This essay explores the relationship of the work in the Museum of Modern Art's 1970 exhibitio... more 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 ...
They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was ne... more 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...
This chapter (5,350 words) provides an overview of the development of narrative photography from ... more This chapter (5,350 words) provides an overview of the development of narrative photography from the 1970s to the present, with a focus on work from the United States. The essay draws on semiotics, literary theory and in particular narratology to investigate narrative photography's push and pull between showing and telling, or in Aristotle’s terms mimesis and diegesis.
The roundtable panel met in February 2007 at the CAA Annual Conference in New York. Andrew E. Her... more The roundtable panel met in February 2007 at the CAA Annual Conference in New York. Andrew E. Hershberger and Jon Rubin were among the original invitees but were unable to fly to New York because of inclement weather.
As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a parti... more As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a particular strand of contemporary photography. It started as a joke: I had seen so many quasi-narrative art photographs of half-dressed young women that I began referring to them as their own genre, "panty photography." As with many inside jokes, once I had coined the term, I began to find validation for it everywhere. Panties seemed to be proliferating in art galleries and magazines. The New York Times ran an article about the current cross-over between art, fashion and pornography, and shortly thereafter an article about hot young female artists and their hot new work. [1] The phenomenon came to a well-publicized head in a spring 1999 exhibition at Lawrence Rubin * Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York City. "Another Girl, Another Planet," curated by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, included images by 13 photographers, 12 of them women. The work was most...
Soutter’s long-standing expertise and interest in gender representation was reflected in this com... more Soutter’s long-standing expertise and interest in gender representation was reflected in this commission to write an essay for the catalogue of an exhibition at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2008–9). Making an original argument about an unbroken tradition of fiction in photography by women, Soutter identified precedents for contemporary staged photography in 19th-century photographic tableaux, pictorialist photography, mid-20th-century documentary, and 1960s conceptual art. The significance of Soutter’s essay lay in its specific focus on the work of women photographers, employing a feminist approach to consider previous blind spots in the literature and to foreground neglected female precedents. While staged photography has been discussed in relation to painting and the aesthetic realm, such analyses have failed to emphasise its potential for female artists who use collaborations with their subjects (Sharon Lockhart, Katy Grannan and Nikki S. Lee), cons...
This essay explores the relationship of the work in the Museum of Modern Art's 1970 exhibitio... more 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 ...
They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was ne... more 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...
This chapter (5,350 words) provides an overview of the development of narrative photography from ... more This chapter (5,350 words) provides an overview of the development of narrative photography from the 1970s to the present, with a focus on work from the United States. The essay draws on semiotics, literary theory and in particular narratology to investigate narrative photography's push and pull between showing and telling, or in Aristotle’s terms mimesis and diegesis.
The roundtable panel met in February 2007 at the CAA Annual Conference in New York. Andrew E. Her... more The roundtable panel met in February 2007 at the CAA Annual Conference in New York. Andrew E. Hershberger and Jon Rubin were among the original invitees but were unable to fly to New York because of inclement weather.
As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a parti... more As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a particular strand of contemporary photography. It started as a joke: I had seen so many quasi-narrative art photographs of half-dressed young women that I began referring to them as their own genre, "panty photography." As with many inside jokes, once I had coined the term, I began to find validation for it everywhere. Panties seemed to be proliferating in art galleries and magazines. The New York Times ran an article about the current cross-over between art, fashion and pornography, and shortly thereafter an article about hot young female artists and their hot new work. [1] The phenomenon came to a well-publicized head in a spring 1999 exhibition at Lawrence Rubin * Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York City. "Another Girl, Another Planet," curated by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, included images by 13 photographers, 12 of them women. The work was most...
Soutter’s long-standing expertise and interest in gender representation was reflected in this com... more Soutter’s long-standing expertise and interest in gender representation was reflected in this commission to write an essay for the catalogue of an exhibition at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2008–9). Making an original argument about an unbroken tradition of fiction in photography by women, Soutter identified precedents for contemporary staged photography in 19th-century photographic tableaux, pictorialist photography, mid-20th-century documentary, and 1960s conceptual art. The significance of Soutter’s essay lay in its specific focus on the work of women photographers, employing a feminist approach to consider previous blind spots in the literature and to foreground neglected female precedents. While staged photography has been discussed in relation to painting and the aesthetic realm, such analyses have failed to emphasise its potential for female artists who use collaborations with their subjects (Sharon Lockhart, Katy Grannan and Nikki S. Lee), cons...
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