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Seeing Things: Photographing Objects 1850-2001
From: The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Mark Haworth-Booth |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Photography represents a way of seeing things--a way of seeing things that may be inventive, descriptive or demonstrative. 'Seeing Things', an exhibition at the V&A's Canon Photography Gallery from 21 February to 18 August 2002, breaks boundaries in assessing this relationship and moving beyond the concept of 'still life'. Here curator Mark Haworth-Booth presents a selection of six pieces from the exhibition. |
 hotography is good at describing things--so good that from around 1850 the medium swept aside earlier imaging systems to become the preferred descriptive process. In 2002 photography, often allied to digital imaging, remains the standard. |
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| Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of 'Seeing Things' at the V&A. | |
Given the richness of the subject, it is surprising that the exhibition 'Seeing Things' appears to be the first to explore it. The theme includes still life, but embraces more than that. The photographers here, including the well known and unknown, address many audiences, disciplines, markets and ideas. Those practitioners interested in the still life genre are usually interested in revising its conventions. 'Seeing Things' is a homage to many kinds of creativity and to the thrilling variousness of the photographic medium. |
The exhibition is divided into six sections: 'Natural things', 'Artefacts', 'Reinventing things', 'Givens', 'People and things' and 'Making things'. Here I have selected one photograph from each section, accompanied by some explanation of the broader context. |
Natural things
 Photography was described by its principal British inventor, W.H.F. Talbot, as 'The Pencil of Nature'. The new medium used the laws of chemistry and physics to create authentic and superbly detailed descriptions. Often such descriptions were produced directly by the objects themselves, without the intervention of a camera or lens. The botanist Anna Atkins arranged plant specimens on sensitized paper and let sunlight do the drawing. She delighted in the beauty of the resulting images. Her technique, known as 'photogram', is used to this day by such artists as Angela Easterling, who made the images shown here at the Eden Project in Cornwall, England. Her photograms show the different densities of leaves from different levels in the forest canopy: sunlight passes through the higher leaves to reach the ones below. Each of the photographic processes shown involves aesthetic decisions that inform the final image. |
Artefacts
Photography was used from the beginning to capture objects, but came of age at the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was the first international exhibition to include photographs as exhibits and to be photographed (as well as painted and drawn). The 1850s also saw the beginning of photography as a tool by which museums copied and shared their collections. Today's websites continue the same idea.
 Objects were not only copied; they were arranged, interpreted and enhanced by carefully controlled lighting and by the addition of toning or colour. In the twentieth century, objects were also used as symbols. Photographic illusionism was harnessed to the advertising industry from the 1920s onwards. In recent years, artists have played with and undermined photography's role in glamorizing objects. A notable example is Richard Prince, who re-photographs and re-crops advertisements to parodic effect. Others have used the possibilities of digital technology to extract new meanings from familiar artefacts. |
Reinventing things
 The term 'postmodernism' embraces many different art practices current in the past two decades. One use of the term refers to the role of artists in revealing aspects of mass media. Another describes the ways in which artists rediscovered the rich traditions of pre-modern art: Hannah Collins, newly settled in Barcelona in the early 1990s, used oysters from the fish markets to explore the erotic potential of a typical ingredient of seventeenth-century still life painting. A third use reflects the role of artists in questioning concepts of gender, identity and race. A fourth indicates the exploration of multiple viewpoints and open/non-exclusive meanings. |
Givens
We think of still life as a studio genre, but photographers have found memorable, ready-made compositions in interiors or on the street.
 It is as if we had suddenly turned a corner or opened a door. Many of the most celebrated of these photographs were made with small cameras, such as the Leica, which has exerted a huge influence since its introduction in 1925. Photographers working in this way provide us simultaneously with intriguing objects and (so it seems) the best way of seeing them--the most judiciously chosen camera position and framing. Thus Walker Evans elegantly brings out the frugal domesticity of an Alabama interior from the 1930s. If the photographers working with view cameras on tripods forgo some of the sense of immediacy captured by their small-camera colleagues, they gain an abundance of sharply focused and convincing detail. |
People and things
 Objects have traditionally been used as attributes of portraiture. Photographers took over the idea from painters and have used it extensively in attempting to illuminate the occupation, interests, social position, personality or perhaps even the spirit of their sitters. Robert Doisneau did this by placing rolls on the table in front of Picasso, who immediately hid his hands for the photograph--which thus captures his inventive playfulness. Sometimes a photographer intuitively discovers an attribute that is so powerful, memorable and easy to copy that it assumes a life of its own. This occurred in 1963 when Lewis Morley had to find a way to photograph Christine Keeler nude, while respecting her modesty. Stories about this famous session can also be seen on the V&A website. |
Making things
Not content with bringing objects to their studios or capturing them as found--or 'given'--in street or home, photographers also create objects that either exist only to be photographed or may only exist inside a camera. Here photography connects with science, sculpture, painting and cinema.
 The artists may either create playful alternative landscapes, as Sian Bonnell did by inventing hills (made of precariously balanced blancmange and jelly moulds) to put into Holland, or create virtual visions and places mixing fantasy, memory and desire. Sometimes an artist such as Oliver Boberg creates illusionistic models of reality that, however skilled we may think we are in separating truth from fiction, put that reality in quotation marks and force us to blink in disbelief. |
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