“The Photograph as Contemporary Art” - In Conversation with Charlotte

Cotton, Melinda Gibson and Lucy Moore at Claire de Rouen Bookshop 13/05/13

LM: The three of us are very happily here, Charlotte Cotton curator writer, Melinda Gibson
photographer and bookmaker and me Lucy Moore owner of Claire de Rouen books. We’re
here to have a conversation about Melinda’s book ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’
and Melinda would you like to introduce the book?

MG: Everyone is quite aware of the title it’s exactly the same as Charlotte’s book. The
project came out of a very old lecture I had back in University. The project was based around
the canonisation and the authorship of photography, these were the questions I wanted to
explore around contemporary art photography. I produced a set of collages that came directly
from Charlotte’s book which were the images taken directly out of them, then I
recontextaulized them into a trio together, to form new unique works and this book is a result
of that. It has been a project two years in the making and a kind of final full circle of
removing the images from Charlotte’s book and putting them into my own.

LM: So Charlotte when was the book published?

CC: ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’ was originally published in 2004 and I wrote it
towards the end of 2003, a very condensed period, it has had a second edition and now I have
just written the third edition.

LM: Melinda, were you studying at the time the book was published?

MG: I was studying just as you brought the book out, I started studying in 2003 and in 2006
graduated. So at that point our first contextual studies lecture we were given your book to
read and really analyze.

CC: Do you remember what you thought?

MG: I remember being really confused actually. We were given this book and every student
said, “We must go and get this book” we went through it and I remember everyone saying this
is going over my head a little bit. However, we had a tutor, Susan Bright, who lectured about
the canonisation of photography and she brought your book in and said “let’s have a look
through this” and from then on it has always resonated with me quite highly.

LM: What strikes me there is this canonisation is very fleeting in terms of your publication of
your book, the situation we’re in now with Melinda’s project being an obvious example of
certainly a sense for me in a bookshop that there is a multiplicity of photographic eyes and
voices and making however, without too much of a hierarchy although there are I guess.
Charlotte your ‘photography as contemporary art ‘ set this landscape for understanding the
relationship between photography and an art or photography’s relationship with that sort of
framework as a way to understand its production and your certainly operating within that
Melinda. I guess I was really interested in the physicality and in a sense you using a technique
which isn’t really photographic, more an art based practice and negotiating with this sort of
knowledge which has been set up in your own truer physical process, and thereby exploring
your relationship within that.

MG: Yes absolutely, I think a lot of it is about having an independent relationship to a book
like that and that is something I originally talked about when I thought about your book as
that I felt when your given, and like a lot of contextual books given in that academic way, you
have a relationship with but it often feels that there is a little bit too much of a gap between it.
I’ve always felt there’s this emptiness as much as you try to penetrate it, however you can’t
really involve yourself within it and for me that physical act of cutting something or pulling
something apart was my real way of diving into this piece of information that I couldn’t
naturally digest in an academic way, but in a more fluid way I did by delving in, pulling bits
out, removing bits of texts, moving bits of paper, and moving bits of the image where you
actually for me get much more of a deeper understanding of it then shallowly looking at it and
just turning over a page.

LM: Aaron Schuman in his forward talks about how it is as if you managed to capture stills
from a dream the night before a big exam. I mean maybe deeper but more subjective and also
playful yet at the same time in a sense, reverent.

MG: Yes, I felt that there needed to be a playfulness about it and like we spoken about before
these contradictions within art photography and visually and conceptually there needs to be a
kind of physical lifting of something, one removing it from a page, but also you play around
with what people know and understand and what you also understood to be true within the
context of those things. I hoped it would be playful, but also its quite juvenile in a way and its
very simple in terms of when you’re a child and you cut something out and you stick a head
on something and you see what that looks like. I think that is really important because it
breaks down the context of everything because you’re bringing it back to the simpler forms of
this bit goes there and that bit goes there.

CC: And I think that it actually builds up a very visually convincing argument to say that
there are these kinds of meta-tropes within contemporary art photography and my selection
which was done as I say in the essay are primarily visually there are these consistently and
you can break it down into almost very simple picture forms that determine contemporary art
photography.

LM: That’s really striking because you do see again and again the silhouette of a figure
straight on and the horizon is another part of it, very much expected I guess.

LM: But also I’m interested that you worked for Wolfgang Tillmans who is I feel one of the
strongest photographers working as an artist. How do you negotiate that relationship and is
that still important to you now?

MG: Yes very important, I worked for him for a short amount of time and strangely I was
brought in to help him digitally but of course working with him for your own practice and just
working in that environment was incredibly inspiring. He is an incredible man and an
amazing artist and what he does is very truthful and honest. What drove me with him is the
fact he always did what he wanted to do but it was always in a very gentle but strong way,
which I liked. The connection he had was strong in what he wanted to say but a beautiful
tenderness to the way he treated everything, even the way he held paper was amazing, that
kind of sensitivity to the medium is what I found truly inspiring.

