Limits of Photography exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Photography

Had a chance last nite to check out the new exhibition at MoCP, titled Limits of Photography and featuring photographs, video, and mixed media by Chris Naka, Curtis Mann, Daniel Hojnacki, Doug Stapleton, J.J. Murphy, John Brill, Randy Hayes, Rhona Shand, Sally Ketcham and Vera Klement.

Combined, their works explore the area where viewers lose faith in the truthiness of images. The exhibition challenges the structure of how audiences interact with photographs, and perhaps how that varies depending on the setting or arena in which that interaction takes place. The works call into question what exactly we expect from images and how those expectations ultimately define the identity of a photograph.

Untitled, 1991
© John Brill

There has been this historical assumption -- particularly in journalistic or documentary photography -- that photographs can somehow reveal an "objective truth" about the reality of the world, insofar as the photo was supposed to be a precise mirror of the scene before the camera.

The notions of authenticity and veracity in journalistic photographs have at times been upheld as next to godliness by the photos' creators, and every act of deception or manipulation that threatened the sanctity of their practice would accordingly be met with equal amounts hand-wringing, censuring, and re-affirmation of principle, as the medium struggles to maintain the sacred trust of its audience and its own credibility in the Fourth Estate. And yet the potential for manipulation in the photographic technique has been its own shadow ever since the creation of the craft. The history of documentary photography is ripe with notorious transgressions, from Alexander Gardner's setup photos in the Civil War all the way up through the digitally altered photo of Iranian missiles in 2008 and other countless examples by press photographers from the front lines of war zones to the Main Streets of daily newspaper coverage.

War Monody, Autumn, series 3, #4, 2008
© Vera Klement

What becomes a crucial question then is: how and why do we assume that photographs are imbued with some sort of "objective truth"? That concept alone seems ambiguous and misleading, and difficult to say that photographs could ever really live up to such a task. Surely there are numerous subjective decisions that get made along the entire process of creating and disseminating pictures -- so in reality, photographic depiction is infinitely nuanced and complex, as I wrote about in an essay on a similar topic in March 2011.

Indiana's Wildflowers Pt. 1
© Daniel Hojnacki

But I'm also interested in how the viewer's assumptions about photography are shaped by the context of the viewing -- more specifically: do people have different expectations of a photo they view in a magazine versus a photo they view in a museum or gallery? Are their criteria for "journalistic photography" different than their criteria for "art photography", and if so, how?

I think this territory becomes even murkier as we've seen a very recent explosion in at least the past 10-15 years of blurred distinctions between those two arenas of photography, with plenty of so-called "art photographers" being consistently commissioned to create work for journalistic magazines and vice versa with so-called "journalistic photographers" exhibiting their works more frequently in museums and galleries. So to add one more layer to the question: do viewers see a "journalistic photograph" differently in a magazine versus in a gallery? And do they see an "art photograph" differently in a gallery versus in a magazine?

A part of me has a hunch that most audiences of photography in either or both of those settings probably don't actually draw as sharp a line in the sand between the two approaches (and their respective inherent truthiness) as the creators and facilitators of those images do amongst themselves. Which leads me to emphatically believe that the continued overlapping and cross-overs of "art photography" and "journalistic photography" influencing and informing each other in certain ways is actually quite a healthy development, and a positive adaptation for the future of all photography in a complex and visually sophisticated modern society.

These are among the complicated topics addressed in the Limits of Photography exhibition. The works represent a wide range of materials and forms of manipulation, from the very subtle to others that have been so heavily manipulated as to almost not even resemble photographic objects at all -- and as such, might altogether lose their veracity as documents depicting reality.

Reduction, 2011
© Curtis Mann

I'm a big fan of what Curtis Mann is doing, and had a moment to meet him yesterday and chat briefly about his methodology. Much of his work begins with found images from a variety of sources (for example, his series Everything After is comprised mainly of photos from war and conflict zones in the Middle East), and he takes the perspective of the photograph as a physical object. He is then able to alter the image through various processes of folding, bending, cutting, painting varnish or spraying bleach onto it, thus imposing a permanent change onto the nature of the photo as well as its definition as a document and the reality it is perceived to reflect.

And just to take Mann's work as a further example, some of his photos were used on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in July 2011, for their story "Yemen on the Brink of Hell" (and to answer the paramount concern of photojournalists: yes, they were labeled as photo illustrations). How are those photos read in that context? Do viewers expect them to be real because they're presented in a journalistic publication (and on a very serious topic, at that)? What is their perceived truthiness as documents (especially if the viewer had not yet read they were illustrations)?

© Curtis Mann

In the summary of curator Rod Slemmons:

"The exhibition title exploits a double meaning. The first is that many of the artists in the show push photography to the limits of recognizing it as photography. The second refers to the limitations encountered when we trust photography as if it were perception -- as if it were a window rather than a flat, constructed surface".

Limits of Photography
ongoing thru 25 March
Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago