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Shape of Light: 100 years of Photography and Abstract Art /anglais
nan
- GenresPhotographyArt
224 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 2, 2018
Catalogue book for the exhibit at Tate Modern (which is well worth a visit if you have the chance).
April 14, 2021
"You control everything. You plan everything, but you leave a door open for reality to enter." - Jean Renoir
There was a time when the histories of photography and fine art appeared to occupy two different paths, complementary and related, but parallel, the distance between them varying but never touching. Photography seemed at some moments in fact to set up camp outside the art world and define itself in opposition to it.
In 1840, when photography was in its infancy, Hippolyte Bayard created his "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man", demonstrating an already acute awareness of the fact that photography is not simply about reproducing reality. Going beyond the subject to achieve a new form of expression was one of the original motivations for photographic creation. Although the camera remains a perfect perspectivist tool, capable of copying reality in its slightest detail, it has long been recognized for its ability to emancipate itself from mere reproduction in order to detach itself from reality and produce mental images. The question, therefore, is not so much about explaining why photography turned towards abstraction - after all, the reasons are the same as they are for other mediums - but rather how and thanks to whom it occurred, bringing it not only into the history of photography, but also into the wider history of abstract art.
With this in mind, the evolution of science and technology during the 19th century is taken for granted here, including the essential roles played by literature, philosophy and music. As a matter of principle, scientific images have been ruled out in order to highlight the desire to "create art", reasoning that it is precisely because photographers wanted to create art that they made every effort to move away from reality. Since the time of the romantics, it has been widely admitted that "the painter should not paint only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him". Paintings no longer had to be descriptive, it could express and translate the richness of the life of the mind through colours. As paradoxical as it may appear, "no reporting", the motto coined by Stephane Mallame to encourage mystery in poetry by suggesting rather than describing, applies perfectly to the research of many photographers throughout the 20th century.
Our time is the top the Great Separation between the real and the abstract, and of the flowering of the latter. But when the new "realism" is transformed, through new processes and a point of view that still eludes us, it will flourish and yield fruits, and may result in an agreement of the abstract and the real that will usher in a new celestial revelation.
Abstraction, which had previously seemed incompatible with the realist precision of photography ,thus became a movement in the history of photography the began and still continues to measure itself against painting. Within abstraction in general, often regraded as an impasse in modern art, photography occupies a special place due precisely to its presupposed realist nature. It is this ambiguous position that makes it one of the mediums most likely to challenge representation in art. From the very beginning, photographers have not been, and are still not, content simply to "take images"; rather, they make them from scratch. Some give way to dream, imagination, blurring and ambiguity, while others construct and introduce a vocabulary of forms and techniques that anchor the medium in a precise temporal context.
"I'm not interested in the texture of the rock, or the tit is a rock, but in the mass of it, and its shadow." This approach, when applied to his photographs, means the viewer is not presented with, ormolu importantly does not see, a rock but instead a mass of light and shadow created by the tone and contrast of the photographic medium. This defamiliarization of the everyday is crucial to understanding how a photograph of the real world can present an abstract view of the world.
The photogram hovers excitingly between abstract geometrical tracery and the echo of objects. In this tension there is often a particular charm - the objects lose body and appear but a lustrous strange world and abstraction.
"Photography is the only deductive art, every other art that I can think of begins with the topic tabula rasa, or a blank sheet of A4 paper, or a theatre awaiting dancers and lights, photography begins with a world that's perhaps over full and needs to sort out from that world what is meaningful."
There was a time when the histories of photography and fine art appeared to occupy two different paths, complementary and related, but parallel, the distance between them varying but never touching. Photography seemed at some moments in fact to set up camp outside the art world and define itself in opposition to it.
In 1840, when photography was in its infancy, Hippolyte Bayard created his "Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man", demonstrating an already acute awareness of the fact that photography is not simply about reproducing reality. Going beyond the subject to achieve a new form of expression was one of the original motivations for photographic creation. Although the camera remains a perfect perspectivist tool, capable of copying reality in its slightest detail, it has long been recognized for its ability to emancipate itself from mere reproduction in order to detach itself from reality and produce mental images. The question, therefore, is not so much about explaining why photography turned towards abstraction - after all, the reasons are the same as they are for other mediums - but rather how and thanks to whom it occurred, bringing it not only into the history of photography, but also into the wider history of abstract art.
