The Value of Space:
A Theoretical Sketch for Photographic Art
in the Late-Twentieth Century
essay by Steve Yates

[Editor's note: This essay was included in the now out-of-print Poetics of Space: A Critical Photography Anthology, a very informative book compiled and edited by Steve Yates, and published in 1995 by University of New Mexico Press. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the author. Steve Yates is Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts; Fulbright Scholar, USSR and Russia; and Associate Adjunct Professor, Art & Art History Department, University of New Mexico.]

To give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity.
— Gaston Bachelard (1)

Perhaps what we must be faithful to is our knowledge that distance from nature is no longer represented by perspective.
— Stanley Cavell (2)

Our individual and most fundamental experiences in life are directly linked to space or at least the idea of space. Every language contains numerous words, phrases, and concepts dedicated to the term. Various disciplines offer meanings and applications. Its definition is ever-expansive, its interpretation measurable only in the context in which it is used. At this juncture in the late-twentieth century, space is less a delineator of prescribed classic or modern proportions than an expressive necessity for inventive aspirations outside traditional norms.

Sweeping generalizations can plague the writing about subjects such as space. However, space and artists’ conceptions of space have played a significant role in the evolution of art. It seems that within history shifts in the direction of art often are accompanied by eras of exploration that help to establish new traditions. Coupled with inventive perceptions of space during periods of prolific experimentation, such changes imply a fundamental and theoretical abandonment of the past, often in vital terms.

At the very least, a serious analysis of the idea of space provides suggestions of maturity and growth by the practitioners of any artistic discipline. At various junctures attention to new conceptions of space suggests other paths in the making. A further indication of a significant break from established convention often involves a certain amount of denial: advocates of the traditional avoiding the changes of the present, an increase in reevaluations of the past, and the repetition of ideas through generations within the prescribed confines of only certain accepted or chosen practices. Such reactions only deepen the implications of change, and the complete departure from past practices that inevitably occurs can have influence beyond individual conceptions of any medium.


Figure 38. James Turrell, Roden Crater 80% overlap, Large Scale, modern stereo viewer on tripod with two aerial photographs, 1985. Courtesy of Karl Bornstein Gallery. Installation view from the exhibition Poetics of Space.

Eventually, practitioners working from common assumptions begin to acknowledge alternatives to conventions in their own work. In their continuing refinement of tradition they resist a full recognition of alternative choices — those outside the options of historic record. Competing schools of thought, challenging the untested ideas that oppose or realign accepted principles, can cause transformations in understanding. When ground-breaking ideas incorporate principles of space, breakthroughs in the direction of art combine with pivotal ways of seeing.

It is noteworthy that modern philosophers and scientists (particularly physicists) have continually undertaken theoretical reevaluations of space. These have played a significant part in substantiating the present foundations of their studies and affected the development and practice of related disciplines.

The primitive mind, by never separating the experience between space and an abstract concept of life, provided the natural world of events with an immeasurable sense of energy, mystery and meaning. Greek thought and early theological principles as well as mathematical formulations that were applied to astronomical and astrological endeavors were influential in establishing theories of the physical world through the Middle Ages. Some of this early thinking led to modern conceptions that reach beyond the immediately visible. The fourth dimension of time-space and multiple dimensions precluded the notion of empty space.(3) During the Renaissance, when mathematics was extricated from astronomy and astrology, science and art together became a breeding ground for thought and calculations that led to a more literal vision of space. The revolutionary ideas of the Renaissance provided the paradigm that lasted for centuries and directly influenced the inventors of photography in the 1830s.

During the Renaissance, art and science were less distinct as disciplines of study and practice. When the notion of measuring distance from a single, immediate viewpoint was conceptualized and formulated, the result was a model of space that provided a more tangible organization of the immediate physical world. Principles based on human scale produced a new sense of proportions that, at least symbolically, established a more direct relationship between the human form and the universe. A means of subjective assessment through calculation and appraisal was applied with craftsmanship and skill.

