The great photographic event of the 1950s was no doubt the exhibition “The Family of Man”, which Edward Steichen organised for the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The exhibition, which was later hosted by dozens of museums around the world and visited by over nine million people over the course of the years, was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World list in 2003. In the aftermath of World War II, its 503 pictures taken by 273 photographers from 68 countries on themes such as love, faith, birth, work, the family, children, war and peace, were intended to contribute to creating a better world and fostering mutual understanding among human beings. This ambitious humanitarian and democratic project met with great success, although it is doubtful whether it could really help overcome the unspeakable horrors, pain, grief, and tragedy of war.
Roland Barthes criticised the exhibition at the time for its overall approach and world-view: “This myth of the human 'condition' rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History.”1 Barthes saw this myth as being expressed by the photographs in the exhibition and the comments accompanying them: “Everything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justifies them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History”; he called for progressive humanism to overthrow this “very old imposture”, “constantly to scour nature” and its laws, “to establish Nature itself as historical.”2 Concerning the theme of “birth and death”, he observed: “Birth, death? … if one removes History from them, there is nothing more to be said about them; any comment about them becomes purely tautological. … Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth.”3
This criticism was levelled four or five years after Theodor W. Adorno's controversial claim that writing a poem after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism.4 Adorno himself had returned to this claim, specifying: “I do not wish to mitigate the statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism; it expresses in negative terms the impulse animating committed poetry.”5 Of more local significance is the criticism levelled against Swiss photography by the director of the Basel Kunstmuseum. In the special Photo 49 issue of the magazine Publicité et Arts Graphiques, of 1949, Georg Schmidt observes: “A Swiss version of 'new photography' has even succeeded in bending photography, this extraordinary instrument of truth, by turning it into an instrument for concealing truth, for embellishing reality by the most objective means.”6 What concerns us here is not the value of this statement in itself, but the fact that Georg Schmidt's criticism sprang from an acknowledgement that something had deeply changed: that with World War II, desires and essential conditions had changed so radically that new languages and images, new aims, approaches and degrees of intensity were required to face up to so many developments, of such great significance.
The horror of World War II had been too inconceivable: it was impossible to go on as if nothing had happened, to continue operating with the same means as before – even if society, the establishment and human beings in their intrinsic laziness were doing all they could to return to normality, to revert to their previous ways. World War II had made individuals withdraw into themselves far too much, at least in those countries which had been directly affected by it. People's trust in the state, the establishment, the Church and all the various moral and legal authorities had been badly shaken – a severe blow had been delivered to their Freudian super-ego.
The late 1950s witnessed the emergence of one of the wildest and most painful artistic currents: Viennese Actionism, which through its provocative acts sought to trigger a change in society. One of its exponents, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, sought to attain the condensation and concentration of the so-called “total act” through shockingly real and aesthetic actions: he would place himself in precarious situations by covering himself in gauzes, wearing masks, and undergoing simulated medical operations or genuine torture. The Actionism of Schwarzkogler and his colleagues is best viewed as a radical act of interiorised and aggressive self-analysis, as the thematising and exorcising of the spectres of World War II.
Generally speaking, artists' reactions tended to be far less drastic. Their approach to the world was changing: the relations between subject and object were sliding and shifting; perceptions were growing more subjective, closer, more intimate, or even physical on the one hand; on the other, they were growing colder, more operative and more conceptual. Gradually, photography adopted radical positions and moved in different directions. It was the German photographer Otto Steinert who launched this process in both practical and theoretical terms. Through his concept of “subjective photography”, he fashioned a new and personal photo-philosophy that stressed composition over themes. Steinert's photographs are exemplary lessons, formally perfect and compelling illustrations of his idea of photography. But for all this perfection, his artistic influence exhausted itself in a surprisingly short time – this was not the case with his great ascendancy as a teacher on the German photography scene in the 1960s and 1970s. His revitalising of modernism through the addition of a subjective and creative twist possibly remained too formalist in character, and too cold to keep pace with the development of society.
