It is Albert Renger-Patzsch’s phrase that gives the title to this excellent exhibition of photography. He wrote, ‘There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object, and the photographer should be fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique’.
It is telling that Renger-Patzsch’s publisher made a marketing decision to change the title of his 1928 book from Things to The World Is Beautiful. The same thing might happen today, since marketing favours giving people what they expect rather than what the author might be trying to provoke.
Predictably, the publisher’s change upset Renger-Patzsch, because it takes the focus off the objects depicted in his photographs, moving it towards the overbearing judgement of a human subject.
Precisely the wrong direction in which to go with the new art of photography, according to his view, one he shared with other better known contemporaries like Steigler and Man Ray. Photography’s virtue was objective—as a trained chemist, Renger-Patzsch had a scientist’s aesthetic. Photography was to be contrasted with the excessively subjective sensibility of the old art of painting.
The thought-provoking notion of ‘joy before the object’ informs the show in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s dedicated photography space. It is a remarkably compact but dense reflection on the viability of this contrast between the objective and subjective. Across the history of photography, it serves to point up some essential formal elements particular to it, while focussing on the key relationship of subject to object.
These elements revolve around the directness of the relationship between the photograph and the viewer, its imagined ‘indexicality’ (Roland Barthes’s term). The photograph renders what is there