Out of Focus
by Noam Lupu

The opening of the first Triennial of Photography and Video at New York's International Center of Photography should have marked a turning point in the way we think about photography. With more than 100 works by 40 artists from across the globe, the triennial is the first expansive look at photographic artwork in New York and a major milestone in the acceptance of photography as a legitimate art form.

According to the curators, the triennial is intended to provide a "critical assessment of new or previously unseen developments in photography and video" — a welcome departure from the center's traditional focus on photojournalism and documentary photography.

But for all that, this first triennial missed a tremendous opportunity.

Photography has certainly come a long way since its meager origins in Louis Daguerre's images of his study. Until the 1930s, when the portable camera and 35mm film were introduced, photography was primarily an art of family portraiture and death. "Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens," wrote Susan Sontag in the New Yorker in December 2002, "photographs had an advantage over any painting as a memento to the vanished past and the dear departed."

With the advent of portability came photojournalism, the documentation of events through images (and, Sontag notes, of death in the making). The photograph became a document not merely of people who have lived but of events that have occurred. Their wide distribution — think of Life magazine in its heyday — also made photographs an integral part of the news. The photographer could capture an event objectively. The authenticity of a photograph was indisputable; unlike text or painting, it tells the viewer, "this has been."

But how authentic is the photographic image? Ansel Adams spent hours in the darkroom adjusting exposure times to enhance the contrast in his famous images of California landscapes. Even legendary war correspondent Robert Capa is said to have staged his famous image of the dying Republican soldier during the Spanish Civil War. Now we can manipulate digital photographs with changes unnoticeable to the human eye. And what if the photograph does not capture a moment at all? Imogen Cunningham's 1957 image of an unmade bed is not about what is there but what isn't — the implied history of who was in the bed. Not exactly authentic documentation.

In 1977, Sontag published her influential collection "On Photography," one of the first attempts to examine critically the photograph's subjectivity. "Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it," she wrote, "photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are." You see only what the photographer wants you to see, composed the way the photographer wants it composed. There is a didacticism, Sontag noted, between the subject of an image and the viewer. And this relationship is mediated not only by the photograph itself, but also by the choices of the photographer. Many of Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of poverty, for example, would not evoke the same degree of misery in color.

A quarter-century later, you might expect the Triennial of Photography and Video to emphasize this role of the photographer. Its curators, however, would have you believe that all 40 photographers were motivated only by their choice of subject. The show, entitled Strangers, suggests that these photographers were exploring the concept of the stranger, that recurring figure on the urban landscape with whom we have but fleeting interaction. "Simply put," they write in the catalog's preface, "we realized that many artists were leaving the studio and going out into public to engage people who were unknown to them as part of their art-making activity." There is little, if any, mention of how these works — through composition and technique — affect the viewer.

Rather, the curators heavy-handedly drive home their "strangers" theme at all costs. Each work or series is accompanied by a curatorial analysis. The texts come just short of telling you what to feel: They tell you what to look for and how to interpret the images, frequently using the word "clearly," as if the curators are somehow privy to the only valid interpretation.

Several of the works do in fact consciously explore the idea of the stranger. Shizuka Yokomizu's series, "Dear Stranger" explores an unorthodox method of portraiture: She contacts people living on ground-floor apartments by anonymous letter, asking them to stand before their windows at a specific hour while she photographs them. In her letters she clearly explains that they are to have no interaction whatsoever so that they remain strangers. The results are portraits of subjects at times skeptical, with arms crossed, at other times trustingly compliant or even exhibitionist, shirtless or in their underwear.

Many of the works in the triennial, however, speak less to the theme of strangers than to other contemporary anxieties: adolescence, nationalism and cultural identity, public protest, postcolonialism, representations of war. In their composition, they do more than depict strangers — they estrange the viewer.

Zineb Sedira's video, "Mother Tongue," for example, explores questions of identity and cultural perspective. In three short videos, the viewer witnesses three conversations — between Sedira and her mother, Sedira and her daughter and Sedira's mother and daughter. The grandmother speaks Arabic, Sedira speaks French and her daughter speaks English, telling the story of immigration in a globalized world. There is certainly a sense of intimacy between the women, but the viewer is also left with a jarring sense that certain things are lost in translation, that there is a linguistic level of miscommunication across generations and across cultures within a single family.

Tim Maul's series "Traces and Presence" records hauntingly empty urban spaces. In a brief text accompanying the series, Maul explains that he followed a psychic around New York City, taking photographs of spaces in which the psychic saw the traces or presence of human grief or anger. To the viewer, though, the photographs seem banal: one image of a street curb, another of a staircase, another of a brick façade. The traces and presences are invisible to the viewer just as they are to the photographer, both of whom are blind to, indeed estranged from, what the psychic sees.

In the case of Luc Delahaye's panoramic image of the Jenin refugee camp, the curators highlight the lack of interaction between strangers in public space. The photographic shows groups of people, two doctors, women carrying groceries nonchalantly pass by the rubble of a bombed-out building. Yet Delahaye's image is also composed such that the viewer is kept just outside the camp, looking in. The viewer is estranged from the life of the camp, a sort of post-colonial voyeur looking in but always outside.

It is unfortunate the triennial's curators did not explore this relationship between the spectator and the art. Perhaps this is a consequence of collaboration — one can imagine the difficulty of developing a unifying theme among four curators. Or perhaps the center found it difficult to let go of its own history in documentary photography and the focus on the subject in an objective photographic image.

Either way, the first triennial is a missed opportunity to bring to the fore questions about the nature of photography and, more importantly, how artists use the medium to evoke a range of contemporary issues. Maybe next time.

E-mail Noam Lupu at noam at flakmag dot com.