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Silver is better than Gold:

-An exploration of what can make photography Art-

joshua brancheau

This book and this image are both dedicated to Henri Cartier Bresson, May the artistic life forever be a quest to capture that decisive moment in our work and in our hearts.

Capturing the Moment, Fall 2000 Silver Gelatin Print, 20 x 16

Mundus est fabula -Ren Descartes

In his 1968 essay Understanding a Photograph, John Berger makes an intriguingly simple claim. Photographs, he suggests, bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographers decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen.
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one and the same 1/125 of a second, of one and the same 1/60 of a second will only ever differ in the manner of their seeing. The difference between them is a difference of how and not of what. And it is this difference in the manner of their seeing that allows me but not you to say of the one but not of the other that this is what I saw; it is this difference in the manner of their seeing that allows you but not me to say of the other but not of the one that this is what you saw. What separates one from the other, in other words, what separates one photograph from the next, is the seeing itself, the seeing that each photograph is. This and nothing more. If the photograph were really a matter of its object, how could we distinguish between one photograph and the next? In this sense, then, the photograph is never of its object. Rather, the photograph is only ever of its seeing. True, the photograph does represent something. Something is always there, in silver gelatin or in ink. But what is there what, for want of a better term, we might call the image or the picture, the referent, i f y o u l i k e , i n o r d e r t o distinguish it from its reference what is there is there only as the mark or the trace of a particular way of seeing. And it is precisely this that Joshua Brancheaus photographs make us see. Consider the Where the Wild Things Are series. Here, a sequence of meticulously constructed city scenes are thrown into comic relief by the digital addition of wild animals bears, whales, a moose. In every case, Brancheau makes no real attempt to hide the fact that the images have been manipulated. The animals are very precisely not seamlessly blended with their new environment. Indeed, the viewer is taken to have grasped the artificial nature of the images, taken to know that the image has been constructed and to be comfortable with knowing

The very precise terms that Berger uses here strike me as propos. For Berger, the decision that lies behind every photograph behind Joshua Brancheaus photographs, for example is not that some particular event or some particular object is worth recording. Rather, the decision is that it is worth recording that some particular event or some particular object has been seen and has been seen in this particular way. A few lines further on, Berger offers the following gloss on what he takes to be the message that every photograph is: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording .2 I would prefer to say although perhaps it amounts to much the same thing I have decided that this seeing is worth recording. I have decided that this seeing is worth recording. Such is, I want to suggest, the utterance that every photograph is. What matters about every photograph, what makes it the specific photograph that it is and not some other photograph is not the event or the object that it seems to report or record; rather, what matters, what makes it the specific photograph that it is, is the specificity of the seeing itself. Two photographs, taken at one and the same time and of one and the same event two images of
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Understanding a Photograph in John Berger, Selected Essays, edited by Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 216. Cf. ibid..

precisely what elements are present, to use Barthes term, and which are not. I n a r at h e r
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image is any less constructed or any more captured than the later ones? What Brancheau seems to be inviting us to ponder both here and with the striking images of the Experience Auschwitz series is this: the photograph does not record some particular event or some particular object; rather, it records records precisely by being the manner in which some particular event or some particular object has been seen. As s uc h, the ph otograph is tautological, although not in the sense that Barthes assumed. 5 For Barthes, every photograph involves a certain voici, a certain voil that it cannot escape: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe Its as if the photograph always carries its reference along with it.6 Fo r B r a n c h e a u a n d t h i s i s w h a t h i s photographs are about the photograph is tautological insofar as it is the seeing that it records. Simon Sparks

straightforward sense, therefore, the images reflect technically what is happening thematically. Something rather different and rather more interesting happens, though, when the series is seen in the light of Capturing the Moment, the wo r k t h a t i n t r o d u c e s t h i s v o l u m e an d t h a t , presumably, therefore, explains it. Here, too, a city scene is punctured by the presence of something wild, in this instance a bird, caught very precisely in the geometrical centre of the photograph. In terms of content alone, therefore in terms of object, if you like Capturing the Moment appears very much of a piece with the later series of Wild Things. And yet, unlike the later animals, the bird in the centre of Capturing the Moment is intended as something that is actually there. Unlike the later photographs, in which Brancheau very clearly mediates between the viewer of the photograph and the scene that was actually there before him, Capturing the Moment is immediately given. The moment here is captured and not constructed.4 But is that really the case? Seeing the first piece in the light of the series might cause us to wonder. Seeing the first piece in the light of the series might, in fact, lead us to think about the extent to which Capturing the Moment does, in fact, capture the moment. Nothing, after all, tells us that this image, too, is not the result of digital manipulation. If bears can be set down on a London street, why not birds in a park in Krakow? Indeed, Brancheau seems almost to encourage these sorts of worries with closing line of this volume: The irony, he writes, is that this whole thing, this book, was crafted on a computer, no silver gelatin at all. Even if we assume that this is not the case, that the bird is, in fact, there, what entitles us to say that this

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Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980) 36 The fact that the setting for Capturing the Moment is more natural and less artificial as it were the city scene in question is a park and not a main street seems to reinforce this sense of immediacy.

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Cf. Barthes, La chambre claire 2 Ibid..

Hello and Welcome!


Before you lies an exploration of what makes photography art. I have dubbed this little project, Silver is better than Gold, because the power of silver nitrate salts to capture photo reality makes photography the ultimate art form, and silver the ultimate metal. By exploring what I see in photography, I wish to pay homage to this great metal and the relatively new tradition that has brought photography to the threshold of today. A wide-angle lens can capture more than the eye can see, a narrow depth of field can force a point of introspection. Photography has the ability to frame a personal perspective for the rest of the world to see, and force us to look at things we might not see everyday. The world we live in and experience in our waking lives is a giant living sculpture. The photo artist utilizes the perspective of a lens in order to capture intimate parts of this world of experience. The technological advances that have brought us photography have enabled the world to create exact replications of the objects we experience in the world. For centuries the goal of European art was to master realism, but with the advent of photography, we get the advent of impressionism, cubism, and postmodernism. Art just has not been the same since the rise of photography. Yet, people are still unwilling to accept photography as art. What is art? What could possibly make photography art?? Lets look at some photographs

Where the Wild Things Are

going to soho, 2005 digital print, 6x9

suburban marmot, 2005 digital print, 6x9

Why does man not see things? He always gets in the way: he conceals things.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?
-Friedrich Nietzsche

sightseeing london, 2005 digital print, 6x9

a swim in the park, 2005 silver gelatin print, 10x8

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them. -John Berger

save the whales, 2005 digital prints, 6x9

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile! -Henry David Thoreau

rook takes pawn, 2005 digital print, 6x9

stuck in traffic, 2005 digital print, 6x9

In Where the Wild Things Are I wanted to question mans place in nature. Humans reside in fabricated environments, providing shelter and comfort to those who can afford to pay for it. We can be so caught up in the environment we have built for ourselves, that we lose sight of the creatures and the environment that our constructions have displaced. Man arose out of nature and at some point lost contact with it. We became so absorbed in our ability to use our minds to overcome nature that we placed ourselves higher than it. Nature has continually tried to contact man, but the predominant perspective of man fears nature and will do anything to stop it from invading into mans space. Man is in conflict with nature. In this body of work I have tried to skew the lines between mans environment and nature. What if we eliminated the natural world, and the surface of the earth was one giant cityscape?? Would the only place to see wild animals be the zoo?? Would whales cross Times Square?? In eliminating the landscape of nature, would we eliminate all of its creatures too?? Where are the Wild Things??

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

What could possibly make photography art?

When asked what is art, Pablo Picasso responded what is not. If I were asked who is an artist, I would respond who is not. We all make art in out own unique ways. Imagination and creation are a few of the things that have set man above the rest of the animals, and art is some sort of refined aesthetic creation. We are all creative in our own unique ways. Art is about creation. Art making is a special way of connecting with the mind in order to bring forward some of our thoughts, manifest dreams into realities. The main argument against photography as an art is that photographs capture reality they do not create it. Anyone who has actively thought about taking a photograph knows that taking pictures is not necessarily a passive capturing process. A photographer can play a very active role in the process of capturing his or her view of reality. Ansel Adams considered his photographs to be surreal. Have you ever seen a sky as dramatic as the sky in an Ansel Adams photograph? Adams could visualize the sky exactly the way he wanted to capture it. Henri Cartier Bresson coined the phrase the decisive moment. He captured images which held emotions and events in timeless space, which we can all respond to. Paul Weston gave us a new way of seeing peppers. Through the active photographers lens there are unlimited worlds to be explored. From constructed landscapes out of torn bits of paper to the elaborate fabricated worlds of Shauna and Robert Parke Harrison, the camera and its trusty piece of silver gelatin film act as an interpreter for the vision of any reality that can be seen. Art is a form of communication. We express ourselves, or we express our agenda. In this volume I have included three forms of photographic art to speculate. The first kind being the sort where multiple images are brought together into single frames in the montage techniques of Jerry Ulesmann. The second kind is documentary photography. Documentary photography is inherently more about capturing what is there rather than manipulating it,. Yet through the use of a camera documentary photographers can share their perspective and tell their stories. The third type is the capturing of constructed environments and camera manipulations which can be created in the studio or wherever your art may draw you. I believe there is art in all three types of photography to varying degrees. The photo-making process is about taking the world we see inside of our heads and sharing it with the rest of the world. I believe all three types operate in this fashion.

He does not create his object in reality as does the painter, but he creates, before the camera begins to function, the irrevocably ultimate aesthetic form. He carries the notion of the shape of an object in himself and he takes the object destined for that form, giving it a certain position or moving it into a certain situation of light, in a certain relation to space.... The photographers artistic performance is thus displayed in pre-photographic and in postphotographic action; in the preparation for real photographic action and in the reproduction of the photograph. The painter recreates his object from beginning to end ... through his activity, through his painting. The photographer, it is true, changes his object, too, by his photographic action ... he gives the convincing shape, most clearly adequate to his perception, before, and he fixes this shape in a mechanistic way.... Whereas the painter remains creative from first to last, the creative activity of the photographer is confined and limited; whereas the artistic action of the painter is not interrupted, the artistic action of the photographer breaks off in the moment in which the apparatus is to fix and make visible its effect. -Heinrich Schwarz

Experience Auschwitz

Lies, Fall 2000 silver gelatin print, 14x11

Arbeit Macht Frei loosely translates into work makes you freeIn the wrought iron over the gate of Auschwitz,
this promise for salvation hangs in iry dissonance with the reality of what its gates enfold

Pain, Fall 2000 silver gelatin print, 8x10

Confinement, Fall 2000 silver gelatin print, 10x8

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as goodthe atavism of an older ideal.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Silenced Struggles, Fall 2000 silver gelatin print, 8x10

Too Many Lost Soles, Fall 2000 silver gelatin print, 10x8

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. -Ingmar Bergman

A Failed Cover-Up, Fall 2000 c-print, 15x11

In Experience Auschwitz I wanted to share an intense experience. Spending a day on the grounds of Auschwitz and Birkenau is one that will never be forgotten. I would like to go back and make an entire book out of imagery from these sights. The feeling of walking through this nightmare for so many people was indescribable. Spending a day on the sight where hundreds of thousands of people were worked to death or killed leaves quite a knot in ones stomach

Hearing about something a hundred times is not as good as seeing it once.


-Chinese Proverb

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that in the process of making a work of art,

the lack of being returns to the positive.

Her reference to an art works lack of being is a reference to the thought of the artwork within the artists head. Previous to its completion, the artwork exists as a thought and lacks being. It is only through the process of making works of art that artists are able to make their thoughts into positive realities

A Legacy of Dead White Men

The Patriarch, Fall 2004 silver gelatin print, 24x30

We have met the enemy and he is us. -Pogo

King of Diamonds, Fall 2004 digital print, 24x30

Queen of Hearts, Fall 2004 digital print, 24x30

Jack of Spades, Fall 2004 digital print, 24x30

What is the difference between artworks and artifacts???

Divide and Conquer, Fall 2004 silver gelatin print, 28x40

A Legacy of Dead White Men is about being trapped inside of a dominant culture. What does that mean? What do we carry over from our crusty white ancestors?? The drive for money and powerAn idea that we are right and should impose our righteousness on others. The conflict between a heart that wants to help and a culture that wants everything for itself is tough. This is just a budding body of work that is most likely to consume me for an extended period in my life. Through the imagery of this work I will be exploring the stresses and struggles that I encounter through my family which holds me up, my psyche which holds me back, and the society that I encounter every day. I try to use popular and traditional symbols to communicate my ideas and express the distinct cultural experience of being a white male.

To see far is one thing: going there is another. -Brancusi

Any Last Words?

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Immanuel Kant defined art as a finality without an end.

Artists create objects, which can be experienced by the world; immortalized emotion, and personal experience, which is forever experienced anew by the observers whom encounter it.

Computers are useless all they can give you are answers. -Pablo Picasso

The irony is that this whole thing, this book, was crafted on a computer, no silver gelatin at all, just a bunch of bits and bots!

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