Olivares, Rosa
The Enigma of Abstraction

Rufo Criado Caja de Luz - 010104, 2001

To employ the terms photography and abstraction in the same sentence seems at first glance to be entirely contradictory. Photography always draws on reality. The photographer always deploys the action of light to transfer onto paper the form, the relief, the essence of something that is, or was real for long enough, for the time necessary to become a photograph. That very reality is the foundation upon which the success of this essentially modern medium is built, a medium whose very existence is based on reflecting real things, with immediacy, making photography the visual paradigm of news, of reality, of information.

That being said, and considering that photography is something more than a technique of visual immediacy, in other words: considering it an artistic language, one must agree with Gauguin in that All art is abstract. That the subjective perception an artist makes in a work, whether painting, sculpture, photography or any other media, removes it from reality in order to transform it into something else. To transform it into a work of art, into a fragment of thought or sensitivity, into a piece of the artist torn off to be shared, devoured, manipulated by everyone else.

Photography emerged in a century in which mechanization and technology were the keys for a spreading modernity. And this is why, since its birth, its technical facets have been among its greatest assets: everything that can be done with a camera, with its lenses, filters, with the shutter speeds, the varying light, the developing processes… and so forth, on to the arrival of cameraless photography, solarizations, images printed not on paper alone, but also on stones, on objects; countless things are done with photographic images, with the technical processes. In our day, in the age of Photoshop and the reign of the computer, technique is no longer a mysterious terrain, photography has really –and not just thanks to Kodak- become a tool within everybody’s reach, and artists can finally use it without purist, technical concessions, without any type of remorse, and thus create images, worlds, sensitivities that need not be attached to any objective reality.

Wim Delvoye Marble Floor # 5, 2000

But the real goes beyond the idea of the conception of the truthful. The real may be false, a representation, an imaginary world, people may be dolls, architecture may be models, but they are still real: the models and the dollies are real. Photography has achieved that flip-flop wherein falsity becomes truth, and deceit is certitude. Perhaps, down the same road, but in the opposite direction, we can begin to believe that photography can also convert truth into falsehood, reality into abstraction. To make an image out of smoke, which, though recognizable, is immaterial. Just as painters know how to transform color into sensations, photographers can transmit something more than facts with their images. This is, as always in art, a formal and conceptual process and above all a development of artistic method and vocabulary.

However, in a surreal pun, we can read on the pages of this magazine that the photographer essential for discussing abstract photography affirms that abstract photography does not exist. Here, we recall the Portuguese painter Vieira da Silva: every abstraction emerges from reality.

Photography was born in the XIX century, and a few years later, at the beginning of the XX century, abstraction was defined as an art movement, taking on the status of genre, converted into a worthy topic for study and offering artists a new territory, art with moral significance. It is painting that pulled the lid off of abstraction, and although examples of abstraction can be traced back to ancient times, it was at this time that in the discipline of painting, artists began to consider abstraction a new current of understanding. It is at this time, at the turn of the XX century, when the question of a new sensitivity arose. Formalism no longer made much sense. And it was considered that perhaps photography, as it has indeed come to do, could continue the situations cyclically abandoned by painting. While painting freed itself of bonds and discovered paths of liberty that were sometimes difficult to make meaningful, photography put on a corset of rigid structures defined by truth, technique and reality.

While artists advanced in their plastic discoveries, overwhelmed by the diversity of paths leading to a new, inner and abstract world, photographers advanced in a world of black-and-white, in small formats in which the formal, technical and conceptual obligations seemed irremovable. But between what things seem and what they are, there is always a great distance, especially in art. And the first photographers who were really considered artists from the beginnings of photography, such as Stieglitz, Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray…, early on in the XX century were already approaching photography as something more than a copy of reality or of its appearance: they approached photography as a method of exploration, as a plastic, visual language with which to shift their inner world outward. They adopted premises of the abstract movement, some seeking a freer subjectivity, others a more exciting game, all the visual absolute.

Richard Misrach from the series Desert Canto, XXII: Night Clouds, 1999

Abstract photography is a trend that has existed since the beginnings of photography. Occasionally, it arose from incidental results of technical experiments, yet often it was clearly intentional, arising from experiments with light, with water, with wind, with speed, with color, indeed with reality itself. But we have already referred to the fact that the real may not be so evident, that the play between the gaze and the possibilities of art are combined and become infinite. Given that everything we believe is not necessarily true, it follows that what we see is not real; possibly, now more than ever before we are conscious of the capacity of deceit, of the absolute lack of certainties. Abstraction is an unknown in its very reality. A visual suggestion, rather than a technical riddle.

On the following pages, we shall see a wide array of examples, of works and artists that habitually practice abstraction as a genre, though this selection is hardly a summary of what we could have shown. From the classics to the still virtually unpublished, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, British, Portuguese; there are artists who play with light, others with movement, others with exaggerated proximity with the subject… To be sure, they all depart from something that exists, though that existence is no less abstract. When Adam Fuss makes a portrait, suddenly what was white is converted to blue; when Wim Delvoye joins fragments of cold cuts, he builds a mosaic reminiscent of Arab craftsmanship; when Sean Scully photographs his own painting, or Richard Misrach looks at the sea, or Frank Thiel captures an image of the geometric design of a framework for a concrete structure… In each of these cases, in each of the cases we demonstrate on the following pages, abstraction appears as an enigma and also as a reality. In this project on abstraction, we have considered classics and contemporaries, well known names as well as others specialists alone will recognize. To be sure, a large number of artists are creating along these lines.

Perhaps abstraction in photography does not exist, but what there is no doubt about is that it is thriving. Thriving thanks to so many artists, who from portraits, realities, landscapes and constructions to studies and theories, explore, search and keep alive the spirit of those painters who sought the visual absolute, who believed in an art with moral significance. In all those pioneers, those restless youths who established the premises of abstraction. Who theorized and dedicated their lives and their imaginations to working with the intangible, outlining air, weighing smoke and measuring water.

Translation: Dena Ellen Cowan