Artist Statement | Chapos

1 A New Vision

The first decades of the twentieth century were a time of great artistic innovation. In the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918), a variety of movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, expanded the influence of art in society and broadened the concept of art itself in Europe. In China, the New Culture Movement challenged the identity of the emerging nation and opened up to artistic influences from Japan and Europe. In photography, this period marked the emancipation of the medium as an artistic language capable of generating a “new vision” of the world. Photography’s formalism and immediacy allowed the medium to represent reality in a practical and sober, yet socially engaging way.

The introduction of the first mass-produced small-format Leica camera in 1924 increased the flexibility of both amateur and professional photographers. The establishment of photography classes at the Bauhaus in 1929 elevated photography from a mere means of reproduction to a tool for creative practice, influencing an entire generation of artists. They moved between Paris, Rio de Janeiro, New York and Shanghai, either in search of new professional opportunities or forced by political turmoil. These are just some of the important developments in the history of photography, which has always been driven by technological progress, social communication and migration.

The avant-garde photographers featured in this section used the camera for their work as artists as well as in advertising, fashion, photojournalism and cinema. They published their work in magazines and showed it in the first photographic art exhibitions. They experimented with countless technical possibilities and held a mirror up to photography. A new consciousness changed the way artists viewed the world, their practice and themselves. The self-portrait manifests this moment of self-reflection and points to the interplay of relationships: Who is being photographed, who is looking at the image and who is making it?

Beginning in the 1970s, another avant-garde continued this interrogation. After the heyday of photojournalism and with the rise of television, artists questioned the production and meaning of the photographic image, which had become ubiquitous in everyday life. Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women bridges a longstanding investigation of pictorial representation and the specificities of photography. In a reworking of Edouard Manet’s famous painting Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881-82), Wall reconstructs the composition by positioning the model, photographer and camera in front of a large mirror and presenting his large-scale prints in a light box familiar from advertising. Compared to modernist artists, his perspective is more conventional but thereby conceptual: the scene becomes a theatrical set-up in which nothing is hidden; all the elements of a photograph are visible. It is completed by the viewer, who actively participates in the composition of the image.

2 Art for the Camera

Artists have used photography in their work since its invention in the nineteenth century, as inspiration, drawing aid or raw material for collages and multimedia works. Despite artistic movements such as Pictorialism and New Objectivity, which valued photography as art, it was not until the 1970s that it entered museums as such. The photographs exhibited were primarily documentations of Conceptual Art and performances, which were considered the actual artistic content. The images served primarily to increase visibility and to provide an afterlife for the ephemeral actions. However, this view neglects the additional layer of artistic expression that photography offers.

Many performances had no audience, but were conceived specifically for the camera. In Körperkonfigurationen, Valie Export adapts her body to architectural elements, questioning urban space and its disconnection from people, especially women. The difference in scale between the body and the architecture only becomes visible in the photographs, which are taken from a low angle. Similarly, Maita Masafumi positioned himself centrally in front of the camera for his work Flow. In nine successive shots, the possible gestures of bending a leaden rod become visible through the stable frame of the photographs. The focus on movement and repetition is also at the heart of Richard Serra’s short films Lead and Fulcrum. The videos are very close to photographic language in their emphasis on the “decisive moment,” which is juxtaposed in its two extremes: the slow motion of the tiring arm and the quick grasping of the lead piece.

Many artists who used photography and film were untrained and often collaborated with experienced photographers to create their work. For Acción de la Estrella, Carlos Leppe had a star shaved on his head in reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 performance. Leppe applied this to the Chilean context, both in terms of international artistic influence and the redefinition of culture under the military dictatorship. In several of the photographs, this ideal composition on the artist’s head completes a transparent version of the Chilean flag. RongRong documented the last part of Zhang Huan’s performance 12 Square Meters as the artist stepped into a pond to wash. The ephemeral end of his action is captured in a poetic sequence that makes it a notable gesture in itself as he leaves the frame.

“Pier 18” was a collaborative project between 27 artists and photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender. Each artist briefly wrote down an intervention to be realized with and by the photographers. For example, photographing the pier from predetermined perspectives or photographing balls thrown into the air, a work of art that was previously only an imagined concept is finally realized.

All of these artists staged their actions to produce the most expressive images. In this way, photography became an integral part of other art forms, influencing them with its own aesthetics, rules and possibilities.

