MARK HAWORTH-BOOTH

Lee Friedlander

Try to imagine photography over the past forty years without Lee Friedlander – what sort of hole would his absence make? First of all, the celebrated exhibition “New Documents”, in which he made his debut with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1967, would have looked and felt very different. As orators know, for credibility, you always say things in threes, as in St Paul’s “Faith, Hope and Charity”: so the triumvirate of Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand is a very different entity from the bipolar, contrasting, Arbus and Winogrand. Those three talents made the 1967 show the sea-change in photography that it proved to be. As its curator, John Szarkowski, wrote in a much-quoted formulation about the three photographers: “Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it”. If Arbus and Winogrand showed us previously unrecognised kinds of human personality and behaviour, Friedlander showed us something different: how his own mind and eye worked, and left their traces in pictures. Friedlander showed, among many other things, how “figure” and “ground” were no longer easily separable but in fact inextricably mixed. He looked at the American scene as if the space programme had been put into reverse and the first moon-man was walking the earth. The usual hierarchies of vision were suspended in his work and the bits and pieces of mundane life reassembled into new patterns and puzzles. […]
So, the new, post-humanist, photography around the world would have been different without Friedlander – it would have lacked a vital ingredient. Let us try to define it further.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 94/2006, pp. 9–24.

JO SPENCE

Questioning Documentary Practice?

As discussions and questions about documentary practice are such a minefield it is unlikely I’ll avoid stepping on many before I?ve mapped out my thoughts, but I’ll try. I’m glad that the organisers have asked a woman to speak, who is middle-aged, comes from an economically poor background, is »working-class identified« but now ostensibly middle class, and has herself experienced disablement through illness. However, I can only represent my own views here and cannot begin to pretend to speak for others outside the identity categories I inhabit. Nor will I hide the fact that part of my identity has been formed from within a specific set of cultural debates and clashes in relation to visual representation, which embrace feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis. However, I do not occupy a »correct position«, nor do I wish to be dogmatic, but am interested that it should be possible to have a dialogue in which we all learn from each other. I have not come here to be preached to, nor do I intend to preach. In common with many people here I am interested in photography and its relationship to power and powerlessness. In that respect I speak with forked tongue as, like many others, I consider myself to have a foot in both camps. As a practising photographer and writer in the field of education, of course I have some power, even though I am often taking a critical stance and feel very vulnerable, ignored and powerless for doing so. But I also speak as somebody who for many years has earned very little and who is ill, and in these other aspects of my life I have less power. Although it is seldom acknowledged, many of us present here occupy and negotiate a terrain which is constantly shifting in relation to our identities, and none more so than within photography where we often use different photographic strategies to meet different needs and wear different hats on different occasions. Additionally (let us whisper), hardly any of us support ourselves entirely from our labour as photographers, or many of us are on short-term grants and put up with disgusting terms of employment. It is the complexity of this fragmented notion of identity which I feel could most usefully be addressed throughout this entire conference, most especially in relation to documentary photography. Documentary photography in its most critical form is usually a method of petitioning those in power, or is used in order to change “public opinion”, that notice be taken of something which needs to be attended to, which is being ignored. It assumes, in the way in which it addresses an audience, that there are universal people “out there” who have uncomplicated, rational minds, who can perhaps be persuaded or shamed into action by the petitioning claims of such photography. Leaving aside political and economic factors, such appeals to the intellect take little account of the matter of how our minds work out of consciousness, which may not be in any way congruent with the so-called rational mind.

This is part of a keynote paper given by Jo Spence at the first National Conference of Photography, organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain, in Salford on April 3, 1987. We thank Terry Dennett, curator of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, for the kind permission to publish this text.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 94/2006, pp. 25–35.

JORGE RIBALTA

The Continuing Pertinence of Jo Spence

Spence’s activity appears today as a process-oriented and relational model avant la lettre,that introduces a programmatic critique of artistic production as the provision of fetish commodities for the market. Spence manages to integrate artistic methods and social circulation in a way that other artists who exert a greater influence in academia are unable to do. In her programmatic rejection of the professional and institutional spaces of art and in her desire to turn her activity into a significant method that can be appropriated by different minorities, Spence has constructed a space for aesthetic-political experimentation that is quite unique in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. As in the case of Lygia Clark, we would have to go back to the revolutionary productivist experiments of the twenties to find similar examples of aesthetic radicalism that have a similar bearing on the construction of subjectivity.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 94/2006, p. 36.

