Once the Movie Has Been Made of Reality Then Reality Changes

The current book I'm reading is Louis Menand's The Free World--specifically the section about the Family of Man photo exhibition at MoMA in 1955. The critics hated it because of the way it was exhibited. They weren't framed but were just posted on foam board and then scattered around the exhibition area, hung from the ceiling and so on, which allowed you to see things in the distance--which you wouldn't if everything was hung on the wall.

"The photographs ranged in size from eight by ten inches to ten by twenty feet and were mounted, in an installation designed by the architect Paul Rudolph (a student at Harvard of the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius), mostly on Masonite boards without frames, and were hung unconventionally—from wires or on poles—and grouped in specially designed areas....But The Family of Man was an installation that is, the exhibition, not the individual photographs, was the artwork. Because they were not wall-mounted, it was possible for viewers to see photographs from different areas at the same time. People were rarely seeing just a single image. Visitors followed a path through the thematic sequence, ending in a room containing a six-by-eight foot color transparency of a hydrogen bomb explosion. All the photographs were intended to be observed in passing. A gruesome picture of a lynching, taken by an anonymous photographer in Mississippi in 1937, was removed early on because viewers stopped to state at it, disturbing the flow. At the end, there was a smoky mirror in which people could see their own faces, and the space was designed so that those on the way out passed those on the way in and were forced to make eye contact. Formally, the exhibition was received as an assault on fine-art norms The artwork was de-aestheticized, not isolated for contemplation; the viewer was de-individualized, made to function as part of a crowd; the art of composition was reduced to an act of selection." (pp. 217-218)

There are always new ways of viewing art, which carries on to today in which art-viewing is mostly on screens, so we're not seeing things the way we normally saw them before, or the way we expect them to be shown, such as in frames on walls. Personally, that's the way I like it but things are always going to change and the critics will always push back on it. I'm still pushing back on the idea that we have to view everything on a screen, which I think obscures certain aspects of photography unique to the print space.

The other thing that struck me this morning in terms of my looking at photographs for my album was that when we look at photographs on Google we see all the different variations of it. Sometimes we see the original image before it was [manipulated] so you see a really contrasty dramatic black and white photo of some location and then you see the actual place and it's such a shock--there's really nothing there, it's just banal. But that's that's the essence of photography--you can make it more cinematic which changes our emotional response to it. Subsequently, you might see the actual place and it changes you again, which is part of the idea for the album. It makes it a "movie", and once the movie has been made of reality then reality changes. 

(Video Transcript 7/1/202)


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1/2023:

What also relates to the idea of the "vibe" of photography is it's embedded technological nostalgias. Old cameras and photos are always cooler than the high-end gear, which I believe are "cliche machines". Old photos were once cliches as well, but usually it takes about a generation for it to be "oldified". When CDs came out in the early 80s, Malcolm McClaren called them "nasty things". He liked vinyl and cassettes (which lots of people still do).

See: The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera