PREFACE

The exhibition “Construction or reality?” is the first major presentation of works owned by the Norwegian Museum of Photography, Norsk museum for fotografi – Preus Fotomuseum, and is a joint project with Lillehammer Art Museum. Although it has only been open for a few years, Lillehammer Art Museum has already hosted a number of exhibitions featuring some of the most influential contemporary photographers. The exhibition “Construction or reality?” offers the audience the opportunity to form an idea of the 160-year-long development of photography. Priority has been given to works that demonstrate an expressly artistic intention, but the exhibition also contains pictures that counterbalance and challenge photography that has come about from purely artistic intentions. The oldest picture in the exhibition is a photograph by Henry Fox Talbot, probably from 1839 – and perhaps even earlier. Talbot argued the importance of photography as a useful technological tool, not least in the field of botanical research. In retrospect, the aesthetic qualities of these pictures are now at least as interesting for our assessment of works from the dawn of photography.

The significance of photography for the development of an iconography related to images of everyday life seems obvious now. A number of other innovations in the traditional visual media of the 1800s also owe their existence to photography, not least such artistic movements as naturalism, realism and impressionism. Less obvious, but of equal importance, is the central role that photography has played in the development of the visual arts in the direction of a greater degree of abstraction. For example, photography created the necessary preconditions for the visualisation of phenomena that people previously had no possibility of forming an image of, enriching the visual arts with the addition of new forms and new subject matter.

As photography is allotted an ever more central position in art museums around the world, knowledge of our photographic heritage will become increasingly important as a starting point for our assessment of new artistic creations.

Svein Olav Hoff

Director, Lillehammer Art Museum

Øivind Storm Bjerke

Director, Norsk museum for fotografi – Preus Fotomuseum

INTRODUCTION

From today’s perspective, looking back over the last 160 years to the very beginnings of photography, many people are surprised that art museums did not recognise the potential of photography as an interesting and challenging field of collection at a much earlier stage. People seemed to have collected paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints almost as a matter of course, whereas other forms of depiction were left to historical museums, libraries and national archives. Recently, however, the trend seems to have taken a radical new turn, and today art collectors and museums will go to great lengths to secure the crème de la crème of photographic art for their collections.

In 1993, the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting, voted to approve the establishment of what was to become Norsk museum for fotografi – Preus Fotomuseum. The museum was to open on 1 January 1995 and was intended both to satisfy the need for a museum that presented photography as an aesthetic expression and to have a broader sphere of activity, covering photography from the angles of the history of culture and the technical developments. The conclusion reached by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs was that the museum should be entrusted with “a broad and overall responsibility for documentation and communication concerning photography – as a historical cultural expression and as an ongoing phenomenon. It should be a museum that hosts permanent and temporary exhibitions, arranges touring exhibitions and provides expert assistance to other cultural institutions that require information about photography, photographic technology and other related subjects.” This diverse mandate reminds us once again of the problem of positioning photography in relation to the methods of depiction that are rooted in pre-industrial production techniques and culture.

This broad mandate also illustrates that until very recently, all work connected to our photographic heritage had been focused solely on establishing and maintaining extensive archives, with no discrimination regarding the individual photograph. After all these years spent primarily archiving and registering vast masses of material and finding suitable storage facilities for the large collections of negatives, it is perhaps high time we considered a change in priorities towards research, dissemination and publication, and regrouping the material according to qualitative parameters. The current exhibition at Lillehammer Art Museum is one step in this kind of direction. One of the inherent difficulties in trying to create understanding for qualitative assessments of photographs on the premises of aesthetic judgements is that just about every sort of organisation and most private individuals use photography as a means of documentation. Each individual photograph can thus have many identities – in one context it may be important as a document of cultural history; in another it may be regarded as an ingenious work of art.

The pattern in this confusion regarding where photography belongs institutionally reflects the fact that while research into the history of art has moved beyond a narrow view of what exactly constitutes art, museums have previously not been interested in any areas of our artistic heritage other than those that tradition has deemed precious. Thus, as far as more recent artistic productions are concerned, this philosophy of value has now been complemented by a tangible identification between what constitutes value and ideas concerning the significance of the individual genius and the mark of genius on a variety of different materials. All visual art forms in which this relation is unclear – indeed, where we have started to query the existence of this kind of relation – have had huge difficulties passing through the eye of the needle and finding a place in art museums.

In no other form of depiction do the elements of the picture surface refer so obviously to the connection between what is depicted in the image and its referent in the real world as they do in photographs. For many people, it is impossible to draw a line between the “skin” of the photograph and the skin outside the picture that the photograph alludes back to. This is illustrated in utterances such as “This is me riding a horse”, said whilst all we are actually looking at is a small piece of paper that has been treated by chemicals. However, with the increasing subjection of photography to the discourse of art history, this identification of the “skin” of the image with the skin that it constitutes a reference to is gradually being replaced by an awareness of the image as a construction. The first step in this kind of direction involves becoming aware of the expression that is inherent in the format of the pictures as well as in the chemical surface.

Photography can be perceived as both a technique and a category of images. One consequence of this is that whilst photography is unproblematically categorised as a science, a photograph will in many cases be regarded as a work of art. Most of the identity problems associated with how museums should treat photographs are painlessly dispelled once we recognise that with the advent of photography arose the first high-tech method of depiction. Photographers are dependent on the existence of a community that maintains and develops an accumulated knowledge, on the basis of which a variety of products linked to photography as an activity can be created, without actually needing to possess any of this knowledge themselves. For this reason, all comparisons with low-technological means of visual representation, such as drawing an image in the sand with a stick, are halting and do not really grasp the essence of this issue, which is that photography represents a qualitative leap in the development of techniques for creating images.

