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| Roy Arden
The Dignity of the Photograph Art Press no. 251, November 1999. Jeff Wall and Roy Arden JW: We're going to talk about the photographers we like best – that's Walker Evans, Wols, Atget, Weegee and Heinrich Zille, and maybe August Sander and Robert Frank. It's amazing that we almost agree on who the most interesting photographers have been, at least in the past. RA: I think we should begin with the relationship between vernacular photography and art photography. This discussion was initiated by the text you wrote on my work in 1993 in which you articulated your idea of "the art concept of photojournalism" in relation to Walker Evans. You explored Evans' appropriation of the photojournalistic vernacular in his quest for a modern art photography. The last time we spoke you felt this had to be expanded to include practically all the photographic vernaculars. Evans did run through the gamut of available models: the snapshot, the portrait studio and automat portraits, architectural, forensic, and anthropological photography; he also appropriated news photos for The Crime of Cuba. He never attempted to hide his borrowings either; there are direct references to these vernacular modes in many of his pictures. The photo of the "penny picture display" immediately comes to mind-he also made numerous photographs of portrait studios. Automat photographs could be seen as the paradigm for Evans' subway and street portraits where an immobile camera captures whoever simply happens to come before it. The relationship between the African artefact photos he made for the MOMA and the "common tool photos" is likewise very instructive. He gives us all the clues, but the interesting thing is how he manages to unify it all. JW: I guess the idea of the vernacular is more inclusive than that of photojournalism. I thought the notion of an "art-concept of photojournalism " was maybe more intense, more focused. That idea was that the classic sense of art photography was defined by photographers who wanted their work not to be bound by photojournalism, but still to make some claim to be reportage. But photojournalism was, and is, such a dominant social institution that it seemed that everyone positioned themselves in relation to it. Photojournalism makes use of photography the way it makes use of written language or television or now the Internet. It uses any medium. In that sense, photojournalism has nothing necessary to do with photography. But reportage derives from the medium. Pictures in the vernaculars of photography are acts of reportage that are not codified in advance, not subject to the rhetorics of the institution of journalism. Usefulness Notwithstanding RA: I like the distinction you make between the photograph, being an act of reportage, and the institution of photojournalism . We know how problematic photojournalism is, how it is largely governed by economic interests, and how photographers had to free themselves in various ways from it. It seems that regardless of the revolutionary or progressive rhetoric in which photojournalism was conceived, it is actually in art photography that photography's potential for reportage finds its best or most complete expression. JW: So, it's not in photojournalism that photography expresses itself as a medium best, because photojournalism always uses photography for some aim which doesn't necessarily derive from the nature of photography. It was always the people who splintered off somehow from photojournalism that set in motion what art photography was for 40 or 50 years. RA: The best photographs produced by photojournalists are produced in spite of the photojournalistic institution. The really memorable and famous news photos – the ones that now have the aura of history paintings – are free of the rhetoric of photojournalism. If you think of the film of Kennedy's assassination or the Eddie Adams picture of the Viet Cong officer's execution, they were made in circumstances where time simply did not allow for any rhetorical construction. If they were of less important subjects they would have been rejected in favour of the usual sentimentality. JW: Yeah, o f course, but still. I don't think being free of rhetorical construction is the main issue. Even though I think that a photographer can find himself in such an unexpected situation, such an emergency, that all he can do is shoot away and hope for the best. The results are totally unpredictable, and that unpredictability is something unique to photography. That's the effect of the Eddie Adams pictures – where's the rhetoric? I don't think it is completely absent. At minimum, it might be glimpsed in the way the picture occupies the uncropped rectangle of the frame. Anyway, it's interesting that art photography proves something about the relation between the spontaneous nature of photography, which is what a modernist would be interested in, and its fundamental application to the human world, which is what photojournalism claims to realize. Photojournalism claims that it is the way photographs are of use to humans. Yet, it seems that photography in itself, although invented by people, doesn't necessarily have its legitimation in being of any use to people. It could be treated simply as an aesthetic experience, without use. You sort of have to experience the Eddie Adams photographs aesthetically, through or in, or even by means of the valid claim they make as reportage. RA: This reminds me that Evans' work has only very recently found an adequate or appropriate reception. Only in the past several years have publications