Playing it Straight

Abstract

The popularity of documentary photography has exploded in recent years and has become a site for rigorous discourse about the truth content of images. Taking a critical rather than celebratory stance, and using the documentary aesthetic as its structuring element, Deadpan: Photography, History, Politics brought together four photographers who utilize this aesthetic to varying, even conflicting, ends. Curators Geoffrey Batchen, Jechey Kim, and Jung Joon Lee chose photographs by Anne Ferran, Hein-kuhn Oh, Walid Raad, and Candace Scharsu to investigate the possibilities for photography to go beyond documentation and serve as interventions into the contemporary social landscape. If in most of visual culture deadpan appears as a non-style, asserting objectivity, neutrality, and the absence of the artist's hand, then these artists strive to undermine these associations. Ferran's large black-and-white photographs from the series Lost to Worlds (2001) depict two slightly different perspectives of the same grassy mound. They were hung one on top of the other, yet their composition suggested a more horizontal relation, as if the photographs were each taken with one eye closed. The mutability of the photographer's gaze mimies the mutability of the landscape: any evidence of the Australian women's prison that sat on this ground has disappeared, leaving nothing physical to attest to its existence. A caption interrupted this gap between image and history, suggesting that words can play their own presence against the absences within the frame. If Ferran captures the anxious aftermath when events become invisible, Oh points to when this anxiety leads to aesthetic production and historical reenactment. Kwangju Story (1995) shows moments from a 1995 restaging of Korea's Democratic Uprising that occurred on May 18, 1980, and many of Oh's photographs simulate images circulated after the actual event. But the students raising the Korean flag are actors, while photographs of onlookers and police display more authentically motivated gestures. Yet iterations of roles and symbols--flag, military, family, police--underscore the performative aspects of nationality and identity in all cases. Oh's work was visible from the street through windows that ran along one entire gallery wall, attracting countless stares from those walking by. The audience was then included in the performance, forced to confront the very metaphor for photography that was challenged by the images facing them. Scharsu's work presents an alternative to these notions of history as a process of loss and recovery. Five black-and-white photographs taken in 2000 depict casualties of the civil war in Sierra Leone: orphaned children, scarred victims, and amputees. …