Photography has been used by many artists for decades, all with different styles and reasons for capturing images. But what roles has photography performed within the practice of fine art since 1975? By analysing and exploring the work of a selection of artists, these roles become apparent and give an insight into what functions photography can perform.

Photography has its roles to play in the creation and re-creation of installations, collages, documentation, and at its most (seemingly) simple level, in the photographic works of art. It has worked in several ways in the last 30 years, some major and others perhaps more minor.
        
Firstly, one of the major roles photography has fulfilled is in its ability to capture ‘the real’. Photographs still and probably always will fulfil this key role within contemporary fine artwork. It is the means by which the so-called masses are informed about what a new piece of work looks like and how it interacts with the space it is situated in.

Many have not personally seen Tracey Emin’s artwork titled ‘everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995’ but through the ability to photograph the work, many have seen images of it. This ability to reproduce three-dimensional artwork in a two dimensional form with speed and relatively low costs means that many people can have photographic representations of almost any artwork imaginable at their fingertips. As cindysherman.com states: “Images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone.”1

The book Fruits published by Phaidon contains photographs by Shoichi Aoki. These photographs show teenagers in Japan who live in an area known as Harajuku. They capture the street fashions within the underground culture that is allowed to flourish there.  Shoichi Aoki firstly formed a magazine to showcase these fashions and to document changing attitudes in Japan towards alternative fashion and the move away from designer labels. He states in the Foreword, “ As a photographer I considered this movement to be a revolution and so formed Fruits magazine as a means of documenting the different styles and clothes that appeared.”2 So as well as simply being a means of documentation for documentation’s sake, photography can also be used as a mode of capturing times of change and revolution, as physical evidence.

However, photography fulfils many more roles than mere recording what is already there. For instance it is also used as a tool in the creation of digital art. Increasingly artists are creating artworks on and for computers, in the form of websites, animations, computer programs and other digital media.

The use of photography has been vital in visual style and layout of Internet sites. The majority of Internet sites use a mix of photographs from the real world alongside computer-generated images, such as www.swansong.tv/whoare. These images combined with computer knowledge have been put together to create an Internet site. Without the images, it simply would not achieve the aesthetic quality it has.

Technological developments since 1975 have dramatically affected photography with the improvement of digital photography. Photographs can now be digitally altered with the use of computers to create much more detailed and better quality images than ever before. The act of digital editing can dramatically alter the appearance of the original photograph. As Michael Rush states,

“The new power that digital technology brings to the image renders it infinitely malleable. Formerly, visual information was static in the sense that the image, although editable in film or capable of being incorporated into other images in montage, was fixed. Once transferred to digital language in the computer every element of the image can be modified.”1

This ability to manipulate photographs digitally, is infinite and thus the artist can have full control over the image and their vision of how it should look. This development within photography has meant that it has become a tool for a lot of experimental artwork.

The artist Jeff Wall created an artwork titled ‘A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai)’ in 1993. Although this work looks as though it has been a photograph of that particular moment the gust of wind blew papers into the air, it is in fact digitally manipulated. The papers were painstakingly added into the image using the latest techniques. The photograph was inspired by a Japanese print by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.

As we see in the created scene of Hokusai’s artwork the lifelikeness of the image is limited to suggestion, as in that is grass because it is green, and we know that grass is green so therefore it is not a bad guess to suggest that. Where as in Wall’s created scene, the artwork is made up of real photographs, which for the most part contains visual information given to us. The element of guessing changes focus from what it is to why it is. The photographs are both similar but in Hokusai’s work you are automatically led to the conclusion that it is a recreated scene where as in Wall’s work you are not automatically drawn to that conclusion.

Just as Wall created his artwork, using a computer to alter it digitally, taking it from the real and into the fictional so too does Cindy Sherman, although achieving it with out the aid of the computer.

 She has turned the camera on herself and instead of her photographs being self-portraiture, Sherman uses herself as a way of getting across observations on contemporary issues in the modern world. Sherman began her career by studying painting but came to the conclusion that,

" . . .there was nothing more to say [through painting]. I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead."
                                                               (www.cindysherman.com)

This was to be a pivotal point in her career and points out one of the key roles photography can play in contemporary art. The speed and ability to truly capture an image in its entirety, quickly and with precision has been of great importance in the ability to free up the time of the artist to work conceptually rather than in a traditional often time consuming process. This is not to say that the process of taking a photograph is not time consuming, but in the case of Sherman, she utilizes this key quality of speed in order to develop her artwork conceptually.

Untitled Film Strip #33

In this photograph by Sherman we see that she has created this fictional scene, one of a series of photographs, using the camera to capture the reality of it. The use of photography rather than say painting gives the scene a sharper more precise detail. Here photography plays the role of the onlooker and you are invited to see the scene as though you were there, something that photography can do well.

Overall, photography has played numerous roles within fine art practice in the last 30 years. Tracey Emin’s work for instance has been represented by photographs to many people who perhaps haven’t seen the original, but through the use of photography can at least see a documented image of the work. For the purpose of documentation and representation Photograph will be one of the main tools the majority of artists use photography for with regards to their work.

Shoichi Aoki uses his photography skills in a similar way to Emin as a process of documentation. Aoki Photographs in order to document the new and passing trends within the underground culture of Harajuku. This for him is not solely about the photograph but also his representation of the creative skills of the subject being portrayed. He creates his photographs both as works of art and to serve as documentation of the current fashion trends. 

Documentation is only one use of photography within fine art. With the development of digital photography, the computer has been used as a tool along side digital photography to create manipulated images of fictional scenes. Digital photography unlike traditional photography can have every element infinitely manipulated. This has led to such artists like Jeff Wall being able to create images such as ‘A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai)’ would not be possible without the improvement in technology and photographic developments.

Artist Cindy Sherman uses more traditional photographic techniques in order to capture images of real scenes, where she maybe dressed as a fictional character from films or arranges slightly disturbing mannequins. Photography is used in her practice in order to free up her time so she can focus on the conceptual development of a piece of work. This was something which painting could not offer her, as painting took more time to achieve the same result consequentially meaning she could not focus as much on her conceptual development.

In conclusion photography has had various roles since 1975 ranging from documentation to creating artworks. The process of taking a photograph has become digitalised and therefore means that photographs can have every aspect of them manipulated, meaning that more and more experimental work is evolving around photography. The flexibility and control of photography makes it an important tool in the contemporary artists toolbox and no doubt will continue to take on many more roles within fine art to come.
 

Bibliography

Books

Art now, Taschen gmbh (Köln, 2001)

New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, Michael Rush, NY (New York, 1999)

Fruits, Shoichi Aoki, Phaidon (London, 2001)

Websites

http://www.art.buffalo.edu/resources/classnotes/art250/readings/newmedia.html, 3rd January 2006

http://www.thenewpress.com/books/overexps.htm, 3rd January 2006

http://www.biad.uce.ac.uk/research/cssonlysite/researchers_staff_profile.asp?mky=1&group=1&raeid=34, 3rrd January 2006

http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml, 3rd January 2006

http://www.bbc.co.uk/paintingtheweather/csv/painting/sudden.shtml, 3rd January 2006