“Facts of Matter: On the Malleability of Photographic Form” is an essay by Heather A. Diack, art historian at the University of Miami, written for the exhibition Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed, presented at the Florida Atlantic University galleries. The exhibition gathered contemporary artists who stretch the boundaries of photography’s materiality, and the essay reflects on what their work tells us about the medium.
Absence, presence and the digital
Diack starts from a long tradition. In the nineteenth century photographs were often described as ghostly, as a way of catching spirits or holding on to what was vanishing. In the twentieth century the spread of cameras grounded photography in everyday reality. The digital age, she argues, revived the old myth of photography’s separation from the real, while making images more ubiquitous than ever. The supposed disappearance of material form produced a longing for analogue processes – a desire that Rosalind Krauss had already analysed in “Reinventing the Medium” (1999).
Matter is always at stake
Diack approaches the question differently. She acknowledges that a return to old techniques can be nostalgic or reactionary, but she argues that “matter” has always been at stake in photography, digital or not. Even the most abstract or digitally produced images remain grounded in, and of, the world. Taking her cue from the philosopher Mark C. Taylor’s Altarity, the source of the exhibition title, she reads photographic processes as a negotiation between self and other, a coming together and a tearing apart of the image.
Artists discussed
The essay engages with works by artists who use photography as both medium and subject, among them Ellen Carey, Marco Breuer, Barbara Kasten, Hannah Whitaker, Matthew Porter, Penelope Umbrico, Noriko Furunishi, Ilit Azoulay, Jibade-Khalil Huffman and John Mann. It also draws on earlier experiments by László Moholy-Nagy, James Welling and Robert Heinecken, and on the theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, Lyle Rexer and Geoffrey Batchen.
Why read it
The essay is a concise introduction to one of the strongest tendencies in recent photography: cameraless images, photograms, chemigrams and constructed pictures. It corresponds to the “Physical and Material” chapter of Charlotte Cotton’s survey and offers a philosophical frame for it.
Key ideas
Three ideas stand out. First, abstraction in photography is not a modern break with the real but another way of showing the photographic process itself. Second, the opposition between analogue and digital is less decisive than it seems, since both involve material operations on light, surfaces and data. Third, artists who fold, cut, scan, rephotograph or chemically alter images make visible the “malleability” of photographic form, and in doing so they question the subject who looks at the image as much as the image itself. The essay opens with a line from Lyle Rexer: the abstract photograph signifies not the given but the possible.
Reference
Heather A. Diack, “Facts of Matter: On the Malleability of Photographic Form”, in the catalogue of the exhibition Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed, Florida Atlantic University, 2015. The essay is protected by copyright; consult the exhibition catalogue.