3 Questioning the Tool  

Working with a camera has always left room for experimentation and chance. As a technical apparatus, the camera comes with certain protocols to follow in order to achieve a good image, but every step, from choosing the film, lens, frame, shutter speed and aperture to developing the image in the darkroom, offers a myriad of possibilities for variation. The avant-garde of the early twentieth century explored unconventional angles to shift the perspective of the world and used the basic mechanism of exposing light-sensitive film to produce photograms. The avant-garde artists of the 1970s and 1980s took a step back and questioned the materials and conventions of how an image is made.

Ugo Mulas’ Verifiche series is a reference to the history of photography and its inventors, who came up with the very first methods of making photographs: glass-plate negatives, non-standardized chemicals, manual methods of determining exposure time and focus. Underexposed and overexposed photographs, broken plates, different image formats and their enlargements were among the many possible results of photographic processes.

Chen Shuxia challenges the expectations commonly associated with photography. Technically speaking, a camera is a mirror to the subject in front of the lens and therefore should yield symmetrical images. Chen uses a distorted mirror to alter her reflection, and confuses the viewer by removing herself from the image, leaving only her shadow. The artist uses simple means to demonstrate the deceptiveness and incompleteness of photography. Timm Ulrichs’ Landscape Epiphanies are a close look at the materiality of the negative and the mental process that detects a motif where there is none, elevating this fleeting moment into a work of art in its own right.

More simply, Michael Snow’s video Back and Forth and Jan Groover’s photographic sequence illustrate the effects of manipulating the camera. Snow moves the camera at a dizzying speed, generating blurry images of the space he occupies. Groover, on the other hand, held the camera steady and pressed the shutter when a car drives by. Depending on her reaction time and the speed of the cars, they are only partially visible.

In an ongoing exploration of the capacities of photography and film, these artists did not aim for the technically perfect image, but tested the limits of the medium. They dissected its individual components and mechanisms, and similar to Conceptual Art, this kind of artistic practice becomes a program. A certain mechanism is applied to banal situations, revealing what photography can and cannot show. In this way, they questioned the photographic image as an immediate and truthful representation of the world.

4 Questioning the Image

In 1965, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described photography as “a middlebrow art,” a practice that depends on certain societal rules and values and a way of life that is inscribed in both the ritual and the style of the images and that is perpetuated across generations, consciously or not.

Some artists take a closer look at images that seem so natural that one no longer sees them as social constructs. Christian Boltanski assembled a series of photographs of pets, places, and people that look like they could have been taken by anyone. But why were they taken, and what specifically do they tell us about the life and memories of the person who took them? The question of authorship is also central to the work of Sherrie Levine, who rephotographed images by the famous US-American photographer Walker Evans. She disregarded his copyright and presented them unaltered as her own, protesting the dominance of male artists in the art world. Barbara Kruger also took a feminist stance in a large silkscreen that combines a portrait of a beautiful woman with a banal slogan that takes on new power in this context.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Ed Ruscha’s point-and-shoot approach disrupted the established convention of carefully composing and printing images. Instead, he almost mechanically registered mundane subjects such as apartment complexes, parking lots, swimming pools and palm trees. Photography thus entered the museum not for its craft but for its mere capacity to record, precisely for which it had long been disregarded as an artistic medium.

Other artists actively subvert the stereotypes of mass images, turning private snapshots, tourism pictures and commercial images against their original meanings. Anna Bella Geiger juxtaposes postcards from the Bororo indigenous community in Brazil with photographs taken on her terrace with friends and family. She questions the exotic image of the Bororo, which seem anachronistic to the supposedly modern lifestyle of the white immigrant population in Brazil. Martha Rosler’s photographs explore the sexualization of women in the Western world. Victor Burgin takes on the iconic landscape of the United States, with its large billboards and open roads. In each image, he adds texts inspired by sociology and psychology to reflect on the material and social conditions of patriarchy. Hong Hao adopts the imagery and language of advertising; furniture and juice ads become the backdrop for a presentation of himself as a successful businessman, reflecting the value placed on material wealth in our societies. It is no longer a specific product, but an entire philosophy that is sold to people.

By appropriating, reassembling and restaging images from the mass media, these artists addressed early on the ever-increasing flood of images that equally shapes our lives today. Artistic versions of familiar motifs reveal the desires and values that influence how we see ourselves and others.

