Sunday, 14 January 2001
When a Parisian photographer named Warnod showed a work called Ships Entering the Port of Le Havre in 1862, the Revue Photographique ran a wet tongue over pointy teeth. Casting a lupine glance at Claude Monet - who was in the process of painting the same scene himself - the magazine observed that Warnod's image had "just as much harmony as the canvases of the most highly esteemed painters, and an absolute truth which artists of the utmost genius would be powerless to attain". The heirs of Messrs. Monet and Warnod have spent the subsequent 140 years slugging it out, and a new show at the Saatchi Gallery suggests that they're at it still.
When a Parisian photographer named Warnod showed a work called Ships Entering the Port of Le Havre in 1862, the Revue Photographique ran a wet tongue over pointy teeth. Casting a lupine glance at Claude Monet - who was in the process of painting the same scene himself - the magazine observed that Warnod's image had "just as much harmony as the canvases of the most highly esteemed painters, and an absolute truth which artists of the utmost genius would be powerless to attain". The heirs of Messrs. Monet and Warnod have spent the subsequent 140 years slugging it out, and a new show at the Saatchi Gallery suggests that they're at it still.
The contest has not been entirely one-sided. Monet may have sat down grim-faced at the easel to ape photography's quickness and objectivity - le style Kodak even found some impressionists making paintings that looked like photographs - but the relationship had changed by the time Chuck Close came along a hundred years later. Instead of being special, photography had become anti-special.
The billions of images we regularly consume by way of the camera had not simply democratised the whole idea of image-making, but had debased it. Close's photorealist portraits were painted in a spirit of anxiety rather than of homage, and he was not alone. You might argue that the phenomenological doubt about what we see and how we see it that underlies most recent art - Postmodernism, the ironising of the YBAs, those oh-so-naive snapshots of Wolfgang Tillmans - is underpinned by a 150-year-old unease about the banalising influence of photography: an unease that has recently begun to be as worrisome to photographers as it has been to artists.
Which could have turned Saatchi's "I am a Camera" into a curatorial mess, with any old thing thrown in to fit an impossibly broad brief. That the first artwork you see in the show is not a two-dimensional piece at all but one of Duane Hanson's uncanny waxworks - the disconsolate-looking Man on a Bench - fills you with foreboding. What has this got to do with cameras?
To tell the truth, the answer is: nothing, or at least nothing at first. By the time you leave the show, though, you'll see that Hanson's waxen Sad Sack is all to do with ideas of authenticity - about the differences between realism and reality - that are themselves bound up with questions about how we have come to view truth in a photographic world.
This realisation comes about through the clever interweaving of images in "I am a Camera". On the photographic side, the show displays all kinds of internal self-doubts. Nan Goldin's Thanksgiving series is made up of consciously snappy snapshots of Americans doing those things they do on the titular day in question (mainlining heroin, blacking each other's eyes, showing off hysterectomy scars and masturbating to camera, apparently). At the same time, though, Goldin's poppy vox pop demands to be taken as art. It's framed, it's hung as a formal installation and - in case it had escaped your attention - it's in an art gallery.
By contrast, Tierney Gearon's Technicolor shots of her children - they ski! they take Tuscan holidays! they swim in the Caribbean! - subvert the family snap by hinting at darker goings-on beneath its glossily neutral surface. Gearon's golden-haired moppets have had early lessons in gender stereotyping. The little girl lolls Lolita-like with hand on hip while the little boy gazes at roadkill through a wolf mask, wee-wees in the snow and - will Professor Freud please pick up a white courtesy 'phone - stands naked on a pedestal before an adoring matron.
For their part, the show's painters have a less compelling take on things. The young Los Angeles artist, Kristin Calabrese, takes a predictable swipe at the banalising powers of photography by painting sort-of-photorealist pictures of banal American interiors: shag-pile carpets, wood veneer walls, 'fridge magnets - you know the sort of thing. Both Calabrese's dated Brady Bunch decor and her mode of working suggest that things in painting really haven't moved on much since 1969 and Chuck Close, a feeling that is reinforced by Jason Brooks' copies of Close's work circa 1969. ("I love that period and nobody's doing it now," rationalises Brooks, with winning candour.)
Of course, another way of looking at it is to say that Brooks is simply following in Close's footsteps by out-Closeing him. Close's appropriation of photography in the 1960s raised all kinds of Warholish questions about the value of originality in an age of mechanical image-making. Brooks's appropriation of Close in the 1990s asks the same question again, but this time with an in-built tiredness that makes you wonder whether painting, in emulating it, hasn't become as mechanistic as photography. Or, just possibly, more so.
* 'I am a Camera': Saatchi Gallery, NW8 (020 7624 8299), 18 January to 25 March.
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