Uta Barth - An Interview

It might seem a bit perverse that a photographer should dedicate a career to what feels like a systematic effort toward destabilising all our assumptions about the visible, the exact thing to which their medium is committed. But such is one - I think quite persuasive - reading of Uta Barth's work for at least the last two decades. She seems more concerned with how meaning might be possible for an image at all, the conditions of meaning, rather than what a particular image could mean.

"Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall (contained and enclosed by a frame that demarcates the area of interest and separates it from all that surrounds it in the room), etc. This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an most visceral, physical and personal sense. Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception."

This interview, in which she discusses, among other things her series Field and Ground, dates from way back in 1996, but is none the less a great introduction to the themes Barth has long pursued in her work, so it's definitely worth your time.

Lydia Anne McCarthy - Refraction

Given the myriad forms of photographic practice available to us, each with multiple styles and expectations, it seems a contradiction – if not a surprising one – to say that some genres are actually quite rigid in the particular approach or quality we require of them. I’m thinking specifically of portraiture – the facile assumptions of legibility are time and again to the fore, where the picture is thought to show a “likeness” or reveal something about its subject, an easy correspondence between disparate surfaces.

To complicate that is not just to call the photographic enterprise into question, but our perceptual expectations as well. They in turn depend on the world being as it appears, with nothing at all behind the veil – or else everything, where a subject performs its absence. The portraiture of Lydia Anne McCarthy subtly locates itself somewhere within these extremes, verging sometimes on abstraction, but never quite allowing it. She deals, in fact, with the complex embodiment of vision.

These works were made by replacing the conventional lens of a view camera with a Fresnel screen, but that is in many ways incidental to their significance. Even if we know the particular kind of optical device used to produce the images, its effect is not so much material as it is in the altered character of our visual experience, which is counter to any expectation we might have of a photographic portrait. What she is dealing with then, is not a likeness of the person, not the photographic performance of their visible identity – their character – but the act of their becoming visible to the camera, the space that they occupy at the moment the picture is being made – these are, in fact, portraits of that space.

What she proposes is an activated visual experience, but it is not one where her sitters are incidental either. Theirs is the realisation of a double embodiment, first as an individual and again as a perceived subject; McCarthy articulates the distinction between those two roles as being within the photographic process itself.


See the rest of this series here and be sure to also have a look at this series, Shadows and Reflections.

Outside the Frame: Some Thoughts on the Work of Joachim Schmid

From the series Cyberspaces

 

 From the series O Campo

Views of two books from the series Other People's Photographs


The staggering rate at which we now make and consume photographic images is liable to induce a sense of vertigo in anyone who thinks about it for too long. Of course, given that it is essentially a technological medium, reproduction is a key value of its nature – the easy multiplication of images, but this new, incredible proliferation of photography itself is something mostly unforeseen, because that shift in the operation of actually making a picture is basically very little, a matter of degree only. However, the implications of this jump from a chemical process to a digital one are huge, and still imperfectly understood, but there are artists who have been dealing with the issue of photographic consumption for a number of years, even before the recent explosion in technology, and perhaps chief among them is Joachim Schmid, who is a prescient observer of media culture in general. Granted he began his investigations – and that’s really what they are – into the social gravity of lens-based images long before the internet and digital technology attained their current status, but there is none the less something about all his work that cements an understanding of just what the whole mass of photographic images would eventually become, consuming reality one frame at a time.

The central aim of his diverse methods has been the remarkably consistent questioning of what is it that we do with photographs and how they shape the way in which we see the world around us, that profound conceptual disparity between representation and experience so often obscured by the multiple roles filled the photographic image. It is – no doubt rightly – an article of faith in any contemporary discussion about the medium that we cannot in any sense trust what we see in a photograph, that some essential sense of its being in reference to a real event has long since been abandoned. Yet we know although this has in a fundamental way to do with a new volatility of the photograph and the ease with which it can be manipulated, the other dimensions of this supposed shift in thinking are much harder to quantify, given the fact that images have always been subject to some sleight of hand, or at least an inherent willingness to deceive. The most remarkable insight of Schmid’s practice has been to articulate in a systematic way the far more complex social iterations of photographic meaning and how those values are tied into the imposition of a particular view of the world that is in fact only made possible by photography – its “manipulation” then belongs to a far more embedded process than the simple fact of changing appearances. It is, in fact, the ordering of our collective reality.

As a result of this particular insight, Schmid is explicitly concerned with the wider structures of meaning, those contexts in which pictures occur and are read. He does not specifically “appropriate” the images that form the basis of his work, but uses their presence in a reflexive fashion to elucidate the ways in which meaning is derived as the function of a particular image in a particular context – and by altering this context he alters the meaning of the images. It is somewhat ironic that this facility for “ordering” our sense of the world through photography depends on the ordering of the photographic material itself, in so far as the subtext of this action is to reinforce that first connection between the image and its nominal subject. This has to be taken as more than just a tangential reference – the image has to be (or is understood as) the analogue of its subject. In changing the context of the images Schmid is revealing this “double-bind” of photographic reference, the way in which it is definitively anchored to a subject – where the picture is inescapably about something – and yet the meaning of that reference is unstable, given to abrupt changes in implication depending on where we find it. The same “reference” can have an untold number of meanings. What’s at stake then is the containment of those possibilities, because it is the limit of any discourse – like attaching a particular reading to a photograph – that establishes meaning. But at the same time we cannot think of these “limits” as being in any way neutral or without an agenda. There is often some pre-existing order packaged with the photograph that demands a certain understanding of its subject (and the photograph itself, in turn). Schmid’s work depends therefore on the articulation of a singular, if paradoxically ubiquitous trope – that of the archive.

This is not just a system of ordering information according to certain rules, the strategies of an archive, or its incidental style, more than that it is the assumed privilege of controlling the meaning within it, setting the terms of that meaning. This is in fact the effect of a super-structure that determines how that content is read, the true intent of which is to shape larger narratives – telling us this is how it was, a kind of proof. The archive is not just order then, but the appropriation of meaning beyond the factual as a projected image of authority. All of which is not to suggest of course that there is some clear intentionality behind such a process, a will to control meaning in itself – and Schmid is not so naive as to imply that in his work. Rather “the archive” is shaped by a gravitational pull between images; the logic imposed on them is subject to a certain kind of irrationality, even in those particular cases where the aim of a collection is to reinforce a specific viewpoint. His series Other People’s Photographs, involving  the process classifying amateur pictures into thematic groupings is emblematic in that regard; the mass of visual material with which we now live is clearly another sort of archival practice – it has, for want of a better word, gone viral and Schmid deals with the change in a particularly acute way.


He also has a comprehensive website.