ANGELA STRASSHEIM
Little History of Photography, Pequena Historia Da Fotographia
Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
March 12 through May 3, 2009


The achievement of likeness, the perfect imitation of reality, was for centuries the obsession that fuelled all artistic practice. The invention of its basic tool, single point perspective, strengthened by positivist rationalism, satisfied the figurative exigencies of western culture for more than five hundred years, in such a way that it came to be a system of immutable visualization. The history of seeing is one of surrender. The surrender to an order of representation based on the mimicry of that which is visible was manufactured by way of omission: to an order of convention, with a defined history and period of development, to the point of naturalizing its identification with the anatomy of vision itself.

Since its appearance, light fixed on a photosensitive plate has fulfilled the dream of achieving an innocent eye that simply cuts out a fragment of reality within its frame. Perhaps precisely because of its technological similarity to the human anatomical apparatus, through its coinciding with the physical means of seeing, the perception of the world as photography was paradigmatic, that no other possible modes of perception seemed to exist, and nor would they. In some ways, humanity sees according to, and with, photography: it does not see in the same way since photography has existed. Now: this culmination of the agreed lie, the final proof of the shining truth of that way of seeing, incorporates into itself its own completion.

The vanguards of the twentieth century, with their battle against the painting as window inherited from renaissance perspective, gradually broke down this literal and perceptualist modality of representation. The model of consciousness which supported that of representation, the philosophical presumptions upon which it was based, were gradually undermined throughout the twentieth century. At the same time that western thought was developing in order to formulate a new way of understanding subjectivity as a fluid, changing outcome in continuous production and evolution, so too the work on the image advanced by its side. The paradox of its own condition, its privileged relationship with reality, was precisely what made photography the perfect tool to investigate into the ways of liquidating its own convention. Photography, critical of the presumption of innocence in its objectivity, of the innocent character of the trace of light, took on the role of making the impossibility of representation visible and, even, dramatizing its literal disappearance. Since then, photography, more than the result of the technical processing of an image, has been a theoretical object: a dangerous artifact that repeatedly makes systems of representation unstable, re-orders the world, rearranges and shakes subjectivities.

Starting from reading photographs, and from their presentation as devices given for public analysis, this little history of fotography militates along the same lines as Walter Benjamin in his famous essay of the same title: to dismantle the possibility of photographic illiteracy, to provide tools for the critical deconstruction of the processes of the creation of images and, so, question the everyday mechanical production of individuals in society.

The structure of the exhibition and the publication that accompanies it is founded in a classical format of art history, using as a starting point the genres of the western pictorial tradition: the portrait, still life, landscape and abstraction. These classifications of the image, frames for reading produced by critical institutions since the inception of the manufactured image, have become representation cubed in the last few decades, as models so overused that they appear worn out, faltering, reduced to a mere code or language structure, subjected to a parasitical appropriation or displaced to a dislocated semantic field.

Artists: IÒaki Bonillas, John Coplans, Tacita Dean, Rineke Dijkstra, Willie Doherty, Pierre Gonnord, Douglas Gordon, Paul Graham, John Hilliard, Evelyn H–fer, Ingar Krauss, Jonathan Monk, Malakeh Nayini, Holger Niehaus, Erwin Olaf, Joao Penalva, Peter Piller, Carla van de Puttelaar, Ros’ngela RennÛ, AndrÈs Serrano, Toshio Shimamura, Angela Strassheim, Wolfgang Tillmans, Albrecht T¸bke, ValentÌn Vallhonrat, Virxilio ViÈitez, Manuel VilariÒo, Ben Watts