Precis

The title of chapter four of Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art, “Something and Nothing”, points to the oblique subject matter of a certain thematic grouping in contemporary art photography. The non-human things that are the focus of this grouping are ordinary, everyday objects, “objects and spaces that we may ordinarily ignore or pass by” (9). Cotton lists some examples of the iconography for this type of photography as follows: “objects balanced and stacked”, such as Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Quiet Afternoon series (1984-85), in which sculptural forms are created by assemblages of mundane household items that are often stacked and fixed together, for example a grater, a carrot and a courgette stacked and impossibly balanced; “the edges or corners of things”, such as Gabriel Orozco’s Breath on Piano (1993), in which the ephemeral traces of condensed breath are juxtaposed with and layered onto the solid, shiny corners of the piano; “abandoned spaces, rubbish and decay”, such as Wim Wenders’ Wall in Paris, Texas (2001) and Anthony Hernandez’s Aliso Village #3 (2000), that focus on neglected and abandoned spaces; and “fugitive or ephemeral forms, such as snow, condensation and light”, examples of which are Tracey Baran’s Dewy (2000), and Manfred Willman’s Das Land series that focuses on the passing of the seasons (115).

In the sense that these objects and spaces have not traditionally been seen as credible visual subjects, and that they often do not merit much attention in people’s everyday lives, they could be considered “nothing”. Yet their very concrete presence, their “thing-ness”, and the way in which they are transformed from ordinary objects and spaces and made “extraordinary” by being photographed from “a sensitized and subjective point of view” (9), and thus altered conceptually, makes them “something”. Through this treatment, argues Cotton, “everything in the real world is a potential subject” (9), as “through photography, quotidian matter is given a visual charge and imaginative possibility beyond its everyday function” (115). She cautions against seeing the subject matter of this type of contemporary art photography as “unphotographed or unphotographable” (115-16), emphasising that the significance of any subject is determined jointly by the viewer and the artist, that the photographer designates something as significant by photographing it, piquing the visual curiosity of the viewer and encouraging an intersubjective engagement.

Cotton identifies one of the precursors of this particular strand of contemporary art photography practice in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and locates contemporary practices within subsequent “attempts to make art from the matter of daily life, by breaking down the boundaries between the artist’s studio, the gallery and the world” (115). Because the specific technical skill of the artist is not immediately apparent or foregrounded, the objects or spaces become the focus of the viewer’s curiosity and attention, and the conceptual weight of their presence and configurations intensifies. In this sense, Cotton refers to “the pictorial charge that can be found in a place [or object], perhaps any place [or object], if one looks” (127, my addition in parentheses). Ways of seeing are crucial; physical, spatial and conceptual relationships are crucial; and an engagement with the concrete “thing-ness” of the objects or spaces, and with their location within their cultural and spatial environments, is crucial.

(What drew me to this particular chapter was an interest that I have had for a long time in the writing of W.G. Sebald, who includes photographs of various objects and scenes in his work. These photographs suggest a deeply phenomenological approach to the subject matter that has been difficult to account for within text-based literary studies. Many of the images Sebald uses lend a documentary feel to the work, and blur the boundaries between fiction and reality; but many of his images relate to architectural and spatial forms, and Cotton’s statement, in her discussion of Wenders and Hernandez that “architecture, in the context of this chapter, tends to be photographed at the point at which buildings have deteriorated or outlived their original purpose, abandoned by their inhabitants to leave only traces of previous human activity” (125), resonates strongly with many of Sebald’s preoccupations with the object in the context of its historical and cultural environment. I am hoping that looking a bit more deeply into this particular strand of contemporary art photography will help me to build a conceptual visual language and shed light on visual aspects of Sebald’s work that I have struggled to account for adequately.)