works_in_progress

1.
Goethe’s Theory of Colours was first published in 1810, but it was largely composed in 1806. In that year Napoleon’s armies defeated Prussia in the twin battles of Jena and Auerbach, and the little principality of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, where Goethe had made his home, was occupied by the invading French. The philosopher Hegel, who watched Napoleon ride through Jena from his window, wrote of the shock of seeing the forces of world history condensed in this single individual astride a horse. Goethe’s encounter with the forces of world history was less metaphysical but more dangerous. His household was threatened with pillage by marauding soldiers, and he narrowly escaped being bayoneted in his own bedroom. Goethe’s life was probably saved only by the determined action of his long-term mistress, Christiane Vulpius, whom he married, perhaps as recompense, shortly afterwards.
The Theory of Colours refers to these events only indirectly: Goethe regrets that he lacked ‘the opportunity of going through a fair transcript of my work before its publication, these pages having been put together at a time when a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question.’ Had he been able to read the work in proof, he suggests, he could have corrected errors that had escaped his notice in manuscript. The implication is that the printed text can reveal defects not apparent on the handwritten page; the technology of mechanical reproduction allows us to read more closely and more critically than is possible with lettering scripted by hand. Cut off from print technology, and isolated more generally from emerging networks of modern scientific knowledge, Goethe’s theory is by necessity amateurish, and outdated even in its moment of composition. But, paradoxically, what cut him off from these modern forms of knowledge was modernity itself—the series of social and political disruptions beginning with the French Revolution and leading to the occupation of Weimar by Napoleon. This paradox, in which modernity blocks the fulfilment of its own promise, links Goethe’s Theory of Colours to certain contemporary art practices.
Arguing against Newton’s mathematical analysis of light, Goethe claims that white light is pure, not a compound phenomenon. While for Newton combining coloured illuminations from across the spectrum produces white light, for Goethe, this combination creates darkness. For Newton, a prism generates colour from white light by separating out different rays that have different indices of refraction. But for Goethe, refraction can occur without our perceiving any colour. He writes: ‘if we look at a pure grey or blue sky or a uniformly white or coloured wall through a prism, the portion of the surface which the eye thus embraces will be altogether changed as to its position, without our therefore observing the smallest appearance of colour.’ In Goethe’s account, colour is only perceived when there is a boundary, an outline, an edge or a contrast: ‘to produce colour, an object must be so displaced that the light edges be carried over a dark surface, the dark edges over a light surface, the figure over its boundary, the boundary over the figure.’ Colour appears when light is perceived through a darkening medium, or darkness through a semi-transparent medium; when darkness is superimposed on a light surface, or when light shines on a dark surface; when the border between light and dark creates overlays and intermixtures.
So for Goethe colour is generated by the interference or conflict of darkness with light. Consequently, darkness for him is not simply the absence of light, but a positive force in its own right. In Paradise Lost, Milton describes the fires of hell as radiating ‘no light, but rather darkness visible.’ Goethe takes this infernal paradox of radiant and visible darkness quite literally: darkness for him is not the impossibility of sight, but a condition of sight. Without these abutments and clashes between darkness and light, we could perceive no colour.
Like print, photography is a modern technology that enhances the human senses, a prosthetic extension of our capacities. Photographs allow us to see things we could not see otherwise; they render visible aspects of the world that escape the naked eye. One might think, in this sense, that photographs belong to that modernity from which Goethe was cut off when he composed his Theory of Colours. The camera is a Newtonian apparatus, and the spectral shifts that mark reciprocity failure, evident in Alex James’s work, support Newtonian optics, not Goethe’s theory. And yet Goethe’s interest in colour, and in particular his attention to colour as we perceive it to be, has a counterpart in photography today. We encounter it in art that explores the flaws and blockages of enlightenment, that employs modern techniques to express the loss and negativity of modernity, that adopts a strategy of darkness visible.

2.
In a series of lectures presented to the Royal Institution in May and June of 1836, less than a year before his death, the English painter John Constable divided the art of painting into two main branches, history and landscape; ‘history including portrait and familiar life, as landscape does flower and fruit painting.’ Constable traced the development of landscape painting from a subsidiary aspect of history painting into an artistic genre in its own right. ‘Landscape is the child of history,’ he stated, ‘and though at first inseparable from the parent, yet in time it went alone, and at a later period (to continue the figure,) when history showed signs of decrepitude, the child may be seen supporting the parent.’ In this way, Constable claimed landscape as the art-form of modernity. Landscape was the genre that had now arrived at maturity, in contrast to the long-dominant genre of history painting, now senescent and out of tune with modern times.
