Staging history

Abstract

Using Thomas Demand's work as an example, this essay considers the symbolic function of photographs as illustrations of historic sites or events. Demand takes pictures of large-scale sculptural paper models, which are reconstructions based on existing images, many of them images of historic significance. The hybrid nature of these photographs is embedded in the process of their making and reveals itself only after close examination. Traditional notions of indexicality are suspended since the final image is not directly connected to the time or place where the ‘original’ was taken. For the viewer, this process of removal is countered by the immediacy of the photographic image and raises questions about our relation to photographs as illustrations of history. These complex layers come into focus if one reads Demand's artistic project through the lens of Braco Dimitrijevic's propositional photographs of the 1970s. Unlike many early conceptualists, Dimitrijevic did not invoke the ‘documentary’ photograph in order to subvert veracity but to demonstrate the suggestive power of the image, even when it operates in the realm of hypothesis. His images of nondescript sites carry the title, ‘This could be a place of historic interest’, and the combination of image and text pushes the definition of history and the photograph beyond the limits of a complete and closed past into a future tense. The suspension of photography's indexical power is also a central aspect in Demand's work, although he achieves this through an intermediary step rather than a linguistic directive. In Demand's images the historic (con)text is always implied but never accessible, and this separation temporarily liberates the image from any prescriptive reading and shows the image as artifact. Demand's photographs go far beyond a play with authenticity. One might say this is simply his artistic method. Instead, I read his work as an exploration of the symbolic nature of photographs (and especially the historically significant photograph) through a process of abstraction and de-familiarization.