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 Moreover, each page features an image of some sort of outdated photographic paraphernalia: the visitor information page shows the various parts of a 6×6 roll film, complete with tin canister, while the events page depicts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.
Of course, in exhibitions devoted to dead photographers, objects like cameras and light meters have long functioned as relics of the medium’s past as well as of the revered auteur in question. So I’m not saying these sorts of things have suddenly come into fashion thanks to the impact of digitality. It nevertheless seems that more attention is more routinely being paid, at least by curators, to the means and materials of photographic production. Recent shows such as Pictures for the Press at the Getty in Los Angeles and La Photographie humaniste at the BnF in Paris have in different ways dealt with the materiality of editorial photography in the era of paper-based mass media. Meanwhile, the Parisian auction house Artcurial has in their handling of print sales from the archives of photo agencies attempted to imbue the ephemeral and often anonymous news photograph with the value of the collectible objet d’art. (I examine this phenomenon in an article to appear in the first issue of the new journal Photographies, forthcoming early 2008).
One of my working hypotheses is that, as photographs are increasingly experienced as de-materialised objects, flickering (or flickr-ing, if you like) across a screen, the physical accoutrements of analogue photography are correspondingly becoming imbued with an auratic, even fetishistic quality. This is not to deny that digital photography has its own materiality. Rather, it is to acknowledge that film, paper and wet chemicals – the production materials of the analogue photographic process – may point more acutely towards a particular haptic object than do the instruments of digital photography. This may be because the combination of film, paper and chemicals always in the final instance produce some sort of photographic, or at least photo-technic, object, whereas a photographic image is only one of any number of products that can be realised with the help of code, screen and keyboard.