Discoveries in optics, medicine, engineering, and various aspects of science as well as mathematics influenced revolutionary breakthroughs in painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture. The pioneering work of the artist Giotto di Bondone in the late-thirteenth century presented a new sense of three dimensions — the illusion of real-world space — on the flat, two-dimensional surface of a painting. His creation of three-dimensional painted form in an architectural setting sparked a visual revolution that led to perspective, connecting art and science to the direct observation of the visible world. Furthermore, Giotto’s activities connected the major art forms of the time — sculpture and architecture for the church — with the subservient art of painting.

In the twentieth century a similar parallel exists in the evolution of photography within mainstream art. The growing assimilation of newly rationalized concepts of space among thirteenth-century art disciplines is similar to the incorporation of photographic principles and materials by contemporary artists. Today’s activities serve the reinvention of space in pluralistic terms, which are breaking away from the modern paradigm. In both cases spatial concepts have echoed more than aesthetic urges and indicated changes in terms of culture. Spatial harmony and unification in Giotto’s era corresponded with the church’s developing a closer relationship with the masses. The interplay of two- and three-dimensional art forms increase over time (Fig.39).

Resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of re-presenting them.

Painting imitated space. And representation — whether in the service of pleasure or knowledge — was posited as a form of repetition: the theater of life or the mirror of nature. (5)

Rational forms of worldly things repeated empowered the picture. What was visibly represented and depicted — including the domain that held and accounted for the things within it — was thought to be unquestionably present in the object prior to the final form of expression.

The invention of photography confirmed painting’s model. By some accounts, the new process even challenged the very precepts of accuracy or truth in representation that helped to establish the importance of painting. Photography was in part conceived from the collective ideas of perspective and space and their refinement over centuries. Another of its aspects was born of scientific, optical, and artistic aspirations, fueled by social and cultural needs as well as the increasing demands of knowledge. A more comprehensive practice from the linear method of descriptive logic — beyond such pictorial devices as foreshortening, chiaroscuro, and perspective — re-formed the picture with uncompromising resolution.

Giotto’s pioneering work placed painting in the realm of intellect and science. Painting eventually eclipsed the predominant influence of sculpture, with its three-dimensional illusion of worldly materials and structure. An unparalleled sense of truth came with sculpted form. Perspective reconfirmed reality for the two-dimensional surface. Photography’s capacity to record the light-reflected world reconfirmed veracity while preserving literal spatial representation as a primary artistic purpose.

Theoretical debates between painters and sculptors of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century were further influenced by those who were attempting to break the tradition of repetitive, pattern-oriented art. (6) The questioning by artists of the inherent limitations of an art form, its relationship to truth, the direction it had served and should take in relationship to its limitations, and its social and cultural roles went hand in hand with a more descriptively functional conception of space in artistic as well as scientific practice.

Five hundred years later, the invention of photography and related initiatives further refined such notions of space. The camera obscura (“dark room”), Sir Charles Wheatstone’s stereo viewer, Daguerre’s large-scaled, illusionistic light paintings for his Diorama theater, and William Henry Fox Talbot’s preoccupation with drawing from the camera lucida, all influenced ideas in seeing. Debate shifted from the materialism of sculpture versus the illusionism of painting to handmade reality versus the machine-ordered truths of the camera.

The camera and light-sensitive materials of photography articulated space. Photography provided a rational form of space that further qualified the linear geometric model of perspective. Using new materials the early practitioners formed a new sensibility out of the Renaissance model. A fine line was drawn between the world seen and the picture space, and this distinction was discouraged. The popular understanding that a photograph was a “mirror of nature” and a product of the “pencil of nature” became a central theme in photography’s escalating battle to become accepted as an art form.

The inventor of the modern process of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, was, in fact, a key figure in the advancement of these pencil and mirror notions. In a presentation of his invention to the members of the Royal Institute of London, on January 25,1839, Talbot described pictures he had taken of his country home as “the first instance on record, of a house having painted its own portrait.” Several days later he announced the invention of photography in a paper entitled “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or, the Process by which Natural Objects May be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil.” Five years later Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, demonstrating twenty-four early examples of photography to suggest its artistic potential as well as other applications. (7) Perspective appeared to be built in; the photograph seemed the result of prescribed natural phenomena; and the influence of human factors was conditioned by a set form of phenomena and process.

While such notions masked the difference between the picture and what was seen by the eye, Talbot’s prolific experiments provided many examples of the artistic potential for the medium. Like painting or printmaking, it appeared to be self-determined by innate qualities. The formal properties of architectural subjects provided evidence of the unique, uncompromising visual character of the medium.

Inevitably, during the formative stages of any new art form, its intrinsic materials help dictate the final form of expression through the hands of the artist. As an art form matures and its traditions grow, individual practitioners create ways of mastering what they perceive as the inherent nature of the medium — its intrinsic characteristics. During the course of artistic development, accomplishments define the medium and its purpose, helping to formulate the contributions of each era.

In the early stages of photography, the materials rather than the basic process varied. The photographer relied upon scientific formulas, and the character of photographic space was less consciously shaped than optically rendered. A limited sense of illusion and stasis typified pictures, often as a result of long exposures or a preoccupation with the rendering of detail that photography offered more than any other medium. Distance was perceived through the delineating properties of light and the descriptive tangibility of people and things. Mastery of the medium was perceived as a science and proficiency in the material form of depiction; space was more a function of the individual photographic process.

Photography’s development, which included experimentation with a variety of materials and processes, continued at the turn of the century, while debates centered on photography’s legitimacy as art. These discussions centered around how photographers influenced their materials more and more openly and were less interested in using their medium to provide a literal translation of the world. New printing processes were employed with expressive vigor, including the application of color. The use of camera imagery became a catalyst to concerns outside traditional photographic approaches yet within the domain of art.

A detailed sense of deep space or overriding impression of perspective was less important than an attention to foreground, short focus, and the print’s surface. Spatial unity was maintained in a closer relationship to the picture plane, allowing for new levels of experience. The print’s image remained closely associated with the objects conveyed but with variations in the semblance of form. Pictorial space was not simply a matter of reality portrayed; it coexisted in terms of individual picture elements. Each part of the subject could be liberated for other purposes and the new sense it independently sustained. The belief in photography’s capacity of literal rendering was extended into the realm of more expressive possibilities — with a transforming principle of space.

During this time of increasing alternatives (and experimentation) for the photographer, controversy grew over the further acknowledgment of the artistic influence over materials. The question of photography’s place in art came to a historical turning point. Such critical and theoretical inquiries during periods of transition include the benefits of cross-influences and shared new conceptions. What becomes shared among artists — the common denominator among the diverse activities of any period in art — indicates the direction of change. The late-thirteenth and the nineteenth century were not only marked by the polemics concerning media (sculpture versus painting, and painting versus photography, respectively) but also by new thinking and new ideas that became the precedents for transformation. In both eras it was a new conception and use of space that not only demonstrated the maturity of artistic expression within individual art forms but heralded a shift in the direction of art that transcended media, materials, or processes.

In this respect, like Giotto in his time, at the turn of the nineteenth century Paul Cézanne conveyed another sensibility in his work. The linear formula of the world observed — artist — artwork — viewer — was relinquished for artworks that reflected the new age of relativity and abstraction. In Giotto’s work, space followed from the objects and their relationships within it; in Cézanne’s, perception, space, and real things occurred simultaneously and without hierarchy. Space was no longer subservient to objects in the world depicted; rather, it co-existed with them as a more comprehensive world seen.

The revolution within culture and technology as well as their interaction provided a new understanding of the world and the structure of thought. Before the First World War the “culture of time and space” permeated every part of life. (8) How much the advent of photography helped liberate this generation of artists from traditional ways of viewing the world remains a question for history. If the invention of photography was a crystallization of the Renaissance model in inception, its seemingly uncompromising mode of ocular rendering and spatial translucence also appeared to preclude further options.

