silver is better than gold: an exploration of what can make photography art

7/28/2019 Silver is Better Than Gold: An exploration of what can make photography Art

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Silver is better than Gold:

-An exploration of what can make photography Art-

joshua brancheau


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This book and this image are both dedicated to Henri Cartier Bresson,May the artistic life forever be a quest to capture that decisive moment in our work and in our hearts.

Capturing the Moment, Fall 2000

Silver Gelatin Print, 20 x 16


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Mundus est fabula

-Ren Descartes

I n h i s 1968 e s s a y U n d e r s t a n d i n g a

Photograph, John Berger makes an intriguingly

simple claim. Photographs, he suggests,

bear witness to a human choice being

exercised in a given situation. A photograph is

a result of the photographers decision that i t

is worth recording that this particular event or

this particular object has been seen.1

The very precise terms that Berger uses here

strike me as propos. For Berger, the decision that

lies behind every photograph behind Joshua

Brancheaus photographs, for example is not that

some particular event or some particular object is

worth recording. Rather, the decision is that it is

worth recording that some particular event or some

particular object has been seen and has been seen in

this particular way. A few lines further on, Berger

offers the following gloss on what he takes to be the

message that every photograph is: I have decided

that seeing this is worth recording.2 I would prefer

to say although perhaps it amounts to much the

same thing I have decided that this seeing is worth

recording.I have decided that this seeing is worth

recording. Such is, I want to suggest, the utterance

that every photograph is. What matters about every

photograph, what makes it the specific photograph

that it is and not some other photograph is not

the event or the object that it seems to report or

record; rather, what matters, what makes it the

specific photograph that it is, is the specificity of the

seeing itself.

Two photographs, taken at one and the same

time and of one and the same event two images of

1 Understanding a Photograph in John Berger, Selected Essays, edited by Geoff Dyer(New York: Vintage International, 2001), 216.

2 Cf. ibid..

one and the same 1/125 of a second, of one and the

same 1/60 of a second will only ever differ in the

manner of their seeing. The difference between

them is a difference ofhow and not ofwhat. And it

is this difference in the manner of their seeing that

allows me but not you to say of the one but not

of the other that this is what I saw; it is this

difference in the manner of their seeing that allows

you but not me to say of the other but not of

the one that this is what you saw. What separates

one from the other, in other words, what separates

one photograph from the next, is the seeing itself,

the seeing that each photograph is. This and nothing

more. If the photograph were really a matter of its

object, how could we distinguish between one

photograph and the next?

In this sense, then, the photograph is never

ofits object. Rather, the photograph is only ever of

its seeing. True, the photograph does represent

something. Something is always there, in silver

gelatin or in ink. But what is there what, for want

of a better term, we might call the image or the

picture, the referent, i f you l ike , in o rder to

distinguish it from its reference what is there is

there only as the mark or the trace of a particularway of seeing. And it is precisely this that Joshua

Brancheaus photographs make us see.

Consider the Where the Wild Things Are

series. Here, a sequence of meticulously constructed

city scenes are thrown into comic relief by the digital

addition of wild animals bears, whales, a moose. In

every case, Brancheau makes no real attempt to hide

the fact that the images have been manipulated. The

animals are very precisely not seamlessly blended

with their new environment. Indeed, the viewer is

taken to have grasped the artificial nature of the

images, taken to know that the image has been

constructed and to be comfortable with knowing


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precisely what elements are present, to use

Barthes term, and which are not.3 In a rather

straightforward sense, therefore, the images reflect

technically what is happeningthematically.

Something rather different and rather

more interesting happens, though, when the series is

seen in the light of Capturing the Moment, the

work that introduces this volume and that,

presumably, therefore, explains it. Here, too, a city

scene is punctured by the presence of something

wild, in this instance a bird, caught very precisely in

the geometrical centre of the photograph. In terms

of content alone, therefore in terms ofobject, if you

like Capturing the Moment appears very much of

a piece with the later series of Wild Things. And

yet, unlike the later animals, the bird in the centre

of Capturing the Moment is intended as something

that is actually there. Unlike the later photographs,

in which Brancheau very clearly mediates between

the viewer of the photograph and the scene that was

actually there before him, Capturing the Moment

is immediately given. The moment here is captured

and not constructed.4

But is that really the case? Seeing the first

piece in the light of the series might cause us to

wonder. Seeing the first piece in the light of the

series might, in fact, lead us to think about the

extent to which Capturing the Moment does, in

fact, capture the moment. Nothing, after all, tells us

that this image, too, is not the result of digital

manipulation. If bears can be set down on a London

street, why not birds in a park in Krakow? Indeed,

Brancheau seems almost to encourage these sorts of

worries with closing line of this volume: The irony,

he writes, is that this whole thing, this book, was

crafted on a computer, no silver gelatin at all. Even

if we assume that this is not the case, that the bird

is, in fact, there, what entitles us to say that this

3 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980) 364 The fact th at the setti ng for Capturing the Moment is more natural and less

artificial as it were the city scene in question is a park and not a main street seemsto reinforce this sense of immediacy.

image is any less constructed or any more captured

than the later ones?

