Artillery Magazine Issue 1, September 2006
Many traditional photographers believe that pressures from digital technology will push their medium into a critical abyss, that their work will soon be defined by nostalgia for silver based images rather than the merits of the work. In the 1990’s, photography became associated with explorations of personal identity and the formalism of German Typology. Since then, photographers have been struggling to find new ground to reinvigorate the medium.
One way to navigate conceptual issues arising from the disappearance of photographic processes is to look back and uncover a new set of references that merge historic traditions with ideas about art and culture whose influence might not be immediately apparent. By creating new approaches to the history of photography, it’s possible to redefine existing tropes, affecting the future of the medium.
I propose a relationship of ideas that take shape at the time of the first photograph and eventually leads to the diverse genre of street photography. In this scenario, the hunt and chase of criminal and detective are explored as aesthetics and play into the legend of the flaneur, a figure known for long walks and careful observation. These three historical figures, obsessed with wandering and observation, provide a foundation for understanding street photography, people using cameras to locate themselves within a given space.
In 1827, Nicephore Niepce made the first photograph and Thomas De Quincey published “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” These events represent synchronic approaches to considering lived space as part of art production. They represent a set of cultural thoughts that laid a foundation for the historical genre of street photography.
De Quincey’s essay defined the newspaper as an aesthetic medium that deals immediately and directly with the space of lived experience. He locates imagination at the most complicated and innovative transgressions of social law. He focuses on the strangest, most perplexing criminals, the Dahmers and Zodiacs of his time. The effects of these murders couldn’t be constructed by paint on canvas; they had to find a format that allowed a resonance with reality. The impact of true crime comes from the setting, which isn’t so much the scene of the crime as one’s own world. The horror of the murder moves personal space into the realm of fantasy, through paranoia. Familiar spaces become contaminated by the idea of murder; the dramatic elements of the crime story mingle with the signs of familiar space, recur in the imagination within the familiar decor of ones own kitchen.
Clever stratagems located at the extremes of human behavior achieve full effect through an idea of a common cultural space. The nightmares that come from literature might always be dismissible as fiction, imagination confined to print on pulp, while the very notion of true crime places the possibility of transgression at one’s own doorstep.
In considering murder as an art form, De Quincey allowed time for grieving, and insisted that the widow and orphans be cared for. Then the ingenious events of the crime could be treated as aesthetic elements. He looked for a sense of the extraordinary within the ordinary, and wanted to retain the force of depravity, without embracing it.
A decade after De Quincey published his work on the aesthetics of murder, a French rogue, Pierre-François Lacenaire, gained international attention as poet, philosopher and murderer. He was arrested for a double killing after bungling an attempt on a third man’s life. He played on the idea of the criminal genius, the man of substance who behaved as a thug. Lacenaire occupied the blurred roles of citizen and criminal. In his self-description, he wasn’t the decadent who willingly fell from the social world; he was spurned by both parents and unreasonably expelled from every school he attended. Through his autobiography, and the implied sense of underlying truth, Lacenaire’s texts achieve a force that’s quite different than a novel presented as imaginary.
Lacenaire stumbled onto what De Quincey began to theorize and what Niepce first to put into form. He saw the events of life as the substance of art. Given time, he said while awaiting the guillotine, his work would have been more important than the novels of Victor Hugo.
Historical accounts of Lacenaire, an international curiosity in his day, presented the killer’s words as irrefutable, the definitive psychology of the criminal and the crime. A sense of truth surrounded his text despite inconsistencies with police records and obvious questions of credibility.
The criminal isn’t the only manipulator. The detective in high pursuit makes his own manipulations as he vies with the criminal on terms of representation. Each man lurks in the crowd, preying on unforeseen moments, watching and waiting, unaffected by social restrictions. The space of the rogue is the space of the detective and at times, their tactics are the same. Perhaps the most famous detective of the 19th century is Eugene-François Vidocq. He lived in the Parisian underworld before becoming a police informant. According to his memoirs, he arranged his life for the zealous pursuit of criminals, and involved his wife and mother in his schemes for catching rogues, and collecting rewards. Vidocq founded the French secret police, la Sûreté, in 1812, and is credited with forensic developments such as casting footprints, and undercover surveillance.
Vidocq was a legend in Paris during his lifetime but became an international celebrity when Memoirs of Vidocq, the Principal Agent of the French Police, appeared throughout Europe and America. Tales of high pursuit and forensic advancement reflected an interest in how signs were manipulated to meet the needs of both criminal and detective. Vidocq was rumored to have changed his height plus or minus 4 inches, changed his voice, accent and skin tone. There is a sense of fiction to all of his stories, yet in their day, they seemed to offer the full drama of civilization at the edge of the abyss. For Vidocq, Lacenaire and De Quincey, the manipulation of signs within common space can have the drama of art yet provide new intensity through its connection with the everyday.
The intense observation and collection of information isn’t just the vernacular of crime. The flaneur of the 19th century Parisian arcades wandered, observed, collected and turned signs to a purpose that was entirely personal. He created mental intersections of appearance and interiority; his sharp wit put order to the observations collected in his head. The flaneur provided aesthetic refinement to the overlooked. These attitudes are exactly those apparent in street photography once flexible film allowed spontaneous engagement with the world. There may be a popular sense that street photography hasn’t existed in earnest since the late 1970’s. Perhaps the history of transformations that move the discussion of photography from Walker Evans to Weegee and then to William Eggleston point at a different field of interest than the street. The force that drives the practice is a process of exploring spaces, chance encounter, fascination, collection and then representation. The street photographer can be defined by his observations of the everyday, by his attempts to preserve and extend the narrative of the observed moment.
Street photography has evolved to include a number of methods for imaging the unforeseeable juxtapositions that question the certainty promised by the social pact. It has moved from capturing the image of passing strangers to a practice of finding what one can of the word, through the decisive moment, the scene of the crime, or the found object that is brought in to the studio to be photographed. The commonality is the desire to engage the unforeseen. In Lee Friedlander’s book, Stems, despite being confined to bed, he found a way to continue his 50-year practice of searching for the unexpected. Friedlander found fascination in the stems of the flowers that his wife brought him each day. This differs from studio work in its insistence on the unintentional moment, on the preference for recording over creating. Friedlander’s flowers aren’t the arrangements of either Cunningham or Mapplethorpe, but were photographed as they came to him.
Contemporary theory has freed the flaneur from the urbanity of the Parisian arcade and reconstructed his image in Disneyland, the corner diner, on the internet and in the library. However little has been said about the recent evolution of the street photographer. Jim Goldberg, who spent a decade documenting the life of a homeless runaway, has taken the same approach to his own family. The most striking example of a photographer moving into a specific site in order to photograph in situ comes from Sally Mann’s images of decaying bodies that were photographed at a forensic study site. In the next generation of photographers, Abner Noland moves found photographs into his studio, backlights the image and then rephotographs the found photo, showing the chance collision of nostalgic memos on the back side with the faint, reversed image of the snapshot.
The detective, the flaneur and the street photographer are not the same thing. They represent a shared history of influence, cultural figures that draw from the past to make something of their own. If indeed, there is a crisis of photography, the expansion of historical dialogues might provide a new understanding of traditional approaches to a medium that is prematurely self-conscious of its ending.