Who’s afraid of photography?

Has an instinctive aversion to photography inhibited dissenting artists from producing potentially powerful and exciting art? I look again at the photographs of Anselm Kiefer.

[Anselm Kiefer, Der Rhein [The Rhine], 1969-2012, Electrolysis on photographic print mounted on lead, 380 × 1,100 cm Photo: Georges Poncet. © Anselm Kiefer]

We live in a photographed world, one saturated with the frozen image. Each photograph captures a little sunlight and imprisons it, consequently darkening the world minutely. Everyone is acquainted with photography and in terms of acceptance of photography as a form of documentation and source of pleasure few people would maintain the medium lacks validity. In the West in an age of mass migration, photographs of wares have returned images to shop signage, a century or more since the hanging icons of yore were retired as obsolete.

Yet when we look at dissident art of a reactionary or nationalistic tendency one medium that seems to be absent is photography. Why should that be? One might say that photography, developed to a practical form in the 1840s, is seen as a sinful innovation – a modern development that has ushered in an age of indiscriminate image capture. Yet, as several generations of Post-Modernists have found, traditional tools and techniques can be put to subversive ends. For example, Wim Delvoye had a cement mixer carved in wood in a Baroque style and Feminist collective used appliqué (and the 1960s Peace Movement used quilting) as a means to advance progressive politics. Conversely, could not a reactionary use the new medium of photography to advocate for non-modern positions?

When Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) was an art student in Germany, there was a pervasive silence about the actions of his parents’ generation during the war. A generation of Germans were told to both repent and forget what they did to serve their country during the 1930s and World War II. This led to a national amnesia punctuated by outbreaks of shaming – an ineffective and disturbing therapy to the collective responsibility for war. The employment of competent individuals in the post-War West Germany led to the perception (among liberally-educated younger Germans) that an implicit acceptance of Nazi attitudes was tacitly compatible with German life (or at least that Naziism was circumstantially dependent and therefore excusable).

Kiefer’s response to the unquiet ghosts of Germany’s recent past was to take a series of photographs of himself giving the Nazi salute in various places of historical significance, in Germany and abroad. In a satirical commentary, he claimed to be occupying Switzerland, France and Italy. The ostensible reading of these photographs was that a young German was representing the futility and hubris of a national political movement claiming ancient sites power. Such appropriation was fleeting, inappropriate and absurd, the conventional interpretation went. Kiefer himself has spoken of his support for democracy and his opposition to Naziism. His bathtub recreations Operation Sealion have mocked plans for the 1940-1 invasion of  Great Britain across the English Channel.

These photographs and others are included in a new catalogue of Kiefer’s photographs (In the Beginning: Anselm Kiefer & Photography, 2023, Thames & Hudson, hardback, £35). It is the first catalogue (published in conjunction with an exhibition at Lille Museum that ran from 6 October to 3 March) to focus upon Kiefer’s photography. However, the artist never exhibits his photographs as photographs, they are always modified. They are included in giant books of lead pages, applied to large paintings, use in sculptural installations, hanging mangled in strips inside a vitrine. Kiefer draws on photographs and collages them into pictorial surfaces, with words (such as names, phrases or lines of poetry) playing a large part in explicating to us potential meaning.

[Anselm Kiefer, Family Pictures, 2013 2017, Set of 16 display cases, Metal, glass, lead, 385 x 145 x 145 cm Photo: Charles Duprat. © Anselm Kiefer]

Kiefer has taken Naziism more seriously than many artists and he recognises the power of the mythology that accrued around (first) the party and then the state. He prepared for his performances (during which he sometimes wore his father’s Wehrmacht uniform) by listening to National Socialist speeches to put him in the correct state of mind. In his photographs of the German countryside, especially the bleak woods and forbidding forests, Kiefer approaches the core of the German self-image of the Heimat.  His art (as in The Rhine (1969-2009)) approaches the feeling of Friedrich and the German Romantic painters. These photographs are evocative and plangent as records and images; yet (of course) any image of Germany in the post-war period is seen as loaded with political wariness and nationalist shame.

