Junk for Code

Annika von Hausswolff + post modern photography

In von Hausswolff's 1993 color photograph from her 'Back to Nature' series, a naked woman lies face down in a shallow marsh, her pale, body half-submerged. Is it a staged crime scene similar to what we see on free-to--television crime programmes? An artist's model posing as a suicide? Sex and violence? A feminist depiction of rape?

The image is ambiguous in terms of its cultural meaning in spite of its simplicity:

Annika von Hausswolff, Back to Nature, 1993

What the image signifies is the postmodern turn to staged photography and to narrative, thereby transgressing If the photo carried the image into history (war photos) then the story telling came from captions or text, as in photojournalism.

In Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s Lucy Soutter says that the idea that pictorial work could function as allegory was extremely compelling; linking contemporary photography with the privileged discourses of literature and narrative history painting, the allegorical interpretation of works allowed them a satisfying complexity and multivalence and also created a new kind of viewer.

In the 1990s photography became a central figure in the postmodern art institution. Consequently, as Soutter points out:

unlike the audience of modernist art photography who expected to see a self-sufficient autonomous image the postmodern viewer could be relied upon to recognize oblique critical allusions without introductory explanation. In allegory, the speaker trusts the audience to make the metaphorical connection and to sustain it throughout the discourse. In essence, this metacritical mode allowed artists to maintain links with old-fashioned art values while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from them.

Allegorical readings often drew attention away from the formal aspects of the work, its explicit subject matter and its presentation. She adds that:

the current narrative work stakes its importance on [a] subtle complicity of its relationship with commercial culture. Its hipness is determined by the narrowness of the margin between art and fashion or between art and pornography; it dances on the razor's edge. In the same way that cutting edge fashion items are barely recognizable as apparel and cutting edge fashion photography makes it hard to see what is for sale, cutting edge gallery photography is barely distinguishable as art.

The tension between commercial and artistic applications of photography has always created status anxiety in photographers. In the l980s this anxiety could be seen in the clashing discourses of art and art photography. Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall are repeatedly referred to as "artists" rather than photographers, even though their work takes exclusively photographic form.

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von Hausswolff's combination of traditional Nordic landscape painting and scene-of-the-crime in 'Back to Nature' photography refers to the work of Bellmer and Duchamp, where the eroticism of looking is closely linked to the female body and to sadism and voyeurism.

If her photographs expose the inner workings of the much maligned gaze of male desire to dominate and possess, then a good part of their attraction for us derives from her willingness to acknowledge that the sight of naked flesh can be oddly riveting. Her work both attracts and repels.

animated images

In Towards A Philosophy of Photography it is argued by Vilém Flusser that there are two interweaving programs in the camera. One of them motivates the camera into taking pictures;the other permits the photographer to play. Beyond these are further programs - that of the photographic industry that programmed the camera; that of the industrial complex that programmed the photographic industry; that of the socio-economic system that programmed the industrial complex; and so on.

In the Introduction Vilém Flusser says that:

If images are to be deciphered, their magical character must be taken into account. It is a mistake to decipher images as if they were "frozen events." On the contrary, they are translations of events into; situations; they substitute scenes for events. Their magical power is due to their surface structure, and their inherent dialectics, their inner contradictions, must be appreciated in light of this magic they have.

Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man, but, meven as they do so, they interpose themselves between man and the world. They are meant to be maps, and they become screens/ Instead of pre-senting the world to man, they re-present it, put themselves in place of the world.

The world becomes image-like, a context of scenes and situations.We forgets that we produce images in order to find our way in the world; we now try to find our way in images. The purpose of text is explain or decode images and to decipher texts is to find out what images they refer to.

The struggle between texts and images poses the question of the relationship between text and image. In modernity conceptual thinking analyses magical thinking in order to do away with it, magical thinking infiltrates conceptual thinking in order to imagine its m concepts. In the course of this dialectical process, conceptual and magical thinking mutually reinforce themselves: texts become more imaginative, and images become more conceptual.

