I really admire those people who are willing to put their research (and by extension, their reputations) out there as they are working on it. I don’t get the chance to do much academic research these days, but I am preparing a presentation on contemporary photography for my little camera club. I’ll keep track of my progress here, and I welcome your comments and suggestions.

There are a number of really good books on contemporary art photography — in which I also include some fashion work — in particular, Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art and David Campany’s Art and Photography. The former has a nice rubric for classifying works by style and theme:

• Orchestrated images, often as part of performance art.
• Tableau photographs “whose meaning is reliant on our investing the image with our own trains of narrative and psychological thought.”
• Deadpan, which aims to transcend subjectivity.
• Images that “maintain the ‘thing-ness’ of what they describe, such as street litter, abandoned rooms or dirty laundry, but are conceptually altered because of the visual impact they gain by the act of being photographed and presented as art.”
• Photographs conveying emotional and personal relationships.
• Documentary and “aftermath photography,” especially as allegory.
• Imagery that “centres on and exploits our pre-existing knowledge of imagery.”

For my presentation, I’m combining these themes under the umbrella of “gallery art” — though I’m looking for a better name. This is where I plan to spend my most of my time in the presentation, since I think it’s the most artistic and (frankly) the most interesting. These works are typically self-conscious, edgy, experimental, risqué, concerned with ideas, part of related series of images, and in touch with and reacting to art history and current events.

The contemporary art world and its satellites have at least two other classes. Recently there have been a lot of photographic retrospectives. A great many collections are moving to museums as the original collectors age, and many of the artists they collected recently have reached major milestones (Ansel Adams’s 100th birthday) or died, piquing public interest. But perhaps more important is the acceptance by museum curators and patrons over the last 30-or-so years that photography is art. These retrospectives are the art historical undercurrent that a large number of contemporary photographers use for inspiration or react to.

Though not as introspective as “gallery art” or as widely regarded as art per se by much of the museum set, an enormous amount of nature/landscape/travel photography is made these days, which I feel obligated to mention in passing. I don’t plan on spending much time on this, because most of it (in my opinion) is only art in a very qualified way. It’s rather timeless and is typically visceral rather than intellectual — an art of longing and appropriation. Nevertheless, many contemporary nature photographers have artistic aspirations and employ formal art techniques and terminology when constructing and discussing their work. It can be quite beautiful and compelling; it’s the genre of most of my presentation’s audience; and who’s to say definitively that it’s not art? I can’t really beat up on the commercialism and success of Thomas Mangelsen, Galen Rowell, Franz Lanting, John Fielder, and others if I’m going to include fashion luminaries like Guy Bourdin and contributors to W magazine.

Update: Even though they don’t appear in the rubric above, I also plan on addressing ethnicity and gender as undercurrents in contemporary art. I’ll have other posts later discussing my progress on scanning and otherwise acquiring these images, but so far I’ve managed to get a rather large percentage of images from artists who aren’t American, especially work from Japanese photographers.