Radical Methods of Presenting Artistic Images Are Explored by Contemporary Photographers

Anyone attending the first installment of “Changing Focus: New Approaches in Photography” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center last week hoping to learn about the latest in lens attachments must have been disappointed.

Ditto for those whose idea of photography is limited to images of a sunset, a celebrity or a quaint village in a foreign land.

But for viewers ready to find out about some of the exciting stuff now going on in photography in Southern California, Mark Johnstone’s slide lecture was just the ticket.

A photographer, teacher and critic for Artweek and European Photography magazines, Johnstone is also a friendly, relaxed speaker--qualities that may have helped his audience stomach the radical idea at the root of much contemporary photography: “You don’t really need to make more pictures to be a photographer. What’s interesting is what the artist can do to recontextualize images.”

Contemporary photographers often prefer to be called artists, he said. Many of them work in immense formats (as big as 10 by 25 feet) that create an entirely different experience for the viewer than looking at neatly matted 8-by-10-inch prints on a wall or thumbing through a book of reproductions.

Some of these artists don’t even do “photography as we know it,” in the sense of aiming a camera at something and producing a print. And many are frankly fed up with the second-class status that still haunts the art form Johnstone calls “the fragile child at the low end of the totem pole.”

To explain what he meant by “recontextualize,” Johnstone was ready with an array of examples of images pulled from their original context or represented in an unusual way in order to express a particular point of view about society or language or perception.

Robbert Flick’s big murals are made up of rectangular photographs arranged in a grid format, each one representing a different fragment of the overall view. Posing and shooting ambiguous tableaux of men and women, Eileen Cowan deals with “a basic theme--the question of relationships between people and intangible emotions . . . separation or intimacy or tenderness.”

Robert Heinecken, whose work often deals with sexual concerns, has frequently used photographs taken from other sources as raw material. (“Because I was never in a school situation where someone said, ‘This is the way a photograph is supposed to look,’ ” he once wrote, “I was completely free to cut them up, combine them or do anything.”)

A number of Heinecken’s pieces are based on fashion magazine photographs. Although he has used them to make new images, one of these works--a group of Vogue covers squashed and stapled to a background--was a “sculptural” arrangement involving no photography at all on his part.

Tim Bradley, one of numerous “emerging” artists that Johnstone discussed, builds table-top models of Los Angeles neighborhoods and then takes photographs of the models. The Hollywood reference (“cities” created for the sole reason of being photographed) is inescapable.

Lance Carlson, another relative newcomer to the photo scene, has created a series of 3-by-4-foot photographs of ordinary objects--a screw, a light bulb, a funnel. Surrounded by frames that are actually part of the photographs, these images are intended, in part, to focus the viewer’s thoughts on the functions of simple but indispensable modern tools.

Yes, there are significant contemporary photographers who work in a relatively traditional way. The operative word is “relatively.”

Joe Deal, for example, has taken a series of “straight” landscape photographs of the Inland Empire. But Johnstone explained that Deal’s real subject is “how man organizes his environment.”

Given such a range of approaches (Johnstone also showed the work of 16 other photographers, each pursuing a highly individualistic style and method), it is not surprising that “there is no single way you can really characterize the direction in which work in (Southern California) is going,” Johnstone said.

Partly because of the tendency of today’s photographers to move all over the country in pursuit of teaching positions, Johnstone said, styles percolate throughout American photography as a whole, rather than remaining regional.

Yet, he said, the big problem is that there is no West Coast publication “with international influence” to get the word out about West Coast photography to art museum curators in other parts of the country. When they come to Los Angeles to ferret out new photography for exhibits, he said, “a lot of work is overlooked.”