Photographer Magazine 2001
I was asked by the magazine "Photographer", on the occasion of its ten-year anniversary, to record my thoughts regarding the presence of artistic photography at the turn of the century. Firstly, because anything that manages to last for a long time in Greece deserves our admiration, especially when it concerns photography, I wish to congratulate "Photographer" on its endurance and wish it a long life.
Regarding artistic photographic creation, things have never been better. It is true that more nonsense has been produced in the last twenty years than ever before. However, this is a natural consequence of the great flourishing of the photographic medium and its "recognition" by the art world. I am not sure if this recognition was necessary or beneficial, but it was a phase that perhaps had to be faced. Moreover, where there is great production, there will be great folly. The fact that the most obvious and naive products are the most promoted should not surprise us, as this usually happens with all arts.
However, it is important that after the conceptual and postmodern excesses, people realized that there are no more margins for provocation and impressing. Thus, a need for a return to the importance of the creator and the history of the medium began to be reborn, something that had been persistently despised during the penultimate decade of the past century. Serious museum directors and some gallery owners are now discovering the value of Evans or Atget, albeit belatedly.
In recent years, photography has produced and accepted all sorts of innovations and artistic distortions. The limits have been expanded to the point of violation. From the abstract Cibachrome imprints of the gastric fluids of a slaughtered rabbit by Adam Fuss, to the fist fucking by Andrès Serrano, from the often naive digital mixes of disparate elements by Jeff Wall, to the corpses in formaldehyde by Joel-Peter Witkin, photography has proven that it is capable of everything, for better and for worse, that it can occupy the pages of the most fashionable art magazines, that it can sell at laughably high prices, that it too can "play" like its big step-sister, painting, falling once again into the trap of a new-pictorialism. Nevertheless, these excesses were partly useful, like every childhood disease, because first, every art is entitled to resort to extremes to define its expressive space, and secondly, because from the moment everything is possible and acceptable, the photographer is obliged to set his own limits, and thus his work becomes even more personal. Besides, now that everything has been done, now that everyone has calmed down, now that photography has been accepted, it is time to do more and better photography again.
With complete schematic arbitrariness, one can observe that photography in the last twenty years has been divided into three categories. First, the photography that occupies the media (advertising and journalistic), which rarely claims anything more than professional distinctions, except in a few reportage cases, where professional projection tries to be covered behind emotional underlines of scenes of misfortune photographed with formalistic solicitation. Secondly, the photography that occupies prominent commercial galleries, certain museums, art critics, and specialized artistic magazines. This photography can clearly be visual (installations, etc.), where emphasis is placed on materiality and the way the image is presented. It can be conceptual or postmodern, where accompanying texts and theoretical positions play a bigger role than the work itself that provokes them. Finally, it can investigate the function and role of the photographic image in society and art, thus transforming from an artistic work that it started to be, into a tool for study and observation. The third, last, and largest in production volume category is what I would characterize as "visual poetry," which has the smallest chances of exposure, but the greatest possibilities to generate emotion. This photography attempts to transform the communicative dimension of the photographic image from a simple imprint of information into a poetic photographic event.
The hopeful element is that this last category, which is also connected with the big names of the past, seems to be gaining ground and finding a place even in the choices of gallery owners and theorists, who for years despised it and relegated it to a nebulous space they called "historical photography." All those who never understood how important Kertész is and how profound De Carava is, it is time for them to discover them and start looking for their successors. And these successors have already given samples (whether it be Craigie Horsfield or Thomas Struth, or many others), although the crust of a pointless solicitation still hovers as a counterpart to exposure, against which the new creators do not have the strength or knowledge to resist.
In the field of art, there are no revolutions, only climaxes due to a few rare geniuses. Everything else is just cyclical movements. Thus, the so-called digital revolution is just another tool that can be used, like all, to generate verbose or wise work. The future may bring us the latter, if a genius creator touches the medium. The first anyway does not surprise us nor occupy us.
My only concern that remains and intensifies is that all those involved with photography, from theorists to the public, continue in their great majority to believe that photography is something simple, instinctive, or innate that does not require knowledge and education to approach. I fear that the new century may bring many good photographers, whom very few will be able to recognize, immersed as most are in the values and the education shaped by advertising, the laws of entertainment, and the pursuit of impressiveness.
Plato Rivellis