVOR PAGLIN VIK MUNIZ VIVIANE SASSEN WILLIAM EGGLESTON WILLIAM WEGMAN WOLFGANG TILLMANS ZANELE MUHOLI ZEKE BERMAN ZOE LEONARD
152 154 156 158 160 162 164 166 168 170 172 174 176 178 180 182 184 186 188 190 192 194 196 198
ADA M FUSS A PH OTO G R A PH I S U S UA L LY N AV I GAT E D BY N A M I N G F I R S T W H AT I S V I S I B L E A N D TA N G I B L E B EFO R E PR O C EED I N G TO T H AT W H I C H I S EPH EM ER A L . Defying the medium’s fondness for the literal, Adam Fuss’ photographs traffic in peripheral sensation, coaxing from the photogram—an historical process known for its flattening of objects—images of extraordinary radiance and density. Less representational than percussive, certain photographs suggest sound—a plucked string or fluttering of the vocal chords, others imprinting themselves on the nervous system or vibrations that register under the teeth; some monotonic, like the lowest keys of a piano. The work—photograms or daguerreotypes or silver prints—are adjectives rather than nouns, and a particularly persuasive exemplar of Roland Barthe’s famous punctum. In several bodies of work, Fuss explores reproductive processes and embryology. Well known are pictures of babies, triumphant silhouettes resonating like tuning forks in incandescent yolks, a caul echoing origin. Here in an Untitled photograph from 1987, viscous droplets have the density of mercury dribbling across a thin magnetic field of glacial and metallic blue like frozen braille. They ping beyond the range of human hearing, a gesture with the clarity of a hallucination. The essence of Fuss’ work is the primal and metaphysical arousal of the senses, culling ancient mythology and iconography without language, a very unique bond between the optical and the spiritual.
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“UNTITLED” 1989
ALEC SOTH M U C H O F T H E FA N FA R E I N CO N T EM P O R A RY PH OTO G R A PH Y I N T H E PAS T FI F T Y Y E A R S H AS EM B R AC ED S T U D I O - BAS ED WO R K . The use of the camera as a tool to grant access to the world, to challenge what one may be fearful of, to engage one’s curiosity, has often seemed eclipsed by staged and “fictional” photographs; a lament to some. Among his generation, the work of Alex Soth has been an influential exception. His bodies of work extend the ethos of documentary photography—the legacy of Robert Frank and Walker Evans and Joel Sternfield, often recognizably—and the medium as an act of inquiry and wanderlust with no immediate agenda. Like much recent documentary, the work is subjective, intuitive and interpretative, and as invested in feeling as fact. The photographs, much of it portraiture, are intentionally fragmented and often ambiguous and withholding of information and closure. It is their sequencing and geography that provides narrative adhesive. The poet Marianne Moore has advised that “we must be as clear as our natural reticence allows us to be.” In Soth’s work, this reserve encourages the subject to only emerge gradually and a sense of the solitary, in subject and in the methodology of the photographer, is the work’s emotional taproot. The isolation and melancholy of small towns and their economic betrayal is the loam from which the characters are shaped. Regardless of the dreariness of place and undertow of despair, a sense of lush reverie often envelops the work and provides its emotional cushion. As here, the work in “Broken Manual” is thematic, an inquiry into the fugitive and camouflaged in American life, which Soth describes with affection and approval, and no small empathy. In his pursuit of a subject in the act of vanishing, intent on self-erasure, the twin impulses of appearance and disappearance that animate the work reveal the photographer’s own emotional armature.
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“EDELS HIDEAWAY” 2007
ALEX PR AGER A TABLEAU IS DEFINED AS A GROUP OF MOTIONLESS FIGURES REPRESENTING A NARR ATIVE SCENE, OFTEN HISTORICAL. As terminology, the word has been used to describe much of contemporary photography. The term would seem particularly suitable regarding the photographs of Alex Prager, as the work’s energetic affection for reenactment is it’s most immediate attribute. The meticulous staging of the photographs is widely admired. Los Angeles, and it’s familiar artifice, is the avowed subject matter of the work, mingling the vividness of the synthetic and a cheerful melodrama. It is a theater not of stars but of ragtag extras; the demotic supporting the counterfeit. The photographs celebrate the halcyon Fifties in Hollywood, the first generation when the commerce of mass-culture illusion solidified, supported by the arrival during the depression of those enlisting as bit players in the happy charade. The series “Face in the Crowd” engages some of the pleasures of speculation while watching a crowd. Filled with extras: typecast character actors as archetypes of middle century generalizations, social typology as rendered in popular culture—in a costume drama, without plot activation. Prager’s mise en scene is not based on individual experience but of an immersion in collective fiction, a nostalgia for an idealized past, the stock image. Complaining of the work’s superficiality seems beside the point as it does not seem to aspire to depth, but to a harvest of tropes; a confection several generations removed from an original that is itself a stylization of the ‘real’. One could argue that the recurring character highlighted in Prager’s work, presumably a surrogate for the artist, provides narrative substance or depth of character by her gestures of queasy anxiety, self-consciousness, and disoriented vulnerability. It is difficult not to suggest that these mannerisms, as a very recognizable form of female stereotyping, are best left to the era from which they originated.
