[Reader-list] (MNIC and photographs) PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; Seven Thousand Pictures Are Better Than One

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All

I have pasted below an old essay on photography. This essay expounds
how photography which began as a exercise to collect visual data,
developed into an art form by the 1960's.

It seems that with the coming up of Multiple Purpose National Identity
cards complete with a digital photograph, the officials of Registrar
General's office are perhaps going to practice photography in its
earliest avtaar.

I wonder what effect it will have on our sensibility when we will look
at an image of a MNIC card holder and think whether this image seems
Indian or not, alternatively I do not know whether MNIC photographs
will be able to influence our sensibilities at all to look and give
credence to gird like photographs of our identity documents.

Excerpt-
This was also the era of the grid's apotheosis. Grid and module came
to the foreground as the organizing principles behind work by artists
like Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin. Grids connote a cool
reverence for order and number (though artists are quite capable of
injecting a certain amount of disarray into a series of right angles).
Photographs once more readily fit the bill. The little rectangles are
the perfect module for a grid construction, as anyone who has ever
seen a contact sheet or a high school yearbook could attest. (Grids
are so pervasive at the I.C.P. Midtown that the spots before your eyes
are likely to be rectangular.)

What the photograph added to the grid system was representation. Never
mind how dumb and dull the subject was, the system now had to take
something other than geometry into account.

Please read the essay for more.

Warm regards

Taha

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D81538F930A1575BC0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; Seven Thousand Pictures Are Better Than One

By VICKI GOLDBERG;
Published: August 23, 1992

 Photography, which came along soon after the great age of the
encyclopedia, was instantly seized on as a new means to collect data.
The visible forms of flora, fauna and far-off lands, monuments,
engineering feats and criminals' faces could all be catalogued, and
were. Photography eventually turned almost everyone into a collector:
cameras inevitably made their owners into accumulators, piling up
endless evidence of friends, family and vacations. Amassing data was
so natural with this instrument that a new era of hunting and
gathering might be said to have come along in the history of
evolution.

No one thought any of the common variety of photographic accumulation,
whether in slide libraries or news-photo files or family albums, had
any claim to being art. But in the 1960's, the very activity of
collecting data was turned into an art enterprise, as if the
catalogue, the survey and the census were artistic models. Groups and
sequences of related photographs that did not necessarily tell a story
and were not often of much individual power were now presented as art
objects.

"Special Collections: The Photographic Order From Pop to Now," at the
International Center of Photography Midtown (through Oct. 16), brings
together work by many of the major and some of the minor players in
this game. Though not all the art gets high marks and not much of it
will make the heart go pitty-pat (or even intends to), this is an
engaging show and certainly proves, if proof is needed, that the
multi-photograph object is still alive and well and living in gallery
land.

Like just about everything else in contemporary life, this kind of art
in effect started with Andy Warhol in the early 60's, when he
silkscreened news pictures and portraits in series onto canvas. It was
at about this point that artists who were not photographers began
using photographs (sometimes appropriated from the mass media) in
their art in a big way and even making art objects out of photographs
alone. Pop Art reinforced this move by raising the status of the
low-class, vernacular, mechanically reproduced and impersonally
rendered image. Serial and Conceptual artists instinctively understood
the virtues of a deadpan documentary medium like photography. The
camera, like a perfect match for a personals ad, responded to the
call.

So at the moment when art was repudiating overt emotion, the grandeur
of humanistic concerns, the distinctive individual touch and the
notion of the masterpiece, Edward Ruscha photographed "Every Building
on the Sunset Strip" and published the results in an accordion-fold
book. "My pictures are not that interesting," he once said, "nor the
subject matter. They are simply a collection of 'facts'; my book is
more like a collection of ready-mades." In part this attitude, which
others shared, was a revolt against the aggrandizement of individual
emotion in Abstract Expressionism. No longer an impassioned creator
flinging paint and angst, the artist posed as a neutral observer, an
accountant of humdrum data wielding a camera like an adding machine.
Goodbye De Kooning, hello Duchamp: photography was a kind of passport
to a new philosophy.

This was also the era of the grid's apotheosis. Grid and module came
to the foreground as the organizing principles behind work by artists
like Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin. Grids connote a cool
reverence for order and number (though artists are quite capable of
injecting a certain amount of disarray into a series of right angles).
Photographs once more readily fit the bill. The little rectangles are
the perfect module for a grid construction, as anyone who has ever
seen a contact sheet or a high school yearbook could attest. (Grids
are so pervasive at the I.C.P. Midtown that the spots before your eyes
are likely to be rectangular.)

