Fictional Photographs 1850-1950

exhibited in Corridor Gallery at GEH, August 10 – October 5, 1980

"Henceforth, form is divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any more, except as a mould upon which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down, or burn it up, if you please."

In this statement, Oliver Wendell Holmes summarized an attitude about photography's relation to its subject matter that has, to varying degrees, persisted with surprising vigor until the present day. We rarely think about the possibility of a photograph that describes something that could not have been photographed. Or, when we are confronted with a photograph that tries to do this, we tend to dismiss it offhand as implausible.

But a "photograph of the unphotographable" is taken as implausible largely because we choose not to believe it. For it is just as large a leap of faith to believe that a photograph of, say, a new event can tell us anything about what actually happened, as it is to accept a photograph of Salome as a truthful representation of that woman. Yet while we have been conditioned to accept the former, most of us have a hard time with the latter.

This problem of the viewer's failure to suspend disbelief is one that has faced most of the photographers whose work is included in this exhibition. Henry Peach Robinson was subjected to a good deal of censure when he first exhibited his Fading Away in 1858 -- some viewers even implored him to give them the address of the "dying girl" so that they might offer her some assistance! Oscar Rejlander was criticised by Thomas Sutton for showing "degrated prostitutes" in his large allegorical work The Two Ways of Life -- this in spite of the fact that the picture offered itself not as a representation of actual persons, but rather as a grouping of allegorical figures. So strong was the desire to take the photograph as a process incapable of lying that any photograph that attempted to do otherwise was not acceptable to the photographic public.

In spite of these obstacles, there have been nonetheless a large number of photographers who have done large bodies of work in which the meaning of the photographic image is determined by the photographer's intention, rather than by the actual qualities of the subject matter before the camera. This exhibition is an attempt to offer a selection of these works to a modern audience. Of course, an exhibition of this size cannot hope to offer more than a cursory survey of all the activity in this mode. Thus, I have limited my scope here to photographers who were active during the first one hundred years of the medium's existence. This seemed to me necessary not only because a limitation of scope was needed, but also because this earlier work in the fictional mode had gone unheeded by critics and historians. And, in order to properly access such contemporary workers in the fictional mode, such as Les Krims and Duane Michals, there must first be an awareness of the historical precedents for their methods.

It is my hope that this selection of images will incite a new interest in this mode of thinking about photography, and that it will remind us that the meaning of a photograph is dependent not on some immutable property of the medium's physico-chemical process, but rather on the intentions of its maker. The works in this show, in spite of their widely differing approaches, remind us of this, especially as it was summarized by Henry Holmes Smith:

"...photography combines a natural process with several compelling inventions derived from the science, technology and art of the last five centuries. It is, for example, an explicit answer of the sciences of physics and chemistry to one aspect of the Renaissance artist's view of nature. "distortions" and "aberrations" of simple lenses must be corrected according to certain conventional rules before they are useful in photography. What aesthetic dominated the thinking of those designers, or of those geniuses of the nineteenth century who preceded them and established once and for all the visual standards we all cling to? What ideal draughtsman had they in mind? What paintings were on their walls?"

Joseph Arkins, Curator

August 1980