STEAMY WINDOWS AND DISTORTED REAR- VIEWS – HOW

1 / 4“GUP Magazine”, February 2017

Erik Vroons

STEAMY WINDOWS AND DISTORTED REAR-VIEWS – HOW PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES CAN FUNCTION IN ARTIST BOOKS“GUP Magazine”, Amsterdam, Netherlands, February 2017

A photograph is commonly considered to function as either a ‘window’, through whichthe exterior world can be seen in all its presence and reality, or, alternatively, it is to beunderstood as a ‘mirror’ to the photographer’s sensibility. While both applications areconcerned with the recording of an external event, the latter serves as the expression ofan internal experience.

Visual artists, however, are actively exploring a blurry middle ground in this apparentdichotomdichotomy, by means of a narrative structure – more and more so through the form ofa book. In order to further elaborate on this matter, two recent publications are discussedhere: Post (Actes Sud, 2016) by Marta Zgierska, and e Epic Love Story of a Warrior (SPBH,2016) by Peter Puklus.

By the end of the 1970s, John Szarkowski – responsible for the photography departmentof the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the time – proposed a clear distinctionbetween photographs that either function as a ‘window on the world’ or, by contrast, asa ‘mira ‘mirror to the soul’. Both of these applications could share a certain aesthetic ideal, butwhen juxtaposed, the dierence in the artist’s intention is more apparent: the ‘window’group of images reports on actual events, while the ‘mirror’ section includes depictionsof something that is altogether more transcendental; they’re images that reect an artisticneed to symbolise an inner state of being.

What Szarkowski didn’t anticipate – or, at least, had not yet in 1978, when setting up amajor exhibition at MoMA on American photography since 1960 – was a period of massccommunication, which eventually gave way to our current ‘post-truth’ era. Photography,by and large, was still trusted for its capacity to report on things that happened in theworld, though viewers were increasingly expected to question its role as an unbiased re-porter. at’s not to say that the metaphor of the window was denounced (thrown out thewindow, if you will) at that time. Rather, the mirror function as proposed by Szarkowskihad gained another possibility, one that could be dened as a deliberate appropriationof the ambiguous trustworthiness of the medium; one that stressed the intermediary roleof the photogof the photographer.

Take the photo series ‘Sputnik’ (1997) for example, in which the Catalan visual artist JoanFontcuberta created a narrative structure of material pulled from various sources. roughthe documentary images that he a regated and sequenced, Fontcuberta relayed thebiography of an imaginary cosmonaut named Ivan Istochnikov, constructing a story thatcould very well be considered plausible because the (Western) audience had access to very


Erik Vroons Steamy Windows and Distorted Rearviews

little factual information about the Soviet Union, let alone its space program. In actuality,the work, produced as an exhibition and a book, is a postmodern backdra of the notionthat photography is a purely transparent medium. It’s not exactly a lie, but its content isabsolutely not ‘true’ according to the ethical standards of journalism.

“Photographs in themselves are not evidence, they can only become so constructed as ‘objects of evidence’,” wrote the independent curator Lars Willumeit, in an essay that accompanieda ga group show that he assembled for the FORMAT photo biennial in 2015. A commonthread of the works presented in the exhibition is that the artists make use of the mediumof an ‘archive’ to achieve a narrative structure. is, by itself, ts a larger trend amongvisual artists to ‘hijack’ photographic material for the sake of producing a keenly orches-trated book. Some recent titles come to mind: Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood(MACK, 2013) incorporates the techniques of photojournalism, forensic photography,image appropriation, re-enactment and documentary landscape photography, not so muchto oer a to oer a reliable reconstruction of past events, but rather, to deconstruct a pre-existinghistory; Sugar Paper eories (Here Press, 2016) includes original photography by theauthor, Jack Latham, of the people and surrounding area in addition to ephemera, vintagephotographs, text, case notes, and images of related objects. As its starting point, the bookis based on a story of the disappearance of two men in the ‘70s in Iceland. In a somewhatsimilar way, Laia Abril reconstructs the story of the most enigmatic and bloodthirstyserial killer of Spanish history in her book Lobismuller (RM Editorial, 2016).

UUnfortunately, John Szarkowski passed away in 2007. Which it to say, he was never ableto comment on this trend that more or less started, let’s say, with the publication of eAfronauts in 2012. In this book, author Cristina de Middel uses a calculated mix of createdand archival materials to creatively tell the real-life story of a science teacher in Zambiawho initiated a utopian space program in 1964. Still, one wonders, how would Szarkowskiclassify those authors who leave it up for debate whether their visual story mainly servesa documentary purpose, or rather a purely artistic need for the expression of a creativeididea?

John Szarkowski acknowledged in a fairly early stage (for example, by praising RobertFrank’s book e Americans, which was published in the late ‘50s), that there was a tendencyamong photographers to deliver a more personal (subjective) view on the state of theworld. But the division between window and mirror images, as proposed by him, did notseem to take into account that such a personal vision could also be forged by applyingseemingly objective visual material.

In this In this genre of photobooks, the content is ‘manipulated’ – not because the picturesthemselves have been altered, but because the authors have arranged (edited) the materialin such a way that their stories are rewritten. It’s even the case that the authors for these



works will oen downplay their creative interference, to such an extent that it’s dicultto grasp the misdirection that has taken place.

