Of course, a long time ago, I thought a picture was a picture only if it was painted. Later on I found to my great surprise that I could see a photograph as a picture-and in my enthusiasm I often saw it as the better picture of the two. It functions in the same way: it shows the appearance of something that is not itself-and it does it much faster and more accurately.

Gerhard Richter 1

How can it be denied that the blur itself is a new impression never seen before except in photography? Photographers are students of movement, apprenticed to light as their only teacher.

Max Kozloff 2

One's regard in a retrospective viewing of a body of work is twofold: one apprehends the individual works, and the spaces between the works, that is, to the relationships within the diachronic evolution of the body of work. Twenty six years is long enough to survey the evolution of a body of work, to discern what yet obtains and what has altered. It is also long enough to ascertain the substantial shifts that obtain in a medium correlative with an individual oeuvre, and within which the oeuvre is situated in a reciprocal relationship.

This retrospective exhibition of work by Reinhard Ziegler traces his move from straight photography to a painterly engagement of the medium. This move is manifest in the hand coloring of the later works, but more than this jejune and obvious observation, the later works are 'painterly' in the art historical ur-sense of malerisch: an emphasis on broad areas of value rather than linear description, along with a concomitant shift from the static to the dynamic. 3 These shifts within Ziegler's body of work are situated within a period of profound change within the practices of photography as an artist's medium. It is at this level, that of intrinsic meaning or content in Panofsky's sense, 4 beyond the necessary but in themselves not sufficient levels of formal analysis or recognition of conventional subject matter, that Ziegler's works function to sustain and reward attentive engagement. Ziegler's works move from stasis to dynamis, as a shift from metaphors of nature to metaphors of culture, from the seemingly unmediated view of the "innocent eye" 5 to the manifestly mediated. This is a move that obtains not only in Ziegler's body of work, but which is also deeply imbricated in the recent practice and theory of photography as an artist's medium, and more broadly in contemporary discourse, notably in the shift from the "natural attitude" 6 of which the notion of the "innocent eye" is the perceptual correlative to a reflexive engagement of cultural production which acknowledges its inherently mediated character.

Movement within a still photograph is conventionally signified by blurring produced from the displacement of the image of the thing photographed on the film during exposure, entailing an exposure time of sufficient duration to allow useful image displacement to occur. Either the thing photographed may move relative to the emulsion or the emulsion may move relative to the thing photographed during the interval of exposure. Ziegler typically employs the latter alternative, with the camera moving relative to unmoving objects. There are several consequences of this movement. First, the perceptual experience of the world is described as not static, an object for disengaged, detached contemplation surveyed with the reserved regard of the gaze, but rather as a transitory perceptual configuration experienced in medias res with the rapid shift of the glance. Second, the embodiedness of the artist is inscribed both as the trace of movement, and in the re-marking of the surface of the prints in the process of hand coloring subsequently introduced into Ziegler's practice. Third, the process of viewing is not bracketed, but thematized. 7 The artist is the first viewer of the work; for both artist and subsequent viewers, the trace of movement, and the trace of the hand in the later hand colored works, obviate the supposition of an "innocent eye" in the imposition of a reflexive consideration of the mediated character of perception. The signifier of motion in Ziegler's photographs is deixic, temporally self-reflexive, referring to the embodiedness of the photographer moving in space relative to what was photographed. 8 The blurring within the image is indexical of the rate of angular displacement during the interval of exposure; given knowledge of the focal length of the lens used for the exposure and the interval of duration of the exposure, calculation of the distance from camera to thing photographed and rate of motion for a particular image is relatively simple. To engage in such calculations explains everything, and nothing. 9 The physical conditions requisite to the appearance of a photograph in its particularity is thus explained by its material cause; the perceptual affect of the image in viewer response is not thus exhaustively explained.

