As with all art forms, photography evolves when practitioners do something radical to express a new way of seeing. Whether in response to social or political upheaval, technological breakthroughs or creative intuition (and usually a combination of all three), these moments of contradiction give way to transition when received conventions are challenged and eventually ossified. I am increasingly interested in the question of how the medium can progress in an age when almost anything is a legitimate subject, smartphones come fitted with Leica lenses and flawless auto-exposure, and millions of images are uploaded to the internet every hour.
In this context, the analogue-digital dichotomy is increasingly blurred and hybridised by artists sceptical of photography’s longstanding claim to epistemic privilege. Indeed, the most expensive photograph sold at auction, Andreas Gursky’s abstract landscape ‘Rhein II’, was first captured on medium format outside Düsseldorf, then scanned and digitally manipulated to remove all sign of infrastructure on the far riverbank. But of course the strangely depthless bands of ethereal green and grey that result nevertheless depict a clearly man-altered landscape. The final image is something of a photorealistic Rothko.
In this vein, practitioners have also turned towards interrogation of the medium itself, its particular grammar and functions. Emblematic are Gregory Crewdson’s elaborate tableaux, which look almost computer generated, or the overblown pixels of Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs series. Clare Strand’s Deutsche Borse Prize-nominated The Discrete Channel with Noise also draws attention to the transmission and reception of photographs in the digital age - their inherent bittiness.
Andreas Gursky, ‘Rhein II’, 1999
In a parallel development, and perhaps partly in response to the glutting of cyberspace with snaps, film photography has made a comeback in recent years. The growing visibility of analogue-centred accounts on photo and video sharing platforms is testament to this. As the lionising tendencies of the metaphorical platform play out in force, YouTube and Instagram have enabled aspiring photographers to bypass traditional gatekeepers. There’s no longer such a need to be in the right place at the right time: film devotees are able to build and engage an audience whose loyalty can be monetised in the service of personal projects. This is an exciting development. But it is also fuelling a growing disconnect between the concerns of contemporary art photography and the interventions of those shaping the interests of analogue amateurs and hobbyists.
A notable innovation on Instagram is the ‘community feed’ – internet magazines with no operating costs and curators sometimes separated by oceans. The most popular have followers in the tens-of-thousands, and as these numbers grow, so too does the algorithmic force of attraction. As little hubs in the fabric of Instagram’s spacetime, they draw in a deluge of hash-tagged content. More so than with traditional magazines, there is an imperative for them to stay on brand. The largely ad hoc, informal gathering of content leaves little scope for distinct issues based around a particular theme or concept. As such, the grid as a whole must appear coherent if not uniform. And I am struck by the fact that, for a number of successful feeds including @burbsonfilm, @makemeseemag and @thefilmstead, the images are selected according to a unifying aesthetic saturated by nostalgia. Scrolling through the grid, the viewer is presented with very little that comments on the vicissitudes of the present.
Indeed, the palette, atmosphere and subjects evoke the work of the American colour pioneers who in the 1970s challenged black-and-white as the only respectable language for art photography. The subjects of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and others gain new currency on Instagram: chunky television sets and other retro appliances, laundry interiors, suburban homes, faded boardwalks and, above all, the classic American car. The smooth plains and gentle undulations of Chryslers and Chevrolets appear again and again, sometimes contextualised in a garage, parking lot or leafy street; occasionally found shrouded in a cover loose enough to reveal the pleasing metallic contours underneath. These subjects are sought out in sentimental defiance of the all-enveloping grip of modernity at its frontier, the echoes then disseminated by a sequence of steps wholly alien to their reference period.
Particularly when seen together, the photos are undoubtedly beautiful: sunlight streams through diner windows to illuminate glasses of fresh juice, lamps glow in dim hotel rooms, palm trees stretch the frame. The images hark back to a time when things were somehow more transparent, more tangible. As such, they have a kind of soothing presence, a stillness.
Nostalgia (from nostos, home; and algos, pain) as a feeling or state of mind is rooted in an apprehension of the irreversibility of time. It hasn’t been so long since these scenes were banal. Indeed, their very banality underpinned the whole New Topographics movement. But as we are drawn further into the postmodern vortex of free-floating bits and pixels that artists such as Ruff are grappling with, they are slipping ever more into the domain of fantasy. This slipping-away certainly amplifies our propensity towards sentimentality. But more instrumental to the manufacture of nostalgia is the economy of recognition which governs the circulation of signifiers on Instagram.
In the churning froth underlying the continuity of its visual stream, the signified is lost or rendered subordinate by the platform’s engagement algorithms. The effect is self-sustaining and self-reinforcing: images are endlessly imitated, reproduced and shared in a kind of photographic echo chamber. Photos circulate, pregnant with the legacy of the colour pioneers - sometimes without the awareness of their creator.
