Image via Complex Original
A new show at the International Center of Photography is asking us "What Is a Photograph?" Exploring the evolution of the photograph as a contemporary medium, the exhibition makes us question what it means to snap a photo, whether on a fancy, professional lens or on a crude iPhone. The exhibition opens tomorrow and will run until May 4, 2014.
The show focuses on experimentation in photography that began in the 1970s and traces the short history of the practice today. What started as imprints on light-sensitive paper and moved into the darkroom is now dominated by the digital. We spoke to Carol Squiers, the curator of "What Is a Photograph?" about a new generation of photographers and how they have completely revolutionized the medium.
"What Is a Photograph?" opens Jan. 1 and runs until May 4, 2014 at ICP.
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Curator Carol Squiers Answers the Question "What Is a Photograph?", the Title of Her New Show at ICP
Today, a photograph doesn't have technical standards.
"I think the whole notion of technical standards within photography has flown out the window, and that's part of what's so interesting about what's going on now. The digital has thrown everything up to question, and part of what the show looks at is how artists were doing that—even before the digital—and made this impact on photography. So it's a kind of a continuity between people who are manipulating Polaroids, or painting on photos, or doing strange things with chemicals in the darkroom. Before the digital made this impact, it was always that ambition to open up the photo to different kinds of expression."
And it's married to the rise of digital.
"I've been thinking about this for maybe the past four years, or maybe longer. I worked in a magazine for a long time, and the impact of the digital on print media and on photography has been a very important topic in magazines since the early '90s, so this is an issue I've worked with in variations for quite a while.
I just got very interested in James Welling—he's an important figure to me—because of the breadth of what he does. He does experimental photographs, makes photograms that go between digital and analog properties, and I think he's a very important figure right now for a lot of people. He's had a big influence in part because he teaches, so I guess it was maybe thinking about James' work. He made his series of color experiments, and then I really started to look around at other artists who were starting to do more experimental things, especially with camera-less photography."
But camera-less photography is still around.
"[Camera-less photography] means that you just use light and an object that you would put on unexposed paper and then chemicals. It's basically what the photogram is, and it's what [William] Fox Talbot did in the very beginning of photography, where you just lay something like a piece of lace on unexposed photo paper, expose it to light, and develop it.
"In Liz Deschenes' case, she often just uses light, photographic paper, and chemistry, which is what she did with the series that we're showing."
Even if analog photography is on its way out.
"We're in this moment now, which is why I wanted to do this show now, where analog photography isn't really dead, but it will maybe be dead in, I don't know... maybe five years. So there will probably be a lot more ways of displaying digital imagery, probably a lot more still and moving interfaces where people will be working with digital images in an incredible variety of ways, ways that I can't even imagine.
"One of the things I've learned from doing this project is that especially younger artists who came up with digital photography have a very energetic relationship with the digital interface. They can write code. They can bend things to the way they want them to be. They know what they can do to get to the result that they want, and that's the level of complexity that it entails in terms of dealing with digital media. It's kind of mind boggling. But for creative people, it's very exciting to take this technology and turn it into a creative tool. So you're running the tool, the tool isn't running you.
"I never thought I would see analog photography become obsolete in my lifetime. I learned photography as an undergraduate, and it's kind of shocking still. Film-based photography was really manufactured as a mass medium, and while I think there's still a lot of people interested in it, just the fact that we all have cameras on us everyday and they're digital means that people are going to become continually more comfortable with just using digital. People know analog photography. They have it in their bones, I guess. But once this generation moves on, when all the snapshots and videos are going to be digital, it's going to be a different story. So it'll be interesting to see what plays out."
Contemporary photography involves new technologies.
"Artie [Vierkant] and Travess [Smalley] are both interesting to me because of the complexity of their work relative to digital media, and they do it in different ways. With Artie, he makes objects for the wall that he then photographs and then puts online, and it begins to alter the installation photo of his own work. The work takes place, not only on the wall in the gallery, but also in the spectrum of the Internet, of the online world. Then other people take his images and begin to alter them, so the work keeps mutating online even though it stays in a certain form in the physical space. That as a kind of model of working is really interesting to me.
"With Travess, he uses the scanner as a way other people would use light and objects and photo paper. He puts things on the scanner, scans them over and over, and makes this kind of original negative that he then makes a print from. Is this part of the photography of the future, where the scanner is part of the thing that we use instead of a camera?"
And it's driven by two, unique trends.
"I think rather than an individual, there are two trends right now: one is represented by James Welling, doing these complicated analog/digital interactions, and the other is represented people like Artie and Travess, who are really working with the products of the industrial/digital age."