Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View

Art Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 1982, Pages 311-319

  Krauss, Rosalind ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84947850983     PISSN: 00043249     EISSN: 23255307     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00043249.1982.10792816     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Clarence King, Systematic Geology, 1878, is Vol. 1 of Professional Papers of the Engineer Department U.S. Army, 7 vols. & atlas, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1877–78.
2. The cartographic grid onto which this information is reconstructed has other purposes besides the collation of scientific information. As Alan Trachtenberg argues, the government-sponsored Western surveys were intended to gain access to the mineral resources needed for industrialization. It was an industrial as well as a scientific program that generated this photography, which “when viewed outside the context of the reports it accompanied seems to perpetuate the landscape tradition.” And Trachtenberg continues: “The photographs represent an essential aspect of the enterprise, a form of record keeping; they contributed to the federal government’s policy of supplying fundamental needs of industrialization, needs for reliable data concerning raw materials, and promoted a public willingness to support government policy of conquest, settlement, and exploitation.” Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, New York, Hill and Wang, 1982, p. 20.
3. In his important essay “L’espace de l’art,” Jean-Claude Lebensztejn discusses the museum’s function, since its relatively recent inception, in determining what will count as Art: “The museum has a double but complementary function: to exclude everything else, and through this exclusion to constitute what we mean by the word art. It does not overstate the case to say that the concept of art underwent a profound transformation when a space, fashioned for its very definition, was opened to contain it.” In Lebensztejn, Zigzag, Paris, Flammarion, 1981, p. 41.
4. The treatment of Western survey photography as continuous with painterly depictions of nature is everywhere in the literature. Barbara Novak, Weston Naef, and Elisabeth Lindquist-Cock are three specialists who see this work as an extension of those landscape sensibilities operative in American nineteenth-century painting, with transcen-dentalist fervor constantly conditioning the way nature is seen. Thus, the by-now standard argument about the King/ O’Sullivan collaboration is that this visual material amounts to a proof-by-photography of creationism and the presence of God. King, it is argued, resisted both Lyell’s geological uni-formitarianism and Darwin’s evolutionism. A catastrophist, King read the geological records of the Utah and Nevada landscape as a series of acts of creation in which all species were given their permanent shape by a divine creatoi. The great upheavals and escarpments, the dramatic basalt formations were, it is argued, all produced by nature and photographed by O’Sullivan as proof of King’s catastrophist doctrine. With this mission to perform, the Western photography of O’Sullivan becomes continuous with the landscape vision of Bierstadt or Church. Although there is some support for this argument, there is an equal amount of support for its opposite: King was a serious scientist, who, for example, made great efforts to publish as part of the findings of his survey Marsh’s palaeontological finds, which he knew full well provided one of the important “missing links” needed to’give empirical support to Darwin’s theory. Furthermore, as we have seen, O’Sullivan’s photographs in their lithographic form function as neutralized, scientific testimony in the context of King’s report; the transcendentalists’ God does not inhabit the visual field of Systematic Geology. See, Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture, New York, Oxford University Press, 1980; Weston Naef, Era of Exploration, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975; and Elisabeth Lindquist-Cock, Influence of Photography on American Landscape Painting, New York, Garland Press, 1977.
5. Peter Galassi, Before Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1981, p. 12.
6. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,” Atlantic Monthly, VIII (July 1861), 14–15. The discussion of the view of Broadway occurs on Page 17. Holmes’s other two essays appeared as “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly, III (June 1859), pp. 738–48; and “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly, XII (July 1863), pp. 1–15.
7. See, Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura, no. 1 (1976), pp. 104–26, originally published as “Le Dispositif,” Communications, No. 23 (1975), pp. 56–72; and Baudry, “Cinema: Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” Cin�thique, No. 7–8 (1979), pp. 1–8.
8. Edward W. Earle, ed., Points of View: The Stereograph in America: A Cultural History, Rochester, N.Y., The Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979, p. 12. In 1856 Robert Hunt in the Art Journal reported, “The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing-room; philosphers talk learnedly upon it, ladies are delighted with its magic representation, and children play with it.” Ibid., p. 28.