Two voices clearly marked a turning point for documentary photography in the 1950s: Ed van der Elsken, with Love on the Left Bank (1956), and Robert Frank with his book on America. With The Americans (French ed. 1958, American ed. 1959), Frank launched a new type of travel book – a photographic road movie. On his part, Van der Elsken created a dramatised storyboard set in Paris. Despite their differences, both projects were deeply influenced by the existentialism of those years, by the feeling of having been thrown into the world and having to search for its meaning on one's own. This view of life derived from the negative experience of World War II. There is no predetermined meaning here, no anchor, no prefabricated house, no freely given structure, no metaphysical construction: everything must be sought, arranged and tested on one's own, in a shaky world scarred by the trauma of war which nonetheless is headed full tilt towards consumption and commercialisation.
For three or four decades the path chosen by Robert Frank appeared to run parallel to the course of the world, which it recorded like a seismograph. Ultimately, it led to a striking reaction to society and an increasing distancing from it. Frank became more and more radical, moving away from the world and his own work. He stopped taking pictures and started shooting videos, only to return to photography under new auspices. With The Americans he tackles the entire history of photography in an exemplary, perfect way: an outward gaze which sets itself in motion to show that someone is spiritually and physically on the street, taking pictures because he is looking, observing and grasping things; a gaze which also acknowledges itself to be a personal one. Between the 1960s and 1980s, Frank became more and more subjective, direct and personal. His collages of texts and images, many of which consisting of two or three parts, are like exposed nerves, like exposed electric wires in the winding of the engine of life. Finally, by using texts and images, he created small real-life situations – with autobiographical elements – halfway between cheerfulness and tragedy, hope and despair, love and loss. At times a breathtaking depth or sense of uneasiness betrays a throbbing anxiety, through torn photographs with dark Polaroid edges showing, and feverish, nervous writing; at other times, a feeling of tragedy seems to swallow everything down its gloomy black gorge. Sometimes reeking of despair, Robert Frank's work always runs up against the senselessness of reality, struggles against the absurdity of the world, searches for meaning, finds life, loses people, fights resignation, and yearns for light and happiness in the night – indomitable, relentless, eager and suffering.7
Man is cast into a world devoid of meaning, and there is no escaping this senselessness. This is our existential absurdity, as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre have expressed it, each in his own way. Man is conscious of this condition of his, but all he can do is yearn for meaning, push himself further and always move forward; he must think and act in order to survive, he must try to temporarily remove the emptiness and absurdity through love. From the 1960s onwards, through his Polaroids and other works, Robert Frank created strikingly existentialist images that are both a project and trace, a vision and a pain he felt, combining sophisticated visual awareness with profound experience and detailed analysis. From then onwards, he never paused in this difficult search of his for “something that has more of the truth and not so much of art”.8
In 1956 Ed van der Elsken created a first form of docu-fiction with Love on the Left Bank: a theatrical love story set in the district of Parisian existentialism (Saint-Germain-des-Prés). A kind of photostory illustrating the poverty and misery of the aftermath of the war, it features characters whom the author had met in person in Paris in the early 1950s. The protagonists are bohemian intellectuals who couldn't care less about what other people think of them: they sleep from four in the morning till four in the afternoon and spend the time in between going from café to café, drinking, smoking and dancing to fill a life that after the war appears uncertain, confused and nervous. Being anti-bourgeois and amoral is their means to escape; instability, their only certainty.
The theatrical element is also to be found in Bagara (1958), Sweet Life (1966) and other projects by Ed van der Elsken. The photographer would approach people in such a direct way that they would often be startled by him and overreact. His pictures illustrate the encounter between photographer and subject, and the tension this engenders. Through his presence and direct and extroverted involvement, he rejected the autocratic role of the photographer: he would stand in the middle of the street and record the way in which the traffic and people reacted to his presence. He thus turned the subject-object relation into a subject-object-subject one – a mutual exchange fostered by the photographer as co-star.
In the same year, William Klein published his famous work Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels – more briefly known as the New York-Book. The author assembled this rough, grainy and provocative book over the course of six months, but with twenty-six years of experience as an immigrant – so to speak – in his own city. A very direct photographer, he would disturb and disrupt people's everyday routine through his work. With its pitch-black print and dynamic layout, his book fully captures the speed of life in the big city. Yet despite its directness, this is not a book about the raw edges of New York, and it is never violent: “There is hardly anything like the real-life murder-and-mayhem of the journalist in Klein (only toy guns and charades of violence)”, Max Kozloff observes. He then quotes Klein himself: “This city of headlines and gossip and sensation … needed a kick in the balls”.9 Half a generation later, William Klein's dynamic, almost anarchic and trendy perspective on everyday life was to influence Japanese photography.