After the turn of the century, through the advent of Cubism in art, the Pictorialist movement, and early modern photography, a liberating break from conventional notions of space took place. In Cubism multiple viewpoints, positive and negative forms, and the use of memory by the painter influenced another means of developing the picture’s structure. The artists of Pictorialism acknowledged the surface of the photographic print as an active part of the final form of expression.

Figure 40. Hannah Hoch, Bauerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple), photomontage, 1931. Courtesy of Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

The development and increased use of collage and montage by the European, German, and Russian avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century provided the framework for unlimited perceptions of space across artistic disciplines. Activities in painting, drawing, graphic and typographical arts for the printed page, filmmaking, and theatrical design reflected widespread experimentation, often combining characteristics of traditional media in new ways. The mobilization of the camera (e.g., the “bird’s-eye” view), the multiple and fragmented viewpoint, and the prolific theoretical “laboratory period” of the Russian Constructivists enormously expanded the potentials of space in art. Pioneering activities in the arts ran parallel to modern scientific, mathematical, and technological achievements. (9)

Dada and Surrealism, which followed, added the dimensions of chance and the dream. The inventions of photomontage by the German Dadaists combined disparate photographic fragments — often reproductions from the printed page — into kaleidoscopic arrangements depicting the anxieties of an industrialized age with increasingly dehumanized dimensions of politics. Picture space was no longer measured in terms of human form or proportion. Distance and scale were broken into a more vital multiplicity that served each part of the montage with imaginative force and fancy. Edges within their photomontages were central leitmotifs. The space of the mind was conveyed in terms inside and outside the photograph.

Theoretical formulations of space by László Moholy-Nagy in Von Material zu Architektur (later translated as The New Vision, From Material to Architecture) in 1929, began to dispel further the conventional notions of the Renaissance model of rationalized space. Over forty uses of the term “space” were identified, adding to the difficulty of any sure definition. The idea of relationships and functions of space in art grew increasingly complex, nonlinear, and disconnected from the past. Modern perceptions of reality coupled with another understanding and sense of the world helped establish fresh criteria. Among artists, a growing dissatisfaction with old conventions resulted in a remarkable diversity in experimentation.

Art was pursued for significant changes in discovery as science pioneered ideas of new purpose that became special turning points in history. Shaping perceptions beyond the visible world encouraged innovation. In the early-twentieth century art and science shared in a revolution of means in vision. Their practitioners were more independently motivated in their aspirations than during the corresponding reformation of the Renaissance. Shifts in practice and theory indicate the transformation of any discipline. A “proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal to extraordinary research.” (10) The revolution of photography within the arts began with the exploration of growing alternatives inside and outside the literal space rendered by the camera.

The climate of social unrest and political instability in Europe and Russia provided the backdrop that further indicated the depth of change. Ideas of space acknowledged the shortfall of dimensional formulations based on the mathematical theorems of Euclid. Theories from various artistic and scientific disciplines proliferated in contradictory fashion. Diverse concepts were united to accommodate the spectrum of possibilities.

In publications such as Der Raum (1922), Rudolf Carnap articulated the categories of “formal space,” “perceived space,” and “physical space” as separate concepts that were interconnected. In a paper delivered to the Kant Society in Berlin, Carnap first presented his formation of these objective, subjective, and material concepts. Based on the well-known contradictions among disciplines from the nineteenth century, he developed a “synopsis of the different concepts of space, organized objectively rather than in their historical context.” Instead of rejecting one theory for another or creating a hierarchy of truths, systematic logic was redefined to incorporate intuition. Carnap pursued a clearer understanding of the “basis of the perception of space” and its relationship to experience. His ideas directly corresponded to the multidimensional ventures, such as the idea of abstraction, arising from art, science, and philosophy of the period (see Carnap’s essay in Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology). (11)

If the conception of space during earlier centuries was conveyed by the metaphors of the mirror and the theater, in this century it had moved from transparency and reflection to the heterogeneity of poetry. A prescribed notion of its character no longer preceded the idea in art. Space could be re-defined if not reinvented. Photography was profoundly affected, along with other modern forms of art in painting, sculpture, architecture, and the new film medium.