Kiefer is willing to dig deeper than most. He sees National Socialism as more than simply a political movement of 1920-1945. Its roots are World War I, Bismarck, Friedrich the Great and Arminius, who defeated the Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. These references appear in photographs, sculpture, paintings and installations, which often come from Kiefer’s practice. Kiefer embraces the dirty, fertile compost of history by using Post-Modern methods of combining materials. Straw, lead, zinc, earth and photographs are as likely to be found in his art as is paint and charcoal. In a photograph of 1978-80, the artist wears a dress and stands on tree stump, a winter scene and a horse head painted on the photograph. He has written the names of Odin and Yggdrasil, the name of an ancient and giant tree sacred to the Norse, inferring that he is a living embodiment of that legend. By linking the modern German to the Nordic people, just as the Nazis had done, Kiefer reiterates the story and allows himself to take on the power and the guilt associated. One cannot escape the sincerity that often overpowers the ostensible mockery of the 1970s liberal sensibility. Kiefer genuinely yearns for meaning, even if his political conditioning prevents him from embracing it fully.

[Anselm Kiefer, Am Anfang, [In the Beginning], 2008. Painting Oil, emulsion, lead and photography on canvas; 380 x 560 cm, Grothe Collection at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany Photo: Charles Duprat. © Anselm Kiefer]

This is not to suggest that Kiefer is a National Socialist; however, he has innate sympathy and understanding for the German and Germanic mythology. Clearly, there are deep points of division between (on one hand) Kiefer and (on the other) National Socialism and Paganism. Photographs that reference Sulamith, Lilith and Jewesses of Biblical history – tying them into a Germano-European mythology – are incompatible with those ideologies.  Art that draws upon Sumerian imagery – art that does not see Sumerian people as Indo-Aryan – does not obviously relate directly to Nordic myth. There is no reason that an artist’s works have to operate from a single viewpoint or form a cohesive universe, but Kiefer’s organic, freewheeling (almost stream-of-consciousness) approach does push us to see his individual works are components of a unified whole. Therefore, we mentally work hard to make connections we infer are applicable to art that references Chaldea and the Teutoburg Forest, however mistaken that urge may be. The visual messiness and the fleeting inclusion of key words create a fertile flux of meaning that can be as confusing as it is enlightening.

Kiefer does not go out of his way to clear up meanings by supplying readings that fit a cohesive worldview. Kiefer is not an intellectual artist but one driven by emotion. He loves play and making connections; he takes delight in surprising himself and by allowing his activity to incorporate a source that he created half a century before. Kiefer is Post-Modern in that he not only combines mediums (including non-art ones) is a bricolage form but also in having a fragmentary, contradictory mental process that cannot have a firm foundation, a clear narrative or an achievable objective. The works are often beautiful and stark but they refuse to be implicitly meaningful, but rather, they are indicative of elusive meaning that the artist cannot explain. Connections are implied, inferred, indefinite, mutable; they undoubtedly mean something, but we (amongst ourselves and in relation to the artist) are in no position to decipher it. We yearn for meaning but the artist withholds, most likely because he cannot articulate verbally beyond what he has presented us with in visual form. A Post-Modernist form of perennialism.     

There is no reason why more artists, those of an explicitly anti-Modern persuasion, may not use modes similar to Kiefer. Once one overcomes an aversion to photography itself, there is no reason why a modern tool cannot be used to transmit an ancient method. Reactionaries have found no difficulty with the quintessentially modern mediums of the poster and propaganda film, perhaps because they feel so utilitarian and thus almost invisible or immaterial means to reaching a definite end. It is when the reactionary approaches the non-invisible medium of photography-as-photography that his hang-ups kick in. Why not paint or draw it instead, he thinks. And so he defers to the more traditional – and therefore safer, more time-honoured (and authority-sanctioned) – mediums, bypassing the medium that fills the modern consciousness. Perhaps the aversion to photography is because today’s reactionary (being a modern man to the core) intuitively understands that a photograph of a modern person dressed in a suit of armour looks at best an extra from a historical film or (at worst) a live-action roleplay gamer engaged in a weekend recreation. And perhaps a die-hard traditionalist recognises the absurdity of his position and does not wish to see it so painfully exposed. However, if a perennial traditionalist were to take Kiefer’s approach – without the myth-mixing and multi-cultural juxtapositions – he could use photography as a valid way of conveying his viewpoint in what might become genuine art.