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Depth of Focus

In recent years, a number of US-based artists have beentaking new approaches to photography, emphasizing process,digital manipulation and the physical support

Since the middle of the last decade, critics and curators havebeen reticent to identify significant movements inphotography. Back in the early 2000s we witnessed thecollective cresting of the Vancouver school, a moniker underwhich a collection of artists like Jeff Wall, Rodney Grahamand Stan Douglas have been grouped; the Becher school, acollection of students taught by Bernd and Hilla Becher at theKunstakademie Dsseldorf, which includes Thomas Struth,Andreas Gursky, Candida Hfer and Thomas Ruff; and anAmerican school of scenographic photography, partlyspawned by Yale-based artists and teachers GregoryCrewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. This is not to say thatwhatever powers are in charge of arbitrating taste havereneged on what appeared, during this brief window ofphotography mania in the early 2000s, to be a promise todecisively legitimate photography as an art of equal standingwith all others.1 Photography, after all, still benefits fromsignificant exhibition platforms in the US, such as the NewYork Museum of Modern Arts annual New Photographyshow, which has been running since 1994; serious academicconsideration from figures such as George Baker, GeoffreyBatchen, Kaja Silverman and others; major symposiaincluding San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts 2010 seriesIs Photography Over?; and publications such as Blind Spotmagazine and the Los Angeles County Museum of Artswatershed Words Without Pictures (2009). What is missingis the impulse to identify schools or movements within newphotographic practices, and the desire to codify a set ofcommon principles. The question is: why?

One might suspect that the answer lies in the fact that thismode of thinking has become somewhat dclass: in an artworld that increasingly values pluralism andinterdisciplinarity, medium-specific concerns and theimpulse to group artists together have given way to arelatively decompartmentalized field of art production, inwhich, somewhat paradoxically, the individual tends to take

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Published on 01/11/11By Chris Wiley

Talia Chetrit Triangle, 2008, inkjetprint

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precedence over the group. However, over the course of thepast five years or so, a number of artists based in the US havebeen developing new approaches to photography. Theseefforts have been largely unsynchronized and spontaneous unaffiliated with any school and beholden to no specificset of theories. These artists are operating according to a setof terms that diverge from those that have been commonlyused to understand the medium.

Institutional discourse around photo graphy remainsencumbered by certain established strictures. These areintimately tied to a specific history of photography that isconcerned with the cameras status as a tool used to depictstates of things in the world. This history could be said torevolve around confirming or problematizing RolandBarthess assertion that the mediums essence (or noeme) isthe ability of the photograph to testify: That-has-been.2Inextricable from this history is the idea that photographyacts as a kind of window onto the world, that the mediumitself is a kind of transparent glass through which we seeimages. This tends to repress, or at least discount, severalintegral aspects of the medium: the physical support uponwhich the image is registered, myriad chemical and technicalprocesses, as well as the numerous choices that were made bythe photographer in capturing the image. This repression ispresent even in elaborate forms of staged photography, suchas those practiced by Wall, DiCorcia and others, and thebaroque digital fabrications of an artist such as AndreasGursky. While these types of images certainly problematizeBarthes photographic noeme and ask us to question theveracity of what we see though photographys imaginarywindow, they nevertheless speak in the same basic formallanguage as have photographers stretching back to LouisDaguerre: they are presenting us with a view, whethercredible or not.

Artists such as Michele Abeles, Walead Beshty, LucasBlalock, Talia Chetrit, Liz Deschenes, Sam Falls, Elad Lassry,Carter Mull, Eileen Quinlan, Mariah Robertson, ErinShirreff, Sara VanDerBeek and a host of others, have begunto turn away from this well-worn photographic language infavour of a different one. This still-inchoate tongue is onethat speaks of photographys repressed aspects the supportthat holds the image, and the techniques used in the processof its creation. The work attempts to move photography awayfrom an idea of it as a conduit through which images arechanneled, towards an idea of photography as a mediumwhose specific properties can be tinkered with, stretched andplaced into dialogue with those of other media.



Liz Deschenes Red Transfer (diptych), 19972003, dyetransfer prints

Though the work of each of these artists is distinct andmultifaceted, for the sake of clarity they can be looselygrouped into two camps: those whose experiments overlapwith painting and those whose experiments are more gearedtowards sculpture. Many of the artists in question straddlethe line between the two, and occasionally produce discreteworks that could be said to functioning both. For those whohave more of a relationship to painting, the work involves anattention to the materiality of the photo graphic support andan engagement with the photographs physical or digitalsurface. Those making work that relates more to sculpture,on the other hand, are more directly concerned with choicesinvolving the boundaries of the photographic frame and theplacement of objects within it.

The discussion of the intersection of photography andpainting is as old as photo graphy itself. Around the beginningof the decade, this discussion reared its head in earnestthrough the attempts of artists such as Wall and Gursky tocreate photographic works that would match painting particularly that of the 18th and 19th century in both scale(monumentally sized prints made possible by theadvancement of digital printing) and allegorical heft (usingelaborate, cinematic staging techniques and digital illusion).However, recent years have seen a resurgent interest inlensless photographic techniques and investigations of thepainterly possibilities of digital imaging software that movephotography into a relation with painting that is lessconcerned with rivalry than it is with the creation of adialogue, or a space in which the two media can intermingle.

