Photography battles with its limitations. Political engagement turns viewers into aesthetes, while impassive images ultimately provoke deep emotions
A photograph is neither cruel nor tender, it is totally impassive, and photographers expend much energy coping with this fact. Photography could be seen, throughout its history, as attempting to overcome this, its greatest limitation as a medium for human expression. There are two schools of coping, and both are richly represented in one of this summer's biggest exhibitions, "Cruel and Tender", Tate Modern's first show dedicated exclusively to photography.
One school, epitomised by Bernd and Hilla Becher, attempts to emphasise the photograph's impassivity. The Bechers are best known for their monolithic studies of industrial architecture - of cooling towers, grain silos, chemical plants. Bernd Becher's students, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, all in their different ways continue this tradition, the watchwords of which are clarity, objectivity and categorisation.
The other school, of which Fazal Sheikh would be a good example, fights against the photograph's impassivity. Its proponents seek to turn the medium into something entirely emotional, itself capable of being passionate just as much as it is of causing passion. Fazal Sheikh has taken many portraits of the Somali women who have been forced by civil war to take refuge in Kenya. His black-and-white images are accompanied by highly emotive texts. "Three times I have seen newborn babies left lying on the ground. In all of the cases the babies later died." An account of practices of female circumcision, placed alongside a row of beautiful pictures, does its best to make them into an angry political statement.
Both these schools, in one way or another, tend to work against themselves - consciously or subconsciously. The work of the Bechers, while initially deadpan, is ultimately deeply emotional. By going with the impassive as far as they can, by taking photographs of buildings that you imagine would be very like the photographs that buildings might take of buildings, they end up emphasising an almost human frailty. Although they have from their beginnings in the early Sixties used the best available photographic techniques, their early work already looks very dated - muted and cramped. (In fact, one of the main themes of this exhibition is that photography is perpetually doing the-same-again-but-bigger-and-brighter.) This inevitable dating is an inevitable part of the medium, and the Bechers exploit this - all their images are taken with an awareness that everything about them will pass into the past, and become as it does so increasingly resonant; a study of industrial architecture changing into a memento mori.
Fazal Sheikh's meticulous black-and-white images, while attempting to be both documentary and politically enraged, cannot help but aestheticise their sitters. The one comment I overheard in this room, from a woman bending down to take a closer look at a picture of a Somali mother and child, was: "Gorgeous!" The starvation chic of fashion photography crosses over into Sheikh's work, and we notice that the women all have a certain style. It's not hard to imagine some Paris-based designer taking these images as inspiration for his next haute couture show.
Although this exhibition purports to represent "the real in the 20th-century photograph", there are actually very few different kinds of reality on display. Writing of Walker Evans, the critic Lincoln Kirstein referred to his "pictures of men and portraits of houses". And these remain the two dominant "real" subjects: people and buildings. Evans, who emerges as the most influential photographer of the past century, did both superlatively. He has since been redone numerous times by other, lesser photographers. Philip-Lorca diCorcia, in his Streetwork series, recreated Evans's subway portraits - naturally, coming later, he made them bigger, and he used different technology (remotely operated cameras). But the idea that people who were unaware they were being photographed would give away more of themselves and be more humanly present, belongs to Evans. Lewis Baltz recreated Evans's "portraits of houses" in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California. These suffer, now, from looking much like what one would expect from any foundation course art student sent to walk the streets of their suburb with a camera, anywhere in the world. Equally, Stephen Shore's travelogue shots of every person he met, room he stayed in and meal he ate while roadtripping across America record everything and nothing in any way precious.
In fact, the loss of this preciousness is one of the buried stories of this show. When Walker Evans decided to take a photograph of the kitchen table in a sharecropper's shack rather than, or as well as, a photograph of the sharecropper, he was making a strong aesthetic decision - a decision that, in giving greater importance to the object than the people, could be seen as offensive. By the time of Garry Winogrand, this parsimony of the image has completely disappeared. Photography has acquired, instead, the luxury of being trivial. Everything is photographed constantly. Winogrand, so we're informed, left behind more than 300,000 shots. Only one of these is Party, Norman Mailer's Fiftieth Birthday, New York, 1973. Why, we might ask, are we looking at this picture and not the 299,999 others? The thought is exhausting.
As is "Cruel and Tender". By about halfway through what is an immense exhibition, including around 690 separate images, you have lost a certain kind of concentration and a certain amount of goodwill. You have started looking not at what things are (this photograph of this person), but merely looking to acknowledge the kind of thing they look like (a photograph of a person).
It is here that the virtues of the earlier photographers become apparent. A single one of Albert Renger-Patzsch's empty streets seems to convey a hundred times the emotion of those of Robert Adams - but perhaps not enough time has passed, and not enough of Adams's world has been lost for them to acquire this.
The titles of August Sander's photographs, some of the most familiar on display here, suggest that they are capturing not just single lives, but entire groups of people. Paul Hindemith isn't merely just himself but The Composer. Yet just as Auden's sonnet "The Novelist" could only be about Christopher Isherwood, so The Composer fails to suggest a type - and succeeds all the more in capturing the individual. All Sander's images are like this: it is impossible to take his Police Officer as merely a police officer; with his mad moustache he is defiantly himself - more so than almost any other person in the show. Sander's work seems to reconcile the two schools of dealing with photography's impassivity. Like the Bechers, he is a maker of documentary series; like Fazal Sheikh, he wants to examine part of society by showing the most humanly involving subjects that he possibly can.
Having gone through some of the later rooms with increasing lassitude, it is a genuine shock to walk from the room containing Boris Mikhailov's portraits of down-and-outs in post-Soviet Russia into the one containing Andreas Gursky's brash, ultra-capitalist Chicago, Board of Trade II. Both are big, both push the two "real" subjects (people and buildings) further or perhaps just with greater exaggeration than before.
The fact that Mikhailov pays his people to display themselves for his pictures reminds us, by deliberate contrast, of Walker Evans on the New York subway with his hidden cameras and unsuspecting subjects. And Gursky's gargantuan prints give a particularly contemporary inflection to Evans's "portraits of buildings" - there is always too much of whatever there is; it is very complex and also oversimplified. On the evidence of this exhibition, the 20th century had only two realities - American and not-American; everything else is nuance.
"Cruel and Tender: the real in the 20th-century photograph" is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8000) until 7 September. The accompanying book, edited by Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, is available from Tate Publishing (£40 hbk, £29 pbk)
Toby Litt's latest novel, Finding Myself, is published by Hamish Hamilton this month
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