In a collection of articles combining analysis and feminism, American historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau critiques the aesthetics of museum discourse and the photographic canons it imposes on artists.
A woman with alabaster skin lies naked in a neglected field, bordered by dark hedges. In the distance, beyond the few tall scattered trees, an imposing army of electricity pylons discreetly draws the horizon. What we see on the cover of Cannon fodder is at the crossroads of rural nudes and landscape photography: between sensual relaxation and the threat of invasive industrialization, Jo Spence and Terry Dennett collide pictorial classicism and documentary frontality in black and white, to reform and re-form photographic canons and, therefore, renew the history of photography or, at least, question it.
Both reflexive and deconstructivist, their postmodern approach is clearly stated in the title of this image taken in 1982 – Remodeling Photohistory (Industrialization) –, which stands out as the perfect counterpart to the eight articles by Abigail Solomon-Godeau that Clément Chéroux selected and had translated to make the work of this American historian retired in France more accessible to French readers.
The link between this introductory image and the texts of the collection organized in three parts – “photography, discourse, feminism,” as the subtitle of the volume indicates – becomes clearer under the pen of Jo Spence, who assures in her 1986 autobiography that there remains to be done
a considerable amount of work on the so-called history of photography and on photographic practices, institutions and instruments, as well as on the role they have had in constructing and promoting certain ways of seeing and telling the world.
Because if the photographer assumes her iconoclasm and admits to wanting to “defamiliarize” (make strange), or even denaturalize the institutionalized genres of photography, the historian brilliantly leads a reflection that embraces everything at once, from theoretical and political, historical and historiographical issues, to formal and aesthetic debates, to deliver an unorthodox thought whose prodigious scope in no way undermines its coherence or commitment. Published between 1983 and 2013, her texts have lost neither their verve nor their relevance; they retain all their insolent freshness.
Photography and ideology
Heir to a rebellious feminism, Solomon-Godeau places her writing under the aegis of a triad of “anti-” that dictates its guiding principles: anti-authoritarianism, anti-hierarchy and anti-patriarchalism. In the wake of Luce Irigaray and Laura Mulvey, among others, she unravels the skein of dominant discourses, whether institutional, ideological or gendered.
Bold, anti-establishment and somewhat rebellious, she traces the history of photography constructed by collectors, dealers and museums, to debunk their fables and oppose them with her meticulous discourse as a historian-researcher. Denouncing the “sepia fashion” of the early 1980s – the excessive enthusiasm of collectors for French and English calotypes, who invented an “imaginary aesthetic” to make them a market product – or the artificial canonization of Eugène Atget as the “Olympian father of great photography” (p. 60), she blacklists the academic aestheticism of museum discourse which, ideological and interested, distorts the historian’s discourse.
Returning to the development and organization of cultural productions, such as that of Atget taken as a model, progenitor and patriarch of modern photography, or that of Soviet revolutionary formalism which became more aesthetic than critical through its enthronement in American museums, she questions and challenges the notions of author, canon and style to better highlight the ideology that underlies institutional aestheticism. According to her, the museification of photography does not simply rewrite history, but simply annihilates it: photographers (Atget, Cahun, the Countess of Castiglione) and photographic movements (American formalism or documentary photography) become “cannon fodder”, or instruments enslaved to an ideologically oriented canonization.
A versatile medium
Reevaluating and redefining the position of the historian, A. Solomon-Godeau therefore calls for taking into account the cultural and religious, economic, political and social determinations that govern discourses on photography. She also insists on the limits of an institutionalization that freezes works and assigns them a place that remains contingent. The canons that inherit a taxonomy developed in the 19e century and nourish a respectable genealogy to build a “myth of continuity” (p. 75) are never eternal, but always in motion.
Just like photographic practices, whose mutability (reuse and variations of formal processes across the 20e century, appropriation of female stereotypes) is combined with a certain terminological instability: what is the difference between documentary photography, photojournalism and social documentary? What about the inside/outside binarity established as an ontological fact? Attentive to the mutations of the medium, she analyzes the transition from analog to digital, between opposition and continuity; she questions the elasticity of categories and the prejudices that they carry (notion of objectivity or photographic truth, theme of lesbian subjectivity).
In this way, she ensures that the problematic status of the photographic object is highlighted, updating in order to explore in greater depth certain phantom questions that have haunted the medium since its invention, such as the opposition between art photography and informational photography, or the debate around images-made-by-a-machine. Her enduring interest in variations and metamorphoses, her tireless talent for debate, for establishing dialogue, make the versatility of the medium studied and the “poethical” problems that they pose a real force of opposition.
A critical ethics
Attached to the subversive instability that she unearths in feminist artistic production and its oppositional propositions – its underrepresented subjectivities that claim the fictional nature of the self and cultivate photographic self-creation to refigure unassignable identities –, Abigail Solomon-Godeau probes and shakes the notions of authority, authorship, and subjectivity. Reflexive, her dense and subtle prose makes the studied motifs (the effects of transitions, translation, ambivalence, and reappropriation) the foundation of her ethical stance.
Honest and lucid, attached to a historical morality, she underlines the partiality of her point of view, tirelessly recalling the missions of the researcher (for a sociology, a semiotics, a cultural and social history of photography) and those of the institutions, more oriented towards aesthetics. Neither inside nor outside, she occupies a liminal and indeterminate space, halfway between perception and cognition, projection and identification. Drawing on critical and theoretical writings, exhibitions and their catalogues, as well as on the works and speeches of photographers, the historian assumes a subjectivity whose acuity and liveliness are as fine as they are demanding. Full of enthusiasm, she fulfills the mission assigned by the cover of her book: remodeling photohistorythat is to say, to rethink, renovate and relaunch the historical discourse on photography.