This Thing:
Photography
A Cultural History
10 March - 1 May 2022
A Definition
Photography is slippery. There seems to be no agreed definition as each attempt has an exception. Photography as lens based, is disrupted by the use of a pinhole, which was there at the beginning of the process. As a process to ‘index the world’ precisely has been questioned by darkrooms, staging and Photoshop. The only definition that holds up in anyway, is where the Webster dictionary got too, the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface. Everything else is bunk. All these other inferences of photography, truth, indexablity, lens perspective all play roles in the use of the medium and it is the use of the medium that this exhibition is about. Yet this is hardly inspiring, it is a practical not cultural definition.
This given, I have come to a cultural definition as a practitioner and one who has spent his adult life in the investigation of the histories, thoughts and thematics around photography. My definition also has issues but I use it as a frame for this adventure.
Photography is a two dimensional process involving the recording of light to produce an image, that allows viewers to see what can not be seen as the moment has past and the perspective, frame, time cannot be shared with the camera or other image recording device. Photography starts with some reality and moves from that point, sometimes a little often a lot, before seen by the viewer.
A photograph allows the viewer to see the unseeable and it used as a trigger to invoke memories, narratives and/or emotions. The photograph made by a practitioner, who starts with a selective reality, which is then manipulated before presentation. This manipulation includes acts of framing, exposure, focus, tone, colour, the adding, subtracting and/or rearranging of elements, real and/or imagined to create a photograph of the unseeable. With the passing of time this ‘unseenness’ gets exaggerated, prompting wonder and nostalgia.
Every photograph in this exhibition starts from an attempt to record a reality that the practitioner of photography saw or felt and then constructed.
Curatorial Concerns
Photography started in France and England in the 1830s. Within 25 years it was portable enough to start traveling the world. Within 50 years it was going to far and distant places. Locals set up studios around the world. Photographs were made, sold and bought, then forgotten.
Beaumont Newhall wrote The History of Photography in 1937, in doing he established the canon, as photography turned 100. He broke ground becoming the curator of photography at MOMA, however being a little uncharitable, one can argue that ‘white’ (mainly) heterosexual men made photographs and they turned local as well as traveling the world to photograph the other.
By the 1970s very few institutions considered photography worth of collecting. Libraries, the Albert and Victoria, the Met and MOMA, being the most important. Into this Harry Lunn had his epiphany (1971), that photographs have levels of value, thus some are more collectible than etchings and other print forms he was currently selling. Two years later Sam Wagstaff had his epiphany at the Met, and started collecting in NYC, and participating in English auctions. Philip Gefter, sites the Wagstaff’s purchase of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Herschel Album for £52000 that convinced auction houses, the public and institutions to take photography seriously as collectible and over time, as art.
The group at the forefront of collecting privately was formed around Wagstaff, and this group of wealthy connected gay men added to the canon, the rise of photography as art and gay liberation are interconnected (Philip Gefter).
I once asked Sandra Byron why, Australian public photographic collections, are curated overwhelmingly by women? I was told that, this was at the time that more women were enrolled and graduating with the qualifications for curatorial positions. In art galleries photography was moving out of works on paper and getting its own department, and it was not considered a prestige, so the galleries were willing to take on women as the men held tight to other media and contemporary art. This gave women had a bigger influence on who makes the photographic canon. It is noteworthy that in Australia there is parity if not more women in the contemporary photomedia art canon.
Photography, while acknowledging the role of heterosexual men in its history, has these two other influences to moderate the patriarchal normative. Notice that Julia Margaret Cameron, Von Goeden and others were picked up and presented as collectible and important.
The written histories of photography kept to this developing canon with one particularly area of blindness. Until the mid 1980s images made by people that were not of European decent and preferably based in Western Europe or North America (WENA) were not included, unless their influence was immense like the Russian constructionists but still Asian, Africa, Australia and South America were not represented, except for the occasional inclusion of Nick Ut’s The Terror of War.
In the 1990s, new histories are written, in these there is the inclusion of the photographers of current economic powerhouse Japan, followed by China. I have often wondered if this was because they are seen as collectible, in that the wealthy in those countries would by them back off WENA collectors at a later date? To exclude the contribution of the 1960s Japanese photographers is blindness at its worst. Newer histories are reevaluating this history, though it would seem that each non-WENA country is allowed a representative or two, preferably now based in Berlin, NYC or London.
In the late 1990s galleries were looking for the fresh and new at an accelerated pace, curators and gallery directors started looking aboard to find fresh work. Catalogues of these shows and other anthology books came on the market.
There is now movement to disperse from the idea of photographic centers, and to see photography as an international media. This has been helped by passionate people around the world who are rightly convinced of the importance of their local scene. In Australia this is represented by BIFB, Photo2022 and HeadOn.
The curatorial of this exhibition argues that the influence of WENA is now decreasing and the creative work is being done outside, and it is by the other. It does not feel the need to be shown in the galleries of NYC, Berlin or Paris, these galleries are now moving to the places where great work is being made, like Beijing. With a passing of the flame to a younger generation new web based networks are forming. To find the new and exciting, takes more time and effort as the now everyone has the opportunity to be instafamous. No longer is an insular view of photography being moderated through the gatekeepers of the former photographic centers in WENA, workable. No longer do artist beg to be shown there, they are comfortable building a world audience from the culture they most speak too and inhabit, now it is our turn to seek out and look.
This exhibition explores the themes that have got us to this point. The history of photography that I have assembled does not shy from the gay or feminine aesthetic or gaze, it includes some heroes and some less known pieces.
