Photography the Dominant Aesthetic

312 Pages·2013·12.88 MB·English

Photography the Dominant Aesthetic

David Cubby
STATEMENT OF AUTHENTICATION
This exegesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Creative Arts
School of Communications Arts
College of Arts
University of Western Sydney
April 2011.
The work presented in this exegesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original
except as acknowledged in the text. I declare that I have not submitted this material in
full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution.

David Cubby
DipADHons. (Brighton UK) Diploma in Art and Design, Fine Art, Honours 1972
GradDipVisArts (SCA) Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts, Photography 1981
Sydney College of the Arts, Australia
MFA (CoFA UNSW) Master of Fine Art by Research 1995
College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia

April 29 2011

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ABSTRACT
This body of practice and research is concerned primarily with the ontology of
photography in demise, that is to say, traditional film-based photography. Inevitably it
proceeds to examine more than the recent industrial shift from analog to electronic
technology by reviewing essentially what the original status of photography was and how
perceived from a phenomenological view of photography’s affect, value and persistence
as a global and culturally dominant way of seeing and communicating.
Investigation proceeds on the premise of the author’s practice as an artist, thinking about
and making photographs leading to a functional understanding of the convergence of
contemporary art processes with philosophical method and particularly existential
phenomenology.
What surfaces out of an examination of historic ontologies of photography tracing the
industrial shift from analog to digital photography is a larger, discernible ontology of a
photography in flux and the promise as well as hazards of its electro-digital palingenesis.
This reshaping of photography tracks a decades long, irregular shift in post-modern
perceptions of photography from a discourse locked in dichotomy between ‘formalist’ and
‘contextual’ theorizing ending in a reconstitution of materiality to the image.
However, it is the socio-perceptual affect of photography that dominates contemporary
imagination and impels this inquiry into a world of perspectival and monocular views, this
dominant aesthetic: truth in detail, meaning in focus, mimesis in diegesis, the ideal and
the beautiful in photogenic form. We all end as photographs now, as anodyne and
slender as the paper onto which the image is sealed or bright and sharp as the luminous
screen upon which its shadow is cast.

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Photography, the Dominant Aesthetic

INTRODUCTION 6
Parts 1, 2 and 3 20
Acknowledgments 21
PART 1
THINKING AROUND HUBERT DAMISCH’S FIVE NOTES FOR A
PHENOMENOLOGY OF PHOTOGRAPHY - A Decade for Each Note 24
NOTE ONE 30
IMAGINARY VARIATIONS 31
NOTE TWO 35
A CERTAIN NUMBER OF THESES 37
NOTE THREE 41
THE ULTIMATE ANALOGON 42
NOTE FOUR 61
AN IMAGE ALREADY WORN BEYOND REPAIR 62
NOTE FIVE 69
AN INCOMPARABLE IMAGE 70
PART 2
A SPLINTERING OF MODALITIES OF SEEING 72
THIS INDUSTRIAL PERSPECTIVE 80
IF ONE OF THOSE DOTS STOPPED MOVING FOREVER 88
THE IMMOBILE EYE 100
TO DO OTHER THINGS 111
PHOTOGRAPHY: THE DOMINANT AESTHETIC 125

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Resolution of Distance as Power 126
Immobilized Between Shadow and Light 132
CONCLUSION AND MAKING WORK WORK 147
LETTERS TO PHOTOGRAPHY 165
Within an Illustrated Box 166
A Clock for Seeing 167
Sketch Everything 167
The Breaking of Golden Rules 167
Art Schooling 168
Between the Nameless and the Named 169
This Watchful Eye 170
A Pattern of Interference 170
Funny Perspective 171
Significance 171
Grand Passion and Bloody Pity 172
A Rare and Extraordinary Lack of Visual Pollution 173
A Mechanical Lion 174
Smile 174
Two Photographers 175
Photographic Veracity 177
Well Composed 180
Contingent character 187
Photography Spoke to its Heart 189
Images of Consolation 194
A Beautiful Object 202
The Naked Truth 206

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PART 3
PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECTS SUMMARY 2000-2011 214
Suburbia 219
Not Quite the Sydney Opera House 231
Somewhere Else 239
Sixteen Bearded Men of St Marys 260
Optical Scream 278
Optic Lingo 288
BIBLIOGRAPHY 297

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INTRODUCTION
I am sifting through some of the philosophical underpinnings of the power and limits of
photography as a dominant descriptor that busily replaced and determined modern forms
of written and spoken language as well as other forms of illustration, in its minute yet
magnified, partial trace of the real.
The method of analysis is shaped here by the idea, histories and presence of art
unashamedly as a kind of observational laboratory with a notion of ‘sculpture’
supplanting ‘art’ as a tool for seeing and understanding informed by the method of
existential phenomenology. Whether accredited as art or not, it may have been just
‘visual-mindedness’ on my part that logs a persistent view of photography as a sculptural
condition, or, a discrete object.

