Julian Stallabrass

What's in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography*

A prominent and distinct strand has become established in contemporary art photography in which people are depicted in uniform series, usually one per picture, and placed centrally in that picture, facing the camera head-on and gazing into the lens. These people are represented straightforwardly, without much apparent intervention by the photographer, and the series displays manifestly uniform characteristics. Since many of the pictorial elements controlled by the photographer are held as standard, variability from picture to picture occurs mostly in the particularities of the subject. Youths are disproportionately represented. Sometimes short captions identify the subjects or their location, and sometimes text of their reported statements accompanies the pictures. This strand of images is visually akin to ethnographic photography of colonized peoples in controlled situations, and of that photography closest to the most objectifying type that made with a measuring stick or standard grid.2 Such depictions can be seen in the work of Celine van Balen, Rineke Dijkstra, Jitka Hanzlova, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Thomas Ruff, and Gillian Wearing, among others, and in differing registers in some of the work of Tina Barney, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Hellen van Meene, and Joel Sternfeld.

The Branding of the Museum

This essay explores the branding of the museum and is accompanied by photographs that form a parallel visual argument to that in the text. The brand is a consistent and affirmative identity that affects all museum operations, including its relationship with visitors, staff, contractors, sponsors and donors. Tate Modern is taken as the central example, as a model of successful and professional branding. It is argued that the consistent and affirmative character of much of the avant-garde and contemporary art that Tate Modern displays, and with its educative role in elucidating the contradictory, complex and often negatory qualities of that art. Branding successfully attracts visitors but it also creates a commercial museum environment which is not clearly separable from other commercial operations, and is subjet to cynicism, disillusion and contamination.

In conversation: War photography

The photojournalist, Ashley Gilbertson, and the curator of the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, Julian Stallabrass, discuss the practice of war photography with particular reference to the Iraq War and the Pentagon’s embedding system. They explore the relations of photojournalists with soldiers and the public, the military’s efforts at public relations, the resistance’s relative lack of interest in the Western media, the restrictions and possibilities offered by embedding, the ethics of photojournalistic practice, and the marked fall-off in coverage of the Iraq War.

Ways of Selling

In the last episode of the TV series, Ways of Seeing, John Berger examined advertising, drawing out its remaking of traditional images of the good life and of the female body in the Western tradition of oil painting: adverts offer us the image of a richer life but ‘exclude us as we are now’. Yet there is one great difference between traditional painting and modern advertising, says Berger: while paintings for the rich were displayed in fine rooms and surrounded by gilded frames that boasted the wealth of their owners, adverts are surrounded by ‘us as we are’. There follows an extraordinary silent sequence of film clips and stills that show publicity images – mostly billboards – in the setting of the run-down city that British capitalism and state had created. Despite the passage of time, the scenes are familiar to us now. Some of the adverts are in bad repair but none have been attacked. The idea of subvertising lay in the future, and graffiti and advertising were in the beginnings of their upward-spiralling competition for ubiquity. Concluding the section on advertising, Berger says that ‘behind the paper are hidden our needs’. The following series of images, assembled in the spirit of Berger’s TV montage, shows how contingency – the inability of advertisers to control the environment into which their images are pitched, and which is itself the product of commerce – and people’s scepticism, irony and anger towards advertising undermine its utopia and reveal deeper needs.