Labyrinth
I sit in a library with three photobooks next to me. It’s always a gamble to read photo books at the library, especially with pages unpaginated, because some people like to slip a page into their pocket. You never know if you’ve got a gap toothed book (the same goes for whatever makes up history…oh well).
The first, Royal Road Test. The classic from 1971. Three men work their way to the desert to throw a typewriter out of a car. This was art back then. Edward Ruscha, Mason Williams, and Patrick Blackwell set this all up, and there’s not much to it. The book is short. You could read it if you could find it.
Anyways, the first photograph is one of the typewriter (“Royal (Model ‘X’) Typewriter,” it says). I believe this is the main character. And afterwards, we get introductions to the men, and then the window from which the typewriter was thrown, and then, finally (this must have been profound in 1970), documentary-ish images of the wreck of a typewriter smashed against the ground. The final image is cute: the wreck of the typewriter on the ground, next to the shadows of the three men. One man’s shadow shows him holding the camera.
Short and sweet: we never see the event of throwing the typewriter out of the car. We only see its evidence. So the book might be making a statement about an event and its trace, or it might also be making a statement about evidence and documentary photography (asking us to take something so silly seriously).
Next book in front of me: A Close Brush With Reality by Bart Parker. I skim it. I think he’s making a statement about photographs being not quite real. I like an image of a claw demolishing a building because it reminds me of the Mark Doty poem “Demolition.”
Finally, David Hockney’s book Cameraworks contains sort of panoramic-printed photography. Instead of a single image constituting a portrait of a person, Hockney takes many images close-up, and collages them into one large portrait. It is pleasing to look at, reminding me, too, of panorama mode on my iPhone, especially when my iPhone’s algorithm becomes choppy.
A while ago, Kathy mentioned an approach to photography that was outdated (“photography is different now,” she said, “than it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s”) . And I have books in front of me with images from the 1970s and 1980s, so I see, in front of me, this “outdated” approach, which, in my mind, is not so outdated at all. In front of me are challenges to what some may call “straight” photography: that an image transparently depicts reality, with little-to-no bias that cannot be accounted for (ironically, in a different meaning of this word, I wanted my queer exhibition to be all “straight” photography to leave the question of representation intact). In front of me, however: photography is poked at through sequence and an almost parody of documentary styles (Royal Road Test), through (pretty didactically) its questioning of itself and reality, with accompanying text (A Close Brush with Reality), and, finally, through an attention to the material through which an image is shown (Cameraworks). If these techniques feel dated, it is only because our perception of the medium has shifted (we no longer see documentary photography like Royal Road Test; we no longer see the styles used by A Close Brush with Reality; we no longer see prints or polaroids to the extent that Cameraworks displays them). If our perception of the medium has shifted, it is only because representation—this capacity for photography (the image depicted, its material, its style) to correspond to and say something about our world—is sort of unstable. The world shifts; technology, with its figurative power, does too.
I wanted to put these all down as bullet points, because this is nothing too crazy (walking through this knowledge like a preset labyrinth), but here we be.