To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. —Man Ray
I’ll tell you what a photograph is. It’s the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. —Garry Winogrand
I’m now dishing raspberry and John Public still likes vanilla. —Lester Plum
Holy uncanny photographic mental processes, Batman! —Robin the Boy Wonder
May God bless Susan Sontag, if there is One, and She dishes out blessings on demand. Had not the American grande dame de lettres been courteous enough in her response to a young British man’s earnest remark, who knows if the “greatest 21st Century thinker on photography” would have become nearly as influential as the indefatigable David Campany, advertised for his extraordinary “ability to write fluently, at length, and with a mass audience in mind instead of simply applying his bottomless talent toward the direction of academia.” We can keep our pants on. Thirty-some years ago the anxious student held his own with the Great Woman, because he “respected her enough to be honest” in an enchanted conversation that sounds like a publisher’s promo on the back of Sontag’s On Photography about, she told him at the time, “‘photography as a phenomenon, social and artistic.’ She paused, and smiled. ‘Perhaps one day you will write a book titled On Photographs’” that we now hold in our hands.
Remarkable, if true, as my Nana used to say. A textbook example of personal recollection exploited for commercial product placement in various interrelated markets, this anecdote appears in the MIT Press blurb and is reblurbed in various reviews of the anthology, like a pedigree. Whatever the story for his brilliant curation, a correctly printed, pedagogically annotated collection of often uncanny images, Campany passes the torch within a tradition of criticism dominated less by Sontag than by John Szarkowski, MoMA’s “seasoned curator and writer” [9] whose innovative in 1973, now long in the tooth, white gold standard of photographic anthologies, Looking at Photographs bakes in a vernacular metaphysics of photography that critics continue to homogenize, often without realizing it. “One of the interesting things about photography,” Szarkowski observed, “is the fact that its records of our selves and our works so often do not correspond to our mental images … for the camera records many unintelligent, insignificant, and circumstantial kinds of truth.” [146] More cynical than Szarkowski’s play on records, Sontag suggested that what “photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.” In our time, of course, even to whisper that photographs represent one truth or another, however decent or disreputable, is to invite the ridicule of a solipsistic cognoscenti who believe “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, but Barthes’ famous dictum was never particularly earth-shattering. In The Pencil of Nature, published in 1844, one of photography’s British inventors, William Henry Fox Talbot, imagined both the medium’s literary potential and, in italics, a system of “certain invisible rays which lie beyond the violet, and beyond the limits of the spectrum” as a way to see in the dark. How? By metaphorizing science as literature. “For, to use a metaphor we have already employed, the eye of the camera would see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.” With its origin story, the discourse of the medium’s essential invisibility has been animating photography criticism since the Cold War, visible between the lines as an ontology, an ideology, or a religion, alone or layered together in semiconscious cultural composites. “A photograph, whilst recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen,” John Berger postulated, adding “A photograph is effective when the chosen moment which it records contains a quantum of truth which is generally applicable, which is as revealing about what is absent from the photograph as about what is present in it.” More than depict presence, a photograph must intimate absence if it is to meet truth’s quantum, its minimum requirement, itself a paradox or a contradiction in terms, if not an oxymoron. It is in secret that context pulls photography from the edge of this semantic abyss: “a photograph communicates by means of its association with some hidden, or implicit text;” wrote Allan Sekula, “it is this text, or system of hidden linguistic propositions, that carries the photograph into the domain of readability.” Celebrating this aesthetics of enigma, the “net gain of the rise of discoursese … to a position of alternative academic orthodoxy,” deadpanned Geoff Dyer, “was to formalise a way of looking at art with your eyes closed.” Actually, this animation is designed to recapture a more imaginative, pre-photographic era. “Thanks to photography,” Paul Valéry lectured the Académie française for the medium’s centenary in 1939, “the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see, and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.” More a whisper than an outcry, this faith in the photographic unseen reflects a philosophical and ideological convergence, creating what Campany, twenty years ago in Art and Photography, beautifully described as “‘postmodern’ art, a key moment in the alignment of art and theory … a new, accelerated environment of distractive fantasy and permanent instability.” [19]
Not that the curator is a fellow in that learned society, despite his risky spells of literary wizardry cast during decades of dedicated study. Not taking the piss here. As a young writer, Campany recalled to 1000 Words, he watched while “neo-liberal capitalism marched its violent way onwards, the academy retreated from the public square.” Campany may have “made the decision, for good or bad, to publish outside of the academy” but his thinking and writing benefit from his education. Many of his essays are fabulously footnoted, sharing, sometimes confounding, his aesthetic, historical, and intellectual sources. Traumatized by photography’s ancient tensions between art and document, accident and intention, appropriation and facticity, dissimulation and truthiness, etc., and collecting a number of images, ideas, and artists he has written about for some twenty years, Campany counts on anthropomorphism for his metaphorical constructions, binary opposition to structure his arguments, and the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to resolve whatever bewitching issues he’s burning at the stake. With these scholarly tools for tuning forks, he harmonizes photography’s cognitive dissonance that Sontag had weaponized, Szarkowski contained, and Barthes mythologized. To fathom how Campany finds this harmony in On Photographs, we need look among both his writings and those of his influences both real and virtual. As we explore various leitmotifs that fade in and out of focus throughout the book, our study is all the more fraught with uncertainty because Campany’s writing, tortuously stretched between generalization and specificity, reads like repressed intellectual autobiography.