A hunter and prey emerging from out of the darkness only to plunge back into it, with his cold yet at the same time emotionally charged, action-filled, anarchic and everyday pictures, Daido Moriyama has described Japan as a “grotesque, scandalous and utterly accidental world of humanity”.10 His marked contempt for the state of his own country in the aftermath of World War II enabled him – through a blending of life and art – to fashion an expressive, dynamic, restless but also enigmatic, erotic and theatrical kind of work and life for himself.
Shomei Tomatsu, who as a photographer acted as a father figure and mentor for Moriyama, has said with regard to Japan that he believes Americanisation has spread from the American military bases. “It is as though America had seeped through the meshes of the wire netting enclosing these bases, permeating within a short time the whole of a Japan. In 1945 its vanquished and devastated cities became filled with Allied soldiers and officers who would hand out chocolate and chewing gum to people who were half starved because of the war. That was America. Nonetheless, this is how he encountered America for the first time. Since then he has not managed to free himself from the idea of ‘occupation’. He cannot keep his eyes off America, the country which utterly controls him, the country he has never seen but has fatally met, the foreign country which showed itself in the concrete form of an army, of ‘occupation’ at the hands of American troops.”11
What Shomei Tomatsu has in common with Moriyama is a highly ambivalent relation with the United States, marked both by fascination and rejection. His work, moreover, is largely characterised by his interest in and heartfelt quest for his homeland, by a concern for the issue of what Japan represents – or might represent – after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The photographs which Tomatsu took after the most serious catastrophes Japan ever experienced – it is easy to forget that aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki a further sixty-six cities were virtually razed to the ground, and that Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in a huge fire – are not characterised by the same profound sense of loss of the homeland we find in Moriyama's work; yet by describing the reality of their day and the many layers of Japan – faces, asphalt, ropes, bodies, architectures – these photographs illustrate a tireless quest for the here and now, the why and wherefore.
Tomatsu is a most outstanding photographer of Japanese society from the aftermath of the war. Two pictures of his are particularly revealing or indeed emblematic of the country's condition after the war, of the transition to modern Japan: his colour photograph for the Japan World Exposition, Osaka, 1970, a red splotch bursting directly onto the window pane and our visual field; and his serene and contemplative black and white picture of a cloud over the sea: Untitled (Hateruma Island, Okinawa), 1971. In both of these photographs the circle from the Japanese flag dissolves – through an explosion and a melancholy, subdued silence respectively – into the oblique horizon beyond Okinawa, the island of the Japanese retreat.
In the case of Daido Moriyama what we are faced with is a restless, troubled spirit. Many of his pictures have a pressing rhythm, both for their subjects – a girl fleeing, a young Japanese man running after a Western woman – and for their style. The framing is often slanted, the pictures distorted, blurred, at times taken from a moving car. A sort of dark dynamic feel pervades them.
Sandra Phillips symbolically opened and ended her essay on Moriyama with his photograph Stray Dog.12 This is an almost hypnotic picture: a dog – photographed on the street, with its shaggy, rough coat reflecting the harshness of the urban landscape – suspiciously stares at the photographer, as if lying in wait for him. It is difficult to tell whether it is about to snap at him or run away. The dog's gaze seems frozen. The picture is that of a wild outcast rather at a loss; it is a dark, grainy snapshot that shows two creatures who for a few seconds found themselves at one another's mercy. To some extent, Moriyama identifies with this stray dog, saying that he aimlessly wanders around the city, following the street. If he wants to turn right, he will reach the corner and turn right. He is much like a dog: he chooses where to go by the smell of things, and when he feels tired, he stops.13
This identification is also reflected by the title of three later books by Moriyama: Dog’s Memory (1984), Dog’s Time (1995) and Dog’s Memory – The Last Chapter (1998). Through this approach, the photographer created a work that may roughly be compared to that of his great model, William Klein (and especially the latter's first, harsh book on New York), as well as the work of Andy Warhol and Weegee. Still, Moriyama's expressive, action-filled corpus of black and white pictures occupies a very unique and personal place in the history of photography. Although personal reasons may be invoked for his restlessness, this is also typical of an age that was almost exploding because of its underlying tensions. The burning, rebellious and contradictory social climate that produced what are arguably the most extraordinary works of the twentieth century in the fields of Japanese dance, theatre, film, art, and photography, fostered striking creative drives – followed by disastrous downfalls. Not even Moriyama escaped this. Over the course of eight years, between 1968 and 1976, he published his four most important books – Japan, a Photo Theater; A Hunter; Farewell Photography (Bye, bye, Photography, dear), and The Tales of Tono – along with other small non-commercial publications. Together with his Marxist intellectual friend Takuma Nakahira and other photographers, he took part in the small but important project Provoke, featuring both texts and photographs, before suffering a long crisis.
