Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View Author(s): Rosalind Krauss Source: Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, The Crisis in the Discipline (Winter, 1982), pp. 311-319 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776691 Accessed: 09/04/2010 18:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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's DiscursiveSpaces: Photography Landscape/View

By Rosalind Krauss et us startwithtwoimages,identically volcanic heat finds its record. Despite all titled Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, this, the rocks seem unreal and the space Nevada. The first (Fig. 1) is a (recently) dreamlike, the tufa domes appear as if celebrated photographmade by Timothy suspendedin a luminousether, unbounded O'Sullivan in 1868 that functions with and directionless. The brilliance of this special insistence within the art historical undifferentiatedground, in which water construction of nineteenth-centuryland- and sky connect in an almost seamless scape photography.The second (Fig. 2) is continuum,overpowersthematerialobjects a lithographiccopy of the first, produced within it, so that if the rocks seem to float, for the publicationof ClarenceKing's Sys- to hover, they do so as shape merely. The tematic Geology in 1878.1 luminous ground overmasterstheir bulk, Twentieth-centurysensibility welcomes making them instead, the functionsof dethe original O'Sullivan as a model of the sign. The mysteriousbeauty of the image mysterious, silent beauty to which land- is in this opulentflatteningof its space. scape photographyhad access during the By comparison, the lithographis an obearly decades of the medium. In the photo- ject of insistentvisual banality.Everything graph, three bulky masses of rock are seen that is mysterious in the photographhas as if deployed on a kind of abstract,trans- been explained with supplemental,chatty parentchessboard, markingby their sepa- detail. Clouds have been massed in the rate positions a retreatingtrajectoryinto sky. The far shore of the lake has been depth. A fanatical descriptive clarity has given a definitive shape. The surfaceof the bestowed on the bodies of these rocks a lake has been characterizedby little eddies hallucinatorywealth of detail, so thateach and ripples. 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commonplace, the reflectionsof the rocks in the waterhave been carefullyrecreated, so that gravity and direction are now restored to this space formerly awash with the vague luminosityof too rapidlyexposed collodion. But it is clear, of course, thatthe difference between the two images-the photographand its translation-is not a function of the inspirationof the photographerand the insipidity of the lithographer.They belong, instead, to two separatedomains of culture, they assume differentexpectations in the user of the image, they convey two distinctkinds of knowledge;in a more recent vocabulary,one would say thatthey operate as representationswithintwo separatediscursivespaces, as membersof two different discourses. The lithographbelongs to the discourseof geology and, thus, of empirical science. In order for it to functionwithinthis discourse,the ordinary elements of topographicaldescriptionhad to be restored to the image producedby i:ii:i:_ _iii-i-i-__i_ ..-:-----:-iiii:i_ i-i:i_: I iiiii:. ..i:li I--_ i_:ill:'i-: :::: :::-i':-':::''':-' :'':' i-l_----II-: -ii :-1 iiil:li::: :::i-'-i-i-i-i~i-i:::-:::::i -'-' ':"-:-'ii:-::::--i:-::-ii-i:i li:ii-iiiiiiiii:iii-ii-iii-:-i-i:ii:ii-i-i:i-iiii.iii:_:l-l-lli: -li_--:----:-_:-::i: :-::::_-_ I--ii---::i:-:_l:_ i:::-il-::i::_ I-::--_:I: I--i;l-1!iiII--: I:: : ::-: :::::i-:-:-I---i i-i-:i:i-:i-

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Fig. 1 Timothy O'Sullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake (Nevada), 1868.

Fig. 2 PhotolithographafterO'Sullivan, TufaDomes, Pyramid Lake, Publishedin King Survey report, 1875. Winter1982

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O'Sullivan. The coordinatesof a continuous homogeneous space, mapped not so much by perspectiveas by the cartographic grid, had to be reconstructedin termsof a coherent recession along an intelligibly Fig, 3 Samuel Bourne,A Road LinedwithPoplars, Kashmir,1863-70, albumen-silver horizontal plane retreatingtowardsa defi- printfrom a glass negative, 815/16 x 11",Collection, PaulF. Walter,New York. nite horizon. The geological data of the tufa domes had to be grounded, coordinated, mapped. As shapes afloat on a continuous, vertical plane, they would have been useless.2 And the photograph?Within what discursive space does it operate? Aesthetic discourse as it developed in the nineteenthcenturyorganizeditself increasingly aroundwhat could be called the ......... space of exhibition. Whetherpublicmuseum, official salon, world's fair, or private showing, the space of exhibitionwas constitutedin partby the continuoussurfaceof wall, a wall increasingly unstructuredfor any purpose other than the display of art. The space of exhibition had otherfeatures 4? besides the gallery wall. It was also the groundof criticism, which is to say, on the one hand, the groundof a writtenresponse to the works' appearancein that special context, and, on the other, the implicit ground of choice---of either inclusion or exclusion-with everythingexcludedfrom the space of exhibition becoming margin- Fig. 4 Auguste Salzmann,Jerusalem, The TempleWall, WestSide, 1853-54, alized with regard to its status as Art.3 salt print from a paper negative, 93/16 X /8", Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, Given its function as the physical vehicle New York, Purchase. of exhibition, the gallery wall became the -the wall--and to representit. diagonalorderingof the surface.No sooner The transformationof landscape after had this compressionoccurred,constituting signifier of inclusion and, thus, can be seen as constitutingin itself a representation 1860 into a flattened and compressedex- within the single easel paintinga represenof what could be called exhibitionality,or perienceof space spreadinglaterallyacross tation of the very space of exhibition,than that which was developing as the crucial the surface was extremely rapid. It began other means of composingthis representamedium of exchange between patronsand with the insistent voiding of perspective, tion were employed: serial landscapes, artists within the changing structureof art as landscape painting counteractedper- hung in succession, mimed the horizontal in the nineteenth century. And in the last spectival recession with a variety of de- extension of the wall, as in Monet'sRouen half of the century painting-particularly vices, among them sharp value contrast, Cathedralpaintings;or landscapes, comlandscape painting-responded with its which had the effect of convertingthe or- pressed and horizonless, expandedto beown corresponding set of depictions. It thogonal penetrationof depth-effected, come the absolute size of the wall. The began to internalizethe space of exhibition for example, by a lane of trees-into a synonymy of landscapeand wall-the one 'A

