Diabolical, But Beautiful

Abstract

Catchers: Camera-less Victoria and Albert Museum London, England October 13, 2010-February 20, 2011 In this newly digitized age in which the photograph's relationship to light is no longer as simple as it once was, Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography at London's Victoria and Albert Museum revives a nineteenth-century quest to pin down the medium's essence in its magical ability to fix shadows. Showcasing the work of five photographers from the late 1950s to the present day, a rhetoric of photographic enchantment plays out in the styling of the galleries' darkened spaces, as well as in the show's emphasis on the mysterious and somewhat mystical quality of the prints and processes on display. Instead of presenting a documentary snapshot of the world as we see it, these images conjure visions of things that have never existed. A timely reflection on a current trend, the exhibition resists the showy excess of the highly staged imagery to which viewers have become accustomed in fine art photography of the past decade. As if suddenly disconnected from the wider spaces of popular culture and mass media, and with a greater emphasis on symbolism and the fragments and figments of dreams, the photography here offers a more contemplative encounter than much work seen in recent years. Mystical themes abound, and the artists' biographies speak of their concern for nature, mythology, and the operations of the subconscious, as well as their almost alchemical approach to various artistic processes. Such themes make for a compelling experience in which it is easy to get caught up in the shadows. Floris Neususs's photograms trace the soft-toned gradations of absence where a human body had lain. The forces of nature's dynamic energies reveal themselves in Susan Derges's watery manifestations of the invisible ebbs and flows that underlie the more usually visible surfaces of the world. Adam Fuss's My Ghost series (1991-2000) speaks of a more spiritual kind of presence poignantly rendered through the once-intimate objects and surfaces of human existence. However seductive the imagery on display, the exhibition's foregrounding of each camera-less photograph's status as a unique original somehow more authentic, intimate, and valid reflects a technological primitivism in which the medium's early days are remembered in a rose-tinted reverie. Fortunately, Shadow Catchers was illuminated by flashes in which this sense of nostalgia was disrupted and internal tensions were revealed. In a few places, any sense of the photograph's intimate and unmediated relationship to reality is deliberately obtuse: for example, in the refusal of Pierre Cordier's chemigrams to celebrate their status as indexical trace. …