Much ink has been spilled over photography, from the moment its invention was announced in 1839 through the latest developments in digital techniques. Until now, a history of this critical activity had yet to be written, and a question needed to be raised: what differentiates photography criticism from art criticism? From Charles Baudelaire to Roland Barthes, to Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, Hervé Guibert and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book offers a survey of the multifold debates and discussions provoked by this mode of expression and representation which continues to evolve and question reality.
Speaking to the journalist Marc Lenot in an unpublished interview, Franco Vaccari (1936–) confided: “Roberta Valtorta, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in a suburb of Milan, said that I am one of the few, alongside Jeff Wall, Victor Burgin, and Gottfried Jäger, to have pursued both theoretical and practical work. The first essay she wrote about me, in 1980, was entitled, ‘In the Heart of the Semantic Catastrophe’.”
Vaccari, an Italian photographer and essayist, is the son of a local photographer. He first studied physics in Milan, before devoting himself to photography. He has practiced, particularly in his “Exhibitions in Real Time,” conceptual and experimental photography exploring the relationship between the camera and photographic representation of reality. Among his 37 exhibitions, between 1969 and 2007, his best known work remains without a doubt the “Exhibition in Real Time no. 41” shown at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, where visitors used the photo-booth he installed in the exhibition room and then pinned their portraits to the walls.
Vaccari is the author of over twenty books, including the manifesto Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico [Photography and the Technological Unconscious] (the only work translated into French), which proves him to be among the first to become aware of the new situation of the flux of images surrounding us and of the resulting “visual noise.” In the same interview with Marc Lenot, he clarified his conception: “First of all, it does not come from the Freudian or Jungian unconscious, but from Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious (that which is revealed by the camera but imperceptible to the human eye) and from the unconscious in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work (the meaning hidden beneath the apparent arbitrariness); it’s not about emotion, the emergence of what we may have forgotten, but about the unconscious of production.” The Italian critic Nicoletta Leonardi coined the term “Meta-critic Art” to refer to his work.
Meta-critic art could also describe the research conducted by Gottfried Jäger, born in 1937. A photographer and an instructor, he studied at the Staatliche Höhere Fachschule für Photographie (National Higher College for Photography) in Cologne. In 1960, he began teaching at the Werkkunstschule (School of Applied Arts) in Bielefeld. As an artist with an interest in experimental photography and photograms, he developed the concept of “generative photography.” Through a series of images, he explored the mechanisms of perception. In the 1970s, he generalized his theory by proposing the idea of “apparatus art.” Passionate about color, he founded a school of photography in Bielefeld, which played an important role in the evolution of this art form in Germany, before they faced competition from the Düsseldorf school. His philosophy has reached wide audiences thanks to talks and university lectures. His essay, Generative Fotografie, remains a standard reference in experimental photography. Finally, in 2004, he advanced the concept of concrete photography, which develops the pictorial potential of the image through self-reflexive and self-referential practices.
A similar quest underlies the work of Aïm Deüelle Lüski, a member of a younger generation, born in 1951 in Israel, who defines himself as an artist and philosopher. Trained by the masters of “French Theory” — Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Gilles Deleuze — since 1983, he has taught at the University of Tel Aviv and other art schools in his country. Searching for a philosophy of the surface, he has worked on the deterritorialization of images. Constructing his own view cameras, he believes that the image must find its organic form in respect of the body of the artist as well as the body of the viewer. The multiplicity of the points of view involved, the contingency of the material, and the assemblage of different visions on the same roll of film challenge any pseudo-natural idea of reality.
In-between criticism
“I continue to think about myself as a sort of displaced philosopher. I don’t invent concepts, I try to displace them.” Hubert Damisch’s (1928–) statement, made in an interview in the Oxford Art Journal,[1] can be compared to Slavoj Žižek’s attitude expressed in The Parallax View. Žižek calls for a type of analysis that would operate a slight change in perception along a barely modified axis, shifting the critical discourse in the artistic and counter-ideological domains.
The artists mentioned here all share this comparative method or subvert it, depending on the discipline they enlist in the service of their image practice. They include, among others: Alan Sekula (1951–2013), with his essay Photography Against the Grain (1983); Christian Milovanoff who, since the publication of his Le Louvre Revisité, has engaged in a critical practice of the image, namely through his dialog with painting and cinema; Denis Roche (1937–2015), who, in parallel to theorizing his own writing and photography practice, maintained close ties with literature through his work on Tel Quel and later as editor of the collection “Fiction & Cie.” at Seuil; Victor Burgin (1941–), who launched a dialog with advertising in the late 1970s and extended it to painting; Jeff Wall (1946–) whose production is part of the greater history of art, and who applies his creative approach to historical works of art which he revisits, combined with a practice much akin to cinema, which he puts into perspective in his writings.
