Author Description

The exhibition documents a development in art of the past decade. It is conceived as an anthology, as a vehicle to individually showcase each artist's influential contemporary practice. The ten artists featured here contemplate the nature, traditions, and magic of photography at a moment characterized by its rapid digital transformation. They rematerialize the medium through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and by creating photo-sculptures, installations, and artist's books. While they are invested in exploring the processes, supports, and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of 'photo poetics,' an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object. Drawing on the legacy of conceptualism, these artists pursue a largely studiobased approach to still life photography that centers on the creation of images as objects, as well as on the representation of imagebearing printed matter— books, magazines, record covers, and snapshots. They are drawn to appropriate these items for diverse reasons, ranging from the cultural and historical significance of the photographs to the personal associations they evoke. The works in the exhibition, rich with detail, reward close and prolonged regard; they ask for a mode of looking that is closer to reading than the cursory scanning fostered by the clicking and swiping functionalities of smartphones and social media.