Foto

Baruch Prince
Professor Kristine Thompson
AH 411/Fall 2011
17 October 2011

In Memoriam, Art Through Photography
“The goal of the best photographers, as of all true artist, is not merely to make a picture, but to record in their print and transmit to others the impression which they experience in the presence of the subject (Caffin, 27).” Expressionism, is what Charles Caffin believes artphotography is (27). I too see art photography as impressionist in more than a couple of ways, because I relate to the experience of wanting to depict something while portraying something else. These elements of representation and depiction are fairly simple to see and understand in most of the arts. In the case of photography though, it is a difficult task to embark. In photography, unlike anyother art, what the camera sees is what everyone who sees the image produced is going to see. The introduction of expression and “artistic” decisions in photography become secondary to the information shown by the image. Therefore photography had a though path to take in order to be considered an art. To undermine all doubts of photography being an art, photographers like Edward Steichen began touse different techniques to try to produce images that were in an ambiguous way more artistic (Stieglitz, 23).
In Memoriam; by Edward Steichen, is a gum and platinum print that has been processed through a watercolor wash. This decision was made entirely with the purpose to make the photograph look more like a painting or at least to have a painting feel to it. Edward Steichen’s actions as apictorialist as Caffin describes it, was seeking to correct the deviation of absolute reality or truth (27). Many photographers like F. Holland Day and Steichen were trying to execute photography through a pictorialist process, hence making the photograph less photographic and more painting like to favor its existence as art. In my opinion, the attempt to retract photography from the supposablypresent reality of the image, is in itself insignificant. Giving the fact that the image produced, is nothing but that, an image produced to represents a moment in time through a translation of information. For instance, if a take a photograph of the Eiffel tower, what I will get is a photograph of the tower, and not the tower itself, the reality is stripped away the moment the light touches the lightsensitive material. Hence, as Allan Sheluka describes it in On the Invention of Photographic Meaning, every photographic image is a sign, therefore it present merely the possibility of meaning (42). In the time In Memoriam was made though, my theory would have been considered rubbish. Mainly because during that time painting was also trying to step away from the pursuit of reality, towards a moreexpressionist style because now there was a machine that could reproduce in an image things exactly as they were; but more importantly, because photography was trying to be considered a fine art rather than a graphic one. Since, according to Sheluka, every photograph tends, at any given moment of reading in any given context, toward one of the two poles of meaning; being either, art photography ordocumentary photography (45). Though in my opinion all photographs are a document of something else, within the concept of photography the two styles arise. In Steichen’s case he wanted to step away as far as possible from the documentary style to begin to work outside the reproduction boundaries and start making fine art. Following Sheluka’s argument, Steichen produced his work as a seer, ratherthan as a witness (45).
Steichen work in general seems to be constructed with a designer’s eye and a symbolic sensibility. Shown within In Memoriam, Steichen depicts a blurred nude that carries classical artistic tropes, that produces an impression of mystery, accentuating this dilemma by hiding the models face. Abstract in principle, In Memoriam shows the physicality of the nude, one can feel...