appeared that show any understanding of his work that would be compatible with the way he saw it. We know that it was initially often reviled and then later lauded as an example of instrumental "'social photography." I'm thinking here of the various uses to which his FSA pictures have been put. But the aesthetic was discounted or just plain invisible to most. From reading the biographies I gather that this bothered him considerably. Don't you think Evans made the pictures in spite of the context that allowed for their production, in spite of that demand for usefulness? JW: He did make them in spite of his assignments, and the context, but I don't think he was independent of that context. I mean that Evans' "'plain style," his "documentary style" has some of the anti-art attitude of the '20s and '30s. Almost everyone who was connected in any way to avant-garde thinking worked against the "art look" and artiness, and part of that went toward the idea that art needed to be more useful, less autonomous, less bourgeois. The whole movement toward "straight photography" was connected with a reaction to the Salon art of the early years of the century. Evans was never sympathetic to any kind of instrumentalization, but he had to work in a context of instrumentalization and of "concerned photography" because that was the opportunity his time presented him with. I think he was able to make the kind of pictures he made in the '30s because he was inspired by the contradiction itself. The problem-of working directly in the light of social crisis without responding directly to it as a crisis was one that suited him, since he saw himself essentially as a dandy. RA: I think he wanted the photograph to have as much dignity as he afforded the people. If you compare Evans to the other FSA photographers they are content to give the people more dignity than the photograph. JW: My understanding of the "dignity of the photograph" is that the picture is not required to serve so-called human needs, at least not in any predictable way. Even when the photographer is working in a situation marked by need and emergency, like Evans was in Alabama. By distancing himself from the neediness he had to confront, the desperate poverty of the sharecroppers in the process of confronting it he radicalized the documentary style or idea and made it more complicated than it had been. That made the work hard to understand. Thankfully. Prose Poetry in Photography RA: We talked about Evans' ability to unify all of the vernaculars. Its his style that accomplishes this unification . His love of Flaubert and the French Realist novel is well known. Evans said he wished to achieve in photography what his own high standards wouldn't allow him to attempt as a writer. He very consciously strove to construct an equivalent, prose poetry in photography. It had to be Realist and it had to be modern. JW: All those terms – Realist, modern, prose poetry – suggest modernist technical innovation. What do you think of Evans' technique? RA: Evans' technique was initially considered appallingly inartistic. This was within the context of pictorialism and modernist pictorialism in the manner of Edward Weston. It gave credence to the reception of his work as instrumental or "social photography." His work struggled against this kind of characterization for decades; today it is evident that his technique was perfect. JW: What I like is that he was neither for good technique nor bad technique. He was kind of open to the possibility that, under certain conditions, technical perfection wasn't significant, and under other conditions good technique was really essential. I like the fact that he was capable of working both ways at a time when to be considered a serious photographer you needed to be kind of a technical virtuoso. It was easy then – and it is still easy – to have a snobbish attitude against good technique, just as well as against amateurism, But Evans was not a snob, in this regard at least, What was great about him, and also about Wols, for example, was his total personal freedom in relation to technique. It's very telling in this regard that Evans and Ansel Adams disliked each other's work almost instantly, from the early 1930s. RA: Some people think that Wols' technique was lacking. His negatives were always scratched, his lighting was rudimentary. They excuse it because he often worked under rudimentary conditions. I don't accept that it was an environmental, circumstantial thing. If it had been a problem for him, then he wouldn't have done it, he wouldn't have continued, Wols wanted his photographs to come out the way they did. Other photographers have worked under poor conditions. Evans developed and printed in his bathroom for some time. For me, the scratches on Wols' negatives and prints are not intentional in the arty way that it is done today, but they were foreseen and accepted. I've always read this as a poetic device, that Wols understood the negative as a skin or membrane. In French, "pellicule" is also dandruff. He invested the materials of photography with organic, carnal characteristics. In the portraits he lights the skin rather than the person, the scratches on the image remind us of its surface and how the skin of the subject is another film layered underneath and behind that is the negative. Wols was always rhyming manner and making photographic onomatopoeia. JW: "Foreseen and accepted" is good, Wols saw a lot of things coming, and he retreated, tried to evade the fascist reality. We've talked about Wols' secession from the idea of the avant-garde around 1930. Wols makes a lot of