Delayed objects.

The Photographic Object

The Photographers' Gallery

London

April 24-June 14, 2009

The Object of Photography

The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery

University of Leeds

Leeds, UK

April 7-June 19, 2009

As our experience of viewing photography becomes ever more immaterial and the encounter with the traditional print is replaced by-digital imagery on screen, we seem to have lost touch with photography. But just as there seem to be few opportunities for a tactile engagement with the increasingly disembodied medium, a desire for a return to a more physical relationship is emerging.

Two shows that ran concurrently in London and Leeds explored this desire through the photographic object in contemporary practice and as a persistent presence in the medium's recent history. Testing the materiality of their chosen format, the internationally renowned artists included in The Photographers' Gallery's "The Photographic Object" share the concerns of the four less-established photographers in the more tightly focused "The Object of Photography" at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery in Leeds. Although at first glance quite similar in ambition, the shows approached the idea of materiality in very different ways--but by stretching its formal boundaries and contesting the limits of its conceptual understanding, both drew attention to the photograph's own "objectness" by staging a viewing experience in which its physicality could not he ignored.

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In London, a diverse grouping of photographic practices traced an eclectic route, emphasizing a shared dissatisfaction with the photograph's status as reproduction or copy by reconfiguring it as something else. In doing so, an appeal to vision was at least matched by an appeal to a sense of touch often provoked by the photograph's surface. Emphasizing a decorative quality, Andy Warhol's use of sewing to piece together the four prints that make up his Male Nude (1987) recreated the explicit serial photos as a kind of homely photographic quilt. Close by. Maurizio Anzeri's "Second Hand Portrait" (2008) overlaid found black-and-white photographic portraits with embroidery, the bright silks obscuring their subjects' faces beneath masks at once primitive, domestic, and obsessive. Tracing the photographer's hand, the swirls of stitching and the needle's puncture wounds remade the photo as a hand-crafted object but rather than a photographic process, they point elsewhere--to craft practices beyond the boundaries of the medium.

In the other work, a quite different sense of physicality was evoked. To create Selected Works #1 2002-2008 (2008), Walead Beshty shredded and pulped his own existing prints to form thick blocks of felted matter. Three-dimensional and utterly non-descriptive, the sedimentary layers appear as an organic landscape, alive with wisps of mold and fungal spores. In contrast, a brittle fragility was demonstrated by the surfaces of Catherine Yass's transparencies in the ongoing series "Damage," bearing traces of their own degradation as she subjected them to processes of abuse --drowning them in a drain, scorching, or burning them--so the emulsion of the image melted or began to flake away. For Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, a fleshier materiality was suggested by the pieces of chewing gum she used as the subject of her series of "Photosculptures" (1971/2007) from the early seventies. Placed in empty spaces reminiscent of Atget's uninhabited cityscapes, a bodily presence was traced in the tooth marks that mold the gum's contours and in the precariously animate quality they appear to display as they are positioned as if about to drip from a shelf, languidly stretching out like a sun-bathing cat, or squatting fatly on a curb. Although compelling in their conjuring of an ambiguous presence that transgresses the expectations of the portrait genre's form, how far Szapocznikow's abject subjects illustrated the exhibition's questioning of the medium's own materiality was unclear.

Perhaps it is in the idea of transgression of form that an overarching theme might be found, and a consideration of Vanessa Billy's project Surfaces for the Mind to Rest or to Sink into (2009), installed at the gallery's entrance, might have helped bring that into sharper focus. Reflecting her interest in how things come into being. Billy's sculptural works staged a series of relationships between flat surfaces, three-dimensional objects, and the spaces in between, creating a dialectic between framing and excess, concealment and exposure, and of seeing and not-seeing that is central to the language of photography. For example, in Seeing or Thinking in the First Place (2009), a Perspex sheet was embedded in a rough-hewn concrete base and smeared with petroleum jelly, its window-like surface obscured as if to deny visual access to the represented world it promises to frame. Upstairs, Delayed Object with Sides and Shadows (2009) lurked in a corner of the gallery--a concrete block bisected into two triangular halves. Just displaced from each other, one half cast its own shadow on the other half's exposed interior face, the interplay of exposure and concealment invoking the positive and negative states on which photography depends, and the delay or displacement necessary for the reproduction of the image it creates.

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It is these displaced "gaps" that other practices probed more successfully, opening up the space between reality and its photographic representation as a moment of delayed comprehension in the viewer's response. Examples of Gerhard Richter's "Overpainted Photographs" introduced a tension between the illusory perspectival space of his "tourist" shots of Florence, and the physicality of the thick ridges of oil paint laid over their flat surfaces to both frame and obscure the view. Even more ambiguous, the empty, almost featureless monochrome fields of Wolfgang Tillmans's "Lighter" series (2008) were folded and creased to form relief sculptures. At once glossy and perfect, and suggestive of the flawed skin of the body, these photographic objects invited a touch that was denied by the Perspex boxes in which they were displayed. Occupying a space between photography and sculpture, and between vision and touch, they mobilized a viewing experience that was not dependent on sight alone.

These gaps in perception were probed more deeply in the more contemporary work on show in Leeds. Concentrating on the work of four young photographers, "The Object of Photography," while also pushing the material boundaries of the medium, was more focused in articulating the dissenting voice suggested by the word "object." Recognizing the function of the photograph in the recording of history, its evidential status and questionable truth was destabilized through an interrogation of a variety of formats and media that denied any lingering belief in the photograph as a window onto the world. Our contemporary consumption of photography was questioned in Hondartza Fraga's "Constellation" series (2007 09) of prints on thick PVC. At first offering the viewer has the impression of a limitless sky punctuated by infinite stars; after closer viewing it is revealed as a still image of a television screen, the "stars" being traces of static. Commenting on our mundane consumption of the world through television, that visual experience was exposed as a fragile fantasy always threatening to break down and dissolve. Joe Mawson's "Heck" series (2008) uses clumsy models to object to the lens's mediation of a more horrific experience, re-telling the story of the Selby rail crash in England in 2001. With no trace of human presence, shallow depth of field, out-of-scale vegetation, and brush-painted detail, the color-saturated prints lent a sense of hyper-reality to our experience--one that was heightened in the just-moving pulse of the MP4 Clipper Maiden of the Sea (2009) as his camera zoomed slowly in and out on a model of the broken cockpit of the plane that crashed in the Lockerbie, Scotland, bombing of 1988. Elsewhere, Andrew Warstat's work combined text, film still, graphite pencil drawing, and digital animation to recreate the photograph in the third and fourth dimensions, introducing a duration that was experienced in the viewing of all the works on show. Reminiscent of the process of looking demanded by the reflected image of the early daguerreotype, Ignaz Cassar's sandwiching of a negative with its own contact-printed double in Field # 2 (2006) demanded an active, searching gaze: quite-black against almost-black, the image was negated, a frustrating experience to counter our usually passive consumption of the medium.

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Invoking the photograph's materiality in ways that worked to push, transgress, and at times negate its usual form, these two shows drew attention to the assumptions we make about the photograph's ability to represent the world to us. Questioning the photographic language through which a semblance of knowledge is conveyed, the gaps opened up through our experience of photography in its material transition from surface to object--from two to three dimensions and beyond--position us in a suspenseful pause between seeing and touching, knowing and not-knowing, as if wailing for the object to deliver its necessarily delayed message.

HARRIET RICHES, PhD, is a lecturer in Visual Culture & the History of Art at Middlesex University in London.

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