Photography: memories and history

William Christenberry's poetic documentation of the vernacular landscape of the American South is an ongoing series that blends the descriptive with the mythic. It parallels the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

William Christenberry, T.B. Hick’s Store, Newbern, Alabama’, 1976

This kind of work links text and image since the artist’s memories of the Deep South are stepped in rich literary and photographic tradition.

William Christenberry, House and Car, near Akron, Alabama’, 1981

This work is about place, time and memory.In this interview in Afterimage (November 2005) he says:

I don't want my work thought about in terms of nostalgia. It is about place and sense of place. I only make pictures when I go home. I am not looking back longing for the past, but at the beauty of time and the passage of time....I can't wait to get out into that landscape and to go back and see those same places. Sometimes they are still there and sometimes they are completely gone...Returning to the sites allows me to record both the traces of passing time and represent how a subject is transformed by time.

He adds that Walker kept his distance emotionally. His view was objective. My stance is very subjective.

The place is so much a part of me. I can't escape it and have no desire to escape it. I continue to come to grips with it. I don't want my work to be thought of as maudlinor overly sentimental. It's not. It's a love affair--a lifetime of involvement with a place.

He adds that although his work is largely celebratory there is this dark side that permeates the South--eg., the issues of the civil rights period and the terrible evil that manifests itself in the Ku Klux Klan's terrorism and racism.

photobooks: possibilities + future

I've been thinking about the possibilities and the future of photobooks.

My starting point is that I no longer buy art photography books because they are too expensive, and that the impeding arrival of Apple's iTablet, or similar innovative platform of communication, shifts the focus from print to online. Technology has lowered the barrier to entry to publishing images bounded in a cover whilst the Internet has changed the distribution model.

This opens the future possibility of photobooks becoming a more experimental means of extending the reach of a cohesive photographic project, body of work, series of photographs or visual storytelling.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Coca Cola, Broken Hill, 2009

The reason for my haphazard, exploratory thinking about photobooks is that the bookform is where I want my work to shift to--the next step beyond Flickr steam or the Rhizomes1 photoblog. I'm not that interested in a portfolio, nor the book as an artform per se. 'Tis time for a radical re-think.

Despite the continued existence of the printed book, the future is increasingly online: as a multimedia platform in which you can scroll through the pages, hear audio, click on links, or watch a video. The future is experimental and the nature of the book and publishing is going to broaden and become more diversified.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Browns Shaft, Junction Mine, Broken Hill, 2009

The DIY possibility using Blurb or any other on-demand publishing website ---as opposed to a traditional publisher ---- offers a good way to test a book project concept. This could be an artists’ book that would be purchased online as an e-book and viewed through a wireless connection, on a big screen TV monitor. A printed book would be on the coffee table. They would be quite different.

Eyecurious says:

Blurb and co demonstrates that they have some way to go to convince professionals in terms of quality. There is nowhere near enough control afforded to you through these sites to be able to get the same result as you do with a printing house where much more fine-tuning is possible. They provide a great affordable and decent quality alternative to lugging a portfolio around with you or to test a book project concept, but for most fine art photographers, this isn’t enough. Perhaps their most important function is to provide amateur photographers or pro-sumers (whatever the hell they are) with a terrific, inexpensive way of experiencing other aspects of photographic practice, such as sequencing, editing, graphic design and production, which is welcome in an age where millions of images are being produced every second.

The testing the book project provides possibilities to move beyond the conservative form of the photo book, which is basically a gallery exhibition on paper; to move to a form in which the book is more than just a collection of photographs and which explores the possibilities to create more sophisticated visual narratives. This would include a LiveBooks blog-- Resolve---recently posted an interesting open question for everyone to attempt to answer: “What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? They are crowd-sourcing a blog post about the future of photobooks and they want everyone to chime in.

The struggle is to avoid the book being reduced to a means to distribute my photographs and to think of the oneline book as a stand alone object.

photography and climate change #2

Climate change is our most pressing global problem and Tuvalu, one of the world's most climate-threatened countries, formally proposed at Copenhagen that countries sign up to a new, strengthened and legally binding agreement that would set more ambitious targets than what is presently being proposed.