With A Hunter (1972), Moriyama presented the world not in narrative terms – as he had formerly done and his forerunners were still doing – but through a considerable amount of content censoring, as if deconstructing it, not just from the point of view of his subjects, but also, and just as strikingly, in terms of the way in which these are rendered – in an elusive, blurred, grainy, and dark manner. As Sandra Phillips and Alexandra Munroe have remarked,14 the outcome is a fragmented, expressive, dynamic and restless work, but one which is also concealed, obscure, and erotically and theatrically charged.
In the same period, Nobuyoshi Araki photocopied his first twenty-five notebooks and published them in a limited edition. His many photographs of Yoko Aoki – whom he had married in 1971 – and of their wedding and honeymoon entered into the history of photography under the title of Sentimental Journey. His first great work, it provides a very intimate, subtle, and personal portrayal of the author's wife.
Diane Arbus's remarkable and always compelling pictures lead us back to the subjectivisation of documentary photography in the United States in the 1960s. The black of her photographs can be very deep – so saturated and dark that some areas give the impression of having been covered in ink or tar. It is as though it came from a world of shadows, of enveloping darkness. A persistent contact is established with the eyes of the subjects portrayed, at times in such a close and direct way that it proves irritating: it is as though we were looking through the subject's pupils into their innermost recesses and, conversely, into ourselves. It is easy to forget here that what we are facing are “only” (square) photographs. In the 1960s, Esquire readers and visitors at the New York MoMA would invariably be struck and often even shocked by this combination of features. Even today, it only takes a few seconds to be captivated by the charm of this touching closeness permeated by warmth, respect and – from time to time – a touch of cynicism as well.
In thirteen years, Diane Arbus created a world parallel to that of her background – for she came from an upper-middle-class family – and her work as a fashion photographer. She portrayed circus performers, dwarfs, Lilliputians, nudists, cross-dressers, prostitutes, and people who would make a living by putting their malformations on display, as well as the scions of wealthy families, twins, and bizarre-looking families. She photographed more or less striking forms of deviation from what is commonly defined as “normal” and bourgeois; she turned her camera on what was different, on marginal behaviours and figures. From the centre of society she approached its outskirts, becoming increasingly drawn towards “other” worlds and characters. She left her own world to pursue immediacy, simplicity, and physicality. She moved away from the stiffness of her family of origin, with its reserved detachment and discrete silence, to search for closeness, genuineness, concreteness and reality. This journey towards authenticity, where Diane felt she could really perceive life and herself, acquired increasingly physical, erotic and sexual overtones. With a seductive combination of coyness and directness, reserve and frankness, beauty and intelligence, she seemed almost impatient to make new encounters and witness new things, experiencing them to the full through a kind of performative act. Her pictures bear witness to a personal action, reflecting the magnetic pull or repulsion between subject and object.
Along with a group of friends, in 1978 Nan Goldin left Boston and Provincetownand headed for New York. An “off off” photographer out of touch with the art world, Goldin spent her time in bars, clubs and avant-garde theatres in the Lower East Side and East Village. Here she launched her grand project entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Unlike Diane Arbus, she led the life she wanted right from the start. She would take direct, intimate and very close-up photographs of her friends, her lovers, herself and her family – and then show them the pictures through slideshows. Sexuality, relations, power, identity, and a blending of harshness and romanticism are the distinguishing features of her work. Nan Goldin's visual diary is not always an optimistic one: “What you know emotionally and what you crave sexually can be wildly contradictory. Sex becomes a microcosm of the relationship, the battleground, an eroticism. I often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited. The tension this creates seems to be a universal problem: the struggle between autonomy and dependency.”15
This manner of photographing one's friends and personal life, of seeing oneself reflected in one's friends, of reflecting friends through one's photographs and of reflecting life through an evolving visual and musical performance has come to exemplify a kind of photography close to rock and punk – a way of being there, of “being inside” that cuts across distances, yet not in a brutal way. Often associated with Nan Goldin is the concept of participatory photography. Her Ballad of Sexual Dependency (published in 1986) may be regarded as the starting point for documentary photography focusing on one's own world, for photography from an inner perspective: what are portrayed are no longer exotic “others” to be “brought home” and shown to a family public, but rather one's own life. Me and you, subject and object, life and photography become blurred; voyeurism and exhibitionism exchange roles.