By focusing on that aspect of photographic pictures that constitutes a construction based on a palpable reality, the technology we use to create images can be likened to computer programs. The photographic image is but one of many possible ways of representing mankind and our surroundings. Conventionally, photography has tended to be perceived as analogous to a “natural” way of seeing and as a descriptive, neutral transcription of the subject of the photograph. However, when you find yourself face to face with an entire archive of photographs, you quickly discover that this illusion often associated with photography is based more on the various different needs within a number of disciplines and fields in which photographic technology functions as a program. The different types of technology all yield different visualisations of the same original motif. For example, no one will dispute that a 3D photograph and an X-ray of the same object render entirely different images. The choice of “program” thus decides the result. In theory, this choice may depend entirely on coincidences, entailing that we leave it up to the people that developed the program to determine how the final outcome will look, or we may make a conscious choice based on an underlying intention.

Traditionally, it has been taken as a premise that there is some artistic intention behind any work of art. In early literature about photography, we can read about how photography was at times perceived almost as a revelation – an image that appears on the premises of nature alone and is therefore not related to any human intention. This perception has perhaps contributed to the exclusion of photography from the institution of art. Traditional art museums with their worship of the individual work, the individual artist and the picture carefully crafted by hand, now find themselves invaded with pictures that are an expression of the consequences of a different means of production, a different social order and a different ideology to those represented in works produced by pre-industrial means. We have not even begun the arduous mental task of trying to conceptualise the tension that exists between the world of images that has arisen in the wake of the new industrial visual technology and those that are the result of manual techniques of representation, between old visual conventions and new expressions, between the established and the new genres, typologies, symbols and iconography. Indeed, we continue to persevere with our efforts to reduce our photographic heritage to exemplification of things that are already well established, in a misguided attempt to find validation for established institutions and ways of thinking. Even when it comes to relating photography to the various branches of the arts, we seem to have an exaggerated penchant for rooting photography firmly in the visual arts. We seem to overlook the obvious similarities photography bears to other art forms such as theatre, projection and film. In other words, we far too easily overlook the fact that photographic art is a unique art form in its own right.

The reading of photographic images within the discourse of art history does not depart significantly from the reading of other categories of images. With regard to photography too, we find a tendency to switch between reading the material on the basis of stylistic categories and reading it in terms of iconography. As a result, we have built up a canon of photographers and photographs that reflect the 160-year-long development. One of the problems associated with treating photography as an art form is that the individual photograph tends to get lost in the crowd. However, in principle there is nothing in the mere fact that a form or technique of an object is rare or common that necessarily distinguishes it as a work of art. It is the qualities of each individual work that have always played the decisive part in the establishment of the artistic canon. In connection with studies of style aimed at determining genealogies and chronologies, quality plays a less significant role. In this latter case, it is the various formal features of the material that decides how it is to be categorised. The iconographic approach focuses more on particular types of subject matter and motifs, with the consequent revelation of the deeper layers of meaning within the work. In connection with selecting works for the exhibition in Lillehammer Art Museum and deciding how to group them, we employed these entirely conventional and traditional approaches.

The decision to establish a museum dedicated to photography was closely related to the fact that the private Preus Fotomuseum already existed. The Preus Fotomuseum was founded by Leif Preus and opened in 1976 under the ownership of the private company Preus Foto AS. The profile of the collection was not focused on Norwegian photography in particular; rather, the collection was built up around the concept of photography in all its many guises and nuances. The founder was especially eager to build up a library, and the museum’s collection of books contains a large number of works in which original copies of photographs have been used as illustrations. Amongst these priceless books, we find a copy of Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature and complete sets of Camera Notes and Camera Work. Preus Fotomuseum also attached a great deal of importance to the development of photography as a technology, with a clear focus on the apparatus. The museum is perhaps best known for its purchase of a Thomas Sutton camera with a water-filled lens, but it also has a large and impressive collection of cameras and apparatus from the pre-photography and pre-film eras.

Norsk museum for fotografi – Preus Fotomuseum is situated in Horten as a consequence of the terms of the contract for the acquisition of the Preus Fotomuseum. The museum has been closed since November 1998 for renovation and refurbishment of the premises at Karljohansvern, which are expected to be finished in autumn 2000. The plans for the restructuring and furnishing of the premises were drawn by the architect Professor Sverre Fehn. The Norwegian Parliament has since laid down a number of financial and physical constraints for the museum building, which mean that it will only be possible to exhibit a fraction of the collection in Horten. The physical limitations of the building also entail that it will not be possible to venture into such a crucial area of collection as electronic image processing in the future. As a result of these constraints, the museum has decided to give priority to building a profile that to a certain extent liberates dissemination of information and the exhibition of works in the collection from the physical limitations of its location. In order to ensure that the museum’s collections are accessible to as wide an audience as possible, we will therefore be dependent on collaboration with the network of museums that is being developed in Norway. This exhibition in collaboration with Lillehammer Art Museum is the first in what we hope will be a series of exhibitions from the collection hosted by other institutions elsewhere in Norway.

Øivind Storm Bjerke