Review: Cotton, Charlotte. (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Ch 3-4

Takashi Homma - Shonan International Village

Chapter Three, Deadpan, looks into a clinical aesthetic based on emotional detachment.  Cotton sees this movement as having developed in reaction to neo-expressivism of the 1980s, a measured retreat from subjectivist perspectives that sought to capture a universal viewpoint.  The movement was characterized as well by large-scale prints.  Cotton identifies the chief influence as Bernd Becherm of the Kunstakademie (Dusseldorf), who trained a large number of students working in this style.  The movement is known otherwise as Germanic, or New Objectivity, and one of the principal exponents is Andreas Gursky, who produces two meter high prints and issues photos like paintings, one-off images that rarely relate to previous images.  Much of his style was based on shooting large crowd scenes from a distance, which when enlarged to enormous prints gave one the impression of stepping into a scene.  Other photographers employ this technique of distance on subjects less crowded, even often empty, highlighting space, while others focus on people, producing portraits of people often isolated from crowds and shot straight ahead, with the subject looking back out through the photo.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Untitled

Chapter Four, Something and Nothing, reviews the use of everyday objects as subject matter.   Techniques include juxtaposition, change in environment, distortion, isolating features, and objects include trash, decay, as well as ephemeral forms such as weather and light.  Often the images are created, like Deadpan, to achieve an objective point of view, to hide any evidence of a photographic point of view.  Cotton cites Fischli and Weiss’ Quite Afternoon as a classic of the genre.  One particularly interesting project by Gonzalez-Torres involved shooting beds immediately after vacated by a couple and then publically displaying the images on billboards in urban areas.  The billboards were then themselves photographed.   Cotton suggests that the photographer working in this vein challenges us to consider what deserves attention.  For myself, I find the discovery process (as a photographer) more interesting than observing such images, many of which leave me cold, blank, empty.  

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