Constable’s distinction between history and landscape appears to be quite simple, but it is drawn asymmetrically. In essence, Constable defines history painting in terms of its subject-matter, which is human action. A history painting depicts an event, a pose, a personage, an attitude. And as the term ‘history’ suggests, it positions that event, pose, person, or attitude within a temporal sequence in which each event is followed by another, and follows on from one which preceded it. When we view a history painting—a painting representing human action—we engage in reconstructing this implied narrative, one moment of which is frozen and contained within the picture-frame.
But because landscape develops from history painting, it cannot be defined in terms of its subject-matter in quite so direct a way. In Constable’s lectures, landscape painting first originates within history painting as insignificant background. As he argued similarly in an earlier lecture, of 1833:
When historical painting was attempted on a larger scale, and the Passion, the Crucifixion, and the Entombment of our Saviour afforded its most important subjects, landscape, and even some of its phenomena, became indispensible. The cross must be fixed in the ground,—there must be a sky,—the shades of night must envelope the garden, (the scene of the agony,)—and a more awful darkness the Crucifixion;—while rocks and trees naturally made a part of the accompaniments of the sepulchre. Here, then, however rude and imperfect, we are to look for the origin of landscape.
So for Constable, landscape is a necessary part of history painting. The cross must be fixed in the ground; here the ground, the background, must be included within the picture-frame. If the viewer is to understand a depiction of an event, the place in which the event occurred must be represented. And because landscape is an indispensible part of history painting in this sense, then landscape cannot be distinguished from history in terms of what it shows. For whatever can be depicted in a landscape painting can also be depicted in a history painting. This is why Constable’s distinction between landscape and history painting is asymmetric. History painting is defined by its subject-matter, by what it depicts. But landscape is defined negatively, by the absence of this subject-matter, by what it doesn’t depict. In Constable’s account, landscape is history painting with the history left out. It is a depiction of human action with no humans, and no action; a representation of the location of an event that doesn’t take place; an event to which nothing leads, and from which nothing follows.

3.
Romantic landscape painting—the tradition in which Constable is a central figure—has often been criticised for representing an idyllic world in which all traces of suffering, social conflict and injustice have been removed. And where is the place that has not been a site of conquest, enslavement, robbery and murder? The history of the relations between humans and the lands they inhabit ‘is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.’ By leaving this history out, the argument often runs, the tradition of landscape art helps to perpetuate the violence which produced and maintains this terrain of injustice.
Constable not only accepts the validity of this criticism: he also takes this absence of history to be the defining characteristic of landscape. But, as some of Constable’s own paintings demonstrate, this absence of history does not mean that landscape painting traditionally presents the world as a natural system devoid of all human life. Landscape under Constable’s definition is not wilderness (and if any images are truly vulnerable to this criticism, it is those that contribute to the mythology of an untouched and unchanging natural world—images of a non-human paradise that are presented to us for all-too-human acts of ideological consumption). If landscape is the child of history, it can never disown this parentage. It bears the traces of history even as it takes the absence of history to be its defining condition. Perhaps this is partly what gives landscape art, when it succeeds, its strangely compelling power: it makes visible a void, an absence, within our historical narratives.
A story from 1958 by Italo Calvino, ‘The Adventure of a Photographer’, illustrates this dynamic. The story follows the photographic career of a man entering middle-age, Antonino Paraggi, who is at first a committed non-photographer. While his friends enthusiastically take up photography, and concurrently fall in love, marry, and start families, Antonino treats photography with disdain, and remains a bachelor. But romance eventually enters Antonino’s life through the viewfinder. While holidaying with friends and their families, the camera is pressed on him—the only single man—for the group shot. He continues taking snapshots, including some of a young woman, Bice, and when they collect the proofs together, she asks him to photograph her again. Bice becomes his model; they fall in love; he photographs her exclusively and obsessively. But when his photography becomes jealously and even violently intrusive, Bice leaves Antonino. He enters a deep depression: ‘he compulsively snapped pictures as he stared into the void. He was photographing the absence of Bice. He collected the photographs in an album: you could see ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts, an unmade bed, a damp stain on the wall.’ If we apply Constable’s terms to this story, it is at this point of his adventure, when Antonino begins photographing absence, that he becomes a landscape photographer.
