Intractable and Untamed
Intractable and Untamed:
Documentary Photography around 1979
June 28 to November 16, 2014
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.
Curator: Barbara Engelbach
Kindly supported by:
Photoszene-Festival
The Photoszene Festival–featuring an extensive programme with more than 70 exhibitions at various places throughout the city of Cologne–is set to begin on August 19 with an opening event and will run until the end of September. The main week of events will be, as usual, from September 16-21, in parallel with photokina.
A festival pass is available an offers reduced entrance to the cooperating institutions and all events of the Photoszene during the festival week. The passes are availavle at the festival headquarters at Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln and The PhotoBookMuseum.
Catalogue
The catalogue, which contains an introductory essay and a text on each of the thirteen series of photographs, outlines the basic attitudes to photography and documentary work apparent in the works.
176 pp. with 70 illustrations, mostly in color. Authors: Jennifer Crowley, Barbara Engelbach, Lena Fritsch, Laszlo Glozer, Shanay Jhaveri, Andreas Prinzing, Inka Schube. Design: Christina Mayer.