5 Transforming the Portrait

The portrait is one of the oldest genres in the visual arts. It is commonly assumed that the portrait bears a strong resemblance to the subject and expresses the sitter’s personality. However, as the artists in this section demonstrate, it is also a fluid space in which subjects can freely explore different aspects of their personality and negotiate the relationship between themselves, those close to them and society.

Patrick Faigenbaum portrays aristocratic families in Italy, combining their long history, the uniqueness of the individual subjects and the relationships between them in a single image. Song Yongping portrayed his elderly parents by restaging important moments in their lives, from marriage to death, and even participating in reenactments of situations from before he was born. Suzanne Lafont takes a much more intimate approach, choosing a narrow frame around the heads of her subjects. Their expressions evoke a universal representation of specific moods in reference to silent film and early photography. These serious portraits stand in stark contrast to performative sequences by Anna and Bernhard Blume, who turn their living room into a stage where they jump and fall among their furniture in a surreal chaos. Thomas Ruff’s work challenges the very expectation of recognizing someone in a portrait. He creates a series of passport-like photographs in different sizes, which he partially manipulates to “take portraiture to degree zero”; his images convey nothing about the people in them, who are ultimately dehumanized by the conventional portrait format.

Stereotypes also play a role in the works of Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and Tseng Kwong Chi. They exploit the deceptive self-representation of people trying to convey certain values, such as religious piety, or use film tropes, such as the beautiful and naive girl, or explore cultural differences reduced to touristic clichés.

Artists such as Françoise Janicot, RongRong and fellow artists address the limits of personal expression and societal expectations through performances that show people trapped, bound by ropes or covered in foam.

The portrait also offers artists the opportunity to take on different roles. Eleanor Antin, Ma Liuming, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Fosso and Urs Lüthi all engage in experiments with clothing and makeup that temporarily blur the lines between conventional notions of male and female appearance and the associations that accompany these gender identities.

Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, and the duo Zeng Han & Yang Changhong portray communities that exist outside the mainstream, whose members are bound together by friendship and shared interests. The series Cosplay features people who dress as their favorite anime characters and bring them to life.

All of these artists emphasize the fact that no portrait is natural, but rather a constructed representation of the self and the other through the use of predetermined codes.

6 Photography as Sculpture

At the same time that some artists sought to deconstruct the technical and symbolic aspects of photography, others went in the opposite direction, redefining the photograph as a concrete object and reinvesting its visual space. The interest in objects and architecture, in their patterns and structures, has always been a driving force for photographers. In the 1980s, the ability to produce large prints in a variety of techniques allowed photographers not only to reproduce places and things, but also to establish analogies between form and content. The mixing of different media in contemporary art, such as photography, sculpture, film and installation, has expanded the possible constellations in which images appear and how they appear.

Forerunners of this development, such as Hilla and Bernd Becher, emphasized the sculptural character of urban and industrial architecture and its presentation in large grids on the wall. They create a typology of forms that unfolds in the juxtaposition of many similar images. Patrick Tosani also pursues this approach of close looking at banal things which he then decontextualizes. In his work, it is not only the specific shape of shoe heels that is of interest, but also the monumental size in which he presents them, which emphasizes the materiality of the image object and transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary. On a more personal level, John Coplans turned his own body into fragments, confronting the viewer with both the compositional nature of the photograph and the prevailing absence of images of age and bodily decay.

Leung Chi-Wo shifts the expected perspective by photographing from the ground up between skyscrapers. The strong contrast between the dark street canyons and the bright sky creates a schematic image. Cross-like shapes are repeated in the arrangement of images on the wall, combining motif and presentation. Jan Dibbets breaks this relationship by assembling photographs of the flat horizon of the Netherlands into the curved shape of a comet. The landscape is barely recognizable in its new form, which takes up a large, unconventional space in the gallery.

Lynne Cohen stays within the rectangular format, but instead examines the architectural setup within the image. A lobby appears as a three-dimensional space, but also as an estranged one, with its aluminum wallpaper and lights. Her large, highly detailed prints give the impression of stepping into the picture.

Zhang Peili demonstrates the fragility and transience of images by repeatedly dropping a mirror on the ground and then putting the pieces back together. This three-hour performance underscores the work of composing an image, but also the liberating effect of destruction to interrupt the constant consumption of visual material in our society.

7 Another Objectivity

In the 1980s, artists increasingly used large-format photographs and photographic installations. Importantly, their works explored the concept of objectivity not only through the material aspect, but also by questioning what a photograph can objectively represent. The distrust of media images and the documentary value of photography prompted artists to explore new ways of addressing social issues in the world through individual destinies that become emblematic representations of our times.

