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Patrick Brugh | Andreas Gursky’s Visual Dilemma: Time and Space in Gursky’s Photography The theories of photography elaborated by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes presume a level of temporal stability not necessarily granted by professional or amateur photographers in a postmodern age. With the advent of digital photography the complications of photographic readings double, perhaps because photographic output has doubled if not tripled, and certainly because anyone with enough time on their hands can manipulate photographs more convincingly than a professional could fifty years ago. The problem of intentional photographic manipulation is simple: photography, commonly accepted as evidence of an occurrence, space, or moment in time becomes “obfuscation of the evidentiary” when the photograph is manipulated post facto. Obfuscation results in a cognitive dissonance not typical to photography; the medium stretches between its natural production and its altered artistic output. The photographic gamut stymies its surveyor and veils its true nature as an art form. Taking on the project of unraveling or ensnaring photography leads the surveyor to a Becher student famous for his manipulated photographs of enormous size that push time-space understandings. Typically focused on large and visually busy spaces such as supermarkets, apartment complexes, libraries, museums and, busiest of them all, centers of commercial exchange, Gursky’s photographs often deny and surpass traditional visual readings. A Sontagian reading is halted by her ethics of seeing, under which she assumes that photography contains an indexical footprint not precisely found in Gursky’s photographs; a Barthesian reading of these images may permit the indulgence of studium, if the image is studied closely enough, but one should doubt the location of a punctum in a Gusky photograph, in all of its intentionality and mediation. A Benjaminian auratic reading of Gursky’s photographs, unlike the compositional readings of Sontag and Barthes, allows for a more experiential moment not anchored in historical indices. The question from a Benjaminian standpoint, however, is whether Gursky’s visions empower the viewer to question the image or overpower the viewer to bow before it. In any case, the phenomenological experience of the photograph is allowed to trump the vain search for a pure historical referent and allows the reader to reengage Sontagian and Barthesian frames. |
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