"I have proof here!" Photography is the new painting. /Angelynn

My bibliography-making skills came in handy this week. Hurrah for all those tedious English papers and their bibliographies! I've been compiling books for the upcoming Collector's Series (which has, unfortunately, been cancelled this coming Saturday). And of course, naturally, I've been browsing and reading some of them as well. I am starting to realise that I'm really not a fan of the business and accounting parts of the museum work, but am interested instead in the intellectual and philosophical parts (discussions in Art Now! and etc.). But..we'll see where this experience will lead me.

So this week, we had Photography as our topic, and it's amazing: "Photography is the new painting." Photography was under a lot of scrutiny before the 1980s and it was difficult for society to accept it as a form of high art. The "new painting" (photography), taken through a machine with a click and printed out from another machine, was being compared with the conventional painting, laboured with hours of paint-brushes and strokes and colours and its textures and authenticity. It seemed far from right with people. Where are the art in photography? Some photographers tried to test the limits of the camera and would literally throw their cameras up in the air while leaving the shutters to automatically click with every f-stop: all about what the camera can and cannot do. Photographers really tried to make photography art in the code of paintings, such as composition and contrast. One even emphasised on making everything by his own: he would take a mugshot of a person, print that portrait in a gigantic scale, make another canvas (yes, he made the canvas), and paint the exact large-scale mugshot as he had printed. There, he would have one made by machines and another made by his own hands. And these large-scale portraits were really daunting not just in their size, but also the identity it photographs; the picture almost is the person. Audience would feel that natural personal bubble and uneasiness when they stepped too closely to these portraits; it's almost too intimate, being that close to someone so vulnerable.

We always think that pictures should be a really quick snapshot of our lives, exactly as it is, no lies. But actually, we all have this for-the-picture smile! A good majority of the pictures taken are actually quite laboured over. At a party, you hear Smile!, and someone will be fidgeting with their hair or checking their teeth, but everyone will be donning that same artificial smile. You think pictures are proofs of moment in life, that they actually happened. You hear The Photo Never Lies (this applies more heavily back when Photoshop wasn't the crazy phenomenon that it is now), but in fact, it doesn't depict the actual reality either. Pictures were usually seen as a snapshot showing a story, like a painting would.

A photographer we gnawed on for a good amount of time was Tina Barney, who was a photographer who teased the notion of "the picture is a story." She's famous for her on-going large-scale portraits of the relationships of her family and close friends. Her works often instilled a sense of ambiguity paired with aestheticism. Instead of "the picture is a story," her photographs were intimate and almost accidental, and most importantly, part of a narrative. For example, instead of "Ah, the woman is setting supper on the table for the banquet," Barney inspired uncertainty: what are they talking about that would make her look so defensive, why is he posed so strangely, why is the man behind turning over when there's no action happening in the foreground, etc. Artificial naturalness and accidentalness. Some of the audience didn't understand how this could be art, as the composition was not complete or balanced (a leg or an arm could be out of the frame), and there was no clear subject or plot.

Photography was a difficult art to invest in by collectors and investors, as ink was fugitive back before the 1980s. And by the 80s, red was almost gone. Furthermore, photography could be so easily reprinted, and the medium was more volatile (compared with an oil painting that can last up to thousands of years with proper maintenance and management). So how can this be a safe field to invest in? When technology stepped up, artists were able to have more reliable machines, materials, and licences. Production and reproduction was more convenient. Once photography gained more faith, it opened the doors to the art that made contemporary art possible today.

Sadly, that is all I can reproduce here for you, as the discussion ran far too lengthy to be pasted exactly onto this post. We covered so much more, and I wish I could share everything with you (if only). Anne-Marie said we'll have subsequent Photography sessions since we opened up many other issues by the end of the Art Now! session; I really hope so! Also, keep in mind that you can always join us on select Wednesdays from 5:30 to 6:30 with a small fee. Check out MoCA's website for more information.

For now, I am running a bit late for MoCA today; I got too carried away and wrote too much for too long for you!

Until the next,

Axk.