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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO6-IMG2-IM_Latulippe_Arcara-Santese_Found-Photos-in-Detroit_004_CMYK-C-1024x697.png\")
The Flag<\/em>, from the project Found Photos in Detroit<\/em> 2009-2010.
Photo : courtesy of the artists & Cesura, Pianella, Italia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Images from the project Found Photos in Detroit<\/em> 2009-2010.
Photo : courtesy of the artists & Cesura, Pianella, Italia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
When abandoned by their owners and removed from their original contexts, photographs are separated from the narrative that gave them meaning at the time they were taken, and thus become open to new interpretations. Arcara and Santese\u2019s artistic recontextualization encourages an aesthetic appreciation of the photographic objects and gives them symbolic significance. Their material deterioration echoes that of the places in which they were found and emphasizes the racial inequality exacerbated by the major economic and social crisis that ravaged the city. The representations have been distorted and blurred by time and the elements. Yet the objects retain an enduring presence, and some of the faces in the photographs still gaze out at us. The images in Found Photos in Detroit remind us that the buildings were not the only ones forsaken during the crisis.
The photographs found in public places by German artist Joachim Schmid evoke another, more deliberate, type of violence done to images. To create the work Bilder von der Stra\u00dfe (Pictures from the Street) (1982 \u20132012), Schmid collected photographs that he found on the street during his travels over a period of thirty years, until he accumulated one thousand. Almost all the photographs are portraits, and more than half of them are ripped or literally torn to pieces, disfiguring the subjects in some way. Schmid carefully tried to recover and reassemble all the fragments, sometimes unsuccessfully, leaving gaping holes in the centre of the image. Most are portraits taken in privacy, in which, paradoxically, the subjects \u2014 such as the young woman lying on a bed in her undergarments with her eyes closed \u2014 place their trust in and surrender to the camera.
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Schmid\u2019s approach makes visible the trajectory of certain personal images, which are not kept as precious objects but go through a disaffection process. Their new materiality reveals the agency of portrait photographs, which are able to trigger intense emotional reactions in those looking at them. The violence committed against these photographs makes visible the almost magical dimension of some images. In fact, the relationship between the amateur photographers and their photographs is deeply rooted in the indexicality of the medium, which sees a physical trace of the represented subject in the image3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. 3 <\/a> - For more on this topic, see Gillian Rose, Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 31-32.<\/span>. The connection between the photographic image and its subject is so strong that the object ends up replacing the person. The object\u2019s presence can become so unbearable that its destruction acts as \u201ca kind of voodoo-like ritual,4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u201d 4 <\/a> - Joachim Schmid, quoted in John S. Weber, \u201cBilder von der Stra\u00dfe,\u201d Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982 \u2014 2007, ed. Gordon MacDonald and John S. Weber (Saratoga Springs: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College; Brighton: Photoworks; G\u00f6ttingen: Steidl, 2007), 21.<\/span>to quote Schmid. Whereas some artists with practices of recontextualization use photographs in the state that they were found, others rely on physical interventions on the objects to reveal or increase their materiality. British artist Julie Cockburn acquires studio photographs taken from the 1940s to 1960s, conventional portraits whose subjects have slicked hairstyles and frozen smiles. She then alters the readability of these photographic representations through various manipulations. In collages such as Mindfulness 1 (2017) and Tantrum 3 (2012), she cuts up the surface of the portraits where the faces are situated and rearranges the pieces in a layout reminiscent of the symmetrical and fragmentary shapes of a kaleidoscope, which not only makes the subjects unrecognizable but also creates a new motif. She disfigures the photographed individuals, who have already, and ironically, been made anonymous through the owners\u2019 abandonment of these photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cockburn also works with embroidery, partially or completely covering the photographed faces with geometric compositions of solid colour that resemble modernist abstractions. The threads are embroidered with a painstak- ing attention to detail, so as to create brightly coloured circles or rectangles with a perfectly smooth, glossy surface that makes one want to touch them. Objects manifest agency when they call out to us and we cannot ignore their presence, as Cockburn points out in describing how the images ask to be completed through her intervention. She explains, \u201cThe original images I work on are often discarded, creased and dog-eared, and there is an element of repair, mending and caressing that goes on5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Julie Cockburn, quoted in Robert Shore, Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014), 204.