ROSAMUND WOLFF PURCELL ARM HOLDING EYE SOCKET collection albinius, leiden, 1992

Katrina M. Brown is curator at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Here she writes about her view on photography, illuminated by an experience near a railway bridge. by KATRINA M. BROWN, Moderna Museets Vänners tidskrift, nr 3/1998

I recently spent a day in the middle of a wide river on a small, open-deck boat, moored to a tiny pier adjacent to a 100-year old railway bridge, holding a tripod for the artist Catherine Yass. She was trying, whenever the swell of the water beneath us would allow, to take some photographs of the bridge from an unusual angle; that is, immediately below it. The images she was seeking were not however, intended to show the bridge as it 'really is', for she will combine them and develop them in such a way that the resultant images, shown as back-lit transparencies, will look as the bridge never has. Much as the resultant works will be abstractions, they are absolutely rooted in the real: any one looking at these works can discern their photographic origins. We see the possibilities for something quite beautiful and surprising in something so familiar and simple. But why start from a photograph?    The argument for photography to be accepted as a fine art medium has undoubtedly now been won. Yet, after an incredible period in which its development has touched every one's lives, its use as a documentary tool is bound to be increasingly undermined by developments in digital technology. But will these developments kill off photography in the ways we currently understand and use it or will they simply allow the medium to clarify its role? Just as photography freed painting from its mimetic function, will digital imaging rob photography of part if its role? Photography is now so ubiquitous in endless formats and through hundreds of uses that it is almost impossible to see it as one medium. Now, of course, digital camera technology means that you could, if you so desired, create an entirely false set of holiday snaps, of your self with friends or family in a part of the world that you have never visited. The photographic image is no longer necessarily a true picture of a given moment. But what would those images be for? How would you use them? The personal photographs we keep are not just images, they are aides-memoires, tools to later allow the remembrance of a whole set of circumstances. It is the experience of and memory derived from those circumstances that allows the photograph to mean something at a later date. Without the memory, the recognition, the snap-shot image is meaningless.    While my relationship to a particular photographic image on the boat with Catherine was undoubtedly an unusual one, it did make me think about how and why photography is used so often in making art. The simplicity of the mechanism's use - 'Just press the button' - and the possibility of capturing in a couple of minutes what might be an incredibly complex scene is undoubtedly of enormous use and attraction. It is still, after all, possible to simply see through the photograph to the image: as Barthes wrote in his investigation of the medium, Camera Lucida, in 1980, 'a Photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see'. There is no other means currently available of capturing a scene and representing it in an endless variety of ways on any scale in a way that encourage the viewer to look at what is pictured. The Bechers' photographs of industrial buildings undoubtedly speak of scientific classification and display, they also allow you to look at the buildings themselves. It may also be the opportunity to incorporate in artworks people, places or objects that actually exist, that the viewer, might possibly have seen, if not that specific example, then something similar. Some touchstone of familiarity is a powerful tool in the exploration of an artwork.    The cameras may get smaller and cheaper, the colours more accurate and longer lasting, and the editing less wasteful, but as a means of quickly and easily recording what is around us, and feeding into visual culture it is impossible to see beyond. It is still the truest form of picture-making.~