surrealist photography and constructivist photography seem somehow glassy. In comparison with Wols, someone like Man Ray was very glazed, protected, coated with glamour. Wols seems to have had a unique kind of confidence, His pictures seem so unprotected. That's where the scratches come in, I think. He totally brushed off the whole "official" element, the official, public side of art. Even Picasso, who I really admire, had the "art armor." Most artists do have it actually. But at the same time, Wols never plays the victim and that is something I like about him. RA: Wols' biggest influences were the Bauhaus and Surrealism. Most of his tropes and motifs derive from these movements which he just missed participating in. He rejects them both, or you could say he critiques them and synthesizes a new personal, vision from them. Bauhaus geometry is rusticated and Surrealism's misogynistic, fragmented feminine body is made whole again, but creaturely. His embrace of the informe is central. If anyone photograph had to stand for his whole practice it would be the image of the construction on the Alvar Aalto stool. It's a kind of mock-monument made of the most ignoble and inconsequential materials stacked on a soiled pedestal. It figures his antithetical relationship both to the Bauhaus and Fascism or any heroic idealism. It predicts almost all of the anti-monumental forms and techniques of art since. It actually looks very much like a Georg Herold or John Miller sculpture. Wols' art is the most interesting precedent for "abject'" art. JW: You've always talked a lot about that "'anti-monument" photo... it's strange how it does kind of predict almost all the later anti-monumental forms and techniques in art . That was always incipient in the art informal that was contemporary with Wols' later work, and it seems like it's really there with Beuys. RA: There is a precedent for Beuys' performance Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare. Wols once had an exhibition and came to the gallery before the opening with his dog. He carried the dog in his arms and explained each picture to it. It was the only appearance he made at the gallery during his show. There are of course the more important formal similarities between these artists' plastic works. We are straying from photography now. What about Heinrich Zille? We wanted to discuss his photographs and I was thinking that his aesthetic is somewhere in between Wols and Evans. There is the problem that Zille didn't see his photographs as finished art products. As with Atget, his work has been recategorized, it has been elevated to the status of art. So it could be another case where this distance from the constraints of what was acceptable beaux-arts photography at that time permitted Zille to make some very good photographs. Impractical in a Practical World JW: Maybe he was hurrying with his photography. You get that feeling from his pictures. Everything seems quick, fresh, sort of ragged-great. He seems to have done it all very easily, quickly and without fuss, He reminds me of Lartigue, when he was a child. The moments they chose, they incidents they wanted to photograph, the motifs were always salient to the emergence of something new, new scenes, new behaviors, I'm thinking of a beautiful Lartigue picture of one of the family's maids tossing a big ball in the air. He sensed the entitlement of servants to pleasure and amusement and free time and leisure. He is a little boy but he notices that the maid likes to play, too, not always to work, and he feels that's important. Anyway, the point is Lartigue had that fluid touch, like Zille. Zille really somehow loosened the grip of any inhibitions on his approach and that led to the incredible beautiful roughness of his pictures. RA: He had a more than adequate subject already developed through his work in caricature: the quotidian life of Berlin, His approach prefigures the snapshot style of someone as recent as Robert Frank. JW: He was one of the first photographers to pay attention to dirt and debris on the sidewalk or on the ground, trash blowing around or being ground away by people's feet or wheels of vehicles, His style doesn't remind me of Atget, but some of his attitudes do, especially since they were exact contemporaries, Atget was more interested in places, Zille more in the people passing through places, inhabiting them, dirtying them, then disappearing from them. Atgel's camera is usually level, but Zille tilts a lot of his pictures, as if they were made while walking. Leveling the camera is a tenet of architectural photography, and so sometimes you think of Atget as an architectural photographer, but he wasn't. RA: Architectural photography is just Atget's point of departure as photojournalism was for Evans. The idea that Atget didn't know that he was making a major work of art is kind of preposterous, I think he was using the notion of architectural photography because it was available, and accepted. The times didn't allow for someone who wanted to make such photographs to consider himself an artist. I'm sure that somewhere inside himself he knew he was making a very important work of art. Certainly there wasn't a great commercial demand for pictures of ragpickers and their hovels, yet it didn't stop him making a plethora of those photos. Unlike Thomas Annan, Atget wasn't commissioned to photograph slum conditions. Today, his "Zoniers" photographs would fit very neatly into accepted fine art categories of "urbanist," "topographic" or "social history" photography. In Atget's time these categories didn't exist. JW: Yes, I think until quite