Photography With Sculpture (MRes Masters Thesis)

2021

Working close to home, Paul Géniaux (1873-1929), photographed a female paludier, or salt-pan worker, in Billiers, on the south coast of Brittany in about 1905. Grayscale contrast has material consequences: we cannot avoid the dirt on her apron or her tough, bare feet on the salted earth. Registered in the image’s silver salts is the difference between the light cotton kerchief on her head and the dark skin of her face, exposed to the same blazing summer sun and wind that crystalizes the salt she skims. Saliculture is a materially intensive agricultural labor, working with sea, sun and wind, yet it shares qualities with fishing and quarrying to harvest salt, the only rock that we eat. In the marais salants of the French Atlantic coast, trapped ocean water increases in salinity as it is guided through grids of carefully maintained, clay-lined channels to ultimately crystalize into prized fleur de sel. Like the crystals skimmed from the briny pan, Géniaux’s photographic practice was a gathering up of the world around him on silver gelatin dry plates. Although allied with a realist approach to photography rather than nascent French pictorialism, Géniaux photographed a highly selective archive of his native Brittany that inventoried the specificity of locally particular gestures, types and trades. Salt workers and their insular, clannish culture had been mythologized by Honoré Balzac, and had been a staple of travel illustration in the 19th century. Géniaux’s photographs generally echoed established visual tropes of rural labor and locale from travel writing to Salon painting; they were widely reproduced as collographs --a photomechanical fusion of camera and printing press-- in journals and as postcards that were reprinted for several decades. This essay is a reflection on material equivalence in fin de siècle realist photography. It puts into dialogue Susan Sontag’s descriptions of photography’s “relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing” literal qualities with Timothy Morton’s “weird essentialism” in which “things are partial, yet ‘organic.’ There are things, but they don’t come with a handy little dotted line that says Cut Here to separate the essence from the appearance.” Tim Ingold’s notion of landscapes as hybrid and dynamic “meshworks” is useful in getting away from “the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space.” Ingold has further called attention to the absence of materiality in studies of objects that have been “already crystallized out from the fluxes of materials and their transformations.” In addition to these theoretical approaches, I have found it fruitful to think about Géniaux’s photograph through the language of land art and collaborative artistic processes of working with the world’s materiality, especially Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), and his interests in salt’s crystalline properties.

June e technical developments of the last two decades have changed our relationships with photographic images -may they be moving or still, situated in artistic or non-artistic contexts. While in most cases the increased ease of production and distribution was met with enthusiasm, for artists the shear amount and fast pace of digital images presents a challenge. To illustrate this point Dutch art director, collector, curator, and artist Erik Kessels has allegedly printed each photo uploaded to Flickr within a single day for his installation Hrs in Photos. e spectacular installation was shown several times since its rst instantiation in -usually at photography venues or festivals -and we can imagine how photographers encounter it with both compulsion and despair. In another reaction to the lost value of photographic prints Kelley Walker decided to o er his piece Chess Players from as a digital le and concedes the owner the right to modify, print, and display it in any desired form. In a recent gallery show in Berlin the work hence was simply crumpled up on the oor. Images are disappearing as it seems -at least for artists. One strategy to face this situation is what some call the 'networked image, ' that is the assembly of images and people in social media as demonstrated by Amalia Ulman in her Instagram performance Excellences & Perfections. Over a period of several months Ulman blended her artist persona with a stereotyped social media addict who pretended to optimize her photographic appearance also by use of plastic surgery. She thus showed how the border between image and body has blurred. ese are just three more or less arbitrarily chosen examples that demonstrate the precarious state of photographic images or the medium of photography in ne arts as it is debated in post-photography discourses. Of course, artists did not need to wait for digital photography and the internet to reject the production of new images in view of those that already exist. But when Rosalind Krauss described the destructive energy of photography as a 'theoretical object' -i.e. the in ltration of ne arts with photography's logic of reproduction etc. -she did not yet imply the possibility that this would nally also strike back on photography as an artistic medium.

a fountain, a display rack for various metal alloys and a robot, and it had caused me more trouble than a dozen ch•ldren.· S1 by1 Moholy-Nagy, Experiment m Totality, 1st edn (New York. Harper, 1950). 67 31 The Light Prop was reproduced In Telehor 1 no. 1-2 (19361 : 80-3. 32 Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy to Franz Aoh, 23 March 1934 Franz Aoh Papers. Getty Spec1al Collections, Getty Research Cemer. los Angeles. 33 Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Construction AL6 (1933-19341, lnstituto Valenc•ano de Arte Moderno UVAM I, Generalltat Valenc•ana. Valencia. 34 Kalivoda, " Postscript," 46. 35 Ibid. 36 Photograph of the reverse of Z VII, object file for Z VII. Thanks to Miles Chappell and Harry

History and Theory, 2009

This article explores the significance of the material practices of photography and its archiving in interpretive approaches to the relationship between photographs and history. Drawing on work in material culture studies in anthropology and on the concept of "material hermeneutic," it argues that photographs should not be understood only through forensic and semiotic analysis of content, but as objects that constitute material performances of a complex range of historiographical desires in the negotiation of the relations among past, present, and future. The analysis is grounded in an exploration of the material practices of the photographic survey movement in England between 1885 and 1918. This loosely cohered group of amateur photographers recorded a historical topography of ancient churches, cottages, passing events, and folk customs in order to create a photographic record for the benefit of future generations. As such it was a self-conscious statement of "popular historicism." The members' concern for key values of permanence and accuracy, expressed through the detail of photographic and archival processes, reveals the ways in which cultural loss and photographic loss become mutually sustaining metaphors for each other, and in which the photographs themselves are material markers of both evidential value and of an affective historical imagination.

