The Photograph as Contemporary Art - Chapter 3

The 3rd Chapter of "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" is als about Deadpan - "a cool, detached and keenly sharp type of photography". I think the key point here ia"detached", as in emotionally detached. This is a move away from emotional engagement with or judgement of the subject. While some of the subjects may be emotive, the photographer is ostensibly recording rather than commenting. The emphasis is on the objective rather than the subjective. Photography is therefore seen as a means to obtain an objective standpoint as opposed to presenting a singular vision - i.e. that of the photographer.

Another important aspect here (and also relates to a word in the definition which opened this entry with), is sharpness. Many of these photographs are intended to be displayed at significant scale. They're taken with large format cameras to increase the level of detail that can be captured and displayed.

There is often an element of removal of the human in Deadpan, Dan Holdsworth took photographs of build landscapes such as shopping centres, but at night and with long exposures - "The image has a distinctly non-human atmosphere, as if showing us an essence that could not be seen by the naked eye. Rather than asking who took this photograph, one might reasonably ask what took it, the sense being that the unsettling contamination of the night is being recorded mechanically, by a surveillance camera perhaps."

Boo Moon took photographs of the East China Sea. Again his work is out of time and without human involvement, they are without history.

An artist that I found particularly interesting in this chapter was Thomas Struth. In his photographs there is an awareness of the photographic form in his work. We are encouraged to take interest in the perspectives and how they are captured in the photograph. To me this seems to be moving away from the sense that the photograph is objective? Surely any thing which has a perspective is not objective?

Struth is also keen to capture the human. He's taken a series of photographs of people viewing art in galleries. They capture (but don't comment on?) this aspect of human behaviour.

Thomas Ruff also includes people in his photographs but again in an unemotive way. He took a series of photographs over the course of a number of years of head and should shots of his friends. They're effectively very high quality passport photographs which "confound our expectations of discovering a person's character through their appearance". He displays on a large scale so that great detail is shown (down to the pores in the skin).

Elsewhere in the chapter we see other photographers who take photographs of people in context of natural surroundings with a neutral, eye-level perspective and flat expressions form the subjects which present limited insight into their lives and personalities.

Overall the Deadpan style is quite interesting to me. I think Gursky, Moon, Struth and Ruff are artists I'll do some more research on.

Amend
After doing some further reading I realised that I'd missed that Deadpan is sometime used to describe what should be the norm as an approach for documentary photography. Which makes sense.