{"id":1801,"date":"2018-02-10T16:57:52","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T16:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1801"},"modified":"2018-02-10T18:08:23","modified_gmt":"2018-02-10T18:08:23","slug":"laura-gascoigne-photography-wrong-sort-of-january-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1801","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: Photography, Wrong Sort Of – January 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153And the Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting goes to\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a photographer!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yep, Cindy Sherman has won the Imperial Japanese gong for mastery of greasepaint for that interminable string of selfies in fancy dress we all wearied of circa 1980. If not for greasepaint, it would have to be for psychological insight \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and despite her readiness to raid the dressing-up box and make her ageing self look ridiculous in the name of art, Rembrandt she ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sherman is the least qualified non-painter to win the award so far, but she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the first. Bill Viola won it in 2011 and Japan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own Hiroshi Sugimoto in 2009 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c both non-painters who piggyback on the history of painting. But no hard feelings; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all water under the interdisciplinary bridge. As Frances Morris established at the opening of Tate Modern\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Switch House: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t any longer have a hierarchy where painting is at the top.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/p>\n

As if to settle the point beyond dispute, last year the Tate awarded its annual IK Prize for creative talent in the digital industry to a team from Treviso for an experimental project using artificial intelligence to compare news photographs with works in the collection. Titled Re][cognition \u00e2\u20ac\u201c potty punctuation is de rigeur in the digi-world \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it set out to answer the question: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Can a machine make us look afresh at great art through the lens of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/p>\n

The way it worked was this. Every day, a crop of current news photos shot by Reuters\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 photographers were shown to the machine, which then scanned the collection at the rate of thousands of images a minute and spat out matches based on object, facial, compositional and context recognition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now this is an area I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve long been interested in, so I went along to Tate Britain to have a look. For years I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been collecting news photographs that echo the compositions of old master paintings. Some subjects are naturally fertile territory \u00e2\u20ac\u201c almost every refugee mother and baby is a Madonna and Child, every grieving mother a Mater Dolorosa \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but the parallels go further. I was particularly pleased to find a photo of Mick Philpott and his wife Mairead at a press conference following the self-started house fire that killed their six children in 2014 doing a perfect impersonation of Adam and Eve in Masaccio\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Expulsion from Eden. <\/span><\/p>\n

Are these coincidences? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think the borrowings are deliberate; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more that the educated eye of the photographer, making a snap decision in the heat of the moment, matches the scene with a meaningful image in the memory, and frames it. Photographers, being blessed with human brains \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and emotional intelligence \u00e2\u20ac\u201c can make split-second calculations machines can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. (If they could, CCTV would produce prize-winning photographs of people breaking open cash points or mugging old ladies.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course the matches in Recognition were nonsensical. The machine was reliable enough (though not 100%) at identifying \u00e2\u20ac\u02dca man wearing a white shirt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dca woman with dark hair\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but despite its programmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 claims that it could determine \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the age, gender and emotional state of each subject it finds\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, it was defeated by the most basic of facial expressions. It saw smiles on the faces of Matteo Renzi at a press conference and Francis Bacon in a portrait by Lucian Freud because their mouths were slightly turned up at the corners. A month-old baby would not have made the same mistake; it would probably have cried. Nor, if consulted, would it have drawn a comparison between a photo of Brazilian President Michel Temer attending the launch of a banking initiative at the Planalto Palace with Anthony Caro\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1980s sculpture Night Movements, on the basis of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153prominent shapes and structures, visual layout, and colours\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. If it had, its mother would have worried. <\/span><\/p>\n

So it was sensible to include an interactive section where visitors could tap a screen and make their own connections \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to see if Recognition can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I had some fun matching a Black Friday photo of a frenzy of red and white shopping bags with Patrick Heron\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Azalea Garden. But I was disappointed to find that visitors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 choices were not recorded on the website, where they would have exposed the machine\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inadequacies. It seems that while a computer can be programmed to fudge a fair approximation of a Rembrandt portrait, left to itself it can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell one thing from another.<\/span><\/p>\n

If this experiment taught us anything, it was that however anti-hierarchical we may be, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too soon to open up the competition to artificial intelligence. Yet in the field of photography, that day may not be far off. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not talking about news photographers, who do a job no machine could possibly do and bring an acute visual intelligence to it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m talking about \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfine art photographers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 as exemplified by Wolfgang Tillmans, the first photographer to be awarded the Turner Prize, who (having recently finished a stint as a Tate Trustee) has a solo show opening at Tate Modern in February. Tillmans takes egalitarianism to its logical conclusion, refusing to distinguish between motifs: if the geeks from Treviso programmed a computer to take photographs, they would look like his.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

While Tillmans is larging it at Tate Modern, the work of Roger Mayne will be showing at Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield in the exhibition Street View: Photographs of Urban Life (until March 11th). Mayne, a chemistry graduate of Balliol College Oxford, was egalitarian enough to want to devote five years of his life to photographing slum children on the streets of West London. The slums have long gone, but the photographs look as fresh as the day they were taken \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which may be why one was chosen as the poster image for Tate Britain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s photographic survey How We Are. In Mayne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case the past tense would have been more accurate. In 1956 he was given a one-man-show at the ICA. Today he might take photographs for Reuters, but he would never be given a show at Tate Modern because he is the wrong sort of photographer. <\/span><\/p>\n

Photography is now the ultimate democratic medium: anyone and everyone can click a shutter. But which images will last? In 60 years\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 time, will people feel a jolt of recognition on seeing a photograph by Tillmans, or blank indifference? For a photographer who calls himself a fine artist, impartial records of reality aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough: to lodge in the human mind, a photograph must mean more to a flesh-and-blood viewer than to a Recognition machine. Here painting still retains the emotional edge that the painter doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to wait for the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdecisive moment\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to reveal meaning, since meaning is built into the composition. For what it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth, Sherman composes her portraits down to the last hair, which could, I suppose, be thought to bring them halfway towards meeting the criteria for a painting prize. But halfway isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t far enough. There is still the small matter of artistic expression.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Photography doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get nearer experience. Painting gets nearer to it because it can do far more,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said David Hockney in a 1984 interview, before quoting Man Ray: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I photograph what you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t paint, and I paint what you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t photograph.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d A wise judgment, and one the imperial family would do well to consider when awarding the next Praemium Imperiale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Laura Gascoigne
\nThe Jackdaw Jan\/Feb 2017<\/span><\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153And the Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting goes to\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 a photographer!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yep, Cindy Sherman has won the Imperial Japanese gong for mastery of greasepaint for that interminable string of selfies in fancy dress we all wearied of circa 1980. If not for greasepaint, it would have to be for psychological insight \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and despite her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[637,202,639,643,638,640,642,641,644,618,82,67],"class_list":["post-1801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-cindy-sherman","tag-david-hockney","tag-frances-morris","tag-graves-art-gallery","tag-hiroshi-sugimoto","tag-ik-prize","tag-mick-philpott","tag-reuter","tag-roger-mayne","tag-switch-house","tag-tate-modern","tag-wolfgang-tillmans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1801"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1820,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions\/1820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}