Ilkova, Jana
Abstract Photography

René Mächler Videogram, 1996

I.

Abstract photography means: The abstraction of the photograph. It does not mean: The abstraction of the objects in the photograph; this goes without saying, since there is no such thing as a photograph that does not imply abstraction. The point in matter here is the abstraction of the photograph as a medium and how it can be reduced to its intrinsic elements. In the process of abstraction, however, characteristics are forfeited that have always been typical of the photograph, in fact, that have turned it into a medium in the first place. One of these characteristics, above all, is its “distinct affinity to untouched reality“, as Siegfried Kracauer briefly and fittingly put it in 1960 (1). Abstract photography: a sacrilege?

The abstraction of the photograph reduces the originally object-orientated medium to its basic constituent parts and strips it of its non-essential, incidental characteristics. But what are the essential and non-essential characteristics of the photograph? Why is there any need to differentiate? Why does one subject this well-functioning means of visual communication to such a process? And why is it deprived of its obviously most important and most successful means of effect, means that have guaranteed its impact and significance to this very day? To many who have addressed these questions, the Abstract Photo still seems to be a mistake, a kind of “dubious genre, neither art nor photography“, to quote the German photographer of Neue Sachlichkeit Albert Renger-Patzsch (2). Under the Fascists, significantly, abstract works of art, including photography, were regarded as entartet, degenerate, they were banned or relegated to the sidelines, being deemed unimportant to the system. They appeared alien, subversive.

Abstract photography deliberately abandons exact reproduction of visible objects, aiming for ’mathematical accuracy’, as was originally demanded (3). It deliberately forgoes the initial hope of an automatic truth, uninfluenced by man’s urge to shape and manipulate. It forgoes everything that appears to constitute a photo. Right from the beginning, the main aim of the picture has been to depict objects and phenomena as true to nature as possible, as in drawings and paintings. The possibilities of perspective, the exact recording of minute details, the presentation of pose and movement were developed over a long period of time and resulted in the fascinating, indeed magical pictures that we can still admire in Renaissance panel painting and still take pleasure in anew. They capture our imagination to this very day. In those days, too, it was the ’decisive moment’ that was sought after, with the help of optical means, as we know today. The painting captured the historical moment, assimilated the fleeting mood, the transient tone of light. But all that called for tremendous effort and required expert skills – and suddenly seemed to be fulfilled with the invention of the photograph, in one single moment, ’all at once’.

Heinrich Heidersberger Rhythmogram

Reading the early texts of Sir Henry Fox Talbot, that he wrote in the course of his first tentative steps towards his Sun Pictures, the ’photogenic drawings’, we are struck by the amazement he felt when he saw how swiftly and effortlessly, how well and how beautifully, indeed, how ’self-expressively’ – that is the operative word! – the objects fused with the light-sensitive material. “The picture drawn by hand cannot compete in truth and accuracy with the image that is created with the help of sunlight,“ he wrote in 1839 in On the Art of Photogenic Drawing. And what he found most awesome was that “the most transient thing of all, a shadow, is captured by the spell of our natural magic and forever held fast in the place that was only intended for a brief moment.“ Today, we can hardly understand the shock Talbot describes when he noticed that a finely-structured, complicated leaf of a plant took no more time to be photographed using his technique than the time required for a coarse-structured, simple leaf (4). Be it fine or course, high or low, it all amounted to the same work, cost the same and yet called for relatively little effort. The first mediating medium had been born. Perspective, detail and moment in time, moreover, the equal treatment of all objects, and the automatism of a method employing technical means that also promised reproduction and unlimited, mass circulation – these were the challenging new factors that have produced today’s universally recognized, indispensable and accepted picture as presented in the media of this modern age.

