Context of Practice: Postmodernism in Photography

Notes written up in lesson:

KEY FEATURES:
• Kitsch: Low Art/High art.
• Chaos.
• Loss of an original: reproduced/recycled.
• Breaking of rules and tradition.
• History is reinterpretated.


• ANDY WARHOL: “Electric chair” 1964, “Marilyn”
• Recycling images and producing a new interpretation, Consumerism.
• Pop Art – Ed Ruscha.
• “26 Gas Stations, 1962”
• “Standard Station, 1966”
• “Collecting or mapping objects.”


• New Topographics : Exhibition “New Topographics; Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” in 1975 in New York. Inspired by the work of Ed Ruscha in 1960s. 8x10 large format view cameras, Photographers from an Higher education Background.
• Bernd and Hilla Becher, 1970s – collection of industrial objects. Male and female partnership- A Lost Era, <theme in their work.
• Other Exhibitors; -Robert Adams, -Lewis Baltz, -Joe Deal, -Nicholas Nixon, -Stephen Shore, -Frank Gohlke.
• Conjunction between the landscape and the man-made.
• New way of looking, making a comment on the unremarkable.
• Keith Arnatt, “Self Burial” 1969.

• Raymond Moore – photographing moments that appear to mean nothing.
• “Turning traditions and genres on their head.”
• “New Topographic Approach”
• Subject Matter is historical.
• Almost like a scientific/industrial catalogue.
• Anti-aesthetic.
• Moving away from making things beautiful. Very factual almost cold, a record of actual life.
• Land Art – Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty, 1970”, - Richard Long’s “A circle in the Andes, 1972”
• Photographing art as a way of documenting the only way to see it is through a photograph.
• The Photograph is part of the journey.
• Feminist photographers: Mary Kelly, “Interim, 1984-89” << *

• Theory based work. – Victor Burgin “Office at Night” 1986- Edward Hopper painting.
-Barbara Kruger, 1987, - Critical practice, conceptual art.
• The idea of staging an image.
• Refusal to provide a narrative.
• Text works together with imagery.
• Sherrie Levine- “After Walker Evans” 1981, re-photographed from a catalogue, raises questions about viewing context and the value of art.
• Reference to Walker Evans who made a series of images of rural workers.
• Sherrie Levine re-photographed a historic image from a catalogue – photographing a reproduction of the image.
• Making comment on the art market and the idea of an “original”.
• “Why is one reproduction of an image more important than another?”
• Images losing their value.
• Raise questions on the way we view images and what price we label them with.
• “Is there no original with a digital print?” An original doesn’t exist in a digital sense.
• “Simulacra and Stimulation” 1981, Jean Baudrilard.
• Interaction between reality, symbols and society.
• The real no longer exists – we only ever have copies.
• Similacrum – a copy of a thing that looks real but isn’t the real thing.
• “A constructed type of reality”.
• Jeff Wall, “Dead Troops Talk” 1992.

• Staged image, soldiers in varying stages of decay and injury. Each costume of the soldiers is from a different stage in history.
• The construction of the image is a typical postmodern way of working.
• Walls work is very critically informed.
• Yinka Shonibare “Diary of a Victorian Dandy” 1998, staged images, questioning racial differences in eras.

• Dropping himself into an era and class that racially he wouldn’t naturally have been apart of. A comment on class, race and society. (Shonibare).
• Yinka Shonibare designed the ship in the bottle that was put on a plinth in Trafalger Square. Part of the YBAs.
• Gregory Crewdson, “Untitled” (Ophelia from Twilight) 2001.

• 21st century Ophelia, a disaffected housewife. Tragedy mood, Harking back from the original Pre-Raphaelite painting (Millet).
• “A moment of tension, photographing between moments”.
• Looks like a still from a movie.
• Doesn’t give the full narrative but asks the viewer to create their own narrative from the clues given in the image.
• Crewdson worked on films so his photography has that style, from the lighting effects he uses.
• Cindy Sherman “Untitled 1981”, Dresses up as different characters, gives a small narrative that again the viewer has to come up with.

• Yasumasa Morimura, “To my little sister: For Cindy Sherman” 1998

• A comment on gender, sexuality, race. Very similar themes to Shonibare.