| The photograph is commonly imagined as the most literal of the arts: what we see in the image is what was there. Even in the age of the digital image this understanding of the medium persists. Yet photography too, from its earliest moments, was understood as a space for performance and a frame where the transient could be pressed into permanence. Consider side-by-side Bayard’s Le Noyé of 1839 and in the same year Fox Talbot’s claim that ‘I have captured a shadow!’ Why not then the photograph —that ultimate vision machine, as the recorder of dreams, as the conveyance of what seems illusory or impossible. |  |
Galerie Caprice Horn – Curator Chris Townsend
The photograph is commonly imagined as the most literal of the arts: what we see in the image is what was there. Even in the age of the digital image this understanding of the medium persists. Yet photography too, from its earliest moments, was understood as a space for performance and a frame where the transient could be pressed into permanence. Consider side-by-side Bayard’s Le Noyé of 1839 and in the same year Fox Talbot’s claim that ‘I have captured a shadow!’ Why not then the photograph —that ultimate vision machine, as the recorder of dreams, as the conveyance of what seems illusory or impossible. Just so long as we remember that in dreams begin responsibilities.
Chris Townsend is a writer and curator based in Berlin and London. He is the author of Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking, Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, 1970-2002; New Art from London (published 2006) and Francesca Woodman (to be published by Phaidon in November 2006). He has edited and contributed to The Art of Tracey Emin, The Art of Rachel Whiteread and The Art of Bill Viola all published by Thames & Hudson. He is currently editing a collection of essays on Jake and Dinos Chapman and writing a book on Contemporary Art and Death.