Among those spurring on the re-engagement with lenslessphotography, Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes and Mariah



Robertson are perhaps the most significant. Beshty, who hasalso emerged as a prominent voice in the field ofphotographic theory, produces monumental, candy-colouredworks made by baroquely folding scroll-like sheets oftraditional c-type photographic paper and exposing them to avariety of different coloured light sources shone frommultiple angles, a process that amounts to the painting, withlight, of a topographically restructured photographic surface.(The act of folding the photographic paper is significant herein that it foregrounds the materiality of the support, but italso serves to slot the work into Beshtys broaderexplorations of surface registration that occurs by chance,such as those produced by shipping glass cubes fitted to theinterior of FedEx boxes that crack in arbitrary patternsdetermined by their handling in transit.) Robertsons lush,variegated photograms are also made using large sheets of c-type paper, but their materiality is emphasized in a morevisceral manner: often ripped and irregularly shaped, theyslump and dangle loosely in their frames, or snake in sinuousribbons around the walls and ceilings of the exhibition spacesin which they are shown. The works imagery, such as it is, isa kaleidoscopic mlange of geometric forms and swathes ofcolour punctuated by the occasional intrusion ofphotographic representation that have beendirectly registered on the papers surface and embellishedduring the developing process with drips and splashes ofphotographic chemistry that resemble child-like experimentswith watercolour. The result is a frenetic, slap-dashmaximalist approach to photographic surfaceexperimentation that could be set up in near-direct formalopposition to the works of Deschenes, whose technicallyexacting approach to lensless photography recalls theexperiments of artists such as Bridget Riley and EllsworthKelly. Many of Descheness works are starkly monochromatic striking fields of undifferentiated colour, or murky, semi-reflective, silver-toned surfaces that have the look ofweathered mirrors. In these works, photographic processesare pared down to their barest essence, in both literal andmetaphoric terms: colour field works such as Red Transfer(diptych) (19972003) deal plainly with the materialtechnology of image making (in this case, the red dye used inthe production of the now-obsolete dye transfer printingprocess), while silver toned photogram works likeTilt/Swing, #3B (2009) speak obliquely to photographysstatus as a rough mirror of the real.

The experiments of each of these artists have deep roots inphotographic history stretching back to some of thefoundational works of William Henry Fox Talbot in the 19thcentury and extending through the works of early-20th-



century artists including Lszl Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray,on to the more contemporary works of artists such as JamesWelling. However, other artists currently making work indialogue with painting have a less direct lineage: they engagewith the photographic surface not as a physical support uponwhich painting-like gestures can be made, but as a field ofpixels where painterly marks can be simulated.

Sam Falls Provocative Percussion (3), 2009, archivalpigment print

Recent works by New York-based Sam Falls, for example, seehim explicitly addressing this idea of the digital photo graphas a virtual canvas. These works have an uncannyresemblance to paintings sometimes to those of DavidHockney but are in fact the result of a multi-part processthat combines analogue photography, digital manipulationand painting. Falls begins by scanning one of his ownanalogue photo graphs often one that conforms to thetraditional genres of portraiture, landscape or still life intoa computer, which he then paints upon using tools providedin Photoshop. He then makes an inkjet print of the digitallypainted image, which he further embellishes with oil paint,pastels and air brushing, often in ways that mirror or extend



the digital painting underneath and make it difficult to tellthe difference between the two. The result is a work thatoccupies a space not only between photo graphy and painting,but also, subtly, between reality and its digital double.Los Angeles-based Lucas Blalock also makes novel, painterlyuse of Photoshop in some of his works, but rather thanvirtually painting on top of the image, as Falls does, Blalockinstead paints with the pixels that comprise the image aprocess that reconfigures and combines rather than adds oroverlays. These are photographic paintings produced throughthe duplication and multiplication of information. As aresult, they look like theyre infested by some kind ofmutating digital blight, which causes their subjects to twistthemselves into pixelated Gordian knots and blur intowavering psychedelic mirages.

Photography is seldom talked about in terms of itsrelationship to sculpture, except as a method for itsdocumentation.3 However, the recent re-emergence ofstudio-based photography, particularly where geared towardsstill life, signals a move away from this utilitarian view of thephotographs relation to sculpture towards one in whichphotography is used as a site where a type of sculpturalactivity can take place. Key to this is a shift in the treatmentof the photographic frame, which supplants the dominantanalogical model of the window, through which the world isviewed, with that of the box, inside of which the world isarranged. This has an obvious relationship to still life and,arguably, to studio-based photography as a whole. However,this model of the frame as box could be extended to a type ofvisual strategy that has its roots in the various photographicModernisms of the beginning of the 20th century, one thattreats the photograph as a space for the construction ofcompositions (of objects, sections of the landscape, or even ofbodies) rather than as a tool to provide information about thestates of things.

