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This essay explores the banal as a contemporary photographic aesthetic, examining banality in relation to notions of boredom and ennui. The "perceptual boredom" of the banal image-its resistance to emotional and critical engagement-is considered in relation to its content, style, and spatial structure.
In her classic text On Photography, Susan Sontag claims that photographic seeing has to be "constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision" (31). For Sontag, photography represents a kind of "extraordinary vision," a perception that continues to inform a great deal of photographic criticism. The past decade, however, has seen the emergence of a different kind of photographic aesthetic. In the words of Neville Wakefield:
Bad photography now reigns. [... ] It makes for good art at a time when good photography witnesses only the flow of technical virtuosity into addictive banality. With the demise of photographic authority, the former province of "photography" with its silver gelatin bureaucrats and legislative decrees has become something much more like a republic of photographic practice. [...] Artists deliberately flout photographic convention to [...] practice without a license. (239)
The work I will be examining here reflects a more prosaic approach to photographic seeing-a fascination with the everyday, a preoccupation with the vernacular, an "ordinary," rather than an "extraordinary" vision. Rather than simply dismissing this as "bad photography," however, I would like to examine the banal as an aesthetic category, as a motif and a mode of reception, and to look critically at the embodiment of the ordinary that lies at its heart.
Photography's fascination with the ordinary is nothing new, but the crystallization of this fascination into a curatorial and editorial aesthetic is a relatively recent development. Such recent exhibitions as Reality Check at the Photographer's Gallery and Cruel and Tender at the Tate Modern introduce to a larger public a number of aesthetic preoccupations that have been visible in exhibition practice for the past decade. Grounded in the allied motifs of boredom, repetition, and inertia, these concerns are also evident in current critical writing on photography. "Banality" and "the banal" show up frequently in accounts of the work of Thomas Ruff, Martin Parr, Richard Billingham, and others; they also...