LM: Do you in a sense feel closer to Charlotte’s practice as a curator? I heard you say you
might start working with archives, now there is an argument many artists talk about editing
and curating as a form of creativity that is perhaps much easier to negotiate than trying to
make an original image.

CC: I think beyond doubt is probably the biggest shift which has happened since the early
2000’s when we were still preoccupied with the idea of authorship, being about the
authorship of a body of work with authored photographic elements. Even in the best
undergraduate courses now, even if you’re training to become a contemporary art
photographer you do so as a publisher, self-publisher and as an editor and a curator. It’s not
that those things didn’t go on before but I think that in part because the early 2000’s were still
the tail end of quite a defensive argument of why photography was a legitimate art form there
wasn’t really that space or capacity to talk about these many different active processes in the
life of a creative artist. In one way ‘the photograph as contemporary art’ and what Melinda
has done has actually push it into what I think is the step which isn’t really in the book, even
though of course I tried very hard for it not to be about an academic legitimatization of
photography, it was really about of what I thought motivated these people and what I felt their
interest is. I suppose I tweak a little bit the word academic, I think it is really an intelligent
book but it’s not geared towards academia its really about its in the ‘world of art’ series which
is the book you pick up when your desperate to know a subject very quickly, and its written in
that way. Even if it feels like an insurmountable amount of information when you first read it.

LM: I guess I’m intrigued by how it very much in some sense evaporates a chorology or a set
of hierarchy’s and so I’m wondering if there are photographers whom you feel particularly
indebted to?

MG: Yes of course there are going to be and how you are trained and naturally go towards
certain photographers. It’s kind of strange I imagine everyone would of thought that Martin
Parr’s picture would be in the selection that I had but there are none of his in there, however
there’s a few photographers I’ve worked with or have a personal relationship with who’s
work is in there and I actually thought it was really important when I was putting it together
to discard those relationships, and to bring it back to something formal and simple about the
visual structure of an image and how you put it together. I’ve never really thought that there
has been a particular photographer I’ve admired and wanted to be like or really influenced me
other than Wolfgang. I think there definitely is an autobiographical element to it because
obviously I’ve dissected in a way that is very personal to me, because the images effect me in
my day to day life or what I’ve been taught, which may be different to other peoples.

LM: What has always struck me about the concept of appropriation is that in one sense it is
about retrieving a sense of power over knowledge or imagery but also problematizing an
authority that a book or an image might have. With that appropriate gesture you also have the
knowledge with the ease with which that gesture can be made therefore, you kind of accept
we’re all on an equal playing field. You have appropriated Charlotte’s book but I could
equally decide to do something to your book, Melinda.

*Not long ago I was talking about Eggleston’s new room at the Tate his images feel
exceptionally singular and brilliant to me and I was wondering if either of you feel that
moment…

CC: There is a good conversation to be had about where we think appropriation is. On a
personal level I don’t think appropriation as a term has really stayed in the same place, it may
even be debatable whether that it is an appropriate term anymore, whether something like
pirating or the way we use orphan images or however everything becomes orphan in this
particular moment allows us a certain license, and also the act of using someone’s images
known or unknown is possibly a less politicized act. I think appropriation at that traditional
70’s, 80’s definition which is often about the artist as the corrector and ideologies through the
control of the images is the big issue. I think that story is somewhat different now.

CC: I would like to introduce something else which is the writer David Joselit who has
written a book ‘After Art’. He has made a really good case for why this sense of there being
so many images and all images being orphans, this kind of raw material which anyone can
create a new form from. It isn’t actually a new phenomenon of the 21st century other big
moment when collage and montage were important within artistic practice in the early 20’s
photomechanical reproductions. It was again another period of unimaginable quantity of
images and that feeling we have today that there are more images than people and in a way
emotionally and in a creative sense reminds us of earlier periods of artistic practice but
portentously with this depoliticized element to it.

MG: It definitely seems less politicized than it ever was before, for me inspirationally I was
being drawn towards the Dadaist’s and that’s obviously highly politicized and it was directly
against that digital influx of that everyone could take a photograph. It is really interesting for
me to be in a position in my own time, to in a sense, feel like I’m slightly suffocated by all
these images and like you said, Charlotte, these raw materials which you can use and for me
in my own practice to use this material in a different way.

LM: Can you talk about what led you to make your work before and maybe what you have in
store for the future?

MG: Going back to your point before, I’m now looking forward to the sense that there is this
continuous relationship with the book. My relationship to charlottes book made me produce a
body of work, I would hope that another’s relationship to what I've done would create the
journey to carry on. I’m excited about this possibility, of the continuing journey where people
use different things, with and for varying levels of inspiration. For me definitely it is now a
finishing point or the end of the project, which is amazing, but I’m really pleased with where
it might take the journey for someone else. In terms of my practice it was been really
inspirational even though it has been such a long process. It has definitely led me to think
more about working with archives and found imagery and not work so in isolation because
when I worked with Charlotte’s book, I sat by myself, it was very quiet and actually just
about me and my relationship with it. My practice is moving where I’m working with
collaborators and archives, being brought into rework archival imagery. It is definitely
moving my practice in a way I never thought was possible and it’s incredible.