They remember only the photographs

Exhibition view "They remember only the photographs". Bétonsalon - Center for art and research, Paris, 2013. © Aurélien Mole

"They remember only the pho­tographs [1]" is a pub­li­ca­tion / exhi­bi­tion, resulting from the col­lab­o­ra­tive work between the Ecole du Louvre stu­dents of the research group "Modern and con­tem­po­rary art pho­tographed" and the University Paris Diderot - Paris 7, rep­re­sented by five stu­dents from the asso­ci­a­tion Politik’art. Entrusted to graphic designers François Havegeer and Sacha Léopold, known as Syndicat, the pro­ject focuses on sci­en­tific research and oper­ates as a reflexive pro­cess in pro­gress. It rep­re­sents the research under­taken at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky (Centre Pompidou MNAM-CCI) by ten stu­dents from the Ecole du Louvre Masters degree. This year, under the co-direc­tion of Didier Schulmann, head curator of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, and Remi Parcollet, post-doc­torate can­di­date at the Labex "Création, Arts et Patrimoine".

In her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag ques­tions the effect of pho­tog­raphy on our per­cep­tion of his­tor­ical and con­tem­po­rary events. "They remember only the pho­tographs" is a ref­er­ence from one the essayist’s quotes that under­lines this par­tic­ular, although rarely addressed, per­cep­tual phe­nomenon : the moment where the memory of rep­re­sen­ta­tion is added to the memory of the event, at the risk of erasing it.

The arrival of pho­tog­raphy and its role in repro­ducing art works, or under­standing artistic prac­tices has blurred our points of ref­er­ence. Moreover, today it would seem that the modern and con­tem­po­rary art archive is freeing itself from its purely doc­u­men­tary status. As a result of art’s con­cep­tual and pro­ces­sual evo­lu­tion, notably dating from the 1960s, doc­u­ment’s status bor­ders on that of art­work, par­tic­u­larly thanks to pho­tog­raphy.

This exhi­bi­tion-pub­li­ca­tion aims to mate­ri­alize a reflec­tion not only on the prac­tice and pro­duc­tion of the doc­u­men­tary image, but rather and fore­most on the archive, its uses, the dif­fu­sion and recep­tion of these pho­tographs. It strives to ques­tion the journey of the photos and the cir­cu­la­tion of art­work and artistic prac­tices, through the use of dif­ferent sup­ports (pho­to­graphic printing, printed pho­tographs, books, cat­a­logues, magazines, revues, invi­ta­tion cards, posters, post cards, dig­ital images…).

It is a ques­tion of iden­ti­fying the causes and the mech­a­nisms of the pro­cess of cul­tural her­itage through pho­tographing exhi­bi­tions and the works on show and ephemeral, imma­te­rial, or in-situ artistic prac­tices. For if pho­tographs of exhi­bi­tion views, work­shops, per­for­mance, dance or even fashion are called upon to fully inte­grate pho­to­graphic her­itage, they also open up a field in which we ques­tion art his­tory and crit­i­cism methods, and the prac­tices of museog­ra­phers and cura­tors. Digital cam­paigns are grad­u­ally devel­oping and these pho­to­graphic archives are being con­fronted with new stakes, not only in terms of preser­va­tion but also in terms of dif­fu­sion and enhance­ment. What are the con­se­quences of this in artistic, sci­en­tific and edu­ca­tional terms?

Sociologically speaking, dig­ital tech­nology makes the hith­erto the­o­ret­ical link between Pierre Bourdieu’s two canonic anal­yses, rational: one on pho­tog­raphy, « Un art moyen » (1965) and the other on museums « L’amour de l’art » (1966). Digital tech­nology, when faced with art­works and museums, mod­i­fies the respec­tive ways that the public, stu­dents, insti­tu­tions and artists them­selves use pho­tog­raphy.

