If you take photographs out of the context of ordinary life — out of the lives lived by people who do not think of themselves as photographers or artists — to insert them into an art context, you will have to charge them up (unless for some reason the photographs somehow possess the artistic pretense that is so desperately sought after by those who can’t enjoy photography for what it does and thus is).
There are many different ways of charging up such photographs. You can create juxtapositions and/or groupings that would not appear in their original contexts. Or you can intervene after the fact, by which I mean that you alter the original photographs in some fashion.
When this work is done by competent hands – the physicality of materials appears to play an important role here, the outcome can be outright exhilarating. Think of, for example, Ruth van Beek‘s incessantly inventive interventions, all of which seemingly so simple — but you still have to come up with them (and most other people simply don’t).
Whereas Van Beek mostly works with commercial imagery — there are a lot of photographs that appear to have emerged from instructional contexts, for his La Cuarta Pared Diego Ballestrasse used family albums (his own and another family’s). The Argentinian artist who now lives in Spain selected small fragments from photographs, fragments that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
Photography is a way of making someone pay attention to something. Art photography often deals with confounding its audience’s expectations: you expect one thing but are presented with another.
The core of La Cuarta Pared centers on presenting photographic fragments that must mean something — when looking at art, there is that clear expectation that meaning might arise. But some art refuses to offer up simple and convenient ways to get to it.
What, after all, does the white tip of a woman’s shoe that just barely peeks out from underneath its wearer’s white dress tell us? The expectation is that there must be a meaning, and when none is clearly presented, the viewer will inevitably construct one. Was someone getting married? And if yes (or even no) what would the tip of that shoe tell us?
On his website, the artist presents a longish text that dives into all kinds of aspects of photography that we are asked to believe are involved in the making of the work. It’s not that I would want to argue with this — at times, I do find discussions about photography interesting.
Were I to encounter the photographs alongside such an elaboration in real life, though, I would probably be inclined to ask the following: you take your own family’s photographs, cut out small segments many of which seem particularly charged up, and then you expect us to believe that it’s all just about photography?
I don’t necessarily intend for the above to be seen as a criticism. Or rather, it’s a criticism of the verbiage that comes with La Cuarta Pared — but not at all a criticism of the photographs themselves.
After all, this is a hugely enjoyable body of work, in part because larger parts of it are so unsettling. Something appears to have gone horribly wrong, but it’s impossible to tell what exactly that is. Again, there’s that game of expectations around photography, and if you play it the way Ballestrasse plays it, people will have questions.
As an artist, you don’t want to give any answers. As an artist, you don’t want to explain anything. You only want to make people feel something (and if they feel something for the love of god don’t go into a spiel around what photography does).
After it arrived in the mail, La Cuarta Pared (the book) ended up in the pile of books I intended to write about. Somehow, time went by, and now it’s a year and a half later. I remember looking at the book many times and thinking I’d wait until the right moment to write about it.
Given its imagery, I always felt I wasn’t quite ready to write the piece — until the other day, when I was rearranging books on my shelves, and I encountered the book again. I am just as intrigued by the book as I was when I first looked at it. And I realized that with this book, I will never be able to identify the right moment. After all, that’s what its images center on: the impossibility to clearly see what is on view.
Recommended.
La Cuarta Pared; images by Diego Ballestrasse; essay by Marta Dahó; unpaginated (with insert); University of Cádiz; 2024
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