The Camera Never Lies?
Art Monthly event
This event took place at the Camden Art Centre in London on Wednesday November 30 2005.
Despite the crimes committed in the name of photographic truth are photographs themselves innocent? With Art Monthly critics Craig Burnett, Alison Green, Axel Lapp and Julian Stallabrass.
Read the features in Art Monthly which inspired this panel discussion by clicking on the links below.
Chris Burden
Ghost Ship 2005
The Beastly Real
Images of the real maybe exploited but, claims Craig Burnett, the pictures themselves are innocent.‘REAL PHOTOGRAPH’ remains the unwritten label on the back of every press picture. The press depends on the popular longing for a photograph that seems to offer a portal to an actual event, a way to experience the jolt of disaster or the sentiment of a remarkable incident. Naturally, this idea is tangled in a quagmire of issues about authorship, editing, context and reception.
Read the full text of Craig Burnett's feature
Giovanni Anselmo
Il panorama con mano che lo indica (Panorama with the hand pointing to it) detail 1982-84
Germany Calling
Axel Lapp discusses recent attempts by artists to negotiate traumatic events in Germany's past.
During the past 20 years or so, many artists in Germany have dealt with issues of memory, with remembrance and history. Though history painting as a genre has all but disappeared, other art forms are now used to investigate, other art forms are now used to investigate history, to fix histories and to negotiate our relationships with the traumatic events of the past.
Read Germany Calling
Carolee Schneeman
Meat Joy 1964
Overnight to Many Cities: Tourism and Travel at Home and Away
Alison Green
The first thing to leave aside with this exhibition is that this is a show about travel photography. It could be so only in the most basic sense that a camera is a device that distances the photographer from his or her subject matter, in other words, that the camera always makes experience into an object. And that every photograph (at least any photograph that has some measure of intention in its composition or subject) offers the viewer something he or she has not seen before.
Read Overnight to Many Cities
Jeff Wall
The Well 1989
The Epic of the Everyday
Julian Stallabrass visits the scene of a crime.
What happens when photography is stripped of its power to record the contingent? Various recent exhibitions have illustrated this encounter, and even shown works which take it as their subject.
Read The Epic of the Everyday
Terence Donovan
Top Coats 1960
Reality Check
Most photography that attempts to deal with the real doesn't even get close argues JJ Charlesworth.
There has been much talk of the possibilities of a newly radicalised aesthetics in recent Leftist discourses under the banner of 'new aestheticism' whose writers are united in their objective to challenge the hegemony of anti-aesthetic theoretical writing and recapture the particularities of aesthetic interpretation. Clearly, central to the Left's engagement with, refusal of, or recuperation of the aesthetic is the possibility of construing a dialectical conception of aesthetic autonomy.
Published in June 2001, no247.
Read Reality Check I
Cornford & Cross
Avant Garde 1997/2002 detail (photograph courtesy of Brighton Local Studies Library) 1960
Reality Check II
JJ Charlesworth asks whose reality is it anyway?
The problem of the Real vexes and perplexes photography like not other area of contemporary art. Photography's direct access to the visual immediate means that our culture charges it with a particular responsibility to visual truth and condemns it all the more fiercely when it reneges on that trust. Of course this problem is and always has been irresolvable; the trust that allows photography to enact objectivity can equally become the seduction through which it manipulates subjectively.
Published in December-January 2002-03, no262.
Read Reality Check II