A more complex illustration of this same dynamic is provided by Constable himself, in a long analysis from 1833 of Titian’s celebrated Martyrdom of St Peter, an altarpiece in the Dominican church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. It is a painting, Constable states,
the background of which, although not the model, may be considered as the foundation of all the styles of landscape in every school of Europe in the following century... the scene is on the skirts of a forest, and the time verging towards the close of day, as we may judge from the level and placid movement of the clouds on the deep blue sky, seen under the pendant foliage of the trees which overhang the road. The choice of a low horizon greatly aids the grandeur of the composition; and magnificent as the larger objects and masses of the picture are, the minute plants in the foreground are finished with an exquisite but not obtrusive touch, and even a bird’s nest with its callow brood may be discovered in the branches of one of the trees. Amid this scene of amenity and repose, we are startled by the rush of an assassin on two helpless travellers, monks, one of whom is struck down, and the other wounded and flying in the utmost terror...
For Constable, this painting presents an ‘admirable union of history and landscape.’ But for us, today, it provides an allegory of the emergence of landscape through the erasure of historical representation, for the painting was destroyed by fire in 1867.
The fire’s effect on Titian’s lost masterpiece was to transmute it into landscape raised to the second order: it is now a history painting with the history erased, and a landscape painting with the landscape erased as well. The physical destruction of the painting transports the artwork into a purely conceptual realm, in which our only access to it is mediated by descriptions such as that of Constable, or through contemporary reproductions. It still bears meaning—it still makes sense to describe its background, as Constable did, as the foundation of all the styles of landscape in every school of Europe. But this meaning is now communicated only in the painting’s absence: it is now this lack of existence which allows the painting to serve as the exemplary foundation of landscape art.
The story of Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter also illustrates another paradox: the eradication of history, which defines landscape, takes place within history. We can date the incineration of this painting. Similarly, we can date the gradual erasure of historical representation within the picture-frame through which the genre of landscape came into being. This is why criticism of landscape as the representation of an unhistorical and illusory arcadia, produced for ideological reasons, is often misplaced. Negativity is present in arcadia too, and the destruction of history forms a chapter in the history of destruction. By figuring empty spaces where histories once occurred, landscapes can suggest ways in which our standard historical narratives are marked by absences and failures for which they themselves cannot account. Such landscapes are not so much unhistorical as counter-historical. They make visible the formative darkness overlooked by narrative modes of history. Just as, in Goethe’s account, darkness can yield all the colours of enlightenment, these erasures of history tell histories of their own. Perhaps it is this capacity that made the landscape tradition the pre-eminent source of modern art, for classical modernism—from suprematism and cubism to abstract expressionism—is predominantly a landscape tradition in Constable’s understanding of the term. In modern times some truths can only be expressed negatively, and some histories can only be communicated in silence.

4.
In an unfinished fragment from 1937, Walter Benjamin comments on the method of critical theory. The comments were to have formed the basis for an introduction to his text Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, and they set out to explain Benjamin’s approach to his subject-matter—the poetry of Baudelaire and Paris culture in the nineteenth century. But although somewhat cryptic, they invite wider application:
To investigate ‘the matter in itself’ is certainly tempting, and in Baudelaire’s case this matter is abundantly present. The sources flow to one’s heart’s content; where they converge to become the stream of tradition, finely delineated riverbanks open out, and between these banks the stream flows along as far as the eye can see.
But critical theory does not abandon itself to this spectacle. It does not seek the picture of the clouds reflected in this stream. Still less does it turn away from the stream in order to ‘drink from the source’, to inquire into the existence of the ‘matter itself’ behind people’s backs. Whose mills does this stream drive? Whose cargo does it float? Who fishes in it? Who exploits its fall? These are the questions critical theory asks, and it changes the picture of the landscape by naming not only the physical but also the social forces which are at work in it. Ultimately, if only in the long run, it can change not just the picture but even the landscape itself by using the fall of this stream for those who, till now, could never yet lay eyes on it...
