ON ALLEGORY

Allegory is allos agoreuei in Latin.  It means to speak otherwise (allos=other; agoreuei=to speak) – to tell one story through another. Originally from literature, allegory had been widely used in art from before the Renaissance until the emergence of modernism.  Since the start of postmodernism, there has been a resurgence of usage of allegory in contemporary art.

As a newly established contemporary art medium, photography has a complication with real, especially when it is used to reflect current or historical issues.  Henry Fox Talbot once called photography “the pencil of nature”, photography record ‘truth’ indexically through reflected light.  Representation is cropped out of the reality context from the moment when the photograph is taken. The photographic image then reveals a space enabling different narratives, meanings and potential significance via this de-contextualisation process. Craig Owen (1980, p.69) says that "Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them". The photographer does not invent the ‘truth’ either. He utilises the camera to confiscate the ‘truth’ fragment and use it as a vessel to convey something other.  We may say that any photograph is an appropriated reality hence photography is a medium with the potential for allegory.  The allegorical meaning “supplants an antecedent one” (Owen, 1980, p.69).

Some contemporary photographic artists develop allegorical interpretations of the current and historical cultural, social and political issues through a variety of approaches.  This strategy has been widely used in the Düsseldorf School led by Bernd and Hilla Becher.  In this essay, I will analyse how allegorical interpretation is conveyed via different photographic practices by discussing Thomas Ruff’s series Portrait (1986) and Andrea Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse (1993).

  

Figure 1

Portrait 1986 (Stoya) 

Thomas Ruff

Chromogenic color print.

1600 x 1205 mm

Courtesy: Tate Modern, London

Thomas Ruff created series Portrait in the period of1981-85, 1986-91 and resume to work it since 1998.  There are 60 images with coloured backgrounds made before 1985 in small prints and 129 with neutral backgrounds made after 1986 in large prints.  I will focus on images in his series made in 1986. 

There are 14 images made in 1986 with the identical size of 160cm x 120cm.  Each individual face is enlarged enormously bigger than life size in a monumental way.  They wear everyday clothes set in white neutral background.  Are expressionless with deadpan complexions revealing no emotions at all.  The detail is exposed sharply and clearly with great verisimilarity.  The texture and colour of the skin can be read almost as though under a microscope.  We can even see each hair pore, every eyelash, and other minute details. 

The excess detail in the images seems to signify something. If we stand in front of these large images, these details become abstract in our perceptions when we gaze at them for a while. We might begin to question if this is part of a human’s expressive face.  We are so near to these faces but at the same time they are far away in distance, mute and impassive.  This abundance of detail lets us contemplate that we probably “cannot decide for certain what is signified and even less what the seen subject is thinking.” (Bate, 2009, p.85)  Valeria Liebermann (2001) commented on Ruff’s Portrait:

“And yet the viewer could never get beyond the surface of the image, because so little was revealed of the figures themselves as to their character, individuality or personality.  The sitters disappeared behind their likeness and left only a precise record of their external appearance which in turn served as a reflective surface of the viewer.” (unpaged)

Thomas Ruff took advantage of photography’s indexical trait and exaggerated to convey his allegory of real.  He used these large prints to enlarge details to challenge our common perception and let us contemplate.  He used a series rather than a single image to explore the allegory further.   We see the identical composition, unified background and the same lack of expression in these vast flat photographic image surfaces.  It could be explained as an allegory of two conflicting social forces and Ruff turns one (spectacle) against another (surveillance).  Bryson and Fairbrother (1991, p.96) commented “They say out loud ‘I am no-one (special)’; and at the same time, they whisper, ‘but I am someone special al the same’. These are the latest generation, of surveillance and spectacle combined.”

Ruff made these images by using a large format view camera at f-45 with studio flash with umbrella and short exposure time. (Winzen, 2001, p.38)  Following his tutor Becher, he reduced photography’s medium expressivity to zero and stripped the subjective characteristics to achieve his visual strategy.  In so doing, he uncovered photography’s true artistic essence and created his allegory.   He made two points on photography in the 90’s: that photography can only reproduce the surface of things, and that a photography is also a statement whose accuracy must be verified through a series of tests, just as a scientist would test out a theory - a single photograph, like a single test, is not enough (Ruff, 1996, p.108).  His series brings out less as individual characters but more the anonymous and generic qualities that each sitter embodies. To a certain extent, Portrait conveyed his conviction that photography can only reproduce the surface of things even though we could engage with many allegorical issues under such a surface.

