1/27: The Photographic Conditions of the Avant-garde

n the Photographic Conditions of the Avant-garde, Rosalind Krauss states, "Surrealist photography exploits the special condition to reality with which all photography is endowed. For photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of finger prints or footprints.....Surreality is nature [the real/the index] convulsed into writing."

Through a close reading of the text and the passages cited above, please translate the concept above into your own language. What does Krauss mean? Why is Surrealist photography so radical? What does "Nature convulsed into writing" mean? How can only indexical representation do this?

1/21: The Optical Unconscious

(Top image David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Fishwives of New Haven with Rev. James Fairbairn and Mr. Gall, 1845, (Calotype), below it, Marta Astfalck-Vietz, Self-Portrait, 1930 and Marta Astfalck-Vietz, Self-Portrait with Mask, 1930, below it, Andre Masson Automatic/Unconscious Drawng, 1930s)

(4th Image down: Brassai, Involuntary Sculpture, 1933)

(5th Image down, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920)

Compare the following statements, both of them by Walter Benjamin, the first dating to 1931, the second to 1936: "In Photography, one encounters something strange and new: in that fishwife from New Haven who looks down at the ground with such relaxed and seductive shame something remains that does not testify merely to the art of the photographer Hill, something that is not to be silenced, something demanding the name of the person who had lived then, who EVEN NOW IS STILL REAL AND WILL NOT PERISH INTO ART.....In such a picture, the spark has, as it were, burned through the person in the picture with reality finding the indiscernible place in the condition of that long past minute where the future is nesting, even today, so eloquently that we looking back can discover it." (A Short History of Photography) Benjamin calls this spark "The Optical Unconscious."

This invests the photograph with intimacy as well as the capacity for illumination impossible for the naked eye alone. He does admonish, towards the end of the text, that this special condition can be exploited by capital for advertising purposes.

Several years later, however, he seems to argue that the instrumentalization of photography is part of its very condition. He celebrates the revolutionary political potential of this. "To an ever increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility." At the end of the essay, Benjamin concludes with one of the most oft quoted phrases in the history of visual culture, that this condition opens onto a leftist "politicizing of art." And yet, at the opening of the essay, he charges photography with the dissolution of authenticity, aura, and historical depth. The deracination of history and authenticity seems to contradict the intimacy and spark he had located in photography.

The question, how does the intimacy of the optical unconscious link to this political capacity? How does the photographer manage a practice that is not reducible to propaganda or advertising? Try to think in Benjamin's terms and paraphrase his language into your own.

1/14: The Index as "The Feminine" vs Disciplinary Law

In "Cupid's Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography," Armstrong makes the claim that flaws and blemishes are the "result of the indexical workings of photography." But rather than conclude with this observation about the semiotic status of photography (semiotic status=its quality as a particular type of sign, i.e. an indexical sign) Armstrong radicalizes her argument, raising the stakes. She continues: each photograph is "a child born of photographic generation, of Mother Photography's reflexive labor." This metaphor of "labor" (feminine labor) is loaded, both in terms of the formal properties of the medium, as well as its ideological import in the context of the late 19th C. Armstrong's proposition, as explicated by footnote 20) relies on Roland Barthes famous discussion of photography. In Camera Lucida (which we will eventually reach), Barthes "speaks of the photograph as a desire for a return to the heimlich of the mother's body" and to a pre-linguistic realm. So: what does Armstrong mean by "mother photography" and "father Art?" Elaborate on the difference, formally and in gendered terms. What has "accident," "chance" and "magic" to do with Armstrong's binary? Consider this provocative passage:

"Over and over again, the generative link between mother and child is tied, erotically, to photographic generation." How is the physical relationship between figures (skin to skin as the author insists) allegorize photography?

Finally, with Sekula in mind, what would the ramification of Armstrong's radical argument be for Sekula's claim that photography was but a form of surveillance and archive construction in the interest of the centralizing of power. How might we reconcile these arguments?

1/7: Monstrous Mimesis

What is "Mimesis?" Why, for Maimon, does it fail to apply to the medium of photography? What is an index? Why does Maimon argue against the "evidentiary" or forensic import of photography in the mid to late 19th C?

With Mimesis in mind, why does Baudelaire (symbolist poet, art critic, champion of an emergent avant-garde in his committed support of the painter Edouard Manet), writing in 1859, say that "in this country, the natural painter, like the natural poet, is almost a monster....our taste for the true ... smothers our taste for the beautiful." Why is this statement relevant to the newly emergent medium of photography? Consider (and try to paraphrase) the following passage (page 86-87 in Trachtenberg) with the image by Oscar Rejlander entitled "The Two Ways of Life" in mind:

"In these deplorable time, a new industry has developed, which has helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith, and to ruin what vestige of the divine might still have remained in the French mind. Naturally, this idolatrous multitude was calling for an ideal worthy of itself and in keeping with its own nature.....An avenging God has heard the prayers of the this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah. And then they said to themselves: 'Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude (they believe that the poor madmen!) art is photography.' From that moment forward our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun worshippers. Strange abominations manifested themselves. By bringing together and and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these 'heroes' to 'hold' their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and charming scenes of ancient history..."

And yet, in the early 1860s, Baudelaire stood for a portrait, (top image). Is Baudelaire merely exposing hypocrisy? Is he an elitist snob? How might you reconcile this SEEMING contradiction? What, exactly, is Baudelaire's problem with the medium as practiced in France in the 1860s and as evidenced by Rejlander. Pay special attention to his terms "industry," "nature..." etc.