ISSUE10 / PHOTOGRAPHY
FALL 2009
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Helmut Newton: Reclaiming The Female Nude Photograph From Pornography
Victoria Z. Alexander
Over the past forty years Helmut Newton (1920-2004) has come to be considered as one of the world’s leading and most influential makers of visionary images. At the time of his death the photographic medium was in his debt as it is to only a few brilliant photographers in history. He specialized in fashion images, female nudes, and portraits. His work was widely published in magazines such as Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, der Spiegel, and Stern. There have been over 100 exhibitions of his work since 1975, he was awarded the Medallion d’Or by France for his work, and a museum dedicated to that work has been opened in Berlin (2004). more...
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Touring the Ordinary: Annette Merrild's The Room
Michael Borowski
Following this proverb Annette Merrild began, in 2001, photographing her neighbor’s living rooms in a Hamburg apartment complex. Over the next four years she expanded her study to include living rooms from cities across Europe. Her series of images show unique details within homogenized apartment spaces. The residents themselves are never photographed. Instead the viewer interprets how others live through the objects and decoration of the space. As a part of a larger archive project, these photographs become associated with scientific documentation. But they equally illustrate the mediums objective limits. The Room attempts to disprove cultural stereotypes with a more intimate view into foreign peoples homes, but this over simplifies the possibilities of their message. more...
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Photography By Other Means: Gerhard Richter’s Challenge to the Real
Dr. Gerry Coulter
What has Gerhard Richter (77), perhaps the greatest living painter, been telling us about photography? Richter has long mistrusted the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses. He has told several interviewers over the past forty years that he finds our encounter with reality to be “imperfect and circumscribed” (see, for example, “Interview with Peter Sager” [1972] 1993:73). Further, he does not believe that a photograph provides us with a picture of reality any more than a painting does – both media are merely imperfect tools used to make images which are a substitute for reality. more...
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Empathy and Engagement: The Subjective Documentary
Mark Durden
James Agee is here describing how Walker Evans takes a portrait of one of the tenant farmer families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans allows his subjects the dignity of determining how they would like to be pictured. His portraits are generally celebrated for this ethical dimension, a negotiation between photographer and subject which differs from much of the other Depression photography, which instead tended to reduce the poor to a spectacle of alterity: wretched, alien, defeated and pitiable. Evans’ subjects address the camera, face on, upstanding, composed and commanding respect. more...
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Michael Fried on Why Photography Matters
Guy Lane
Once Michael Fried starts talking about photography his enthusiasm is infectious: ‘What I was seeing was people standing in front a work by Jeff Wall for twenty or twenty five minutes - and talking about it, discussing it, pointing out things. And I thought, “Man, this is great; this is just good in itself”. I’d say to my painter friends - even the ones who are still abstract painters - “Photography is on your side – just wait.” Because photography is making people look closely again, and in itself that is simply marvellous.’ more...
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Before The Gaze
Gözde Türkkan
In its early stages, photography was expected to be a perfect and precise representation of reality; thus it tended to replace painting in terms of documentation and authentication. For instance it was used as a memento in portrait and post-mortem photography since the 19th century. Currently photojournalism and vernacular photography is likely to be the most unadulterated form of photography because it is either supposed to represent facts without interference or just to keep a moment’s impression, which is judged memorable. On the other hand, each and everyone behind the camera makes decisions. Even the most naïve interference might not be that ineffective. more...