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“CROWD #4 (NEW HAVEN)” 2013
AN D REAS GU RSK Y AS PHOTOGR APHY LONGED FOR INCLUSION AMONGST THE CRITICAL AND MARKET R ANKS OF PAINTING, PHOTOGR APHS FOR INTERIOR PL ACEMENT—NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH BILLBOARD PHOTOGR APHY OR L ARGE- SCALE DEPICTIONS OF PRODUCE ON GROCERY TRUCKS—BALOONED IN DIMENSION. The work of Andreas Gursky became a conspicuous emblem of this ambition of scale. Engulfed in a Gursky is an initially disorienting event. Depth of field is compressed and vertical space elongated. The work maintains an improbable visual democracy, dazzling in detail and repetition and fulsome historical reference, from annual report to nineteenth century landscape painting, at once detached and romantic. Technological changes in representational capability advance further than our ability to see. Cinemascope, for instance, gave a clarity to peripheral and linear vision beyond our sight and presently, highdefinition technology can suggest our own human vision is murky. Part of the significance of Gursky’s work, however, is not only it’s physical immensity and the hypnosis of its visual precision, but its rhetorical ambition: a vast spectacle of material plenty that enables the triumph of global markets and capital, multiplying like a viral pan-opticon. Stock exchanges, high and low retail, container shipyards, factories, entertainment and sporting spectacles, hotel lobbies, airports, are the photograph’s vocabulary. The work’s acquisition by the very forces of multi-national accomplishment on the global marketplace is, perhaps, the work’s defacto achievement; an endorsement by the market forces that the work celebrates—a movement of capital in one direction and the history of representation as determined by the ruling class. The ‘democracy’ of the work becomes proprietary, and like many forms of gluttony, suggests a colossal loneliness. It is a true paradigm for the time.
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“OHNE TITEL XIII (MEXICO)” 2002
AN DRES SERR AN O A N D R ES S ER R A N O C R E AT ES S TAG ED PH OTO G R A PH S — S T I L L L I FES A N D P O R T R A I T S —T H AT H AV E B EEN N OTO R I O U S I N T H EI R PR OVO CAT I O N A N D I N T H EI R D ES I R E TO JA B MO R A L, S E XUA L A N D R EL I G I O U S CA N O N. Steeped with a lavish and baroque Christian vocabulary, the work gleefully braided the ecclesiastical and scatological, the sacred and profane. Frequent in the early work were bodily fluids laden with elements of both Catholicism—blood and milk— and at the time, pathogenic—urine, semen. Throughout, the rituals that give ministry to our most profound human uncertainties—of death, pain, of the erotic—is the trigger of the work. Throughout the history of visual representation and until recently, the depiction of an individual has been most often as a result of economic privilege and power and social hierarchy. To be portrayed was a trophy of cultural significance and achievement. The disadvantaged have long been a concern of humanitarian photography whose motive was social change, and the impoverished often depicted in squalor as a strategy to reveal what had been hidden or ignored. In the series “Nomads” Serrano brought the fundamental tools of the studio portrait—seamless paper and a soft box strobe, to photograph the homeless in New York City, thus momumentalizing them, and giving them dignity and individuality. Here “Mary” from 1990 is described with tenderness, her heavy swaddling a buffer to sadness and a bulwark of her stoicism. Serrano uses the visual rhetoric of formalized portraiture that gives currency to the prominent, to recognize and elevate those without, thus seizing the language of power to portray the powerless.
