STEFFEN SIEGEL

Building Blocks for an Artistic Theory of Photography

“Attempts to master the subject theoretically have so far proved thoroughly rudimentary,” asserted Walter Benjamin with a view to photography.¹ Yet today, nearly a whole century later, the profusion of attempts to fundamentally draw closer to “the subject” has long since become overwhelming. The need seems so great that hardly anyone speaks about a theory of photography in the singular these days. Photographic images are not simply useful instruments within the sphere of our everyday activity. They are constantly challenging our views and, in the process, in their very own way, also challenging a theoretical understanding of this medium. In the artistic work of Adrian Sauer, these two aspects meet.

Such an assertion calls for more detailed justification when our gaze falls on Sauer’s work 256 Graustufen (256 Shades of Gray, 2020) at the latest. Clearly, the title of the work carves out what is to be seen there: different gray tones which are gradated—sorted from dark to light. Anyone awaiting visual opulence from photographs will surely be slightly disenchanted. Ironically, however, a promise of opulence that could not be more pronounced is associated with the brittle abstraction of the 256 Graustufen. Indeed, between the two outer points of pure black and pure white, Sauer unfurls a panorama of possible gray tones, aiming to cover every single one. Should someone compare this installation to a space-filling visual test chart, then one must be more precise: it is not the camera being tested here, but rather our own ability to see.

Just recently, Peter Sloterdijk reminded us how worthwhile it is to take gray seriously as a philosophical subject. His attempt to conceptually explore gray led to a chromatics of monographic scope.² Yet though the philosopher is fascinated by the proverbial gray of all theory in a metaphorical sense, the photographer homes in on the issue with concrete clarity. With a ribbon of all kinds of gray spanning several walls, a regime is made visible that presupposes the majority of images circulating today. In viewing Sauer’s installation, however, we too are meant to get moving. It is not only the succession of walls that gives this work a home; equally decisive is the free space opening up between them. It provides the necessary stage for testing our gaze. Thus facilitated is a game oscillating between near and far, one that recognizes an essential instrument of gaze testing when the beholders assume different distances to the fields of view.

¹ Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography” (1931), trans. Stanley Mitchell, in Screen 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 5–26, esp. p. 5.
² Peter Sloterdijk, Wer noch kein Grau gedacht hat: Eine Farbenlehre (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2022).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 160/2022, pp. 9–18.

SONIA VOSS

A Heap of Broken Images, Where the Sun Beats*

The art of photography is inextricably tied to glass. Since the era of what is generally accepted as its invention, and for a long time thereafter—until the invention of flexible film—the glass plate was the substrate that made possible both the taking of a photograph and its reproduction ad infinitum, by contact or by means of an enlarger. Beyond this practical fact, the qualities of glass—its transparence, its capacity to let light rays pass through it—have often been elicited in describing the characteristics of the photographic medium and defining it as a faithful tool for the reproduction of reality: from Roland Barthes (“Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see”¹) to Kendall Walton (“Photographs are transparent: we see the world through them”²), theorists have asserted, citing the physical qualities of glass by way of metaphor, that the image produced by the mechanism of photography coincides perfectly with the object represented. Photog­raphy is like glass, in that its raison d’être is to allow us to see, while itself eluding our notice.

One of the most recent works of Austrian artist Ulrike Königshofer is a series of photograms entitled Shades of Glass (2020). The photograms are presented in small decorative frames, such as one finds at the flea market or antique shops. It is, moreover, in flea markets and antique shops that Königshofer has unearthed the frames fitted with glass panes which form the point of departure for her work. These non-objects, as it were, these structures without content, which serve the sole function of vehicle or catalyst for the value of something else (their format—generally around 30 × 20 cm—their simplicity, and their antiquated style permit us to imagine that the frames were originally intended to present photographs) have been taken apart by the artist and their glass placed in front of sheets of photosensitive paper. We recall that the photogram is a technique of photography without a camera, belonging in a way to the pre-history of the medium. It relies on the relative transparency of the objects being reproduced: it is by virtue of its translucency that an object can be transferred to the paper, the gradations of such translucency permitting one to obtain a photogram rich in details and nuances (an opaque object will leave only its silhouette, will reveal nothing of its volume or texture).

* This title is borrowed from a verse from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
¹ Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 18. The translation of the quote is R. Howard’s, cf. Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 6.
² Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” in Critical Inquiry, 11/2 (1984), pp. 246–77. This and the preceding quotation are cited by Muriel Berthou Crestey in her article “De la transparence à la ‘disparence’: le paradigme photographique contemporain,” in Appareil, 7 (2011), published online on 11 April 2011.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 160/2022, pp. 19–28.

JOAQUÍN GARCÍA MARTÍN

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and the Amber Spyglass

In the third book of the trilogy His Dark Materials, novelist Philip Pullman tells the story of the invention of the lacquered spyglass, an artifact that allows one to see the Dust, a substance that, for the author, acts as a metaphor for the coexistence between spirit and matter. Some commentators see this as an idea related to Milton’s concept of the lost paradise, in which Man and Nature were one, sharing the same substance. For Pullman, Dust would be a monism that denies the worldviews of Plato or Descartes. Hence, in his books, what helps us to see the truth of our relationship with Nature is technology (the spyglass)—a Seeing in the literal sense, one that is revealed when we apply the eye to the lens.

