The relationship between photography as an autonomous art form and as a medium used within conceptual art practices to move away from painting, ultimately for deflationist purposes, has steadily become less and less clear in recent decades. Twenty or thirty years ago it was still relatively simple to distinguish between classical photography and 'expanded' photography - alternative practices which consistently used the form and content of the picture to refer beyond the frame of the image to another, external level of meaning.

There has been so much work exploring the transitions between concept and the idea of a 'pure' image that the two aspects are closely interwoven and often very difficult to tell apart. Defying the negative assertions of cultural pessimists, history and art history have continued to evolve in recent decades and within this historic perspective all positions and their boundaries necessarily have a dynamic character. Nowadays this may not always involve the creation of new paradigms or agendas, but it does lead to the development of new perspectives and the re-examination of old positions. As in other cases where boundaries have become problematic because they were drawn in the past - in the relationship of figurative and non-figurative painting, for example, or between the artwork and the space surrounding it - the particularly interesting artistic positions are those that explicitly address these problems of definition and make them a central element of their practice. The important thing here is that the artist works within a particular medium, while at the same time building up enough distance from this medium to show that within a dynamic historical perspective we can and should not rely on past assumptions about the medium's attributes. In photography - still at an early stage in the process of historic definition - the path is often a very narrow one: it is extremely difficult to decide when a photograph is simply a substitute for a painting and merely rehearses traditional habits of perception, and when it is a distinctive medium carrying with it all the complexity and contradictions of recent developments. As an artistic medium, photography is far from being so new that it automatically induces a subversive or objectivising mode of understanding. At the same time history can also be understood as merely a system of reference for fulfilling various nostalgic desires - bringing the dead back to life, so to speak. Photography, with its built-in potential for quotation, is particularly susceptible in this respect.

In his early works, Christopher Williams already established a distance from his medium by using found materials; later he does this by having assistants produce the images under his direction. Of course, this kind of procedure does not mean that his individual artistic signature is eradicated, yet at the same time it ensures that the subjective viewpoint is not identified with the camera's viewfinder but remains separate, within the artist's mind. This in turn ensures that decisions are made on a level which relativises the medium, where the metaphor of the artist's 'eye' is no longer possible. What he conjures up from his mind, of course, always remains photography, but photography in all its facets and various genres, from the press photo through to portrait, architectural photograph and nature study. On the one hand this expands the scope of the medium enormously; on the other hand this expansion collapses at the point where the artist's role as remote stage-manager exposes this expansion as nothing but simulation.

Williams's early works are still very reminiscent of the Conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s - for example his selection of press photographs from archives to form an exhibition in which John F. Kennedy has his back towards the camera or is hidden by other people. Here the stage-management and concept reside in the act of selection: because the central subject of the images has been obscured the photographs become disfunctional; in their original context this divested them of meaning to the point of unusability, but in the context of art their meaning is restored, because here they work as images pointing beyond what they make visible. A typical quality of Williams's work is already apparent here: in just a tiny moment things have been displaced from their usual role - a brief turning-away from the camera or one person's small step between the lens and the subject has shifted the world of the image in a way that totally destabilises it. The image itself as an autonomous object somehow becomes completely mysterious and can only be made sense of through the conceptual act, through explanatory narrative. Unlike many first-generation examples of Conceptual art this reference to an invisible concept is no longer an explicit, emphatic act which itself becomes the focal point of the work; instead it has something non-committal about it, as if this were only one of several possible options.

