We’re pleased that NRK and art critic Mona Pahle Bjerke reviewed Oslo Negativ, giving attention both to our presentation of Arno Rafael Minkkinen and to Nick Brandt’s Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is on Track), 2015, shown in Fotografiska Oslo’s presentation Passion for Photography, with works from the Møller Collection.
Bjerkes review raises a question worth taking seriously. In a world flooded with beautiful images, what makes a photograph matter?
She opens with the central challenge of art photography: lifting an image beyond a mere record of reality, and creating something fresh in a medium where almost everything has already been seen.
She grants that Minkkinen has a clear project and a distinctive voice, but finds the visual twist in many of his images too easy to anticipate. She also stops in front of Narragansett (1973), a photograph in which Minkkinen screams out into a vanishing perspective, and writes, “There is truly nothing obvious about this composition.”
We agree. We’d also like to offer some context.
Minkkinen began photographing his own body in the landscape in the early 1970s. His lineage runs through his teachers Minor White and Harry Callahan, but Minkkinen turned the camera on himself. He works without digital manipulation or assistants, usually with a cable release or the self-timer, giving himself only seconds to get into position.
An arm becomes a branch, a leg becomes part of a lake’s edge. He has now done this for 56 years, in 30 countries and 30 American states. That breadth is deliberate. The work is meant to speak universally, and its message is simple: we are not apart from nature, only a part of it.
Over those decades, his language has travelled far beyond him and has been borrowed, echoed and absorbed into the visual culture we all now swim in.
Perhaps that is the paradox of an original voice. When ideas succeed, they become familiar, and familiarity can easily be mistaken for cliché. Perhaps the “visual twist” we think we recognise today is, in part, something Minkkinen helped teach us to see.
Minkkinen’s own answer to the critic’s question is worth hearing. A photograph matters, he says, when it shows something never seen before, and that can’t come from subject matter alone. Buildings, cars and human bodies have all been photographed countless times; by that measure, we might as well throw our cameras away. “How something has been seen,” he says, “is where meaning and purpose enter.” Year after year he returns to a core theme, and each photograph is its own new variation.
The same review describes Nick Brandt’s photograph Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back, Your LIfe Is On Track 2015) as a powerful work. In her text, the context is fully laid out: the method, the years of return to the same land, the cost of urbanisation to animals and people alike. With the story in place, the image lands.
That, to us, is the real lesson.
In an age of image overload, the photograph alone is rarely enough. History, process and intention are part of the work, and it’s a gallery’s job to bring this to light.
So we’d answer the question raised elsewhere in the review, “beautiful, but so what?”, with an invitation to our readers.
Come and stand in front of the photographs at Oslo Negativ. Better yet, find a seat. Paul Klee believed that to understand a picture, you need a chair. Take your time. Read the texts provided by the galleries, ask the gallerists, and speak with the artists present. There is no such thing as a stupid question.
Or, as Ted Lasso put it: “Be curious, not judgemental.”
Oslo Negativ runs at the Nasjonalgalleriet until 25 October.
Ellen-K Willas, WILLAS contemporary