Viewing the various images of industrial Melbourne in the initial Collaborations exhibition at Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide opened up the theoretical project of rethinking of documentary photography to the idea that these representations are a form of industrial archaeology. What appeared from reading these photos was a sense that the photos appeared as an excavation of a forgotten, industrial Melbourne in that they were a retrieval of what has been overlooked as the ruins, detritus or wasteland of industrial Melbourne. Though they enabled us, the viewer, to form a sense of the historical textuality of modernity these archaeological images would not be seen as art by the art institution.
Today the idea of photography as a medium that simply records the world around us seem positively quaint. However, the various images on the white wall of the gallery highlighted how this large format, documentary photography also placed an emphasis on the modernist concern with the basic form of the art object -- ie., the shapes, colours and lines that make up the art work. The emphasis on the basic form of the image indicate the aesthetic aspect of this documentary style in a topographic mode.
Though the pictures are a form of historical knowledge, the aesthetic dimension moves this documentary photography away from the conventional notions of mechanical representation--capturing the real. This naturalism continues to define photojournalism, the media's reportage tendency to reduce photography to illustration, and conventional understandings of documentary photography. Photographic images are anything but neutral reflections of the wider world or simple traces of a present past. In this return to the past the photos are a form of history making about the uncanny or the unhomely.
The rethinking of documentary photography is also post modernist in the sense that it represents the present as if it were already past--as if it were history. The exhibition highlighted this topographical photography as a historical practice with its inbuilt tensions (or dialectic) between formalism and historicism. It indicates how this photography plays with time and historical distance, representing a moment in the past only to give it over to new interpretations and modes of seeing in subsequent viewings.
Yet contemporary photography is all about,, “interrogating the medium”, which often means shifting it away from documentary towards other, more conceptually driven art forms – abstract painting, sculpture, performance, video installation in a world of of image overload. We now live in a digital world drowning in images with the arrival of the smartphone camera. The numbers are mind-boggling: 350m photographs a day uploaded on Facebook; 95m photographs and videos shared on Instagram daily. The combined number of images shared uploaded on both platforms now exceeds 290bn, while there are 188m daily active users of Snapchat. Artificial technology is just around the corner.
In contrast the industrial Melbourne project is very modest and slow. It works in terms of a series --bridges or freeways or creeks ---so that the images of these found object are connected to one another in an archivalist sense. Seriality can be understood in terms of difference as opposed to sameness, and photographic projects can be seen in terms of longevity as opposed to the instantaneous. As Susan James argues in her Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain the linking of images in a series forces the establishing of connections and relations. It bounces the gaze from one site to another, to build up meanings across time, thereby giving us a sense of our own industrial history, as well as a perspective on the spaces that we currently inhabit.
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