ANON; SCENE OF CRIME NEW YORK c. 1915

David Elliott, Director at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, talks to Andreas Gedin, artist and editor, about the museum´s new exhibition "In Visible Light" and the situation of photography today. by ANDREAS GEDIN, Moderna Museets Vänners tidskrift, nr 3/1998

AG: You commissioned a first version of "In Visible Light" for the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, which was curated by Russell Roberts. Has it been changed a lot to fit Moderna Museet? DE: The basic idea of the exhibition remains the same as does the largest part of the loans. I was closely involved in the early stages of the exhibition planning but left before it took place in Oxford. I have simplified the structure of the exhibition a little, breaking it into seven rather than eight sections, and have rewritten the introductory panels for each section. We have commissioned Sara Arrhenius to write a special introduction to the Swedish edition of the catalogue, mentioning in passing that the father of modern Taxonomy was the Swedish scientist Carl Linneus. Also with Leif Wigh and Maria Lind I have added some material. We felt that the "art section" of the exhibition needed strengthening and work by a number of artists ranging from Andy Warhol, Susan Hiller, Christian Boltanski and Lorna Simpson to Christine Borland, Maria Hedlund and Nathan Colley has been added. In addition we were also concerned to define the specifically Swedish context of the exhibition and to use the considerable resources of Moderna Museet's Photography Collection and Library. This lead to the incorporation of some little known Crimean images by Roger Fenton, some mug shots of famous Swedish film stars taken in the 1940s and 1950s, the pioneering slow motion photography of Dr Harold Edgerton, the virtually unknown studies of people from all over Sweden made by the State Institute of Racial Hygiene in Uppsala in the 1920s and '30s, and previously unexhibited nineteenth century studies of criminals in Swedish prisons as well as much more.......... "I think that it is a myth that contemporary art does not refer to history and that the dichotomy you make between the "historical" on the one side and the "contemporary" on the other is false. Every manifestation in the Museum is, for better or worse, contemporary even though it may contain historical material." AG: "In Visible Light", "Wounds" and the forthcoming "After the Wall",are all exhibitions with an historical approach: an idea or a problem is discussed in the light of what has been done before. Are you planning any exhibitions with only contemporary art, without referring to history? DE: I think that it is a myth that contemporary art does not refer to history and that the dichotomy you make between the "historical" on the one side and the "contemporary" on the other is false. Every manifestation in the Museum is, for better or worse, contemporary even though it may contain historical material. We are very consciously aware of this. But if you have a problem with history, the present Avatar exhibition and all the Moderna Museet Projekts have little overt historical content. AG: Is "In Visible Light" in itself a statement, or does it just want to show how photography has been used to categorise the world? DE: It is intended to be more of a revelation than a statement. It shows how shakey the categories are in which we are inclined to put things and how these categories can dominate the ways in which an image is seen and understood. There is a lot of history in the exhibition - as well as considerable amount of contemporary art: history of science, history of sociology, history of anthropology, eugenics...historical ideas of what constituted beauty - natural and physical - many of which have not entirely disappeared. And of course the exhibition also examines the interface between the history of photography itself and the ways in which artists, over the past forty years right up to the present, using the medium of photography have changed the meanings and contexts of this history. Cindy Sherman's Film Stills are incomprehensible without at least an awareness of the imagery of film noir and cheesecake. Even that hottest and consciously most banal of contemporary categories The Everyday, the subject of the next Sydney Biennial, has its own historical iconography in Atget and Renger-Patzsch. "It's better than a bad drawing and it is actual as long as the image is not manipulated and the caption is accurate." AG: The simple but important question about whether a photography is a documentary medium or not seems to me to focus on the conflict between Modernism and Post-Modernism. To put it concisely: in a Post-Modern age one doesn't believe in the factual truth of photography. Much of the work in "In Visible Light" touches on this issue. Do you have any definite position in this conflict? DE: Well, for a start I don't equate Modernism with simple nineteenth-century Positivism and belief in progress. And here one has to distinguish between the contemporaneous histories of Modernism, which on the whole were rather naively Positivist, and the phenomenon of Modernism itself (however you define it) which from its origins has always been polyvalent. So I really don't think that this is the issue. Many of the earliest photographers had previously been painters and the artifice of art seems to me to have always run in and out of the medium. A photograph can be cropped or manipulated to show anything but because it seems to be a mechanical, unmediated operation with little intervening between the motif, the emulsion of the film and the final image it has an aura of objectivity. And I guess that many photographers have used this as a selling point...particularly the idea of a special, "super true" objectivity which only some photographers can see but at this point the activity gets perilously close to art - at least it seems so to me. That is not to say that photography cannot record things that are there but which we cannot see - just think of some medical or astronomical examples! "What seems to have been happening is that while most photographers exclusively work with photography many artists use photography as one of a number of media in their work and that the idea of a "good photograph" is not their final objective." AG: Yes, photography is used as "evidence" in daily papers, natural sciences, in forensic science etc. What do you think about that? DE:It's better than a bad drawing and it is actual as long as the image is not manipulated and the caption is accurate. A well balanced, exciting photograph with a wrong or misleading caption could, however, under certain circumstances have a pernicious influence. AG: Regarding these crucial questions, what do you think about the future of photography as an art form? Will it, for instance, retain a special status or will it become just one artistic medium among many others. DE: I think that photography always has been one artistic medium among many, although obviously not all photographers have, or have had, the pretension to make art. What seems to have been happening is that while most photographers exclusively work with photography many artists use photography as one of a number of media in their work and that the idea of a "good photograph" is not their final objective.~