More than half the world's countries say they are determined not to sign up to any deal that allows temperatures to rise by more than 1.5C - as opposed to 2C, which the major developed economies would prefer.

Pep Bonet, miner, Poland, 2009, from the Blackfields series in Consequences by Noor

Like Australia Poland has long relied on coal for its energy, and it has been reluctant to force the coal industry to invest billions of dollars to try to clean up smokestack emissions, fearful it would drive up electricity costs to consumers.

Pep Bonet, Belchatów power plant, Poland, 2009 from the Blackfields series

The Belchatów power plant is the largest in Poland, supplying almost 20 percent of the nation’s energy. Each year its chimneys belch more than 31 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.The Australian equivalents are to be found in the high-emitting South Australian station Playford B. T and the Victorian Latrobe Valley generators Yallourn and Hazelwood. Australia hasn't closed a single one for the purpose of reducing greenhouse pollution. We're dusting off old coal-fired power stations and extending their lives instead.

photography and climate change

Consequences by Noor features the work of nine photographers from the photo agency Noor who documents the devastating effects of climate change around the globe including the rising sea level in the Maldives, coal mining in Poland and oil sand extraction in Canada.

The goal of the exhibition, which is being shown at Copenhagen where world leaders are crafting a new climate change deal, is to document some of the causes and consequences, from deforestation to changing sea levels, as well as the people whose lives and jobs are part of the carbon culture.

Francesco Zizola, Malé, Maldives,

Scientists say that The Maldives, the lowest-lying nation on Earth, is at risk of disappearing from the world map.Malé sits on an island just three feet above sea level. To counter the tides and storms, a $60 million 11 feet high concrete barrier system, financed by Japan, now rings Malé.

Australians are on the also front lines in experiencing the life-altering consequences of climate change. Despite this, as the Washington Post story says:

Most farmers, the biggest losers as the river shrinks, simply do not buy the notion that southern Australia's climate is changing in a way that is probably irreversible. Their skepticism has withstood nearly 13 years of unrelenting drought, falling incomes and daily encounters with a river that is dying in front of their eyes.

Its just a long drought for them, and the cycle will return. As climate change makes drought an unexceptional circumstance as soutyhern Australia becomes hotter and drier, so the farmers will be weaned off drought assistance.

Situationists + the problem of the city

Henri Lefebvre in this interview says that the Situationist's idea of derive was more of a practice than a theory.

In the course of its history the city was once a powerful organic unity; for some time, however, that unity was becoming undone, was fragmenting, and the derive was more of a practice than a theory. It revealed the growing fragmentation of the city. In the course of its history the city was once a powerful organic unity; for some time, however, that unity was becoming undone, was fragmenting,....We had a vision of a city that was more and more fragmented without its organic unity being completely shattered.

Lefebvre adds that:

Afterward, of course, the peripheries and the suburbs highlighted the problem. But back then it wasn't yet obvious, and we thought that the practice of the derive revealed the idea of the fragmented city . .... The experiment consisted of rendering different aspects or fragments of the city simultaneous, fragments that can only be seen successively, in the same way that there exist people who have never seen certain parts of the city .... One goes along in any direction and recounts what one sees.

The Situationists abandoned derive in favour of the idea that all urbanism is an ideology when the city completely exploded with suburbs and they abandoned the problem of the city. What was the problem of the city? The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities and it can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.

The city has been thoroughly commodified: it is a privileged space for the consumption of commodities and it is consumed as if it were one big commodity. For urban inhabitants to start really living, they must make use of their cities. But the word "use" must be considered as broadly as possible; it must include appropriation, which inevitably involves re-creating ("inventing" or "sculpting") existing space(s), that is to say, the production of new space(s).

