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Deadpan Photography: Enjoying the Pretence
Juliette wrote last week about Deadpan photography. I was intrigued because it’s a term I had seen start appearing all over the place lately and I wasn’t sure what it was. So I did a deep dive to understand for myself (unpublished on Substack as it’s not an opinion piece). But in turn it got me thinking about what Deadpan was doing and how.
Look at Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent. Let your eye travel along those shelves. Notice the grid, the symmetry, the way the ceiling mirrors the shelves and the whole frame vibrates with the same repetitive energy. Now notice that you are being watched. The image is watching you look at it. It knows what it is doing.
Certain photographs give you a feeling of truth. Some pictures feel true because they caught something that was happening. Famous photojournalism photographs fall in that category (Phan Thi Kim Phuc’s photo for example). Others feel true because they noticed something ordinary and pointed at it, saying it mattered. For example Walker Evans, Roadside Stand near Birmingham, Alabama, 1936. Simple, but shows the reality of life at a point in history and plays as social commentary. Others feel true in a third sense: true the way a document feels true, as though someone held up a camera and let the world print itself.
That feeling is the deadpan trick. And it is interesting to understand how the trick works, because it shows you how photographs get under your guard.
The deadpan style borrows the visual language of the survey, the scientific record, the architectural typology. Frame square to the subject. Light even and flat. Everything equally in focus, equally important. The message is: there was no editor. The photographer stepped aside. You are seeing what was there.
But of course Gursky, one of the most important recent members of the movement, composed 99 Cent. He chose the angle, the lens, the moment, the crop, the colour grade. The image is even mot likely a composite (we’d call it a stitched panorama today). The whole thing is built to make you forget anyone built it. What’s different in that photograph isn’t that he made choices, because everyone makes choices when they hold a camera. It’s that the style is built to hide the fact that choices were made. A form of artifice that presents as the absence of artifice.
The usual critique is obvious here: deadpan isn’t neutral. It can’t be. Every photograph selects. Calling a style objective when it is anything but is naive, or dishonest, or both.
That critique is true, of course, but it’s not what’s interesting about deadpan: neutrality is a performance, so what? The interesting thing is that you can see the performance happening. Look at 99 Cent and you know, somewhere under the surface, that this is not how a store really looks. It is too clean, too ordered, closer to a diagram of a store than a photograph of one. The pleasure of looking at that photograph lives in that space. You know the trick and you let it work anyway.
This is the form’s real operation. Deadpan does not convince you it is neutral. It performs neutrality in a way that lets you enjoy both the performance and your awareness of it. You are in on the joke. The image says it didn’t choose, and you know it chose, and both of you agree to pretend otherwise because the pretence produces something valuable: attention. By stripping away the obvious markers of authorship, the deadpan photograph hands the interpretive work to you. I will not tell you what this means, it says. You decide. A gift, or a challenge, or a cop-out, depending on what is in the frame.
The Bechers understood this better than anyone. Their grids of water towers and blast furnaces look like the most objective photographs ever made. Straight on. Grey sky. No people. Same framing, same distance, same conditions. Arranged as a grid they present as data. As though the photographers were botanists collecting specimens of an industrial species on the verge of extinction.