"The Photograph as Contemporary Art" - Chapter 4: Something and Nothing - Learning points

The course material includes also "The Photograph as Contemporary Art", a very interesting book written by Charlotte Cotton published by Thames and Hudson (London 2014 Third edition). As I decided to do for my practical course, I would like to keep track of my learning points as I gradually go on reading the book reporting the most important sentences by the above author.
No copyright infringement intended - photographs will be removed immediately upon request.

The photographs in this chapter show how non-human things, often quite ordinary, everyday objects, can be made extraordinary by being photographed.
These photographs retain the thing-ness of what they describe, but their subjects are altered conceptually because of the way they have been represented.
Through photography, quotidian matter is given a visual charge and imaginative possibility beyond its everyday function.
The iconography for this strand of photography includes objects balanced and stacked, the edges or corners of things, abandoned spaces, rubbish and decay, and fugitive or ephemeral forms, such as snow, condensation and light.
There is no such a thing as an unphotographed or unphotographable subject.
This strand of photography has been driven by related attempts to make art from the matter of daily life, by breaking the boundaries between the artist's studio, the gallery and the world.
Rather than asking how and by whose hand the work of art was made, the question becomes: How did this object come to be here? And what act or chain of events brought it into focus?

Peter Fischli and David Weiss in their Quiet Afternoon series show table-top assemblages of mundane items that seem to have been found close at hand in the artists' studio.
They created sculptural forms by fixing and balancing these objects together and then photographing them against dull backgrounds with raking shadows, lending a comic drama to their consciously unsophisticated temporary sculptures.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss - Reibeisen Mit Karotte Und Zucchini, 1984-1985

Gabriel Orozco's art is full of impossible, witty and imaginative games. 

Whether in the form of photographs, collages or sculptures, or as an animated conversation between these mediums, his installations and exhibitions display work that, with a remarkable economy of means, offer exciting and playful conceptual journeys.

In his Breath on Piano, on one level the photograph can be seen as the documentation of the highly fugitive act of breathing onto the seamlessly shiny surface of the piano top.

On the other, it makes us see the image as image, as forms on a surface, which is a fundamental condition of a photographic print.

Gabriel Orozco - Breath on Piano, 1993

For more than thirty years, British artist Richard Wentworth has photographed the sign and debris of urban streets.

The objects are often redundant from their original function, reused or abandoned, and through photography they gain new, sometimes comic characterisations.

Richard Wentworth - King Cross, London, 1999

German artist and director Wim Wenders uses still photography when a site carries its own story and does not require him to construct one cinematically.

In Wall in Paris, Texas the cracks in the road and the plaster on the side of the building that has fallen away to reveal the brickwork beneath create an allegory of the deterioration and fragility of the place, emphasised by the fraught diagonal lines of the power cables dissecting the image.

Wim Wenders - Wall in Paris, Texas, 2001

Tracey Baran's highly sensual photograph, Dewy, of an etched glass still wet with moisture and placed on a widow sill, light falling onto it through foliage, is a classic still life.

The sense of physicality in this uncontrived combination of planes and forms is delicately mapped.

Tracey Baran - Dewy, 2000

Jeff Wall's Diagonal Compositions no. 3 may at first seem to be an unusual work for him because of the absence of a cast of actors or impressive mise-en-scène.

Wall's careful construction of a grouping of peripheral things prompts questions about our own relationship with photographs: Why are we looking at this? At what point in history and our own lives did a corner of a floor represented in a photograph become iconic, worthy of our attention?

To what degree does it need to be abstracted by the seemingly innocent frame in order for us to recognise this grouping of non-subjects to be still life?

The beauty of Wall's photography is that, while it raises these complex questions, it still satisfies us a works of art.

Jeff Wall - Diagonal Composition No. 3, 2000

German artist Uta Barth's series Nowhere near pares down its subject matter to the spaces between things.

Here she focuses on a window frame and the view beyond, whose blurred forms mark the boundary of what is outside the photograph's visual range.

Thus we are made hypersensitive to what we edit out or do not look at, and so do not define as a subject or a concept that can be seen.

  Uta Barth - Untitled, Nowhere Near (nw 6), 1999