With this in mind, the evolution of science and technology during the 19th century is taken for granted here, including the essential roles played by literature, philosophy and music. As a matter of principle, scientific images have been ruled out in order to highlight the desire to "create art", reasoning that it is precisely because photographers wanted to create art that they made every effort to move away from reality. Since the time of the romantics, it has been widely admitted that "the painter should not paint only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him". Paintings no longer had to be descriptive, it could express and translate the richness of the life of the mind through colours. As paradoxical as it may appear, "no reporting", the motto coined by Stephane Mallame to encourage mystery in poetry by suggesting rather than describing, applies perfectly to the research of many photographers throughout the 20th century.
Our time is the top the Great Separation between the real and the abstract, and of the flowering of the latter. But when the new "realism" is transformed, through new processes and a point of view that still eludes us, it will flourish and yield fruits, and may result in an agreement of the abstract and the real that will usher in a new celestial revelation.
Abstraction, which had previously seemed incompatible with the realist precision of photography ,thus became a movement in the history of photography the began and still continues to measure itself against painting. Within abstraction in general, often regraded as an impasse in modern art, photography occupies a special place due precisely to its presupposed realist nature. It is this ambiguous position that makes it one of the mediums most likely to challenge representation in art. From the very beginning, photographers have not been, and are still not, content simply to "take images"; rather, they make them from scratch. Some give way to dream, imagination, blurring and ambiguity, while others construct and introduce a vocabulary of forms and techniques that anchor the medium in a precise temporal context.
"I'm not interested in the texture of the rock, or the tit is a rock, but in the mass of it, and its shadow." This approach, when applied to his photographs, means the viewer is not presented with, ormolu importantly does not see, a rock but instead a mass of light and shadow created by the tone and contrast of the photographic medium. This defamiliarization of the everyday is crucial to understanding how a photograph of the real world can present an abstract view of the world.
The photogram hovers excitingly between abstract geometrical tracery and the echo of objects. In this tension there is often a particular charm - the objects lose body and appear but a lustrous strange world and abstraction.
"Photography is the only deductive art, every other art that I can think of begins with the topic tabula rasa, or a blank sheet of A4 paper, or a theatre awaiting dancers and lights, photography begins with a world that's perhaps over full and needs to sort out from that world what is meaningful."
December 22, 2018
I saw this 2018 exhibit of abstract photography at the Tate Modern and it ranks now as one of my favorite museum shows ever. There is so much I'd never seen before. I wish I could give the same rave review for the book. The selection of photography alone is worth buying the book for. But the text -- which sets out to trace the history of abstract photography and describe the historical connections between abstract photography and other forms of abstract art as they were happening -- is disappointing: full of interesting things, almost all of which are buried in lingo.
It has always bothered me that so often museum exhibition catalogs, sold in the museum book shops to museum patrons, seem to be written less for museum patrons, than for earning the regard of their professional colleagues. There is just no excuse for a museum exhibition catalog to include the words, "different subjectivities through the same processes of organised defamiliarisation,..." Any motivated and patient reader can read this book and will get a lot out of it. But imagine what wonderful things this book could have done for the people who bought it in the museum shop if it had been written for them instead.
It has always bothered me that so often museum exhibition catalogs, sold in the museum book shops to museum patrons, seem to be written less for museum patrons, than for earning the regard of their professional colleagues. There is just no excuse for a museum exhibition catalog to include the words, "different subjectivities through the same processes of organised defamiliarisation,..." Any motivated and patient reader can read this book and will get a lot out of it. But imagine what wonderful things this book could have done for the people who bought it in the museum shop if it had been written for them instead.
January 6, 2023
If you’re like me and try to find your own style, I recommend trying other routes.
If however you’d just like a quick history I guess you’ll like this book.
If however you’d just like a quick history I guess you’ll like this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews