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February 23, 2007
I've finally got around to having some of the urban photos that I have been shooting in the last year or so with my old film camera developed by Atkins Technicolour. I've also started an urban album. My eye has been caught by the graffiti around the city of Adelaide, because these images renegotiate the social significance of our public spaces:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Graffiti, Adelaide, 2007
I interpret this kind of graffiti as expressing a violent rejection of instrumental reason. Graffiti protests at the hegemony of instrumental reason in our social and economic world, and in the emotional protest against this form of reason we can discern the rationality of graffiti as a 'street art'. This particular image uses a simple wall in a public space (a car park), and the figure of a scary monster to express unconscious emotion.
In Aesthetic Theory Adorno says, in reference to Walter Benjamin's writings on photography, that:
Benjamin's dichotomy between auratic and mass-produced art, for simplicity's sake, neglects the dialectical relation of these two types. For another, he becomes the victim of a perspective on art that hypostatizes photography as a model, which is just as atrocious as the view, say, of the artist as creator" Benjamin's conception as a whole tends towards a kind of copy realism which cannot account for the moment of critical opposition in art--opposition to cult, the ideological surface phenomena of life. (AT, pp. 82-83)
Adorno notes that in his early essay, 'A Short History of Photography' Benjamin was more dialectical as he held that early photography did have something of an aura. This was subsequently lost owing to commercial exploitation by Eugene Atget.
Is this the only way to look at photography? Surely we could say that, even though photography, is one the most mimetic of arts, photography is a way of interposing an image between ourselves and the thing or object, and that it has the effect of extracting the thing (graffiti) from the perspective of the world. We are now looking at an image not a mirror of a thing. And the image suggests that we see the marks on the wall not as vandalism that needs to be wiped off, but as a street art whose shout of outrage should be preserved in some way as a valuable expression of street culture.
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Gary,
this photo of Adelaide graffiti is similar to the work of stencil graffiti in Melbourne. It is an interesting website that documents the extensive graffiti in that city.
Have a look when you have a moment.