Christer Strömholm paved the way for Anders Petersen. Through his detailed, delicate yet gripping pictures – particularly those of the transsexual women from the Place Blanche (Les Amies de la Place Blanche, which he took in the 1960s and published in 1983) – this elegant, tender, loving, but at times dark Scandinavian surrealist shifted the focus of the photography scene north. Through his subtle representation of what the visible world hides and can reveal, Christer Strömholm taught Anders Petersen not just photography, but also a certain perspective on life.
We now make our way into Café Lehmitz, a Hamburg venue. It is here that in the late 1960s one could find Anders Petersen. For two or three years this young Swedish photographer was a patron of this pub, in which all formalities, rhetoric and pampering would be cast aside and life would be lived to the full – in a direct and uncompromising way, with dark humour and despair, but also by happily dancing the time away. This rough place simultaneously served as a home and shelter, as a “last resort” to protect people from the abysses outside and within, making them slightly easier to endure. Despite its belated publication, Café Lehmitz (1978) soon came to be known as a famous, direct, cruel yet at the same time loving, book on life outside – outside the bourgeoisie, in the gusty areas unprotected by society where all that matters is who you “really” are at the end of the day. Much like Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank from a decade earlier, Petersen's volume is a provoking, lively and personal document that can be seen to provide a clear starting point for a kind of photography marked by a special degree of intensity.
Anders Petersen's later work increasingly takes the form of a diary, based on visual encounters; its documentary aspect gives way to performance. The photographer's gaze grows sharper, breaking through appearances and looking tough guys right in the face. Petersen becomes increasingly “hypnotically intimate”, hypnotically present; he stands cheek to cheek with male or female friends or acquaintances, next to or in front of them; he wakes them up, calls and stares at them. He shows participation – he shows he's there by going beyond fair intentions, good behaviour and society rules, in order to reveal those forces asleep within us in an almost animal-like manner: aggressiveness and sexuality, as well as nostalgia and warmth. As a photographer, he visually illustrates the way he moves, enters places, goes forth and lives with others. His photography exudes a committed humanism that is intimate, direct and sincere in its display of beauty and monstrosity, gentleness and roughness. His life and photography search for what is eruptive or genuinely tender within us, and approaches others with nostalgia. Ultimately, Anders Petersen's work, which seems so familiar yet at the same time so foreign, provides a self-portrait while serving a documentary purpose.
In the 1970s the path of documentary photography became increasingly marked by subjectivisation. Its parameters gradually changed, as the objective representation of the world was replaced by its subjective perception. A shift occurred from photographic truth to truthfulness, from the truth of the object to the truthfulness of the subject and the photographer's genuineness. The visual exploration, knowledge and representation of the world turned into dialogue, into a reflection on the medium used and oneself. The representation of the world in itself started revolving around its axis, becoming the world for us, our own world in a given moment, perceived according to our specific interest and purposes, or according to aims others have set for us. The photographer, so to speak, visibly entered into photography. He started revealing and exposing himself – from his position as the one in charge he actively made his way into the field and entered into the picture.
This path was also followed by many photo-reporters, although usually in less prominent a manner compared to the photographers described so far. From Bruce Davidson (Brooklyn Gang, 1959) and W. Eugene Smith (Minamata, 1971–73) to Josef Koudelka (Gypsies, 1975), David Goldblatt (Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975), and Gilles Peress (Telex Iran, 1979/80, but published in 1984), by the late 1970s the line between the world in front of the camera and that behind it had clearly started dissolving. The space portrayed became more permeable, approaching a continuum in which people act and things occur – all this becoming fixed on film through the photographer's glance. In this process, individual images would often be replaced by a succession of scenes, by series or sequences in the form of a cloud enabling one to convey certain themes in a more sophisticated manner. Entities disappeared and processes became visible.
