Planet Parr

Another exhibition of photographic objects that deserves comment is the current show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Planète Parr, which displays a selection from the photographer Martin Parr’s personal collection. In addition to being a famous Magnum photographer, Parr is also an avid collector of all kinds of things and objects that in one way or another are produced through photographic (or neighbouring) technologies. Accordingly, the show’s display ranges from standard photographic prints, via postcards and photo books, to trays, plates, clocks and other household objects printed with photographic motifs – often in the form of a portrait of famous or notorious people (from Osama bin Laden via Saddam Hussein to Mao and Stalin).

Before even entering the galleries one is treated to selected examples from Parr’s famous series Small World, which are on display in the Jardin des Tuileries. In the photographer’s characteristically detached and, one is tempted to say, sniggering style this series brings home the surreal spectacle of mass tourism – and I use the expression ‘bring home’ advisedly here, because the print display is situated right on the edge of the Place de la Concorde, with the obelisk, the Eiffel Tower and the Invalides within view, producing a rather compelling mise-en-abyme of the whole spectator experience.

A view of Martin Parr's Small World pictures in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris (photo: NLV)

Photostalgia

In the past year or so, the technostalgic impulse vis-a-vis photography that I have written about previously on this blog has manifested itself in several new guises. Two recent exhibitions in the UK have been particularly exemplary of the increased attention that is being paid by curators and other arts programmers to the materialities of analogue photography: ‘The Photographic Object’ at The Photographers’ Gallery in London and ‘The Lost Art of the Picture Library’, first shown at the Guardian newspaper’s new premises in King’s Place, London, and subsequently at the University Gallery at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

… and I’m back

This blog has been inactive for a while, due to several factors – not the least of which being that I started a new job about a year ago and have been busting my proverbial guts getting the hang of it. Whatever time has been left over from teaching, preparation and administration I have tried to channel into publishing projects, which means writing for the blog has been shunted down the list of priorities. I have decided to resurrect it, however, in a slightly different form, with shorter posts more in the style of regular (as opposed to ‘research’) blogs, where I will write short comments and notes on items of relevance to my project (which remains the focus of this site), such as exhibitions, publications and events that capture my interest and attention.

Inside ‘the image factory’*

Over the past couple of months I have been conducting interviews with people from the picture industry, trying to get a range of insiders’ viewpoints on the transition from analogue to digital production and archiving. My hypothesis – that the work of picture research and archiving is materially altered when carried out via a screen as opposed to in a physical, three-dimensional environment – has to a great extent been confirmed. But each individual’s experience of these changes has clearly been different. Some feel empowered by what they see as better, faster and easier access to photography collections in digitised form, while others emphasise the loss of the materiality of the image and the sensory pleasures of rooting through a roomful of boxes and filing cabinets. Nearly everyone – even those who consider digitisation to be wholly positive thing – express some regret at the loss of the personal interaction between researchers, archivists, photographers and lab technicians that used to characterise the industry in pre-digital days.

Technostalgia and tangibility II

In early November I attended the 23rd annual CHArt conference, which this year bore the title Digital Archive Fever – as precise a diagnosis of my own current condition as any. For me, the most interesting contribution came from Doireann Wallace, a PhD student at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who is doing some important work on the dissemination and exploitation of stock photography through online image banks à la Corbis and Getty Images. Focusing her paper on a close reading of Getty’s online operations, Doireann touched on a section of this website which utterly fascinated me and which I immediately wanted to explore in more detail.

Technostalgia and tangibility I

In the past weeks I have been working on several conference papers and abstracts, and as part of this process tried to come up with snappy titles that would somehow sum up what I felt was at stake in cultural productions such as the Lee Miller exhibition discussed earlier on this blog. I came up with what I thought was the neologism ‘technostalgia’ – a term that seemed to encapsulate the longing for an earlier, more tactile and seemingly more ‘real’ technology represented by pre-digital cameras, film canisters and paper prints. The term was clearly too perfect not to have been already coined by somebody somewhere, and so it proved when I investigated the matter through a quick Google search.

Merchandise and materiality: Lee Miller at the V&A

In view of the expectations raised by the microsite for The Art of Lee Miller exhibition, currently at the V&A Museum (see previous post), I was not disappointed when I finally went to see it today.

The show itself foregrounds photographic materiality and historicity by privileging vintage prints (produced close to the time of the negative, as the introductory panel explained), even when these are in a fragile or even damaged condition. This means that most of the works on show are quite small, and invite a the viewer to take up a pleasingly intimate distance to each object. The sense of intimacy is further induced by the dark interior of the exhibition space – the walls are painted black – which is of course also an illusion to the interior of the black box that is the camera.

Materialising the medium

Since my current research focuses on the materiality of pre-digital photography I am always alert to the ways in which this materiality is foregrounded in contemporary representations of the medium.

A good example is the website design for the exhibition The Art of Lee Miller, which is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 15 September 2007 – 6 January 2008. The pages devoted to this exhibition on the V&A website quite deliberately deploy signifiers of photographic materiality in order to historicise Miller’s work within a bygone era of the medium. The text panels appear against a background that is meant to look like the back of a faded paper print, complete with scuffed edges and the slight miscolouring that such old-fashioned fibre-based (i.e. non-resin-coated) prints tend to acquire with age. Moreover, each page features an image of some sort of outdated photographic paraphernalia: the visitor information page shows the various parts of a 6×6 roll film, complete with tin canister, while the events page depicts a battered light meter of the hand-held kind (from the age before cameras had built-in light meters).

(click to enlarge)

The overall background seems to resemble some sort of coarsely woven green cloth, possibly intended to evoke Miller’s uniform when she was an accredited photographer with the US Army during the Second World War. I haven’t yet been to the actual exhibition (my enthusiasm for Lee Miller having been severely dampened by recent overexposure to badly-written undergraduate essays on the subject) so I can’t say how the show itself might address or, indeed, harness the haptic quality of old press prints, dented film canisters or crumpled contact sheets.

The Memory of Photography

Photography is a primary example of what Régis Debray would call a technology of memory. These technologies include writing, printing, painting, sound recording, computer code, and all the other ways in which we inscribe images and utterances in order to preserve and/or transmit them. Photography has of course since its invention, to a much greater extent than any of these other technologies, also been conceived as a powerful metaphor for memory – and memory has often been likened to photography. (Recall Oliver Wendell Holmes’s description of the daguerrotype as a ‘mirror with a memory’ or look up the cognitive science concept of flashbulb memories.) As anyone who possesses a family album will acknowledge, photographs are important instruments in the work of memory. In this project, however, I am also concerned with how memory functions as a crucial tool when working with photographs.