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Photography 3.0: The End of Photography as We Knew It

By Taco Hidde Bakker

Published in Unseen Magazine #1 (Autumn 2014), pp. 21-24.

The World Wide Web is like a daily photo fair. Those who wish to expose themselves to an abundance of photographs can do so day-to-day, provided they have the tools to connect with this electronic universe. But the photographs encountered here are often, if not always, defined by the nature of reproduction: the possibility of endless modification, appropriation, copying and the ease of sharing. What happens to authorship and the singularity of the photographic image in this hyper-mediated world in which old categories have started to slide into each other? By means of a thought experiment, I will roughly divide photography’s history into three timeframes. There is a large overlap between them of course, as with the ascent of new modes the older ones stay alive even though their wider importance diminishes. In the era of Photography 1.0 – from the official announcement of photography by the French government in 1839 until 1930 –, the year the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York began collecting photography, most photographers used the camera without complication. They believed in the power of photographic representation and reproduction without bothering too much whether their cameras produced highbrow art or not. The period of Photography 2.0 – 1930 until 1990 –, the year of the first commercial release of Photoshop, brought forth emancipated photographers. Their work was art. They exhibited in galleries and museums and sold work, individually framed, in series, as books or installations. Contrary to the inherent nature of photography as a cheap means of reproduction, photographer 2.0 claimed authorship and originality, vouched for by the museum and the art critic. The work, in limited editions or unique pieces, transcended borders between the two-dimensionality of print and the three-dimensionality of sculpture and installation pieces.

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In 1970, Peter Bunnell organised a revolutionary exhibition at MoMA, simply titled Photography into Sculpture, in what could be seen as one of the first major moves from Photography 2.0 towards 3.0. The exhibition presented a selection of artworks at the intersection of photography and sculpture. It was meant as an inquiry into the possibilities of photography’s material and spatial complexities.

Robert Heinecken Figure in Six Sections, 1965. Gelatin silver prints on wood blocks. Collection Kathe Heinecken. Courtesy Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago.

One of the participants, Robert Heinecken, called himself a ‘para- photographer’. He saw his work as standing ‘beside’ or ‘beyond’ traditional notions of photography as a flat, representational medium. Heinecken worked as what is now known as a multidisciplinary artist. Photography, video, printmaking, collage and sculpture merged into a new practice. From ‘para’ we move on to ‘trans’, ‘extra’, and perhaps already ‘post- photography’. I’m not sure if the 3.0 stage of photography has yet been reached, but we seem to be speeding towards it. Photographer 3.0 might not even be an apt description. Photographers presenting their work in an art context prefer to call themselves artists, lens-based artists, artists working with photography, and so on. To what extent does the designation ‘artist’ actually still make sense?

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A polymath is equally at home in a myriad of ‘disciplines’. Why even bother to separate them theoretically? Photography 3.0 will be fluid, transcendental, meta: uniting the material inseparably together with the performative. How, then, does photography 3.0 fit into the art market? Should it be exchanged by means of financial transactions or should it solely exist to be witnessed? Does performative, web-based or sculptural photography not first and foremost provide an experience, beyond the concepts of exchange value and material ownership? Sometimes a performance is sold as an instruction, specifying under which conditions it can and should be performed. We are moving through, in sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s words, ‘liquid times’, which are marked by chronic uncertainty. Despite the rigidness of the binary paradigm and our trust in science, the realms of analogue and digital are increasingly indistinguishable. Nearly everything can be broken down into ones and zeros and be reanimated again. The question as to what is real and what is virtual will be much harder for the next generations to answer. What does this mean for photography? Does the photographer become a designer and synthesiser of imagery more than a mere taker of snaps? A choreographer of constructed situations? The public ceases to be a passive spectator and becomes participatory. Performances become interactions, (site-specific) interventions and live events. Photography becomes part of temporary works and actions, seldom repeated: scripts, not prints and software, not hardware.

Tom Lovelace, Blue Pomona Stone, © 2013.

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The 2014 edition of the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam features many artists practicing photography in spatial and performative modes, as well as assimilating the medium into a wider artistic practice. Tom Lovelace builds sculptural installations, in which photography is integrated, as well as enacting performances in front of a camera, presenting the resulting photographs as works of art, hung in the same space in which action took place. The duo Cornford & Cross made a series entitled After Image, Total Decollage – a series of sculptural works produced through the obliteration of photographs, which were mounted onto aluminium substrates for conservation purposes. Cornford & Cross’s installations initially were site-specific, but photography has become vital to their practice, particularly in terms of the visibility of their work since not many people witness live events. According to the artist duo, when planning their projects they take into consideration the photographic possibilities and they document the evolution of the work through various staged shots.

Lorenzo Vitturi, Miuccia & Green Stripes (from the series Dalston Anatomy). Courtesy the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery. © 2013.

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Lorenzo Vitturi builds temporary sculptures and organises interventions. It is mostly these resulting photographs that are then spread through exhibitions and books. Vitturi has brought his experience as a set painter for film into his multidisciplinary photography practice. For Vitturi, photography can be used “to set the scenes of thoughts and ideas through the manipulation of space”.

Egon van Herreweghe & Jasper Rigole, exhibition display of Elective Affinities, Ghent, 2012.

Inspired by the unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29) of the highly original German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), Egon van Herreweghe collaborates with other artists on a series of visual correspondences called Elective Affinities. After a first edition with Jasper Rigole, a second edition was made with Lara Dhondt. The setup consists of the installation of a temporary workshop in a public space where they use a photocopier to reproduce images from newspapers and magazines, recombining them intuitively in a game of action and reaction. The live events produce limited editions of the series.

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Paulien Oltheten during a photo-lecture, date unknown.

The work of Paulien Oltheten finds shape in multiple expressions, such as installations for the gallery or museum space, books, videos, slideshows and improvised lectures. Oltheten writes on her website that she balances “on that border between what is (semi) staged and what is natural and what is a moving and what is a still image”. Whatever shape her work takes, she invites the audience to move with her tender and humorous power of observation, mediated by spontaneous editing and a versatile camera-eye. In our ‘liquid times’ photo-artists (or how they should be named in the age of Photography 3.0) engage in processes oscillating between photography, Photoshop, video, written and spoken word, website, multimedia installation, sculpture, painting, embroidering – sometimes integrating multiple disciplines into live actions and performances, which in turn live on by virtue of recording media and the zero-dimensional World Wide Web.