Museum Ludwig

Intractable and Untamed

28 Jun - 16 Nov 2014

Candida Höfer
Weidengasse Köln 1974
Aus: Türken in Deutschland, Silbergelatineabzug, Vintage, signiert, datiert, betitelt mit Annotationen
13,50 x 18,50 cm
Museum Ludwig
INTRACTABLE AND UNTAMED
Documentary Photography around 1979
28 June - 16 Novem­ber 2014

Cu­ra­tor: Bar­bara En­gel­bach

In times of sweep­ing so­ci­e­tal trans­for­ma­tions and cris­es, pho­tog­ra­phy be­comes an im­por­tant medi­um. Af­ter all, as an im­age of re­al­i­ty, the pho­to­graph has an im­me­di­ate im­pact that the pho­to the­o­rist Ro­land Barth­es, in his book Cam­era Lu­ci­da (1979), called un­tamed. It is this di­rect con­nec­tion to re­al­i­ty, “The awak­en­ing of in­tractable re­al­i­ty,” that makes the doc­u­men­tary as well as the artis­tic ap­proach sig­ni­f­i­cant in pe­ri­ods of rad­i­cal change.

This ap­plies, for in­s­tance, to the year 1979—the be­gin­n­ing of the so-called cri­sis de­cades, the conse­quences of which even to­day have an ef­fect on eco­nom­ic and po­lit­i­cal con­di­tions world­wide. Artists and pho­to­g­ra­phers mon­i­tored and doc­u­ment­ed th­ese glob­al changes over longer pe­ri­ods of time, gen­er­al­ly in the places where they lived. This ac­tiv­i­ty of­ten re­sult­ed in a mul­ti­tude of pho­to­graphs.

The ex­hi­bi­tion there­fore fo­cus­es not on in­di­vi­d­u­al im­ages, but on se­ries. It fea­tures one se­ries for each of the thir­teen artists and pho­to­g­ra­phers rep­re­sent­ed in the mu­se­um’s col­lec­tion, in­clud­ing Robert Adams, Joachim Brohm, Ute Klophaus, and Can­di­da Höfer. Loans of works by David Gold­blatt, Miyako Ishi­uchi, and Raghu­bir Singh com­ple­ment the col­lec­tion.

Doc­u­men­tary stand­points are re­vealed not on­ly by the pho­to­graphs them­selves, but al­so by the way in which they are used. The ex­hi­bi­tion thus ad­dress­es five sets of is­sues in re­la­tion to each se­ries of pho­to­graphs: who the pho­to­g­ra­phers were or are; when and where the pho­to­graphs were tak­en; who com­mis­sioned them; where, how, and with which tar­get au­di­ence in mind they were first pub­lished; and the ex­tent to which they open up pos­si­bil­i­ties for pho­tog­ra­phy to­day.

The ti­tle of the ex­hi­bi­tion is de­rived from Ro­land Barth­es' short book Cam­era Lu­ci­da, writ­ten in 1979 and first pub­lished in 1980, where he distin­guished two re­spons­es to pho­tog­ra­phy—its tam­ing by means of aes­thet­ic cat­e­gories, in­clud­ing au­thor­ship, oeu­vre, and genre, and its ac­cep­tance as an un­flinch­ing re­cord of re­al­i­ty re­ly­ing on un­tamed ef­fects. Some twen­ty years lat­er the ex­hi­bi­tions doc­u­men­ta 10 and 11, set up in 1997 and 2002 re­spec­tive­ly, proved that view­ing pho­tog­ra­phy both as an art form and as a re­pro­duc­tion of re­al­i­ty need not be a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. On the con­trary, Ok­wui En­we­zor has shown that in its doc­u­men­tary ca­pac­i­ty pho­tog­ra­phy can re­define the re­la­tion­ship be­tween aes­thet­ics and ethics. To­day, thir­ty-four years af­ter the publi­ca­tion of Barth­es’s vol­ume, our ex­hi­bi­tion ex­amines doc­u­men­tary pho­to­graphs dat­ing from around 1979 in terms of their aes­thet­ic, eth­i­cal, per­for­ma­tive, and po­lit­i­cal en­gage­ment with re­al­i­ty.
 

Tags: Robert Adams, Joachim Brohm