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a representationof the other--of Monet's late waterliliesis thusan advancedmoment in a series of operationsin which aesthetic discourse resolves itself around a representation of the very space that groundsit institutionally. Needless to say, this constitutionof the work of art as a representationof its own space of exhibitionis in fact whatwe know as the history of modernism. Thus, it is now fascinatingto watchhistoriansof photography assimilating their mediumto the logic of that history. For if we ask, once again, within what discursive space does the original O'Sullivan-as I describedit at the outset-function, we have to answer: that of the aesthetic discourse. And if we ask, then, what it is a representationof, the answer must be that within this space it is constitutedas a representationof the plane of exhibition, the surface of the museum, the capacity of the gallery to constitutethe objects it selects for inclusion as art. But did O'Sullivan in his own day, the 1860s and 1870s, construct his work for the aesthetic discourse and the space of exhibition?Or did he createit for the scientific/topographicaldiscoursewhich it more or less efficiently serves? Is the interpretation of O'Sullivan's work as a representation of aesthetic values-flatness, graphic design, ambiguity, and, behindthese, certain intentionstowardsaestheticsignifications: sublimity, transcendence-not a retrospective constructiondesignedto secure it as art?4And is this projectionnot illegitimate, the composition of a false history?

T

his questionhas a special method-

ological thrust from the vantage of the present, as a newly organizedandenergized history of photographyis at work constructingan account of the early years of the medium. Centralto this account is that type of photography,most of it topo-

Fig. 5 TimothyO'Sullivan,ShoshoneFalls (Idaho), 1868. graphicalin character,originallyundertak- fragment, to generateambiguousoverlap; en for the purposesof exploration,expedi- a perspective to which Galassi gives the tion, and survey. Matted,framed,labeled, name "analytic," as opposedto the "synthese images now enterthe space of histor- thetic" constructive perspective of the ical reconstructionthrough the museum. Renaissance-was fully developed by the Decorously isolated on the wall of exhibi- late eighteenthcenturywithinthe discipline tion, the objectscan now be readaccording of painting.The force of thisproof, Galassi to a certainlogic, a logic thatinsistson their maintains, will be to rebutthe notion that representationalcharacterwithin the dis- photographyis essentiallya "child of techcursive spaceof art,in an attemptto "legit- nical ratherthanaesthetictraditions'"and, imate" them. The term is PeterGalassi's, thus, an outsider to the internalissues of and the issue of legitimacy was the focus aesthetic debateand to show, instead,that of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition it is a product of that very same spirit of Before Photography, which he organized. inquiry withinthe arts that welcomed and In a sentence that has been repeatedby developedboth "analytic"perspectiveand every reviewer of his argument, Galassi an empiricist vision. The radically foresets up this questionof photography'sposi- shortened and elliptical sketches by Contion with respectto the aestheticdiscourse: stable (and even Degas) can then be used "The object here is to show thatphotogra- as models for a subsequentphotographic phy was not a bastardleft by science on the practice, which in Galassi's exhibition doorstepof art, buta legitimatechild of the turns out overwhelmingly to be that of Westernpictorialtradition."5 topography:SamuelBourne,Felice Beato, The legitimation that follows depends August Salzmann, CharlesMarville, and, on somethingfarmoreambitiousthanprov- of course, TimothyO'Sullivan. And the photographsrespond as they ing thatcertainnineteenth-centuryphotographershad pretensionsto being artists,or are bid. The Bourne of a road in Kashmir theorizing that photographswere as good (Fig. 3), in its steep splitin values, empties as, or even superiorto, paintings,or show- perspective of its spatial significanceand ing that photographicsocieties organized reinvests it with a two-dimensionalorder exhibitions on the model of Establishment every bit as powerfullyas a contemporary salons. Legitimationsdependon going be- Monet. The Salzmann(Fig. 4), in its fanatyond the presentationof apparentmem- ical recordingof the textureof stone on a bership in a given family; they demand, wall that fills the frame with a nearlyuniinstead, the demonstrationof the internal, formtonalcontinuum,assimilatesits depicgenetic necessity of such membership. tion of empiricaldetail to a representation Galassi wants, therefore,to addressinter- of the pictorial infrastructure.And the nal, formal structuresratherthanexternal, O'Sullivans (Figs. 1 and 5), with their circumstantialdetails.To thisendhe wishes rock formationsengulfed by thatpassive, to prove that the perspectiveso prominent blank, collodion sky, flatteninto the same in nineteenth-centuryoutdoorphotography hypnotically seen but two-dimensionally -a perspective that tends to flatten, to experienced order that characterizedthe Winter 1982

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Tufa Domes of Pyramid Lake. Viewing the evidence on the walls of the museum, we have no doubt that Art has not only been intended, but has also been represented: in the flattened, decorativelyunifying drawingof "analytic" perspective.

readjustmentof the eyes from plane to plane within the stereoscopic field is the representationby one part of the body of what another part of the body, the feet, would do in passing throughreal space. And it goes without saying that from this physio-opticaltraversalof the stereofield, ut here is wherethe demonstrationanotherdifferencebetween it andpictorial runs into difficulty. For Timothy space derives. This is a difference that O'Sullivan's photographswere not pub- concerns the dimensionof time. The contemporaryaccounts of what it lished in the nineteenth century and the be can distribution was like to look at stereographsall dilate real they only public shown to have hadwas throughthemedium on the length of time spent examiningthe of stereography.Mostof the famousO'Sul- contents of the image. For OliverWendell livans-the Canyon de Chelly ruins from Holmes, Sr., a passionate advocate of the Wheeler Expedition, for example-- stereography,this perusalwas the response exist as stereographicviews, and it was to appropriateto the "inexhaustible"wealth these that, in O'Sullivan's case, as in Wil- of detail provided by the image. As he liam Henry Jackson's, the wider public picks his way over this detailin his writing had access.6 Thus, if we began with a on stereography-in describing,for examcomparisonbetweentwo images--the pho- ple, his experienceof anE. & H.T. Anthony tographand the lithographictranslation-- view up Broadway-Holmes enacts for we can continue with a comparison be- his readersthe protractedengagementwith tween two cameras:a 9 x 12 platecamera the spectacledemandedby stereoviewing. and a camerafor stereoscopicviews. And By contrast, paintingsdo not require(and these two pieces of equipmentmarkdistinct as they become more modernist,certainly do not support) this temporaldilation of domains of experience. examining Stereographicspaceis perspectivalspace attention,this minute-by-minute raised to a higher power. Organizedas a of every inch of the ground. When Holmes characterizesthis special kind of tunnel vision, the experience of deep recessionis insistentand inescapable. modality of viewing, where "the mind This experience is all the moreheightened feels its way into the very depths of the by the fact that the viewer's own ambient picture," he has recourseto extrememental space is masked out by the optical instru- states-like hypnotism, "half-magnetic ment he must hold before his eyes. As he effects," and dream."At least the shutting views the image in an ideal isolation, his out of surroundingobjects, and the conown surrounds,with theirwalls andfloors, centrationof the whole attentionwhichis a are banishedfrom sight. The apparatusof consequence of this, producea dream-like the stereoscope mechanically focuses all exaltation," he writes, "in which we seem attention on the matter at hand and pre- to leave the body behind us and sail away cludes the visual meanderingexperienced into one strange scene after another, like in the museumgalleryas one's eyes wander disembodiedspirits."'8 The phenomenologyof the stereoscope from pictureto pictureand to surrounding space. Instead, the refocusingof attention produces a situationthat is not unlike that can occur only withinthe spectator'schan- of looking at cinema. Both involve the nel of vision constructed by the optical isolation of the viewer with an imagefrom which surroundinginterferenceis masked machine. The stereographicimage appearsmulti- out. Inboth, the imagetransportstheviewer layered, a steep gradientof differentplanes optically, while his body remains immostretching away from the nearby space, bile. In both, the pleasurederivesfromthe into depth. The operationof viewing this experience of the simulacrum:the appearspace involves scanning the field of the ance of reality from which any testing of image, moving from its lower left corner, the real-effectby actually,physically,movsay, to its upper right. That much is like ing through the scene is denied. And in looking at a painting. But the actualexpe- both, the real-effect of the simulacrumis rience of this scan is something wholly heightened by a temporaldilation. What different. As one moves, visually, through has been called the apparatusof cinematic the stereoscopictunnelfrominspectingthe process had, then, a certainproto-history nearestgroundto attendingto an object in in the institutionof stereography,just as the middle-distance,one has the sensation stereography'sown proto-historyis to be of refocusing one's eyes. And then again, found in the similarly darkenedand isointo the farthest plane, another effort is lating but spectacularlyillusionistic space of the diorama.9 And in the case of the made, and felt, to refocus.'7 These micro-muscular efforts are the stereograph,as would laterbe the case for kinestheticcounterpartto the sheerlyopti- film, the specific pleasuresthatseem to be cal illusion of the stereograph.They are a releasedby thatapparatus-the desiresthat kind of enactment,only on a very reduced it seems to gratify-led to the instantly scale, of whathappenswhena deepchannel wild popularityof the instrument. The diffusion of stereographyas a truly of space is opened before one. The actual

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mass mediumwas madepossibleby mechanized printing techniques. Beginning in the 1850s but continuingalmost unabated into the 1880s, the figures for stereo sales are dizzying. As early as 1857 the London Stereoscopic Company had sold 500,000 stereoscopes and, in 1859, was able to claim a cataloguelistingmorethan100,000 differentstereo views. 10 It is in this very term-view-by which the practice of stereoscopy identified its object, that we can locate the particularity of thatexperience. Firstof all, view speaks to the dramaticinsistence of the perspectivally organized depth that I have been describing. This was often heightened,or acknowledged, by the makers of stereo views by structuringthe image arounda vertical markerin fore- or middle-ground that works to center the space, forminga representationwithinthe visual field of the eyes' convergence at a vanishing point. Many of Timothy O'Sullivan's images organize themselves aroundsuch a center -the staff of a bare tree-trunk,the sheer edge of a rock formation-whose compositional sense derivesfrom the specialsensations of the view. Given O'Sullivan's tendency to compose aroundthe diagonal recession and centering of the view, it is not surprisingto find that in his one published account of his work as a Western photographer he consistently speaks of what he makes as "views" and what he does when making them as "viewing." Writingof the expeditionto PyramidLake, he describesthe provisions,"amongwhich may be mentioned the instruments and chemicals necessary for our photographer to 'work up his view.' " Of the Humboldt Sink, he says, "It was a prettylocationto work in, and viewing therewas as pleasant work as could be desired."11Viewwas the term consistentlyused in the photographic journals, as it was overwhelminglythe apgave to theirentries pellationphotographers in photographicsalons in the 1860s. Thus, even when consciously enteringthe space of exhibition, they tended to choose view rather than landscape as their descriptive category. Further,view addressesa notion of authorshipin which the naturalphenomenon, the point of interest, rises up to confront the viewer, seemingly withoutthe mediation of an individual recorder or artist, leaving "authorship"of the views to their publishers, ratherthanto the operators(as they were called) who took the pictures. made Thus, authorshipis characteristically a function of publication, with copyright held by thevariouscompanies,e.g., ?Keystone Views, while the photographersremain anonymous. In this sense the phenomenological characterof the view, its exaggerateddepthand focus, opens onto a second feature, which is the isolating of the object of that view. Indeed, it is a "point of interest," a naturalwonder, a