In many respects, the 1970s were an exciting decade for photography, yet at the same time one characterised by uncertainty, by outside attacks and a degree of cautiousness. For the first time, photography found itself under strong pressure. On the outside, it was about to be stripped of its dominant role in world coverage by live television. On the inside, it was increasingly overshadowed by the first big wave of commercial colour photography. Art too started employing photography but with little regard for the “fine arts of photography”, that is without the idea of “great photographic art” being inherent in the photographic image; instead, it did so through rough and “formless” works based on so-called found footage. Even the shift in the concept of “photographic truth” was not always perceived as an opportunity.
It was arguably this uncertainty that was chiefly responsible for the emergence of the three physical features which distinguish much of the documentary photography from this decade: the black edges of negatives, wide-angle lens, and coarse grain. Black edges – of varying thickness – started framing socio-documentary pictures like vanilla sticks. Corners would almost invariably be soft and rounded. Photographers wishing to overdo things would enlarge the perforated edge for rolling their film on and set their picture within a dark, black rectangle. A layer of light or dark grey or black dots would cover the frame. During development, 400 ASA Tri-X Kodak films would be pushed to 800 or 1600 ASA in such a way as to be able to shoot without a flash even with poor lighting – the result being that a coating of grains of varying thickness would cover the fine faces, wonderful landscapes or architectural surfaces portrayed, enveloping the subject as though in a net. Finally, photo-reporters in the 1970s would go for wide-angle views, making bodies and faces shrink and vanishing points and horizons slope to the sides. This unusual perspective suggests closeness yet creates distance, with the aim of blending iconic images with complex arrangements.
These three methods to construct images were extremely popular. The use of edges, which seems to turn every black and white photograph into something terribly serious, was practically universal at a given moment. In the light of the uncertainty surrounding photography at the time, these features may be viewed as a marked reaction, a formal counter-strategy. Photography was intended to achieve as authentic and lifelike an effect as possible. Close, direct and with no frills, it was meant to undergo no redevelopments in the darkroom that might alter its original impressions. This became the creed of a kind of figurative counter-reformation. On the one hand, what was pursued was lifelikeness and genuineness by revealing the medium and “piercing” the image to show its brightness; on the other hand, the abstraction of black and white photography was provisionally and uncritically accepted. The use of black and white was still regarded as the norm and measure of all things in documentary photography – almost an ennobling feature. Let us not forget that museums were still refusing to accept colour, which was first introduced through William Eggleston's exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1976.
Be that as it may, different paths and positions soon emerged. With the end of the traditional canon (in terms of contents, formal arrangements and social and moral norms), not all documentary photographers embraced subjectivisation. A movement in the opposite direction is illustrated by American landscape photography. In the late 1970s, a kind of formal revolution was launched in the United States. While photographers from Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams had always focused on the depiction of the American landscape in terms of an unspoiled, sacred nature with a capital N, a need was suddenly felt to engage with an environment that was changing through the occupation of the earth and of nature and their transformation into a territory which people gain possession of, exploit and sell. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha and other young artists countered the old pantheistic and ecstatic view of the environment with a contemporary and realist view of the concrete environment of trivial, everyday life.
In the exhibition “New Topographics” (Rochester 1975), the new generation of photographers represented by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel subverted the representation of beautiful, romantic and existential landscapes: a transition was made from the “divine” and sacred landscape to landscape as a fact of life. Quite simply, these photographers illustrated the grand American ideal, which up until then had at times been represented as austere and empty, but always serene, beautiful and complete. From the heroic and poetic “nature and I” they switched to “the park and we” or even the banal “they and the garden”.
