The death of the Pictorial in Post Modern Photography?

I'm currently studying for a BA in Photomedia and Design

Communication and I've decided to look at the nature of Post Modern

Photography - in particular the apparrent death of the pictorial

image in Post Modern Photographic Art. Pictorial images are often

malligned as being outdated and meaningless in relation to the ideas

driven imagery of post modernism - but as a lover of aesthetic beauty

in photography, I wonder if this criticism is justified. Surely

there is room in the gallery for imagery that simply aims to please

without necssarily confronting issues? Any comments?

Tim:

 

Interesting topic, but how do you define a "pictorial" image?

I thought Modern photography was the end of pictoral photography?

 

To answer your question, you must define "post-modern" photography.

Secondly, just because someone says someting is "meaningless" does

not mean it is so. I would be very careful in thinking that art

criticism is actually making factual statements. Unlike science,

which needs to show some kind of repeatable evidence, anyone can can

be an art critic and make any unsubstantiated claims they want. Some

are nice enough to quote others who support their views (or even

twist quotes to do it), but that is merely scholasticism.

 

To say beauty in art is meaningless is contridicted by your own

question. You yourself admit it is important for you. If the artwork

is effective, what does it matter which -ism it belongs to. What is

important is that it is significant to the viewer.

 

Who was it who said, "the reports of my death have been greatly

overexaggerated." I would take the pronouncements of our post modern

artists and philosophers with a grain of salt.

See it in the light of asking why ballet isn't taught in a square dance class.<p>

 

Postmodernism is, if you will, the antithesis of pictorial photography.<p>

 

Pictorial photography constructs and builds in a non-challenging way on what's sacred as opposed to the deconstructive or challenging design of Postmodern photographic art think.<p>

 

<i>Pictorial images are often malligned as being outdated and meaningless in relation to the ideas driven imagery of post modernism - but as a lover of aesthetic beauty in photography, I wonder if this criticism is justified.</i><p>

 

Pictorial images are more considered "Passe" than "meaningless" or "outdated." To me, it's a certain type of egotistical pseudo intellectualism at work. Work seen by champions of Postmodern photographic art see it as superior to the intellectually vapid images of pictorialism.<p>

 

<i>Surely there is room in the gallery for imagery that simply aims to please without necessarily confronting issues? Any comments?</i><p>

 

There's room but it won't happen until folks like yourself, working within the educational institutions, demand that curators grow up emotionally and start sharing the center stage with more than one type of photographic art.<p>

 

Allow me to ask questions:<p>

 

Let's say you get what you want, pretty pictures now hang back on the wall, do these images succeed in challenging the senses or mind other than to throw some eye candy at the viewer? Does this love of "aesthetic beauty in photography" offer any depth, emotionally, intellectually or otherwise to the photographic process? In reality, isn't the positioning of a pretty picture on the wall, just another adornment of the wall, vapid of meaning, to be gazed upon in admiration as in "Wow, that's sure a purty picture." and nothing more?<p>

 

The final, what you're seeing and asking about is valid but it has it's flaws in that time marches forward and not backwards. The day of pretty pictures has come and gone; empty, vapid, void of substance. As has also the day of Postmodern photographic art; content driven images that are bleak, dower, decrying the negative in life as the artists try to find a new negative low. Now it's incumbent to move photographic thinking forward, into the day, and can do so through the not necessarily ironic blending of pretty pictures or the non-challenging, with the Postmodern photographic content driven art or challenging photographic efforts to create a new artistic genre.<p>

 

Hopefully I've given you some ideas to ponder in your quest:)<p>

"...Pictorialism is used to describe photographs in which the actual scene depicted is of less importance than the artistic quality of the image. Pictorialists would be more concerned with the aesthetics and, sometimes, the emotional impact of the image, rather than what actually was in front of their camera."</p>

<a href="http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/pictoria.htm" >Pictorialism</a></p>

See also:</p>

<a href="http://www.psu.edu/dept/palmermuseum/past/pictorialism/pictorialism.html" >Pictorialism into Modernism</a></p>

Pictorialism is flourishing in a postmodern context. Check the work of Wolfgang

Tillmans, Simon Norfolk, or Tom Hunter - all of it informed and enriched by classic

painting.

Tim.

 

You might want to define yourself, for the benefit of others as to what you're meaning by "Pictorial images..." Some seem to be missing the point of what I think you're trying to ask.

There are many pictorialists whose work hang in galleries. It seems that most

of the current landscape photographers having success in galleries are

pictorialists. I think you speak far too prematurely of the death of pictorialism.

 

I'm a pictorialist. I try to create images that are beautiful. I would hope that

there is a subtext to my work that might influence people to have an

appreciation for the beauty of our planet and maybe some desire to protect it.

