FotoFocus Biennial 2016, which is now underway, has as a basic tenet that photography is a fine-art form — that its practitioners are free to do something more than document conventionally photogenic or interesting things.
In some instances, that freedom has taken the direction of using the lens and developing/printing process as tools to create imagery as mysteriously abstract as any painting, or to transform a photograph into a three-dimensional object. You’ll see plenty of examples by Contemporary artists at this year’s FotoFocus.
But there’s another way — more traditional and with a long history — that photography has staked out its claim as fine art. And that is to see and take seriously that which others might overlook or dismiss. And it’s that kind of work currently on display in After Industry, at the Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts.
After Industry as a title carries with it the whiff of what’s called “Rust Belt porn” — gorgeously colorful photos of debris-strewn ruins of old factories and high-rises. But this exhibition, curated by FotoFocus Artistic Director Kevin Moore from the collection of Gregory Gooding, has a different tack. The title refers more to the world after industrialization than our current post-industrial world. Most of these are beautifully preserved gelatin silver prints of black-and white images.
It features 13 20th-century photographers who saw the landscape — the natural one as well as the built one — in a different way. They were fascinated by what the non-artist would tend not to notice.
Among them is a German photographer, Albert Renger-Patzsch, who was ahead of his time. Looking at the new factory buildings coming into existence, he accepted them as manifestations of an exciting new world and as harmonious companions with the trees and natural landscape already there. At least this is the curatorial line presented at the show. Looking at the spindly, wintry trees in his photographs, I sense gloom. But those that capture the buildings, whose construction has been influenced by the Modernism of the Bauhaus movement, do seem alive with excitement.
That proud tower in his “Zeche Katherina, Essen” photo (from 1954/55), with its neat horizontal rows of windows, has an assured architectural sense of order to it. The factory in 1928’s “Fagus-Werk, Alfeld,” seen at the junction of two sides, looks something like the windowed Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany.
It’s interesting, speaking of trees, to compare Renger-Patzsch’s work with the dramatic 1983 photograph by Robert Adams called “On Signal Hill, Overlooking Long Beach, California.” Adams clearly bemoans the impact on the American West of sprawl. Here one tall, emaciated tree stands sentry over a smoggy spread-out cityscape.
Once you’re used to Modernism, you can see its influence in a surprising amount of objects — or maybe you just imagine it. But I see it in American photographer Frank Gohlke’s 1974 “Grain Elevators, Cyclone, Minneapolis,” where the cyclone — used in dust collection — has a robotic appearance while on its side on the ground. (It also looks like a giant phonograph needle.) Why it’s on the ground is unclear. Is it surplus? Detritus?
The exhibit’s pièce de résistance is American photographer Lewis Baltz’s 51-print series from 1974, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California. I doubt anyone will look head-on at these images and say, “Bauhaus lives!” They at first appear banal, in their neat rows with thin gray frames and white matting.
And maybe, in the overall scheme of things, they are. But, like Minimalist painting, the more you look, the more you notice. I was struck by one image, a spare composition of vertical and horizontal lines balanced by a white wall and some sickly shrubbery. It reminded me — on first glance — of a 21st-century contemporary home with its sleek, stylish industrial door and smoothly non-decorative surfaces. But then I noticed that some of those lines delineate a parking space in a lot, others are perhaps for ventilation and that door may well be for a garage or loading dock.
Is it pretty? Ugly? You choose. Baltz makes you look hard and think long. That’s fine-art photography to me.
AFTER INDUSTRY is on display at Weston Gallery through Nov. 27. More info: cincinnatiarts.org/weston.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 5, 2016.
