Black Sun

Minor White - Black Sun 1955 - © Trustees of Princeton University

    When I was at art college in the Seventies, I moved first from painting to sculpture and then to photography over the course of the three years I was there. I think the last move was motivated by the fact that I used the camera to record the large, ephemeral pieces I made that by necessity had to be dismantled shortly after construction to make space in the studio for the next piece or just to give someone else a bit of room to work - I did have a habit of 'going large' and filling whatever space I could get.
    During the last half of my stay there, I got deeply absorbed in Photography as Art. The debate about it's status was still being chewed over at that time, despite the evidence of innumerable, disparate bodies of work by photographers all over the world - at the time spanning around 150 years from the 'invention' of photography. What struck me most profoundly was that very 'disparateness' - considering that the prevailing view by and large was that the mechanical process of photography itself limited it to 'reproduction' and recording - documentary, reportage, facsimile - (I've already alluded to this in a previous post,) and that this somehow 'reduces' it's creativity to 'craft'. This at the time was seen as second-tier to 'Art' and often used to belittle and demean that which didn't fit into the sphere of 'Fine Art'. The definers of 'Fine Art' of course were the traditionalists of academia and critics: not themselves practioners, but self-appointed arbiters. At that point in Art History, they were still struggling to come to terms with what contemporary artists and their work in painting and sculpture was about - both of which had mutated far from the recognisable norms promoted by an out of date establishment, let alone whether it qualified in their terms as 'Art'.
    It looked as if photography would always be beyond the pale at this point. As I mentioned previously, my college thesis was an attempt to disavow this status quo via a refutation of Roland Barthes' 'Rhetoric of the Image' which if he was correct would have rendered photography in perpetuity an inferior, imitative practice with no place in history alongside 'Art'.
    Ironically, of course, the impetus that eventually pushed photography onto the stage was money. Capitalism and the 'Fine Art Market' had caught up. By the Eighties, dealers and collectors were paying stupid sums of money for objects that only a very few years before had sold for the modest sums dictated by their humble 'mechanical' status. It would seem that to be validated, a work of 'Art' has to have a material worth dictated by those arbiters of such things - we even make TV about it: 'Fake or Fortune?' is but one example. Depressing.
    I chose to use the Minor White photograph above for  a couple of reasons. It speaks both of the deliberate and the serendipitous. The choice to frame a scene in a particular way - a rural mid-western, winter landscape - in this case fairly conventional - and the chance event of the long exposure needed for the shot creating a 'black' sun through 'reversal' - the chemical process that produces positive transparencies or 'slides'.
    Minor White espoused Gurdjieff and Zen Buddhism and a significant part of his output was mediated by the chance encounter, the 'found' image; often resulting in complete abstraction from the recorded 'reality' captured by the camera. White talked of 'equivalence' where photographs are more than their apparent subject matter, taking on an implied or derived significance, suggesting or symbolising 'otherness', and denying any simple mechanistic correspondence between subject and object. This didn't sit well with some establishment figures at this time: to quote a critic:
             "Without a capacity to see in rocks some glimmer of essential form, as Weston did, or in clouds some hint of a universal life force, as Stieglitz did, one cannot understand White's pictures....One gets the impression that White did not develop as an artist in a linear sense so much as he oscillated between conflicting poles."
    I think this is fairly obviously a measure of this particular critic's incapacity for actual critical thought; relying rather on the accepted tropes of his trade than genuine enquiry or inquisitiveness: faculties absolutely necessary to see and interpret the world as it is and not as one assumes it to be.
    Photography and it's place in the world have thankfully moved on; it's breadth, variety and accessibility now seen as the virtues that they are. It is.