Staged Images

 Currently on exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum is the photographic work of Cara Romero and ceramics by her husband, Diego.  She is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe.  He is from the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico.  The photographic images ranged from large posters to billboard-sized images.  I have never been a fan of elaborately staged work, but I found the exhibition interesting for several reasons.

A video narrated by the photographer provided a good overview of style and techniques.

There are online videos which also illustrate the technical aspects of the work, including this shot from a PBS presentation which reveals the image making instrument to be a Canon digital camera.

 Back home after viewing the exhibit I searched online to try to get some idea about how the work was being received.  While I found a lot of links to show Cara Romero has had her work exhibited in museums all over the country, there really seemed to be no critical assessments, but only often-repeated boilerplate publicity.

My conclusion at this point is that even though there may be a lot of talk about contemporary photography, there seems to be no general agreement on exactly what that may be.  High-tech digital imagery and directorial staging certainly are prominent, but how any of that relates to the history and practice of photography over the past two centuries is not at all clear.

It is perhaps not surprising that the statements made by the artist are not particularly helpful, as such self assessments and explanations seldom are.  Romero relates that she was initially very enthusiastic about some of the early work by people like Curtis in portraying indigenous people.  As she got more into developing her own ideas and style, however, Romero decided that there was not much done since the early days to bring forth an updated view of how indigenous people are encountering the world today.  So she offers her current work as an effort to fill the perceived void.

The problem I see with that self assessment is that Romero seems to be working with a pretty narrow slice of indigenous experience.  Most of her models seem to be young creatives living in Santa Fe; they and Romero are certainly interesting and often beautiful people, but the pictures resulting from  their collaboration leave aside rather a lot of daily life of the greater community.

I think it relevant to note that elaborately staged photography is not a new idea.  Perhaps due in part to the cumbersome equipment  of the very early photographers and the hurdle of very long exposure times,  staging images - often depicting biblical subjects - was a very prominent technique.  Here, for instance, is a shot by Julia Margaret Cameron.

 Stieglitz and Strand led something of a rebellion which devalued staged work in favor of more spontaneous straight photography, and that trend predominated for the next half century in defining what should be considered as photographic fine art.  However, some staged work continued to wiggle its way into museums and art publications.  One practitioner who has been particularly enduring is Cindy Sherman, whose explorations of female identity were incorporated in self portraits which she called Untitled Film Stills.

And, finally, it cannot be overlooked that staged images have been the backbone of  advertising illustration without a letup since very early in photography's history. 

In a recent online presentation to the New Mexico Film Photographers group Chip Greenberg presented convincing evidence that the role of photographers in producing the avalanche of staged image ads which we have all been accustomed to may be close to an end.  What he did was produce an image using an AI image generator which was very close in appearance to an image he had made in his commercial photography studio years ago.  That AI image - even after some refinement - probably took less than an hour to make, while the original image on film was the product of days of work.

Following Chip's lead and shamelessly borrowing Cara Romero's concept I picked an online AI image generator of many available with a quick Google search and made the following image in under five minutes.  It won't end up in any museum exhibits, but I think it should generate some soul searching by curators and critics.