Tableau Vivant - Photographic Tableau

Photographic Tableau

Jean-François Chevrier was the first to coin the term Tableau in relation to a form of art photography, which began in the 1970s and 80s in an essay titled The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography in 1989. The initial translation of this text substitutes the English word 'Picture' for the French word 'Tableau'. However Michael Fried retains the French word 'Tableau' when referring to Chevrier's essay, because according to Fried (2008), there is no direct translation into English for the French word Tableau. Picture is similar, however "…it lacks the connotations of constructedness, of being the product of an intellectual act that the French word carries." (p. 146) Other texts and Clement Greenberg's theory of Medium Specificity also cover this topic.

The key characteristics of the contemporary photographic tableau according to Chevrier are, firstly:

"They are designed and produced for the wall. summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and "consumed" (p. 116)

By this Chevrier notes that scale and size is obviously important if the pictures are to 'hold the wall'. But size has another function; it distances you from the object. It makes you stand back from the picture to take it all in. This confrontational experience, Fried notes, is actually quite a large break from the conventional reception of photography which up to that point was often consumed in books or magazines.

The tableau has its roots in pictorialist photography (see Alfred Stieglitz) and not the Tableau Vivant. Pictorialism, according to Jeff Wall could be seen as an attempt by photographers to unsuccessfully imitate painting:

"Pictorialist photography was dazzled by the spectacle of Western painting and attempted, to some extent, to imitate it in acts of pure composition. Lacking the means to make the surface of its pictures unpredictable and important, the first phase of Pictorialism, Stieglitz's phase, emulated the fine graphic arts, re-invented the beautiful look, set standards for gorgeousness of composition, and faded." (p. 75)

Pictorialism failed according to Wall because photographers lacked the means to make their surfaces unpredictable. However Photography did have the ability to become unpredictable and spontaneous. This was achieved by making photographs, related to the inherent capabilities of the camera itself. And this Wall argues was a direct result of photo-journalism and the media/culture industries.

"By divesting itself of the encumbrances and advantages inherited from older art forms, reportage, or the spontaneous fleeting aspect of the photographic image pushes toward a discovery of qualities apparently intrinsic to the medium, qualities that must necessarily distinguish the medium from others and through the self-examination of which it can emerge as a modernist art on a plane with others." (p. 76-78)

The argument is that unlike most other art forms photography can profit from the capture of chance occurrences. Through this process - the 'snapshot,' the 'accidental' image - photography invents its own concept of the picture. A hybrid form of the Western Picture or pictorialist photography and the spontaneous snapshot. This is the stage whereby Wall argues that photography enters a 'modernist dialectic.' Wall claims that unpredictability is key to modern aesthetics. This new concept of the picture, which Jeff Wall proposes, with the compositional aspects of the 'Western Picture' combined with the unpredictability that the camera affords through its shutter, can be seen in the work of many contemporary photographic artists including Luc Delahaye, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Irene Caesar, and Philip Lorca-Dicorcia.

The Tableau as a form still dominates the Art Photography market. As Fried notes:

"Arguably the most decisive development in the rise of the new art photography has been the emergence, starting in the late 1970s and gaining impetus in the 1980s and after, of what the French critic Jean-François Chevrier has called "The Tableau Form" (p. 143)

However there appears to be only a handful of young, emerging artists working within the Tableau form. Examples include Florian Maier Aichen, Matthew Porter and Peter Funch.

For a piece of art to qualify as tableau it must be produced for the gallery wall (large print), must be pictorial (beautifully composed) and must take into consideration the intrinsic qualities of the camera (chance). Digital manipulation is often a prominent technique used in the creation of work within the Tableau Form, since photography is often said to lack human agency and one of the salient qualities of the Tableau is that it must be an object of thought.