EVIDENCE
OF WHAT?
Joan Fontcuberta
translated by Jennifer Flores Sternad '04/'05
Et
quid amabo nisi quo aenigma est
Giorgio de Chirico
In 1978
I visited New York for the first time. Avid to visit the museums and galleries,
during one week I soaked myself in everything there that smelled of the
culture of photography, with the intention of returning with the largest
possible quantity of stimulating memories possible. But in case memory
were to fail, books and catalogues made up the most precious loot of my
trip, most of all for someone like myself who came from a Spain that was
still Third-World in that its photographic publications were nil. This
lead me to sniff around carefully in the specialty bookstores and the
result was the discovery of various treasures. The most surprising was
the book Evidence, published in the previous year by the Californian artists
Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan.
A laconic cover, without illustration, appeared to announce some type
of treatise about documentary photography. Completely lacking any type
of explanatory introduction, upon turning the pages the reader only found
in it “documentary” photographs of distressing triviality
(although to call them “documentary” still is painful). It
treated images that were aseptic and obedient to the conventions of documentation
pure and simple, that is, without greater aspiration than to transmit
visual information in the most clear and concise form, and lacking any
type of imprint of an “author.” Probably the type of graphic
material servile to the needs of the world of industry or science.
Nevertheless, upon scrutinizing the meaning of these photographs, the
most profound surrealism emerged from their radical banality. Someone
injected a serum (?) into the shaggy extremity (?) of an ape (?); an astronaut
crawled (?) over the carpet (?); a dense cloud of smoke (?) indicated
the controlled detonation of a new explosive (?). There are some interpretations
that can be given and so many years after having acquired the book I continue
to be fascinated by the sense of unease they produce in me: the book continues
today to be one of my photographic bibles.
Mandel and Sultan had obtained the images from very diverse sources, like
research laboratories, veterinary and criminology departments, archives
of firefighters and of various hospitals, aeronautic institutes and from
agricultural studies, etc. Only the detailed list of the government institutions
and agencies where the artists carried out their investigations preceded
the unconnected succession of images. It is easy to deduce that in the
environment of those respective sites of provenance these photographs
were so boringly comprehensible just being perfectly useful; they were
limited to completing the characteristic mandate of transmitting precise
information, and noone would have had difficulty in deciphering them.
And they achieved this for a simple reason: the cultural and functional
space in with they were inserted anchored the eventual dissemination of
their meanings. That which designated this meaning, to say it in other
terms, was the tie between the frame (cuadro) of the image and the context
(extracuadro) that surrounded (envolvía) it, that which we saw
and that which were able to suppose, that which was shown versus that
which was hidden. In fact, to transgress this tie and in so doing verify
the fragility of sense, the pair of artists had limited themselves to
putting in practice the dadaist technique of the estrangement of the object:
from the filing cabinet in the research laboratory to the couché
of the art book; from the descriptive finality to the aesthetic speculaton;
the same thing saw its content fundamentally disrupted, and consequentially
its relation with the user. The decontextaulization not only modified
the use vaule, but above all, it pulverized the very notion that photography
was the proof of something, the support of some evidence. Because we should
have asked ourselves: Evidence of what? Perhaps evidence only of its own
ambiguity. What remains, then, of the document?
The book, then, can be understood as a critical and ironic manifesto about
the naturalness of the documentary mode as above all the conditions that
govern information and knowledge. In this sense, Evidence appears as a
magnificent epistemological essay. But also, beyond demonstrating the
inevitable polysemy of all the images, the act of detaching them and freeing
them from their environment in which they reside, we are confronted with
the dislocating action of the object-trouvé. The fascination the
surrealists felt for all of those humble and anonymous photographs doesn’t
seem strange to us, for under the placid cloak of reality were hiding
inexhuastable secrets. At bottom, those photographs become the screens
where we project our fantasy and where underneath familiar appearances
the Freudian Umheimliche reveals itself. In a composition titled “The
enigma of Isidore Ducasse” Man Ray shows a piece of fabric covering
some unknown thing, and precisely this occultation produces in us a disturbing
and unquieting effect. The pages of Evidence can be understood as a metaphor
of this same enigma.
Another question that the book arouses provokes is the unresolved conflict
between the simple realist practice of photography and documentary photography
as it is understood as a style. That is to say, between applied photography
(for editorial illustration, most of all) and the consciousness of the
author. When Baudelaire wrote, “Now is the time, then, in which
[photography] returns to its true duty, which is to serve the sciences
and the arts, but being a very humble servant,” perhaps he had taken
the pleasure of verifying that the photographs Mandel and Sultan found
in those archives were pure servants of industry or of science, and as
a result, had renounced a style. But immediately afterwards Baudelaire
himself would have been startled by the new life that those same resuscitated
images were able to acquire. Although a photographer may put an image
at the service of a cause, the same atavistic instinct of photography
will push it to evade all of the constrictions of orders, categories and
tasks, and in fact, the lives of many historical photographs can be measured
by the duration of their transit from the order of the archive to the
order of the museum.
And it is possible that this reflection may open another line of debate:
appropriation as a strategy to construct a discourse, in this case a discourse
about misunderstanding (misinterpretation). In the hands of Mandel and
Sultan those photographs have been transubstantiated, have suffered a
mutation in the depth of their essence: now they are not documents but
rather pieces of a puzzle. Pieces whose articulation takes us to a new
ontology of photography’s certainty. The fossilized “documentality”
has parted with its surface and the photographs now present themselves
not as artefacts that aspire to describe the world but rather to help
us think about it.
For all of these reasons Evidence has become a worshipped book that continues
to be one of the jewels of my library. Thanks to its recent re-edition,
it will be that for many other libraries as well.