Photography - seduced by art?

Associated media

Guy Lane takes a look at the current show at London's National Gallery

If it is true that the potential and possibilities of new technologies are always encumbered by the achievements of their predecessors, then it is no great surprise that photography has long enjoyed – or should that be 'endured'? – a tangled relationship with art. Of course, the photographic field sprawls unchecked; and no single adjective can adequately characterize that relationship. For every 'intimate,' 'fruitful' or 'umbilical' there will be a ­– no doubt equally apt – 'troubled,' 'ambivalent' or 'hostile’.

Recall, for example, the words written by Barry Lane (the first full-time photography officer of the Arts Council), writing in the early 1970s to make explicit the technology’s independence and autonomy:

Photography...has its own distinct techniques and disciplines, history, social and aesthetic concerns, and public outlets. Its historians are not art historians...Its critics are not generally art critics. Art galleries...generally do not show photography in quantity...Art publications give very little if any coverage to photography or photographic exhibitions...

What might Lane have made, I wonder, of the National Gallery's 'Seduced by Art – Photography Past and Present'? The exhibition, and accompanying catalogue, strive to explore the relationships between the work of certain contemporary photographers and assorted illustrious forbears, identified by the curators as 'two sets of Old Masters, those of four centuries of fine art and those of the first three decades of photography’. As the curiously unreconstructed talk of 'Old Masters' suggests (and, yes, Julia Margaret Cameron is one) this is an exhibition with its sights fixed firmly on the past.

The terms of that engagement, between contemporary practice and artistic precedent, prove both rich and fluid. In the work of erstwhile documentary photographer Simon Norfolk, for example, photographs made by John Burke around the time of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) serve as points of departure for Norfolk's own compositions, which are digitally modified to echo the aubergine-brown tones and hues of Burke's work. The newer work thereby effects an aesthetic and political commentary. As Norfolk noted, on first seeing one of Burke's albums, 'I immediately saw a cycle of imperial history right there. Imperialism is what interests and enrages me more than anything else. Today's war should more properly be called the Fourth Anglo-Afghan War'

Other encounters between old and new are less explicit. So, in discussing portraiture, the works of such contemporary photographers as Thomas Struth, Karen Knorr, Tina Barney and Martin Parr are featured as ‘updates’ of historical portrait painting, or as evidence of the persistence of certain of the genre’s conventions. To the extent that their work does not necessarily look like that of their putative artistic predecessors (unlike the way that Norfolk's homages look like Burke's pictures), their inclusion in the exhibition's project is arguably less compelling. Perhaps, as proposed, there is a degree of continuity between a 19th-century German family portrait, and a group shot by Thomas Struth – but, given the manifold differences, it is hard to see it as more than incidental.

Elsewhere, Seduced by Art's juxtapositions and correlations can surprise, provoke and instruct: Craigie Horsfield is in debt to Degas; Nicky Bird appears entranced by Julia Margaret Cameron; Jeff Wall re-imagines Delacroix; Beate Gutschow re-works Poussin; and Ori Gersht stunningly breathes life, destruction, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, into a van Huysum flower study. There is, then, no disputing the wealth and variety of work that directly engages with an artistic canon. The salient question, as Gersht's pictures imply, is the degree to which such a photographic endeavour can be successfully completed, while still conveying information about a world out there.