Sculpture Journal, 2006

, among others. Then, inexplicably, something happened. In 1906, after completing a portrait of a child of the Mond family, Ecce Puer, he stopped creating new subjects. Puzzled scholars at one time considered this period 'inactive' or 'non-creative', but in fact Rosso was highly productive. From 1906 until his death in 1928, he focused intently on writing his art theories and on producing sculptural replicas and photographic reiterations of his own sculpture. This work has been read as repetitive, and the multiple casts have generated a series of problems regarding their attribution, chronology and authenticity. 1 This article will demonstrate how, contrary to the opinion of previous scholarship, the second half of Rosso's career was dedicated to the achievement of his artistic goals through the creative medium of photography. As will be explained below, Rosso created sculpture which he intended should be seen exclusively from a unique vantage point-the same as that from which the artist received his 'first impression' of the subjectso that the observer could share his emotion. This viewing modality is the visual equivalent of observing a flat object. Because a photograph is an exact twodimensional representation of an image perceived from a unique point of view, the best visual translation of Rosso's aesthetic theory lies in the photographs of his own sculpture, which were crucial in securing his place in the history of art. One of Rosso's peculiar demands on the observer is that he or she should consider his sculpture as if it were a painting. 'My work must be looked at as a painting, from the optical distance, where it recomposes itself with the collaboration of your retina' 2 and 'a work of sculpture is not made to be touched, but to be seen at such or such distance, according to the effect intended by the artist. Our hand does not permit us to bring to our consciousness the values, the tones, the colours-in a word, the life of the thing. For seizing the inner significance of a work of art, we should rely entirely on the visual impression.' 3 Often presented to the public in vitrines, Rosso's sculpture appeared to be visually contained in a sort of frame provided by the glass case's lead joints, which marked

CORVINUS JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL POLICY, 2008

This article, the purpose of which is to place photography into the discussion, has been developed through the different social sciences with which it particularly deals with the anthropological, historical and social significant elements that include tales of human groups, the means of defining their existence, and rituals and manners of constructing relationships with environmental, social and cultural surroundings. The paper has six sections, starting with an introduction. The following chapter provides some keys to understanding the possible connections between sociology and photography. The third part develops a discussion of the place of the anthropological field in recognizing photography as a human and cultural practice. The next chapter opens a debate about photography, through the results of a case study in Colombia involving a discussion about the family, the construction of visual speech, the tales that individuals create in a family album, and the possible distortions and interest in building particular dialogues about the past. We conclude with theoretical reflections about the important place of visual narration and the construction of collective memory in the institution of the family. In this way, we show the continuously constructed tales that unveil the human sojourn in the world. In the same way, the family as an institution is one of those human groups that uses tools such as photography to construct their stories and their official collective memories in oral and visual discursive narrative codes.

Exposure: Journal of The Society for Photographic Education, 2015

2007

My approach in this work is to present and discuss works of art that utilized the medium of photography, in order to outline a red thread through the history of photography in contemporary arts. I also want to prove the assumption, that there have been works of art, utilizing the medium of photography in order to create, what we nowadays know as contemporary art, prior to the introduction of the term itself around 1950 (Henning, Holland, Price, Ramamurthy & Wells, 2015). This work contains neither the complete history of photography nor fine art but it highlights interactions between the two and underlines the great potential of the relatively young medium photography.

Art/Umění Vol. 66, no. 5, pp. 350-367, 2018

In the wake of the recent surge of interest in the relation between sculpture and photography, the article revisits the photography’s capacity to convey the haptic qualities of sculpted matter. Starting from the logic of supplementarity, whereby a photograph reveals something that we do not notice while meeting the sculpture itself, the article focuses on the photographic detail and its inherent tactility as the materiality’s own surprising touch. At the same time, a close attention is paid to the role of scale in the photography of sculpture and to the connection between the impact of the detail and the play of scale, which makes us aware of the uncertain borderline between image and mental image. Different from measurable size, scale enters our perception of the photographed sculpture as something irreducible to the detail understood as the matter’s signature. While being a more abstract agent than the more directly tactile detail, scale has its own mode of addressing the viewer by making her suddenly aware of her own situation. The more personal nature of this address makes it possible to connect the scale, rather than the detail in its more usual iconographic sense, to Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum as, first and foremost, a mental event. However, as the article makes clear, this event, whereby a detail expands mentally and independently on any measurable size, cannot occur without the underlying relief-like or tactile qualities of the photographs themselves. To support this interpretation of the productive tension between the detail and the scale, the article discusses a series of examples (starting with the early daguerreotypes) and appeals to a broad range of studies, from Herder through Aloïs Riegl and Ronald Barthes to the most recent debates.