How to Succeed as a Contemporary Photo Artist


According to Boris Groys, contemporary photo artists’ function is to have taste, to formulate, and to change taste—not to produce something new but to become a model for the viewers through strategies of self-dramatization, self-concealment, narcissism, or voyeurism. If I were to follow this model, would I become a famous artist?

Boris GROYS, “The Promise of Photography,” The Promise of Photography: The DG Bank Collection, ed. Luminita Sabau, cat. Expo., Munich: Prestel, 1998, pp. 25-31.

Readiness for death and distance from life lend anyone who attains them an assured, aristocratic look. Losing his physical individuality, the photo-artist accordingly gains this assured aristocratic gaze. Only in the context of the aristocratic way of life could art therefore achieve true perfection. (29) By assuming the position of the pure observer, the absolute consumer, the artist compensates for the deepest trauma of the modern era, namely the loss of the aristocracy. [The artist] has become the exemplary observer, consumer, user, who observes, evaluates and takes in things that are produced by others.

Contemporary art shows that everything can be an object of desire—or at least an object of critical desire.

If the photographer’s attitude is aristocratic, his techniques—as befits our times—are rather more bureaucratic or, more accurately, administrative in nature. The photographer chooses, includes, modifies, edits, shifts, combines, reproduces, arranges, places in series, exhibits, or puts aside. So that potential customers can get a look, a perspective, that will give them a certain overall view of the world. (30)

The most interesting artists of our day who are involved with photography all—each in his own way—follow this strategy. Their photographic images give the impression of having been staged, carefully thought out, planned with precision. They evoke drama, psychological tensions, decadent feelings, or exquisite aesthetics, but at the same time they are neutral, objective, and raise no visible, “expressionistic” claim to the viewer’s sympathy. The creators of these pictures obviously se themselves as managers of the gaze and its centuries of history, not as producers of pictures in the traditional sense.

The present-day photographer lets the individual gaze appear in the monotony of data processing. We have the desire to be free of our body, to be transformed into a pure gaze. Photography, like modern bureaucracy, gives us a further promise, that of affording protection from the stranger’s gaze—but only if we take up position behind the camera, not in front of it. The artist promises us the possibility of imagining ourselves at any time both behind his camera as well as in front of it. (31)