Curatorial Limits
The curation of this is show has been ongoing for a long time. I have been collecting since the late 1990s. My collecting of photography was initially slow. I have had many pieces in my hands and lost some in a separation and rebuilt the collection over the past five years. The main limitations have been availability and budget. I have not been able to replace the Robert Mapplethorpe I had, where as I lost and bought a Salgado. I have a list of works I would very much like to add to the collection.
The collection started with two themes. The first is representations of Asian masculinities, this is ongoing. The second was NYC. Many of the photographs from the NYC collection were lost in my separation.
This is not a show that had access to an archive of thousands of images, instead it is selected from the images that have come up at auction and secured by the gallery. This is a work in progress which, I feel is up to a standard that I can now present.
Things are moving again, after 20 years of positioning digital photography as the center of photographic practice this is being rejected by the millennials who have fallen in love with film again, but a hybridised form that digitises it to present on various web platforms.
The size of XYZ Photo Gallery limited the curation as I could not hang the 2.5x1.5m Chi Peng or make room for Michael Shaowanasai, Yang Yi or Xu GuanYu pieces in the collection, which are a meter plus in width. They are represented in his exhibition with a signed Chi Peng book ‘Me, Myself and I’, given to the curator after lunch at his loft in Beijing. I’ve also included a signed art book ‘Nude’ by Ren Hang, who’s work went global.
Each work is selected because of either the authors position in photography, the importance of the image or that the image illustrates an important role or theme in photography. In part it is confirming the canon, yet adding to it.
NASA Panoramic Views of the Landing Site from Sagan Memorial Station 1997
#Landscape is one of the earliest of photographic subjects. It was not long before photography started to try to capture vistas. The panorama as a series of photographs dates back to first decade of photography.
This image is included to show the benefit of #digitalimage making. This camera is unlikely to be recovered. As such the images being sent back to earth via transmissions marks a significant step in photography. The image can be made and transmitted fast. This has been a bonus in news gathering as it is in space.
This is perhaps the most extreme of my thesis that a photograph is the representation of what can not be seen. We can not visit mars, the photograph is not our usual perspective and we are not even sure if these are the colours our eye will register.
This is an official NASA image.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Eunuch of the Imperial court 1949
The idea of the decisive moment, a shutter opened at the moment that the scene comes together presenting the maximum drama, is his enduring philosophical contribution to photo theory and his street photography and reportage photography is still the #template for all that have taken these theme since.
This is also a photograph about the formation of the magnum photo agency by the founders. Each took an area of the world as their territory to report on. HBC took Asia. This portrait of one of the imperial eunuch is amongst the most know of his images of this period.
This also speaks to the trope of the Whiteman recording the world for the consumption of white viewers. Here Chinese masculinity is presented as neutered. Yet it was the Eunuchs that allowed for sensible diplomatic relations without the flow of testosterone creating egotistical outrages that sent countries to war. During the last years of the Qing dynasty the eunuchs had become a problem for the rulers. There is an interaction between the subject and the viewer, what thoughts transpired we can not know.
Guglielmo von Pluschow
#27 Napoli 1880S
Von Gloeden and Pluschow later joined by Galdi were photographers that made images for the consumption of men who enjoy male beauty and sex with other men.
Philip Gefter, the contemporary critic and biographer of Sam Wagstaff, argues that there is a link between the rise of gay liberation and the rise of photography as collectable. Wagstaff held a hard line anti photography as art, until several things happened. He saw the pictorialists at the Met and fell for Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1904. Then saw Enrico Natali’s photographs as part of his position of curator at Detroit Institute of Arts which he saw more in. Then he met Robert Mapplethorpe. He not only promoted Mapplethorpe’s work but photography as a whole. He started collecting. He soon was collecting from dealers and drawing in a group of well financed gay males. He changed the narrative of photography and collection with his purchase of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Herschel Album, for a record price. Wagstaff and these men reevaluated the photographic canon. There was little written about 19thC photography and people who were not considered important were elevated. Von Gloeden and Plauschow among them. It is difficult to see these men rising to not worthiness without the intervention by a group of New York Queens who idealised beauty and youth.
In their day, Pluschow was considered the more talented. Currently Von Gloeden, is in the standard. In recent studies Pluschow. has been considered to the more modern and sexual. Between 1900-10 he was in trouble for sex with minors three times. Thus his work fell out of favour. The art world is usually forgiving of white men who sexually transgress, once they are dead and their work comes up for resale by wealthy collectors.
This photograph is a striking portrait within the ‘classical alibi’ genre. This print was sold and stamped by another photographer, but has Pluschow’s stamp as well. The number indicates it is a later work.
Wagstaff’s obsessive collecting of photography is responsible for the way we see photography today.
Unknown
Woman, said to be indigenous c1850
GeorgeGoodman brought the Daguerreotype process to Sydney after learning under Daguerre. The process was used until 1860 when other cheaper and safer processes took fully over. This print was purchased at auction from the LewisMorley collection and is described as; Aboriginal Subjects. Quarter plate daguerreotype, of a Thursday Island woman c1850, in original case. The rest of the image’s history is unknown. Attempts have been made to seek further information, but have so far failed.
Like many photographs which present as artefact this image opens up a series of unanswerable questions. Is this an indigenouswomen from ThursdayIsland? If so where was the photograph made? Considering the colonial interest was only in anthropological understanding of Australia’s indigenous peoples, why is this lady dressed in the fashionable Victorianattire? Thus the big question, who is she? Another photograph in the ThisThingPhotography Exhibition open 2-6:30pm Wed-Fri and Sun in Docklands see website in profile for instructions to find us (we are the gallery equivalent of a speakeasy).