Figure 2

Paris, Montparnasse

Andreas Gursky.

Chromogenic color print.

205 x 421 cm

Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York,

His contemporary, Andrea Gursky normally creates and uses single image.  Paris, Montparnasse is an image measuring 205 x 421 cm.  We see a multi storied homogeneous flat block façade of countless windows. The boulevard in the front is dwarfed by the height of the block. We cannot see the left and right border of the block, which makes us perceive that the block might be extended to infinity.  Upon a closer look, we can see each window and its inside with great details.

Figure 3

Detail

Paris, Montparnasse

Andreas Gursky.

Chromogenic color print.

205 x 421 cm

Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York,

Hans Irrek (2000, pp.48-59) compared the experience of viewing Gursky’s work to an experience on a Shakespearean stage. We can choose to sit below and near to view specific detailed performance, or choose to sit higher and further to see the play’s overview. Due to Paris, Montparnasse’s epic size, we have to step back to see the overall structure of the building.  From this distance, we see the abstract and static structure we would never notice if we pass through the block in person. There is sublime in the vastness and infinity. If we step close to the image, we find every window is revealed.  We see the curtains, the interiors with lamps, chairs, potted plants and even persons in their own moment, who did not notice being captured by the camera at all.  We know each individual window scene is probably a home.  This becomes alienated from the viewer as we would never enter or interact with these thousands of little worlds and we can only stand in front of them and observe.  Galassi (2002) mentioned the experience of seeing Gursky’s work:

“Our Olympian detachment makes the familiar strange to us, and, like benign extraterrestrials who have unexpectedly encountered an inhabited plant, we study the view with disinterested curiosity, free equally of urgency and malice.” (p.23)

This detachment and distance creates a space enabling us to engage with the image further from the current reality we are living in.  Who are those people living there?  How could such a gigantic flat block be built in Paris Montparnasse…

Paris, Montparnasse is a visual allegory of contemporary culture, politics and society.  Gursky once remarks “to go to the centre-city is to encounter the social ‘truth’, to take part in the magnificent plenitude of ‘reality’.” (Gursky, 1992, p.7) He appropriated the flat block and created a social allegory. It seems that this is not only a flat block physical façade but also a condensed society spectacle, with mass produced homogenous lives exposed to authorities’ surveillance.

There are neither distorted perspective lines nor any single vanishing points in the image. Everything in the image is shown in great detail sharply with nothing out of focus.  We know no wide-angle lens or large format camera can make such an image.

Unlike Ruff’s Portrait (1986), Gursky applied digital manipulation to his work Paris, Montparnasse.  It is one of the early digital works that Gursky used digital technology for in the early 90’s after his first digital montage work “Restaurant, St Moritz” in 1991. From Schmidt-Garre’s (2011) documentary on Gursky, we know that he normally takes several Polaroid or smaller photos, and then montages them together to achieve his basic composition before formally involving his large format camera.  Paris, Montparnasse is planned this way and created digitally with a fusion of several images taken from different perspectives.

Digital montage is Gursky’s strategy to create his allegory of real.  He uses this approach to represent the world – to get freedom restricted from the pure indexical characteristic of the photographic medium.  This in a way is detrimental to the intrinsic indexical credibility photography has.  Just after the technical development enabling digital post-photography manipulation, William J. Michell (1992, p.20) says, “From the moment of its sesquicentennial in 1989 photography was dead—or, more precisely, radically and permanently displaced—as was painting 150 years before”. 

Gursky took up this technology and disobeyed the Becher’s tradition of objective documentation by developing it further.  The traditional objective documentation is never an objective one, as Walter Benjamin already asserted in 1931 (p.255) “reproduction of reality now says less than ever about reality”.  The moment the image is taken it ceases to be objective. Gursky himself neither claims factuality, nor says he is making a fiction.  He emphasised that the crucial thing is the direct grasp of reality by embracing the digital technology.  He conflates the documentation realism with the digital postproduction creating a new allegory of real.  He utilised the new medium specificity and continued to exploit the documentary expectation of the photography medium.  Our eyes cannot easily perceive his masterly digital manipulation, as it looks so real.  To simplify, we may say that this truer truth mirrors the surroundings we are living – the post capitalism globalisation hyper reality. The viewing experience becomes part of the allegory of real.  The montage does not “falsify” (Hentschel, 2008 p.28) anything; it intensifies the allegorical interpretation of the current reality.