The Russian artists of Constructivism experimented with combinations of materials to realign the viewers’ experiences in looking at art. The German Dada invention of photomontage removed the narrow compass of the single viewpoint in the spirit of anti-art. Uncommon points of view with the camera as well as fabricated subjects created by the European avant-garde opened further possibilities. Artists, like the scientists of the era, found they could search into the intangible. The necessity of believing in concrete forms of reality or a fixed purpose was transformed to accommodate the unperceived characteristics of reality.

Similar notions of reality beyond the immediately visible world were developed in untested fields of science, such as quantum mechanics. (12) A new way of seeing in the world evolved that was unlike the physics of everyday experience. Art, like modern science, was filled with paradoxical questions and ambiguities that made clear the need for a new orientation. Art was no longer a measurement of unified space. Rational theory of perspective and sight had outlived its usefulness.(13)

An open-ended idea of space was more important to the artist than a substitute for subjective experience. It represented a change in culture in terms of looking beyond the present. Photographic materials and processes — photomechanical reproductions from the printed page to photograms and montage — extended the potential of art in photographic terms. This major shift stepped beyond perception and the expression of formal outlines drawn from language. Innovations with photographic dimensions of the period indicated another relationship between artwork and viewer as well as unprecedented ideas about what meaning photographic imagery could convey.

By the early 1920s, Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky was a leader in endeavors that concerned new concepts of space in art. In his photographic self-portrait (see Fig. 21), the artist’s vision replaces the alphabet in a universal language where pictures supersede the written word. Hand and eye construct the design for tomorrow’s culture with social implications that transcend political consternation. Rooted in the modern revolutions of science and technology with progressive social goals, Lissitzky regarded art as a dynamic process.

Figure 21. El Lissitzky, Self-portrait, photomontage, ink, pencil, and gouache, 1924. Courtesy of State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, photo by A. Sergeev, 1994.

Space became a medium that contributed to the materialization of the idea, and form was — to use an aspect of photography metaphorically — a “frozen instantaneous picture of a process.” Lissitzky’s interest in the mobilization of the viewer and the abandonment of the static position by the viewer in confronting a work of art offered values beyond Cubism. The Russian avant-garde led the way into the “new space” through their work and teachings in some of the most advanced schools of the era. (14)

Photography and the growing perceptions of space were inexorably linked in inventive postures that revealed the fixed point of view in art as an exhaustible means of expression as well as a limited form of experience. The Russian and German reactions to the radical social and political reformations around the First World War were filled with anxiety. A more expressive space, opened to the dynamics of life, was also conceived as less predictable — yet evolutionary — through experimental artistic practice.

Figure 41. Robert Heinecken, Refractive Hexagon, cut gelatin silver photographs glued to wood geometric puzzle, twenty-four parts, 1965. Courtesy Center of Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Board of Regents.

By the 1950s and 1960s, American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, and Robert Heinecken (Fig. 41) became pre-occupied with the space of the imagination as an analogue to experience. Space was further separated from causality, marking a difference in seeing that affected not only how the artist perceived the nature of photographs but how photography could be used in seeing the world. Collectively, the ideas of artists — inside and outside the late-modern tradition in photography as an art medium — helped set a direction that altered the form of content in art. Space through photographic innovation became a catalyst for the invention of incommensurable ways of seeing. It was no longer the product of ideological consequences or a servant to the world observed.

Flatness in photographic art began to gain importance. This was less an attention to delicate surfaces than a reorientation in the relationships between the artwork, the viewer, and the world. (15) For the artist, it clearly represented a move beyond the compression of distance, as in painting, into a structure without dimension. The picture could assimilate more ideas, especially through photographic terms.

Figure 42. John Baldessari, Thread, Ektacolor photograph and gelatin silver photographs with gouache on five panels, 1986. Collection of Suzanne and Howard Feldman. From the exhibition Poetics of Space.

The picture plane as a position for meaning and experience was realized with unlimited capacities. Not just a replication of flatness from the language of modern painting, this view was an act of recognition by artists of the space of the imagination. The use of photographic materials, ideas, and means set the precedent for a heterogeneity of flatness — a new poetics of space.

