Photography, Performance, Ruin: Performing photography in site of architecture

Abstract

This essay is written from the perspective of a photographer aware of the flaws of the medium in providing an accurate account of reality. Photography and the act of photographing are considered in performative terms and the value of performance in extending photography's penetrative and illuminating power is discussed. In exploring these ideas the essay considers photography in relation to time, history and ruin. A reading of a photograph as a premonition of ruin is considered in relation to the photographic representation of architecture. The author's own photographic encounters with the exterior of the Bank of England are examined in terms of how the performative act of photography, coupled with the medium's relation to ruin, may reveal something of that building's history – as an institution founded on abstract notions of money and power. The author's subjective experience with photography is considered in relation to the interpreted spatial and temporal dynamics of performance and ruin manifest in the work of Robert Smithson. Of interest here is Smithson's approach to photography, clashing the matter-of-factness of mechanical photographic reproduction with allegorical interpretation and allusion to the ruinous forces of entropy. The visual and conceptual resolutions of Smithson's ideas are considered in relation to Walter Benjamin's advocacy of subjective interpretation and his envisioning of a messianic redemptive arc enabling the past to break the continuum of history. The essay argues that photography is more effective as a revelatory medium if enacted in ways that draw attention to the medium's limitations. The photograph's own signification of inevitable ruin – enhanced through photography's alignment with performance – is key to its illuminating power.

Notes

1 This article was subsequently reworked by Smithson and its title amended to ‘A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (1967) (Smithson 1996: 68).

2 ‘Ruin! Ruin! Ruin!!!’ are words spoken by the ‘Old Lady’ in a cartoon by James Gillray published on 22 May 1797 entitled ‘Political Ravishment or the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in Danger’ (Keyworth 2013).

3 The most recent version of the Bank, designed by Herbert Baker, was built in the 1920s and finally completed in 1937.

4 Here I am referring to the Denkbilder, or thought-images, which formed a particular part of Benjamin's literary output.

5 Perhaps performance can stand in too for the temporal dynamic of narration called for by Sontag when she writes, in response to Brecht's critique: ‘Only that which narrates can make us understand’ (1977: 23). Her statement chimes with Benjamin's advocacy of the itinerant storyteller who makes real understanding possible through experience and interpretation.