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“MARY” 1990
AN D REW MOO RE H I S TO RY A N D PH OTO G R A PH Y H AV E A LO N G A N D U S EFU L A L L I A N C E I N O U R U N D ER S TA N D I N G O F T H E PAS T T H R O U G H PR ES ERV I N G I T S A PPE A R A N C E. Regardless of our recent understanding of photography’s subjectivity, we rely upon the medium to relay a visual semblance of the past. The historian, one may presume, feels an alloy of affection and gratitude to the medium. The photographs of Andrew Moore are often made in a location where the past and present converge, in Moore’s words “a cross-section through time” where the history of a site is revealed in its deterioration: Havana, New Orleans, Detroit, Times Square. “House with Yellow Porch, Sheridan County” is part of a body of work from the 100th meridian, a longitudinal dividing of east and west of the vast American landscape. The photograph’s force is in its dizzying descriptive quality and exactitude of time and place. Abetted by a low aerial perspective that emphasizes its isolation, its abandonment seems finalized by the last rays of late winter daylight withdrawing its consolation, despite the solace of warmth from the yellow porch. The brittle tangle of the landscape mock the geometries of the dwelling, relieved of its responsibility of shelter and comfort and soon engulfed in darkness. Sheridan County, Nebraska is one of historic locations of the Homesteading act of the 19th century, that allowed citizens to claim 160 acres of raw acreage with the provision that the land be improved upon and inhabited for five years. Perhaps the knowledge of this commitment heightens the poignancy of its current predicament. In the photograph, stoicism overcomes any sense of melancholy or defeat but exists as an elegy for human ambition versus nature’s overwhelming brawn.
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“HOUSE WITH YELLOW PORCH, SHERIDAN COUNTY, NEBRASKA” 2009
AN N E COLLIER ANNE COLLIER EXPLORES THE MATRIX OF REPRESENTATION, POWER AND GENDER THROUGH THE RELATIONSHIP OF WOMEN AND THE CAMERA, BOTH AS SUBJECT AND AS PHOTOGRAPHER, AND OFTEN, THE CAMERA AS PREDATORY INSTRUMENT. Sourcing visual relics and placing them in the camera’s frame, Collier amplifies the inherent rhetoric of the image sheared from language, disclosing its influence on mainstream thought. By choosing artifacts from the pre-internet culture in which the image had a surface and materiality (their permanence notable amongst the fleeting nature of the image today), adhered to an object—record covers, appointment calendars, magazine pages—clarifies the photograph as a possession—a talisman of our desire as consumers. “Crying” from 2005 anticipates later work that parses the representation of women in stage-managed tears: not as an indication of empathy nor compassion, but as a patronizing emoji of vulnerability. Here the stilllife is a stack of record albums, an image of a weeping Ingrid Bergman visible from a soundtrack of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Bergman’s elevated gaze into the distance and to the future appears allegorical, almost occult, her tears those of revelation, her mouth a gasp; static in her availability, her ‘weakness’ suspended forever. As is characteristic of the work, the object brought to attention remains distant—reversing, perhaps, the possession of the female, uncoupled from our ownership. Throughout its history, photography’s relentless objectification of the female could seem conspiratorial in its consistency.
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“CRYING” 2005
AN N IE LEIBOVITZ THE M AGA ZINE AND THE PHOTOGR APH HAVE HAD A DEEPLY COLL ABOR ATIVE PARTNERSHIP SINCE THEIR FIRST LIAISON. The ideological resonance of the magazine has been provided in part by photographic accompaniment: the construction of female aspiration and obligation through Vogue, the advocacy of new sexual proprieties via Playboy, National Geographic’s colonialist instincts and the American promotional agenda of LIFE. The magazine forged an audience for photography’s evolving vision, introducing the medium to a wide public. Magazines have influenced photographic form and content. The subject of the magazine photograph is dictated by the cultural moment and—unless a photographic essay—condenses information into a single succinct image. Annie Leibovitz may be the most familiar magazine photographer of her time. From beginnings as a scruffy photojournalist her work defined an emerging rock and roll picturesque, and then the narrative portrait in compliance with the boom of celebrity culture. Liebovitz’ work was distinctive: teasing a persona of exhibitionism, inferring a playful dialogue with a savvy audience, inventive and improvisational and often goofy. Gradually, Leibovitz’ narrative innovations have become a recognizable signature—the warm, muted palate, a reliance upon place; glamour as a grandiose and theatrical production. As environmental portraits, their inevitably lush interiors—sanctuaries of burnished commerce or scholarship and of a bourgeois past; sites of mythic landscape and conquest, suggest accomplishment as heroic achievement and, in the tradition of with history painting, the image as trophy. It is a seductive spectacle, bestowing the public figure as an ideal, often melancholic and hushed as if burdened by their responsibility as public guise. The work reinforces the comfort and privileges of power.
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“HUGH DANCY, KAREN ELSON AND MICHAEL SHANNON” VOGUE US OCTOBER 2013
BARBAR A KRU GER BA R BA R A K R U G ER U T I L I Z ES S TAG ED I M AG ES FR OM M I D C EN T U RY W H OS E S T Y L I Z ED R H E TO R I C M AY B E LO N G E X PI R ED B U T T H AT R E TA I N A N AU R A O F AU T H O R I T Y, L AY ER I N G A MO R DA N T VO I C E OV ER; A L A N G UAG E O F D EC L A R AT I O N A N D D O M I N A N C E A N D I N Q U I RY. Among the most recognizable from a generation of so-called ‘post-modernist’ artists who work with photography, the work has long entered the cultural bloodstream. The pictures address power, and how images and language forge leverage. Kruger’s words are arranged in terse formation, shellacked onto the pictures—occasionally in staccato alignment—bleating along the margin. The words do not sabotage but collude with the visual syntax of the image. Kruger’s incantatory clumps of language form provocations regarding privilege, consumption, the body, greed and control. The work is accusative, the frequent use of genderless pronouns seek to lure the viewer into the inquiry, depending, perhaps, on their own degree of guilt, ego or culpability, or simple curiosity. Who remains silent? Whose voice is heard? Who controls language? Who constructs identity? The photographs employ the material of print and media culture: screen printing, vinyl, the halftone of reproduction. The work exists equally as agitprop and commodity, as branding, marketing, sloganeering, public address, occasionally merchandising (billboards and gift items) and selling, as a hybrid of seduction and intimidation. It is cunning in its braiding of intention: seeking to provoke discourse, and as advertising, seeking to convince and vend, an advertisement for itself.
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“UNTITLED (WHO WILL WRITE THE HISTORY OF TEARS?)” 1987
BERN D AN D HILL A BECH ER A C O M M O N M OT I VAT I O N F R O M T H O S E W H O S E E N G A G E M E N T W I T H P H O T O G R A P H Y I S S I G N I F I C A N T, I S T O C O N S I D E R T H AT W H I C H I S U N R E C O G N I Z E D, T O C U L L FR OM T H E VAS T I N V EN TO RY O F T H E WO R L D T H AT W H I C H D ES ERV ES A PPR EC I AT I O N. With the publication of Anonyme Skulpturen in 1970, Bernd and Hilla Becher provided a tactical template of their commitment to log the industrial forms of the Ruhr valley and elsewhere in Northern Europe. Cooling towers, silos, blast furnaces; edifices whose form, determined by functionality, could be appreciated for their aesthetic merit, were photographed under gray morning light, all the better to articulate line and sillouette. Famously, the images were arranged in pairs and grids as vernacular inventory, and to foreground repetition and compositional precision. The Becher’s scrupulous fidelity to the project was astonishing, and the work became a dominating influence on photographic discourse, an intriguing counterpoint to the emerging photographic subjectivity of the time. The photographs provide an historical arc from German taxonomic photography of the 1930’s (both August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt) and a Duchampian sense of readymade, and the seriality of then-emerging ‘minimalist’ thinking. That its guidance would extend into several generations of German photography is all the more unforseen. As a formal analysis, the work privileges form over content. Perhaps this circumscription actually enriches the work’s ideological reach: is this ignoring the brutality of the industrial past an act of romanticism? Does the neglect of industry and economic power and its complex, ominous past in German history function as suppression or redemption? Despite the Becher’s apparent wish to avoid feeling and their praxis of objectivity, there is a strain of sentimentality in their intention, and longing for the obsolescence of the industrial past. Possibly this attempt of erasure creates an unintentional complexity and purpose.