Lefebvre argues that the promises of modernist capitalist architecture and city planning had failed and he developed his conception of a “right to the city” for all urban dwellers.This would restructure the power relations which underlie urban space, transferring control from capital and the state over to urban inhabitants. The right to the city is an argument for democratization of urban development decisions and placing power over how space is used with “citizens.”The “right to the city” is the right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of … moments and places.”

David Harvey says in New Left Review that:

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.

This implies greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus. Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city.

Encounter Bay: the old slowly disappears

When I was walking along the beach in the early morning at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor, during the week of the heat wave, I realized that the old beach architecture of Victor Harbor was going, and that it would soon disappear into the slip stream of history.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, two chairs, Encounter Bay, 2009

The sizeable blocks would be sold by the children of the current owners, the beach house would be bulldozed, to be replaced by several two story glass and concrete buildings that would take up the whole block. Oh, and the trees would be pulled down so those in the back block could have sea views. Modernism comes to Victor Harbor, belatedly.

The old is giving way to the new and there is a changing sense of place. This is the effect of sea change in spite of the threat of rising sea levels the early signs of beach erosion.

The changes are subtle around Encounter Bay. A house gone here, an empty lot appears where once there a beach shack; another new house going up; a new boat ramp that replaces the old jetty, the subsequent absence of the pelicans, a tree cut down; another big development proposal announced.

What we have here is the significance of the ordinary, the unremarkable and the overlooked in our understanding of how many (if not most) advertising images communicate with their ‘smiling, white middle-class families at the beach, well-groomed businessmen shaking hands,and romantic young couples kissing. This background noise of consumer culture is the highly visible and dramatic advertising images which attract most consumer and critical attention.

So we overlook the old wooden jetty at Encounter Bay--it is now a faded memory-- whilst the white beach house standing back from the road amidst the old pines of the farm that is long gone is unseen and overlooked. The pines remind us of what once was and the beach shack stands as an isolated image in the ‘visual landscape of stock photography.

a climate warming graph

As a photographer in South Australia I experience the effects of rising temperatures in terms of a hotter and drier climate and no water flowing down the Murray River.

The Hadley Center has a useful graph about climate change which I reproduce here:

In the context of ClimateGate I would like to say that the 2007 IPCC Assessment, which is the most comprehensive and respected analysis of climate change to date, states clearly that without substantial global reductions of greenhouse gas emissions we can likely expect a world of increasing droughts, floods and species loss, of rising seas and displaced human populations.

However, even since the 2007 IPCC Assessment the evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened. The scientific evidence which underpins calls for action at Copenhagen is very strong.

tablets are coming

This is an example of how tablets-- the "new cool toy" eg., the rumored Apple "iTablet", an expanded, souped-up version of the iPod Touch --- will enable the creation of innovative reading experiences by publishers, media companies, and advertisers:

Tablet devices will play video and music and display text; they will let you navigate by touching your fingers to the screen; and they will be connected to the Internet at all times. Here then, is your new morning newspaper, with videos next to stories and the ability to customize the panes to deliver what you want and leave out what you don't.

These powerful devices with constant Internet access will enable us to rethink media. They will be about about high quality media content, games, music, photo albums and everything with the word “fun” in it.

the aesthetic image

At this Undoing the Aesthetic Image conference mentioned in Radical Philosophy Jacques Rancière refers to two recent trends in contemporary photography--the historical tableau of Jeff Wall and the monumental portaits of Rineke Dijk.

He argues that photography is not content to occupy the place of painting Rather it:

presents itself as the rediscovered union between two statuses of the image that the modernist tradition had separated: the image as representation of an individual and as operation of art. How should we think of this new coincidence and tension between the grand pictorial form and simple images of indifferent individuals?

From what I understand, Rancière's aesthetics holds that politics is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order. Aesthetics is bound up in this battle because the battle takes place over the image of society -- what it is permissible to say or to show.

On the other hand, we have a politics of aesthetics, which, in the modernist regime, establishes the autonomy of art, the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself and liberates art from being shackled to any particular noble content that distinguishes it from everyday life. This artistic egalitarianism is analogous to the breaking down of real social and political hierarchies.