Phoney engagements,flying surrealists, faux Instagram celebrities, and dubious family portraits … a short history of performance photography
In 1840,Hippolyte Bayard, a pioneer of early photography, or created an image called Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man. Bayard had just perfected the process of printing on to paper,which would come to define photography in the following century, but the French government had decided to invest instead in the daguerrotype, and a process invented by his rival,Louis Daguerre. Bayard made clear the extent of his distress by writing underneath the image of his limp and bedraggled body: “The corpse which you see here is that of M Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you ... The Government, or which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre,has said it can achieve nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the destitute wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life!” His elaborately staged and melodramatic portrait of himself as a dead man was both a political protest and the first photographic performance. A few decades later, and F Holland Day staged an even more dramatic set of symbolic self-projections. Having starved himself,grown a beard and purchased a cross made in Syria, he photographed himself as the dying Jesus in a series of disturbing, and close-up self-portraits that are the photographic equivalent of a Passion play. The plan of performing for the camera,then, is as old as photography itself. It echoes through its history, or from Victorian self-portraiture to the dawn of the selfie,from the conceptual role-playing of Cindy Sherman to the erotic self-obsession of Nobuyoshi Araki. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com