The typology by which we sort the many forms of artistic production today is unconvincing at the best of times, but no shorthand definition is as senseless as the distinction made between photography and "art photography"—that is, between photographers who are exhibited in photography galleries and those shown in art galleries. Scores of mediocre photographers have ended up in the glamorous and lucrative art gallery camp, thanks to the pretentious intervention of an ambitious curator. And scores of brilliant photographers, lacking such champions, have been confined to the unjustly low-ranking exhibition spaces of photography co-ops, press agencies and galleries of photography. (A gallery that exhibits only photography is as anachronistic as a gallery that exhibits only painting or sculpture, yet we have plenty of the former and none of the latter.)
One great photographer who has found himself mostly on the wrong side of the fence, thanks to these accidents of art theory, is Keith Arnatt, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Photographers' Gallery in London. Although the odd Arnatt photograph has been included in big museum group exhibitions about photography or conceptual art—he's featured in Tate Britain's show about British photography—he has never enjoyed a solo show in a private art gallery, and his last solo show in a public art gallery was in 1982. In short, he's never been properly recognised as one of the most interesting British artists of the last 30 years. This is partly his own fault—originally a conceptual artist, Arnatt ostentatiously abandoned fine art in the early 1970s, declaring: "I am a photographer." Artists are allowed to pour scorn on the art world—it simply adds a layer of "institutional critique" to their work—but photographers are likely to be taken at face value. Arnatt's profile has been further disadvantaged by his practical wardrobe, remote Welsh address and dislike of parties.
Two of Arnatt's early photographic series—one of tourists visiting Tintern Abbey, eating ice cream in poorly matched outfits and bad haircuts (The Visitors, 1974-76), another of scruffy men out walking their dogs (Walking the Dog, 1976-79)—were forays into a kind of anti-photography. Eschewing the usual "serious" themes of photography, the exotic locations of photojournalism and the studied compositions of photographic portraiture, these works were celebrations of the bad taste and simple pleasures of British society. As such, they anticipated Martin Parr.
What makes Arnatt's work brilliant rather than just good? It's not the artistic strategy of making rubbish look gorgeous—that's an old trick that's been used a thousand times. Nor is it his "command" of the medium—though it's true that his photographs are beautifully executed. The quality that really defines Arnatt's work is that he has developed photographic counterparts—not mere imitations or translations—to some of the strategies of modern painters.
In the 1990s, Arnatt photographed messages written by his wife on scraps of paper and the back of envelopes—including, memorably, the phrase "Where are my wellingtons, you stupid fart?" Some may baulk at my comparing these apparently mundane and flat images to the celebrated text-based paintings of conceptual artists Richard Prince and Ed Ruscha. But just as Richard Prince set out to knock painting off its pedestal in his own way, by using his brush to write popular jokes on his canvases, thereby presenting simultaneously a study in humour and an essay on the aesthetics of paint, so Arnatt's scribbled notes are studies in colour and line as well as comments on the everyday reality of marriage. The camera adoringly captures every crease and nick along the edges of these banal notes, as well as the faint imprint of another illegible text or pale pink margin underneath, creating a powerful visual analogy of Arnatt's affection for his wife.
Arnatt's early rubbish dump pictures were similarly subtle: a pale-green moss-dappled stone sits on crumpled pink plastic; a soft blue cushion with a floral motif lies against purple-brown gravel; the yellow remains inside a jar of lemon curd shine out next to a soggy pale turquoise tissue. It's impossible to talk seriously about these works without sounding like the Dave Spart of art criticism, which is perhaps why so many have steered clear. Yet these are photographic essays in composition, texture and palette analogous to the work of modern painters like Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter. Just as these artists presented the textures and colours of paint and collaged materials as the subject of the painting itself, so Arnatt's work is an exploration of the textures and colours of the photographed object.