Victor Burgin, a visual artist, writer, and university professor, pursues artistic and theoretical activity centered around the image as it relates to other social and political contexts. Burgin combines two, nearly antagonistic, theories: one, largely sociological, in the American critical tradition, the other, more lacunary and semiological, in the lineage of Roland Barthes. Burgin studied painting and visual arts at the Royal College of Art in London and took part in major exhibitions, such as When Attitudes Became Form, in 1969, and Three Perspectives on Photography, in 1979.
Having created works informed by conceptual art, Burgin turned his attention to practices combining photography and text, which revisit the genres of advertising, fashion, reporting, and propaganda. Identifying the interconnections between forms of power and sexuality, his research foregrounds, with a blend of conceptual rigor and poetic elegance, the linkages between media, culture, and art. In his “L’Adieu à la photographie,” published in Art Press in 1988, Burgin renounced photography for the sake of synthetic image and video.
His best-known book, Thinking Photography, published in 1982, laid the foundations for a new ideological analysis, which he pursued in his In Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996).
With Arnaud Claass, Christian Milovanoff (1948–) is one of the first two artist-instructors at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP) in Arles, an institution founded in 1982 and officially accredited by the Ministry of Culture only thirty years later. Having completed his studies in sociology and ethnology, Milovanoff turned his energies to photography in 1976. While the Le Monde writer Claire Guillot has criticized the approaches of the two photographers, invoking the categories of “the sensible and the intelligible,” it is worth recalling that Claass promotes a direct practice of the image whereas Milovanoff focuses on documentary fictions.
The exhibition Paris–New York, at the then newly opened Centre Georges Pompidou (1977), allowed Milovanoff to discover, in addition to Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and his series Clouds, “that photography could be autonomous (rigorously constructed), with nothing out of frame, the whole activated by centripetal forces, but at the same time relatively autonomous since belonging to a series. I had considered photography and its history only in view of these two parameters which were in some way fundamental tenets impossible to abandon.”
Milovanoff’s second defining aesthetic shock took place in 1988, namely his discovery of Jeff Wall at the Institut d’Art Contemporain (IAC) in Villeurbanne, which strengthened Milovanoff’s conviction that photography, as a diverse art form, belongs to the history of art. He concluded that criticism must dialog with other forms of art without trying too hard to establish an autonomous territory. He wanted to think of American-European photography in terms of other international visual experiences. He has transmitted these ideas in his teaching, his articles, as well as his photography lessons offered to the public at the Amphitheater in Arles. The following catchphrase aptly encapsulates his approach: “One must SEE, RECEIVE so that critics may REVIEW.”
Denis Roche, a writer, poet, and photographer, is a representative of the current of “photobiography.” His fictional essay on death, Louve basse (1976) concludes with a series of self-portraits taken from the back. He created numerous images of himself in Aller retour dans la chambre blanche [Coming and Going in the White-room], self-portraits taken with a self-timer, which allowed him to appear in the photos with his wife Françoise Peyrot. In 1980, he founded the Cahiers de la photographie with Gilles Mora, Bernard Plossu, and Claude Nori. The same year, Dépôts de savoir & de technique, published in his collection “Fiction & Cie.” at Seuil, sets down his theoretical approach, later elaborated in his La Disparition des lucioles (réflexions sur l’acte photographique) [Disappearance of Fireflies (Reflections on the Photographic Act] (1982). He advocates the photographer’s independence: “One must first accept the idea that photography is not a copy or a substitute for anything, that it is its own subject and that this subject is its own study, its own definition, its own intent.”[2] Roche tried to identify the specificity of photography vis-à-vis other forms of art: “There is a ‘literature’ of painting, and vice versa, a ‘literature’ of history, and vice versa, a ‘literature’ of politics, and vice versa, a ‘literature’ of religion, and vice versa, a ‘literature’ of psychoanalysis, and vice versa; there is even a ‘literature’ of literature, and vice versa. But there could be no photography of literature, there could be no ‘literature’ of photography, since ‘literature’ of photography is photography itself.”[3]
In 1991, a selection of his works examined the time of photography from the double perspective of the concepts of “ellipsis” and “lapse.”[4] In Le Boîtier de mélancolie [The Box of Melancholy] (1999), Roche offered a personal overview of the history of the medium, showing his ties to other great artist who worked purely as photographers.
The Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, born in Vancouver in 1946, has been shaped by conceptual art. The author of a thesis on the Dada movement, Wall has taught art history in Canada. Since 1971, his large-format photographs have been exhibited in large light boxes adapted from advertising and thus from consumer society. Strongly influenced by the documentary style, his photographs are, in reality, carefully staged and elaborated, not unlike cinematic scenes, and often require lengthy preparation. A single photograph may be an aggregate of a hundred shots before the desired result has been obtained. Jean-François Chevrier calls this practice “ciné-photographie.”
While they may seem at first drawn from real life, the pseudo-snapshots at the origin of Wall’s photographic tableaux exude a curious atmosphere: the frozen, utterly made-up gestures of the models seem to repeat an absurd, everyday choreography. The appearances are all the more misleading that the photographer invites the viewers to constantly question their own perception of reality.
Jeff Wall’s objective is to paint “modern life,” just as Édouard Manet (1832–1883) did before him, whose painting Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881–1882) Wall mentions in Picture for Women (1979). Facing a mirror, the photographer’s reflection appears next to his model as he holds the cable release of his large-format view camera. The process of taking the picture is thus embedded in the shot itself in the form of a mise-en-abime. Other works directly reference Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), and Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), among others. The primary ambition of the photographer is to address the traditional big issues of pictorial representation through a critical practice.
For the most part, Jeff Wall’s works do not transmit a clearly identifiable message. This is true of Milk (1984), one of his most frequently reproduced works: a man seated before a brick wall shakes a milk carton which explodes and the squirted liquid, suspended in mid-air, directs our gaze to the left, toward an empty window that proffers no information. The meaning of the gesture remains a complete mystery. As Marc Lenot points out, “By refusing to tell a story, even while scientifically composing his photos, Jeff Wall lets us go where our imagination may take us, but our imagination doesn’t take us anywhere.” This work, fascinating as it is disconcerting, encourages all sorts of speculation and appeals to our critical faculties, without ever offering a response. His writings, however, do provide some theoretical clarifications.
Jeff Wall extrapolates from his own practice in order to construct his theoretical frame of reference. In Gestus,[5] Wall evokes the micro-gestures he stages in his photographs; Photography and Liquid Intelligence,[6] on the other hand, allowed him to engage with different forms of knowledge by way of analysis of his famous “tableau form,” Milk. One of Wall’s articles, “La Mélancolie de la rue: Idyll and Monochrome in the work of Ian Wallace, 1967–1982,” accompanied the exhibition of this Vancouver school photographer, defending Wallace’s work as much as it did Roy Arden’s (1957). Wall’s theory has also developed in the course of interviews, including several conducted by Jean-François Chevrier. In “L’Académie intérieure,” an interview given in 1990, Wall explains: “The interiorization of academic methods lays the groundwork for the exercise of anti-academic art, for radical art, for critical art. Any form of art that wants to be critical must be aware that it cannot treat its material without being complicit in the very thing it critiques.”
Christian Gattinoni
Christian Gattinoni has taught at the École National Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles since 1989. A practitioner of writing and photography since the mid-1970s, he has carried out a cycle of images on the memory of the history of the 20th-century through an homage to his father as belonging to the second generation. He splits his time between art criticism, exhibition curating, and image pedagogy.
Yannick Vigouroux
Yannick Vigouroux is a graduate of the National School of Photography in Arles. He is an art critic, curator and photographer. In the same collection he published, with Christian Gattinoni, Contemporary Photography (2009), Early Photography (2012) and Modern Photography (2013).
Histoire de la critique photographique
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[1] “Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann: A Conversation,” in Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 2 (2005), pp. 157–81. — Translator’s note.
[2] Denis Roche, La disparition des lucioles (réflexion sur l’acte photographique) (Seuil, 1982, repr. 2016), p. 52. — Translator’s note.
[3] Ibid., p. 8. — Translator’s note.
[4] Denis Roche, Ellipse et laps: L’Oeuvre photographique, pref. Hubert Damisch (Paris: Maeght, 1991). — Translator’s note.
[5] Jeff Wall, Gestus: Ein anderes klima/A Different Climate: Aspects of Beauty in Contemporary Art (Düsseldorf: Stadtische Kunsthalle, 1984). — Translator’s note.
[6] Jeff Wall, Photography and Liquid Intelligence: Another Objectivity, Exhibition Catalog (Paris: Centre nationale des Arts Plastiques & Prato: Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, 1989). The idea of “tableau form” was coined by Jean-François Chevrier in his contribution to this catalog. — Translator’s note.