Right from the start, Campany’s impassive voice smooths the way. “Photographs are often thought of,” he begins aphoristically, “as ways to hold things still, to calm the flux of a restless world. They allow us to gaze at fixed appearances, for pleasure or knowledge, or both.” Leaving aside any Freudian contrasting pleasure with knowledge or art with science, who is doing the thinking? Does photography really give us the gaze, challenge us to stare? Images may enthrall, but at what point does inspiration mutate into interpretation written by the medium itself, with us for its Ouija boards? Campany curated his collection of photographs not for their status as icons from the medium’s history, even as their future celebrity is encouraged by their inclusion. Campany’s choices speak to both his distrust of documentary and his affection for conceptual photography. Desiring comprehension of a medium evolving as if it had a life of its own, and with a flair for ingenious description, Campany transforms a metaphor into a figure of speech condemned to human attributes. When does anthropomorphism, a technique writers employ to subdue an overactive voice without losing the action of a transitive verb, cease functioning as a literary device and begin to dominate ontologically? Is it real or is it rhetoric?
Photographs, Campany continues with a poetically cadenced flourish, and independent of human agency,
are highly mobile. They move over time, across cultures and between contexts. They lose meanings, and acquire meanings. Indeed, they could not be quite so mobile were they not quite so fixed. The mute stillness of photographs permits their promiscuity and proliferation. And so, paradoxically, photographs have produced the flux they promise to calm. They confuse as much as fascinate, conceal as much as reveal, distract as much as compel. They are unpredictable communicators. They cannot carry meanings in any straightforward way. A single photograph is unable to account for the appearance it describes, or even account for itself. Like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, a photograph is insistently there, yet enigmatic. In each one there is a kind of madness. [8]
Thus commences On Photographs, a theoretical, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic mashup of photography history with postmodern dreamwork. Campany’s binary, no-this-without-that descriptions are not zero-sum; thesis and antithesis he covers with emotional polarities, confused and fascinated, concealed and revealed, distracted and compelled, unaccountable and crazy. Will we find synthesizing in every snapshot a reductio ad absurdum snapped by a deus ex machina? Absolutely. In Melville’s novella, Bartleby symbolizes nihilism at its narrative extreme. Invented during the enlightenment, nihilist philosophy combusted during the industrial age, eventually replicated throughout modernity like a virus, or a photograph, exposing truth as a claim to veracity that may or may not be true. “The art world still seems anxious about the documentary potential of photographs,” the curator diagnosed in a 2015 interview. “It likes artful deconstruction of the claims to truth-telling, but it can’t really handle the more complex mix of fact and wish, revelation and enactment. Documentary gets dismissed as naive realism only to be replaced by real nihilism.” Truth-telling—documentary’s unrealistic ideal—requires “faith in the reality of images” by gullible realists whilst unbelievers who have “faith in their unreality” are sophisticated nihilists. Binary opposition may impose one against the other, but both have faith.
Faith is key. On Photographs is Campany’s generational contribution to an art history scarcely conceivable to 20th century photography criticism’s holy trinity, bound to empirical truth as they thought they were. Sontag’s On Photography may remain “the most highly read book on the subject” [11] but, as Nearest Truth’s bad boy “scribbler” decreed, both Barthes’ and Sontag’s books “exhibit easy pedestrianism that makes their place on Photography 101 syllabi easy to understand.” When asked about his influences, Campany underplayed their hand, asserting that “the ones that come readily to mind are the writings of Roland Barthes (on almost anything other than photography), Susan Sontag (same).” Sounds plausible. As for Szarkowski, in 1982 Rosalind Krauss dispensed with his influence in an important essay in which she fomented revolution in art history, using methodologies improvised with theories learned from post-1968 structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis by “thinkers that mattered” also to Campany, who reminisced about the “French thought that really shaped me intellectually.”