BARBARA CLAUSEN

"becoming visible", a conversation with Anita Witek

The artist Anita Witek, who lives in Vienna and London, investigates the mutual constitutions and possibilities of demarcating space, body and identity in her photographs, videos and installations. On the basis of found, appropriated and self-made image material, Witek reflects on aspects of production and representation in the field of photography. Again and again, she analyses the experience of space as a site of production and action with the aid of social structures and gestures, that she clearly draws out in her photographs and video. Witek overlays the mediatic and physical space in her installations in its “becoming visible”, confronting it with the history of its reception, ranging between use, obsession and aesthetic experience. This is manifested in many different ways in her analysis and subversion of the viewing strategies of collectors, amateurs and experts, regardless of whether it is CCTV cameras (Closed Circuit Television), magazines for hobby photographers or Internet portals for escorts. By intermeshing her media-based and visual feedbacks, she investigates the mechanics of the cultural archive and its image politics of the body. Witek’s works are snapshots of a continuous process of appropriation in the shadow of the cultural history of photography, that hovers between the reproduction and the unique. The question to what extent the constitution of the medium itself as an image carrier, be it analogue or digital, determines not only the reproduction, but also the reception of gender and social space plays a key role in this context. The starting point for the following interview was a series of discussions in preparation for a joint conversation at the Vereinigung Bildender KünstlerInnen in Vienna in April 2005. In the following months, some questions and items of discussion were thought out and taken up again for this interview, in the spirit of Witek’s practice.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 94/2006, pp. 37–48.

BASAK SENOVA

Banu Cennetoğlu: Remotely Spying on Uncertainty.

Banu Cennetoglu is a photographer. Her vocation is to freeze “uncertain” situations. Implementation practices of her projects deploy every possible presentation mode as the main concern of the uncompleted processes of documenting and framing. This act magnifies the state of “uncertainty” by emptying the codes of each and every space that inhabits her works. […]
She had been monitoring and recording the same spot from a distance for months. She spent hours each day uncovering the alchemy of this unusual area, inhabiting three distinct divisions: a lavishly designed brand new beach; Turkish State Railways Recreation Camp; and the Military Zone. Haunted by curiosity, she recorded like an agent, floating through the retrograde flow of the overlapping imageries of her past. The closer she got, the more she realised the segregated realities that didn’t belong to anything, but existed only in the course of their own transitory states.
In the exact sense of Agamben, these singularities communicate only in the empty space, without any link to a common property or identity. This corner in Istanbul designates an empty space without a significant codification. Yet it is almost hidden beneath the posh area that hails the monetary politics of escalating capitalism. The first segment is the beach with 39 imported palm trees. The area was converted into a private beach club after the demolition of a leisure centre that existed illegally for twenty years. The second segment is the derelict Turkish State Railways Recreation Camp, which has been inhabited by 160 Chechen refugees for the last six years. Finally, the third segment is a typical Military Zone: the soldiers are in a constant cycle of standing guard, but the shell of the segment looks the same due to their uniforms and locations; it is impossible to detect the changes of this organism with static camouflage. These three segments are located side by side without any connection or interference with each other. The strict borders between them imply socially determined mental gaps. There is no direct communication, opposition, or negotiation. These segments simply exist in their own language. The most “uncertain” segment is the Recreation Camp with its invisible and unrecorded inhabitants. The semi-presence of the refugees denotes a redundant situation, which the system seems to tolerate temporarily. Therefore, being expropriated from the system turns this segment into a real threat, also foreshadowing menace for the users of the system.
“Are There Any Palm Trees in Grozny?” (2005) tracked the log of the uncertain and unpredictable developments in a specific time-frame. Nonetheless, the log creates a sense of timeless voyeurism, which could be extracted from any other geography.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 94/2006, pp. 49–56.

RUTH SONDEREGGER

Critical Theory of Social Pictures II

At the beginning of this series of essays (/i>Camera Austria 93/2006) I set out to give a positive formulation of the challenge and topicality of the critical theory of social pictures of Benjamin and Adorno. My aim was to defend the project of criticism against a post-structuralist objection: the objection whereby criticism presumes too much when it strives to go beyond the genealogical, representation-critical and thereby denaturalising reconstruction of the madeness and contingency of all social states. For – as the post-structural objection goes – when the genealogical view does not look down on everything in a uniform way, when it establishes nuances and exceptions, or even ventures into the realm of positive alternatives and utopias, the criticism becomes self-contradictory. It obscures the fact that an old regime is replaced by a new one. With the Rosetta film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, I wanted to present a concrete, promising perspective of the possibility and present form of critical social pictures.
But rejecting the post-structuralist criticism of criticism and highlighting one possibility of critical social pictures far from eliminates all problems. There are momentous objections to Critical Theory in particular and to the criticism project as a whole. I would like now to address these objections. For they have potentials that a theory of social pictures must take seriously and assimilate.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 94/2006, pp. 74–75.