Observations on Recent Photography
Beyond the seductive spectacle.
By Patrick Kaipainen
Posted June 25th, 2007Deuil, Spring Hurlbut's recent exhibition at the Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, continues the tradition of the still life as a meditation on death. What's more, the artist demonstrates that she has a firm understanding of what a photograph is. This may read as scant praise to bestow upon a photo-based artist, but I intend it as the greatest commendation. I'll qualify my assertions after a digression.
I mean to suggest that there is a general misunderstanding of what constitutes a photograph. A good deal of imagery is photographic in origin, but I would hesitate to situate such images within the domain of photography proper.
There is a quotation in this year's Contact catalogue that remarks on the need "to start reading the word 'photographic' in a new way." It continues with the observation that "'photographic' today is really photo-GRAPHIC, the photo providing only the initial layer for the overall graphical mix." This explains photographic elements within mixed media environments and most importantly, the incredible malleability of the digital image.
To treat a photograph as a graphic, as a design element, is to treat it superficially, and to disregard its most important features: its undiscriminating rendering of surface detail, its consequent ties to a particular referent, and its documentary capacities.
While Contact is a photography event, it includes many things which cannot be regarded as photographs. Douglas Coupland's installations in bus shelters — occupying space that would otherwise have been used for advertisements — made no pretensions of being photographs. In fact, their use of text and composite imagery made them look very much like advertisements. Karen Ostrom's installation in MOCCA consisted of a panorama that covered the foursquare walls of its installation space. It didn't attempt to be a photograph.
The strongest work in The Constructed Image, the main exhibition of Contact 2007, was that in which the bulk of the construction and manipulation took place before the photograph was taken, as is seen in the work of Thomas Demand. His photographs of paper constructions don't lie; they merely record the fabrications placed before the camera. His image of (paper) x-ray equipment in a (paper) airport was also the most seductive in the MOCCA show, as it didn't wallop the viewer with a gratuitous spectacle, or with a display of Photoshop virtuosity.
The difficulty with digital manipulation is that it tempts artists to produce a kind of illustrative illusionism, wherein a space is created in order to be populated with fantastical objects. Digital editing can also very quickly become the raison d'être for work that is conceptually weak.
Spring Hurlbut, "Mary #1", from Deuil series
With all this in mind, I'd like to suggest why Spring Hurlbut's recent work is so worthy of note. To begin with, her show at Prefix is emblematic of photographs, rather than of photographic imagery. It carries with it all the corresponding associations of memory, (a)temporality, and partial objectivity. These qualities of the medium resonate with the subject matter of Hurlbut's photographs: the cremated remains of her father weighed on an antique scale, tiny fragments of bone carefully arranged according to size, the ashes of a friend scattered on a black surface.
The photograph of the scale contains a wonderful tension. The package of ashes is quantified, which serves to emphasize that it is a mere bag of dust, which yet signifies the end of a life. To this is added the inherent irony of the photograph as a thing which attempts to prolong a moment towards eternity while simultaneously acknowledging the particularity of its subject. The inexorable failure of memory is recognized in this photograph, but the artist also recognizes that, so long as it is contested, memory persists.
The other images which make up the exhibition resemble photographs of star fields and celestial bodies, that is, until the viewer approaches them, at which point it becomes evident that the space represented is much more intimate. The stars are in fact ash. In these photographs the macro and the micro coalesce, the space is simultaneously vast and shallow. Once again it is the particularity of the photographic medium, its rendering of surfaces that afford these pictures their power. The sense of profundity they elicit is directly related to their ability to convince the audience that they are looking at the actual remains of a real human body.
The final aspect that locates Hurlbut's exhibition within the realm of photography is its archival aesthetic. (Photographs are predisposed to collection.) Her pictures observe an almost scientific uniformity, as though the camera and lights were left in the exact same place as new objects were placed before them. The ruler in the bone fragment photographs operates in the same way the scale does, implying careful analysis and record keeping.
It might be noted that I have scarcely mentioned the formal aspects of Hurlbut's photographs. Aesthetic experience can scarcely be described in words, and it would do the artist's work no favours to blunder in this direction. Her work cannot be criticized on technical grounds. Suffice it to say that her photographs are as beautiful as objects as they are conceptually cogent. Certainly, the conceptual and the aesthetic cannot be separated if good art is to be produced, and it is their close identification in Deuil which so distinguishes Hurlbut.