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“KOHLEBUNKER, D” 1967–1993
BRIAN WEIL L I K E M A N Y PH OTO G R A PH ER S I N T H E T W EN T I E T H C EN T U RY, B R I A N W EI L WAS MOT I VAT ED BY A H U M A N I S T PR EM I S E O F PH OTO G R A PH Y AS A P OW ER FU L I N S T R U M EN T FO R S O C I A L C H A N G E. His work is fearless, and with a preternatural emotional and moral urgency. Although of different topics, together the work forms a portfolio that flickers and scratches like a secretive and silent film from an obscure place and past. Some reference theological and mythological ritual and suggest a liturgy of redemption through suffering, profanity and physical extremity. Some suggest ancient ceremony and a deeply remote mysticism, ageless and immobile. Others depict violence so anonymous and convulsive that identity is eviscerated. In the Untitled image at right, Weil’s work as a Miami police photographer provides an image of lurid and ghastly suffering, lacerated by the photographer’s caustic abrasions, a scabrous palimpsest of mortal pain and loneliness. In its Goyaesque desire to acknowledge the most harrowing and private of the human predicament the work forms a tender contemplation of agony and of shame. Despite the work’s confrontational tone, in its fierce compassion and courage, and unconditional empathy, it becomes a form of grace. Towards the end of his life in 1996 he would conclude that the medium no longer could operate as a portal for social progress and justice, and abandoned photography. He founded the needle exchange program in New York City as a method to diminish the spread of HIV, and as a way to directly address a social crisis.
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“UNTITLED” 1982
BRUCE DAVIDSO N T H E D EC I S I O N O F B R U C E DAV I DS O N TO EM PLOY CO LO R FI L M AS A D EPA R T U R E FR OM A LO N G - H EL D U S E O F B L AC K A N D W H I T E—T H E PR EFER R ED MO O D O F D O CU M EN TA RY— TO D ES C R I B E W H AT S EEM ED T H E MO N O C H R OM AT I C M U R K O F T H E N E W YO R K C I T Y S U BWAY WAS CO U N T ER I N T U I T I V E. The resulting photographs were revelatory, transforming an understanding of photographic color and its subtlety and fragility and the influence of competing artificial light on color palate,and to express the authentic feeling of place. The morbid and fetid gloom of underground public transportation in 1980 in comparison to relative sanity of the present cannot be overstated, and Davidson’s plunge into the Stygian dank corresponds to guerrilla photography in zones of conflict, this one particularly close at hand. Acrid color insinuates itself, by flickering fluorescent light and photographic flash, bouncing off soft steel, jolting the shadow, seizing information that would be swallowed in darkness and grime. Graffiti ricochets, a hieroglyphic clatter of a metallic crypt. Flesh is close and clammy. Bruce Davidson was inspired by a noble aspiration: “we confront our mortality, contemplate our destiny, and experience both the beauty and the beast” that positions the photograph as an evangelical deed. “Subway”is significant both as a vivid sociological report of its time, now an archive, and as an aesthetic innovation motivated by visual accuracy.
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“SUBWAY” 1980
BRU CE WEBER IN MUCH OF ITS ARR ANGEMENT WITH COMMERCE, THE PHO TOGR APH HAS BEEN A ROBUST ADVOCATE FOR M ATERIAL PROGRESS, PROSPERIT Y AND COMFORT, AND THE PROMISE OF CONFIDENCE, IF NOT SWAGGER, THAT ACQU ISITION CONFERS. The medium has been aggressively art-directed for its promotional bravado. At critical moments in visual culture, advertising images have the ability to both respond to and form the cultural zeitgeist and photographers became the auteurs of our cultural gawk. Through campaigns for the likes of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, Bruce Weber’s rendition of the erotic and aristocratic, respectively, contributed to their dominance as fashion brands of the era. In both cases, the depiction of economic and erotic hedonism proved an irresistible elixir to mainstream culture. Weber’s self-motivated work fused the wholesome and the sexually charged: the idealism of Norman Rockwell twined with Physique Pictorial, a nostalgic and midwestern Americana and the narcissism of fin-de-siecle urbanity. Athletic and chiseled boys and girls comport with abandon and camaraderie, their tenderness and enthusiasm just short of apparent sexual congress. The work encouraged a pivot in American culture where male sexuality, as a component of increasingly visible gay culture, became available to an audience of all sexual orientation. Weber’s work, inescapable in the public sphere, shared male sexuality and desire with the heterosexual gaze, an objectification that had been historically addressed to women. This, with its shrewd function in the avarice of the market place would have profound effect on culture, and whose reverberations endure.
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“CAMP LONGWOOD, UPPER ST REGIS LAKE, NEW YORK” 1993