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November 15, 2009
In The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting Rosemary Hawker says in reference to some of Gerhard Richter's paintings that:
blurring, smudging, and streaking the paintings, the photographic clarity and visual cohesion from which they originate is obliterated, and with it, their claim to offer up the subjects they represent is lost. Richter's obscuration marks the dirty window from which the view is taken, and this is at the same time the violent mark of rejection of the "spotless mirror " that photography has been so often compared with.
To question photography's adequacy for the task of representation is to threaten certain epistemological certainties that rely on the possibility of pictorial representation as such. An example is Uta Barth's field #9, from the Field series:
Hawker adds that obscured images are an easily discernible style of imagery in art history and that Richter knows this history. At a certain level, we need to know it so as to recognize that his research on the idiom of photography is about an already established topic in art history, that of obscurity.
Despite their diversity, Leonardo's sfumato, the disconcerting tenebrousness of Rembrandt, and Goya's bleak "black paintings" all share a visual ambiguity that is their strength. As Turner is famously said to have responded to the complaints of some clients, "Obscurity is my forte: '
Obscurity is also a persistent trope in photography itself ---most notably in photographic pictorialism, but also in contemporary photographic art practice, such as the work of photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto and Uta Barth.
Uta Barth's photographic works for instance, question the traditional functions of pictures and our expectations of them and examines the conventions of photographic presentation. Her two series, Ground and Field (created from 1994 to 1997) consist of blurred images generated by focusing the camera on an unoccupied foreground. These unframed, empty images present only background information, implying the absence of subject and referring to the function of images as containers of information.
The untitled images of Ground show landscapes and interiors and make reference to the compositional conventions of still photography and painting. In the Field series, Barth shifts from the vocabulary of still photography to that of film, exploring cinematic effects and the images mimic cinematic framing conventions in a subtle query of the visual structures that imply movement or activity in the foreground.
Hawker adds that:
rather than obscure images being less informative, or less true to perception and visual experience, such images can be seen to more adequately parallel perception and its limits and analogously refer to the limits of representation more generally, to be more truthful in their explication of what is idiomatic to all language
What is idiomatic to photography is the truth effect, but this is paradoxically communicated through blur and lack of focus as much as through clarity.
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Utata Barth's latter series after the Ground and Field ones are here.