Figure 43. Susan Rankaitis, Dragon Channel, unique toned, gelatin silver photographic montage, 1985. From the exhibition Poetics of Space.


Figure 44. Francisco Infante, Artifact, gelatin silver photograph from sculptural installation, Moscow, 1981. Collection of Lewis and Lynn Pollock.

Gaston Bachelard provides a remarkable sense of an ontology of space in his seminal analysis in La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space). His critical inquiry into the origin of the poetic image focuses on the phenomenon of the artist’s successes, independent of skill and craft, of knowing and not knowing (“not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge”), and on the image’s “transcending of all the premises of sensibility.” (16) While this French philosopher sees that the poetic act (“the sudden image”) is not accessible to close scrutiny, he confronts the imagination to examine what are “simple images of felicitous space.” Such an exploration helps to determine the human value of space as well as the immeasurable part of artistic creation.

This vivid philosophical rendering of space, revealed through the analysis of literature, is illuminating when considering artists working with photography over recent decades. It touches upon a spectrum of contemporary issues, opening a vast and renegotiable view of photographic art and its relationship to the world, without the limitations of modern doctrine. Space has become central to contemporary practice, transcending any single approach or tradition, and has placed photography within the mainstream of art much as a similar evolutionary shift in the Renaissance did for painting.

Correspondence between media and ideas is vital in such circumstances of transition. Photography shares in the historical change in seeing and the use of the imagination:

Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain in different space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in ... with all the partiality of the imagination. (17)

The shift for the artist is into a territory with little relation to language. Photographic art at the end of this century faces the merging in functions of the real and unreal.

This critical attention to new conceptions of space, which rises consciously and unconsciously from the unbridled imagination and outside the bounds of formalist discipline, can provide us with a firmer understanding of the extraordinary changes in photographic works of art in recent decades. The growing conviction of a present generation of artists that space is limitless underscores the diminishing convictions toward historic or formalistic parameters. Traditions are only important when they are used as the basis for the development of new art that has no hierarchies and that moves beyond the confines of old definitions.

If the innovations of the 1920s helped release the viewer from a set way of experiencing the world, then the present activity by artists continues to forge another awareness. Today’s open-ended conception of space exceeds the applications of new materials and technologies or the resonance of social unrest or cultural change. It has become an intuitive replacement for past values that recognizes the limitations of past criteria.

A vital preoccupation with space offers the viewer a kind of questioning and discovery that is less preoccupied with performance than with participation and invention. Photographic works no longer represent a mirror turned inward or outward. They are unconcerned with any systematic or stylistic counteraction to tradition. There is an expansion in the discipline of seeing that suggests an opening of the door and a stepping away from one of the last strongholds of the artist’s historical residence in worldly physical space — that of past photography where photographs only contain the world.

This new value of space, within and outside established photographic practices, includes the nature of the process of photography articulated by the idea. Rather than putting forth a denatured form of space or reduction of the camera-bound image, this is an art that invites infinite forms of expression. Virtually uninvolved with science, systems of measurement, or the limits of technologies, it denies formula. It is a value which affirms human vision, the unfolding of perception and insight. Visual perception has gained a strong foothold within the photographic directions of art. Merleau-Ponty described the unstructured character of such a discourse:

Visual perception (which is never, in fact, limited to the visual alone) is not a sort of picture that another picture could reproduce, just as knowledge is not the copy of a world already given. (18)

In terms of art with photographic dimensions, relationships, and ideas, expression is unrelated to what Bachelard termed the “reproductive imagination.”

In the venerable pursuit of seeing, the poetics of space is part of the artist’s search for another understanding in the context of a fundamental problem of our time: the reorientation of the self. Artistic intuitions of space involving expansive ideas of photography realigned seem to provide answers in this perplexing period of change. Contemporary photographic practices are leading the way in expressing the nature of our presence beyond the post-modern world.

Notes
1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Etienne Gilson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 202.

2. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1979), 115.