In real life, and now in photographs as well, the landscape had become an enclosed, marginalised and occupied territory. It was also a developed one, as illustrated by Lewis Baltz's Tract Houses (1971), with their banal insignificance, or his New Industrial Parks (1974), marked by the minimalist elegance of silent and faceless architectures, and by Robert Adams's The New West (1974), which bears witness to unchecked urban growth in what was once a magnificent area. These works show brand new cities and houses which in the name of economic pragmatism reject the Western idea of the city as a centre and hierarchically and rationally ordered structure. Everything here is “real estate”, even the landscape: city and countryside merge through a profit-centred perspective. As Heinz Liesbrock observes: “Adams's theme is the transformation of the old West into the one-dimensional America of the present, the perversion of a landscape which once stood for the idea of an entire nation, until it becomes the background for a tame and corrupt society, blind to the devastation it causes.”16
The photographer's gaze ceased being sustained by utopia; rather, detached enquiries were launched into what was happening to the landscape, to cities and the suburbs. Photographers and artists would use the pure images and the identity of form and content as a critical tool to replace the illusion of artistic skill with almost mechanistic descriptions. In such a way, they assigned an essentially new task to those gazing at their photographs (i.e., us as viewing subjects): to turn their gaze on the current, present world before their eyes, with no choices or feelings. Their half-conceptualised documentary photography sought to provide a sober and concrete view of what was taking place out there, to look at it from a neutral, unembellished perspective, almost with scientific accuracy. Their pictures are intentionally cold because these photographers wished to distance themselves from human pathos, from the sentimental drive of the 1950s. They drew upon conceptualism and structuralism in their work, seeking to identify structures and shapes, and to define the typology and systematic quality of ruling urbanism. The subject no longer derives a feeling of fulfilment or enrichment from his viewing; rather, he feels he is himself part of a system.
This form of documentary photography was more of a reaction against the spread of the capitalism of big companies and the commercialisation of the nature, life and soul of America, than one against the loss of authoritativeness affecting established social values and institutions. In such a way, what Roland Barthes had called for in his criticism of “The Family of Man” was finally achieved: the emergence of progressive humanism with the power to overthrow the “very old imposture”, which is to say “constantly to scour nature” and its laws, in such a way as “to establish Nature as historical” once and for all. Through systematic inventories, photography here explored the way nature and the world of life had been reduced to economic factors.
These two paths – one subjective, the other systematic – reacted in very different ways and at different times to social conditions in the aftermath of World War II and the process of the radical commercialisation of life. Ultimately, in their concentrated form, both represent abstractions that inevitably overlook many interesting and effective perspectives. Standing halfway between the two are – among other forms of photography – William Eggleston's partly imperturbable, partly indifferent gaze, Lee Friedlander's sophisticated and thoughtful representation of everyday life, the ethnographic approach of Stephen Shore's American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, Garry Winogrand's obsessive attention to everyday life, Larry Clark's intimate and voyeuristic gaze on sex and drugs, Luigi Ghirri's delicate language, with its focus on ordinariness and search for the essence of images, and Bernard Plossu's diary-like, poetic and subjective travel photography.
1 Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man”, in Mythologies, English translation by Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1951), in Kulturkritik und
Gesellschaft I. Gesammelte Schriften. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1998; Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 30.
5 Theodor W. Adorno, “Engagement” [1962], in Petra Kiedaisch (ed.), Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter (Stuttgart, 1995), p. 53.
6 Georg Schmidt, in Photo 49, special issue of the magazine Publicité et Arts Graphiques (Lausanne, 1949), p. XVIII.
7 See Urs Stahel, 'In einer sinnlosen Welt. Die Polaroids von Robert Frank', in Urs Stahel, Martin Gasser, Thomas Seelig, and Peter Pfrunder (eds.), Essays über Robert Frank (Göttingen, 2005), pp.166–74.
8 Sarah Grenough and Philip Brookman, Robert Frank. Moving Out (Zurich, 1994), p. 142.
9 Max Kozloff, “William Klein and the Radioactive Fifties”, in Books on Books #5. William Klein: Life is Good & Good for You in New York [1956] (New York, 2010).
10 Daido Moriyama, Stray Dogs (San Francisco, 1999), p. 15.
11 Shomei Tomatsu, Skin of the Nation (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 16.
12 Daido Moriyama, Stray Dogs (San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 8–30.
13 Ibid., p. 18.
14 Ibid., pp. 9ff., 31ff.
15 Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture, 1986).
16 Heinz Liesbrock, “Vision und Revision des amerikanischen Westens”, in The New West. Landschaften der Colorado Front Range [1974] (new ed. Cologne, 2000), p. xxiii.
Published in Photography Vol. 3: From the Press to the Museum 1941-1980.
Text by Urs Stahel, Francesco Zanot and Camile van Winkel, Edited by Walter Guadagnini.
Skira, Milano 2013