singularphenomenonthatcomes to occupy this centeringof attention.This experience of the singular is, as BarbaraStaffordhas shown in an examinationof singularityas a special category associated with travel accounts beginning in the late eighteenth century, foundedon the transferof authorship from the subjectivity of the artist to the objective manifestationsof nature.12 For this reason, the institutionof the view does not claim the imaginativeprojection of an authorso muchas the legal protection of propertyin the form of the copyright. Finally, view registers this singularity, this focal point, as one momentin a complex representationof the world, a kindof complete topographicalatlas. Forthe physical space within which the "views" were kept was invariably a cabinet in whose drawerswerecataloguedandstoreda whole geographical system. The file cabinet is very differentas an object fromthe wall or the easel. It holds out the possibility of storing and cross-referencingbits of information and of collating them throughthe particulargrid of a system of knowledge. The elaboratecabinetsof stereoviews that were part of the furnishingof nineteenthcentury middle-class homes as well as of the equipmentof public librariescomprise a compound representationof geographic space. The spatialityof the view, its insistent penetration, functions, then, as the sensory model for a more abstractsystem whose subjectis also space. View andland andinterrelated. surveyareinterdetermined What can be seen to emerge from this analysis, then, is a system of historically specific requirementsthat were satisfied by the view and in relationto which view formed a coherentdiscourse. Thatthis discourse is disjunctfrom what aestheticdiscourse intendsby the term "landscape" is also, I hope, apparent.Just as the view's constructionof spacecannotbe assimilated, phenomenologically, to the compressed and fragmentedspace of whatBeforePhotography calls analytic perspective,13so the representationformed by the collectivity of these views cannot be likened to the representationorganizedby the space of exhibition. The one composes an image of geographic order; the other represents the space of an autonomous Art and its idealized, specialized History, which is constituted by aesthetic discourse. The complex collective representationsof that qualitycalled style-period style, personal style-are dependent upon the space of exhibition; one could say they are a function of it. Modern art history is in that sense a productof themostrigorouslyorganized nineteenth-centuryspace of exhibition: the museum.14 It is Andr6 Malrauxwho has explained to us how, in its turn,the museum, with its succession of (representationsof) styles, collectively organizesthe masterrepresentation of Art. Having updatedthemselves

through the institutionof the modern art book, Malraux'smuseumsarenow "without walls," the galleries' contentscollectivized by means of photographicreproduction. But this serves only to intensify the picture: Thus it is that, thanks to the rather specious unity imposedby the photographicreproductionon a multiplicity of objects, rangingfrom the statueto the bas-relief,frombas-reliefsto sealimpressions, and from these to the plaques of the nomads, a "Babylonian style" seems to emerge as a real entity, not a mere classification-as something resembling,ratherthe lifestory of a greatcreator.Nothingconveys more vividly and compellingly the notionof a destinyshapinghuman ends than do the great styles, whose evolutions and transformationsseem like long scars that Fate has left, in passing, on the face of the earth.15

ple adduced by Stanley Cavell in relation to aesthetic judgments, where he repeats Wittgenstein'squestion:"Could someone have a feeling of ardentlove or hope for the space of one second-no matterwhat precededor followed this second?"16 But this is the case with August Salzmann, whose careeras a photographerbegan in 1853andwas over in less thana year. Little else on the horizon of nineteenthcenturyphotographyappearedonly to vanish quite so meteorically. But othermajor figures within this historyenterthis metier and then leave it in less thana decade. This is true of the careers of Roger Fenton, Gustave LeGray,and HenriLeSecq, all of them acknowledged "masters" of the art. Some of these desertionsinvolveda return to the more traditionalarts; others, like Fenton's, meanttakingup a totallydifferent field such as the law. Whatdo the spanand natureof these engagementswiththe medium mean for the concept of career? Can we study these "careers" with the same aving decidedthat nineteenth-cen-methodological presuppositions,the same turyphotographybelongs in a muse- assumptionsof personalstyle and its conum, having decided that the genres of tinuity, that we bring to the careers of aesthetic discourse are applicable to it, anothersort of artist?17 And what of the other great aesthetic having decided thatthe arthistoricalmodel will map nicely onto this material,recent unity: oeuvre? Once again we encounter scholars of photography have decided practices that seem difficult to bring into (ahead of time) quite a lot. For one thing, conformity with what the termcomprises, they have concludedthatgiven images are with its assumptionsthat the oeuvre is the landscapes (ratherthanviews)andtheyare result of sustained intentionand that it is thus certain about the discourse these im- organicallyrelatedto theeffortof its maker: ages belong to and whatthey arerepresen- that it is coherent. One practice already tationsof. Foranother(butit is a conclusion mentioned was the imperiousassumption that is reached simultaneously with the of copyright, so that certainoeuvres, like first), they have determinedthatotherfun- Matthew Brady's and FrancisFrith's, are damental concepts of aesthetic discourse largely a function of the work of their will be applicable to this visual archive. employees. Anotherpractice,relatedto the One of these is the concept artist with its nature of photographiccommissions, left correlative notion of sustainedand inten- large bodies of the "oeuvre" unachieved. tional progress, to which we give the term An example is the HeliographicMissionof career. The otheris thepossibilityof coher- 1851 in which LeSecq, LeGray, Baldus, ence and meaningthatwill unfoldthrough Bayard, and Mestral(which is to say some the collective body of work so produced, of the greatestfiguresin earlyphotographic this constituting the unity of an oeuvre. history in France)did survey work for the But, it can be argued, these are termsthat Commission des MonumentsHistoriques. nineteenth-centurytopographicphotogra- Theirresults, some 300 negativesin which phy tends not only not to support,but also were recordedmedievalarchitectureabout to open to question. to submitto restoration,notonly werenever The conceptartistimplies morethanthe publishedor exhibitedby the Commission, mere fact of authorship;it also suggests but were nevereven printed.This is analothat one must go throughcertain steps to gous to a directorshootinga film butnever earn the right to claim the condition of having the footage developed, hence never being an author,the word artist somehow seeing the rushes. How would the resultfit semanticallybeing connectedwith the no- into the oeuvre of this director?1s tion of vocation. Generally, "vocation" Thereare otherpractices,otherexhibits, implies an apprenticeship,a juvenilia, a in the archivethatalso test the applicability learning of the traditionof one's craft, the of the concept oeuvre. One of these is the gaining of an individuatedview of thattra- body of work that is too meager for this dition througha process thatincludesboth notion; the other is the body that is too success and failure. If this, or at least some large. Canwe imaginean oeuvreconsisting partof it, is what is necessarilyincludedin of one work? The history of photography the termartist, can we thenimaginesome- tries to do this with the single photographic one being an artistforjust one year?Would effort ever producedby AugustSalzmann, this not be a logical (some would say, a lone volume of archaeological photogrammatical)contradiction,like the exam- graphs(of greatformalbeauty), some por-

