I've tried to digest Cotton's article bellow. After reading the article twice, I still could not wrap my head around what she was really trying to say. So I did what the old college way of trying to understand text, outline it and break the article into pieces. Hope it helps others to wade through the article.
She is actually pretty much anti-fashion in a sense that she thinks current "contemporary-art photography" is conservative and rigid and its claims to a contemporary way of seeing as questionable.
But her statements I think have to be qualified from the perspective of "contemporary art photgraphy" and not photography as a whole.
BTW, for those who missed it, her article links to all the photographers she mentions including images etc.
I. Introduction: Setting the Scene
I. Early 2000s Researching for her book: (photography as contemporary art) and curating exhibits on the history of photgraphy
A. The market for photography was setting and breaking new records
1. Examples: Richard Prince’s untitle cowboy photograph (US$1.248 million) and Steichen’s Pond Moonlight (US$ 2.9)
B. Photography has undergone a “face-lift” enabling it to sit alongside painting and the visual arts in international fairs and art center
1. Large scale C prints mounted on plexi glass
2. Extremely small edition numbers
3. “Staged” photographs
a) Every prop and gesture could be attributed to the artist’s direction
b) N.B. Author views above with suspicion and views it a bastard form of photography
(1) She was schooled in the magic of photography: willfull embrace of luck, mistakes and happenstance
(2) She does not want to deride the “awe-inspiring handful of artists” who showed us that photography is a “supremely capable and elastic medium”
(3) But the popularity of “staged” photos does not herald “understanding of photography’s broad creative terrain”
C. Since the mid-1990s black and white photography (documentary photography / pseudo documentary photography) has lost popular interest
1. Viewers are used to the “big , colorful spectacle of contemporary art photogrpaphy”
2. 35mm work has not offered “style and production values required to sustain clear legibility”
a) Truly great photographs by Stieglits, Evans, Weston Kertész and Cartier-Bresson (mostly LF and MF) are still very powerful within the cultural milieu
b) Contemporary relevance for the current practitioner of black and white will be a hit and miss
(1) Dominance of color in contemporary art photography
(2) B&W as a historic and once-important art form
(a) Last generation of B&W contemporary art photographers were from the 1950s
(i) Arbus, Winogrand, Friedlander
(b) Current students and younger artists tend to reference Cindy Sherman and the god-fathers of color photography
(i) Eggleston, Shore
(ii) with occasional referencing of proto-artist-using-photogrpahy
(a) Man Ray, Ruscha
(iii) Bernd & Hilla Becher are seen as unreapeatable but they demonstrate how (B&W)photography can be discipine and controlled
(iv) It is telling what the current artist keep relevant nad in contemporary circulation
D. The rise of digital technology
1. Color is now predominantly hybridized
2. Digital capture is making inroads into creative practice
a) artists she has talked to see it as a viable option
(1) good enough quality and long term cost effectiivity
(2) she cites pragmatics and creativity as key ingredients in true art photography
b) but creative exploration of digital photographic languages is held back by the “seductive grip of digirally sharpened and lushly enhance C prints
(1) as they become the print by which to judge others
(a) we forget the pleasure of an entirely analog print (analogous to forgetting the hiss of vinyl records)
(b) the potential for other color languages are slow to emerge
(1) the art-market is still suspicious of ink-jet prints
(2) Digital C-Print dominance
E. Thus the current career oriented photographer chooses a rather conservative path
1. “Trying to be like” Eggleston, Shore & co.
2. Sticking to large C-Prints
3. Not departing from these standards.
II. Black & White will provide photography’s long term positioning within the Art World
A. Black & White is complex, messy, unfashionable and has a wide scope which are ingredients for cognizant, challenging photography
1. Established darkroom trial and error loving photographers are stockpiling on film and paper
2. Young practitioners are experimenting ironically transforming chromatic digital to monochrome
3. B&W analog is still the key entry point to photography outside of the financially and technologically privileged families and high schools
a) a cheap way to teach visual literacy in not so well off schools
b) while techno-friendly time-rich amateur photgrapher crafts his black and white masterpieces by digital means an epson
4. re-appearance of monochrome fashion photography
5. monochrome work is seen as a reprieve from potential cultural extinction
B. Looking and defining photographic practice in print
1. Nostalgia in photography:
a) Self-consciousness in the the act of looking at a photographic print
(1) Taking pleasure in the physicality of a photographic print and its survival through time
(a) Embracing the profoundness (auratic) of monochrome photography as a true shift away from the way we look at photographs in these digital times
2. Photography is an act of making choices regarding methods and visions which
“should not be defined by the fashionable, marketable production values of an era”
a) Lipper’s Trip and Schoor’s Forest and Fields as revivals of photographic heritage at the same time making it fresh
b) An-My Lê’s Small Wars series referencing rethoric and aesthetics of Roger Fenton and George Barnard
c) Not as acts of rethinking history but offering creative in process solutions to the potential quagmire of the color manifestations of photography-as-contemporary-art
d) Survey of Works
(1) Osamu Kanemura
(2) Jason Evans
(3) Marketa Othova / Jasansky & Polak
(4) Walead Beschty
(5) Christopher Williams, James Welling, Shannon Ebner Michael Queenland
e) Contemporary black and white photography and photographers as surveyed aboved present the true maverick character of photography at a time when current contemporary art photography’s “contemporary way” of seeing is questionable
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