Ta Nea (People Supplement, 1999)
A photograph is composed of a mixture of communication and poetry. The ratios between them classify the photograph in the realm of documentation or art. In the latter case, the image itself must incorporate all the elements that constitute its transformation and generate emotion. In the former, communication is achieved (in the best case) with the help of common cultural references, which most viewers can refer to, and (in the worst case) with the help of other texts and comments, thereby limiting the function of the photograph to illustrating verbal communication. Naturally, the general public is much more familiar with the communicative aspect of photography than with its poetic aspect, which also requires knowledge of how the photographic poetic language works.
Photographer artists are often victims of this dual nature of photography, either because they have not themselves realized the difference, or because they cannot forgo the easy acceptance provided by the dominance of the communicative character of the photograph. The reason why publishers hesitate to invest in photography that targets poetry rather than communication is either their inability to appreciate the presence of the artistic photographic language or their reasonable desire for the book to be accepted by the wider audience.
Stavros Petsopoulos of Agra Publications is one of the few publishers who dared to release purely photographic albums, taking on a very significant commercial risk. However, I am not sure if, when he published Johanna Weber's book "Faces of the Resistance" three years ago, a German living in Greece, he believed it to be an artistic album or a historical record. The question is important because the answer determines the type of critical approach.
This book, whose aesthetic and typographic quality is impeccable, as is the case with all books of this publishing house, includes a series of identical, square, frontal, black-and-white portraits of Greek resistance fighters, some known to the general public (e.g., Manolis Glezos, Mikis Theodorakis) and others perhaps unknown. The photos occupy the right pages, while the corresponding left pages contain first-person comments of the photographed about the resistance period and their sufferings. The structure and presentation of this photographic album, combined with the photo exhibitions that accompanied its release, leave little doubt that these photographs aspire to be recognized as photographic works rather than historical references.
The problem with these portraits is that by themselves, as photographs, they present the limited interest offered by any face image, even with zero intervention by the photographer. An interest (not at all insignificant) that would be present even in a series of ID photos. It is characteristic that the reader-viewer cannot distinguish some of the photographs, in which one might recognize an exceedance not achieved in other images. This uniformity with the simultaneous absence of the creator's mark has been adopted by several conceptual contemporary photographers, whose artistic proposal (whether one agrees with it or not) cannot be unrecognized. However, to support such an approach, the photographing of the portraits must be evidently the same and without the slightest emphasis or reference to these individuals. They should function solely as human samples of a police or medical record (e.g., Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, Luc Delahaye). Conversely, if one wanted to unify this series of portraits under an artistic style and photographic proposal through the dominant presence of the photographer, then the significance of each image should be highlighted, turning the whole into a typology, following perhaps the model of the great August Sander, or the African Seidou Keita, or the American Mike Disfarmer, or the contemporary German Thomas Struth, or the Spanish-Argentine Humberto Rivas, in which no portrait is identical to another, although they are all similar, connected more by their slight differences than by their obvious similarities.
In "Portraits of the Resistance" (as the title suggests), an effort is made to arouse the viewer's interest and emotion through the accompanying texts (and related interviews), which inform about the role and identity of the portrayed, while often mentioning in the introductory texts (and interviews) the fact that the artist belongs to the nation that tortured or tormented the portrayed. The photographs serve merely as triggers of emotion, not as the primary material. The texts, by endowing the individuals with a particularly charged identity, enhance the communicative aspect of the image at the expense of the abstract and poetic. It is even possible (but no longer verifiable) that the photographs would function better without the crutches of the informational texts. Often, the proximity of photographic image and word benefits the latter and not the former.
Weber is undoubtedly a capable photographer (as her earlier work, which she kindly showed me, attests without doubt) and obviously sincere when trying to connect her national guilt with the country she lives in and with the artistic medium she uses. However, it would have been better if all this had fueled a genuine photographic emotion with the breadth of abstraction that Photography and the photographer herself are capable of, rather than being put in the service of a safe and obvious historical-literary approach.
Plato Rivellis