New Objectivity and the Optical Properties of Photographs

Heidi Specker won me over shortly after an old roommate of mine introduced me to Im Garten, her lovely book published by Steidl. Though her exploration of man-made and natural forms at first felt a bit too lucid, the more time that I spent with the photographs, the more I understood her deeper interest in “the relationship between construction and deconstruction.”

In the Speckergruppen in the 1990s, Specker studied the structural principles that underlie modern architecture. There followed a body of work titled Concrete, a detailed examination of materials and their visual appearance. In her latest series Im Garten, Specker has returned to the nature of photography, once again exploring photographic models in the composition of her images in which urban spaces and the prolific vegetation they contain are completely divorced from narrative moments.

Blossfeldt 1, 2003 (from “Im Garten”) © Heidi Specker Interesting to me is this removal of context within her photographs, similar to that of some images by recently mentioned photographer Roe Ethridge. Specker’s work is, however, most often compared to that of Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966), a German photographer often associated with the New Objectivity movement – art in opposition to expressionism. Glasses, 1927 (from “Die Welt ist Schön”) © Albert Renger-Patzsch Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist Schön (The World is Beautiful) is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. Jörg Sasse, a student of Thomas Ruff at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, will at times consider the world in a similar fashion – as in the case of many of the photographs in his series Private Spaces. W-91-04-01, Heidelberg, 1991 © Jörg SasseW-90-06-02, Düsseldorf, 1990 © Jörg SasseW-89-08-01, Düsseldorf, 1989 © Jörg Sasse This leads me towards a separate, though somehow related, discussion. Recently, I received another insightful e-mail from Bill Sullivan where he explained Sasse’s approach to photography as not un-like that of Gerhard Richter. In fact, take a look at the “Categories” available on Sasse’s website – interesting, no? But, viewing the work by project, “it is as if the look of current photo data/texture was the matter,” wrote Bill, and “the iconography is, in a way, secondary.” He mentioned that Sasse’s work is interesting to him “because it separates the photographic properties from the images - again, a la Richter.” Bill is interested in the optical properties of photographs – like Richter, but beginning with folks such as Whistler or Manet, who addressed these ideas earlier in painting. Again, in the case of Sasse’s more recent work Bill restates that, “the visual properties are the most relevant objective ‘document’ - not the iconography or what is depicted.” 9385, 2007 © Jörg Sasse5433, 2005 © Jörg Sasse Over on the new blog Fartin On Thunder, Ben Smart, in a post titled Unsavory Digital Practices, considers photographic processes and looks closer at a few contemporary approaches that drastically change the way we might consider the optical properties of photographs.

On the subject of photographic processes in the 19th century, P.H. Emerson once said, “only a vandal would render an image in red or blue.” Emerson was referring to the cyanotype process, and the technique of giving a second impression on hand-made photographs with a pass of watercolor pigments sensitized with gum bichromate. These techniques he was referring to are now treasured and embraced by practicioners of alternative process photography. The result of these processes are esoteric, but almost ubiquitously accepted as being “letigimate” photographic processes. The eve of digital photography as its own medium has led to new visions within photography that had P.H. Emerson been alive to see, he probably would have rendered him speachless to a such degree that his jaw would atrophy. My favorite example of this would be HDR imaging. HDR photographs are typically made of still-subjects and require multiple bracketed exposures to compensate for highlights that get blown out and shadow areas where detail is dumped. This kind of compensating for the low-lattitude of digital capture, however; has led to this bastard-child of an aesthetic. The overzealous tech-heads behind HDR images have apparently never studied the zone system, or have never taken a drawing class, because they end up putting too much detail and too-light values in all the wrong areas. To quote a friend of mine, “they all look like middle values.” With just a little shadow, and just a little highlight, these images end up looking like they belong on black velvet rather than photographic paper.

Romanian Athenaeum, photographed using the HDR technique, 2006 © Simon Laird See more examples of HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging by making a simple Flickr search. Ben goes on to conclude that,

An image of these sorts could be an effective platform for postmodern photographic ideas, but unfortunately enough most of these images are postmodern only due to the complete incidental abandon of modernist aesthetics. With this new technological era of photography upon us, it’s interesting to consider how this hyper-abundance of photographic images will effect art. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, minimalists and post-minimalists were reacting to the “gluttony of images” in the media, and its effect on reality. Perhaps a similar reaction will happen in coming years, against the overimportance of the informal image.

Could this be? Whether it’s further addressing what can be done through detailed examinations of materials and their visual appearance or, by way of new technological advances, rendering the world more hyper-real than ever, what effect will these two practices have on future images and image-makers (specifically fine art photographs and photographers), our understanding of visual information and, ultimately, our relationship to that which is around us?