Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
New Jersey, United States
21 March - 28 June 2009
Venturing outside the discipline of art history, this exhibition presents two dozen photographs from the museum's permanent collection in response to a philosophical question posed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in his 1950 lecture "The Thing."
What is a "thing?" For Heidegger, this word, a noun so noncommittal that it describes a neutron, a radio wave, fire, or the Atlantic Ocean, exemplifies the abstractness of human thought.
At the dawn of language, he postulates, all words worked the same way modern verbs do, expressing action or change; speech was a dynamic, engaged act.
A more removed, mediated grasp of reality came into being with the advent of nouns.
The world as we know it is composed of mutually distinct, separate, and classifiable things, and it is this that enables us to convert it into images and to alter it through technology.
Heidegger argues that these human capacities reached an untenable extreme in the modern era with television (which puts the entire world at a uniform, abstract middle distance) and the atomic bomb.
Photography is often described as an objectifying medium, or even as objective: the forms in a photograph, after all, were drawn by objects that stood before a camera.
But the camera always has an operator, whose priorities and choices determine what kind of truth the photograph is going to ratify.
Timing, scale, distance, framing, grouping or isolation, detail, perspective, length of light-wave: in a camera image, these are not mere aesthetic factors but matters of epistemology.
What Is a Thing? explores some of the countless ways that photographers of the past 170 years have broken down and reconstituted reality, affecting understanding of the modern world as decisively, and as subtly, as the language we use every day.
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