recently, you couldn't be a photographer unless you got engaged in some practical pragmatic purpose for your pictures. If you wanted to be impractical in a practical world you had to be in the center of high art because that was the only place where an impractical picture was acceptable. But, I feel that it was known, or at least sensed, at the very beginning of photography, that photographs were also impractical pictures, that even as they seemed to serve so many purposes they also were just another way of making pictures, as such. At the same time, the idea of usefulness was so dominant that it was experienced as absoluteIy true and so that absolute always had to be worked through. I felt that for a photographer like Atget and for many others it was natural that they should accept the idea that what they were doing was practical in order to give themselves a glimpse of the aesthetic potential still half-hidden in photography. RA: Evans had to negotiate the same sort of survival games. He had to find opportunities where he could be paid for doing something close to what he wanted to do-but then he really did something else. The FSA photo project wasn't created to produce the kind of pictures that Evans made; it was someone like Dorothea Lange who really filled the prescription. Evans eventually earned the privilege and freedom he thought his work deserved when Fortune magazine created a special place for him as a sort of artist in residence. It isn't until Robert Frank's time that you have the arrival of the artist photographer who barely has to negotiate at all and instead is given a Guggenheim Fellowship to make an epic poem about America. This is the history of art photography: because of the binarism of pictorialism vs. document that set the stage for what people could accept as art photography, those who eschewed pictorialism in favor of reportage had to resort to subterfuge in order to make their work. Maybe that is the condition that Dan Graham was trying to create by making photographs as some sort of illustration within a larger conceptual project. He doesn't present them as art photographs that can stand alone until later on. Ed Ruscha also resorts to mock instrumentality in order to generate his photographs of Los Angeles. They are inventing a game that will allow them to make a certain kind of picture. JW: Once the external constraints are gone, like for us, then we don't have to negotiate, we can act directly to make purely impractical, autonomous pictures, and that's accepted as such because photography is now clearly recognized as an art. It is clear that it is over because now if you want to reassume some kind of practical obligation it must be purely subjective. It can't be imposed on you by anybody else; you have to impose it on yourself. You have to develop a commission for yourself. You have to invent the assignment. That is, the invention of the assignment expresses your understanding of the historical evolution of the art form that you are working in. But the problem with that is that we now have a new model which is beyond photojournalism, the art model directly. We're all aware that we're working in this model, in this form, and any reference to any other, earlier, form, any heteronomous form, is a personal gesture, a gesture we're responsible for, artistically. RA: Today the operative model for all artists is "the project." That is the term that is used and its origin is in the academy, the art school. In art school you are assigned projects at first and then you are later expected to be able to assign yourself projects. When you have mastered the art of assigning yourself projects and completing them according to the standards of the art world – you are graduated. It sounds extremely dreary. The art schools have institutionalized the existential approach to art. The avant-garde won the battle for control of the academy sometime in the 60s, and that is the present model. JW: One assumes an obligation freely and subjectively in order to find out what it is that we are now obligated to do, since neither God nor any institution will obligate you in that way. Maybe it is just a formalization of something that emerged out of the collapse of the external institutional obligations of the photographer. And that collapse has been institutionalized in, or as, art school. Art school is very much where art comes from, and determines much of how art is made and what art is made. Everything is based on art school now. Most current and recent art is an expression of having been in art school. RA: Perhaps we should discuss Weegee now. Why is he an important artist and also probably the greatest photojournalist of all time? JW: I have my doubts about Weegee. I'm impressed but I have my doubts the way I don't about the others. Sometimes I wish he'd put away his flash once in a while. I am impressed by Weegee's confidence that he was making serious art at the same time that he managed to more than fulfill the criteria of photojournalism. Weegee always knew that his work deserved to be exhibited in the art museum. There is a remarkable page in Naked City, it reproduces an exposed sheet of 4 x 5 film with the Kodak marking and notch code visible. Otherwise it's a black monochrome. The caption states that it is a picture of Greenwich Village, "because nothing ever happens there." It goes on to ridicule the artists as frustrated bohemian poseurs, It's his critique of art. He was quite bitter about the hierarchy of art that positioned him at the bottom. Of course, Weegee prevailed. Today his work's legitimacy as art is unquestioned. His talent was