All photography works in the spaces between our mind’s eye and embodied social reality. But as photography has become more self-aware, recognizing that it is situated within both art and documentation, it has learned to handle old chores in new ways.
For those with a social conscience this repositioning is a problem because we no longer see merely through the photograph into the thing itself. We also realize the photo is a framed entrance to such issues as absence, history, memory, even a melancholy yearning in equal proportions to the thing seen. Decisiveness is certainly not abandoned but it is no longer sufficient in a social world now understood globally through local conditions and without the easy solutions that marked past modernist assumptions.
Beatrix Reinhardt speaks of a “purposeful displacement” in reference to her work. Certainly her biography—born in Russia, raised in East Germany, then moving to the USA—qualifies her as a global nomad, whose geographical site of identity is located in no particular place. Much of globalism argues that meaning and identity emerge from motion rather than location. True perhaps, in part, but such claims can appear too disembodied, too removed for those, like Reinhardt, who focus on the local human condition. Hers is not the position of a global tourist stationed on the outside wistfully looking in, but rather is an extension of her attempts to participate within communities.
Her photographs record the physical meeting places of social clubs in which she frequently or variously resides or participates for a period of time. Visitor? Perhaps. But a club is a group of people who have diverse interests yet agree or need to come together occasionally to share common fragments of desire. No one pretends that momentary social interactions construct the wholeness of life, but they do construct valuable parts—and these are the heart of Reinhardt’s photo journey. The photographic correlation to these realizations is the action shot, but Reinhardt chooses the documentary precisely to raise the question of photography’s relation to its own genres.
Her works look vacant, static, and powerfully formal in their point of view, like those of a portrait photographer who showed up late to the gathering. But look again. Formalism is used to signify, not represent, the scenes which are moments after something has happened. On a primary level she assumes we are attentive observers able to locate evidence of presence; traces remain. The lights are still on, ashtrays remain unemptied, dirty footprints from use mar prior clean environments. Yes, you did just miss it, but it was there.
Time is layered, and reality unstacked as we, like her, pull it back through the details, our embodied eyes slowly moving through the room. These shots and scenes don’t contain the seamlessness of a document, although at first view they seem to. Therein lay the tension. There is an apparent self-conscious struggle contained under the strongly posed certitude in order to theorize the concept of a document. The social resonance creates a purposeful tension against the constraints imposed by the strong frontality, formalism, and purposeful lack of people.
As John Berger, the British critic, famously argued, what is important in a photograph is not in a photograph. The formalism and Reinhardt’s concentration on objects tells us she negotiates the various realms of modernism, social connections and postmodern theory. It’s not objectivity the documents are after, but rather a document of presence through absence. What at first seem like vacant settings are testimonies to the inadequacy of photographs as documents to claim the capture of reality. No system of representation, as the social documentarian Martha Rosler argued, can adequately represent what is real. Indeed, the very nature of the real has come into question and reformulation due to realizations over the imperfections within ourselves, at work in opposition to our very strong drive to construct a totality. It’s not our lives that are at question here; it is how we conceive our social life, in whole or in part, and photography’s relation to it. The apparent transparency of a photograph as document—its function as a delivery system into reality—is not recoverable. Other pathways are needed.
Richard Leslie
Richard Leslie is an independent art historian, critic, and curator specializing in contemporary art, theory, criticism, and photography. He is a visiting assistant professor in art history at the State University of New York at Stoneybrook.