9. “ Photographs from the High Rockies, ” Harper’s Magazine, XXXIX (September 1869), pp. 465–75. In this article Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake finds yet one more place of publication, in a crude translation of the photograph, this time as an illustration to the author’s adventure narrative. Thus one more imaginative space is projected onto the blank, collodion screen. This time, in response to the account of the near capsize of the exploration party’s boat, the engraver whips the waters into a darkened frenzy and the sky into banks of lowering storm clouds.
10. For another discussion of Galassi’s argument with relation to the roots of “analytic perspective” in seventeenth-century optics and the camera obscur a, see, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, University of Chicago Press, 1983, Chapter 2.
11. Michel Foucault opens a discussion of the museum in “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 87–109. See, also, Eugenio Dona to, “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet,” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1979; and Douglas Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” October, No. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 41–57.
12. André Malraux, “Museum without Walls,” The Voices of Silence, Princeton, Princeton University Press, Bol-lingen Series XXIV, 1978, p. 46.
13. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, New York, Scribners, 1969, p.91, n.99.
14. An example of this is the nearly four miles of footage shot by Eisenstein in Mexico for his project Que Viva Mexico. Sent to California where it was developed, this footage was never seen by Eisenstein, who was forced to leave the U.S. immediately upon his return from Mexico. The footage was then cannibalized by two American editors to compose Thunder over Mexico and Time in the Sun. Neither of these is supposed to be part of Eisenstein’s oeuvre. Only a “snooting chronology” assembled by Jay Leyda in the Museum of Modern Art now exists. Its status in relation to Eisenstein’s oeuvre is obviously peculiar. But given Eisenstein’s nearly ten years of filmmaking experience at the time of the shooting, given also the state of the art of cinema in terms of the body of material that existed by 1930 and the extent to which this had been theorized, it is probable that Eisenstein had a more complete sense, from the script and his working conception of the film, of what he had made as a “work”-even though he never saw it-than the photographers of the Mission Héliographique could have had of theirs. The history of Eisenstein’s project is documented in full detail in Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, The Making and Unmaking of “Que Viva Mexico,” ed. Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, Bloom-ington, Indiana University Press, 1970.
15. See, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann and His Times,” October, No. 18 (Fall 1981), p. 95. This essay raises some of the issues about the problematic nature of Salzmann’s work considered as oeuvre that are engaged above.
16. Man Ray arranged for publication of four photographs by Atget in La Révolution Surréaliste, three in the June 1926 issue, and one in the December 1926 issue. The exhibition Film und Foto, Stuttgart, 1929, included Atget, whose work was also reproduced in Foto-Auge, Stuttgart, Wedekind Verlag, 1929.
17. Maria Morris Hambourg and John Szar-kowski, The Work of Atget: Volume 1, Old France, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1981, pp. 18–19.
18. Ibid., p. 21., Maria Morris Hambourg and John Szar-kowski, The Work of Atget: Volume 1, Old France, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1981, pp. 18–19
19. The first published discussion of this problem characterizes it as follows: “Atget’s numbering system is puzzling. His pictures are not numbered in a simple serial system, but in a confusing manner. In many cases, low-numbered photographs are dated later than high-numbered photographs, and in many cases numbers are duplicated.” See, Barbara Michaels, “An Introduction to the Dating and Organization of Eugène Atget’s Photographs” The Art Bulletin, LXI (September 1979), p. 461.
20. Maria Morris Hambourg, “Eugène Atget, 1857–1927: The Structure of the Work,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1980.
21. See, Charles Marville, Photographs of Paris 1852–1878, New York, The French Institute/Alliance Francaise, 1981. Thisxontains an essay, “Charles Marville’s Old Paris,” by Maria Morris Hambourg.
22. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York, Harper and Row, 1976, pp. 208–9.
23. Thus far the work of Alan Sekula has been the one consistent analysis of the history of photography to attack this effort. See, Alan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal, XLI (Spring 1981), pp. 15–25; and “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” Artforum, XIII (December 1975). A discussion of the rearrangement of the archive in relation to the need to protect the values of modernism is mounted by Douglas Crimp’s “The Museum’s Old/ The Library’s New Subject,” Parachute, (Spring 1981).