<\/span>.\u201d The material alteration of the photographs shifts and reinvents these images with no history. Furthermore, the intervention transforms anonymous, vernacular images into complex works that are in dialogue with art history. In Face Paint (2020), threads in different shades of white are superimposed on a young woman\u2019s face, giving the impression of vigorous brushstrokes, which, in erasing her mouth and eyes, would have left droplets of paint all over the image. Combining figurative representation and abstraction, the work plays on several registers. Cockburn appropriates a popular medium of representation and transforms it through an artisanal practice that evokes abstract painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n American artist Han Cao also associates found photography with embroidery. Her works create tension between two techniques: photography, which is mechanical, instantaneous, and infinitely reproducible, and embroidery, which is artisanal, unique, and requires time-consuming manual labour. In Oversaturated (2020) and Spontaneous Combustion (2020), heads explode into a myriad of coloured particles created by hundreds of French knots embroidered on the surface of the images. On black-and-white portraits of couples taken in the early twentieth century, she covers the bodies of women with delicate plant motifs and their faces with enormous corollas of colourful flowers. The Wallflowers series (2019 \u2013 2020) is a commentary on the studio photography of that era, in which women were often relegated to a secondary role. Cao gives these initially austere figures a dazzling presence even as she erases their faces. These works make visible the agency of photographic objects. Their capacity to act on the world is what turns the gaze to piles of images ruined by damp in an abandoned building; it is what drives someone to pick up a torn portrait from the sidewalk and piece it back together; it is what creates the desire to touch vintage photographs and \u201cdarn\u201d them with embroidery thread. Agency makes the objects perform. It is the impetus of their trajectory across time and space, through the renewed interest and emotional reactions that they provoke in a succession of owners who, through their interventions, transform how the objects are perceived. The photograph is an object with which we enter into a relationship, whether that triggers the impulse to tear it apart or offers an aesthetic experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n
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( No. 836, Tehran, May 2004<\/em>, from the series Bilder von der Stra\u00dfe<\/em>, 1982-2012.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & P420, Bologna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/101-DO6-IMG7-IM_Latulippe_Cockburn_the-chocolatier_CMYK-EXTRA-e1629389511726-edited.png\")
Face Paint<\/em>, 2020.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
& The Photographers\u2019 Gallery, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO6-IMG6-IM_Latulippe_Cockburn_face-paint1_CMYK-EXTRA-828x1024.png\")
The Chocolatier<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Flowers Gallery, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The capacity of the objects discussed here to produce reactions is due largely to the materiality of film photography printed on paper. Upon arriving in Detroit, rather than adding more representations of dilapidated buildings to the many that were already circulating online, Arcara and Santese found the ultimate representation of the financial crisis in abandoned photographs. The physical presence of these photographic objects is precisely what appealed to the artists. Schmid points out that \u201cif you actually look at the fragments of a snapshot you get an idea about the energy that was involved in its destruction. People don\u2019t do that for no reason.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Joachim Schmid, quoted in Mark Durden, \u201cPhotography, Anonymity and the Archive: Joachim Schmid,\u201d Parachute, no. 109 (January \u2014 March 2003): 120.<\/span>The materiality of these forsaken, ravaged, defaced objects leads one to create new narratives to understand them. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not just the image, it\u2019s the picture as a physical object. Loaded with that destructive energy the picture becomes a more interesting object.\u201dNOTE count=7][\/NOTE] 7 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span>. The same applies to the vintage photographs disfigured or reconfigured by Cockburn and Cao: their material properties are precisely what encourage the artists\u2019 interventions.
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