Campany’s deference is evident in his sympathy for Mac Orlan’s old street poet. Atget after Krauss was Szarkowski’s creation, whose “work is the function of a catalogue that he had no hand in inventing and for which authorship is an irrelevant term.” Fully dehumanized, Krauss recreates a functional Atget automaton. Reappropriating Krauss’ deflation of Atget’s artistic significance, Campany roasts the old chestnut about artists—Atget “became ‘Atget’ the great figure in the modern history of photography only after he had died.” [10] In Art and Photography, the curator had already diminished Atget’s aesthetic achievements, whose “carefully artless, automatic quality of the pictures, with their inadvertently haunting depiction of the empty city … ‘Atget’ was an invention of the museum.” Nevertheless, like Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye (1966), On Photographs includes Fête du Trône, 1925, [20-21] one of Atget’s many pictures “which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.” [64] For Szarkowski, the image is evidence of artistic innovation beyond the prime of life: “that Atget in his last years discovered a new stratum of facts, and that the descriptions of these new facts produced pictures that are in their sense and structure different from any photographs before them.” For Campany, Atget’s “strange assembly” of a county fair’s closed freak show inspires a commonplace: “Like photographs, humans come in all shapes and sizes, often with particularities you simply could not invent.” Ouch. Repeating with Szarkowski Man Ray’s questionable claim that “Atget wanted no credit” for his “documents pour artistes,” Campany morphs the artist, in whose work Walker Evans saw the “projection of Atget’s person,” into an “enigma” whose “photographs seem to have been made for his pleasure alone … thick with the mystery and poetry of the everyday.” Atget’s photography is no longer naïve and unintentional, even if its status as art remains unconfirmed. Campany recalls Atget’s “pictorially sophisticated documents of Paris,” before collapsing the medium as a whole into an apocryphal bromide, the luck of the vernacular draw. “Every photographer is anonymous until they are not, and every photograph is potentially a work of art, although it will never cease being a document.” [10]
That Campany finds these truisms “both liberating and disturbing” is no less significant than his rejection of what Krauss called art’s “great aesthetic unity: œuvre … the result of sustained intention” that art historians identify or fabricate as directed. To the contrary, anonymity and vernacularity rule. “Authorship and intention,” he confirms, “may be the least compelling pieces of information appended to photographs.” [10] Krauss had defined art as “not a timeless manifestation of human spirit, but the product of a specific set of temporal and topical, social and political conditions,” the investigation of which defines “the activity of postmodernism.” Or, as Campany reflected in Art and Photography, a photograph “means little on its own and relies on a broader textual and discursive apparatus to bring out its latent possibilities. It is also a highly mobile kind of image, liable to be pried from its original location, to outlive its initial purpose, or to exist in many places at once.” [20] With this pedagogy, where intention and authorship become data points no more or less significant than any others, any photograph can indeed be art, whatever that means. That nobody knows is a tenet of postmodern thought. “Second-guessing the photographer’s intentions may be tempting, but it is rarely satisfying;” Campany speculates about Helen Levitt, [56-57] “and when it is, we have little way of knowing if our guesses are even remotely correct. Even the photographer may not know exactly why they took a particular photograph or what it might mean.”
Whatever our conscious intentions, with photography we risk exposing our subconscious desires. Inspired by Levitt’s wistful portrayal of 1940s New York children standing on the sidewalk watching soap bubbles fly by in the street, Campany defines street photography as a personality assessment, “both a formal game and a test for anyone keen to discover what they really think about the world around them. Of all the genres, it is the most reactive, the camera equivalent of the psychoanalyst’s couch. Intuitive responses can reveal unconscious thoughts.” It’s an old idea. Szarkowski, who saw Shakespeare in Levitt’s photographs “filled with the qualities of art, as though the street were a stage, and its people were all actors and actresses, mimes, orators, and dancers,” [138] translated Mac Orlan’s belief in a photography revealing “an absolutely anarchic evocation of an ulterior motive” into “free … subconscious thought.” In pursuit of an imaginary psychosis, photographers are us. “In turn,” Campany asserts, “the viewer can only ever respond to the work of a street photographer in the same way: a formal game and a test of what we think about the world depicted.” Like Szarkowski, he finds art in Levitt’s vision; unlike his predecessor, he minimizes, if not infantilizes, her photographic mastery. “Looking at Levitt’s work, one can feel these paradoxes acutely,” Campany postulates, assuming that Levitt had not known why she made her photographs or what her photography might signify. He makes a jejune inquiry in which he attempts to demystify and project onto us Levitt’s role as a photographer with little control of her medium, unable to communicate what Szarkowski called “the precise and lucid description of significant fact” in pictures we will clearly understand. But her camera charms us, even if we don’t know why: “To spend time contemplating the apparent ease she had with her camera and her surroundings is to become disarmed. Are you looking at what she was looking at? No. She was looking at the world through a camera; you are looking at the image she made. But is what you find significant the same as what she found significant? We cannot know. Photography makes a mystery of intention.”
Perhaps, but this mystification reflects Campany’s nihilistic anthropomorphism. “Out of the almost nothing of us, out of the almost nothing of daily life, something emerges. A child into an adult. A photograph into a work of art.” Sounding like a poet Campany reduces the artist to a passive participant in the “almost nothing” of her artistic life, unconsciously reacting to her mysterious intuition. Levitt, an introvert who, in the curator’s regrettable phrase, “confessed to being inarticulate,” was a high school dropout who learned photography at “her own pace” until she realized “her own potential as a delicate observer of the world around her.” Not exactly. As Campany documents in his 2017 essay introducing Levitt’s subway portraits, passages from which he repeats verbatim in On Photographs, Levitt, while still in her teens, trained with a commercial portrait photographer. In her twenties “her pictures and personality endeared her to” Walker Evans, James Agee, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom she collaborated for decades. Fortunately, photography is easy. “Photography is not like writing a novel or symphony,” Campany notes in his text about Vivian Maier. [68-69] “One can pick up what is needed in a couple of weeks.” Like Levitt and Maier, the “great observational photographers manage to intuit and work out their own way of doing this, one that suits and expresses their disposition towards the world.” Intuition outsmarts education. “You cannot really be taught how to be good at it, but you can practice and figure something out for yourself.” Campany knows what Levitt wanted and how she felt, her reticence a catalyst for aesthetic surprise: “Her pictures did not dare insist on the artistry of their maker. She preferred you to feel you were looking at the accidental artistry of the world itself.” Thus he mansplains1 criteria for female photographers, and he’s not alone. Even Szarkowski, an accomplished architectural photographer, believed that “the work of the late Diane Arbus … depended more on talent and character than on a coherent understanding of photography as a traditional discipline, and her great work was made within even more restricted technical and formal boundaries than those of her heroes.” For Maier, for Levitt, for how many photographers, from quantity emerges quality, from document art appears, by accident. “In any archive of 150,000 images, there will be a few great shots. Such is the nature of wandering, observational photography.” Like a champion bowler’s, “Maier’s strike rate was prodigiously high.” To paraphrase the late Janet Malcolm, Levitt and Maier were good photographers elevated, like Atget, to the ranks of the great simply because curators burned most of their work, at least in spirit.
Whether or not photography gives subconscious street shooters a self-taught shot at conscious or posthumous glory, Richard Avedon’s camera behaved just like Levitt’s and Maier’s. Quoting the celebrity fashion photographer’s contribution to Marilyn Monroe’s mythification, Campany repeats Avedon’s infantilizing exploitation story: “And when the night was over she sat in the corner like a child with everything gone. But I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it, and as I came in with the camera I saw that she was not saying ’no.’” [206-207] She was not saying yes either. Avedon’s 1957 portrait of Monroe performing, in the vernacular of the era, a spaced out brat pack bar fly replays a psychodrama for Campany’s therapy camera with its “acute awareness of the fragility of the self, and of the camera’s disarming way to get to it.” Like a 19th century littérateur, Campany links biography to aesthetics as he describes the ill-starred celebrity’s legendary vulnerability “taking its toll on her already fragile psyche,” as if Monroe’s mental health were actualized in Avedon’s picture, rather than a character created by one of Hollywood’s most accomplished actors. “In photography it is the model that counts,” Gisèle Freund says in her autobiography, “and the role of a good photographer is to be the sensitive instrument by means of which a personality is revealed.” Monroe knew what Avedon wanted and gave it to him. The show must go on. From fanboy curiosity about Avedon’s “tantalizing” tale, Campany pivots to pop psychology preaching that “selfhood is always a matter of performance.” He wonders about acting, not as an art form but as as an emotional coping mechanism, “to present the struggle that presentation demands. Was this what Monroe was doing for Avedon at the end of that day in his studio?”
Forget any fly-on-the-wall fantasies about photoshoots after hours. “When a virtuoso photographer enters a domestic situation,” Campany extols a portrait shot out the back door by Lee Friedlander, [18-19] “ordinary events may be lifted suddenly into another realm” producing photographs that are “neither formal nor informal, on a line Friedlander has danced disarmingly for more than six decades.” Presumably like Levitt and Maier, Friedlander “has a deep love and an acute understanding of the amateur’s happy accident”; unlike them, he doesn’t have to search through thousands of mishaps for a few great shots. “Friedlander has made hundreds of images with this playful complexity.” What’s notable about Campany’s adulation, in addition to the semi-unconscious gendered historicizing, is his rebranding of photographic genres: “street” is supplanted by “observational,” family snapshots by “domestic photography.” Friedlander’s “much more than a portrait” ticks all the appropriate boxes for contemporary curation. Everybody depicted “seems to dramatize in a different way that act of photographic seeing” in a self-referential “meditation… on backyard psychodrama, on picture-making, on light, sight, vision, geometry and the transformative nature of photography.” Seeking a more precise definition of photography’s essential power, Campany wonders about intention. Is Friedlander’s “wry and enigmatic” subject “in on this brief and layered amusement, or the butt of it?” Is the photographer friend or foe? Do we laugh with, or laugh at?
“One could argue,” Campany posits, “that every photograph ever taken must be a metaphor for photography.” [226] One could, but we won’t, because arguments about art’s self-referentiality, repeated to death since Abstract Expressionism, trudge through postmodern criticism like zombies. Still, at our peril we underestimate their impact on Campany’s love for conceptual photography, featuring neither accident nor intention, with no conflict between art and document, unless artists have factored these into their practices. The first photograph in the collection is such a metaphor, depicting a view camera collaged together by conceptualist Robert Cumming, titled 1826; Niépce’s Pewter Picture, 1980. [14-15] Campany endows photography’s French inventor with eternal foresight. “With photography, Niépce had introduced profound complications into the understanding of originality, artistry, science, authorship, time, realism, reproduction and proliferation. They haunt image-making to this day.” Luigi Ghirri suggested that Niépce’s picture was among the “genuine threads of modernity”; Campany’s myth of a postmodern Niépce signals his appreciation of Cumming’s “complex visual puzzle, exploring perception, fascination, and our easily duped faith in photography. Niépce and the other pioneers would have appreciated this playful homage.” Speaking for photography’s inventors, he imagines Cumming’s art at one with photographic tradition, reincarnated. “Photography’s past lives on in the minds of those in whom it means something, and in meaning something it remains contemporary.” Photography spawning a religion for believing dupes like us. What to believe?