Ziegler's gelatin silver photograph Aspen Grove, 1976, depicts a seductive moment of light on the natural form of aspens. The affect of the image depends on the particularity of its description of a grove of aspens regarded as a static pregiven entity. As a pregiven entity, the motif is engaged within the scopic regime 10 of the "innocent eye." With its light aspens against a dark ground, a trope of light separated from darkness, Aspen Grove references a classical motif of American modernist landscape photography. 11 It is a useful benchmark from which to gauge the development of Ziegler's work in its shift to the description of motion within the static field of the still photograph, and his concomitant evolving dynamic treatment of the pictorial surface, both in its photographic aspect per se and it the aspect of subsequent hand coloring of the surface. With Im Haeslich, 12 1975, and Trees, 1976, Ziegler begins to utilize the conventional signifier of blurring to suggest movement in a still photograph. In these early instances, Ziegler's photographs of blurred trees elicit the strongly felt sense of running through a woods, of forward motion of the body barely under control. In these photographs, the blurring is a function of the photographer holding the camera while moving through the woods, exposing with a sufficiently slow shutter speed to enable angular displacement of the image. In itself, this signification of movement within the still image is disquieting: while the effect is observed early on in the history of the medium, it was typically regarded as a defect in a medium in which the mobile is most often rendered as if immobile. 13 Beyond this categorical expectation, Im Haeslich and Trees have a sense of anxiousness and agitation about them, a product both of the displacement within the image, and the dark wood within which this displacement occurs:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, chè la diritta via era smarrita. 14

In Im Haeslich and Trees as well as in the works following, the movement of the artist as central to the facture of the image is an assertion of authorial agency, and thus of authorial presence. As photographs typically presupposes a co-presence of thing photographed and artist, employment of movement as a thematization of presence is a re-inscription of the ur-presence of the photographic situation. This would seem unremarkable but for the nascent doxa of the time, that of 'the death of the author,' the position that a text:

is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. 16

In The Paradox of Doubt, Somewhere Between Improvisation and Destiny, The Precision of Each Moment, and Gershwins's Final Glance, all 1982, the embodiedness of the artist in motion is mediated by working from a moving vehicle. This continues in Majestic and Green Building, both 1984. In these works employing movement but prior to the introduction of hand coloring, one has a sense of dérive, 'drift' in the Internationale Situationiste usage of a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. 17 If the sense of movement in Im Haeslich and Trees is disturbational 18 and anxious, the sense of movement in these works is hectic, quickly glimpsed.

Kinetic States # 11, var. II, Kinetic States # 5 1/5, and Kinetic States # 24, all 1983, along with Thinking of Robert Frank, 1986, thematize the incorporation of the signification of movement in the still image, and add hand coloring to the image. This addition perdures throughout Ziegler's subsequent works. The importance of this move is evident through the comparison of Somewhere Between Improvisation and Destiny and Kinetic States # 11, var. II as the same image obtains in both works. The former gelatin silver print is small, 6 1/2 x 10 inches, black and white, and retains an intimacy of aspect. The latter is larger, 16 x 20, with a vigorous and painterly application of pastel over the gelatin silver photograph. In Kinetic States # 11, var. II, the displacement of the hand coloring relative to the underlying gelatin silver image doubles the angular displacement through movement of the gelatin silver image, while at the same time clarifying and defining passages within the gelatin silver photograph. The marks constituting the hand coloring in Kinetic States # 11, var. II are distinctly on the surface of the underlying gelatin silver photograph, while the hand coloring in Thinking of Robert Frank, 19 1986, is more subtle, integrated with the underlying gelatin silver photograph. One might also compare Gershwin's Final Glance, 1982, and Place of Rest, 1999. While made from different negatives separated by twenty seven years, both employ an arch motif, both were made in Paris. Gershwin's Final Glance, like Somewhere Between Improvisation and Destiny, is small and black and white; Place of Rest large and hand colored. While both entail essentially closed rather than open form, 20 the space of the latter image is flattened in the reiteration of the image plane by the application of hand coloring.

