There is currently a fantastic little photography exhibition up at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, entitled Photography on Photography. The show presents work from 1960 forward that turns the camera—but primarily the mind—back on the medium of photography itself. This type of show has been done before, but rarely as good as it here (and with a relatively small group of artists and prints). The artists included are all poignant to the theme of the show (Douglas Eklund, Assistant Curator, is definitely no dummy). Two particular artists stand out for me: James Welling and Mark Wyse.
James Welling (b. 1951) has quietly created a well-deserved following for himself in international photography circles and is also one of the few photographers featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. The wall label for the Welling is particularly enlightening:
“The various steps involved in the creation of these works are instructive: Welling first arranged and exposed plumbago blossoms on black-and-white sheet-film negatives then printed each one using a different assortment of colored gels. Each work is, then, like the result of a performance in the darkroom, where the admixture of infinitely shaded hues seems to pulse, swell, and bleed around and through the spiky branches—a performance that can be repeated, varied, and completed by each viewer in the act of looking. They are also exuberant displays of analogue technical wizardry that constitute an implicit rebuke to the surfeit of digitally manipulated photography that is less than truthful about its methods and effects.”
That last sentence is brilliant!
Mark Wyse, another well-established but relatively little-known southern California artist, was included with a single (and singular) image. Here’s the wall label for Mark Wyse’s piece:
“A professional printer as well as a photographer, Wyse makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. The title of the series, Marks of Indifference, refers to an essay on photography and Conceptual Art by the artist Jeff Wall and is used by Wyse not only to denote the idea of the camera as a blank recording device in works by Warhol and Acconci of the 1960s but also the very subjects of his pictures and the larger question of photographic meaning and intentionality. In this example, a tomblike room is seen at an oblique angle, focusing on the jagged lines left when a shelf was ripped from a wall. In one sense, the remnants of the act of removal captured in the image are an apt metaphor for photography itself—a mute presence that stands in for an absence. The paradoxical sense of enclosure and openness, surface incident and emptiness, is typical of Wyse’s photographs, which reflect ambiguously upon the relationship between the mix of conscious and unconscious intentions that is the stock and trade of photography’s relation to the world.”
The sentence that I’ve placed in italics is a potent statement about what photography does; the conflation or collapse that so often happens in the minds of most people between the photograph and what is in the photograph (or the perceived subject of the photograph) is elegantly pointed out in Wyse’s work.
“Recent years have seen much hand-wringing about the future of the medium, as 150 years of analog photography rapidly give way to its digital successor. Traditional photography’s “slow” techniques and the carefully produced prints and books made for the exhibition and dissemination of images now seem as quaint as etchings to a culture increasingly dominated by screens over which pass an ever shifting array of text, still and moving images, and live transmissions. In the face of this epochal transformation, attention has turned to artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and James Welling who long ago fused an interest in Conceptualism with a loving attention to the material bases of analog photography.
The work of the younger artists that conclude this exhibition, from Josephine Pryde’s blushed fourteen-part meditation on photography, time, and luxury anti-aging products to Mark Wyse’s sepulchral study of marks left by shelves torn from a wall, assume as a matter of course that photography cannot help but reflect on its own status and condition. It is not accidental that their works and those of their colleagues seen here also eschew digital manipulation—the ideas that go into their pictures come out of a direct engagement with process that equates extending a tradition with its continual questioning.” —from the exhibition statement.