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tion of which are known to have been takenby his assistant.19 And, attheopposite extreme, can we imagine an oeuvre consisting of 10,000 works? Eugene Atget's labors produceda vast body of work which he sold over the years of its production, roughly 1895-1927, to various historical collections, such as the Bibliothequede la Ville de Paris,the Mus~e de la Ville de Paris (Musee Carnavalet), the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Monuments Historiques, as well as to commercial builders and artists. The assimilation of this workof documentationintoa specifically aesthetic discourse began in 1925 with its notice and publicationby the Surrealists and was followed, in 1929, by its placement within the photographicsensibility of the GermanNew Vision.20 Thus began the various partial viewings of the 10,000-piece archive;each view the result of a selection intended to make a given aesthetic or formalpoint. The repetitive rhythm of accumulation that interestedthe Neue Sachlichkeitcould be found and illustratedwithinthis material, as could the collage sensibility of the Surrealists, who were particularlydrawn to the Atget shopfronts, which they made famous. Other selections sustainother interpretationsof the material.The frequent visual superimpositionsof objectandagent, as when Atget himself is captured as a reflection in the glazed entranceof the caf6 he is photographing,permit a reading of the work as reflexive, picturing its own conditions of making. Other readings of the images are more architectonicallyformal. They see Atget managingto locate a point around which the complex spatial trajectoriesof the site will unfold with an especially clarifyingsymmetry.Most often images of parks and ruralscenes are used for such analyses. But each of these readingsis partial,like 316

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Fig. 6 Eugene Atget, Verrieres,coin pittoresque, 1922, printing-outpaper, 97/16 x 71/16", Collection, The Museumof ModernArt, New York, Abbot-Levy Collection, PartialGift of ShirleyC. Burden. tiny core samples thatare extractedfrom a delight and thrill us, and that in this vast geological field, each displaying the ambitionhe failed as often as not. Or we could assume thathe beganphotopresence of a different ore. Or like the blindmen's elephant. Ten thousandpieces graphing as a novice and gradually, are a lot to collate. Yet, if Atget's work is through the pedagogical device of to be considered art, and he an artist, this work, learnedto use his peculiar,recollation must be made;we mustacknowlcalcitrantmediumwith economy and sureness, so that his work became edge ourselves to be in the presenceof an oeuvre. The Museumof ModernArt'sfourbetterand betteras he grew older. Or we could point out that he worked part exhibition of Atget, assembledunder the alreadyloaded titleAtgetand theArtof both for others and for himself and that the work he did for himself was Photography, moves briskly towards the solution of this problem, always assuming better, because it served a more dethat the model thatwill serve to ensurethe mandingmaster.Orwe could say that it was Atget's goal to explainin visual unity for this archive is the concept of an artist's oeuvre. For what else could it be? terms an issue of great richness and John Szarkowski,afterrecognizingthat, complexity-the spiritof his own culfrom the point of view of formalinvention, ture-and that in service to this goal the work is extremely uneven, speculates he was willing to acceptthe resultsof on why this should be so: his own best efforts, even when they did not rise above the role of simple There are a numberof ways to interrecords. pret this apparentincoherence. We I believe that all of these explanacould assume thatit was Atget's goal tions are in some degree true, but the to make glorious picturesthat would last is especially interesting to us,