But, it’s not always so. In the realm of artists who take the same creative approach butmore cleanly state their interpretative intentions, let’s have a closer look at two otherrecently published artist books: Post by Marta Zgierska (b. 1987, Poland) and e EpicLove Story of a Warrior by Peter Puklus (b. 1980, Romania).

PPost, a winner of the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie, is “an attempt at intimate contact which closes the past non-experience in the present,” as the author herself describes it. Intriguing (or confusing) as that may sound, Zgierska leaves no room for misunderstanding: “In 2013, I survived a serious car accident. I was close to death, and reality – one that I had been adapting to with diculty – slipped through my ngers. is misfortune brought about another: surgeries, months of physical limitations, a breakup, and the return and aravation of anxiety neurosis. […] My mind was lling up with fragmentary memories, and sharp, detached details.”

e work e work contains hints to her exhausting dreams, fears, obsessions. at is, what we seerelates directly to what Zgierska has experienced, but what we potentially feel is some-thing that arrives from our own memories, as triered by these images. Or, as ChristianCaujolle writes in an accompanying text: “Feelings, although they are not expressed, are evoked. Imagined by a me who looks.” He goes on to describe the pictures themselves, detacheddocumentations of arrangements set up by the artist, as ‘formidably precise’. However,from their juxtaposition and sequencing – which, apropos, also includes an interlude ofdepictions of cldepictions of clay masks that are all printed on a thinner paper – arises a certain archof symbolic meaning.

Edward Weston once proclaimed that “an idea, just as abstract as could be conceived by a sculptor or painter, can be expressed through ‘objective’ recording with the camera.” While thismight be considered a typical modernist notion, it also seems to resonate from Zgierska’sphotographs. Something lingers beyond the strict aesthetic form of the depicted objectsthat she presents. In fact, all images in Post (a ball of hair, a handful of teeth, a compressedccar wreck, etc.) are ignited with a metaphorical reference to the traumatic experiences ofthe author. Or, in the words of Zgierska: “My own physicality and pain became a source of images that felt more and more substantial and bodily as time passed.”

e Epic Love Story of a Warrior by Peter Puklus (published in collaboration with SelfPublish Be Happy) is, on the other hand, an attempt to tell a story with more emotionaldistance. It contains an impressive amount of provisionally constructed objects, put to-gether with studies of stairways and Soviet-style apartments and juxtaposed with theatri-ccal poses performed by nude models.



e sheer volume of e Epic Love Story (at 468 pages, it’s the size of a dictionary) might beconsidered versatile and bulky, but it is smartly held together with a keen edit. Signicantly,it also includes a poem. e words of ‘Untitled (How many people fell in this abyss...)’ bythe acclaimed Russian poet Marina Ivanova Tsetaeva (1892-1941), however, can only beread when ipping the pages from the back to the front cover. It altogether serves as acollage that references everything from World War I to the dissolution of the Soviet Unionand as the author notes, he is “pland as the author notes, he is “playing an associative game based on a collectively experiencedhistory and the images we have imprinted in our minds about this period.”

But who is this ‘we’? And who is the protagonist (the ‘warrior’)? Puklus retells the executionof Romania’s Antonescu through a photograph of a single pole in the ground, he marksthe assassination of Franz Ferdinand with a cluster of nails, and he su ests the looming,iconographic shape of the Empire State Building through a bundle of wooden shards. Notall readers are in an equal position to fully grasp the references. ose who have studied(East Eu(East European) art history are obviously in a better position to make the links – conno-tations intentionally sprayed as a visual perfume. It remains questionable, however,whether or not such a level of abstraction allows your average viewer to recognise theallusive quality of this book.

As a curator and a critic, John Szarkowski defended a longstanding thesis that photographsare ‘good’ when they can speak for themselves. More precisely, he praised those post-warphotographers (e.g. Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus) who managed toexpexpress their authorship by spontaneously recording the exceptional as it occurred in theoutside world. Szarkowski was far less charmed by prefabricated ideas, i.e. by visual artistswho gave priority to a concept over the nature of the material itself. What he did not seemto have foreseen, however, is that eventually, as noted by critic Gerry Badger, “[T]he photobookbecame the primary vehicle for giving the photographer’s work a voice – a narrative voice.”

e bodies of work as mentioned here are books that all include a (dramatic, theatrical)reference to actual events, only because the author has incorporated such an index. Perhapsthe viewer the viewer gets it, to a certain level, or perhaps not at all. One could indeed argue aboutthe e ciency of the applied methods to give way to an autobiographical motif (Zgierska)or a more communally experienced history (Puklus) by the support of images that are allsculptural in their form and performative in their action. But Post and e Epic Love Storyof a Warrior are artist books, rst and foremost.

One could fail to perceive Puklus’s distorted rearview mirror to its fullest potential, orbeing unable to emotionally respond to the steamy window on personally traumatic eventsas addas addressed by Marta Zgierka, but their balance acts on the rope between artistic anddocumentary impulses could not go by unnoticed, as they perform them without any formof disguise.

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STEAMY WINDOWS AND DISTORTED REAR- VIEWS – HOW