Types

Abstract

The pieces in this section share an interest in the typical and in the ways in which photographycan be used to provide evidence of that very typicality. Photography’s capacity to recordevidence has been central to its practice and theory from the outset, founded on the premise(and the promise) of an indexical relationship between the thing recorded and the record made.Of course that relationship could always be distorted, manipulated or fabricated by technicalmeans – with increasing ease and regularity in the digital era – but even such distortions wouldonly serve to point up the dominant assumption of fidelity, of the photograph simply recordingand conveying the facts. This is not to say, however, that such photographs would lack aestheticquality or conceptual interest. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s seminal 1977 publication ‘Evidence’enduringly demonstrated this through a careful selection and sequencing of photographsculled from numerous government agencies and research institutions. Nominally objective, thepictures were unfailingly strange, sometimes surreal, sometimes disturbing and often forlorn.These were, as Sandra S. Phillips notes in her essay for the revised edition, ‘photographs madefor the purpose of record’, but by virtue of what they deemed worthy of recording, and how thatrecord was composed and framed, much was revealed, both about the unavoidably expressivecapacities of the medium and about the prevalence of scientific and technical developmentwhich typified the era.1Photographic evidence operates in distinct but related ways in each of these four pieces.There is a shared affirmation that the making of photographs serves to confer significance andvalue on something hitherto overlooked, ignored or misunderstood. In Jasna Galjer’s carefullyconsidered essay, she traces how the Kravica Children’s Health Resort in Croatia - a strikingpiece of socialist-era architecture by Rikard Marasovic – is being reframed in terms of its culturalmeaning and value through photographic and filmic projects. Despite, or perhaps because of,being neglected and in disrepair, the complex demands to be incorporated into the collectiveconsciousness, to allow its past to be reconciled with a potential future. This is as much to dowith its overt formal properties as its layered history in use, both of which are captured in thephotographic and filmic projects which Galjer discusses. (...)