One of these early works produced under the artist's direction shows a greyhound running round the curve of a track in a dog race. At first sight this work seems to be the exact opposite of the documentary photographs taken from the archive. In terms of content, however, we are again dealing with documentary photography as a genre: the sports photograph. This time the central subject of the work, the dog, is emphasised even more than would be usual in a documentary photograph. The impression created, not only through the printing process, is of a highly elaborated work, completely contradicting the fleeting nature of the scene depicted: the result is a certain feeling of artificiality. The dramatic moment, the hundredth of a second in which the image was captured, contradicts the artistic perfection of the end result. Here Williams moves very close to an ideal image which appears to rely solely on its content and its formal beauty for its effect. Yet as you look at the picture the impression steadily grows that there is in fact no immediacy here at all: that the artificiality which fixed the image in an artistic context was also inherent in the process of thought leading to its creation. The concept disappears almost to the point of invisibility, manifesting itself only in an obsessive perfection which presents as a stage-managed scene or simulation something which in fact cannot be such at all. This work already shows something that plays a key role in many of Christopher Williams's later works, i.e. that the conceptual level is no longer introduced explicitly but reveals itself only through very delicate manipulations in the border zones which distinguish a simple image from a conceptual work. As you look at the work its aesthetic qualities initially push you in a very definite, apparently easily comprehensible direction; and yet on closer inspection this proves to be tenuous. Here the fact that the artist has chosen a specific medium is also important: these subtle, gradually perceptible alienating elements require a thorough knowledge of the medium and a knowledge of all the various contexts in which it can be used.

In Williams's portraits of Eurasian women, too, we seem to be dealing initially with specific genres which are being used in an unproblematic way. Their up-front advertising aesthetic might be seen as a kind of Warholian transfiguration of the everyday into a new, very restrained reworking of Pop art. Yet with the yellow colour that we are all familiar with from Kodak film packs the artist brings a totally different dimension into the images, something which like the subjects of the images themselves belongs to the collective memory of the medium. This has a dual effect here: on the one hand it is a reference to the material which actually constitutes the medium; on the other it appears within the content like an alien body which has got lost somewhere in transit between different levels of interpretation. Here, too, the tension of the work resides in the fact that it initially ventures into almost banal territory - the portraits might be utilised in a tourist catalogue or something of the kind - but then undermines this territory with a small intervention, pointing in a very different direction. Here the concept is not seen as an alternative to particular traditions, in the way that first generation Conceptual artists positioned themselves against painting and sculpture, but simply as a way of always being able to point in a different direction, laying bare the processes by which the medium operates. It would be wrong, therefore, to argue that Williams defines his position from a Conceptual art basis; in fact, following on from his teacher John Baldessari, he sees it as a way of constantly asking new questions of the apparently fixed dimensions and rules of artistic discourse.

Another of these minimal interventions involves turning things around. In a series of works Williams has depicted beetles lying on their backs. The form of these works is reminiscent of classic black-and-white photography familiar from natural history documentation and the aesthetic style it established. In other words they are radically different from the other works discussed so far. The animals are taken out of their natural context and photographed against a neutral background; the setting as a whole transmits a kind of academic monotony as a foil for documenting pure form. Yet this neutrality itself is disrupted by the animals' position that signifies helplessness and therefore brings in an element of drama. Again as viewers we find ourselves in a space that cannot be clearly defined: in this case the artist has created the ambiguity not through external references but through a simple inversion. Although we may all have observed beetles in this situation, in these works all natural elements are excluded and everything points towards an elaborately stage-managed scene (Williams produced some of these works in collaboration with an insect trainer for Hollywood films).¹

The aesthetic impression created by this contradictory quality is one of cruelty - cruelty which we do not connect with the insect's helplessness so much as with a particular historically identifiable way of depicting natural objects by reducing them to formal criteria. These photographs have a counterpart in other works produced at the same time in which a car is photographed in a very similar way, against a neutral background, except that here it is the machine which - seen through the eye of a nature researcher taking a modern aesthetic stance - suddenly acquires a helpless, pitiable quality. Again it is the artist's distance to his medium which makes this other perspective possible. The camera here is not an 'expanded eye' with the eye's subjective qualities but a medium which already has a very long history and a correspondingly extensive archive of images and effects.

Yet Christopher Williams is always dealing with more than just the relationship of photography to art. Working at the boundaries of the genre - in the grey areas where classifications cannot be made a priori but reveal themselves only through the work's own processual dynamic - he points to the openness and open-endedness which must always be part of the artistic process when it takes place in awareness of a historic context. The uncertainties and ambiguities the artist generates in the viewer show that modes of seeing are subject to change - habits and routines can be created and then disrupted. Transforming this interplay into art and constantly arriving at a point which is not an end point but contains within itself the next necessary development is perhaps the most fundamental attribute of good art, regardless of the medium being employed.

- Martin Prinzhorn