John Baldessari made a sort of specialty of throwing both the grid and
the photograph out of kilter. In one piece at the I.C.P. Midtown he
repeatedly turned on its end a photograph of a chaotic event that
appears to be people reacting to a bombing. In another -- "Horizontal
Men (With One Luxuriating)" -- a couple of vertical fellows walk on
their backs in conformity with the title.

What the photograph added to the grid system was representation. Never
mind how dumb and dull the subject was, the system now had to take
something other than geometry into account. So Ray Metzger's
"Telephone Booth" is wholly abstract at a distance but repeatedly
spells out "phone" up close, and Bernd and Hilla Becher's varied
arrays of water towers not only locate handsomely monumental forms but
speak of the nature of the industrial landscape.

The grid is in theory infinitely extendible. Who knows why the artist
quit at nine rectangles across? Why not ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Arnaud
Maggs takes the question seriously in "48 Views Series," a
9-foot-high, 31-foot-long collection of photo-booth-type pictures of
162 people, each photographed 48 times: a total of 7,776 images. With
such a barrage of pictures, the intrigue resides in the irregularities
-- a blank space where a portrait should be, a wavering and misaligned
vertical strip -- but the work also gives off a faint whiff of the
evil of banality.

It seems that the camera turned willing artists into mad
encyclopedists. Douglas Huebler made a sprightly visual enterprise out
of a Conceptual vow: "Throughout the remainder of the artist's
lifetime he will photographically document, to the extent of his
capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most
authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may
be assembled in that manner." Dennis Adams constructed an alphabet
from 26 pictures of Patricia Hearst. Judy Fiskin took tiny,
poker-faced photographs of unprepossessing houses in a long sequence
called the "Dingbat" series. You could reasonably consider "Special
Collections" the biggest art bargain in town. Where else could you see
well over 8,000 photographs without wilting entirely away?

Like any artistic form, the multi-photograph object can express
different demeanors and aims, from neutrality to satire to social
comment. Artists do not always succeed in conveying their intentions,
but intentions matter. The one real lapse in this show occurs when
they are ignored. Sixteen photographs of baseball players on
phonograph record covers from 1962, though charming, were not meant to
be art, were not meant to be seen as a group and were not meant to be
displayed on the wall. Once more Duchamp rears his head. Had an artist
appropriated and grouped these very same images, presto, change-o,
they would have become a bona fide art object. Curators, however, do
not yet have that much latitude.

Using photographs must have seemed like an amusing idea to artists
raised on Jackson Pollock, and some played the medium for smiles. In
"Chest of Moles (Portrait of Pamela)," Robert Watts has framed tiny
photographs of all the moles on a woman's body and displayed them in a
glass-fronted chest. Others, like Christian Boltanski, use multiple
appropriated images to speak to the emotions, forgoing the supposed
objectivity of photographs that lured many artists in the 60's. "The
62 Members of the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955" consists of pictures,
rephotographed, that children back then had selected to represent
themselves at their best. Those children are middle-aged now, and some
are probably rich and others dead, some are faithful husbands and some
divorced, and still they smile and clutch their pets as if yesterday
were forever.

Rick Hock uses more obviously loaded imagery in "Codex (St.
Sebastian)," which includes Andrea Mantegna's St. Sebastian,
Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Marat," some stills from film comedies
and pictures of hell. Hock brings things up to date on appropriation
by including the book jackets of "The Art of Describing" and "The Art
of Memory" to hint that memory depends on images reproduced in one
medium or another. He also brings us back to the origins of this kind
of multi-photo art: one of his central images is Richard Avedon's
photograph of Warhol's horribly ravaged torso after he was shot.

No doubt St. Andy is the proper patron/protector of this art form. He
was a rabid collector, scavenging images as much as objects. He
consciously turned himself into a wholly neutral, tape-recording
observer, an artist who worked so mechanically he could give
instructions for art on the phone. The damages to his body, like
everything about Warhol, could be represented, exhibited and endlessly
reproduced, then appropriated for someone else's work (along with both
high art and popular imagery) and ultimately converted into an icon
commensurate with his fame.

Vicki Goldberg is the author of "The Power of Photography: How
Photographs Changed Our Lives."