PHOTOGRAPHY: Ian Tromp
MICHAEL MEYERSFELD’S photographs are stylish and technically accomplished. But they cannot be described as innovative or groundbreaking — the claim made for them in the press releases for his show at the Everard Read Gallery.
The main claim is that this is an exhibition which will alter the very status of photography in this country, allowing it entry into the hallowed realm of “art”. Such a statement, while it reveals some attitudes of the photographer and the gallery, is patently untrue.
Meyersfeld describes his photographs as “neither commercial nor newsworthy; I took them purely for their aesthetic value”. Are we to assume that these three terms define the polarities by which photography can be received: as either commercial, newsworthy or aesthetic? This is to transfer the creation of meaning and value in photographs entirely on to their subjects. But what is important, in testing the “art-status” of photographs, has more to do with the ways in which viewers engage with them, and in which galleries display them, than with what they happen to represent.
If we apply Meyersfeld’s categories to his photographs, the overwhelming impression is of their commercialism. Meyersfeld is an ad-man, and these pictures have the unmistakeable quality of an ad-man making art.
It is true that most of the pictures fit within familiar art genres: there are landscapes, figure studies and still-lifes. The most successful are landscapes, some of which demonstrate a depth of sensitive observation, and some unusual compositions.
For instance, two scenes from a forest in Mahe reveal the fine particularity of textured lichens and leaves. A seascape is transformed by an unexpected composition, the parallel lines of earth and sea ruptured by the rounded form of a large rock.
At their worst, Meyersfeld’s photographs are tricksy (as in two pictures composed of images mirrored and reversed around a vertical axis), or trivial (a few still-lifes which might have illustrated short stories in Cosmo), or show their commercial roots all too strongly (a figure-study of a half-coy, half-seductive woman).
A number of photographs are blighted with soft-focus; here Meyersfeld mistakes sentimentality for the stronger emotion of nostalgia. Some of these images might have been moving, had sticky sentiment and empty style not all but replaced feeling.
This is the first time the Everard Read Gallery (variously described as “South Africa’s oldest and most established art gallery” and “the leading gallery on the African continent”) has shown photographs. This should provoke questions about the curatorial position of the gallery, rather than pronouncements on this show constituting “an exciting precedent in the art world”.
The gallery’s director, Mark Read, is quoted as saying: “We have always shown very fine works of art, and for us it is highly significant that this is our first exhibition of photographs. We do not consider, however, that we are doing anything out of character — we consider the photographs to be fine works of art.”
After more than 150 years, the “art-status” of photographs is not in question, and even the most myopic critic is unlikely to question the medium’s inclusion in the orthodox histories of Western art. Any artist or gallery that feels the need to proclaim a display of photographs as groundbreaking reveals only the conservatism of their own assumptions.
Meyersfeld exhibits at the Everard Read Gallery until August 29