'to capture motion': Photography as Archive Work

By far the most and best known pictures of early performances are photographs which were usually published in magazines, newspapers or catalogues. Often single pictures or a sequence of a few pictures became imprinted on the public consciousness beyond the experience of those who had attended. These images condensed performances into a selection and sequence of a few, spectacular moments, portraying them again and again over the decades.

Work on the visual archive for performance art of the 1960s and 1970s is closely linked to photographers who perceived their work as documentary. In view of this, Alice Maude-Roxby asks at the beginning of her contribution to the catalogue of the exhibition Art, Lies and Videotape:

In the course of her research, Maude-Roxby looked for answers to these questions by interviewing performance artists and photographers, visiting their archives and designing the exhibition Live Art on Camera, which was shown in 2007 in the Hansard Gallery in Southampton [5]. Her observations make it clear that performance photographs should be seen in the context of contemporary photographic practices, the photographer’s body of work as a whole and his creative ‘signature style’.

In the interviews printed in the catalogue she goes into some of these aspects in more depth. I will take up only one aspect here: the mode of photographing. In this context, what is referred to above as ‘(signature) style’ could be more precisely described in the sense of Vilém Flusser as a result of the ‘apparatus-operator complex’ [Flusser 1998: 181]. This arises from the technical circumstances and the creative decisions which these elicit from the photographer, implying here also a conception of the documentary. [6]

Babette Mangolte and Peter Moore are two important photographers for performance art archives. I would like to address a few points emerging from their experiences and reflections.

Peter Moore began working as a photojournalist in the 1950s for LIFE magazine in New York, where he discovered the art scene as a subject for his photography. He photographed Fluxus events, Happenings and Judson Dance performances, among other things, with almost systematic regularity. It is said that he and his wife Barbara accumulated an archive of 300,000 negatives over the next 30 years [Maude-Roxby 2003: 72]. In a rare published interview in 1974, Moore spoke about his attitude and working method in situations in which documentation was his priority.

Moore declined shooting photo sessions, rarely photographed at rehearsals and chose a position at performances that blended with the audience. He used a camera that made little noise and worked without flash, not wishing to cause a distraction. While he sees himself as an observing viewer, he often chooses a frame in which other viewers – members of the audience – are visible.

Moore describes the photographic exploration of a performance and its space as a movement from the general to the specific and speaks of ‘establishing shots’, a convention more familiar to us in film [Argelander/Moore 1974: 53]. It seems logical, then, to see his photographs as series which follow certain dramaturgic rules, also where the photographer is concerned. Such series have hitherto, to my knowledge, not been published. The serial aspect has been a fundamental element of movement images ever since chronophotography experimented with analysing movement by means of regular single shots. The question of what series can make visible differently from moving images in film and video, and how they can be differently read, remains largely unanswered. The same is true of the question of how they can be reproduced or published.

In an interview, Moore commented on the above mentioned problem of representing performances by single images and controlling selection:

The photographer, camera-woman and film-maker Babette Mangolte describes the central aspects of her early work on performance archiving in the essay published here and on her website. Drawing on her comments, I would like to highlight an interesting point concerning the history of movement images.

Even if here it only exists as imitation in some respect, this idea of automatism refers back to the concept of a unity of man and machine which played a role in art of the 1960s. One example of this is photographer Ed Ruscha’s 1966 photo book Every Building on Sunset Strip. Here, Ruscha simulated a photographic automatism by installing a camera on a car and photographing the entire street in fixed time brackets while driving along [Schröter 2005].

This brings the technical aspect of photography to the fore. The speed of release imitates formal structuring, e.g. in the timed release mechanisms of chronophotography. This comparison of different modes of photographing raises the question: Is there really a connection to the early methods of photographic motion capturing which Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge worked on in the late 19^th century? These two best known representatives of chronophotography designed an experimental system for breaking down the movements of humans and animals into a series of instantaneous shots. In this way they aimed to portray phases of movement and measure the differences between them. By means of the camera’s mechanically timed release mechanism and a carefully planned arrangement of figure and background, they tried to capture motion. Storing movements with the help of photography implies breaking it down into discrete images. The mechanical timing corresponds with the idea of the mechanics of movement. To ensure the effectiveness of this method of movement analysis the intervals between the shots had to be kept as short as possible. The speed at which the release mechanism worked and the exposed surface could be transported played a significant role [see Frizot 2008; Braun 1992; Marey 1893].

Can this historical, experimental motion recording system be placed in the same context as Mangolte’s description of her method of documenting performance in photographs?  The speedy release which she speaks of is not regulated by any mechanism or numerical system but by the photographer’s intuitive physical movements in reaction to the rhythm of a movement taking place before her.

Nevertheless, the basic system of photography – breaking down time and motion into “arbitrary moments” with the help of a technical arrangement [7] – remains the same. As does the question of how motion can be read from these individual images in series, or how a specific readability can be achieved in the serial arrangements of the photographer. Not only Muybridge’s practice of combining single images in projection (using a zoopraxiscope) to portray movement is significant for historical discourse but also his method of publishing his motion studies in print form [8]. The different effects of various forms of presentation should be taken into account when discussing ways of gaining access to visual artefacts of the performance archive.