Alfred Steigltiz 1917 Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain

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By ‘sculpture’ I do not mean elevating photography to a plinth as revered object but, in
the Duchampian sense, the way the notion ‘ready-made’ cleverly shifts context by nature
of its placement, in this case, the viewing paradigm of gallery from that of traditional
museum setting to something like an experimental, observational laboratory.
“Art is a laboratory where experiments are conducted that shape thought into visual
and imaginative ways of framing the pain points of culture.” (Van Alphen, 2005: xii).
For example, in the act of seeing a displaced urinal with its misnomer ‘fountain’ and
bawdy signature, “R. MUTT 1917”, prejudice may be stripped bare to reveal object as an
object in itself.
Given that experience, one either rejects it as an abomination within a place intended for
viewing the desirable ideal or emphatically accommodates a whole new way of seeing.
From this point on it can be shown that art works begin to think or rather, wonder. Thus, I
see sculpture not in terms of idealized art object but simply a technique for seeing:
setting aside naming or titling, without preconception.
The view of sculpture that I describe, as a potent trope, positions me to attempt to see
without language becoming a kind of veil, a fixed and customary filter1. Instead I am
experiencing, seeing and wondering, rather in the same vein as C. S. Peirce the
American logician, philosopher and key figure in establishing semiotics with his acronym
‘F. R. L.’. That is to say, the First Rule of Logic is ‘wonder’ and “in one sense, this sole”,
rule of reason is that,
“…in order to learn, one needs to desire to learn and desire2 it without resting satisfied
with that which one is inclined to think.” (Peirce, 1899: 135).

1 A great deal of philosophical investigation has been linguistically orientated, leaving a history of philosophy replete with
caution against being lost to what George Berkley (1685-1753) described as a ‘mist and veil of words’. Gottfried Leibnitz
(1646-1716), John Locke (1632-1704), Alexander Johnson (1786-1867) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) were all

philosophers who took their main task to be penetrating this mist.
2 Note the title Burning with Desire MIT 1999, Geoffrey Batchen’s book on “the conception of photography”.

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When Van Alphen characterizes art as a laboratory, he is not only relaying that insight to
art practitioners but, rather reprimanding art critics and scholars for continuing to see art
and the museum as historical product and not historical agency – that is to say, art in
action and as process. The museum converts, in part if not whole, into studio and an
extension of studio practice located alongside and not necessarily at the expense of the
institution’s archiving aegis.
For myself, as practitioner, the oddness of photographic image has always filled up the
foreground; a strange thing, a weird object, seen-as-though-seen-for-the-first-time and,
in this way an experience of photography essentially without prejudice and/or context, as
a thing-in-itself, akin to a “peak experience” (Maslow, 1964: 23). It is the most beautiful,
unencumbered way of seeing and experiencing of the world and what Susan Sontag
implies when she divines the most surreal aspect of photography as being the
photograph itself.
Seeing ‘sculpturally’ in this way is then close to philosophical speculation in
phenomenology, shãh mãt3 by Duchamp! What is experienced here, in
phenomenological terms, is an epoché – photography as ‘sculpture’ or:
“… a suspension of belief of existence and consequently of action in the real world
whereby one's own consciousness is subject to immanent critique so that when
such belief is recovered, it will have a firmer grounding in consciousness – the
world ‘is lost in order to be regained’” (Husserl, 1935: URL 24/5/2009).
Furthermore, the descriptiveness of the phenomenological method – economic, careful –
and the persistent description of that which is present and observed, returns again and
again to the experience. It seems similar to the process of drawing which, according to
Ihde, is “in Wittgensteinian form: ‘describe, don’t explain’” (Ihde 1986: 34). At this point
description, as with drawing, splits spontaneously, amoeba-like and new meaning,

3 ‘shãh mãt‘ is the Persian word for ambush and the origin of the chess phrase ‘check mate’

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insight, like new life, is conceived. It is conscientious reflection that cleaves open
description through correlation and as intentionality, an exponential shaping of
experience making the noetic process, or insight, philosophical or, indeed, art.
Witnessing photograph as a phenomenon, its essential ‘thingness’ and affect takes
speculation beyond our modern, peremptorily optically-dominant sensorium. This draws
on the photograph in synaesthetic reflex into sublimating illusion, so that it remains
structurally undisturbed and hidden, it becomes a ‘habit of mind’ or subconscious in the
conceptual formation of illusion leaving image content in faux-unison with its referent.
And, this digs deeply in terms of the photographic object as a whole, its materiality being
subsumed, becoming transparent and unspoken, to the point where we need reminding
that; “… a photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two dimensional image”
(Edwards & Hart, 2004: 1). Photographs have; “… volume, opacity, tactility and a
physical presence in the world” (Batchen, 1997: 2).
In the recent industrial shift from analog to digital photography as part of a fresh
examination of ontologies of photography, I have been drawn to addressing an ontology
of a photography in demise. And, this follows a decades long, irregular shift in
postmodern perceptions of art and photography eventually, over the past decade,
reconstituting materiality to image from a discourse locked in dichotomy between
‘formalist’ and ‘contextual’ theorizing. Postmodern critical theory of photography around
the mid-to-late 20th century commenced with an ontological desire to reveal essentially
what photography is, working from an earlier phenomenology of photography by André
Bazin4 and including the unaffected writings of proto-photographers – that is to say, the
early experimenters in photography such as Fox Talbot5, Daguerre6 and Niepce7.

4 Bazin, André (1918-1958), The Ontology of the Photographic Image, (Bazin, 1958)
5 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was a British inventor and a pioneer of photography. He was the inventor of the
calotype process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Fox_Talbot (accessed 1 May 2011).
6 Daguerre was apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting with Pierre Prévost, the first French
panorama painter. He became a celebrated designer for the theater and later came to invent the Diorama, which opened

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