The Photography as Contemporary Art`: chapters3-4

3 Deadpan

A prominent style of last twenty years has been deadpan shaped by the Bechers and their students, the most prominent of whom is Andreas Gursky. He uses large prints that are discrete, he does not produce series. Uses high vantage points as in Chicago, Board of Trade.

 A number of photographers have used photography to demonstrate scenes without people. I find these interesting because they challenge the viewer to consider what the elements in the image are for, how do they function for their users, DO they function for their users. The absence of people raises the last issue, and gives us no clues as to how the constructions impact on people's lives.

An example is Bridget Smith's Airport, Las Vegas where she deliberately takes casinos in the daytime, when they lack the glitzy bright light look of night.

"Deadpan photography often acts in [a] fact-stating modes; the personal politics of the photographers come into play in their selection of subject matter and their anticipation of the viewer's analysis of it, not in any explicit political statement through text or photographic style."

Lewis Baltz has worked with images of high tech laboratories.

Dan Holdsworth has specialised in in "liminal spaces" where our sense of place is dislocated.

Struth has taken many images of people in galleries, invoking a somewhat self conscious self appraisal for gallery goers of their own behaviour.

Others have used the approach in a more rural setting, eg Niewig's images of places close to home. She looks for examples of where nature may have interfered with the agricultural order of straight lines.

Clare Richardson has taken images of Romanian farming communities to show how the landscape remains unchanged. A similar approach to balancing the sublime and romantic capacity of landscape and a clear cut style of photography has been used also by Jasansky and Polak in Czech Landscapes.

Lastly, Cotton looks at deadpan in portraiture.

Ruff asked his subjects to remain expressionless. Others take expressionless images of people on the street - Sternfeld and Hanzlova, for example.

Dijkstra chooses particular moments or spaces to take unsentimental images, e.g. her images of three naked women after childbirth.

4 Something and Nothing

This chapter focusses on the object - "how non-human things can be made extraordinary by being photographed".

Well-known example is Fischli and  Weiss's Quiet Afternoon series, strange sculptures of every day things.

Less sure about Orzoca's Breath on Piano, an interesting idea but does it show much?

Like Wentworth's photographs of urban detritus being used for unconventional purposes, such as a car door being used to block access to a doorway (King's Cross).

Architectural images in this genre are typically of buildings that have outlived their useful lives, e.g. Hernandez's image Aliso Village of a skeleton hung form a ceiling of a presumably defunct room.

The images here aim to alter our perceptions of daily lives, perhaps to look at our environment with a broader mind, to (colloquially) think outside the box.

Tillmans works with a variety of subjects to explore the relationship of photography with its subjects. Suit  is an example.

Jeff Wall's image of a mop bucket (Diagonal Composition no 3) "...challenges us to consider why we are looking at this". This is an example of where the art stops for me, as in some of the images in chapter one, it is getting too close to taking the audience for granted.