A picture of Baudelaire is presented here, and it is a traditional one. The tradition of bourgeois society may be compared to a camera. The bourgeois scholar looks in, just as the layperson does, enjoying the colourful images in the view-finder. But the materialist dialectician operates with it. His aim is to set a focus. He may employ a larger or smaller aperture; choose a more sharply political or more muted historical lighting: at the end, he closes the shutter with a click. Once he has exposed the plate —attaining an image of things as they are in the social tradition—he gains a right over this concept and he develops it. For the plate can only provide a negative. It originates from an apparatus which takes light for shadow, shadow for light. Nothing would worse befit the image obtained in this way than to claim it to be definitive. Its lifelikeness is merely apparent, and its value most certainly does not derive from this. But in a certain case, what does not appear but is nonetheless true is the conflict that the social interests of tradition enter into with the object that is inherited from tradition. To a much greater extent, the value of the image obtained rests on summoning up what is portrayed to act as a witness against the tradition that called its image onto the plate.
Photography here functions as an analogy, allowing Benjamin to set out how critical theory can achieve this counter-traditional goal. To do so involves technique, deliberation, construction and careful timing. It means using the cultural apparatus one inherits against that inheritance itself, exposing it to the criticism that it has always generated and yet sought to smother. In this way, Benjamin claims, critical theory can help deliver the material world into the hands of those for whom it has meant loss and never profit, for those whose memories of land are of toil, dispossession and threat. But if theory can function like photography, photography can function like critical theory, for Benjamin’s analogy works both ways. The ability to identify the forces at work in a landscape can also be possessed by a camera, not just by theory. A photograph can change the landscape it depicts, wielding those forces for the benefit of those at whose cost the landscape was shaped.
But Benjamin’s analogy is not wholly reversible. Critical theory may be able to name the forces at work in the landscape, as Benjamin suggests, but photography cannot do this. Indeed, photography cannot name anything: photographs are mute. In 1839, William Fox Talbot referred to the images produced by his new technique as ‘words of light,’ and this idea is present in the word ‘photography’ itself—literally, ‘light writing.’ But the term ‘photography’ is a misnomer, for photographs are not words, and photography is not writing. Writing is essentially sequential: characters must be written in order if they are to compose words, and words must be placed in order if they are to combine into sentences. Reorder the words, and the sentence becomes nonsense. Reorder the characters, and the words disintegrate. When we read, we string the words together in time, and while the time this takes may vary, there is an implicit sequence that we follow. We may reverse this sequence, and read a text backwards, but we can only do this because the text possessed an implied order to begin with. A photograph has no such order. While it may take time to scan a photograph visually, to draw in and comprehend its elements, there is no pre-given sequence in which we must perform this act, and in consequence photographs cannot be viewed backwards. If photographs are capable of changing our picture of the landscape, thereby changing the landscape itself, they cannot do so by naming. Unlike an historical event, and unlike a word in a sentence, nothing necessarily leads to a photograph, and nothing must follow from it.

5.
Australia is overlaid with a mesh of stories. Stories take time to tell, and this time seeps into the land. Stories also shape time: they give experience beginnings and endings, turning the raw stuff of occurrence into meaningful events. Travelling or dwelling, we encounter fragments of other people’s stories and other ways of telling stories, while we prepare the ground for stories of our own—stories which may incorporate some of those fragments, but which equally must leave some out. Photographs are still, and the images they display are static. They tell no stories. Yet photographs also shape time. The time of exposure records a passage of light that can never be recaptured, light that will never return. Each exposure is entirely unique. And yet this record is infinitely reproducible: from one negative can come many prints. Only in this sense can photography be understood as a language: as the citable inscription by light of time. The promise held out by this language of light, still and silent, is that of illumining our landscapes anew. It falls to the viewer to propel these images into historical meaning, into words and actions.
What relevance do these messages from bygone eras—from 1806, 1836, 1937—have for us today? They seem separated from us by an unbridgeable chasm, for our world is no longer illustrated or represented by images, as it perhaps still was in those times, but is now largely produced and formed of images. Considered as someone whose task it is to create significant images, the artist is now decisively outmoded by the operations of the contemporary media industry, for our everyday lives are shaped by a daily avalanche of pictorial resources and commercial imagination that no artist could hope to rival. This outdatedness of the artistic practice of image creation is a fact that must be addressed, at some level, by every practising artist.
Photography is the last artistic craft but also the first modern technique to supersede the old crafts of image production. Because of this doubleness, photography is a singular heir to the paradoxes outlined by Goethe and Constable. To an extent greater than other art-forms, it can hold fast to the significance of the negative, and employ the resources of darkness visible. This book presents some of the possibilities of such a strategy. The stillness and muteness of these images allows a negative recognition of losses for which there is little place in the stories we tell of Australia.

Tom Ford