The ellipsis here is of course loaded with words unsaid: the ‘woman’s hand’ makes all the difference. Juxtaposed like this, Bruce Brown’s nice but otherwise unremarkable image of air travel seems sapped. It’s a snapshot, a record of modern comfort in a time when affordable air travel is taken for granted - a ‘social photo’. The Eggleston referent, by contrast, is timeless and uncanny: the cocktail emanates a kind of energy; the ethereal partial-object stirring it gives the image an air of voyeurism.
The formerly banal: Stephen Shore, ‘Thirty-First Avenue and Crescent Street’, 1974
The rise of film photography on new media platforms has also contributed towards what could be described as the deterritorialisation of the Americana aesthetic. This phenomenon has found recent expression, for instance, in British photographer Ian Howorth’s debut monograph Arcadia (2019), which he describes as a visual representation of Britishness. Although paying titular homage to a vision of pastoralism uncorrupted by the vices of civilisation, Howorth does not seek some kind of Merrie Olde England. Rather, he looks to the traces of a pre-digital age in what is also described as a personal exploration of his fraught relationship to the concepts of home and identity.
The cover image, leaves and petals pressed up against frosted glass in a way that makes it appear almost permeable, immediately establishes the organising principle of the work: seeing though a filter. Although Arcadia does often capture the little quirks of England in a thoughtfully observed way, much of the series depicts the same kind of recycled nostalgia as the community film feeds: diners, vintage sports cars, faded seafronts. At times it is more America than England: at least one image could have been made in Palm Springs.
The point is not to discount the beauty and mystery of Howorth’s work. His soft interiors with their muted pastel tones complement wonderfully the vivid colour of his sunlit exteriors. But, as the photographer himself suggests, the series ultimately amounts to a blast of dreamy ‘nostalgia porn’. It has little to say about Britishness in the 2020s. When Howorth turns his lens towards the ‘unusual colours’ that defy the ‘neutral’ tones of contemporary England, he is expressing longing for another place that was actual once, but is now lost to time. His nostalgia is thus a kind of ‘utopia in reverse’, to use Andreas Huyssen’s phrase.
‘Although I have a genuine love for all the scenes I photograph, for me, it’s their survival amidst rampant modernity that interests me the most.’
- Ian Howorth
What strikes me here is the notion that somehow these places would not survive, that the onslaught of ‘progress’ would be so totalising as to eliminate all traces of a former modernity. But the implicit proposition is interesting. Perhaps an enhanced appreciation of the material co-existence of multiple temporalities could indeed remind us that the present is not immutable: attitudes are not fixed, lifestyles not static. The onward rumbling of modernity is a function not only of technological progress but also of human agents making decisive cuts into the fabric of reality. Perhaps, then, the selective representation of the present in all its constitutive unevenness could alert us to its radical openness, its actuality.
The problem when it comes to Arcadia is that Howorth makes no allowance for anything beyond 1985 in the frame. He celebrates that which escapes the flattening and dislocation effects of global convergence patterns but refuses any immanent indication of their unevenness. In his representational bubble, the tensions of the current age are therefore obfuscated. Ultimately, the fact of the book’s publishing in 2019 is more significant with respect to understanding the age than its contents.
One common reading conceives nostalgia as a kind of compensatory impulse, a reaction to the frenetic pace of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’. To live in age of cynical reason is to live under the sway of the basic ideological injunction to Enjoy and to more or less accept the coordinates of the political-economic status quo. In response, the photographic curation of reality fetishistically avows the past as more meaningful than the present. But in so doing, the complexity of the bygone age is glossed. What we get instead is a phantasmic projection whose function is to fill the void of the present, a world rendered grey not only in colour palettes but in teleological, ontological and theological knowledge also.
This is only to suggest that when photographers uncritically embrace the past through mimesis, their work cannot usually provoke much more than idle enjoyment or psychic pacification. While Howorth can offer us escape from the antagonisms, even the sheer blandness, of neoliberal society through heightened awareness of vintage forms and spaces, he cannot substantially alter our relation to the modern world and its predicates. And when the same impulse to document nostalgically is subordinated to and reinforced by the logic of Instagram’s algorithms and the economy of recognition they serve, the effect is doubly numbing: circulation takes precedence over signification.
Most of us, I believe, ultimately accept the impossibility of discarding our digital support systems and the entire technological substratum which continually and by necessity renders their elements outdated - not only in form but also in their very relations to one other. And so even if not always in outward appearance, the suburbia of the colour pioneers is lost forever. This is so too because, when their scenes and subjects pop up amidst Howorth’s ‘rampant modernity’, they are no longer banal. Indeed, as the community feeds highlight, a new kind of aura is being created around vintage cars and the rest.
‘Chudleigh’, from Robin Friend’s Bastard Countryside (2018). The work is a kind of anti-Arcadia: landscapes neither fully blighted nor preserved, but rather altered, corrupted – hybrids.