This is the most expensive photograph ever.
It’s a photograph of a section of the Lower Rhein that flows from Bonn in Germany to the North Sea. A print of the photograph fetched £2.7million in 2011. The original photograph was taken by Andreas Gursky in 1999.
Gursky’s work is featured in Charlotte Cotton’s fascinating book: The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
She devotes a chapter to: Deadpan photography. It’s a style of photography that tries to capture subjects, be they landscapes or portraits, without conveying any emotional interpretation. The concept sounds as though it will produce only dull photographs.
But the very existence of deadpan photography raises a key issue about photography. The camera ought to be the perfect machine for recording, deadpan, any scene or person infront of its lens.
The camera clicks and records… and that is all.
Deadpan is the ultimate in documentary photography, capturing something as it actually is, without any slant or spin from the person holding the camera.
In deadpan portraits, the subject is often dead centre, not slightly towards one side of the frame. Emotionless, still, unglamorous, unprepossessing.
So what is it that the photographer can do that adds an emotional or interpretative component to a non-deadpan photograph?
If some photographs are labelled as deadpan, how is this achieved… is it ever achieved? And how is the antithesis of deadpan achieved. To what extent do light, angle, composition and moment contribute to a photograph’s effect? And in the case of a portrait, if the subject smiles, does that ruin the deadpan effect?
Cotton points out that a webpage, or a book does not convey the full effect of the best deadpan photographs. They are huge images, taken on large format cameras that capture every detail and have a far superior dynamic range compared to even the most expensive DSLR cameras.
But, says Cotton,
“More photography has been created for gallery walls in the last decade than in any other period in the medium’s history. And the most prominent, and probably most frequently used, style has been that of the deadpan aesthetic: a cool, detached and keenly sharp type of photography.”
Other deadpanners to look out for: Thomas Struth, Axel Hutte, Candida Hofer, Lewis Baltz, Dan Holdsworth, Richard Misrach.
I wonder whether the front cover of this month’s RPS magazine can be classed as deadpan. She looks emotionless, inscrutable; she is positioned dead centre. But she is speaking volumes.
The look, the clothes… perhaps that’s the power of deadpan photography.
In its silence, it speaks not loud, but deep.
Clive Edwards 