by J. Hoberman ╱ from NYR Blog ╱ 6 November 2012

The photograph as truth-claim or art-object

I do not think I agree entirely with Hoberman’s conclusion. That is to say, the trouvéy-ness of the photograph is different in its relationship to its own objecthood and to what is depicted “within” it; it’s an entanglement that has different complications than that of, say, a drying rack’s relation to its status as art. I am more sympathetic to the curator’s argument.

Is photography a way of documenting the world that has an inherent “truth-claim” on the real? Or is it, as Steichen suggested, essentially graphic, a technique for creating a certain kind of image? “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” an exhibition now up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (later traveling to the National Gallery and Houston’s Museum of Fine Art), makes a vigorous case for understanding the medium as Steichen did. The argument is amplified in the accompanying catalogue written by curator Mia Fineman, who, in effect, proposes a new truth-claim of her own: “Photography’s veracity has less to do with essential qualities of the medium than with what people think and say about it.”

According to Fineman, photography has been artificially enhanced almost from its advent in 1839. “Especially in the early days of the medium, producing a realistic-looking photograph often required a healthy dose of artful trickery,” she writes. Moreover, the familiar insistence on photographic objectivity is itself something that derives from the early twentieth-century emergence of photojournalism and social documentary—and also, we might add, of motion pictures. In that sense, photography is pre-modern as well as postmodern…

And yet, it was with technology that a five-year-old child (or one of the horses that galloped before Eadweard Muybridge’s camera in the 1870s) could produce an image of the world with the clarity of a Leonardo. The sterile debate as to whether photography was actually an art continued well into the twentieth century. The real issue, of course, was whether photography had changed the nature of art—not least by introducing the element of chance. The photograph is the original objet trouvé—the basis for Robert Smithson’s crack that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.”