While Sophie Ristelhueber’s extreme enlargements and Hannah Collins’ life-size reproductions deliberately show only details of conflict and poverty in Europe, they bring these ignored problems up close. In Ristelhueber’s work, the detail of a man’s face in a Paris hospital evokes the landscape of the war-torn Eastern Europe he fled. His experiences are inscribed on his body in the form of scars and wrinkles. The face, with its texture, and the photograph, with its scale, become a symbolic landscape. Collins sees herself as a sculptor and poet, which she expressed in the production of Thin Protective Coverings. By collecting cardboard boxes from the street and arranging them in her studio, she created a seemingly infinite, desolate environment. This reflected the environment of East London where she lived and where homelessness was rife in the 1980s. The immersive image contains fragments of text relating to the experience of homelessness, which cannot be conveyed in a single image, no matter how large.

In an opposite approach, the series by David Goldblatt and Zhang Haier give a broader picture of societies in South Africa and China. Although they are also only fragments of the lives of the people portrayed, the pictures show different aspects of their bodies and activities that are usually too intimate or fleeting to be captured in a single image. It is these details that reveal the differences between various groups in a society, in a kind of inverted typology of their personality and place in the social structure of a country.

Luo Yongjin synthesizes 80 individual images of a large apartment block into one coherent composition. The scenes are taken from different perspectives and at different moments in the building’s construction. In the final work, the many temporalities and states of the site come together, simultaneously demonstrating and transcending the usual fragmented representation of photography. In this way, Luo is able to reflect the human experience of time and place in the work, which is a continuum rather than a “decisive moment,” as traditional photography suggests.

The diversity of form and subject matter in these works demonstrates the versatility that photography can offer artists and the medium’s acceptance in contemporary art. There are no longer fixed expectations in terms of size, technique and material, which are now determined by the content of the image and the messages the artists wish to convey.
 
8 A World in Itself

Since the 1980s, photographers have produced works that at first glance appear to be documentary images, but are in fact carefully staged, self-contained works. They do not depend on an external context to be understood, but are a world in themselves. These tableaux, analogous to painting, employ the concept of theatricality; they create the illusion of being real scenes, while it is clear that they are made for an audience. Importantly, they include the viewer, who completes the image through contemplation. At the same time, the viewer is often excluded from a true understanding of the image by the deceptive minimalism of the motif.

Jean-Marc Bustamante’s images of cypresses are a case in point, as they reveal nothing about their history or background. His large-format prints immerse the viewer in the rich detail of the trees, so that the eye’s wandering becomes the purpose of the artwork.

Candida Höfer and Yang Yongliang work with the main viewing conventions of Western and Chinese art, respectively. Höfer’s depictions of architectural structures are based on a fixed central perspective that constructs an image from a close foreground to a receding background, while Yang follows the tradition of shifting perspective that moves up and down. George Rousse confuses the two-dimensional plane of the image and three-dimensional space by painting graphic structures in a room, resulting in a spatial image visible only from the camera’s point of view.

The constructedness of images is also at the heart of Sandy Skoglund’s work. The content of her pictures is entirely fabricated in the studio and generally destroyed after the photograph is taken. Skoglund uses this freedom to create scenes that mix everyday situations, such as an elderly couple in the kitchen with animals painted in garish colors that evoke a nuclear catastrophe, conflating our sense of reality, fantasy and nightmare.

In Li Yongbin’s Face 4, a mirror at the window of his apartment reflects a Beijing street scene. In the video, he rubs away the mirror’s silver backing to reveal his face behind it. After a long meditative sequence showing the cityscape, nightfall slowly reveals the artist’s face in a dim red light. The slow duration and shifting layers of superimposed imagery turn attention from the exterior to the interior. In this and similar works, Li explores the technical possibilities of video to manifest presences, feelings and experiences that are otherwise imperceptible.

By incorporating the museum space and the audience that transforms an image into a work of art, Louise Lawler, Christian Milovanoff and Thomas Struth demonstrate the fictionality and artificiality of art and its context. By focusing on lighting, framing and placement, their photographs enter into a dialogue with the space and the exhibition becoming works in themselves. These works both reference art history and inscribe themselves in it. They are a mise en abyme of photography’s success in the art world and the art market.