Hand-coloring of photographs is a venerable practice, with ample nineteenth century antecedents. That notwithstanding, within the modernist paradigm of the 'photographic' 21 hand coloring was a heresy existing beyond the pale, persisting in the early 1950's primarily in the realm of commercial portrait photography. Even there, its fortune was distinctly waning following the widespread availability of chromogenic materials following World War II. As the modernist paradigm predicated on the reductivist purification of a given medium of all not regarded as essential to its practice collapsed in the late 1960's, 22 and contemporaneous with a tremendous expansion of photographic curricula in higher education within a fine arts context, and including a significant expansion of courses in the history of photography, 23 hand coloring along with a variety of other commercially abandoned photographic processes were adopted by artists, notwithstanding a residual hostility by a modernist arrière-garde.

To draw or to paint on the surface of a photograph is to give emphasis to the surface qua surface. As Norman Bryson has noted with respect to traditional [i.e., pre-modern representational] Western oil painting, the medium first must erase the ground of figure-ground relations, and second, must erase the trace of the figuring paint as such. 24 In so doing, the medium becomes, as it were, transparent; the viewer then attends to the signified without attending to the signifier as such. Photographs are commonly engaged in viewer response as if the medium is transparent, 25 not visible as such. In drawing or painting on the surface of the photograph, the surface is asserted as a surface, as a ground which receives, and is obscured by, the figural trace of the drawn or painted mark. This is at once an assertion of the material cause of the artwork and the efficient cause 26 of the artwork as presences. 27 The marking of the surface of the photograph is indexical of the artist's hand; a re-marking of the indexicality 28 of the photograph as a "quality of transfer or trace [which] gives to the photograph its documentary status, its undeniable veracity." 29

The indexicality of photographic images commonly entails the co-presence and thus the co-temporality in the initial exposure of the photograph of the artist and the thing photographed. In viewer response to the photograph however, another situations obtains, as Roland Barthes has urged:

The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence. . .its reality [is] that of the having-been-there. . . .30

In Ziegler's most recent works, hand coloring increasingly transforms the underlying gelatin silver photograph, to the extent that the photographic character of the substrate is largely obviated and transcended. In Place of Rest, In the Quiet, Walls of Wonder, the blurring is less strongly oriented, settling into a Brownian motion of swarming particles, over which the luminous cloud of hand coloring settles as tightly and as calmly as a fog into a valley. These works thus appear neither as gelatin silver photographs, nor as pastel paintings, but rather as a third category that subsumes and yet maintains both while negating each. The operation of this dialectic is expressed in the structural diagram of a Klein or Piaget group: 31

photograph------------------------pastel
|                                     |
|                                     |
|                                     |
|                                     |
|                                     |
|                                     |
not-photograph------------------not-pastel
         \                      /
           painting-photograph

One's regard in a retrospective viewing of a body of work is twofold: one apprehends the individual works, and the spaces between the works. In retrospect, the relation of subsequent to antecedent work appears as it cannot appear in the uncertain blur of the facture of the works: necessary and inevitable. In retrospect, the individual works are apprehended with pleasure. To give pleasure in the apprehension was once a definition of beauty. 36

Reinhard Ziegler's work in the corporate collections of Anderson Consulting, Delta Airlines, Digital Equipment Corporation, Domino's Pizza, RTKL Architects-International, Texas Instruments and TGI Friday's. Ziegler is represented by Conduit Gallery, Dallas, with work online at www.conduitgallery.com.

1. Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), p. 217. BACK
2. Max Kozloff, "The Etheralized Figure and the Dream of Wisdom," Lone Visions Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 253-284. BACK
3. For the art historical usage of malerisch, 'painterly' as an oppositional pair with 'linear', see Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: the problem of the development of style in later art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), especially pp.1-53. More generally with respect to the history of spatial devices in images, see William Vance Dunning's excellent Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). BACK
4. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1939, 1967), pp. 3-17 for these fundamental methodological distinctions. BACK
5. For the notion of the "innocent eye," originating with Ruskin as a ramification of Locke's epistemological denial of innate ideas, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, 1961, 1969), pp. 14ff et passim. The notion is that unmediated sensa are possible and sufficient to percepts of things in themselves. For a visual deconstruction of the innocent eye, see Mark Tansey's The Innocent Eye Test, 1981, oil on canvas, 78 x 120 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, promised gift of Charles Cowles, in honor of William S. Liberman; cf. Tansey's Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object, 1981, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. And Mrs. Warren Brandt. Contrary to the presupposition entailed in the notion of the "innocent eye," things unmediated by concepts are not available to us, as Kant suggested: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B75/A51, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's, 1925), p. 93. BACK
6. Though hardly recent, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) is helpful with respect to the notion of the "natural attitude" in relation to the pre-given; see esp. pp. 145, 150, 329. [initial publication as Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954); the work seems to have been begun in 1934 and continued through Husserl's terminal illness, until his death 27 April 1938.] BACK
7. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 94. BACK
8. Deixis is a term adopted from classical rhetoric; its application to art historical discourse originates with Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Deixis is opposed to the aorist: in deixis signification is contemporaneous with the signified, while in the aorist signification refers to a temporally past signified. BACK
9. "Nec Babylonios temptaris numeros." "Nor try Babylonian calculations," as Horace put it. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Carminum Liber I, Ode XI. BACK
10. See Martin Jay's magisterial Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). BACK
11. Cf. Ansel Adams' Aspens, Dawn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado, 1937; Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958 [in Adams' Portfolio VII, 1976]; Alders, Prairie Creek Beach, Northern California, c. 1949 [in Adams' Portfolio VI, 1974]. BACK
12. Im Haeslich refers to the woods in Germany where the negative was exposed. One might render the title as "Just then (or meanwhile) repulsive / hideous / ugly." BACK
13. See John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 10. Cf. Max Kozloff, "The Etheralized Figure and the Dream of Wisdom," Lone Visions Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 253-284. BACK
14. Dante, Inferno, Canto I, 1-3. "In the middle of the journey of our life / I came to my senses in a dark wood, / for I had lost the straight path." BACK
15. Unheimlich is 'uncanny, uncomfortable, uneasy', a negation of it's root heim-, 'home, abode, dwelling place'. (Curiously, heimlich has the senses of 'secretive, underhanded, furtive'.) In Heidegger's use, the term has its literal sense of 'uncanny' but this sense is closely connected to that of 'unhomelike' and connected to anxiety. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie, Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), p. 233 and n. 1; H 188. BACK
16. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 142-148. BACK
17. Dérive is to be distinguished both from the Surrealist practice of aimless wandering and the nineteenth century flâneur. Ivan Chtcheglov's "Formulary for a New Urbanism" describes the goal of the practice of dérive as that of utter disorientation, a liberation through an openness to the unanticipated wonders of an urban space. Ivan Chtcheglov was nineteen when "Formulary For a New Urbanism" was written under the pseudonym of Gilles Ivain. Later denounced by the Lettrists, he entered an asylum; his text appeared in the journal International Situationniste after a restoration of connections with the Situationists in the late 1950s. See also Guy Debord's "Theory of the Dérive," International Situationniste 2 (December 1958). "Formulary for a New Urbanism" is available online at http://www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/Chtchegloc.htm; Debord's "Theory of the Dérive is available online at http://www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/2.derive.htm. BACK
18. For the notion of the disturbational in art, see Arthur C. Danto, "Art and Disturbation," The Philosophical Disenfranchisementy of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 117-133. BACK
19. The title of Thinking of Robert Frank references Robert Frank's gelatin silver photograph Metropolitan Life Building - New York City from Les Américains (Paris: Robert Delpire, 1958); as The Americans (New York: Aperture, 1959); Frank's photographs for The Americans were made on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship during 1955 - 1957. BACK
20. For the oppositional pair of 'closed' versus 'open' form, see Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: the problem of the development of style in later art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), especially pp.1-53. BACK
21. See Andy Grundberg, "The Crisis of the Real," The Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974-1989 (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1990), pp. 1-22 regarding the modernist construction of an essentialist notion of the "photographic." BACK
22. See, as exemplary of the period, Clement Greenberg's formulation in "Modernist Painting," Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), pp. 193-201:

    It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered "pure", and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. "Purity" meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.

