ABSTRACT
They have become ubiquitous in museums, galleries, private collections and corporate boardrooms: monumental, ultra-detailed photographs of places, people or objects arranged right in the middle of the frame. Their style has been called deadpan, a term originally used to describe an expressionless face. These works have undeniable presence. They are made with large-format view cameras and usually printed very large, as if intended for the walls of museums, commercial galleries and the spacious homes of collectors. They contain so much detail that the eye can get lost inside them; book or magazine reproductions cannot do them justice at all. Made with even lighting, frontal compositions and sharp-all-over focus, these pictures appear to present their subjects without any manipulation or hidden agenda. We may be tempted to take such images as transparent depictions of their subject matter. Yet it is important to remember that the desire for objectivity is itself a position. For those most involved in thinking and writing about such work, the cool, uninflected surface of deadpan photography provides a springboard for some of the most ambitious aesthetic investigations in contemporary art. For many viewers, however, this work remains perplexingly blank, impersonal and boring. The central figures in this kind of photography are Germans Bernd and Hilla
Becher, and the students they taught at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie between 1976 and 1997.1 Much has been written about their work, but little that gets to the grist of why, exactly, this group of photographers make deadpan images of repetitive and unexpressive subjects and how this version of objectivity might be understood (or indeed misunderstood) outside a German context. This chapter investigates the shifting role of objectivity over the twentieth century as well as examining notions of disinterestedness, criticality and banality we might use to interpret such work. We will look in particular at architectural interiors, cityscapes and landscapes by Candida Höfer, Frank Breuer and Thomas Struth. At stake is the question of why this anti-personal aesthetic has become so dominant in international art photography at the turn of the twenty-first century.
