Digital Image Systems: Photography and New Technologies at the Düsseldorf School

353 Pages·2020·17.224 MB·English

by  Claus Gunti

DIGITAL IMAGE
SYSTEMS
PHOTOGRAPHY
AND NEW
TECHNOLOGIES
AT THE
DÜSSELDORF
SCHOOL
CLAUS GUNTI
0 Introduction 006
A FRAMING THE DÜSSELDORF SCHOOL 020
B WHAT IS DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY? 031
1 Reception of digital photography: 038
post-photographic theories and the German
documentary discourse
A EMERGENCE OF A GERMAN DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 047
1 I n Deutschland (1979), Autorenfotografie 053
and la politique des auteurs
2 P hotography history and documentary 064
photography history
3 The rebirth of documentary forms and New 072
German photography
B THE END OF PHOTOGRAPHY 077
1 Media theories and photography theories 080
2 T he Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the 083
Post-photographic Era (1992)
3 W illiam J. Mitchell’s selective endorsement 094
C DISCOURSE ON DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY IN GERMANY 098
1 Post-photography and Düsseldorf 098
2 Fotografie nach der Fotografie (1995) 100
2 Archeology of computing: 114
photo-conceptualism, the Becher protocol
and early computer art
A PRE-DIGITAL MECHANISMS IN CONTEXT: 1960S / 1970S 120
1 Chronophotography, serial order and time 125
2 Serial constructions, grids and repetitive patterns 129
3 Rosalind Krauss and the grid 134
B S ERIAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND COMBINATORIAL 137
FUNCTIONS: A TRANS-HISTORICAL PATTERN
1 The Becher protocol 137
2 Image deconstruction as archaeology of computation 144
3 Emergence of digital tools in Düsseldorf 152
(1987 – 1998)
A DIGITAL RETOUCHING TOOLS 156
1 Thomas Ruff’s Häuser series 156
2 Additive and subtractive retouching techniques 170
B DIGITAL STITCHING 175
1 Andreas Gursky’s expanded realities 175
2 Paris, Montparnasse: construction of an enhanced
reality and improved viewer experience 195
3 From indexicality to verisimilitude: the super-documentary 200
C EARLY DIGITAL COMPOSITIONS 203
1 Jörg Sasse’s early Tableaus 203
2 Deconstructing photographic representation 216
D THOMAS RUFF’S ANALOGICAL AND DIGITAL 219
EXPERIMENTS WITH THE PORTRAIT
1 Alternative representations of the face 219
2 The Andere Porträts and Blaue Augen series 226
3 Diverging reception 234
4 Generalization of digital aesthetics in 238
Düsseldorf (1999 – 2015)
A COMPLEX COMPOSITES: ANDREAS GURSKY’S 243
GENERIC WORLD
1 Formal homogenisation and grids 243
2 Indexicality, verisimilitude and ideal types 250
B IMAGE RECYCLING AND APPROPRIATIVE POSITIONS 259
1 From Skizzen to Speicher: images and database 259
in Jörg Sasse’s work
2 Media, pornography and the viewer experience: 272
Thomas Ruff’s jpegs
3 Automated images and 3D effects: Thomas Ruff’s ma.r.s. 289
C THOMAS RUFF’S GENERATED PHOTOGRAPHS 300
AND THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
1 Iconoclasm and abstract pornography: Substrats 301
2 From enhanced to generated realities: 305
Thomas Ruff’s Zycles
D GENERIC PICTURE REALITIES 314
1 Single image typology 314
2 Images and grids 316
3 Association with post-photography 318
5 Conclusion 320
6 Appendix 332

A BIBLIOGRAPHY 334
B INDEX 346
C ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 349
PART 0
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
008 INTRODUCTION
A PHOTOGRAPH ALWAYS
LOOKS LIKE A
PHOTOGRAPH,
BECAUSE IT’S A
PHOTOGRAPH. 1
Thomas Ruff’stautological statement in his contribution to the cata-
logue of the German pavilion of the 1995 Venice Biennial implicitly
polarizes a multitude of contradictory beliefs that have aspired to de-
fine photographic images. Histories and theories of photography
throughout the twentieth century have been animated by the tension
between photography’s frequent claims to an ideal of transparency,
commonly associated with a documentary rhetoric, and more prag-
matic approaches that analyze images in terms of their context of
emergence, their historicity or their use. Ultimately, Ruff’s seemingly
naive posture negates one of the strongest beliefs associated with
mechanical reproduction: its often-professed truth claim. Throughout
the history of the medium, the mythical relationship of the real with its
depiction has been deconstructed repeatedly. John Tagg has, for in-
stance, unequivocally noted that “the photograph is not a magical
‘emanation’ but a material product of a material apparatus set to work
in specific contexts, by specific forces, for more or less defined pur-
poses. It requires, therefore, not an alchemy but a history, outside
which the existential existence of photography is empty.”2 Yet, despite
this apparently indisputable argument, the appearance of digital
technologies in photography in the late 1980s triggered a dogmatic
1 T homas Ruff quoted in Thomas Ruff. Andere Porträts + 3D, exhibition catalogue (Venice Biennial,
1995), Ostfildern, Cantz, 1995, p. 17.
2 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories, Houndmills/
London, Macmillan Education, 1988, p. 3. Quoted in Bernd Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte der
Photographie (Bild und Text), Munich, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010 (2006), p. 371.
009
theoretical response that revived what Allan Sekula once called “the
folklore of photographic truth.”3 The ontological acceptance of the
photographic image, based on the notion of indexicality derived from
semiotics, has proven extremely resilient in responses to digital im-
agery: many proponents of the ongoing debate on the use of these
new technologies and their implications have emphatically professed
the “end of photography,” in an impetus which can be subsumed under
the generic label “post-photography.” This phenomenon can almost
exclusively be traced back to one single book – whose rupture claim
is not even as radical as it may seem –, William J. Mitchell’s The Re-
configured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, which was
published in 1992.4
Fig. 1: Andreas Gursky, Paris, Montparnasse, 1993 (205 × 421 cm)
Approximately at the same time, these technologies began to be
adopted among some of the first photographers to be institutionally
recognized as artists. In 1987, Thomas Ruff was the first member of
the so-called Düsseldorf School, a group of photographers who stud-
ied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and
whose work has been repeatedly associated with a German docu-
mentary tradition, to investigate the use of computer-assisted
post-production to retouch images. A few years later, Andreas Gursky
and Jörg Sasse also adopted this new technical potential, which be-
came increasingly important in the formal and aesthetic development
of their work. While the digital primarily constitutes a retouching and
composing tool until the mid-1990s, its use progressively fuels
far-reaching transformations in the conception of photographic rep-
resentation, as much technically as conceptually. Twenty-five years
later, Thomas Ruff would generate images with specifically designed
computer programs (e.g., the Photograms series, 2012). He entirely
relinquishes the notion of capture from the photographic process,
hence challenging the very definition of what a photograph might be.
3 Allan Sekula, “Documentary and Corporate Violence,” in Alexander Albero and Blake Stimson
(ed.), Conceptual Art. A Critical Anthology, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 1999 (1979), p. 360
(originally published in Dialogue/Discourse/Research, exhibition catalogue, Santa Barbara
Museum of Art, 1979 and in an expanded version as “Dismantling Modernism, Re-inventing
Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 19,
No. 4, Summer 1978).
4 W illiam J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge
(MA), MIT Press, 2001 (1992).