ABSTRACT
For Location Piece #1, New York-Los Angeles, 1969 (1969), the artist Douglas Huebler pointed his camera out an airplane window in an attempt to photographically capture the thirteen states flown over during that particular flight. The resultant images of random cloud formations appear abstract, if not absurd, particularly considering Huebler’s professed aim of documentation. This conceptual project mocks the poetic traditions of art photography as well as the ways documentary photography claimed to be literal. Moreover, the piece provides a poignant case study of many issues that surrounded the status of photography at this juncture rife with paradox. Recalling Alfred Stieglitz’s famous series of cloud studies from the 1920s, which were tellingly titled Equivalents, Huebler introduced the unassimilable problems posed by real life variables in order to test the limits of the photograph as either a credible work of art or a convincing document. In the artist’s own words, “I use the camera as a ‘dumb’ copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomenon appears before it through the conditions set by a system.”1 Like Huebler, many conceptual artists used the perceived neutrality, or “dumb” quality, of the photograph to dislocate the ideology of pure opticality and self-sufficiency espoused by high modernism. These artists, such as John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman, desired to expose the contingent relationship between photography and belief, in favor of a discourse of doubt [Fig. 11.1].