Atget's oeuvre, the numberswere seen as providingthe all-importantcode to the artist's intentions and the work's meaning. Maria Morris Hambourghas finally and most definitively decipheredthis code, to find in it the systematizationof a catalogue of topographicsubjects, divided into five major series and many smaller sub-series and groups.24The namesgiven to the various series and groupings,nameslike Landscape-Documents, PicturesqueParis, Environs, Old-France, etc., establish as the master, largeridea for the worka collective This inching forward from the normal picture of the spiritof Frenchculture-not categories of descriptionof aestheticpro- unlike, we could say, the undertakingof duction-formal success/formal failure; Balzac in the ComidieHumaine.In relation apprenticeship/maturity;public commis- to this master subject, Atget's vision can sion/personal statement-towards a posi- then be organizedarounda set of intentions tion that he acknowledges as "foreign to that are socio-aesthetic, so to speak; he our understandingof artistic ambition," becomes photography's great visual annamely, work "in the service of an issue thropologist. The unifying intentionof the larger than self-expression," evidently oeuvre can then be understoodas a contintroubles Szarkowski. So that just before uing search for the representationof the breaking off this trainof thoughthe medi- moment of interface between natureand tates on why Atget revisited sites (some- culture, as in the juxtapositionof the vines times afterseveralyears)to choosedifferent growing beside a farmhousewindow curaspects of, say, a given buildingto photo- tained in a lace representationof schemagraph. Szarkowski'sanswerresolvesitself tized leaves (Fig. 6). But this analysis, in terms of formal success/formal failure interesting and often brilliant as it is, is and the categories of artistic maturation once again only partial.The desire to repthatareconsistentwiththenotionof oeuvre. resent the paradigmnature/culturecan be His own persistence in thinkingaboutthe tracedin only a smallfractionof theimages work in relation to this aesthetic model and then, like the trailof an elusive animal, surfaces in his decision to continueto treat it dies out, leaving the intentionsas mute it in terms of stylistic evolution:"The ear- and mysteriousas ever. lier pictures show the tree as completeand Whatis interestingin this case is thatthe discrete, as an object againsta ground;as Museum of Modem Art and MariaMorris centrally positioned within the frame; as Hambourghold in theirhands the solution frontally lighted, from behind the photog- to this mystery, a key thatwill not so much rapher'sshoulder.The laterpicturesshow unlock the system of Atget's aestheticinthe tree radically cut by the frame, asym- tentions as dispel them. And this example metricallypositioned, andmore obviously seems all the more informativeas it deminflected by the quality of light that falls onstrates the resistance of the museoloupon it.'"22 This is what produces the gical and arthistoricaldisciplinesto using "elegiac" mood of some of the late work. thatkey. But this whole matterof artisticintention The coding system Atget appliedto his and stylistic evolution must be integrated images derives from the card files of the with the "idea largerthan he" that Atget libraries and topographiccollections for can be thoughtto have served.If the 10,000 which Atget worked.His subjectsareoften images form Atget's picture of the larger standardized, dictated by the established idea, thenthatidea can informus of Atget's categories of survey and historicaldocuaesthetic intentions, for there will be a mentation. The reason many of Atget's reciprocal relation between the two, one street images uncannilyresemblethe phoinside, the otheroutside the artist. tographs by Marville taken a half century To get hold, simultaneously,of thislarg- earlier is that both are functions of the er idea and of Atget's elusive intentionsin same documentarymaster-plan.25 A catamaking this vast archive("It is difficult," logue is not so much an idea as it is a Szarkowskiwrites, "to namean important mathesis, a system of organization.It subartist of the modernperiod whose life and mits not so much to intellectualas to instiintention have been so perfectly withheld tutional analysis. And it seems very clear from us as those of EugeneAtget"), it was that Atget's work is thefunction of a catalong believed to be necessary to decipher logue thathe had no handin inventingand the code providedby Atget's negativenum- for which authorshipis an irrelevantterm. The normalconditionsof authorshipthat bers. Each of the 10,000 plates is numbered. Yet the numbers are not strictly the Museum wishes to maintain tend to successive; they do not organizethe work collapse underthis observation,leadingus chronologically; they sometimes double to a ratherstartlingreflection.The Museum back on each other.23 undertook to crack the code of Atget's For researchers into the problem of negative numbersin order to discover an since it is so foreign to our understandingof artisticambition.It is not easy for us to be comfortablewith the idea that an artist might work as a servantto an idea largerthanhe. We have been educated to believe, or rather, to assume, that no value transcends the value of the creativeindividual. A logical corollary of this assumption is that no subject matter except the artist's own sensibility is quite worthyof his best attention.21

aestheticanima. Whatthey found, instead, was a cardcatalogue. With this in mind we get a verydifferent answer to various earlier questions, like the problem of why Atget photographed certain subjects piecemeal, the image of a fagade separatedby months or even years from the view of the same building'sdoorway or window mullions or wrought-iron work. The answer, it would seem, lies less in the conditions of aesthetic success or failurethanin the requirementsof the catalogue and its categoricalspaces. Subject is the fulcrumin all of this. Are the doorways and the ironworkbalconies Atget's subjects, his choices, the manifest expression of him as active subject, thinking, willing, intending, creating?Or are they simply (althoughthereis nothingsimple in this) subjects, the functions of the catalogue, to which Atget himself is subject? Whatpossible priceof historicalclarity arewe willing to pay in orderto maintain the formerinterpretationover the latter? Everything that has been put forward about the need to abandonor at least to submitto a seriouscritiquethe aesthetically derived categories of authorship,oeuvre, and genre (as in landscape) obviously amounts to an attempt to maintainearly photographyas an archive and to call for the sort of archaeologicalexaminationof this archivethat Michel Foucaultboth theorizes andprovidesa modelfor. Describing the analysis to which archaeologysubmits the archive in order to reveal the conditions of its discursiveformations,Foucault writes that [They] must not be understoodas a set of determinationsimposed from the outside on the thoughtof individuals, or inhabitingit from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute ratherthe set of conditionsin accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordancewith which that practicegives riseto partiallyortotally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. [The relations establishedby archaeology] are not so much limitationsimposed on the initiative of subjects as the field in which thatinitiativeis articulated (without however constituting its center), rules thatit puts into operation (without it having invented or formulatedthem), relationsthatprovide it with a support(withoutit being either their final result or their point of convergence). [Archaeology]is an attemptto reveal discursivepractices in their complexity and density; to show thatto speak is to do something -something other than to express what one thinks.26 Everywhereat presentthereis an attempt to dismantlethe photographicarchive-the set of practices, institutions,and relationWinter1982