But I create photographs mainly for the purpose of expressing my ideas of

beauty.

You don't fit the "post-modern" title, however, so it's not clear what this has to do with the question. Most everything I've seen that is considered "post-modern" (and not simply in the timeline sense) is non-pictorialist, as the original poster suggests.

Tim

 

You might also want to mention if you mean galleries or museums as there's still plenty of pictorialists, as B Kosoff suggested, still hawking pictorial photographic art.

Jonathan Swift satirised all such silly arguments rather well, and that more than 250 years ago, when he wrote of the war between the Big Enders and the Little Enders.

 

<RANT ON>

A picture is a picture is a picture. It may (and I emphasise 'may') be worth while for someone compiling a catalogue to place it into a category but each image, be it in paint or pixels, must ultimately stand alone. The idea that some new fad displaces an earlier one is at best facile and, most of the time, tedious. In reality, as any visit to an art gallery with a reasonable collection will show, styles pop up over and over again in different places and times, as new people rediscover older ideas.

 

How anyone could write much more than a couple of sentences on the subject is beyond me. On the other hand, art criticism is mostly harmless, provided you do it in private and wash your hands carefully afterwards. It's the people who describe themselves as 'artists' you need to watch out for, especially the sub-species Photographicus Artisticus Poseurius which can give you a very nasty rash if you stand next to them.

</RANT OFF>

 

Sorry, what was the question????

Jeff were you addressing me? I know I'm not post modernist, I think that Tim

was referring more to pictorialism in an era of post modern art.

--> "each image, be it in paint or pixels, must ultimately stand alone"

 

Why?

 

When did it become ilegitimate to pay attention to relationships between and among works (paintings, photographs, etc)?

I was, I was wondering if you were putting yourself in the post-modern category because it sure didn't strike me that way. I've seen very little here that would be classified as "post-modern".

Although Jeff I'm a minimalist, as are many of the current crop of landscape

shooters, and minimalism is at the tail end of modernism, does that mean

we're modernist as well?

"each image, be it in paint or pixels, must ultimately stand alone"

 

Just as there is no nature without theory, there are no pictures without other pictures.

"there are no pictures without other pictures."

 

Duh?

 

What the blue blazes does that mean when it's at home?????

You have a brain, Harvey, figure it out.

Look at 'Tomoko and Mother' by W. Eugene Smith.

Hey Tim! Did you bail on your question?

 

At the end of Neville Wakefield's essay: "Second-hand Daylight: An Aesthetics of Disappointment", he sums it up in a nut shell.

 

"For the present generation, the waking dream has become an air-brushed nightmare and damaged flesh is all we have. And if the enthusiasms of disappointment are the true heirs to a banished tradition, bad photography may well be our only hope--a ruination enclosing the last legitimate attempt to form an aristocracy."

I liked Mr HPs Rant, He must be a reader of Heinlein.

Well said.

We can create many catagorys of art but miss the real issue in that any Photo, drawing, painting may be beautiful, and still be meaningful to the viewer. Some items may have been created to be non pictorial and convey a message and be lost in the viewer eye.

If its good, its good, meaning not withstanding. Look at the work of the folks in this arena, very pretty, very meaningful.

"You have a brain, Harvey, figure it out."

 

The point is that I do have a brain and I'm trying not to sully it with asinine statements that sound terribly clever to the person that makes them.

"For the present generation, the waking dream has become an air-brushed nightmare and damaged flesh is all we have. And if the enthusiasms of disappointment are the true heirs to a banished tradition, bad photography may well be our only hope--a ruination enclosing the last legitimate attempt to form an aristocracy."

 

?????? If that actually has a meaning, I've missed it. Why is our flesh damaged? What is an air-brushed nightmare? What tradition was banished? "Enthusiasms of disappointment"????? Why is any kind of image "legitimate"? And why is the bad any more "legitimate" than the good? Who is forming an aristocracy? Wouldn't you MAINTAIN an aristocracy?? Who is King and where is the court????? I'm sorry Thomas, but the author has simply inherited a vocabulary, but he hasn't figured out how to say anything.

For me there ain't no pictorialism or realism or surrealism or postmodernism or whatever to stand on it's own.What my minds eye is seeïng ( or what I'm really hoping it to see) should or can be a mix of everything, just like the white of sunlight, at first without color but actually made that way by the use of different colors. Same way in using all those 'styles' : to combine them in order to make something pure or neutral that has no use for a name.

'?????? If that actually has a meaning, I've missed it.'

 

yeah, it's a bit fruity isn't it?

 

if i catch his drift he's referring to a photographic celebration of the ugly and the

banal that came about as a reaction to the unobtainable, photoshopped ideals of

mainstream culture.

 

but it sounds a bit dated ('heroin chic') - beauty is popular again.