The Peeling Paint on Iron Bench, Kyoto; 1981
Notes:
Pg 167
- …under the auspices of Alfred Steiglitz extolled photography as an art form in its own right. For De Zayas, however, ‘photography is not Art, but photographs can be made into Art’. The statement is of significance because its puts into play so many assumptions regarding ‘art photography’ which remain basic to its aesthetic. The very notion of making an image into art has been a dominant aspect of its tradition, as such feeds into endless debated concerning as assumed higher or ‘purer’ form of photography. Indeed, De Zayas called art photography ‘pure’, a conceptual idealization of from which seeks a realization free ‘of all representative systems’.
- Thus De Zayas moved beyond nineteenth century parallels between painting and photography, claiming for the photograph an ideal form based on its own terms of reference and its own potential as a means of representation.
- Photography envisioned as a fine art seeks both a different pedigree and a different basis, and involves, especially in the 1890s and 1900s, the establishment of a distinctive aesthetic credo which was not only a reaction against the way photography has become bound up with painterly concerns.
Pg 168-9
- Speaking against manipulation, as such, it distinguishes photography from painting as a unique medium in its own right with its own unique possibilities. But we also recognise here terms that are to be basic to the ‘tradition’ of fine art photography: ‘straight’, ‘pure’, and ‘tone’ are fundamental parts of the vocabulary and lay stress on a sense of clarity and intensity without reference to the way the subject is imagined in any literal form. Indeed the notion of purity not only emphasises the formal elements of the scene, it suggests an ideal imaging and has crucial implications for a Platonic (and in the American context a transcendental) belief in an ideal visual form.
Platonic – of or associated with the Greek philosopher Plato or his ideas; confined to words, theories, or ideals, and not leading to practical action.
Pg 172
- Weston extends the language of a ‘pure’ photography into a technical brilliance informed by creative spirit. The ‘pure’ is part of a intuitive and inspired act of which the camera is only the medium.
- The eye thus neutralizes the subject, and makes it part of a larger metamorphosis of form in which, as with Stieglitz, everything has its equivalent
Pg 174
- Weston and Adams, along with Imogen Cunningham belonged to what was known as the F64 Group, a small body of ‘art’ photographers whose title emphasised its members commitment to intense and detailed scrutiny of the world according to the highest principle of technical ability. Essentially F64 is symbolic of the ideals of art photography
- … bind them together within a common aesthetic.
Pg 175
- … points to the extent to which so much ‘art’ photography relates to domestic environments and private spaces, but does so as a part of a continuing attempt by the eye to transform the most obvious of things into their unique potential as objects. In that sense everything waits to be photographed, for it can only achieved its apotheosis, so to speak, in the image which reveals that ideal potential in visual forms.
Apotheosis – the highest point in the development of something; a culmination or climax.
- They have about them a deep and often immutable presence which resists any attempt to reduce them to paraphrase.
- Haas: ‘The Peeling Paint on Iron Bench, Kyoto, 1981): …seeks to retain, and compel us to admire. Rather than the subject, the eye here feeds on the brilliance of a world so clarified and intensified as to be super real
- The context of ‘art’ photography which retains something of an elitist view of black and white, still the dominant medium here, as in documentary; but in art photography it is part of a purist approach, laying stress on the photograph as a medium in its own right rather than as an attempt to reproduce the world as it ‘is.’
Pg 179
- … distinctive for their sense of implied meaning always hovering on the point of definition
Pg 180
- New Colour (Photographs 1978-1987): The effect is to create a hyper-presence. The color is so intense, so vivid, that it achieves a palpable existence in its own right and, in effect, becomes the subject of the image
Pg 182
- The image offers a visual conundrum for the viewer to contemplate rather then to openly question received ideas.
- Investigates the terms of visual understanding
Pg 183
‘Web 2’
Photograph
16 X 20 in
1987
‘Necker Shelves’
Photograph
34 X 26 in
1993
‘Teapot and Ball’
Photograph
16 X 20 in
1986
- Zeke Berman: …rich example of how ‘art’ photography moves beyond the ideal and the refined to align with wider issues concerned with the philosophical and conceptual. In that sense this is as much a poem as it is a photograph, for we read it as a series of texts, partial and changing definitions, and as a visual (as much as a literary) puzzle. Everything is a text, everything means, but the world we perceive is not so much a mix of true sense of the word, a made
- Art photography, thus, can make of the most obvious things a rich context of visual interpretation.
- Their obvious status is deceptive, or within the context of colour photographs they have made significant, and distinctive. Hence, the irony of the art photograph: everything can be made a photograph and, in Eggleston’s terms’ an be art
Pg 185
Chair in Janacke’s House, 1972
- ….to the continuous probing of our terms of existence.
- These images have an underlying ambiguity fed by a deep lyrical sense of the human context of photographs focus.
- Sudek: …both extends ‘art’ photography and announces its limitations. Above all, he seeks meaning in what is to hand, so that the camera is part of a constant probing and measure of one’s terms of existence
- …made the most subtle image from the most basic of reference points. This remains the of the most central contradictions of ‘art’ photography