for the human figure. When I look at Weegee's pictures I often think of Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Weegee depicts the human figure very boldly; they are usually from head to toe – the whole person. I want to avoid cliches about the "tragic drama of human existence" but that is what Weegee is all about. I'm sure he knew there was something vulgar about the flash, but it was the only way to make the pictures and he just worked through it. JW: Yes, true, the flash in his work is very voluptuous even when it is mounted, as usually it is, front on. The only thing about Weegee that makes me wonder is that I think that, unlike any of the others, there is something permanently adolescent about him. That is partly one of the things that made him very strong, very bold; he's not hesitant. But I think it also may have harmed his work, because sometimes you have the feeling that whole ranges of emotion just passed him right by. He couldn't recognize them, couldn't picture them. His range is limited, and it isn't just his closeness to actual photojournalism that limited him, it's him. The Book, Real and Symbolic RA: Yet Weegee does express the prevailing sentiment or Zeitgeist of 1940s New York. That brutal sensibility is reflected in the gangster and noir films. This was when boxing was the most popular sport. I hear James Cagney's voice in Weegee's pictures. It is the effect that the Great Depression had on the whole country; everyone had been "beaten up" by the experience. JW: I don't think I agree. I still think there was a whole world of moods that existed in New York in the '40s and '50s and Weegee simply had no interest in them. For example, there are so few serene moments in his work, no brooding, little compassion or peace. If you think of the whole work of one of the others as if it were a single long story, it would take you many places, many different places. That happens with Weegee, but to a much lesser extent. With him it's noisy, it's immediate, it's raucous, it's violent, it's hilarious. It is really full-bodied and baroque, and great, but there are zones of the world that he never touched. RA: Yes, but he sure helped to blow away the last traces of pictorialism and was a major inspiration for the New York School. Weegee is from the "school of hard knocks" and I've always had a soft spot for that kind of thing. JW: But I think he would've been better if, for example, along with say the guy gunned down in the street, the people in hysterics at a fire, and all those other things, if maybe he had done something as calm and sure and art press 251 photography even elderly as Evans looking at that sharecropper's bed. I think what you say is totally right and my only critique of him is that for whatever reason his world is a little bit small and maybe the reason has to do with the fact that he was closer to real photojournalism, for obvious reasons, than anybody else. Not to mention it was virulent tabloid journalism. No other significant photographer had to practice photojournalism the way Weegee had to – or thought he had to. RA: So what about Robert Frank? Frank owes a lot to Weegee. JW: Frank is someone who drifted off into spaces that Weegee wouldn't or couldn't. I've always thought of Frank's The Americans as one of the two best photographic books. The other, the very best to my mind, is American Photographs. That's partly because Evans made the pictures in different formats. I know that sounds really technical-fetishy, but I think that it shows the entire gamut of ways of practicing photography. There is a combination of different formats and ways of photographing – 8 x 10s, 35 mm – articulated together. The whole mandala of what photography is has been put together in one statement. It seems to me to be both the perfect book of photographs, and the final one. RA: The Americans is exceptional for its cinematic kind of flow or continuity. Frank focused on narrative, on human drama. JW: Evans' book wasn't cinematic. I don't think it wanted to be. It is photographic, really photographic whereas Frank's has the one flaw, if you want to think of it as a flaw. This is that Frank wanted his book to be like something else, like a film. Evans didn't really want that, he wanted it to be just precisely what it was. And it is. Frank's book is cinematic and Evans' book is photographic, and photographic is better, because it is book of photographs and it needn't imitate cinema. For that reason it seems more perfectly realized. The cinematic seems to be a metaphor structuring The Americans. That created a slight flaw, a slight give in the rigor of the way it was thought of and done. If you are making a book of photographs it is not a film and it needn't be metaphorized as one. But, on the other hand, these two books as a pair are so perfect that I believe there is no real point in making books of photographs anymore. Evans both founded the notion of the book of photographs and closed it. It has never been followed by anything that comes close to it. I think American Photographs ends what Mallarme began. Mallarme's idea of symbolism is that everything was destined to end in a book. Everything was destined to be expressed in something called a book and this book would have been his total expression. It was an impossibility, but in being that it is an artistic model. I think American Photographs is, as a book, the end of symbolism; it ends the idea that the whole world can be expressed in the form of a book. Art Press no. 251, November 1999. Text: © Roy Arden. All rights reserved.
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