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has often spoken of his interest in the “relationships between nature and culture, which are always present—often in a very formal way—and derive from the opposition between a natural and chaotic form, on one hand, and a cultural and organised form on the other hand.”¹ These relationships he understands as based on a division, created primarily by human vision, which alternately separates him from his environment and unites him with it. As he says,

If we think of the process of modernity as something started with the Cartesian division between Res cogitans (the subject perceiving) and Res extensa (the corporeal substance, the world-at-large) and the subsequent elaboration and purification of this division, it’s easy to see how this division allowed us to understand nature as something external to us, something that can be manipulated at our will, and grounded the belief that this mishandling wasn’t mishandling us back at all.²

Steegmann’s work focuses, therefore, on the investigation of certain essential aspects of the relationship between Nature and Culture, trying to highlight the correlations between the human and the non-human. It is a conception of the environment as something that goes beyond this dualism, transcending it and manifesting itself in an ecosystem of mutual interactions. For Steegmann, “Art has the capacity to reconfigure our relation with reality,”³ and, in part of his work, this is done by using, literally, a lens that allows us to see it.

¹ Fábio Zucker, “Conversation with Daniel Steegmann Mangrané,” Jacaranda Magazine, no. 4, (May 2017), pp. 82–93, here p. 82.
² “Interview: Lauren Cornell in Conversation with Daniel Steegmann Mangrané,” in Daniel Steegmann Mangrané: A leaf-shaped animal draws the hand, eds.
Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli, exh. cat., Pirelli HangarBicocca, (Milan: Skira, 2020), pp. 113–18, here p. 116.
³ Ibid., p. 118.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 160/2022, pp. 29–38.

KIM KNOPPERS

A Future Archaeology of Our Networked Era

The “brickstone Motorola mobile phone” used by the 1980s iconic duo James “Sonny” Crockett and Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs in the American police series Miami Vice took ten hours to charge and offered less than thirty minutes of call time. In 2002, the first smartphone was developed: more handy, more functional, and much cheaper. Today, there are more cell phone contracts than human earthlings. The Motorola brick cell phone already belongs to the archaeology of telecommunications.

Between Archaeology and Futurology
As an early digital native, the visual artist Lilly Lulay (b. 1985), who is based in Frankfurt am Main and Brussels, grew up in the 1990s when the Internet, cell phones, and digital cameras were becoming an integral part of our lives. Her body of work contains many interesting contradictions that seem to move between archaeology and futurology in multiple ways. Archaeology could be described as the study of the materialized traces of mankind. Through artifacts we can almost touch our predecessors. On the contrary, futurology is a study that deals with future possibilities based on current trends. Because it is about the future, the study is not rooted in physical existence but in the intangible—in something one cannot feel, see, or touch yet.

An archaeological artifact is a material time capsule that takes us back to other times and places. In this respect, an analogue photograph from the nineteenth century can be seen as an archaeological artifact. Precisely this appeals to Lulay: “[photography’s] ability to make us perceive things that are far away from us in space and time.”¹ For a residency located on the French Atlantic Ocean in the Basque Country, Lulay engaged with the landscape formed by deposits and erosion, and also tracked more contemporary traces and relics of human intervention. For the series They Were Here (2016), she photographed graffiti and engraved notes by locals and tourists that cover bomb shelters from the time of German occupation. She blended them with initials and with floral and geometric patterns found on the walls of a local château. Printed on semitransparent silk, neoprene, and acrylic fabric, Lulay’s photocollages pin down how natural processes and cultural traces within a site continuously overlap, shift, and influence each other.

¹ Lilly Lulay, Dissecting the Visible (Berlin: Kuckei + Kuckei, 2021), p. 28.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 160/2022, pp. 39–48.

NINA STRAND

Holding On

By juxtaposing found images, Eline Mugaas enters a photographic game, driven by her curiosity about the new narratives that appear when different images are placed together.—A certain image, a film still, has been on Eline Mugaas’s mind for a long time, like a song she cannot get out of her head. The scene is from one of Constantin Brâncuși’s films shot in his Paris studio. A woman is dancing on a low plinth, her body twisting as she raises her arm above her head. The movement reminded Mugaas of other images throughout art history, from antique caryatids—columns shaped like women’s bodies designed to hold up temple roofs—to the stylized women painted on the urns of the Greek geometric period, raising their arms above their heads and pulling their hair in grief. She thought of the writhing female bodies in the paintings of both Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani, all of this reminding her of the movement made when swinging an object up on one’s head or lifting a child on one’s arm.

This idea of lifting, supporting, and carrying is on display in Mugaas’s contribution to Camera Austria International. She opens her series Seated Figure (2022) with a page titled “Classical Pillow,” which contains two images of seated sculptures, details from the reliefs of the Ludovisi Throne at the National Museum of Rome, the playful coloring obviously her own. The next spread, “Limbs and Torso,” presents two large photographs placed over postcards and books on Mugaas’s studio desk. The first one is taken from a book about flower arrangements and depicts a wooden structure. The caption tells us that the limbs of a white birch have been arranged to form a geometrical pattern. In the other photograph, we see the truncated legs of a broken statue, supported by a plexiglass rod that becomes the focus of the image. In the next spread, “Sitting Pretty,” there is an open book on a table where two postcards have been strategically placed; on one, a broken statue, this one of a horse and a rider, also supported by rods. On the opposite page Mugaas has superimposed two images. In the bottom photograph, two naked people seem to be performing a sexual act on a desk chair with wheels. It is an act of balance and movement. The couple’s faces are obscured by the other image, which is of a man seemingly impossibly balancing a chair on his finger. Both images show undoable acts. In the last spread, “Perfect Chair,” an image is pinned to the studio wall next to a flattened box. The fashion photograph renders a woman wearing a plaid outfit. She stands in front of a chair that, in terms of structure, reflects the movements of a twisting body. And on the final page, a cardboard box is also dressed in plaid, and has become a chair.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 160/2022, pp. 49–58.