Marjaana
Kella Writing Photographs Conference,
Tate Modern, 13 October, 2018
Rethinking Photographic Abstraction:
In Search of a Metapresentation
At the turn of the millennium, photography seemed to flourish in contemporary art more than ever
before. Its sudden success seemed to gain its power partly from the inner features of the medium,
which were spotlighted in many contemporary photographs. The idea of conceptual photography
and, on the other hand, different projects related to “abstract” photography were revived.
But what is an abstraction, and what does it have to do with representation? Derived from Latin abs
trahere, meaning “to draw away”, abstraction is a process of removing characteristics from
something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics. I.e. by reducing unnecessary
elements, abstraction does not undermine representation rather intensifies it: by abstracting the core
of a matter will be revealed. I call it a super(re)presentation or metapresentation.
The way abstraction is understood in the context of modernist painting is perfectly logical with this
basic idea. In abstract painting, the effects borrowed from any other medium (such as the illusion of
three-dimensionality) were eliminated to reveal the essential elements which, according to Clement
Greenberg, were related to the flatness of the canvas.
Along the centenarian history of abstract painting, we have also become accustomed to the idea of
an abstract artwork and how it should look like. Unfortunately this convention has also
contaminated the concept of abstract photography. Ever since Alvin Langdon Coburn decided to
call his light figures shot with a prism as abstract photographs, ”abstract” photographs have
persistently resembled abstract paintings.
Usually there are few recognisable elements in photographs that are called “abstract”. Typical
examples in abstract photography exhibitions have been so-called cameraless pictures, like photo-
and chemigrams. Paradoxically, also digitally created “abstract” photographs often look a bit
similar.
If we take the idea of the abstraction seriously, abstraction in photography cannot by any means
resemble abstract painting because the preconditions of the picture are fundamentally different.
But what is a photograph? This is the central question when we are deliberating photographic
abstraction. Do we consider this to be a photograph? Or is this a photograph? Do we need a camera
to have a photograph or is exposure itself enough for an image to be called a photograph?
In order for the photographic abstraction to meet the true criteria of a superpresentation, we should,
in my opinion, have an image created through the camera’s aperture. And what should come up in
metapresentation, in addition to the exposed light-sensitive material, is so-called “transparency” of
a photograph.
Depiction, imaging through a camera’s lens replicates in a peculiar manner our way to see and be in
the world. The perspective lines of visible come together in the focal point, behind which there is
the subject. The camera is a metaphor to human itself; to our way of perceiving the reality. This is
also a fascinating starting point for rethinking photographic abstraction.
1) Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (1979) challenges us to think about the picture’s own complexity.
At whom is the woman in the picture looking? Is it the spectator – or perhaps it is the person taking
the picture whose reflection she can see in the mirror? What about the camera in the middle of the
picture? At first glance, it looks as if it is angled towards the spectator. However, if we consider the
whole image field to be a reflection in the mirror, the image itself returns back to the camera visible
in the middle, camera obscura, and back to imaging that happens inside it. The picture takes its
own picture.
2) A suitable ground for photographic abstraction could also be a portrait, which is per se already
related to the spectator and the subject being viewed. Thus, a portrait could be considered to
represent the idea of a picture in general – although this only works if it does not aim to reflect the
personality of the person in the picture. These kinds of deadpan portraits are, for example, Thomas
Ruff’s portraits of young Germans.
3) Also philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, have referred to portraits –
especially photographs of death masks – as examples of pictures that represent the idea of an image
in general.
Masks casted with a mold were used for centuries to capture the features of prominent persons, in
particular. The molds were casted of the dead person’s face soon after they had died. The death
mask captured a transitional phase; the physical touch of the dead person’s likeness before the body
decomposes and the eyes draw away from sight. At same time, the imprint also captured something
essential of the image itself.
A photograph in itself is a casting just like a death mask – it came about of presence that was once
there and the touch of light. A photograph of a death mask is an image of an image, but also an
image of an image preceding it; a face which likeness was made visible by the vision drawn away
(death). This picture, three times removed, can act as an exemplary image of an image.
4) Thus far all of my suggestions of photographic abstraction have been single photographs.
However, already in 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote that reproductibility is photograph’s special
feature. Especially in the current flood of pictures, it is impossible to find the original. The picture
of the pictures does not exist and a photograph never comes from nothing. Pictures imitate each
other.
As Roland Barthes wrote in 1980, already a single photograph has many overlapping presentations.
The first one of these is the pose of a person presenting him/herself for the picture. The subject sort
of places oneself there beforehand to become an image. The second presentation is of the
photographer who tries to turn the picture into a piece of art. Third is the pose in the eyes of the
spectator who “projects the present photographs´s immobility upon the past shot”. Finally, Barthes
states: “what founds the nature of photography is the pose”.
In this project, the participants took pictures of each other. The photographing session was also
filmed at the same time. I´ll conclude this presentation by moving image which shows us one more
photographic abstraction.
