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• Issue #260
• Article

By Michael Diemar

Snapping a Gursky (1993 photograph of an apartment block in Montparnasse).

Exhibitions about painting and photography and how they relate to and influence each have turned up pretty regularly over the last 20 years. And on the whole, despite some very fine works, I have found them flat and disappointing, never really getting to the heart of the matter.

I can only think of one exception, "Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror", curated by Anne Baldassari, shown at Musée Picasso in 1997 and the Barbican Art Gallery in 1999. I think it was successful because it dealt with one artist in depth, presenting direct links and proof, but also giving room for some intriguing speculation.

But that's not the approach others have chosen, opting instead for group shows and general overviews. Which means that more often than not, important subtleties are lost. Any non-practitioner who has ever walked around an exhibition with a talkative practitioner, be it of painting or photography, will also be aware of how explanations of focal length, depth of field, paper stock, burning, thickness of line, choice of brushes, shading, tones, chiaroscuro effects and much else, can give a much deeper understanding of the creation of the works.

Well, there are no such in-depth explanations in Tate Modern's new exhibition, "Capturing the Moment - A Journey through Painting and Photography". Tate Modern has attempted to deal with the relationship between painting and photography before, in 2019, with "Shape of Light - 100 Years of Photography and Light." The aim was to "explore photography in relation to the development of abstraction, from the early experiments of the 1910s to the digital innovations of the 21st century". Except, it didn't quite do that. Most of the rooms had one or a few paintings, or a sculpture, but the exhibit consisted of mostly photographs, in many cases works that sort of looked like the former. The approach seemed to be, "Hang enough works on the wall and the theory will take care of itself."

"Shape of Light" had a catalog. "Capturing the Moment" doesn't and at the start of the brief tour, curator Gregor Muir, Director of Collection, International Art, Tate, explained, "This is not a didactic exhibition, more a meandering journey, asking questions about how painting and photography have influenced each other." So not much theory. And this felt more like a big show at a commercial gallery, where less scholarly rigor is expected. As for the works, two-thirds come from Tate's own collection, the remaining third from the YAGEO Foundation in Taiwan.

When I first read about the show in November last year, it was described as spanning 100 years. Evidently something happened along the way because this is mostly a post-war and contemporary show. Still, in the first section, there's a 1938 portrait, "Buste de Femme" and Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California". The link here seems to be that former was "executed in the time of photography". The caption for the latter deals not with composition or painting but quotes the sitter, Florence Owens Thompson, whom stated in 1978, "I wish she hadn't taken my picture…(Lange) didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did." Valid grievances for sure, but not really relevant to the theme of the exhibition. And quite a few other captions here seem oddly out of place, as if they have been grabbed from other contexts.

Next, there is a Francis Bacon who eventually gave up painting from life altogether, using photographs instead. Here is a triptych of Lucian Freud, and a study for a Pope. In this case, an inward-looking Pope. A more fitting example would have been one of Bacon's screaming Popes, illustrating his way of "crashing" two images into each other, that is the portrait of Innocent X, painted by Diego Velázquez around 1650 and a still from Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin of the screaming old woman as she watches a baby in a pram rolling down the steps towards soldiers with their guns raised.

Curator Gregor Muir, with Jeff Wall’s "A Sudden Gust of Wind".

While painfully thin on theory, there are some very fine works in this exhibition, such as Jeff Wall's lightbox work "A Sudden Gust of Wind" (1993), its composition based on the famous work by Japanese painter and printmaker Hokusai. Actors and landscape were photographed digitally and the study for the work, reveals the careful placement of the sheets of paper blowing in the wind, acting as markers of its direction.

But there's also some real fluff here, such as two photographs by Louise Lawler from 2006, taken in Tate's store room, one showing the corner of a Roy Lichtenstein painting, the other a Gerhard Richter painting, with padding on a corner. Nothing wrong with the works themselves, but they have been included here "to show another use of photography in the context of a museum".

Next are two monumental works by Andreas Gursky, the 1993 photograph of an apartment block in Montparnasse, and May Day in Berlin, taken 2000. Gursky, who drew parallels between his work and history painting, more than anyone established large-size color work in the market. Adding details, or removing them, drew heavy criticisms from purists at the time but that debate seems relevant again, with AI and deepfake images.

On the wall next to it is a work by photographer and visual artist Pushpamala N., who has been called "the most entertaining iconoclast of contemporary Indian art." The work in question is "The Arrival of Vasco da Gama" and is a staged photograph made in 2014 and based on an 1898 painting by José Veloso Salgado, "to explore the role of fiction and fantasy in both image-making and the history of colonialism." I expected at least a mention of staged photography, almost as old as the medium itself, but there was none.

There is a fine display of seascapes by Hiroshi Sugimoto, linking them to Mark Rothko paintings, followed by Gerhard Richter, including "Two Candles", painted in 1982, slightly blurry, the candle being a memento mori in the history of art. Close by there's a quote by Richter, "The most banal photograph is more beautiful than the most beautiful painting by Cezanne". There's no context given, but it is a reminder that painting directly from photographs enabled Richter to try to erase painterly style from his work.

The next room, the biggest, also seems the most engaged. Here are two large silkscreen works by Andy Warhol: Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler in "The Wild One" and a self-portrait. Warhol took up silk-screening in 1962, having been taught the technique by his assistant, Gerard Malanga, enabling him to use photographs, expanding their meaning. Prior to that, he had achieved repetition in his paintings by using rubber stamps, but thought it felt "too homemade".

David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. © David Hockney Photo Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter

Opposite hangs what many regard as David Hockney's finest painting, "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures)", 1972. It's certainly the most expensive. It sold at Christie's New York in November 2018 for $90,312,500 million. The painting joins two of Hockney's themes, the swimming pool and the double portrait. The man standing beside the pool is Peter Schlesinger, Hockney's former lover. Adding an unknown man swimming towards Schlesinger, Hockney signaled his acceptance that their relationship was over.

Hockney went to a friend's house near Saint Tropez and took hundreds of photographs of the pool and the background, using a stand-in for Schlesinger. Back in London, he used some portraits he had taken of Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens and spent two intense weeks--working 18-hour shifts--to paint the work.

But there many other impressive works in this room, such as "Stern", a 2004 painting by Marlene Dumas, of Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who was found dead in her prison cell in May 1976. Suicide according to officialdom, while supporters claimed murder The painting is based on a photograph that was published in the magazine Stern. Above it hangs "Lucy", painted the same year, based on a detail in a 1608 painting by Caravaggio, Burial St. Lucy, but reworked in a style that suggests a photograph taken in a morgue.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Predecessors. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo credit Sylvain Deleu.

Close by is Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby's Predecessors, executed in 2013, in acrylic, charcoal, pencil and acetone-transferred prints, made from photographs, cutouts from magazines and newspapers and Xerox Copies.

But just as the exhibition starts to really come alive, it meanders off into vagueness in the last section.

While Salman Toor's "9PM, the News", 2015, is a very fine painting, showing a family at the dinner table, "ghosts" (according to artist) hovering to the side and in the background, a TV blaring, it's difficult to link it to photography in any way. As the rushed tour came to an end, even the curator was struggling to find the right words and quickly wrapped it up.

Michael Diemar is a London-based collector and consultant. He is also editor-in-chief of The Classic, a new free magazine about classic photography. He is a long-time writer about the photography scene, writing extensively for several Scandinavian photography publications, as well as for the E-Photo Newsletter and I Photo Central.