The Uncanny Image:
Essays on Photography
Peter Nesteruk
Dedicated to Yin Dejian…
*
Contents:
1 Forward.
Part One: Theory.
7
Introduction:
Photography and Diremption.
11 Photography
Theory I; The Uncanny Image.
29 Photography
Theory II: The Invisibility of the Black and White Photograph (For Roland
Barthes).
45
Photography Theory
III: The Uses of Photography (For Susan Sontag).
65 Unsought Continuities.
Power and Narrative: Diagonals and Directionality (Left/Right in the 20th
century Art History of the Black and White Photograph/Museum Ludwig).
78 21st
Century Cross-overs. Photography and International Art
Trends.
87
Conceptual
Photography in China - a Contested Emergence…?
89 ‘Race’,
the Photograph and the ‘Fetish’ (Denigrations/Fetishism).
Bridge:
From Theory to Analysis:
95 ‘The Time of the
Black and White Photograph: Black/White Photography in China’
Part
Two: Analysis
145
Images of Women: Xing Danwen, Gao Bo, Jiang Zhi, Marcus Harvey.
155
Mountains.
162 Classicality
Compounded. Jacopo Benci: Black/White Photography: Architecture.
169 Time, Ritual
and the Photograph in the Art of Jacopo Benci.
179 Digital Night.
181 Landscapes: Feng Jianguo.
184 Gao Bo: Black
and White Photography as Ritual.
194 Lu Nan
(temporality, institutions and prisons).
198
Pinhole.
204 Size Matters.
218 Sugimoto.
213 Tampering with the
Image.
218 Yu Fengge: Lost Dreams.
220 Yu Fengge: Black, White and Grey.
224 Ghost in the
Machine, Li Yaning.
225 Photograph
of a Grove, Li Yaning.
228 Photography:
The Image of Captured Time (after Rhetoric
of Time in the Arts).
264 Black and White
Photography Revisited (Diremption and Photography)
I Diremption: ‘Presence’ and Experience.
II Making
Connections…
III The Black and White Image
IV
Conscience and the Image…
V The
Genres of Black and White Photography Revisited.
291 Appendix:
Philosophical/Metaphysical. ‘Ground of Being’/the
grounds of beings.
*
Forward
Photography’s situation: a black and white prelude to the onslaught
of the digital. Monochrome blink before the long glare of the
virtual spectrum. Silver, pitch, or sepia, gold
anomaly introducing the now universal rainbow arc of the prism.
Photography (originally prominent in
black and white or monochrome), once its nineteenth century status as a novum and
privileged mode of ‘fixing’ the real had ebbed with the rise of documentary
film (first in black and white then with the introduction of colour); and once its diremption
as a medium into art and documentary (historical, newsworthy and domestic) in
the early and mid-twentieth century became superseded by consecutive waves of
ever-cheaper availability and ease of use crowned by the dominance of colour: then either ended its short history or (depending
upon your definition of photography) became dissolved into the popular as part
of the technological revolutions of the digital image and communications
(mobile and internet) in the course of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. Indeed, colour photography
had barely arrived as a popular and then, after a suitable ‘time lapse’, as
‘art’ medium, when the digital revolution replaced it with ‘cameras’ which were
in fact computers – increasingly neatly packed into the space of a mobile
phone. This exponential dissolution was so ubiquitous as to render it, the
resulting image and its universal uses, as virtually invisible (pun intended).
A solubility, a ‘suspended solution’, so omnipresent as to provide a second
order lens, a ‘second nature’ for which we ‘instinctively’ reach. Not only
placing it on the other-side of the obvious (as too obvious as to be worthy of mention), but also to transform
reality itself into a field of infinite self-reference, a mise-en-abime where visuality
reflects (sic) endlessly upon itself. And a process where our
eyes, aided by our digital handmaid, became ever-more expert at differentiating
and decoding the marks within the frame of our visual point of reference.
A realm made up of light and its reflection (and the capture, storage,
transmission and exchange of these reflective surfaces we choose to call the
world of objects). Visual culture is, whether on screen or still mainly
printed, a patchwork quilt fashioned from these chimeras; the cult of second
hand surfaces we all worship as the Real (very little of what we know, or have
‘seen’, we have actually seen, first hand…). This explosion of the visual is
not, however, a result of the new technologies with their largely quantitative
effects on culture (speed and number), but of our evolution as diurnal beings,
leading to our species preference for the visual as our dominant medium of
receiving and understanding, or measuring or appraising, reality; of situating
ourselves in a given context. Sound, or speech, is our dominant mode of
expression with respect to communicating information about that reality to each
other (deferring to the visual again for the storage of this information as
image or as word). This apparently exponential passion for the recording of the
visual (and aural) however augments to the point of overawing our ‘natural’
abilities, making near redundant the gifts of memory on which we once depended.
Technology produces copies more precise and more clear, in all aspects - apart
from the emotional and the supporting synesthesia of the ‘other’ senses, that
is – than our own, notoriously effervescent, mental ‘copies’.
So
it was that a sense of curiousity which began with
the experience of a very distinctive kind of image, with a set of unique qualities
and a particular history (the black and white photograph), led, with the onset
of interrogation, to all the ‘big’ questions concerning the relationship of our
visual sense to our being. In the course of its scant hundred and fifty-years history, before dissolving into the sea of the
digital image, the chemical necessities of the early, mono-chrome or black and
white photograph posed certain questions, offered a certain version of reality,
in a way only possible to this, most historically contingent of mediums of
representation. The resulting answers (and suggested place in, not only the
history, but also the world of vision) exceed their original remit and
consequently exist as a provocation on several other planes of meaning and
human experience.
This collection of essays is divided
into two parts. Part One comprises a set of articles exploring theoretical
issues, which, whilst begun some time ago, were mainly written over the course
of the last few of years under the stimulus of commissions and engagements, in
an ongoing attempt to understand photography (and particularly black and white
photography) as a historically unique, and distinctively modern, contribution
to the human experience, aesthetic, communicating and rhetorical, with its own
distinctive offerings, powers of transformation and controversies.
Part Two is a collection of analyses again spanning a number
of years and representing a variety of attempts to understand particular
photographs in terms of their impact and as carriers of intense meaning
(mainly, but not entirely, focusing upon black and white photography); as well
as representatives of photography and the realm of the image, or visual
culture, itself.
The owl of Minerva, indeed, flies only at dusk; knowledge
only comes at the end… So it took more than a century for the two theorists
recognized as the ‘parents’ of photography theory, Susan Sontag and Roland
Barthes, to open the conversation - only a few years before the process they
discussed, was about to end, or anyway became transformed beyond recognition.
The thinking of these belated ‘godparents’ (taking over from the parents at
their demise) offered just before the demise of the child in question, looms
large in these articles; at times provoking disagreement, but mainly taken as
suggesting starting points (and occasionally dead-ends, paralleling the
putative death of the process itself). The other major influences in these
analyses and attempted theoretical clarifications are the role of temporality
in fact (experience) and in rhetoric in human culture and one of culture’s
oldest, and today most invisible of supports, rituality. For the taking of
visual culture, the world of the image, as a form of rituality, I make no
apologies.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2026