Among the dif­ferent doc­u­ments that are linked to and provide insight into the exhi­bi­tion, pho­tog­raphy is clearly dom­i­nant. In fact, it occu­pies a strong place in many of the recent pub­li­ca­tions about the his­tory of exhi­bi­tions. Institutional archives such as that of the Venice Biennial or doc­u­menta in Kassel, are becoming increas­ingly acces­sible and provide his­to­rians with a re-reading of art his­tory, and more specif­i­cally the his­tory of exhi­bi­tions. Featured are key fig­ures, priv­i­leged wit­nesses of these events, such as the pho­tog­ra­phers Ugo Mulas or Gunther Becker, the latter who devel­oped a rig­orous
doc­u­men­tary style sim­ilar to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The sub­jec­tiv­i­ties of the authors call for pre­cau­tion and dis­cern­ment, as illus­trated by the impli­ca­tion of the young Reiner Ruthenbeck when doc­u­menting Düsseldorf’s artistic scene at the start of the 1960s. Today, the status of his revis­ited images must be recon­sid­ered, in regard to his work as a sculptor. In the same way, today Mulas is con­sid­ered a pre­cursor of pho­to­con­cep­tu­alism, thanks to his series of “ver­i­fi­ca­tions” pro­duced at the end of his life, in the early 1970s. 40 years later, these were dis­played in museums alongside artists
from the Arte Povera, whose art­works he had doc­u­mented throughout his career. In the case of an exhi­bi­tion, art doc­u­men­ta­tion there­fore needs to be con­tex­tu­al­ized, and the pho­to­graphic doc­u­ment’s path must be mapped out, given that the mise en abyme enables us to rethink our rela­tion­ship to the art­work. Gerhard Richter has recently used pho­tographs as a medium for paint­ings which erase the museum space, images which in fact orig­i­nate from dif­ferent museo­graph­ical reportages from his last touring ret­ro­spec­tive, allowing his­to­rians and critics to com­pare the choices made by each of the three dif­ferent cura­tors. We can note that despite pho­tog­raphy’s limits and the sub­jec­tivity by which artists seek to con­fine it, it has in fact para­dox­i­cally accom­pa­nied and made pos­sible those artistic prac­tices that seem impos­sible to re-trans­pose through an image, such as per­for­mances or dance. In this way, an in situ or ephemeral work, such as graf­fiti, can also develop an ambiguous rela­tion­ship with pho­tog­raphy. With regard to not only the dif­fu­sion but also the con­ser­va­tion of this type of artistic prac­tice, left unac­counted for by museums, today Martha Cooper’s role seems obvious. If insti­tu­tional archives are lim­ited by the status of doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­raphy, pri­vate archives, par­tic­u­larly those of col­lec­tors, are clearly devel­oping par­tic­ular advan­tages, espe­cially when the col­lected works are orga­nized in light of con­cep­tual ten­den­cies. Documents thus become an exten­sion of the col­lec­tion. It is also impor­tant con­sider the point of view of an inde­pen­dent pho­tog­ra­pher, such as André Morin, who reg­u­larly doc­u­ments con­tem­po­rary art exhi­bi­tions in gal­leries or art cen­ters, when involved in
fol­lowing the pro­gress of a pri­vate col­lec­tion.

Experiencing a work often takes place in space, and pho­tographing it sug­gests choices of view­point, framing and light. When pho­tog­raphy is used to doc­u­ment an exhi­bi­tion or work­shop as the artist’s artistic space, it isn’t lim­ited to a simple doc­u­men­tary repro­duc­tion. In this way, despite taking a doc­u­men­tary approach, the pho­tog­ra­pher’s inten­tions always evolve to be both objec­tive and sub­jec­tive. With these pho­tographs, it is impor­tant to take into account the author’s status and to con­sider these “in­volved doc­u­ments“ as a trans­la­tion, re-tran­scrip­tion or inter­pre­ta­tion. So dance pho­tog­raphy is a pho­to­graph­ical prac­tice without being con­sid­ered a genre per se, as the col­lab­o­ra­tion
between Pina Bausch and the pho­tog­ra­pher Guy Delahaye demon­strates. Moreover, the majority of reportages, notably for press magazines, fea­ture key fig­ures from the world of pho­tog­raphy such as Cecil Beaton, William Klein or Juergen Teller. In con­sid­ering the milieu of printed pho­tog­raphy, its rela­tion to text is just as inter­esting as its pro­duc­tion and recep­tion. It is there­fore useful to examine images in Vogue and Paris Match as well as ARTnews and Art d’Aujourd’hui. Fashion magazines, like art reviews, are also poten­tial exhi­bi­tion spaces. In turn, an exhi­bi­tion can become a place of writing, of text. Great inter­na­tional exhi­bi­tions are pro­gres­sively building a his­tory of dis­played art. Displaying an exhi­bi­tion about the exhi­bi­tion at the Paris exhi­bi­tion of 1937, or indeed proposing to dis­play its lit­er­a­ture, was an oppor­tu­nity to think about museog­raphy. The written becomes the image that the
image describes.

Remi Parcollet

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The pub­li­ca­tion linked to exhi­bi­tion They remember only the pho­tographs is avail­able online:
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Exhibition view "They remember only the photographs". Bétonsalon - Center for art and research, Paris, 2013. © Aurélien Mole