Painted Photography:  Notes from an exhibition

Placing paint on photographs is almost as old as photography itself. The earliest known coloured photographs were made by the Swiss daguerreotypist and miniature painter Johann Baptist Isenring (1796-1860), who exhibited hand-coloured daguerreotypes in Zurich as early as August 1840, just one year after Daguerre‘s process had been introduced in Paris (Henisch/Henisch 1996: 21). It was a common practice throughout the 19th century and only gradually receded with the advent of colour photography in the first half of the 20th century. Painted photographs as a means of artistic expression became a widespread phenomenon at the same time as photography itself made its grand entrance in the art world from the 1960s onwards.

This huge and diverse practice of painting photographs remains understudied. Although many prominent artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Valie Export, or Gerhard Richter have developed substantial work with painted photographs, there has been no systematic study, no larger exhibition, no art historical overview of the topic. Artists are mainly studied individually. We therefore still lack the tools to describe what happens when a photograph is painted over. What happens to the photographic image? Which are the art historical contexts in which artists decide to use this mix of media? How do these individual artistic approaches intersect and differ?

When planning the 2019 exhibition “Gezielte Setzungen. Übermalte Fotografie in der zeitgenössischen Kunst“ (“Placingdeliberately. Painted photography in contemporary art”) at Sprengel Museum Hannover, Stefan Gronert and I felt like taking afirst step into a vast territory that had long been waiting to be explored. To start somewhere, we focused our attention on artists working in Germany and Austria.

My presentation will offer some of the findings that were made through the exhibition: For the German speaking context, there seem to be two major appearances of painted photographs in art. First, in the 1960s/70s, where it seems to coincide with thecrisis of painting. Second, for about the last ten years, there has been a new interest in painted photographs, with artists such as Helen Feifel, Peter Klare or Shannon Bool. Could this renaissance of the manual in the field of photography be understood as a direct reaction to the experience of the digital world? (Gronert 2019: 7).

In my presentation, I will focus my attention on those current practices. I would further like to develop some theoretical thought on the temporal nature of painted photographs. In this combination of media, the photograph is always prior to the applied paint. If photographs enclose something ‘that has been’ (and will have been), following Roland Barthes (Barthes 1989:105f.), – how does the applied paint shift or add to the temporal aspect of the image? It is this question that I would like to expandon and pose for discussion.

​

​

​

​

Theresia Stipp is an art historian and museum educator at Sprengel Museum Hannover. She studied art history at Freie Universität Berlin focusing on photography. In her master thesis with Prof. Dr. Peter Geimer she critically discussed colorized photography from the American Civil War. Theresia has worked, among others, at Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Museum für Photographie Braunschweig and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Her recent curatorial work include the exhibition “Gezielte Setzungen. Übermalte Fotografie in der zeitgenössischen Kunst” (2019) at Sprengel Museum Hannover as well as the online and physical project “The Things I Tell You Will Not Be Wrong” by Scope Hannover. Biennale für Fotografie und Medienkunst.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​