Deceleration Through the Imprint: Photo/graphic interactions in contemporary art

Art historian David Joselit has recently argued that the task of art today is resist “the allure” of information’s “transparency”. This places a specific emphasis on photographic images. The ease of their production and ubiquity of use — as a crucial element in economic, social and cultural acceleration processes tied to information — has increased the implicit transparency that has arguably been one of photography’s most prominent attributes. The article suggests that printmaking can provide valuable procedural, aesthetic and conceptual means in the questioning of the photographic image’s assumed transparency that thereby contribute to the image’s criticality. Drawing on the concept of the “imprint” — as developed by the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in a still untranslated study — the article undertakes an analysis of a specific mode of contemporary printmaking, namely the woodcut. It is proposed that the distinctive material methods developed by the two chosen artists, Brook Andrew and Christiane Baumgartner, present a unique manifestation of the imprint that results in a process of slowing down the viewer’s apperception. Concurrently — and closely related to the artists’ thematic concerns — they can generate an enquiry of photography’s transparency and thus enhance its socio-cultural potential of critique.