Since the 1980s, discussions about photography have been bogged down in the concept of "the real," the most meaningless term in the art theorists' lexicon. In effect this has divided up photography into two camps. Photography's claim to show reality—otherwise known, usually in inverted commas, as "objective truth"—is posited against the various ways in which the camera and photographer alter reality by taking photographs. On the one side are the photojournalists, guided by Cartier-Bresson's notion of the "decisive moment," which was his definition of the way a good photographer could preserve a significant scene forever. On the other is the postmodern school of "staged" photography, and its best known exponent Jeff Wall, in whose work models pose in scenes laboriously constructed by the artist.
This tired debate has gone round in circles for decades. Now there is fresh hope we may get out of this ghastly conundrum (for which we can blame Roland Barthes and other French people) thanks to the idea that there is a third aspect to the aesthetics of photography—the thought that a photograph is itself a three-dimensional object with a material existence. It is this idea that is explored in the Photographers' Gallery's landmark exhibition, "The Photographic Object," showing until 14th June. The show is tantalising rather than thorough but, if people pay enough attention, it could be a first step in revolutionising the way we think about photography.
Photographers, of course, have long been aware of the vital importance of photographs as objects: of surface, finish, process and so on. Among critics and theorists, though, treating photography as the creation of objects is a welcome and long overdue step. First, it's about expanding the definition of photography itself. Upstairs, the exhibition features a handful of works by Gerhard Richter in which he overpaints small photographs of prosaic city scenes with delicate miniature versions of the abstract textures of his large paintings of the 1980s. Downstairs there are a couple of collages, containing photographs by Vanessa Billy. Collaging photographs was a technique popularised by the constructivists in the 1920s, as the Tate's recent Rodchenko and Popova exhibition showed. But this medium has long been considered to belong to the genre of "art," not photography. So here the idea of a photographic object is the art theory version of a land grab—an attempt by curators of photography to seize the genre of collage and the partly-painted photograph for themselves.
A second quality of the photographic object is a delight in the surface texture of the printed photo. The London-based Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri takes old photographic portraits he has found and embroiders intricate geometric patterns on them. Anzeri's images are wonderfully macabre. The faces in the sepia photos appear to be wearing strange masks, from which their eyes peer out, as if from a bizarre cult. The sheer absurdity of his process—in which a photo is used as a departure point for wild geometric patterns—feels like a satire on constructivism and a metaphor for madness. In terms of objecthood, though, this simple combination of two different media also draws our attention to the surface of the photograph, as a material in itself.
Yet the most ambitious ideas of photographic objecthood can be seen in the work of Walead Beshty and the London-based German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. On one wall there is an example of Tillmans's abstract photographs of photographic paper, this time folded into an elliptical curve. The marvellous image is full of subtle gradations of tone. Against another wall, in a series of Perspex cases, are a number of folded pieces of exposed photographic paper, also by Tillmans. One is folded forward along the bottom; another has three sharp creases, and each of the three areas is of a different colour; a third has been punched so it is full of nicks. Beshty's pictures, meanwhile, include brick-like blocks of mashed and crushed photographs and crumpled transparencies whose images have been partly scratched and worn away.
Works such as these transform photographs into sculptures, using those very attributes which would lead us to regard a photograph as damaged. If nothing else, we can thank the theory of the photographic object for introducing us to the aesthetic pleasures of the crumple and crease.