3. For a thorough historical analysis from a scientific viewpoint, see Max Jammer, Conceptions of Space (New York: Harper Brothers, 1960).

4. See Robert Klein, Form and Meaning: Writings in the Renaissance and Modern Art (La forme et l’intelligible) (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1970), reprinted and translated (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), especially part 2, chapter 7, 129-142; John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, second edition (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1957); Erwin Panofsky, Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form (Vortage der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924-25); Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1964), especially chapter 4.

5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (Les mots et les choses) (New York: Random House, 1970), 17.

6. For an insightful analysis, see John White, “Paragone: Aspects of the Relation-ship between Sculpture and Painting,” Art, Science and History in the Renaissance, Charles S. Singleton, editor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968).

7. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, revised and enlarged edition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 19-21.

8. For a thorough study of the cultural implications of space in modem terms, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

9. For a pioneering survey of early (proto) modern photography, See S. Yates, “Proto Modern Photography: The Artist and the Critic,” Proto Modem Photography. (Sante Fe: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, 1992), an exhibition co-curated by the late Beaumont Newhall with Steve Yates. Key contributions in the ideological principles of space by the Russian avant-garde in the early twentieth century can be found in the work and writing of El Lissitzky. See “A. and Pangeometry,” reprinted in this volume, John E. Bowk, “The Construction of Space,” Von der Flache zum Raum, Russland 1916-24, (From Surface to Space, Russia 1916-24.) (Koln: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1974), 4-15; John E. Bowit, El Lissitzky (Greenwich: Galeried Gmurzyuska, 1968), 47-56. Also Alan C. Birnholz, “Time and Space in the Art and Though of El Lissitzky,” The Structuralist, 1978. Theory behind Russian Constructivism is diverse and multifaceted. For a more comprehensive understanding across the spectrum of ideas in the writings of the period, see Russian Art of the Avant Garde, Theory and Criticism 1902-1934, Ed. John E. Bowit, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988).

10. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 2, no. 2, enlarged second edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 91.

11. Rudolf Carnap, “Der Raum: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre” (Space: A Contribution to the Teaching of Science), Kant-Studien, no.56, (Berlin; Verlag von Reuther and Reichard, 1922), introduction, 5. This paper was read and is-cussed by artists working and traveling through Berlin, which was an art and information center after the First World War. This paper was significant to the formulation of the theory and writings of Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy.

12. Niels Bohr’s pioneering theoretical work at the turn of the century began to explain the movement of atoms from one state to another as a “quantum leap.” Until late in the twentieth century, this “leap” — or intermediary state — was considered to exist invisibly and theoretically without verification by direct observation. But the notion of the quantum leap and a picture of it — which remained outside direct, human visual perception for the greater part of this century — was a critical tool in the evolution of modern physics. In recent years, scientists have found a means to begin to observe this phenomenon.

13. William M. Ivins, Jr., Art and Geometry: A Study in Space Intuitions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946, reprinted New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1964), 68-70. The last chapter of this publication is reprinted in this volume. William Ivins developed significant writings about the role of perspective in Western art as well as photography’s influence on perspective in the art of the nineteenth century. Also see On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938, reprinted New York: De Capo Press, 1973).

14. Lissitzky-Kuppers. El Lissiitzky, “Nasci, 1924,” 347, and “Proun, Not world visions, BUT — world reality,” 342-44.

15. Leo Steinberg qualifies this new orientation as the “flatbed picture plane” in the work of Robert Rauschenberg. See his essay in this volume. Century Art (London; Oxford University Press, 1972), 85-91.

16. Bachelard, xxix.

17. Ibid. xxx-xxxii.

18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “L’oeil et l’espirit,” Art de France 1, 1960, as quoted in Robert Klein, Form and Meaning, 186.

This revised essay first appeared in the Museum of New Mexico quarterly El Palacio, 92, 3 (Spring 1987), a Special Issue on Contemporary Photography, edited by Steve Yates, in concert with the exhibition “Poetics of Space: Contemporary Photographic Works” at the Museum of Fine Arts.