Thought-Factory.net Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
PortElliot2.jpg
'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Weblog Links
Library
Fields
Philosophers
Writers
Connections
Magazines
E-Resources
Academics
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

photographic discourses « Previous | |Next »
June 9, 2009

Steve Giles, in Making Visible, Making Strange: Photography and Representation in Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin in New Formations, (June 2007) says that:

By the early 1920s--in western Europe and the USA, at any rate--there had developed two clearly articulated but polarised discourses on photography, namely the documentary and the fetishistic, the scientific and the magical, which betray their roots in the aesthetic theories of the 1880s and 1890s. (7) On the one hand, we have the photographer as witness, producing images of reportage which ostensibly provide empirically verified and verifiable information. On the other hand, we find the photographer as seer, using imagination to transcend empirical reality and express inner truths.

Though the artistic discourses on photography in the early years of the twentieth century were dominated by Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism both were undercut by the emergence of Cubism both of
Instead of being construed as a mediator of a prior or pre-existing reality, whether external or internal, the visible surface of the painting came to be seen as an autonomous entity in its own right. The dispute between Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism, which had turned on the nature of the truths that art should mediate, was thereby transmuted into a more radical confrontation concerning the very essence and possibility of representation as such.

The Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism duality was intersected by an alternate modernist perspective, which certainly rejects the representational ideology of Naturalism, yet also wishes to retain a determinate relationship to 'nature', whether human or otherwise. Russian Futurist/Formalist and German Expressionist aesthetics are fully aware of the...concern with the adequacy of artistic representation, but they integrate that concern with more general reflections on a crisis of consciousness.That crisis is represented as us inhabiting a world where everyday perception has been deadened, and authentic seeing has been eroded, if not rendered impossible. This loss of vision is connected to a process of rationalisation and disenchantment, in consequence of which we never 'see' beyond the surface of things.

The Russian formalists wants art to make things visible by making them look strange, whilst the German expressionists suggests that art can achieve the same strategic aim of restoring authentic vision by making visible essential relationships which are otherwise inaccessible to everyday perception. The latter therefore requires the artist to break through the surface of actuality in order to grasp and mediate its otherwise non-visible essence, whereas the former advocates intensification of our perception of objects by making them more palpable. Hence the Russian formalist wants the stone to be more stony, whilst the German expressionist wants the building to transcend its stony objectivity.

He states that we have:

on the one hand, the adoption of bizarre perspective and point of view associated with the more radical exponents of Neue Sachlichkeit, and on the other the 'painting with light' associated with, say, Christian Schad or Man Ray. In both cases, the documentary and evidential force of photography would appear to have been forsaken, and realist art forms modelled on the traditional truth claims of photography would appear to be hopelessly anachronistic and irredeemably flawed.

If art is to remain true to its realist heritage and tell how things really are, it must abandon a realism that only aids the facade in its work of deception by reproducing that facade. Lifting the veil of reification so as to reveal those essential societal relations that would otherwise remain hidden from view is to be achieved by breaking through the facade of surface deception.

The question posed is this:

How can the relative merits of two ostensibly incompatible aesthetic strategies--making visible and making strange--be combined in such a way as to take full account of the modernist/Expressionist critique of naive realism as manifested in Naturalistic representation, without losing sight of the need to make social realities perceptible in a way that avoids the pitfalls of Expressionist abstraction and transcendence?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:32 PM |