The work of Elad Lassry serves as a usefully emblematicexample. Principally, this is due to his insistentforegrounding of the boundaries of his images with custom-made lacquered frames whose colours match those found inthe photographs they contain. As a result, whether Lassrysworks take the form of portraits, individual object studies, re-photographed and appropriated imagery, or still lifes, theyexude a similar feeling of being fully integrated objects types of image/sculpture rather than simply images thathappen to be presented in frames. However, it is in Lassrysstill lifes and individual object studies which often take theform of whimsical arrangements of foodstuffs and householdgoods or presentations of kitschy objets dart, almost always



placed on brilliantly coloured backgrounds that this effectis most potently elaborated: a mildly uncanny doublingoccurs in these works, in which the object or objects in theimage reflect back on the object-like quality of the integratedimage-and-frame.

Other photographers working in the sculptural vein, such asMichele Abeles, Talia Chetrit and Eileen Quinlan, are slightlyless explicitly invested in the material presence of thephotograph on the wall, but nevertheless exhibit a pointedconcern for the way in which objects (and, occasionally,bodies) sit within the frames of their images and createspatial relationships. Abeless studio constructionsintermingle various generic still-life flotsam (potted plants,wine bottles) with lolling, nude male bodies whose heads areoften truncated by the frame a strategy that positions theworks as canny rejoinders to the commonplace use of theanonymous female form as a prop for picture-making. Moreoften than not, Abeles also overlays these studioarrangements with transparent, jagged swathes of colour, acompositional device that seems to indicate the intrusion ofa digital hand, but is in fact achieved with entirely analoguemeans, through the use of layers of Perspex and colouredlighting gels. The resulting images are a strange mix of theanachronistic and the contemporary, one part Blow-Up-style1960s editorial work and one part digitally amalgamateddreamscape.



Lucas Blalock Tire, 2011, silver gelatin print

This wavering between past and present is similarly evidentin the practice of Talia Chetrit, whose recent works areredolent of glamour and product photographs from the1940s, but with a cunning dash of perceptual sleight-of-hand.Her work Drip Vases (2011), for example, would have beena straightforward photograph of a pair of vases withexaggeratedly crenulated openings huddled together on aneutral backdrop, if Chetrit hadnt chosen to display theimage upside-down, giving the impression that the invertedvases are being slow pulled, toffee-like, towards the ground.Other works, like Drawing on Drawing (2010), are engagedwith similar perceptual trickery: what at first appears to be aphotogram made in the style of Moholy-Nagy or Man Ray isrevealed, upon further inspection, to be a photograph of amotley collection of objects arrayed on top of a looping,circuitous pencil drawing.

Quinlan shares Chetrits interest in photographys capacityfor creating illusion,but her work is more explicitly tied upwith literal and metaphoric forms of photographicabstraction. Quinlan makes tightly composed photographs of



puffs and tendrils of smoke lingering amid funhouse-likearrangements of mirrors that dizzily vacillate betweenabstraction and representation, never seeming to settle ineither camp. These visual acrobatics are lent addedsignificance by the pointed double entendre of titles such asthat given to her 200507 body of work Smoke and Mirrors,which speaks to the illusion-making capacity not just ofQuinlans images, but of photography as a whole. Thoughtheir work is diverse, when taken as a group, these artistsmake a case for the reconsideration of the works ofphotographers such as Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, PaulOuterbridge, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Paul Strand, puttingforward the possibility that photography can be used as a toolfor organizing space, in addition to its function as a tool fordepiction.

But where, ultimately, might the significance of these shiftsin recent photography lie? It is indisputable that we nowinhabit a world thoroughly mediatized by and glutted withthe photographic image and its digital doppelganger.Everything and everyone on earth and beyond, it wouldseem, has been slotted somewhere in a rapacious, ever-expanding Borgesian library of representation that we havebuilt for ourselves.As a result, the possibility of making aphotograph that can stake a claim to originality or affect hasbeen radically called into question. Ironically, the moment ofgreatest photographic plentitude has pushed photography tothe point of exhaustion. It is in the face of this waning ofphotographic possibility that these artists are attempting tocarve a way forward by rethinking photographic subjectivity.They are, in other words, working at the task of whatphilosopher Vilm Flusser, in his increasingly influential textTowards A Philosophy of Photography (1983), deemed to bethe essence of experimental photography: to create a spacefor human intention in a world dominated by apparatuses.4

1 This largely tacit and, of course, slightly absurd promisewas made manifest in the breathless title of Michael Friedsmost recent book, Why Photography Matters as Art as NeverBefore, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008.2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections onPhotography, trans. Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, NewYork, 1981, p.773 MoMAs mammoth 2010 exhibition The Original Copy:Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, curated by RoxanaMarcoci, is the most prominent recent example of thistendency.4 Vilm Flusser, Towards A Philosophy of Photography,trans. Anthony Mathews, Reaktion Books, London, 1983,



p.75

Chris Wiley

is an artist, writer and curator based in New York, USA. Hehas worked on numerous curatorial projects at the NewMuseum, New York, as well as on the 8th Gwangju Biennial(2010), South Korea.

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