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List of Contents
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Extract from Chapter 3 'Deadpan'
 More photography has been created for gallery walls in the last decade than in any other period in the medium’s history. And the most prominent, and probably most frequently used, style has been that of the deadpan aesthetic: a cool, detached and keenly sharp type of photography. Here the reader is at the mercy of the levelling out that occurs when these photographs are reproduced in a book. The monumental scale and breathtaking visual clarity that predominate when one experiences the photographic print need to be kept in mind. But what can still be seen in a glance if one looks through the images in this chapter is the seeming emotional detachment and command on the part of the photographers. The adoption of a deadpan aesthetic moves art photography outside the hyperbolic, sentimental and subjective. These pictures may engage us with emotive subjects, but our sense of what the photographers’ emotions might be is not the obvious guide to understanding the meaning of the images. The emphasis, then, is on photography as a way of seeing beyond the limitations of individual perspective, a way of mapping the extent of the forces, invisible from a single human standpoint, that govern the man-made and natural world. Deadpan photography may be highly specific in its description of its subjects, but its seeming neutrality and totality of vision is of epic proportions.
The deadpan aesthetic became popular in the 1990s, especially with landscape and architectural subjects. In hindsight, it is clear that this form of photography contained elements that matched the gallery and collecting climate of the decade to such a degree that it shifted photography to a more central position in contemporary art. The impetus within art to define new trends that can supersede established ‘movements’ played in the medium’s favour in the early 1990s.
Photography that offered an objective and almost clinical mode had a renewed freshness and desirability after a heavy concentration in the 1980s on painting and so-called neo-expressive, subjective art-making. The increased scale of photographic prints since the mid-1980s not only took photography into the same league as painting and installation art but also commanded space in the increasing number of new art centres and commercial galleries. The subjects of these photographs, panning across a range of manufactured locations, of industrial, architectural, ecological and leisure-industry sites, was tantalizingly close to being the perfect, self-referential art for the imposing buildings, often converted from industrial warehouses and factories, in which contemporary art was now being shown. Deadpan photographs, so technically well done, pristine in their presentation, rich with visual information, and with a commanding presence, lent themselves well to the newly privileged site of the gallery as a place for seeing photography.
The image above is
Muazez by Celine van Balen, 1998
from the series Muslim Girls.
Courtesy of Van Zoentendaal, Amsterdam |
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