In case you missed the panel we did at the Southern Graphics Council's Conference this week, I wanted to put up some links to the panelists' sites. They were great, and I hope you enjoy considering their relation to the problem of how images are meaningful as much as I did...
This is how we opened the conversation...
This is a conversation about authority.
About who has it and who believes them. It’s about how printmaking in its many forms plays a vital role in creating and maintaining authority, even as other seemingly more reliable technologies have emerged.
If there are any ‘artistic’ print makers in the room, I beg your patience, but encourage you to listen carefully to the panelists, as an individual’s interpretations and personal expressions are part of all the seemingly objective information we intend to discuss. Inevitably part. A good deal of what we’ll talk about may not be art in the strictest sense, but, like art, it concerns itself truth. One must remember that the eyewitness doesn’t only tell the story of the thing he’s witnessed, she describes how she experienced it.
First, we’ll hear from Professor Joshua Brown, who will describe the ways in which a news hungry public experienced the American Civil War prints formed the foundation for understanding images in 19th century illustrated newspapers. We’ve all heard that the Civil War was the first war fought on camera, but few realize just how hard it was to disseminate the images captured by pioneering photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Matthew Brady, or Alexander Gardener, or how technological limitations inherent in photography made for static, ambiguous images. In the nearly 40 years between the appearance of illustrated weeklies like Franks Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly, wood engravings carried the news in pictures to a ravenous readership. Exploring visual narratives that are unlike photographs – such as history painting or theatre – Professor Brown finds the basis for print-imagery’s acceptance as ‘truthful.’
Photography, with its ironclad reputation for objectivity, is a kind of marginalia (a remarque) that affects and our understanding of the central printed image. Added to the artist’s technical arsenal long after printing methods had been perfected, photography often fell short of the kind of authenticity printmaking that printmaking easily achieved. Professor Michael Sappol will talk about how photo’s absence at the birth of medical illustration put in place certain expectations for that particular species of imagery. Medical illustration’s heritage is in drawing and printmaking, methods particularly well-suited to selective emphasize, the rendering of certain physical properties (like texture), and a balance between the general and the specific. But even when photo-technology caught up to the printmaker’s art, printmaking still had a role to play because of its authoritative connotations.
Daniel Heyman is a painter and printmaker from Philadelphia who has been capturing the images and testimonies of victims of torture from Abu Ghraib and other black sites through out that troubled region. Treading on ground that is more commonly worked by documentary filmmakers and photojournalists, Daniel Heyman employs a discourse identified with subjectivity – that of contemporary art – in pursuit of documentary truth. His works – which incorporate a myriad of printing techniques (most often etching) – slow down a process photography tends to accelerate. His work looks to emotional truths, those beneath appearances that can only be observed over time as a story unfolds, and not in the blink of an eye or the flip of a shudder.
Before we begin, I want to thank each of the panelists for participating in this wide-ranging look at a truth and authenticity, which are curiously shifting subjects, and thank you for your attention and questions. This panel is an opportunity for me as an artist and critic to pursue a question that has weighed heavily on my mind – what kind of information can we reasonably expect to learn from pictures.
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