9 Globalization

In the wake of globalization, artists have turned to the effects of worldwide trade and commerce on the transformation of our societies. The growing infrastructure for the exchange of goods has brought cultures together, as the same architecture and consumer goods are found in all corners of the globe. Human labor has also become an international economic factor, resulting in a wave of migration. Artists accompany this development by traveling along the trade routes, thereby extending the reach of their work.

Andreas Gursky assembled a large panorama of the full, colorful shelves of an US-American supermarket. The sheer mass of imported goods is overwhelming, and both the consumer and the viewer get lost in this dizzying display. Ironically, the cheap price of the items in the picture is the exact opposite of the value of the artwork, which fetched record prices for a photograph in 2006 and 2007. Frank Breuer, on the other hand, focuses on the individual logos of international corporations erected next to warehouses. The logos are supposed to express the values of the companies and their products, but through the space they take up in the landscape, they become monuments in themselves.

Eric Baudelaire documented the different types of infrastructure in the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand, France, which has been shaped by apartment complexes, factories and the remnants of nature in between. When the Michelin company outsourced production to India, he commissioned the photographer Anay Mann to repeat his investigation there, where the environment has been similarly marked by the expansion of human settlement and business.

Weng Fen explores the place of the individual in a country undergoing physical, social, economic and political change. His photographs in the series Sitting on the Wall are characterized by indistinct foregrounds separated by cityscapes in the background that have become symbols of modernity and progress. The figures stand or sit on the viewer’s side of the boundary, gazing into the distance and reflecting on the transient state between here and there, the present situation and the potential future.

Cai Guo-Qiang’s interventions in the US-American landscape address cultural and political power relations. Clouds of smoke resemble mushrooms, alluding both to their importance as food and medicine in his native culture and to the threat of global nuclear catastrophe. The ambiguous power of weapons, as well as poisonous and beneficial mushrooms, calls into question the double bind between destruction and creation.

Photography is the primary medium through which artists visualize these phenomena in a variety of locations, revealing both their commonality and their site-specific context. It is also a product of global exchange, in the trade of its materials (cameras, chips, film), its mass production and reproduction and its easy distribution. Conceptually, it also resembles industrial logic in its standardized formats and the objectification of diverse situations.

10 Photography Today

The avant-garde artists of the 1970s through the 2000s established photography in all its many forms as a key element of contemporary art practice, education, collections and the marketplace. Today’s artists continue to make the most of its many possibilities, whether making socially engaged documentary work, exploring historical archives or pushing the technical boundaries of what images can be. Drawing on the medium’s long history, they make use of all its techniques and cultural functions. It is less the grand tableau that characterizes their work than the mixing of media in various constellations.

In Wolfgang Tillmans’ self-portrait, the artist’s cell phone is propped up on a table in the hospital room where he is being treated. Since the picture was taken during the Covid-19 lockdown, he could only communicate with his friends via video call. The person he is talking to is absent, leading the gaze to the small screen showing the artist with his camera. Tillmans’ work reveals the vulnerability of human existence, his curiosity about social phenomena and the evolution of technology and communication. He presents his large-format prints unframed to emphasize the materiality of photography.

Sara Cwynar appropriates images found in old photography manuals. By interfering with the moment of photographic reproduction, she produces flawed images in the tradition of experimental photography from the early twentieth century. Her work reflects on the nature of trial and error, analogue and digital transmission and the circulation of images. The notion of recycling is central to her work, which is characterized by the combination of obsolete and contemporary technologies.

Wang Chuan’s 8 Great Sights of Beijing also addresses the passage of time, particularly in light of the urban development of the Chinese capital and the disappearance of ancient monuments. Not only are traditions and landscapes changing, but so is photographic technology: Wang deliberately focuses on the pixels of the image, signaling the moment when digital photography lacked high resolution. The image has deteriorated, not unlike the ancient sites, leaving behind a record not of eternity but of a fleeting moment in time.

Aaajiao, on the other hand, explores the ramifications of the latest technology, in this case NFTs. The artist offers four images as a zipped download, but only the buyer of the NFT receives the key to decrypt the folder. The icon has been transformed into a self-portrait of the artist and is therefore the only visual representation available, as the actual images are locked. The artwork interrogates the politics of accessibility and commerce of contemporary image production, as well as the ephemerality and multiplicity of formats in the digital realm.

The enduring popularity and power of photographic images in everyday life continues to motivate artists to explore the fundamental questions posed by photography, including those related to its technical capabilities, its societal applications and its capacity to represent the human condition.