| As Brecht says ... by David Evans |
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| Seventy-five years ago, the German Marxist Bertolt Brecht wrote that a documentary image of a munitions factory didn’t reveal much about the actual conditions of production inside its walls. We would learn more, Brecht thought, from ‘something artificial, invented’, or ‘constructed’. Brecht’s incredibly perceptive point suggests that mere fidelity to appearance does not necessarily help in understanding complex modern reality; in fact, a montage construction may show us more than a picture of this kind. (Edwards, 2006) |
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| Tillmans has said that in photographing gold ingots he indicates something meaningful about money and value. An old remark by Bertolt Brecht is useful here: a photograph of a factory tells you nothing about the relations between the people inside it. The title of his Tate show and book – If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters – gives the game away, as well as reflecting the recent art-world prejudice for the straightforward depiction of the ‘real’. What is really being granted here are various naturalistic glimpses of objects and people. Access to the real demands a higher price – in thought, knowledge, and the building of structures, and in the realization that some things do matter more than others. (Stallabrass, 2004) |
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| … Hine’s major photobook of the 1930s, his Men at Work (1932), was an example of appreciative acquiescence rather than reforming zeal. It was a celebration of the American worker, and included a number of images from his renowned series on the construction of the Empire State Building, one of capitalism’s last hurrahs before the Depression began to bite … As Bertolt Brecht pointed out, a photograph of the Krupp factory exterior (or the construction of the Empire State Building) – no matter how formally adroit – tells us nothing of the complex socio-political forces that brought it into being. (Parr and Badger, 2004) [...] |
| David Evans is a research fellow in photography at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth. He writes regularly for journals such as Afterimage, Eye and Source, and is secretary of the online photography magazine criticaldictionary.com. |
Excerpt from 'As Brecht says ...' by David Evans. All text © David Evans 2007. Full Version can be read in the soon to be released Photography Class Catalogue. |