Tutorial 5: Photography

Horst Bredekamp, ‘A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft’ (2003)

Current problems in Art History

• Art history has neglected the media arts, dealing only with works of ‘high’ art

  • Turning itself into a ‘splendid second archaeology’

    • Refined yet limited

Key arguments

• Calls for a return of art history to Bildwissenschaft

  • ‘Bild’ includes image, picture, figure, illustration

  • Bildwissenschaft includes the study of advertisements, photography, nonart photography, film, video, & political iconography

  • Art history should embrace the whole field of images beyond the visual arts, and take all of these objects seriously

• E.g. Aby Warburg

  • Argued that art history could fulfil its responsibility for the arts only by enlarging the field to include ‘images in the broadest sense’

  • Strongly emphasised the value of a picture beyond the limits of the arts

    • Images allow us to understand contemporary internal & external life

  • E.g. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

    • ‘Takes a seemingly banal photograph as seriously as a fresco by Raphael’

    • Warburg represents the essence of art history as Bildwissenschaft

      • Claimed to invest an unhindered energy in even the seemingly marginal and worthless

James Elkins, ‘Art History and Images that are not Art’ (1995)

Assumptions about non-Art images

• Inherently informational/utilitarian

• Without aesthetic value

• In reality, constitute the majority of all images

Current problems in art history

1. Non-art images are largely not studied

   • BUT in the last few decades, there has been increasing interest in non-art images that draw on the conventions of fine art

     • E.g. mass cultural images, commercial & popular imagery

2. Even when studied, the aspects of non-art images studied are limited

   • E.g. can identify & account for literal, obvious influences between art & science (e.g. how artists brought science into their art)

     • But this is NOT the only relationship between science & art

     • Fails to do the same for oblique/subtle/indirect influences

Why should we study non-art images?

1. To expand the discipline of art history; currently very limited

2. Because the distinction between art and non-art images is demonstrably untrue

   • One image may not clearly fit within a single category

   • Non-art images are fully expressive and capable of great & nuanced ranges of meaning

   • Non-art images engage the central issues of art history (e.g. aesthetics, styles, meanings, criticism)

     • E.g. Astronomers creating ‘scientific’ images for scientific journals

       • Goal: to make them as clear & graphically elegant as possible

       • Employ a range of image-processing tools to ‘clean up’ the raw data provided by telescopes

       • E.g. removal of unwanted shapes, dust, burnt-out pixels

       • Reflects aesthetic concerns (‘perfecting of reality’) that governed Renaissance painting

       • Full of artistic choices, deeply engaged w/ the visual

   • Non-art images can present more complex questions of representation, reproduction, etc. than much of fine art

     • E.g. In the fine arts, if a drawing is associated with a painting, the two are likely to be similar (e.g. preparatory sketches for a painting)

       vs. in scientific images, the reflationship between drawings & completed illustrations can be more varied

       • A single image might be associated w/ many kinds of images

       • E.g. autoradiography vs. the drawings created to help explain anomalous bands on the autoradiograph

       • Forms in autoradiographs: horizontal dark bands in columns

       • Forms in explanatory drawings: molecular models, simplified shapes & arrows

         = new terms would have to be coined to explain the ways in which such images are connected

James Hevia, ‘The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer China, Making Civilization (1900-1901)’ (2009)

The photography complex

Consists of:

(1) Human parts

• Photographer

• Photographed subject

(2) Nonhuman parts

• Camera (container, lenses, moving parts, variations of its form)

• Negatives

• Chemicals for the development of ‘positive’ prints

• Reproductive technologies (e.g. printing, line engraving, photolithography)

• Photographic archive

• Transportation & communication networks along which all these parts travel

• Light

James Hevia, ‘The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer China, Making Civilization (1900-1901)’ (2009)

Historical context

The photography complex was used:

Unique feature of the photography complex:

The Boxer Uprising (1900-1901)

Historical context

• The Boxers: a loose-knit anti-Christian social movement

  • In collusion w/ Qing Dynasty military forces, attacked the Western enclaves outside the city of Tianjin & the legation quarter in Beijing

• European imperial powers dispatched military contingents to relieve the besieged legations

  • Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, the US, Japan

  • Once this was accomplished, were determined to punish & teach lessons to the Chinese government & their people

• China staged through the 1900 photography complex remains part of our global collective present

  • The photography complex not only documents reality, but fundamentally alters it

  • Due to storage & preservation capacities of the imperial archive

  • Structures understanding of 1900 for future generations

  • In China, photos were assembled into a nationalist discourse to ‘never forget national humiliations'

    = production of reality

The photography complex was used:

1. In performances of power

   • Often recorded staged events en masse

   • E.g. a ‘triumphal march’ through the Forbidden City

     • Ritual opening & exposure of what had previously been denied to the gaze of Euro-Americans

2. As an instrument of punishment & lesson-teaching

   • The photography complex as a participant, instrument, & record-keeper of acts of humiliation & punishment (e.g. the execution of purported Boxers)

     • The foreign presence, including that of the camera, was presented as a humiliating lesson in itself

Unique feature of the photography complex:

1. The linking of ideological systems w/ the photography complex

   • E.g. through text drawn from imperial archives of knowledge about others

   • Creates a unified representation that can be circulated widely & understood consistently within imperial networks

   • Helped forge a popular consensus at home for imperial adventures abroad

   • Bruno Latour: photographs as immutable mobiles

     (1) Can achieve optical consistency

     • Remain materially unchanged as they travel

       Can be consistently understood & used across diff. contexts

     (2) Highly mobile

     • Can be transported to other sites

     • Reproduced & spread at little cost throughout networks of empire

James Hevia, ‘The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer China, Making Civilization (1900-1901)’ (2009)

Named example

An execution scene to be found in the archives of the U.S. Army Military History Institute

Historical context

• Produced but never published

• Considered a ‘bad’ photo

Description

• Caught another photographer in the act

• Blurred sections indicating motion of subjects

Interpretation

• Call into question any unmediated claims about colonial photography

  • Instead of focusing attention on the key event, this photo draws attention to itself & the processes involved in fabricating photos

  • Makes visible that which the photography complex conspires to hide

    = forces us to consider the staged nature of the events before the camera, opening to scrutiny mechanisms of imperial power and technologies of rule