For its 2020 outing, the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie (Biennale for Current Photography) is curated by David Campany around a set of thematically distinct exhibitions taking place in three cities and six museums. The catalogue, The Lives and Loves of Images, introduces each of the exhibitions, the photographers and the projects behind the works on display. The result is an engagement, verbal and visual, with aspects of contemporary photography. It is commonplace to say that we inhabit a culture dominated by images but, notes Campany, ‘really it is an image-text culture’. We look at pictures and they speak when responses to them are put into into words.
He begins with ‘Reconsidering Icons’, conversations of a photographic kind between artists and iconic images. The ‘dialogues’ take form, for example, in the reworkings by the Swiss duo Cortis & Sonderegger of well-known pictures from photojournalism and photographic art. Another very specific instance is Broomberg & Chanarin’s Afterlife series, re-reading the 1979 image of 11 blindfolded Kurdish prisoners being executed by firing squad. Away from icons, ‘Yesterday’s News Today’ considers the way old news images from print publications can become the material for an archaeology of media.
‘All Art is Photography’ extends this probing, self-examining of image-making by considering its interactions with other visual arts, from painting to performance. A consequence can be a blurring of boundaries, a hybridity that includes critical views of the physical spaces for the display of art. Antonio Pérez Rio spent thirty-seven days inside the Louvre, observing how famous paintings and sculptures that have survived several centuries now, in his own words, ‘face people who visit the museum for once in their lives and refuse to look directly at them’.
‘Walker Evans Revisited’, beginning with a eulogy to the justly celebrated photographer, looks at the many artists who respond to and find inspiration in the wide range of his projects. Reducing these projects to the descriptive term ‘documentary style’ – an idiom that remains tagged to Evans’ name – does a disservice to the breadth and depth of his achievements and this is amply demonstrated by the score of photographers that Campany calls up. They include Sherrie Levine’s re-photographing of some of his famous images; Jessica Porter’s cropping from the Labor Anonymous archive for her 150 accompanying sentences; and the way his spirit lives on in the work of – to name but three – Camille Fallet, George Georgiou and Vanessa Winship.
Images viewed as singular ‘moments’ take attention away from the importance for many photographers of sequencing their pictures to form relationships between them. The ‘When Images Collide’ exhibition explores image combinations that disrupt traditional notions of montage and collage, as in Anastasia Samoylova’s Six Real Matterhorns’ – commissioned especially for this Biennale – where one of the seven images is a fake Matterhorn in Disneyland. My favourite, though, is Christoph Klauke’s Double Portraits and the sweet subtleness he captures in two exposures of the same face taken several seconds apart.
There is a promiscuous side to image-making arising from the hard economics of working as a photographer. The art gallery and the art market, each freighted with intercourse between business and culture, is a fact of life that underlies the ‘Between Art and Commerce’ exhibition. The work of Hein Gorny and still life images by Scheltens & Abbenes notwithstanding, this is perhaps the weakest of the six shows. The subject matter is a contested field and could be the basis for a whole Biennale devoted to its complex ramifications.
The Lives and Loves of Images is endlessly engaging; a book that one returns to at intervals to look through and consider anew its themes and issues. There is a deficit of work from outside of Europe and North America, excusable perhaps if the set of topics is seen to lend itself to a Western canon. Apart from the occasional Japanese or Indian photographer in the book, it is as if the invention of the camera never reached Latin America, Africa or Asia. As if in those continents, the lives and loves of images is not to be found.
Sean Sheehan
The Lives and Loves of Images is published by Kehrer; see also Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie
