https://krollermuller.nl/jan-dibbets-perspectiefcorrectie-rechthoek-met-1-diagonaal
A few weeks ago I visited an exhibition by Jan Dibbets at the H’ART Museum in Amsterdam. I have admired his work for a long time. Yet during the visit a question kept returning: can we ever truly escape the overwhelming influence of conceptualism from the 1960s?
Dibbets repeatedly stresses that photography is underestimated. By this he means that photography is more than simply taking pictures. He was not interested in depicting the world. Instead, he wanted to challenge the camera itself. For him, photography is not art in itself, unless you surpasse your predecessors and introduce something genuinely new. Otherwise it becomes redundant photography; superfluous images, made simply because they can be made. In his view, much of photography falls into that category.
In the series Perspective Corrections (1967), he demonstrates that the camera, reducing a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional surface, can never reflect reality in a neutral way. Each image in the series contains a rectangle or square that is in fact a trapezoid in the physical world, yet appears perfectly rectangular in the photograph. What is distorted in reality looks geometrically correct in the photographic image.
Around the same time, the Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira also rejected the idea of photography as a tool for simply capturing reality. His book For a Language to Come from 1970 can be read as a manifesto. Nakahira regarded photography as a new language, one capable of evoking feelings or activating an experience. Photography, in his view, should not function as a transparent window onto the world, but as a fragmentary language.
His images are dark and abruptly framed, often without a clear hierarchy. Street scenes, objects, shadows. Meaning does not easily settle in them. They read more as fragments of perception than as statements.
https://www.shashasha.co/en/book/for-a-language-to-comettps://www.shashasha.co/en/book/for-a-language-to-come
In the final year of my photography studies, the entire curriculum revolved around portrait photography. A well-known photo fair in the Netherlands had chosen portraiture as its theme, and the school participated in the fair. I am not a portrait photographer, and the subject did not resonate with me. Out of pure rebellion, I therefore photographed every single slice of an entire loaf of bread. On glass, that is. The action resulted in eighteen portraits.