It’s not easy to sum up the entire contemporary photography scene. I’m positive I’m going to leave something really important out. I know for certain I will — Cindy Sherman isn’t in my presentation, after all. (But seriously, her newest pieces are really hard to look at. Sheesh.)
But I’ve proclaimed a moratorium on downloading or scanning new images for Monday’s presentation. Photoshop helped me turn the 200-or-so images into 11 contact sheets, which I’ve been looking at over the last couple of nights to create my notes. The contact sheets — I will post them soon — are luscious, but the notes are still very spare. Obviously, not all of the images will make the final cut.
I have had a bit of success imposing order on the collection. The four loose categories are (1) the social landscape including portraiture, beginning with Alec Soth, traveling through Nan Goldin, and ending up somewhere near Thomas Struth; which leads naturally to (2) the reaction to Ansel Adams in the (mostly American) landscape, which involves a lot of conceptual and serial work. (3) There are number of photographers who are currently collected in my notes under the heading “constructed and unusual”: Christopher Bucklow, David Hockney, Vik Muniz, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and a host of Japanese artists. Finally, (4) I have a wee bit of fashion photography. There are recurring threads of commerce, photographic truth, the limitations of the camera, and the individual. Somehow I also need to deal with gender, race, cultural identity.
Putting Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Laurie Simmons into the social landscape context gives me a chance to introduce some of these issues — gender and cultural, for example — while sneaking the human form into the presentation. I agonized for a while about how to include nudity, which is a significant part of contemporary photography (artistic and otherwise). I’m going to start with a humorous disclaimer and then treat everyone like adults, even the septagenarians.
More later.
Impressive amount of work..
That’s a pretty long list..
But how could you not include :
Edward Burtynsky
Andreas Gursky
Robert Frank
Wolfgang Tillmans
Candida Hofer
Andreas Serrano
maybe even
Carrie Mae Weems?
And I completely agree with you.. Cindy’s new work was pretty hard to see.
Mike, it was hard figuring out what to put in and who would get unintentionally snubbed. Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky were the hardest for me to leave out. There work is so very interesting to me; but I had trouble finding decently sized images online and ran out of time to scan examples. Ditto for Candida Hofer.
Robert Frank got a big shout-out in the presentation, but The Americans was a little too early for the presentation even though it definitely was a huge influence on the New Topographics School.
Tilmans, Serrano, Weems — I didn’t know enough about them to make broad overgeneralizations.
Incidentally, a surprising number of fashion houses are using some very edgy original art by Cindy Sherman, Juergen Teller, and others in their high-end marketing (think W, Vogue, etc.). Very unpretty, but perhpas an indication of future societal acceptance of this aesthetic. I ended up putting a couple of images from Cindy in anyway (but not the ones that made me want to puke).