Photography out of Conceptual Art

Art History, 2009

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Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, 1999

They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication. - Dennis Oppenheim on his use of photographs.(1) This statement by Dennis Oppenheim introduces the paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear the artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. For many years curators, critics and historians have corroborated this reductive understanding of the role of photography in Conceptual Art. Sidestepping the aesthetic properties of conceptual photographs is convenient; it simplifies the distinction between Conceptualism and the more material-based practices of Pop Art and Min...

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Visual Studies, 2011

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2016

This essay explores the relationship of the work in the Museum of Modern Art's 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, to the contemporaneous activities of conceptual artists using photography--works very rarely discussed in relation to one another. It outlines their shared rejection of the values of modernist fine art photography and explores the different ways that they interrogated traditional notions of medium in their uses of photographs. It reveals the extent to which Photography into Sculpture expanded the notion of photography as art from within an institutional art photography context, while the conceptual artists employed a short-term strategy of treating photography as one non-art medium among several to challenge fine art aesthetics. In order to underline the paradoxes inherent in the ways photography was discussed and institutionalized at the time, the essay's examples of conceptual art using photography are drawn from the Information exhibition curated by ...

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In this essay, I explore two contemporary photographic projects – Trevor Paglen’s Limit Telephotography series of US military black sites, and Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture on urban poverty – and the place of Conceptualism and the ‘conceptual’ in critically understanding them. To do this, I will firstly offer a brief delineation of the two terms, before examining in detail how the projects I’ve chosen relate to and augment both.

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Academia Letters, 2021

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Focusing on work in the 1998 exhibition Sightings: New Photographic Art, ICA, London, the emergence of narrative photography in the 1990s and the tension between the documentary and the fictional within these contemporary works will be explored through the concept of the performance space of the photograph. Two articles from one issue of Artforum, in September 1976 – AD Coleman’s ‘The Directorial Mode: Notes Towards a Definition’, and Nancy Foote’s ‘The Anti-Photographers’ – allow for a consideration of the histories of narrative photography and conceptual art that jointly inform this contemporary practice with images by Jennifer Bornstein, Sharon Lockhart and Annika von Hausswolff providing this paper’s focus.

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