Stunning, if slightly out of focus
Exhibition Shape of Light Tate Modern
One of the most interesting books about photography is Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
(1980), about the ways in which photographs record the past. It’s a magnificent piece of poetic thought but its technical naivety is surprising. One of the purposes of a photo, Barthes argues, is to say: “this has been”. It’s evidence, in other words; the camera never lies. Yet trickery and invention are in photography’s genes. There would be no photography without manipulation. To eliminate this aspect of the form is to misunderstand it altogether. Shape of Light aligns photography with abstraction, and asserts quite definitively that nothing has to “have been” in order to become the subject of a photograph. Indeed, many of the works on display – which begin in the early 20th century, alongside the work of painters who were vorticists, cubists and expressionists – were created even without cameras, using photosensitive materials to produce works on paper that echo what contemporaries were doing with paint.
Through Man Ray and Brassaï, working in 1922 and 1933, respectively, the surrealist notion of automatism comes through, and the idea of photography as unconscious or inadvertent is brilliantly at odds with the perception of it as a functional enterprise. Man Ray exposed sensitive paper to light sources – blindly, in the darkroom – and called the results “Rayographs”. Brassaï – whose photographs of graffiti are also represented here – took a series he titled Involuntary Sculptures. The shadowy close-ups of unidentifiable forms (a rolled-up bus ticket, a soapflake) were published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure, with captions by Salvador Dalí.
In the same period, a rationalist counter-argument was being made by Aleksander Rodchenko and László Moholy-nagy, who saw in photography a way to extend the possibilities of architectural form. Rodchenko left painting “for dead” in 1921, and Moholynagy, one of whose canvases is included here, began to echo his own work in monochrome. Germaine Krull’s portfolio of industrial art, Métal,
stands out in this company, and reveals her to have been far more radical than she was given credit for at the time.
The highlights include two kaleidoscopic collages from the Thirties made by Luo Bonian and never before seen outside China; Man Ray’s original Polaroid abstractions from 1959, taken by swinging a camera around his Paris studio; Barbara Kasten’s large-scale Seventies cyanotypes; Sigmar Polke’s beautiful and chilling green “chemigrams” from 1992, made by exposing uranium; and a series of photographs made this year by Antony Cairns using e-reader screens, with a strikingly tintype-like result.
But the gallery is huge, and the overall point needlessly broken down into rather repetitive sections, often containing similar images by the same artists. It’s not always clear when photographs are thought to have pre-empted the work of painters and when they have responded to it. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock and Riley all figure. Perhaps the order of influence was never very clear anyway, or maybe it’s only the intellectual (or social) proximity that matters.
Your experience of this exhibition will depend on whether you see it as an argument or a historical account. If it’s a history, then it makes sense that photography should have had to consistently assert its position as abstract art throughout 20th century. If it’s an argument, though, you’d like to imagine we’re beyond all that now, and it’s a shame to have to insist.
The insistence – if it is that – makes this exhibition seem like a sibling to the one at the National Portrait Gallery, in which 19th century photographers are shown striving for status. In both cases, the work is stunning, but the question that has dogged it and continues to hover – the matter of whether or not it should be considered art – is among the least imaginative ways to think about it.
Until Oct 14. Tickets: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk