ON THE TREND of CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY NEW PHOTOGRAPHY WEI-HUAH CHEN
Philosophical Impact on the Essence of Photography ——What Is Photography
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Photography was in Zone-V
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New Viewpoints of Documentary Photos
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What is the Fixed Identity of New Documents
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Dadaism, Postmodernism and New Photography
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Liberation and Extension
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Bibography
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On the Trend of Contemporary Photography - New Photography
Philosophical Impact on the Essence of Photography——What Is Photography? Pragmatism, which insists on positivism, is also adamant on intrinsic mechanical qualities. Documentary photographers place lesser importance on self-referential expressions and take photographs for the intentions of capturing reality and truth; from which, two iconic figures in the field of Journalism come to mind, and they are Eugene Atget1 and Henri Cartier-Bresson2, who was insisted that photographs should not be cropped and saw this as a personal professional ethical conduct. Although Roland Barthes3 proposed seeing the analogue nature of photography as the representation of reality; however, the autonomous photographic discourse is now regarded as merely one of the possible methods of image construction. In Duel on Photography, Japanese photography critic, Takuma Nakahira4, stated that, “Coupled with knowledge and attainment, a filter seems to have been placed before the eye, which prompts for compromise when taking photographs. In order not to succumb to such an eye, constant polishing is thus critically important!” On the other hand, Japanese photographer, Kishin Shinoyama5, also stated that, “If my photography were to become conceptual installations or replaceable by literature, in which
1 Eugène Atget (12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French flaneur and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. 2 Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father
of photojournalism. He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation.
3 Roland Gérard Barthes ( 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician.Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to communicate actual events. Many of his monthly myth articles in the 50s had attempted to show how a photographic image could represent implied meanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer ‘naturalistic truths’. 4 Takuma Nakahira ( July 6, 1938) is a Japanese photographer and photography critic. Nakahira’s first published photobook, For a Language to Come has been described as “a masterpiece of reductionism. Up through its publication in 1970, Nakahira had been well versed in a style in the vein of Daido Moriyama’s are, bure, boke (rough, blurred, and out of focus). 5 Kishin Shinoyama (3 December 1940) is a Japanese photographer. He has put out a large number of books of photographs of girls, dressed, mostly undressed, and nude.
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On the Trend of Contemporary Photography - New Photography
Eugène Atget, Pommier. 1922–23. Albumen silver print, 8 9/16 x 6 7/8
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On the Trend of Contemporary Photography - New Photography
case, there would be no point for me to continue taking photographs. Photography requires very minimal words; what it presents is what it is.” The nostalgic tone in the photographer’s words seem to recount his faith in straight photography, as he also seems to be renouncing post-modern works of integrating photography with other mixed media. However, there seems to be a rise in philosophical impacts and critiques targeted at the essence of photography, and the notion of “photography could be greatly fictitious” has also aided in the execution and development of artworks inspired by the idea.
Kishin Shinoyama, Takuma Nakahira. Duel on Photography. Cover designed by Zhi Hong Wang.
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Photography was in Zone-V In Issues of Fine Art Photography, Taiwanese visual artist, Ben Yu 6 , stated that fine art photography is used for the narration of “pure artistic visual works that are still and silenced”, as he also compared it with documentary photography, Journalism, and commercial photography. There appears to be some shared similarities between journalism, commercial photography, and fine art photography; however, within the framework of contemporary photography, the notion of images is regarded as one of the elements of representation, and thus, it has become appropriate to depart from traditional photography and to venture into Pictorialism, and to use this as an approach for making one’s way into art museums or galleries. On the other hand, this phenomenon has also brought advantages to documentary photographers. As documentary photographers have always declared their photographs as presentations of realistic tragedies in this world and not artistic representations, with the new definition set for contemporary photography, this new direction is allowing documentary photographers to breathe some signs of relief. I believe that the debate of “is photography art” has placed this medium in the midst of Zone-V (grey region), and also stirred for the quandary of how to position itself and how to be positioned. However, it is exactly due to this regards for a fixed identity; photographers have been inspired to create works as realizations and responses to this question.
Robert Demachy (1859 - 1936), a prominent French Pictorial photographer, was in 1888 began using the Gum Bichromate printing method. He developed a style that relied upon heavy manipulation of the image both during the development of the negative and again while printing.
6 Ben Yu is a professor in Taiwan Chengchi University of department of advertising, also known for art critic, contemporary visual artist.
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New Viewpoints of Documentary Photos Being neither Journalism nor Pictorialism7, what is the fixed identity of New Documents? Curator and Director of the Department of Photography, John Szarkowski 8, wrote in his introduction to the 1967 MoMA exhibition, NEW DOCUMENTS, “In the past decade this new generation of photographers has redirected the technique and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand. The world, in spite of its terrors, is approached as the ultimate source of wonder and fascination, no less precious for being irrational and incoherent.” He further stated that, “What unites these photographers is not style or sensibility; each has a distinct and personal sense of the use of photography and the meanings of the world. What is held in common is the belief that the world is worth looking at, and the courage to look at it without theorizing.” On the other hand, at the 2011 exhibition, Photography : New Documentary Forms, a re-declaration for traditional Journalism was announced, with the documentary value of photography being implicitly based on its claim to objectivity, which may depend
Diane Arbus. Giant. A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. (1970).
7 Pictorialism is the name given to an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of “creating” an image rather than simply recording it. 8 John Szarkowski (December 18, 1925 – July 7, 2007) was a photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the Director of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
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Mitch Epstein Biloxi, Mississippi 2005 2005 C print on paper unconfirmed: 1143 x 1419 mm Presented by the artist 2010 Mitch Epstein/Black River Productions, Ltd.
on the choice of the subject matter, the perspective from which it was taken, and the context in which it is shown or reproduced.
What is the Fixed Identity of New Documents? In The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Charlotte Cotton9 mentioned the notion of regarding photographic images as contemporary art should not be applied indiscriminately to all existing styles or conventional ways of categorization. From which, it is the separation of contemporary photography from photography history that should be focused on, with connections and inheritance between the two not being necessarily pertinent. In other words, this means the materials or concepts for New Documents could be based on the combination of multiple media with the development of variations, which is analogous to the genre of fusion jazz.
9 Charlotte Cotton is the curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Before joining the museum in 2007, Charlotte was curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1992-2004), the head of programming at The Photographers Gallery (2004-2005) in London.
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On the Trend of Contemporary Photography - New Photography Hirishi Sugimoto, Tri city drive-in,1993.
The distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism, documentary or nondocumentary within the context of New Documents has already lost its objectiveness and significance. The line between modern straight photography (e.g. Moriyama Daido10 and Nobuyoshi Araki 11 ) and contemporary art photography (e.g. Sugimoto Hiroshi12 and Andreas Gursky13 has become increasingly vague. Regardless of being the documentary approach opted by Nobuyoshi Araki for the expression of “love and desire”, or the new objectivity and typology approach inherited from Bernd und Hilla Becher14 of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and used by Andreas Gursky to document the
10 Moriyama Daido ( born October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer noted for his images depicting the breakdown of traditional values in post-war Japan. 11 Nobuyoshi Araki ( born May 25, 1940) is a Japanese photographer and contemporary artist. He have published over 350 books by 2005, and still more every year, Araki is considered one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world. Many of his photographs are erotic; some have been called pornographic. 12 Hiroshi Sugimoto ( born on February 23, 1948 ), is a Japanese photographer. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death. 13 Andreas Gursky (born January 15, 1955) is a German visual artist known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often employing a high point of view. Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed. 14 Bernhard “Bernd” Becher ( August 20, 1931 – June 22, 2007), and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser (born September 2, 1934), were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures.
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Andreas Gursky - photo from the 99 cent series,1999.
industrial society or the modernized landscape, their artistic endeavors are now all regarded as one of the many forms of New Documents. The issues and viewpoints raised in their works are the critical points used to construct the documents of contemporary art. Taiwanese photography critic Li-Xin Guo15 wrote in Further Writing on Photography, “To set a clear definition for New Documents is just as daunting a task as to set a clear definition for postmodernity.� These are concepts that are
ARAKI, Painting Flowers series, 2007.
15 Li-Xin Guo is a professor in Taiwan Chengchi University of Department of radio and television, also known for photography critic.
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continuously evolving; however, these two terms also share the common trait of being liberated from fixed conditions and the confrontation of preexisting clichés and authorities.
Dadaism, Postmodernism and New Photography Although Postmodernism 16 philosophy has become a noted school of thought in the Western society and the world of art in the recent two decades, there are still people today that insist on the separation from art and to return to the mechanical property of photography and pragmatism. However, Charles Baudelaire17 referred to those typical photographers as flaneurs, and criticized fine art photographers who wished to be elevated to the same level as that of fine artists. He believed that those art photographers lacked imagination and feelings, and were only mediocre at best. However, today’s contemporary photographers have undoubtedly been influenced by postmodernity and post-Duchamp Dadaism. By combining various media, such as sculpture and video art, they are creating works with a multiplicity of rhetorical forms and with methods of heavy appropriation, and together with the incorporation of the essence of New Documents, the genre of New Photography has thus taken shape. Therefore, in the future, strict definitions will not be imposed upon “photography” or
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946). Fountain, photograph of sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Gelatin silver print. 9 ¼ x 7" (23.5 x 17.7 cm)
16 Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought. 17 Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic.
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the notion of “using photography as medium”, because contemporary photography has already ventured into a brand new context via New Photography. This also allows the features and subjects of New Photography to continue to inherit and evolve from traditional documentary photography, deadpan photography with its unbiased documentary of reality, preconceived staged photography, Dadaism inspired works, or other hybrids incorporating different approaches. For his exhibition in 2003 at Tate Britain, Wolfgang Tillmans18 proposed the concept of “if one thing matters, everything matters”, as a new contemporary photography concept. With works of decisive moments that resemble documentary photography, abstract cameraless photography, or flatten sculpture that directly presented bent photo papers, through Tillmans’s relayout, the exhibition proposed the concept of equality in seeing all images. Tillmans’ proposed new ways of seeing prompted for more multiplicity in contemporary photography, with him regarded as an iconic figure for New Photography.
Museo del Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Columbia, 25 Oct 2012 - 28 Jan 2013
Wolfgang Tillmans. Lighter, blue convex , 2010.
18 Wolfgang Tillmans, (born 1968) is a German Fine-art photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer - and also the first non-English person - to be awarded the Tate annual Turner Prize.
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Liberation and Extension Franz Roh 19 once pointed out that there are two golden eras in the course of photography history, with the initial period being the Louis Daguerre era and the later spanned from the invention of photography to the development of the last of the last in the present time. The period in between the two segments of time were not highly regarded by him, because he thought photography was used to mimic painting during that time, which is something that works against the very essence of photography. The early 20th century was referred to by Roh as the latest period of photography, with it becoming an independent art form or as photographic-based work began to take shape. However, it is still quite challenging to define the two once paradoxical phenomena, with “photography being an independent art form” and “photography also integrated in other art forms”. Nevertheless, New Photography still places tremendous emphasis on traditional documentary narratives, but it also aims to subvert the classical approach, while also being encompassing for the plethora of possible ways to represent reality. The maximum value that the progression has garnered is probably the expansion of depth and scope with the photographic subjects and expressive methods. As the debate of “what is photography?” is responded and liberated, a new trend of contemporary photography for the 21st century is thus formed.
19 Franz Roh (February 21, 1890 – December 30, 1965), was a German historian, photographer, and art critic. Roh’s magic realism, though not often written about in recent years, is nonetheless an important contribution to a phenomenological or existential theory of aesthetics. Roh, celebrating the post-expressionist return of the visual arts to figural representation, utilized the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to emphasize that “the autonomy of the objective world around us was once more to be enjoyed; the wonder of matter that could crystallize into objects was to be seen anew.” Roh was, then, emphasizing the “magic” of the normal world as it presents itself to us 12
On the Trend of Contemporary Photography - New Photography
Bibliography Takemi Kuresawa . GENDAI BIJUTSU NO Keyword 100. Tokyo, Japan : CHIKUMASHOBO LTD, 2009. Kishin Shinoyama, Takuma Nakahira. Duel on Photography. Japan: Faces Publications, A Division of Cite Publishing, 1977. Ben Yu, Issuses of fine art photography. Taipei, Taiwan: tfam Publishing, 2003. Li-Xin, Guo. Further Writing on Photography. Taipei,Taiean: Garden City Publishing, 2013. Li-Xin, Guo. Writing Photography. Taipei,Taiwan: Yuan Zun Culture Publishing, 1998. Charlotte Cotton , Chinese translation by Shih-Lun Chang. The Photograph as Contemporary Art . Thames & Hudson, 2009. Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill & Wang, 1982. Pierre Assouline . Henri Cartier-Bresson : L’Oiel du siècle. Gallimard Education, 2001. Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian. “ Photography: New Documentary Forms. “ 2011.
> http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/display/photography-newdocumentary-forms Yaji Huang. "Last of The Last - the Progression of MoMA New Photography." 2011. > http://blog.yam.com/perceptionU/article/36761229 MoMA Organization. Press release archives - "NEW DOCUMENTS," Wall Label. February 28 - May J, I967 . > http://www.moma.org/pdfs/docs/press_archives/3860/releases/MOMA_1967_JanJune_0034_21.pdf?2010
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