    Greenberg here, and in his earlier "Towards a Newer Laocoön," Partisan Review (July-August 1940) reiterates and builds on the move, and employs much of the geopolitical rhetoric, of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Laokoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, [1766] trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). BACK
23. See John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), pp. 273-275 for an account from a perhaps hostile witness. BACK
24. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 92. BACK
25. Indeed, the distinction of 'as if' transparent versus that of transparency of the medium as such is elided by a number of writers, from William M. Ivins in Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968 [1953] ), to André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" in his What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), to Kendall L. Walton, "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," Critical Inquiry 11:2 (December 1984), pp. 246-277, with the result that the photograph is conflated with the thing photographed. Thus Bazin asserts: "The photographic image is the object itself, . . ." (ibid., p. 14). This is manifestly an ontological category mistake, the more glaring for occurring in a text entitled "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." BACK
26. Reference is to Aristotle's notion of cause, aitai, distinguishing between intrinsic causes of material cause, hule and formal cause, eidos, morphe, and extrinsic causes of final cause, telos and efficient cause, arche. As bringing about the being of the artwork by the agency of his action, the artist is the efficient cause of the work; the stuff with which the artist produces the work is the material cause; formal cause consists in the morphe ('form,' 'shape') and eidos ('intelligible look'); the telos is the end or goal, that for the sake of which the agency of the efficient cause is exerted, here the artwork as such. See Aristotle, Physics II.3, 194b. BACK
27. For an valuable contribution to the engagement of the materiality of the art object, see Andrew Benjamin, Object Painting (London: Academy Editions, 1994). BACK
28. See Charles Saunders Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 98-119. BACK
29. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Notes on the Index, Part 2," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), pp. 210-219. BACK
30. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 44. BACK
31. This structuralist diagram is termed a Piaget group as employed within the human sciences, and a Klein group as employed within mathematics. See A.-J. Greimas and François Rastier, "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," Yale French Studies 41 (1968), pp. 86-105; Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in ed. Michael Lane, Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 367-388. For the seminal application in art history, see Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), pp. 276-290. The horizontal lines in the diagram are the complex [at top] and neuter [at bottom] axes, expressing a relationship of contradiction between the terms. The vertical lines are schemas expressing a relationship of contradiction as involution. The terms developed from these oppositions can be continued indefinitely, and are of considerable utility in explicating the logical preconditions of recent work; see the present author's "Shifting Paradigms: Rethinking Photography in an Expanding Field," lecture for Texas Visual Arts Association, Dallas Visual Arts Center, 26 April 1991. BACK
32. See William S. Wilson, "And/Or," Sequence (con)Sequence: (sub)versions of photography in the 80s, ed. Julia Ballerini (Annandale-on-Hudson: Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College; Aperture Foundation, 1989), pp. 11-31. BACK
33. The principle of parsimony is a directive to an economy of thought, commonly given as Ockham's Razor (after William of Ockham, d. c. 1349): Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, "Do not multiply entities without necessity." BACK
34. Thierry de Duve's Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996) is a brilliant exposition of the shift of the logical terms of discourse following from Duchamp's move. BACK
35. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 148. BACK
36. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, 27 1 ad 3: pulchrum autem dicatur id cuius ipsa apprehensio placet; "whereas a thing is called beautiful when the mere apprehension of it gives pleasure." BACK