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October 18, 2009
Issue 5 of Proximity Magazine's is on photography. The editors say that they had battles on whether or not “Fine Art” photographers were more interesting than “documentary style” photographers. Then fashion photographers were maligned from one corner, while in another quarter they were celebrated as one of the reasons photography is so well accepted as an art form to the public.
Unbelievably, fists flew while championing the rise of the “amateurs” and chairs were kicked around while the editors argued about either the irrelevance or the significance of Flickr, Myspace and Facebook.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, erosion, Victor Harbor, 2009
In this issue there is an article by Bert Stabler on why he doesn't like photography. I struggle to follow some of the reasoning.
Stabler says:
in the case of photography, the key anxiety of the medium is its own transparency, the sense of constantly being an undressed emperor. The anxiety is narcissistic, the uncanny otherworldly familiarity of the mirror. Fine art is so hard to distinguish from anything else these days, and fine art photographs are so hard to sift out of the ocean of photography, that the signifiers are, by necessity, highly rigid – a rigidity the market richly rewards. So, what are these signifiers of “photography as art?”
His answer is that art photography is hemmed in 'by three ‘P’s: painting, poverty, and Pentax (technology). Fair enough.
On the first 'p' he says that from its inception, photography established itself as art by trying to move into the space abandoned by painting. Painting went on to its own tightrope walk on the thin line of cultural relevance, and photography seemingly stuck around to lap up painting’s sloppy seconds. Okay, that is probably true in a historical sense. However, photography had little problem in gaining cultural relevance in the 20th century, even if it struggled to be accepted as a "fine art" in the art institution.
By the poverty signifier Stabler means that we are treated to an endless minstrel parade of homeless veterans, junkie drag queens, sideshow refugees, depressed suburban loners, trailer-park residents, and various other contemporary mutants deemed undeserving of dignity." Fair enough. That's documentary photography.
Stabler then adds that:
Photography is unique. It is not like other art, because there is no step away from mimesis. The image is not made of something clearly artificial, like paint, clay, or even collage. There is no embodiment. The print or screen quality is merely a certain kind of window. And, unlike the analogous media of film and video, there is no time, and thus no sense of the third party – the camera and the subjects being part of a distinct event, whether explicitly contrived or not...What photography then offers is a pure presence, a mirror that shows us what Lacan contends is at stake when we develop in early childhood a sense of our own objective existence, by not just (mis)recognizing oneself in the mirror, but wanting oneself.
Hence the idea of photography as a narcissistic medium.
However, I'm puzzled by "wanting oneself". What does that mean? The reference to Lacan's mirror stage refers to a phase in which the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image, whilst the Imaginary refers to the field of images and imagination, and deception.Stabler adds that in a sense we are infantilized by photography – we are seeing something like a waking dream, a scene as both a memory and an object of desire, but not an event or a thing unto itself. Should photography enable us to see an event or thing unto itself?
Mimesis is not equivalent to a mirror since what stands between is representation and expression. Maybe pure presence is an illusion of contemporary photography--but not fine art photography?
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