Gisèle Freund’s elegant portrait of Virginia Woolf, [78-79] accompanied by Campany’s sensitive portrayal of “one of the most significant figures of twentieth-century photography,” is the brightest highlight of On Photographs. Freund, whose influence on the practice and study of photography is as prodigious as it is ignored, studied “the social consequence of photography – how it affected people’s relationship to knowledge, politics, consumerism, and even their sense of self. This was far more significant than photography’s status as art” in the 1930s, when Freund was writing her doctoral thesis and beginning her illustrious career in photojournalism and portraiture. Campany notes that Walter Benjamin’s iconic essay about photography “explored similar ideas” to those Freund developed in her research. Despite her innovations, both artistic and scholarly from the 1930s, and declared persona non grata during the McCarthy era, Freund was indeed “entirely absent” in the 1960s when “influential English-language” art historians began to structure their canons and write their catalogues. Even Camera Lucida’s translator neglected to include Barthes’ footnote to Freund’s seminal Photographie et société. It was Freund who described how the Paris Communards of 1871 “willingly allowed themselves to be photographed on the barricades,” were identified by the police after their revolt failed, and summarily executed. “For the first time in history, photography became an informer for the police.” That is to say, evidence, a consumable product, photography’s original sin. Camera as weapon has never been just a metaphor. Erroneously we call the democratization of photography what for Freund and Benjamin was, no pun intended, the end of an aura,2 when the “sphere of tradition” finally dissolved into the vernacular.
Praising Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s geometric image, [162-163] Campany aims to subvert whatever sense of photography he believes we all share. Included as an example of “painting’s confrontation with photography, not only as medium of description, but also as a modern standard of visualization”—remember what Valéry taught us about seeing what photography teaches us to see—Mangold’s picture appears to explore concepts of scale, angle of vision, pattern, and could be a photograph, until Campany shows us how the lines are drawn “at a very human angle,” that is to say, deliberately askew. Forgetting that such distortions are easily reproducible with the appropriate equipment, Campany explains that “Such work does not reproduce well on the printed page,” drawing our attention to the apparently poor quality of its reproduction in a “more perverse, but also instructive” lesson first taught by Sontag. The issue is not reproducibility as much as it is exploitation. “The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects—to fight against boredom,” she wrote. For Campany, vision itself has been colonized, first by photographers who, like photorealist painters, act out their “nerdy masculine obsessions,” then by their cameras. “But abstraction was not the only response that painters could make to the camera image and its colonization of vision.” If Sontag’s camera is a flippant colonizer’s tool shooting How the West was Bored, Campany’s produces photographs that colonize the act of seeing. Their use of the colonial as metaphor is lamentable, given the camera’s long history as tool for lethal oppression—remember the Communards and Freund’s missing footnote in Camera Lucida.3 For conceptual artists, “Nothing was to be taken for granted. All assumptions about art and images were to be questioned.” From the debate the artist emerged victorious, an original transcending its copy. “Her paintings are not images. They are objects – unique, handmade.” What fascinates in the reproduction “asks us to seek out the real thing” which is, of course, invisible. All we have is the picture. Sometimes that’s enough. In an image by Brassaï, Campany finds that Picasso’s “sculpture is as effective in a photograph as it is in real life.” [152] The aura is intact after all.
Or is it? Like postmodern ectoplasm oozing from Dada’s modernist past, Dust Breeding, [154-155] Man Ray’s 1920 “visionary image by a pioneer of photographic art,” has haunted Campany for over thirty years. “Dust Breeding embodies so many of the formal ambiguities and expanded possibilities of what an artwork can be,” Campany wrote two decades ago, bullet pointing the requirements of conceptual art: “In this single photograph there is an exploration of duration, an embrace of chance, spatial uncertainty, confusion of authorship, ambiguity of function, and a blurring of boundaries between media – photography, sculpture, performance.” The reception of the work, also seen as an “anecdotal image, a production shot simply showing” Marcel Duchamp’s work in progress, heralded a heroically conceptualist “period in which artists were exploring new angles, new relations of image to language, and the uncertain status of photography between document and artwork.” It was Krauss, Campany reports in Art and Photography, who first discovered that Dust Breeding “condensed many of the ideas that were central to the vanguard art of the 1970s.” [25] Only in the footnotes we learn that Krauss would not allow her “essay of crucial importance” to be cited because, in academic phraseology, “it cannot be made into an extract.” No matter. a Handful of Dust from the Cosmic to the Domestic, Campany’s penetrating 2017 exhibition and catalogue, will stand for the foreseeable future as the definitive study of the subject, thus Dust Breeding’s inclusion in On Photographs feels like the return of the repressed.
Freund spoke of meeting confused tourists who would remember where they had been only after returning home and seeing their pictures. “In their case, as with millions of others, the photograph had substituted a pseudo-truth for the real world.” What is good for the snapshooter is good for the conceptualist. Realizing that a “degree of abstract expressivity is present in all photographs,” [190] Campany acknowledges another one of photography’s truths—Szarkowski called them “thin slices of fact that, laid together, create fantasy.” [138] Not unlike Photopath, [158-159] Victor Burgin’s “Borgesian image-object that seems to break every rule of photography even if it adheres so strictly to the medium’s oldest aspiration, to substitute itself for the world” with pictures printed and laid out according to the artist’s precise specifications: “so that images are perfectly congruent with their objects.” What we see really is what we get. Almost. “Photopath seems at once the purest kind of photograph and an anti-photograph,” Campany will discover in his 2022 book devoted to the work, and will reach an astonishing conclusion we wish he had foreseen when writing On Photographs, but we’re not spoilers.
At least, not spoilers like John Divola, performing conceptualist éminence grise, whose inventively titled “Untitled” from his 1996 series “as far as I could get (10 seconds)” [244-245] is the artist’s “simplest and most affecting work.” In the desert, his camera on a tripod with its timer set to 10 seconds, Divola trips the shutter, runs “towards the horizon and … shoots himself in the back.” Although Divola did not shoot himself literally—as performance artist Chris Burden did in 1971 when, in a radical rewrite of the pie-in-the-face gag, he directed someone to shoot him with a .22 rifle as he posed for the gallery crowd—Campany romanticizes the nihilistic metaphor. The curator replays the shoot, “trudges back” to the camera with Divola, and waits for the prints, in which “the artist can see the evidence of his lonely auto-humiliation. However fast he runs, however far he gets, the camera will always stop him in his tracks.” This curse of the selfie will become “infinitely detailed mural-size photographs of banal landscapes in which he is the sole figure,” suitable for hedge fund lobbies. “It could easily be a melancholy body of work, were it not for Divola’s endearing sense of the absurd and his disarming knack for getting at complex philosophical ideas about images and human experience.” But how complicated is his comprehension? Being shot in the back while running away is a common occurrence in the United States, where police brutality and political violence are exacerbated by an unabated flood of firearms, as well as encouraged and forgiven by politicians in hock to their oligarchical masters. If, today, it is impossible not to see “Untitled” as a statement of White privilege, this interpretation was to be expected even when Divola created the series. That both artist and critic need this bitter reality check smacks of bad faith.
“All of this leaves photography open to those want to take charge of it, to use it in one way or another,” [8] Campany warns us. Stripped of their agency, photographs are vulnerable to abuse. Taking charge are “photography pictorial conventions” that Campany evades so brilliantly with his selection of images, “and, more importantly, “words. Writing, speech, discourse. … Words do many things for photographs, but in general they are used to oversee and direct them, the way parents supervise wayward children.” Even as the wordsmith infantilizes he anthropomorphizes, and pictures finish his thought for him, “with the potential to exceed the demands imposed on them. And in that excess, photographs work upon us in ways we still barely comprehend.” And we thought we were in charge. It’s now or never. “Have your way with images, or they will have their way with you.” [104]
Campany’s way with photographs is to pretend we have no way at all. Because “photography masks its madness,” [8] his insanity defense obscures “a potential of painting” that happens also to be one of photography’s essential truths: “any figurative resemblance is conjured as an illusion.” [98-99] Paraphrasing a prosaic psychoanalytic theory that “colour often threatens to untether itself from the figuration to become its own value, and its own source of visual pleasure,” Campany seems surprised that a painter’s brushstrokes “really are abstract” yet has difficulty visualizing such abstractions in a photograph, still trapped between art and document, and indifferent to photographic technologies.4 “In observational photography, colour has its origin in coloured things in the world. A pink cake is a pink cake. Nevertheless,” Campany detects about Saul Leiter, who shot expired film because it was inexpensive and unpredictable, “it feels as if he could be experiencing the colour abstractly, responding to it almost independently of the subject matter.” Speculating about the artist’s intention as “he moved the viewfinder around the scene,” Campany loses the plot. In consonance with his abstract expressionist sensibilities, color is Leiter’s subject. The narrative of a young person writing a letter while sitting at a table of a famous Parisian sidewalk café (Les Deux Magots, across the street from Café de Flore), feels like a fashion editorial requirement that Leiter satisfied with nostalgia. The date may be 1959; Leiter’s Paris is entre-deux-guerres, his love for masses of color determining his point of focus. “Perhaps a colour arrangement caught his eye,” Campany concludes, leaping from psychoanalytic speculation to cliché. “We can never know for sure. Photography has a way of covering its tracks.” Like an runaway? Resemblance is illusion, the referent invisible in plain sight.
“Similarly,” Campany contends, “On Photographs cannot explain the various images it presents, although it is an account of how they can slip away from explanation and keep us interested. As such, it is a book concerned less with what we think about photographs than with how we think about them;” he emphasizes, “and less with photographers’ intentions than with what happens when we look.” [9] What happens when we look? Campany’s question recalls an idea Sontag stressed at the end of Against Interpretation, in which the role of art is one with its criticism: to enhance reality. “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Criticism, like poems and photographs, should not mean but be. Sontag was developing an idea expressed twenty years earlier by Clement Greenberg. “I do not wish to be understood,” he admonished sniffily, “as saying that a more enlightened connoisseurship will hold that what, as distinct from how, Rembrandt painted is an indifferent matter.” If meaning is of greater interest to those who concern themselves with empirical questions, such queries are rendered less significant in Campany’s search for method, in keeping with principles of postmodern analysis. “The insistent but obscure sense of purpose, the basic motif, along with the interest in vision, appearance, surface and reproduction, are among art’s implacable concerns.” [162] An artist’s intention becomes compelling only when it appropriates metaphors for art writ large. What matters more than the question is the history of its premise.
Despite his analytical ambitions, the curator often surrenders to myopic exaltation. In The Americans, “perhaps the single most influential book by a photographer” and filled with “willfully subjective” images, Robert Frank created “highly sophisticated redefinitions of the nation’s iconography.” [248-249] Seeing with the photographer’s eyes, Campany concludes “All Frank could see was disappointment, alienation, and systemic racism.” Is that all? The curator defangs Jim Crow when he mentions one of Frank’s most famous photographs, shot in 1955 New Orleans, a year before segregation was declared unconstitutional on buses: “Passengers on a trolleybus arrange themselves by race” as if it were normal— not enforced— social practice that Black passengers segregate themselves behind the section reserved for Whites. “Modern America is a restart, an experiment,” Campany imitates political pundits, “and its keenest observers, in photography, film, painting, literature, and theatre, have been monitors of the experiment.” In a bizarre omission, On Photographs, like Looking at Photographs, excludes Gordon Parks, the 20th century’s single most important artist in any medium to monitor, as well as play an active role in, the American experiment. This curatorial failing is all the more disconcerting, given that the curator knows Parks was also “an accomplished writer—and later a painter, musician, and filmmaker—who moved with enviable ease between his talents.” Without irony he recalls the evolution of The Americans into “something of a counter cultural monument. Museums and collectors were beginning to want prints” commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, worthy of the photographer’s full measure of devotion. “After all, Frank had given his photography and the country his fullest attention … his achievement could not be surpassed.” Then 60s hippies became 80s hedge funders and pushed up vintage print prices in pace with their tax breaks. How far we have evolved since Szarkowski used a metaphor, later popularized by Sontag, to describe Frank’s “new style: a weapon that was as clean and functional and American as a double-bitted ax.” [176]
The last photograph in the collection sends us back to the first. Just as Campany acclaims Niépce’s staggering foreknowledge of art history’s postmodern “complications,” he repeats his insanity plea in his esteem for William Henry Fox Talbot’s visual and visionary sagacity. The 19th century photography pioneer “grasped that what photographs do and mean is complicated. With great foresight he understood the madness of his invention: the overwhelming detail, the world beyond intention, and the way photographs work upon our conscious and unconscious thought.” [9] Thus On Photographs ends in an originalist dream where the curator is on a first-name basis with Talbot, clairvoyant and oracle. “William presented his images on pages, on walls and in vitrines, and knew that, in time, there would be no place they did not belong. Photography could be art and document and everything in between, and every area of human activity would be touched by it, including writing. It was all there at the beginning.” [250] Indeed it was. We know for fact that Talbot was the first photographer to invite Pollyanna into the darkroom to see what develops. We also heard him laughing about the narrative potential photography afforded the curious. “Alas! that this speculation is somewhat too refined to be introduced with effect into a modern novel or romance; for what a dénouement we should have, if we could suppose the secrets of the darkened chamber to be revealed by the testimony of the imprinted paper.” Imagining Talbot as Father Time overshadowing our melancholic postmodernity, is Campany a gullible realist, or a sophisticated nihilist?
Both, probably.
There are gorgeous moments in Campany’s prose.
As theoretically musclebound as Art and Photography reads today, such readings usually occur in flabby hindsight. The issues Campany confronted twenty years ago have not been resolved. Whenever the curator pulls us into postmodernized quicksand, there’s a footnote with which he hopes to save his argument in a scholarly tradition dating back to the Renaissance. A generation later, no doubt to “resist the slings and arrows of outrageous editors” and other bottomline feeders, Campany wrote On Photographs for a captive audience uninterested in footnotes, destined for dumbed-down introductory photography classes, and rightsized for student backpacks.
What do we want from photography? Not to worry. On Photographs brings the vanilla.5 Despite its marketing to a generalized readership, just who is measuring out the spice is not altogether apparent. Does the flavor emanate from a collective unconscious, both informed by and repressed in critical language, as an artifact of White Western bourgeois, neoliberal late capitalist ideology? Without a doubt. It’s the party line of those who experiment with, in Ghirri’s lovely phrase, “the subtle formal alchemy of postmodernism.” If it is language which speaks, not the author, as Barthes insisted, what’s Campany’s teaching us? About photographers the text is unambiguous, spilling out from between the lines. Abandoning postmodernist methodologies, it underestimates, if not trivializes, the artistry of photographers like Helen Levitt and Vivian Maier, glorifies, if not sanctifies, conceptualists like Robert Cumming and John Divola, and reincarnates, if not zombifies, photography’s inventors Nicéphore Niépce and William Henry Fox Talbot. The misreadings of Leiter and Avedon sacrifice history to exhausting psychoanalytic platitudes. With these symbols of Campany’s unabashed passion for photography, do his anthropomorphic metaphors breathe life into the medium? Certainly. To remove the text from On Photographs is to rewrite the book as a graphic novel. Perhaps the curator hopes we will read it as fiction, in which his writing is but one voice among many we will hear, if we pay attention, when the photographs start talking.
If it is only language that speaks, it must not be but mean. Is Sontag’s wish for criticism to make art and life “more rather than less real to us” just a fool’s errand? Are we hoist with our own petard? The title page of On Photographs offers an odd picture by surrealist Maurice Tabard depicting a wide open human eye collaged over and gazing left across a vacant flophouse room. A cynical symbol of photography to be sure, surrealistic melancholy, memory hollowed out. A more improbably realistic interpretation has us looking back to the ancients, when empty rooms were functions of a memory palace, or method of loci, a series of mnemonic systems and visualization techniques practiced from Antiquity until the Enlightenment. With the invention of photography, the memory arts, already forgotten, vanished as photographs began to supersede memories. It’s a cautionary tale.
“For too long, there had been this received notion that Levitt’s photographs are lyrical and poetic, words that are too often applied lazily to the work of female photographers,” curator Walter Moser told photography critic Sean O’Hagan. “The truth is that Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.”
“‘Photography’s claim to be an art was raised precisely by those who were turning photography into a business.’ In other words,” Benjamin explained after quoting Freund’s dissertation, “photography’s claim to be an art is contemporaneous with its emergence as a commodity” for society at large. In our postmodern era, when every aspect of our lives is input for commercial purposes known and unknown into an anonymous data archive, Benjamin’s and Freund’s revolutionary ideas sound all the more curious. “This is consistent with the influence which photography, as a technique of reproduction, had on art itself. It isolated art from the patron, delivering it up to the anonymous market and its demand.” In italics Benjamin defines art’s “sphere of tradition” or aura: “It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.” Everybody gets a shot at both the what and the how of photography. Social media’s raison d’être. Benjamin’s wearing a caustic smile as he rolls over in his grave.
Welcome additions to Campany’s “Further Reading” list will be Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence and Mark Sealy’s Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time and Photography: Race, Rights and Representation.
Document versus art debates never end. In 1946 Clement Greenberg acknowledged the conflict: “Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as work of art as well. But we do have evidence that the two functions are compatible.” No doubt Campany, a prolific curator of Walker Evans’ photography, noted Greenberg’s praise of Evans in contrast to his criticism of Edward Weston for “artiness rather than art. … Evans is an artist above all because of his original grasp of the anecdote. … photography is closer today to literature than it is to the other graphic arts. … The final moral is: let photography be literary.” Greenberg criticized Weston for concentrating “too much of his interest on his medium,” an excessive attention to process he forgave the painter, because with a brush the painter “puts the feeling he withholds from the object into his treatment of it,” whereas Weston’s glass-eyed “camera … defines everything in the same way and an excess of detailed definition ends by making everything look as though it were made of the same substance, no matter how varied the surfaces.” Which, of course, it was. The substance is the photograph, not the referent it depicts. Ceci n’est pas une pipe, seriously. One of those rare moments in art history when the still life is substituted for the bowl of cherries. As a postmodernist, Campany understands that Weston’s obsessive attention to uniquely photographic qualities, whether or not at the expense of visual metaphor or narrative, was his response to photography’s ontological confusion between subjective art and objective document. In a Weston photograph, subjectivity and objectivity are woven one within another like the stalk of a flowering plant, an organic synthesis we might dissolve, given, as Campany explained in Art and Photography, “the exoticism and easy enigma that can be generated by recycling just about any photograph out of context.” [22] Amen to that, even if generating the unusual from banality is a raison d’être of Western art since the Renaissance. Look at all the oddball pictures in old books everywhere, and a few in On Photographs.
The metaphor has a distinguished history. Just the other day, “Sex with you is so… vanilla,” Amy told her husband George in a recent episode of Beef, an inventive Korean-American drama. Not the spice we crave during any intercourse without ice cream. Looking back to the late 1940s, “One night we were playing in Amarillo, Texas, and the band was playing ‘Stardust,’” jazz music innovator Ornette Coleman recounted to Arthur Taylor. “They let me play a solo. I got up, and for the first time in my life, I played what I felt and heard without thinking about changes or anything. And I got fired. They dumped me. The guy kept hollering: ‘Give ‘em vanilla, give ’em vanilla, give ’em vanilla.’” Some ten years earlier the metaphor had appeared during the 1937 film, Stand-In. Atterbury Dodd, an idealistic young Wall Street banker, goes to Hollywood to save an ailing movie studio and falls in love with Lester Plum, its jaded star’s stand-in. While the comedy is the protagonist’s journey from capitalist to socialist, what’s significant for us is the metaphor with which the stand-in describes herself, once a child star and in adulthood demoted to anonymous labor. “I’m now dishing raspberry and John Public still likes vanilla.” The moral of the story? Give them the saccharine they think they want. Why? “That’s the picture business.”