What Brancheau seems to be inviting us to

ponder both here and with the striking images of

the Experience Auschwitz series is this: the

photograph does not record some particular event or

some particular object; rather, it records records

precisely by being the manner in which some

particular event or some particular object has been

seen. As such, the photograph is tautological,

although not in the sense that Barthes assumed.5

For Barthes, every photograph involves a certain

voici, a certain voil that it cannot escape: a pipe,

here, is always and intractably a pipe Its as if the

photograph always carries its reference along with

it.6 F o r B r a n c h e a u a n d t h i s i s w h a t h i s

photographs are about the photograph is

tautological insofar as it is the seeing that it records.

Simon Sparks

5 Cf. Barthes, La chambre claire 26 Ibid..


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Hello and Welcome!

Before you lies an exploration of what makes photography art. I have dubbed this little project, Silver is

better than Gold, because the power of silver nitrate salts to capture photo reality makes photography the

ultimate art form, and silver the ultimate metal. By exploring what I see in photography, I wish to pay

homage to this great metal and the relatively new tradition that has brought photography to the threshold

of today. A wide-angle lens can capture more than the eye can see, a narrow depth of field can force a

point of introspection. Photography has the ability to frame a personal perspective for the rest of the

world to see, and force us to look at things we might not see everyday.

The world we live in and experience in our waking lives is a giant living sculpture. The photo artist

utilizes the perspective of a lens in order to capture intimate parts of this world of experience. The

technological advances that have brought us photography have enabled the world to create exact

replications of the objects we experience in the world.

For centuries the goal of European art was to master realism, but with the advent of photography, we get

the advent of impressionism, cubism, and postmodernism. Art just has not been the same since the rise

of photography. Yet, people are still unwilling to accept photography as art. What is art? What could

possibly make photography art?? Lets look at some photographs


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Where the Wild Things Are


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going to soho, 2005

digital print, 6x9


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suburban marmot, 2005

digital print, 6x9


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Why does man not see things? He always gets in the way: he conceals things.-Friedrich Nietzsche

Error has made animals into

men; is truth in a position to

make men into animals again?

-Friedrich Nietzsche


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sightseeing london, 2005

digital print, 6x9


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a swim in the park, 2005

silver gelatin print, 10x8


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What distinguished man fromanimals was the human capacity

for symbolic thought, the

capacity which was inseparable

from the development of

language in which words werenot mere signals, but signifiers of

something other than themselves.

Yet the first symbols were

animals. What distinguished men

from animals was born of theirrelationship with them.

-John Berger


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save the whales, 2005

digital prints, 6x9


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We shall see but little way if we require to

understand what we see. How few things can a

man measure with the tape of his understanding!

How many greater things might he be seeing in

the meanwhile!

-Henry David Thoreau


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rook takes pawn, 2005digital print, 6x9


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stuck in traffic, 2005

digital print, 6x9


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In Where the Wild Things Are I wanted to question mans place in nature. Humans reside in

fabricated environments, providing shelter and comfort to those who can afford to pay for it. We can

be so caught up in the environment we have built for ourselves, that we lose sight of the creatures

and the environment that our constructions have displaced. Man arose out of nature and at some

point lost contact with it. We became so absorbed in our ability to use our minds to overcome nature

that we placed ourselves higher than it. Nature has continually tried to contact man, but the

predominant perspective of man fears nature and will do anything to stop it from invadinginto mans

space. Man is in conflict with nature. In this body of work I have tried to skew the lines between

mans environment and nature. What if we eliminated the natural world, and the surface of the earth

was one giant cityscape?? Would the only place to see wild animals be the zoo?? Would whales

cross Times Square?? In eliminating the landscape of nature, would we eliminate all of its creatures

too?? Where are the Wild Things??


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To speak truly, few adult

persons can see nature. Mostpersons do not see the sun.

At least they have a very

superficial seeing. The sun

illuminates only the eye of

the man, but shines into theeye and the heart of the child.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson


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What could possibly make photography art? When asked what is art,Pablo Picasso responded what is not. If I were asked who is an artist, I would respond who is not.We all make art in out own unique ways. Imagination and creation are a few of the things that have

set man above the rest of the animals, and art is some sort of refined aesthetic creation. We are all

creative in our own unique ways. Art is about creation. Art making is a special way of connectingwith the mind in order to bring forward some of our thoughts, manifest dreams into realities. The

main argument against photography as an art is that photographs capture reality they do not create it.Anyone who has actively thought about taking a photograph knows that taking pictures is notnecessarily a passive capturing process. A photographer can play a very active role in the process of

capturing his or her view of reality. Ansel Adams considered his photographs to be surreal. Have

you ever seen a sky as dramatic as the sky in an Ansel Adams photograph? Adams could visualizethe sky exactly the way he wanted to capture it. Henri Cartier Bresson coined the phrase the

decisive moment. He captured images which held emotions and events in timeless space, which we

can all respond to. Paul Weston gave us a new way of seeing peppers. Through the activephotographers lens there are unlimited worlds to be explored. From constructed landscapes out of

torn bits of paper to the elaborate fabricated worlds of Shauna and Robert Parke Harrison, the cameraand its trusty piece of silver gelatin film act as an interpreter for the vision of any reality that can beseen. Art is a form of communication. We express ourselves, or we express our agenda. In this

volume I have included three forms of photographic art to speculate. The first kind being the sort

where multiple images are brought together into single frames in the montage techniques of JerryUlesmann. The second kind is documentary photography. Documentary photography is inherently

more about capturing what is there rather than manipulating it,. Yet through the use of a camera

documentary photographers can share their perspective and tell their stories. The third type is the

capturing of constructed environments and camera manipulations which can be created in the studioor wherever your art may draw you. I believe there is art in all three types of photography to varying

degrees. The photo-making process is about taking the world we see inside of our heads and sharing

it with the rest of the world. I believe all three types operate in this fashion.


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He does not create his object in reality as does the

painter, but he creates, before the camera begins to

function, the irrevocably ultimate aesthetic form.

He carries the notion of the shape of an object in

himself and he takes the object destined for that

form, giving it a certain position or moving it into

a certain situation of light, in a certain relation tospace.... The photographers artistic performance

is thus displayed in pre-photographic and in post-

photographic action; in the preparation for real

photographic action and in the reproduction of the

photograph. The painter recreates his object from

beginning to end ... through his activity, through

his painting. The photographer, it is true, changeshis object, too, by his photographic action ... he

gives the convincing shape, most clearly adequate

to his perception, before, and he fixes this shape in

a mechanistic way.... Whereas the painter remains

creative from first to last, the creative activity of

the photographer is confined and limited; whereas

the artistic action of the painter is not interrupted,

the artistic action of the photographer breaks off inthe moment in which the apparatus is to fix and

make visible its effect.

-Heinrich Schwarz


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Experience Auschwitz


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Lies, Fall 2000



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Arbeit Macht Frei loosely translates into work makes you freeIn the wrought iron over the gate of Auschwitz,this promise for salvation hangs in iry dissonance with the reality of what its gates enfold


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Pain, Fall 2000



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Confinement, Fall 2000



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What an age experiences as evil is usually

an untimely reverberation echoing what was

previously experienced as goodthe

atavism of an older ideal.-Friedrich Nietzsche


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Silenced Struggles, Fall 2000



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Too Many Lost Soles, Fall 2000



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Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the

way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into

the dark rooms of our souls.

-Ingmar Bergman


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A Failed Cover-Up, Fall 2000

c-print, 15x11


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InExperience AuschwitzI wanted to share an intense experience. Spending a day on the

grounds of Auschwitz and Birkenau is one that will never be forgotten. I would like to

go back and make an entire book out of imagery from these sights. The feeling of

walking through this nightmare for so many people was indescribable. Spending a day

on the sight where hundreds of thousands of people were worked to death or killed leavesquite a knot in ones stomach

Hearing about something a hundred

times is not as good as seeing it once.

-Chinese Proverb


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Simone de Beauvoirwrote that in the process of making a work of art,

the lack of being returns to the positive.

Her reference to an art works lack of being is a reference to the

thought of the artwork within the artists head. Previous to its

completion, the artwork exists as a thought and lacks being. It is

only through the process of making works of art that artists are able

to make their thoughts into positive realities


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A Legacy of Dead White Men


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The Patriarch, Fall 2004



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We have met the enemy and he is us.

-Pogo


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King of Diamonds, Fall 2004

digital print, 24x30


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Queen of Hearts, Fall 2004



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Jack of Spades, Fall 2004



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What is

the difference between artworks

and artifacts???


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Divide and Conquer, Fall 2004



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A Legacy of Dead White Men is about being

trapped inside of a dominant culture. What doesthat mean? What do we carry over from our

crusty white ancestors?? The drive for money

and powerAn idea that we are right and should

impose our righteousness on others. The conflictbetween a heart that wants to help and a culture

that wants everything for itself is tough. This is

just a budding body of work that is most likely to

consume me for an extended period in my life.Through the imagery of this work I will be

exploring the stresses and struggles that I

encounter through my family which holds me up,

my psyche which holds me back, and the society

that I encounter every day. I try to use popular

and traditional symbols to communicate my ideas

and express the distinct cultural experience of

being a white male.


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To see far is one thing: going there is another.

-Brancusi


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Any Last Words?


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This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination,

is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by

the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or

circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to

others.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson


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Immanuel Kant

defined art asa finality without an end.

Artists create objects,

which can be experienced by the world;

immortalized emotion, and personal experience,

which is forever experienced anew by

the observers whom encounter it.


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The irony is that this whole thing, this book, was crafted on a

computer, no silver gelatin at all, just a bunch of bits and bots!


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computer, no silver gelatin at all, just a bunch of bits and bots!


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silver is better than gold: an exploration of what can make photography art

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