All images © MacdonaldStrand
Brad Feuerhelm considers the participatory aspects and iconic violence in Most Popular of All Time, a new book by MacdonaldStrand.
Brad Feuerhelm considers the participatory aspects and iconic violence in Most Popular of All Time, a new book by MacdonaldStrand.
Having picked up
the latest self-published title from husband and wife team MacdonaldStrand
(Clare Strand and Gordon Macdonald), I have come away with a greater sense of
what photographic practice can bring about when disseminated through the line of
the pencil, darkly. As photography becomes more and more synonymous with that
of conceptual art practice, the
mantra of the iconic within the medium begins to permeate a greater need for understanding
for our own associations with images that take on a totemic value. A photograph with 'iconic status' is an instantly recognised yet sometimes little
understood visual cadence that explodes across the world in daily consummation
of news and media alike. How do we recognise, process, receive, and finally retransmit
its symbolic value over time? How do we train our minds to adhere to a group
formula for understanding these visual markers of progress and detriment? And
finally, how to we reinterpret this material and send it back out into the
world to promote its niche capacity for several understandings within the
visual language of the time - past, present, and future?
The works contained
within the superb Most Popular of All Time invoke such questions. The project results from an online survey conducted by the artist/curator duo, whereby
users were asked to name their most iconic images. These photographs have become so ubiquitous that it is hard to see their content and they have become detached from their context.From the information gathered, MacdonaldStrand took the resulting
images and reduced them to line drawings with 'connect-the-dot' numbered points. Left half-finished, the image is then to be completed by the further drawing on
the part of the viewer.
All colour is
drained, all traces of photographic grey scale removed. It is a simple yet
effective conceit to reduce photography to that of line, but also embedded
within the work is the ability to promote the ‘punctum’ of its iconic status with
a participatory function - it brings the viewer into a complicit rendering of
line and photographic management of iconic status.
Within the works
selected for re-purposing are Eddie Adams famous ‘execution’ image and Richard
Drew’s Falling Man. These pictures in
and of themselves capture very difficult conditions of humanity and the role of
observer within. The majority of the images displayed are of a
horrific base and coalesce our need to exult difficult imagery into that of
lore and legend, that of description and representation which is often fraught
with a tension not found in other mediums. In short, they are epic tales of
pleasure and pain, ecstasy and absence.
Yet representation
is not the exclusive aim within the book nor the works themselves, but rather they evoke a need to
understand how we as a collective society enable these icons caught on
film (or file) and how we redistribute their meaning and function as the
photograph itself. The structures of violence, the poignantly horrific, and the
sometimes misunderstood signifiers of our collective photographic imagination
delineated by the direct act of hand on paper.
The works are
also available for an incredibly economic rate, which is also clever given the
material. I have purchased all images within the show for less than £100. But in
doing so I understand what exactly it is I am enabling. MacdonaldStrand have
chosen a crafty and intelligent way to examine and exclude some of the
icons of photography through something as commonplace as a pencil. Time and the
flow of chaos have been reduced to the materially manageable.
Brad Feuerhelm
