Photography Redefined
Photography Redefined
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, November 29, 1986
FOR over a century after Daguerre's discovery of the photographic image in 1839, wielders of the camera have battled with prejudice and popular resistance in their concerted effort to gain full-fledged artistic status for their work. In a world that had placed an enormous premium on effort as artistic imperative, photography did not seem difficult enough. Virtually anyone could snap a picture, and photography itself was merely a mechanical process in the service of a generation passionately in love with likenesses. "Press a button," said an early advertisement, "and your camera does the rest!"
But almost from Daguerre's announcement of his curious invention, painters everywhere had intuited the need for alternatives that the camera had forced on them. Stripped of its original function — that of providing a visual record of people, places and events — the art of painting had to struggle against convention in order to remain a vital artform. The birth of photography marked the end of classical painting, and had sent the art of the last century in a desperate search for its modern-day identity.
Ironically, it was photography that was caught in a virtual standstill. Eager to define a set of norms and aesthetics to govern the photographic medium, its pioneers had shackled the artform in a bid to strengthen its precarious status on the cultural front. Based on these norms, a picture had to possess defined quantities of sharpness, contrast, detail and visual drama for it to graduate from "snapshot" to technically-competent "artshot." It was apparent that innovation was strictly confined to the choice of subject-matter and approach; photography had sold itself into slavery for a semblance of cultural respectability.
"Creative Refractions," the First Annual Exhibition of New Photography at the Penguin Gallery in Malate, attempts not so much to shatter convention as to enlarge the scope of contemporary photography. Many of the best works on display challenge our sensibilities, disputing previous definitions and engaging them in philosophical debate.
Xerox, photo-collage, even altered magazine pages, hang side by side with unconventional polaroids, sloppy hand-coloreds and transferred photo-lithographic images. While a great deal of the work leaves much to be desired, the trend towards radical deviation is obvious beyond success and failure. The traditional photograph as well-polished, squeaky-clean and untampered, is all but done away with, facing total rejection at the hands of our young artist-photographers. The concern with form and process is overwhelming in these avant-garde tendencies, placing the art of photography on equal terms with liberated painting. What the Penguin show lacks in consistency and curatorial handling is more than compensated for by the candor and breadth of vision celebrated in the individual pieces. Exceedingly more confident of its presence in our cultural consciousness, the new photography now dares to bargain in reverse: respectability is shunned in favor of promise.
The Penguin Annual is a must-see, posing questions that are as yet unanswered. Do pictures lifted from mass-scale publications qualify as original photography? Does xerography now have the potential to match wits with the conventional camera arts? Has the new photography dominated recent painting? To what extent is mutation acceptable in a non-traditional photographic work? If and when the answers become available to us, they will doubtless find their clarification in the scarred and dimly-lit walls of the Penguin Gallery. And more often than not, history in the making is infinitely more exciting than its transcription into textbooks.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Photography Redefined” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, November 29, 1986
