First few pages of a paper about the Chicago artist Fred Camper.

Fred Campers Adjacencies 4: Brazil is an artist book, formed by 101 groups of images,

which carefully manages the different elements of photographic objectification to

disempower them. Camper approach to photography, as it will be clear at the end of this

paper, is neither concern with the creation of meaningful and discrete units of though, or

with the creating a unilinear connection between them as a naturalized or absolute

approach to photography would. On the contrary, Campers images are open entities that

allow the viewer to connect them ad infinitum. Although it would be nave to say that

Camper images are meaningless, they certainly are not a strong force in a process of

objectification; as it will see throughout this paper meaning in Campers work and

specifically, Adjacencies 4: Brazil is usually generated by the connections that the viewer

has to perform on the static images. The work is part of the series Adjacencies conformed

by others works such as Adjacencies 1: Iowa Houses, Adjacencies 2: Iowa Highway,

Adjacencies 3: Beijing to Chicago and several works in progress. 1 According to the artist,

the work represents 8 cities and towns that constitute only a fraction of Brazil as

follows: Salvador, sheet 0. Ouro Preto, sheets 1-6. Congonhas do Campo, sheets 7-13.

Sabar, sheets 14-20. Salvador, sheets 21-50. So Paulo, sheets 51-68. Belo Horizonte,

sheets 69-76. Rio de Janeiro, sheets 77-80. Brasilia, sheets 81-1002.

There is some assumptions that propose now will be helpful to guide the reader through

the different levels of artistic struggle Camper proposes without losing really important

characteristics of the work. First, the fact that individual photographs are not close forms

1 The fact that Camper works in series has not been taken that much into account in the present
paper as it is mainly focusing on the analysis of an specific work, but it certainly supports the general
argument of objectification being undermined as it rejects the value of what gets to be objectified.
2 For more information about the work, see http://www.fredcamper.com/A/index1.html, which also
contains a complete online version of it.
and that meaning is generated differently with each viewer interaction allows me to

propose a different epistemological approach to the object that arguably is more suitable

for it. The idea is to deemphasize the artist as the heroic figure of the creator by moving

away from an artist-focus analysis to an object-focus analysis, considering the idea of an

object as constantly changing and regenerating. An object is an effect that is continuously

connected to its causes and the idea of causes, defined as that to which something else is

indebted (Heidegger, 3), would provide a framework upon which this analysis will be

structure. According to the Aristotle (as qtd. in Heidegger, 4), there are four causes for

any effect: (1) causa materialis, the material out of which the object is made; in these

case the architectonical constructions; (2) causa formalis, the elements, possibilities and

limitations of photography; (3) causa finalis, the underlying social goals, some that, I

would argue, can be considered unconscious for the artist. Finally, the Greeks proposes

the idea of (4) causa efficiens, which counts for what brings about, with its peculiarities, a

object out of the myriad possibilities offered by the other causes; in these case, the artist.

Secondly, it is really relevant to consider, and here we keep on following Heidegger, that

the four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for

something else (5). In this form we try to avoid any over_ or underestimation of the

artistry of an object by considering one form more predominant than other, as every part

is equally responsible for the bringing into appearance of something, and for the esthetic

phenomena. Finally, it is important to keep in mind the fact that the different divisions

used here for analysis purposes are not conditions of the work itself; i.e. the work does

not show itself to the viewer as a separate sum of these different characteristics.