Interesting (if slightly schizophrenic) editorial in Art News on the boom state of contemporary photography, the potential loss of materials, the growth of digital, but also the interest in traditional materials for contemporary work
(thanks joerg)
- a few excerpts for "academic discussion and criticism" (take the time to read the rest):
"The year 2005 may be remembered as a watershed in the history of photography, a crucial date when one generation of artists lifted off into blue sky while another was brought down to earth, left once again to ponder its slave-master relationship to technology."...
"“You can’t have a show about contemporary art anymore without having photography as a central element,” says Sandra Phillips, director of the photography department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Art photographers are now gossiped about on television, with Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson rating mentions by the snarky art students in the HBO series Six Feet Under. Larry Gagosian has added Alec Soth and Sally Mann to his roster of heavyweights. "...
"The history of photography, unlike that of painting and sculpture, is bound up, literally and figuratively, with books. William Henry Fox Talbot, Jacob Riis, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Larry Clark, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin are only a few of the artists whose original prints have exercised far less influence than the reproductions in their books."...
"New York dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes, who ran the contemporary-art department at Sotheby’s in the 1980s, has observed that the multiple nature of photographic prints no longer bothers collectors. “People now want to own pictures that other people own,” she says. “That’s a major shift, and photography is one reason why.”"...
"But the independent British curator and critic senses that the mood is shifting again, thanks in part to technology—“I think there’s anxiety about digitization,” she says—and in part to the swinging pendulum of taste: “We’re coming out of ten years when big color and big prints were the norm.”
Bright predicts a revival of black-and-white photography, citing the work of Shannon Ebner and Markéta Othová, neither of whom is represented in her book. “Their work is quite poignant, not staged, and they make smallish prints,” she says. “There’s a desire to return to modernist esthetics, to what photography used to be and how we imagine it should be.”"...
"Papageorge has never made an exhibition-quality ink-jet print, and examples produced by his graduate students at Yale have yet in his eyes to “reach the level of poetry.”"...
PS - this issue of Art News is about photography
Bookmarks