What's in a face? Blankness and significance in contemporary art photography

October

Volumn , Issue 122, 2007, Pages 71-90

  Stallabrass, Julian ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67449143904     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/octo.2007.122.1.71     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1944), p. 52
2. Such photographs were first made by James H. Lamprey, who in 1869 devised a standard measuring grid against which subjects were photographed. Also in 1869 Thomas Huxley proposed using standard views of subjects with a measuring rod. Such techniques were adopted by others. See James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 149, 151
3. See, for example, the portraits and reported text in Zed Nelson's Gun Nation (London: Westzone, 2000)
4. This series, Trust, shows people captured by other spectacles: in video arcades or at soccer matches; with eyes closed in prayer; or while receiving beauty and medical treatments. See Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Trust (London: Westzone, 2000)
5. A recent exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery explored this lineage in European photography; see Kate Bush and Mark Sladen, eds., In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century (London: Black Dog, 2006)
6. Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 518
7. August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs, 1892-1952, ed. Gunther Sander, trans. Linda Keller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986)
8. Jessica Morgan, "Interview," in Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits, exh. cat. (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art; Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), p. 74
9. See also Urs Stahel, "Afterwards," in Rineke Dijkstra, Portraits (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2005), p. 147
10. See Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), p. 182
11. and James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941)
12. See Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Viking Press, 1937)
13. and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939)
14. Wolfgang Tillmans, correspondence with the author, June 18, 2003
15. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979). 31-48
16. For a critical view of the Arbus literature, see Catherine Lord, "What Becomes a Legend Most: The Short, Sad Career of Diane Arbus," in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 111-23
17. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus (London: Allen Lane, 1974), p. 10
18. Carol Armstrong, "Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus," October 66 (Fall 1993), p. 32
19. Irving Penn, "Introduction," in Worlds in a Small Room (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), n.p. The book was first published in 1974. It was not the first time Penn had fled fashion for its other: in 1947 he had left Vogue to travel to Haiti to find some "real women."
20. See Maria Morris Hambourg, "Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50," in Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), p. 8
21. Penn, Worlds in a Small Room, n.p
22. According to Laura Wilson, Avedon at Work in the American West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), p. 13
23. John Rohrbach, "Preface," in Richard Avedon, In the American West (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), n.p. The first edition was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1985
24. Richard Bolton notes Avedon's knowledge of his precursors and gives an extraordinary account of the concerted marketing and press-management campaign that accompanied the exhibition and publication. See Richard Bolton, "In the American East: Richard Avedon Incorporated," in The Contest of Meaning. 261-82
25. Arbus did this for the majority of her career, printing the edges of her negatives between 1963 and 1969. See Neil Selkirk, "In the Darkroom," in Diane Arbus: Revelations, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2003). 270-71
26. Wilson, Avedon at Work in the American West, p. 102
27. Avedon, American West, n.p. (my italics)
28. Avedon, American West, n.p
29. See Bolton, "In the American East," p. 264
30. See Ulf Hård af Segerstad, "Irving Penn - Uncompromising Image Builder," in Irving Penn Photographs: A Donation in Memory of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1995), p. 35
31. Selkirk, "In the Darkroom," p. 273. Dodging and burning are techniques used to manipulate the light reaching various areas of the print to ensure good detail throughout high-contrast images or to obscure unwanted elements. Arbus limited herself to altering the overall contrast of her prints by using different developing solutions
32. Dijkstra claims: "I hardly give any directions and I demand a concentration that is decisive for the photographs." See Mariska van den Berg, "Interview with Rineke Dijkstra," in Rineke Dijkstra: Location, exh. cat. (London: The Photographers' Gallery, 1997), n.p
33. Leo Steinberg, "Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public," in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). The passages on sacrifice are pp. 6-10
34. Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," p. 520
35. For the former, see Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium: An Art Project by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, exh. cat. (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, 2004)
36. Morgan, "Interview," p. 80
37. Martha Rosler, "Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?," in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), p. 221
38. Cited in Andy Grunberg, "Out of the Blue: The Photographs of Rineke Dijkstra," Artforum 36, no. 9 (May 1997), p. 87. Statement originally published in the catalog to the Frankfurter Kunstverein's 1996 installment of its "Prospect" series
39. For loneliness, see Mariska van den Berg's interview with the artist. Dijkstra says in an interview with David Brittain that she is searching for the "essential" in her subjects. See Creative Camera, no. 357 (April-May 1999). 20-27
40. See, for example, Sally Mann, Immediate Family (New York: Aperture, 1992)
41. and Jock Sturges, The Last Day of Summer (New York: Aperture, 1991)
42. Rosler, "Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?," p. 226
43. For a fine account of the range of the decline in political activity across capitalist democracies, see Peter Mair, "Ruling the Void? The Hollowing of Western Democracy," New Left Review 42 (Nov.-Dec. 2006). 25-51
44. David Harvey, in his recent history of neoliberalism, notes that it recommends that people should be free to make choices, as long as they do not choose strong forms of collective organization. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 69
45. Richard Avedon, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1993)
46. Avedon, American West, n.p
47. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 196-97