gious motif as seen inSelf-Portrait in Blue Bathroom,
1980, where the bathtub suggests ritual cleansing,
and the artist’s image in the mirror is framed by
the blue of St. Mary, another tendency that har-
kenedbacktoanearliertime,especiallytheturnof
the twentieth century. Andre Serrano’s overt use of
Christian iconography caused a firestorm of contro-
versy in the late 1980s, sparking the so-called ‘‘cul-
tural wars’’ in America.
Sexuality and its complex relations with the
photographic act of seeing are also at the center of
Nobuyoshi Araki’s work. Araki presents the female
body with an erotic intensity as in hisTokyo Story
series, 1980–1988. Undressed, bound, and staged in
domestic environments, it becomes the object of
both exhibitionist and voyeuristic instincts. Playing
with the conventions of documentary and fashion
photography as well as pornography, Araki uses his
photographs as a means to exorcise his phantasms,
offering along the way an incisive portrait of con-
temporary Japanese urban culture, proving that in
the 1980s, the human body, naked or dressed, does
not necessarily only implicate sexuality. In the
1980s, sexuality becomes yet another area for dis-
course on social issues, politics, or aesthetic theory.
The use of the human body, while a central motif
in 1980s photography, was not monolithic in the
nature of its representations. In stark opposition to
Mapplethorpe’s cold vision of perfect physique,
John Coplans focused on the deterioration and
vulnerability of the flesh, using his own body. As
Elizabeth Fraiberg wrote, Coplan’s photography
‘‘is the stuff of Mapplethorpe’s worst nightmares.’’
(Fraiberg 1990, 28) Coplans use of large scale and
fragmented images presented in series brought
forth a number of earlier tendencies associated
with art photography of the 1960s and 1970s.
It is Lucas Samaras, working since the 1960s,
who has probably most fully explored the limits of
the documentary form through his use of Polaroid
photography in a number of series in which he
presents the intimacies of his own everyday life.
Using the ability of Polaroids to both instantly
offer up their image as well as their ability to be
physically manipulated, Samaras enriched an his-
torically humble medium with a personal literature
that challenges presumptions about its immediacy
and ‘‘popular’’ character. The highly personal,
humble use of photography exemplified by Goldin
and Samaras or Francesca Woodman, among
others, also saw its opposite in another hugely influ-
ential tendency of the 1980s, that of the cold, dis-
tanced, analytic social document.
The most characteristic example is the work of
Bernd and Hilla Becher, which is principally an
objective recording of architectural relics of the
industrial age. (Industrial Facades #4, 1978–1995)
yet which in presenting ‘‘typologies’’ fit well within
the postmodern theoretical structures advanced dur-
ing the 1980s. Bechers’ conception of photography
influenced a great number of photographers, who
had worked since the 1970s but burst forth on the
international scene in the 1980s, among them
Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth.
The Bechers, whose photographs had achieved pro-
minence within the conceptual and minimal art
movements, taught at the Staatliche Kunstakademie
(State Art Academy) in Du ̈sseldorf, where Gursky
and others assimilated their rigorous method and its
implications. Teasing an eccentric geometry out of
each of his subjects, Gursky reorders the world
according to his own visual logic, accumulating myr-
iad details to offer a sense of harmonic coherence.
His pictures typified byHong Kong Stock Exchange,
1994, may be described as modern-day versions of
classical history painting in that they reproduce the
collective mythologies that fuel contemporary cul-
ture: travel and leisure (sporting events, clubs, air-
ports, hotel interiors, art galleries), finance (stock
exchanges, sites of commerce), material production
(factories, production lines), and information (librar-
ies, book pages, data).
RuffandStruthalsoexploitedandexpandedthe
Becher’s use of photography as a neutral medium in
the service of an objective representation of reality.
The mechanical and coldly descriptive appearance of
their images is reminiscent of August Sander’s socio-
logical use of photography to record ‘‘types’’ in the
1920s and 1930s. Yet this generation of artists rea-
lized that photography’s ‘‘neutrality’’ and ‘‘objectiv-
ity’’ are not a reality, rather a commonly-held belief.
In their typically large-scale, color photographs,
these artists present images that often seem more
real than reality itself.
Another important photographer to emerge out
of the historical traditions of photography in the
1980s is Martin Parr. A photojournalist in tempera-
ment and by training, Parr produced several star-
tling color series that extended and redefined this
tradition, includingThe Last Resort, 1986–1988,
andThe Cost of Living, 1988. In these photographs
that unite a growing political awareness with a pre-
occupation with the domestic and mundane, Parr
created dynamic, colorful images that, ranging in
subject from crumbling British seaside towns to
international hubs of consumer culture, offer
witty, unblinking insights into contemporary life.
But aesthetic tendencies or even aesthetic fad and
fashion aside, photography, unlike painting and
other traditional media, is primarily a fruit ofHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE 1980S