click! Photography Changes Everything

John Baldessari, celebrated artist and educator, describes how photography transformed his options and work.

When I began painting in the early sixties, I had an old Rolleiflex camera and used it to take visual notes. I’d go out looking for compositions that sort of looked like the paintings I was doing, make 8 x 10 inch prints, put them up on the wall, look at them, paint, and then go outside and do it again. Around that time, a general discontent about art came into my life, a feeling that painting and sculpture were not all that art was, which is what I had always been taught. It bothered me that there seemed to be two separate histories, one for photography, another for art, and they didn’t seem to overlap each other much. I began to think: “Why am I just using photography for a reference? Do I have to translate photography into painting to make it art? Maybe art could include other things.”

In the mid-1960s, I was living in National City, California—not a hotbed of art activity—so it didn’t really matter what I was doing, which was liberating. When you’re painting, one of the things you do is edit. You usually try to make your subject look better than what you see; you pretty it up. But I was living in such a dismal community that I thought I’d just deal with it and show it as it was, warts and all.

So, I drove around in a VW bus, holding my camera out the window, snapping pictures of buildings without looking, and then I wrote down the addresses of where I had been. I knew artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg were using silkscreened photographs in their work, so I couldn’t do that. Instead, I started brushing liquid emulsion on stretched canvases, thinking that anything on stretcher bars throws out “art signals”, and that the way to close the gap between photography and art was to literally print photographs on canvas.

Pretty soon, I was using photography almost exclusively in my work. But it wasn’t photography that I was interested in, but what art might be, and how photography could give me a quick way to implement my ideas. If I wanted, let’s say, a photograph of a house, any picture of a house would do, so I began clipping pictures out of newspapers, magazines, and books. I went dumpster diving outside of photo processing houses. In the early 1970s, somebody told me about a place in Burbank that sold movie stills, but the ones that they had carefully catalogued cost $10 or $15 apiece. They also had bins of 8 x 10 glossies from movies they couldn’t identify, mixed in with 8 x 10s from the local newspapers, and those were only 10 cents apiece. I’d go there whenever I had free time and bought anything that looked halfway good or thought I might use, eventually. I started to realize that because they came from movies and often fell into conventional categories, people were carrying images like them around in their heads in a collective unconscious, and that I could begin to play with that.

The way I sometimes block out parts of some pictures, for example, is part of a flirtatious game I play with the viewer. If I show you everything, it’s going to be ho-hum. If I make a picture a guessing game, I might capture your attention for a little bit longer. There is a hierarchy of vision that I’m interested in attacking and breaking down. If you look at a photograph of people in a room, you’re going to look at their faces first. You’re not going to look at a book that’s on a table. What I try to do is make you look at the book on the table.

The more I got into photography, though, the less I cared about all the preconditions that came along with it. I cared about images, but not about making perfect prints. Photographic paper generally comes in standard sizes: 8 x 10, 11 x 14, and 16 x 20 inches; maybe 20 x 24 was as big as it got. I found a photo lab in LA that did advertising work and could print up to 6 feet wide and I worked with them for years. When I taught painting, I’d tell students, “You don’t have to be enslaved to the rectangle, just cut out of the canvas what you want, and use that.” And when I shot pictures with my Rolleiflex at the time, I began dropping in different masks—a long skinny rectangle, a triangle, a circle—and composing images in whatever shapes I wanted them to be.

People used to think I was anti-painting. I wasn’t. I’ve just always thought that art should be more than painting. My goal has always been to attack conventions of seeing. The work is about seeing the world askew. Remember that old Charles Adams cartoon, where all you see are people sitting in a theater audience and everyone has a horrified expression on their face, except for one guy who’s grinning and laughing? I often think that guy is me.