contemporary art and photography

Pop art in the 1960s elevated mass-media images to the status of prime material, but artists still transferred photographs on to canvas. It was Conceptual art, a major force by the 1970s, that swept away traditional fine-art hierarchies based on the status of certain media—namely painting and sculpture—as intrinsically ‘finer’ than others. (There were other symptoms of a changing climate: for example the posthumous exhibition of Diane Arbus's work at the 1972 Venice Biennale, the first photographs to be shown there.) Following the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, artists and critics began to argue that the artist's role was no longer to produce objects but visual concepts, realized and communicated via the most appropriate materials, regardless of their status. Ideas, processes, and experience were to be paramount, rather than the final product. Inspired by the counter-culture and political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, artists worked against the commodification of art, evident since the 1960s art-price boom, by producing works that were ephemeral, geographically inaccessible, or highly theoretical. In the process, photographs became one of the most accessible objects on the gallery wall, easy to sell and collect. Robert Smithson's (1938-73) Spiral Jetty (1970; now destroyed), an unstable earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, was accessible mainly through the films and photographs he made of it. Gilbert and George's (Gilbert Proersch, b. 1943; George Passmore, b. 1942) Living Sculptures (1969), performance pieces enacted in or outside the gallery, survive mainly as photos and video footage, and early in their work they blurred distinctions between the performance, its record, and their real-life personas (A Portrait of the Artist as Young Men, 1972). Ana Mendieta (1948-85) used her own body to create various Silueta Works in the 1970s, temporary silhouettes on the ground made from ephemeral materials such as snow, sand, flowers, or stones; the colour photographs she produced were intended as souvenirs of an essentially private ritual. Eleanor Antin's (b. 1935) performances and temporary installation works, such as 100 Boots Turn the Corner (1972), one of a series based on siting 100 boots in various public places, were staged primarily for the camera. Many artists began to use photography not as a medium per se, but as part of their interest in semiotics, their engagement with mass culture, and their preoccupation with hybrid practices and lens-based images. In Women and Work: A Document of the Division of Labour in Industry 1973-75 by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, and Mary Kelly, photographs function as documents that give women workers an individual visual identity. If the final piece looks beautiful, it is not because of the aesthetic quality of the individual images, but because of the care and visual rigour with which the whole piece—images, texts, numerical information, etc.—is composed, framed, and presented.

By the 1980s, in a politically and culturally more conservative international climate, the art world was returning to more object-based practices, but in the meantime a new generation of artists, curators, and collectors had been brought up to consider photography as one medium amongst many from which art could be made. A variety of practices acknowledging the contingency of cultural codes, including photographic ones, developed away from traditional values of art photography such as craft and self-expression. Artists, photographers, and critics focused on how the endless production, reproduction, and circulation of images had rendered trivial the notion of originality which had hitherto underpinned the artist's privileged status and photography's exclusion from the fine arts. In works such as Untitled (After Karl Blossfeldt: 2) (1990), Sherrie Levine's (b. 1947) rephotographed reproductions, rather than original prints, of well-known images by famous photographers (she had begun in the 1980s with Edward Weston and Walker Evans) questioned their status as ‘original’ works and, incidentally, underlined the fact that the medium's recognized ‘masters’ were largely male. Richard Prince (b. 1949) found his sources in magazines, rephotographing images by changing the crop, focus, or colour, and recomposing them in new series, such as Girlfriend (1993), which isolated and made visible the devices used in advertising and magazines to arouse desire. Cindy Sherman, too, subverted images from popular culture in her photographic re-enactments of clichés of femininity.

One of the concerns of conceptual art was the idea of identity, including gender and racial identity, as culturally determined and socially constructed rather than essential, and artists such as Carrie-Mae Weems (b. 1953)—Burnt Orange Girl (Colored People) (1989-90)—and Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962)—Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998)—continue to use the camera as a political tool. The commercial and critical success of many of these practitioners, who define themselves as artists rather than photographers, and do not necessarily work exclusively in one medium, problematizes established museological categories of distinct painting and photography collections. Photography's assimilation into art has been brought about by the redefinition of art away from medium-specificity. Diverse and hybrid practices are taken up by artists according to the visual and conceptual concerns of their current projects, recognizing the camera as the main source of the world of images we live in today. The Mexican Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962) uses photography to record the unintentional presence of sculpture, or its potential, in everyday life. He often fabricates makeshift scenes and impromptu arrangements, using temporary material and everyday locations. In Gatos y sandías (Cats and Watermelons, 1992), pictures on tins of cat-food echo the green striated patterns of the watermelons on which he has arranged them. A moment of gleeful pleasure, of art inspired by supermarket shelves, whose display logic Orozco at once mimics and disrupts, is brilliantly re-evoked by a photograph which also makes visible the globalization of even the humblest foodstuff.

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) began his career photographing the London club scene and creating spreads for the magazine i-D. He achieved international fame for his informal photographs of friends, part street fashion, part record of the fleeting, ever-changing look of contemporary life. When he won the Tate Gallery's Turner Prize in 2000, reviewers pointed out that he was the first fashion photographer to do so. But the boundaries between artistic and commercial imagery have long been blurred, as magazines commission established artists to shoot fashion features, and fashion photographs are sold in galleries. In new museums such as London's Tate Modern, fashion photographs may be exhibited in the same section as canonical paintings of the nude.

— Patrizia di BelloPatrizia di Bello

Bibliography

• Ianus, E. (ed.), Veronica's Revenge (1998).
• Walther, I. F. (ed.), Art of the 20th Century (2000).
• Marien, M. W., Photography: A Cultural History (2002).
• Campany, D. (ed.), Art and Photography (2003).
• Cotton, C., The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004).
• Mahon, A., Eroticism and Art (2005)