Owens (1980) alleged that allegory deconstructs the readings of the pre-existing interpretation and supplants one with another (p.82).  We see that Portrait and Paris, Montparnasse first evoke the literal reading, as a passport or mug shot and a flat block façade, and then that view becomes replaced by something other.  Both artists’ visual strategy is to create convincingly real but strangely artificial -“data sublime” (Stallabrass, 2007, unpaged) in Ruff ‘s Portrait and subtle manipulations in Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse both using large format image making with great verisimilarity.

Under our gaze, the content of the images are intercepted and supplanted by “something other”.  In an allegory, “the image is a hieroglyph; an allegory is a rebus – writing composed of concrete images” (Benjamin, 1938, cited in Owens 1980, p.84)  “Portrait” is a political allegory.  What is on the photograph is not just an anonymous portrait but a social and political phenomenon with multi layered allegorical significance such as surveillance, democracy and even spectacle.  Paris, Montparnasse is not simply a building’s façade. It is an allegorical interrogation of our current times, economical, political, and social globalization hyper-realities.  Benjamin summarized the process of making them strange and alienating then in order to uncover them. (cited in Owens, 1980, p.85)  The machinery of representation by photography empowered Ruff and Gursky to “super-induce a vertical or paradigmatic reading of correspondences upon a horizontal or syntagmatic chain of events”. (Owens, 1980, p.96)  Owens considered this as Barthes’ “obtuse meaning” and elaborates as something to do with disguise. (p.97) It is identified with “isolated details of make-up and costume (which properly belong to the literal level)” (Owens, p.98) and proclaims their artifices through excess.

Photography is an indexical surface functioning as allegory signifiers.  The allegorical obtuse meaning is the “third meaning” following literal and symbolic ones.  It is the third surface, under which we deconstruct the supposed meanings of the images and reconstruct another reality with the intervention of obtuse meaning.  Contemporary photography practice draws historical and current reference from everyday life and reflects allegorical enigmatic and complex realism with traditional, digital or even hybrid media techniques.

Benjamin, Walter (1977) The Origin of German Tragic Drama Trans. John Osborne, London, NLB cited in Scott Bryson, et al, eds. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Bates, David, (2009) Photography: the Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg.

Benjamin, Walter, (1985) “A Short History of Phtography” (1931) in One Way Street and Other Writings. tran. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso.

Galassi, Peter, (2001)  “Gursky’s World” in Andreas Gursky. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Gursky, Andreas, (1992.  Andreas Gursky. exh. Cat. Cologne: Kunsthalle Zurich.

Hentschel, Martin, (2008) Andreas Gursky Works 80-08. Hatje Cantz.

Hurzeler, Catherine, (1996)  “ Interview with Thomas Ruff”, in Thomas Ruff. Malmo: Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art.

Irrek, Hans, (2000) “Shakespeare‟s Stage,” in Gloria Moure ed. Architecture Without Shadow, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa.

Mitchell, William J., (1992) The Reconfigured Eye - Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

Owens, Craig, (1980) “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” (1992) in Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger,Lynne Tillman,and Jane Weinstock eds., Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Ruff, Thomas, (2001) quoted in V. Liebermann, 'Photography as Proving Ground', Thomas Ruff. exh. cat., London.

Liebermann, Valeria, (2001) 'Photography as Proving Ground', Thomas Ruff. exh. cat., London.

Schmidt-Garre, Jan (2011) DVD, Andreas Gursky - Long Shot Close Up, Halle: Arthaus Musik GmbH

Smithson, Robert, (1079) ‘A Sedimentation of Mind: Earth Projects’ in Nancy Holt (ed.), The Writings of Robert Smithson. New York: New York University Press.

Stallabrass, Julian, (2007) What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography’, 
Available at

<www.courtauld.ac.uk/people/stallabrass_julian/2009-additions/Ethnog-phot-Oct%20format.doc>

Accessed: 03/03/2012.

Schmidt-Garre, Jan, (2009) Long Shot Close Up – Andreas Gursky. Berlin: Paris Media.

Winzen, Matthias, ed. (2001) Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the present. Cologne: Walther König.

Image Credits:

Figure 1

Portrait 1986 (Stoya) 

Thomas Ruff

Chromogenic color print.

1600 x 1205 mm

Courtesy: Tate Modern, London

Figure 2

Paris, Montparnasse

Andreas Gursky.

Chromogenic color print.

205 x 421 cm

Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York,

Figure 3

Detail

Paris, Montparnasse

Andreas Gursky.

Chromogenic color print.

205 x 421 cm

Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York,