From the archives: an abstract that would have been made around 2001-2, before there was the ocean of digital images in social media where people consume and discard images so rapidly. Before the emergence of our image-heavy world, where it is no longer enough to simply ‘make a photograph'. Photography now needs some concepts or ideas.
This looks back to that time, when as argued by photo historians such as Lyle Rexer and Carol Squires something happened to photography in the 1960s/1970s that made it impossible to look at art photographs in the traditional way. What shifted with this event, it is argued, was the emergence of an assumption that photography never did simply open a window on the world. Photography as a window on the world was the traditional view of photography, but there had also been artists who had been experimenting with and redrawing the boundaries of traditional photography for decades.
That event was conceptual art, the movement that saw a gravitation toward language-based art, a lo-fi aesthetic and an understanding of art as primarily a way of exploring ideas--then anti-commodification, social and/or political critique, and ideas/information as medium Although it often yielded nothing more than ephemeral events or experiments, its impact is all over the art world. Conceptual art introduced to the art world various types of photography that had been excluded or ignored, while calling attention to the fact that even photographs that seemed straightforward often demanded a second look.
The after effect of the upheaval caused by conceptual art was the shift to understanding photography as creating new worlds through the complex process of making images--by reconsidering and reimagining the role of light, color, composition, materiality and the subject in the art of photography. This creates a conceptual framework around which post-digital imagery can be viewed and interpreted---a photo can be a reality of its own, something without any reference points to empirical reality.
The artists on the cusp of photography’s latest existential crisis associated with the ocean of digital images are essentially deconstructing the medium and putting it back together, sometimes in the form of a sculpture, or an intentionally disposable zine, a mass produced print, or releasing it into the ethers of the internet. A photogprahy that is almost devoid of ideas is going to disappear into the ocean of images.