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visual materialamountsto a proof-by(June 1859), pp. 738-48; and "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly, the of and creationism photography XII (July 1863), pp. 1-15. presence of God. King, it is argued, 9 See, Jean-LouisBaudry, "The Apparesisted both Lyell's geological uniformitarianismandDarwin'sevolutionratus," CameraObscura,no. 1 (1976), ism. A catastrophist,Kingreadthe geopp. 104-26, originallypublishedas "Le Nevada the Utah and records of Dispositif," Communications,No. 23 logical (1975), pp. 56-72; and Baudry,"Cinelandscapeas a series of acts of creation in which all species were given their ma: Effets ideologiques produits par Notes l'appareil de base," Cinithique, No. permanentshape by a divine creator. 7-8 (1979), pp. 1-8. The great upheavalsand escarpments, 1 Clarence King, Systematic Geology, it 10 W. Earle, ed., Points of View: formations Edward is of the basalt Vol. dramatic were, 1878, 1 ProfessionalPapers TheStereographin America:A Cultural is argued, all producedby natureand of the EngineerDepartmentU.S. Army, 7 vols. & atlas, Washington, D.C., History, Rochester, N.Y., The Visual photographedby O'Sullivan as proof Studies WorkshopPress, 1979, p. 12. of King's catastrophistdoctrine. With U.S. Government Printing Office, In 1856 RobertHuntin theArtJournal this mission to perform, the Western 1877-78. 2 The cartographicgrid onto which this reported,"The stereoscopeis now seen photography of O'Sullivan becomes in every drawing-room;philospherstalk continuouswith the landscapevision of informationis reconstructedhas other Bierstadtor Church. learnedly upon it, ladies are delighted purposesbesides the collationof scienwith its magic representation,and chiltific information. As Alan TrachtenAlthough there is some supportfor drenplay with it." Ibid., p. 28. berg argues,the government-sponsored this argument,thereis an equalamount of supportfor its opposite:King was a 11 "Photographsfromthe HighRockies," Westernsurveys were intendedto gain access to the mineralresourcesneeded serious scientist, who, for example, Harper's Magazine, XXXIX (Septemfor industrialization.It was an industrial made greatefforts to publishas partof ber 1869), pp. 465-75. In this article as well as a scientificprogramthatgenthe findings of his survey Marsh's Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake finds yet one more place of publication, in a eratedthis photography,which "when palaeontologicalfinds, which he knew crudetranslationof the photograph,this full well providedone of the important viewed outsidethecontextof thereports time as an illustrationto the author's it accompaniedseems to perpetuatethe "missing links" needed to give empiradventure narrative. Thus one more ical support to Darwin's theory. Furlandscapetradition."AndTrachtenberg continues:"The photographsrepresent thermore,as we haveseen, O'Sullivan's imaginative space is projectedonto the an essential aspect of the enterprise,a blank, collodion screen. This time, in photographsin their lithographicform function as neutralized,scientific testiformof recordkeeping;theycontributed responseto the accountof the nearcapsize of the explorationparty'sboat, the to the federal government's policy of mony in the context of King's report; the transcendentalists'God does not engraverwhips the watersinto a darksupplying fundamentalneeds of indusened frenzy and the sky into banks of inhabit the visual field of Systematic trialization,needs for reliabledataconlowering stormclouds. Geology. See, BarbaraNovak, Nature cerning raw materials,and promoteda and Culture, New York, Oxford Uni- 12 Thus Staffordwrites, "The conceptthat public willingness to supportgoverntrue history is naturalhistory emanciment policy of conquest, settlement, versity Press, 1980; Weston Naef, Era and exploitation." Alan Trachtenberg, pates the objects of nature from the of Exploration,New York, The Metroand Elisof The Incorporation of America, New Museum 1975; Art, government of man. For the idea of politan abeth Lindquist-Cock, Influence of York, Hill andWang, 1982, p. 20. singularity it is significant .., that 3 In his importantessay "L'espace de geological phenomena-taken in their Photography on AmericanLandscape widest sense to includespecimensfrom l'art," Jean-Claude Lebensztejn disPainting, New York, GarlandPress, the mineralkingdom-constitute landcusses the museum'sfunction,since its 1977. scape forms in which naturalhistory relatively recent inception, in deter- 5 Peter Galassi, Before Photography, New York, The Museum of Modemrn finds aesthetic expression. . . . The mining what will count as Art: "The final stage in the historicizingof nature museum has a double but complemenArt, 1981, p. 12. sees the productsof historynaturalized. tary function: to exclude everything 6 See the chapter "Landscape and the In 1789, the German savant Samuel Published Photograph," in Naef, Era else, andthroughthis exclusionto conGovernment the In 1871 stitutewhatwe meanby the wordart.It Witte-basing his conclusions on the ofExploration. does not overstatethe case to say that writingsof Desmarets,DulucandFaujas Printing Office published a catalogue the conceptof artunderwenta profound de Saint-Fond-annexed the pyramids of Jackson's work as, Catalogue of when a space, fashioned transformation of Egypt for nature,declaringthatthey Stereoscopic, 6 x 8 and 8 x 10 Photofor its very definition, was opened to were basalt eruptions;he also identiH. Jackson. graphs by Wmin. contain it." In Lebensztejn, Zigzag, fied the ruins of Persepolis, Baalbek, 7 The eye is not actually refocusing, of course. Rather, given the nearnessof Paris, Flammarion,1981, p. 41. Palmyra,as well as the Templeof Jupi4 The treatmentof Westernsurvey photer at Agrigento and the Palace of the the image to the eyes and the fixity of Incas in Peru, as lithic outcroppings." the head in relation to it, in order to tography as continuous with painterly BarbaraM. Stafford,"TowardRomanscan the space of the image a viewer depictions of nature is everywhere in the literature.BarbaraNovak, Weston tic Landscape Perception: Illustrated must readjustand recoordinatethe two Travels and the Rise of 'Singularity'as Naef, and ElisabethLindquist-Cockare eyeballs from point to point as vision moves over the surface. an AestheticCategory,"ArtQuarterly, three specialists who see this work as n.s. I (1977), pp. 108-9. She concludes 8 OliverWendellHolmes, "Sun-Painting an extension of those landscape senher studyof "the cultivationof tastefor and Sun-Sculpture,"AtlanticMonthly, sibilities operative in American ninethe naturalphenomenonas singularity," VIII(July 1861), 14-15. Thediscussion teenth-centurypainting,with transcenof the view of Broadway occurs on dentalistfervorconstantlyconditioning by insistingthat"the lone naturalobject . . need not be interpretedas human the way natureis seen. Thus, the byPage 17. Holmes's other two essays now standardargumentaboutthe King/ surrogates;on the contrary, [the 19th appearedas "The Stereoscopeand the O'Sullivan collaboration is that this century Romantic landscapepainter's] Stereograph," Atlantic Monthly, III ships to which nineteenth-century photography originally belonged-and to reassemble it within the categoriespreviously constitutedby artand its history.27It is not hard to conceive of what the inducements for doing so are, but it is more difficult to understandthe tolerance for the kind of incoherenceit produces.

