The Body of the Image: Anno Dijkstra’s Sculptural and Monumental Reconstruction of Press Photos

The early 1960s was a time in which the relation between ­photography and contemporary artistic practice was renewed. Previously ­limited to particular spheres—illustrated journalism, documentary ­photography, amateur photography, art photography—photography became the ­catalyst for a major revision of artistic categories. In ­particular, ­photography was integrated into artworks. Such a process of ­integration first occurred in Pop Art, which exploited the reproducible, ­ubiquitous, mediatized and vernacular quality of its images. More than the ­photographic material as such, it is the testimonial, historical and ­semiotic functions usually associated with photography that are here capitalized upon, such that the new presence of photography in artistic practice is at once material and conceptual.

Thus, media images became part and parcel of artistic practices engaged in a renewal of the representation of contemporary history. By means of these images the art sphere has attempted to rehabilitate the historical genre, which was once suppressed by the avant-gardes, as part of a process of the genre’s critical reassessment. The canonical images of photojournalism—snapshots made iconic through the process of mass mediatization—are revisited. Photojournalism has since become the ­testing ground for contemporary art’s historiographical ambitions. Consider, for instance, the work of Dutch artist Anno Dijkstra, who ­creates sculptural reconstructions of figures taken from famous news and media images. Such photos—i.e., the image taken by Nick Ut in Vietnam in 1972 and the one taken by Kevin Carter in Sudan in 1993—have both earned international awards for photojournalism and become monuments of the genre. Photography becomes monumental when it dominates public space (read: media space) by means of a variety of reproductions and transpositions—posters, CD-roms, exhibition prints, postcards, the Web, etc.—thereby endowing the snapshot with a staggering ubiquity. This ­monumentality of the image is quite peculiar in that it stems from an absence of any designated site. The media image thus becomes a ­monument without a pedestal, without a place.