Abstract Photography ignores all this – and more. This should be quite clear. It forgoes the recognizable object, the decisive moment, the conventional perspective, fidelity to Reading the early texts of Sir Henry Fox Talbot, that he wrote in the course of his first tentative steps towards his Sun Pictures, the ’photogenic drawings’, we are struck by the amazement he felt when he saw how swiftly and effortlessly, how well and how beautifully, indeed, how ’self-expressively’ – that is the operative word! – the objects fused with the light-sensitive material. “The picture drawn by hand cannot compete in truth and accuracy with the image that is created with the help of sunlight,“ he wrote in 1839 in On the Art of Photogenic Drawing. And what he found most awesome was that “the most transient thing of all, a shadow, is captured by the spell of our natural magic and forever held fast in the place that was only intended for a brief moment.“ Today, we can hardly understand the shock Talbot describes when he noticed that a finely-structured, complicated leaf of a plant took no more time to be photographed using his technique than the time required for a coarse-structured, simple leaf (4). Be it fine or course, high or low, it all amounted to the same work, cost the same and yet called for relatively little effort. The first mediating medium had been born. Perspective, detail and moment in time, moreover, the equal treatment of all objects, and the automatism of a method employing technical means that also promised reproduction and unlimited, mass circulation – these were the challenging new factors that have produced today’s universally recognized, indispensable and accepted picture as presented in the media of this modern age.

Christopher Giglio Untitled, from the series Cathode Rayograms, 1997

II.

The development of Abstract Painting has often been described as the inevitable consequence of the photograph of the 19th century, with its pretence to perfection and dominance. Once it had also sidelined object-oriented painting from an economic point of view – consider, for example, miniature portrait painting that had been flourishing at the time in France and was more or less destroyed by the emergence of mass portraits based on the method of the Carte-de-visite of Disdéri – artists turned to other genres and tasks. The history is known. Painting, too, did away with a lot of what had been characteristic about it – in favour of painting for the sake of painting. It withdrew within itself, and the abstract, indeed, absolute picture was the result. Photography followed suit, even if for other reasons. It is futile to ask whether it was a photograph of the photograph – this is what we are concerned with here – that got its impulse for abstraction from painting or whether the impulse came from photography. The ideas for it came from somewhere completely different anyway, quod demonstrandum est. There is no doubt that academically trained painters have always been the first to read the signs of the times. They recognized and understood the tremendous innovatory potential of the new technical pictures as soon as they appeared; take, for example, the experiments of Ducos du Hauron as early as 1870 with his three colour projectors and the subsequent colour screen-plate process, forerunners of the colour photograph that we take so much for granted nowadays (6). Thus, these experiments paved the way for the impressionistic technique of Pointillism. So far, so good. Now, even before the photographers grasped the potential and significance of their as yet technically underdeveloped pictures, the painters were already using them successfully and on this basis were creating a new style. There was a similar development in the relationship between motion photography and motion painting. Nevertheless, it is futile to ask what came first. The visual innovations inspired painting and photography alternately, and it is, as the art historian Herbert Molderings commented, only a question of the point in time as to which medium claims precedence for one or the other innovation (7).

It is important at this point to establish the fact that many trends converged in the period around 1900, giving the impression that the time was ripe for a fundamental reassessment of the concept of what had so far constituted a picture. The assumption that a picture should have objects and a content, was more than borne out by the realistic photo. The instantaneous photograph captured life objectively and fully. In addition – and this was undisputed – a picture had to convey form, display style. The picture not only had to make things visible, but also had to include the perception of the artist as expressed in his subjective approach. Photography of Pictorialism as from 1880 and Art Photography around 1900 were the reaction to these ideas. Despite all the criticism that these movements attracted because of their stylistic proximity to pictorial Symbolism and Impressionism, they nevertheless opened up new possibilities for the photo. The latter sought its own style, its own special form. Pictorial photography, however – to stay with this subject for a moment – also meant for the first time a breach of the agreement on the fundamentals of photography as formulated and applied by Daguerre and Nièpce. Its centrepiece consisted of the “automatic reproduction of the pictures captured in the camera obscura“ (8).

(...)

Translation: Jean Saefken