318

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miles of footage shot by Eisenstein in isolated, detachedmonolithsshouldbe Mexico for his projectQue VivaMexiplaced within the vitalist aesthetic traco. Sent to Californiawhere it was dedition--emerging from the illustrated voyage-that valued the naturalsinguveloped, this footage was never seen lar. One might referto this traditionas by Eisenstein, who was forced to leave that of a 'neue Sachlichkeit' in which the U.S. immediately upon his return the regard for the specifics of nature from Mexico. The footage was then cannibalized by two Americaneditors produces a repertoryof animateparticulars." Pp. 117-18. to compose Thunderover Mexico and 13 For anotherdiscussion of Galassi's arTime in the Sun. Neither of these is gument with relation to the roots of supposed to be part of Eisenstein's oeuvre. Only a "shootingchronology" "analytic perspective" in seventeenthassembledby Jay Leydain the Museum centuryoptics andthe cameraobscura, of ModernArt now exists. Its statusin see, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Derelation to Eisenstein's oeuvre is obviscribing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, University of Chicago Press, ously peculiar. But given Eisenstein's 1983, Chapter2. nearly ten years of filmmakingexperi14 Michel Foucaultopens a discussion of ence at the time of the shooting, given the museum in "Fantasia of the Lialso the state of the art of cinema in termsof the body of materialthatexisted brary," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans.D. F. Bouchardand by 1930 and the extent to which this S. Simon, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell Unihad been theorized, it is probablethat Eisenstein had a more complete sense, versity Press, 1977, pp. 87-109. See, from the script and his working conalso, EugenioDonato, "The Museum's Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual ception of the film, of what he had made as a "work"---even though he Reading of Bouvard and Picuchet," TextualStrategies:Perspectivesin Postnever saw it-than the photographers Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. of the Mission Heliographiquecould have hadof theirs.The historyof EisenHarari,Ithaca,CornellUniversityPress, 1979; and Douglas Crimp, "On the stein's project is documented in full Museum's Ruins," October, No. 13 detail in Sergei Eisenstein and Upton (Summer 1980), pp. 41-57. Sinclair, TheMakingand Unmakingof 15 Andre Malraux, "Museum without "Que Viva Mexico," ed. Harry M. GeduldandRonaldGottesman,BloomWalls," The Voices of Silence, Princeton, Princeton University Press, Bolington, IndianaUniversityPress, 1970. 19 See, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "A lingen Series XXIV, 1978, p. 46. 16 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What Photographerin Jerusalem, 1855: AuWe Say?, New York, Scribners, 1969, guste SalzmannandHis Times," October, No. 18 (Fall 1981), p. 95. This p. 91, n. 9. 17 Students of photography'shistory are essay raises some of the issues about not encouragedto questionwhetherart the problematicnatureof Salzmann's historical models might (or might not) work consideredas oeuvre thatareenapply. The session on the history of gaged above. photography at the 1982 College Art 20 Man Ray arrangedfor publicationof Association meeting (a session proudly four photographsby Atget in La Rdvointroducedas the fruitsof realscholarly lutionSurrialiste, threein theJune1926 researchat last appliedto this formerly issue, and one in the December 1926 issue. The exhibition Film und Foto, unsystematically studied field) was a display of what can go wrong. In the Stuttgart,1929, includedAtget, whose work was also reproducedin Foto-Auge, paper"CharlesMarville,PopularIllustrator:Origins of a PhotographicAesStuttgart,WedekindVerlag, 1929. thetic," presentedby ConstanceKane 21 MariaMorrisHambourgandJohnSzarHungerford,the model of the necessary kowski, The WorkofAtget: Volume1, internal consistency of an oeuvre enOld France, New York, The Museum of ModernArt, and Boston, New York couraged the idea thattherehad to be a stylistic connectionbetween Marville's GraphicSociety, 1981,pp. 18-19. early practice as an engraver and his 22 Ibid., p. 21. laterwork as a photographer.The char- 23 The first published discussion of this acterizationsof style this promotedwith problem characterizes it as follows: regardto Marville'sphotographicwork "Atget's numberingsystemis puzzling. His picturesare not numberedin a sim(e.g., sharpcontrastsof light and dark, hard,crispcontours)werenot only hard ple serial system, but in a confusing to see, consistently, but when these did manner.In many cases, low-numbered apply they did not distinguish him in photographsare dated later than highnumbered photographs, and in many any way fromhis fellows on the Mission cases numbers are duplicated." See, Heliographique. For every "graphic" BarbaraMichaels, "An Introductionto Marville,it is possibleto findanequally the Dating and Organizationof Eugene graphicLeSecq. 18 An example of this is the nearly four Atget's Photographs"TheArtBulletin,

LXI (September1979), p. 461. 24 Maria Morris Hambourg, "Eugene Atget, 1857-1927: The Structureof the Work," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, ColumbiaUniversity, 1980. 25 See, Charles Marville, Photographs of Paris 1852-1878, New York, The French Institute/Alliance Frangaise, 1981. This containsan essay, "Charles Marville'sOld Paris," by MariaMorris Hambourg. 26 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York, Harperand Row, 1976, pp. 208-9. 27 Thus far the work of Alan Sekula has been the one consistent analysis of the history of photographyto attack this effort. See, Alan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," Art Journal, XLI (Spring 1981), pp. 15-25; and "The InstrumentalImage:Steichenat War," Artforum, XIII (December 1975). A discussion of the rearrangementof the archive in relationto the need to protect the values of modernismis mountedby Douglas Crimp's"The Museum'sOld/ The Library's New Subject," Parachute, (Spring 1981). RosalindKrauss is Professor of Art History at HunterCollege, C. U.N.Y., and an editor of October.

Winter 1982

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