A recent show at the Mus?de l’Elys?in Lausanne asked fledgling snappers from around the world to send in their portfolios. Of the thousands that did, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, not one submitted a piece of street photography. An entire field of practice – the mainstay of olympians like Weege and Walker Evans and Robert Doisneau – had simply disappeared. With it went a belief in Cartier Bresson’s decisive moment: that a camera, unposed and surreptitious, could catch a kind of truth.
Look at the Elys?s catalogue (reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow 2005 – 2025, Thames & Hudson £18.95) and you’ll see the work of a young American, Ted Partin. At first glance, Partin looks like Nan Goldin: actually, his MTV-generation shots are about as far from Goldin’s as it is possible to be. Posed, complicitous, made with a large-format camera, they say to the viewer: everything I’m showing you is a lie; the image, the medium; the world.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for this self-doubt, then point a shaking finger at Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans’s book, truth study center (Taschen £14.99), is a thing of beauty, its images (Shay III, Device Control) at times mistakeable for functional photography: documentary shots, say, or travel pictures.
The point of Tillmans, though, is precisely that his work does not have a function. It is storyless, evanescent, self-referential – in a word, art.Where all trainee photographers once wanted to work for news agencies, they now want to be artists: by the far the largest number of submissions to reGeneration were art photographs. Susan Bright’s Art Photography Now (Thames & Hudson £29.95) suggests why. Looking at the work of household names like Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr and Tillmans, Bright’s book hints at just how much photography has come to hog the contemporary art scene.
Given this success, it’s ironic that the art photograph – blamed since the 1850s for the death of painting – now seems likely to wipe out the likes of Doisneau as well.One painter who would not have crowed at this twist was Francis Bacon. It’s widely known that Bacon’s work owes a debt to photography, though just how large a debt is described by Martin Harrison’s excellent In Camera: Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson, £35). Although lacking images from the Joule archive, Harrison’s book traces Bacon’s descent from Muybridge and Eisenstein and his obsession with what Harrison calls “working documents”: photographs torn from books and magazines and overscored with paint. Bacon, like Monet, saw that photography had changed the way we see; as Walter Benjamin noted, the reproduction of a Vel?uez is not the same thing as a Vel?uez. A child of his time and a devout Benjaminian, Bacon liked to work from photographs of paintings, not from paintings.But would he have worked from Tillmans? I doubt it: Bacon’s taste was for photography with muscle – newspaper shots, reproductions in art books, illustrations from anatomy manuals. So you can imagine his eye being caught by two of this year’s most intriguing monographs, both of work by men from the last pre-art-school generation of photographers, both unjustly lesser-known.Willy Ronis (Taschen £14.99) covers the career of the 95-year-old Frenchman whose images of Paris – to my mind, rawer than Brassa? or Doisneau’s – sum up the city’s malnourished chic in the years after the Second World War.
