Conveniently coinciding with the beginning of a new millennium, the dawn of the digital age has dispersed the certainties of photography. The medium, once dictated by the technical procedures of camera and darkroom, has given way to the ease of the ubiquitous click-button devices that the majority of people play and work with everyday. Left bereft of their specialist status that gave photographers definition and direction, contemporary practitioners look out across a boundless plain of confused values but also challenging possibilities. The cover of Post-Photography by Robert Shore uses a picture by Cristina De Middel of an astronaut climbing over a ridge in a barren landscape. Taken from Middel’s project The Afronauts (2011) that tells the story of the proposed Zambia space mission, the exploring figure stands in for the writer, or reader, moving through the future terrain of photographic practice.
Taking its cue from the now-historic moment of postmodernism, the term ‘post-photography’ is seemingly an adjunct to this ending of classic modernist practices that aimed for purity of method and form. A more recent extension to an understanding of a post-medium practice was ascribed to photography by the art historian George Baker in his essay Photography’s Expanded Field (2005). At the close of his text Baker observes that photography has not come to an end, but that it is entering a period where its relationships have become more complex. Rather than discussing the medium itself, Baker focuses his attention upon our mapping of this expanding territory. While Shore’s survey shares some of this expansive approach to photography, it is not a book that is driven by critical theory. A lighter touch serves to introduce the reader to a number of paths that run across this open field.
From the outset Shore establishes that he is not advocating a specific art movement but is instead describing a particular moment. From his vantage point of the present he has brought together fifty-three practitioners whose work exemplifies certain current trends. These trends effectively provide five chapters that discuss: found imagery and appropriation; layering and superimposition; staged photography; physical interventions; and new approaches to photojournalism (or, as Shore describes it, ‘post-photojournalism’). All five sections begin with a short introduction by Shore, which is followed by a one-page profile on each of the selected photographers, and three to five pages of images. The profiles are written by the photographers themselves, providing the reader with an artist’s viewpoint. Acting as a guide, Shore takes the reader on a tour to visit all the practitioners located on his emerging map.
What is made clear by the book’s title, and by Shore’s introduction, is that those profiled are ‘artists-working-with-photography’; this focuses our attention upon practitioners who are building up an identifiable practice. Mishka Henner and Eva Stenram both work with appropriated material. Henner has become a master of navigating the internet for images that survey the physical landscape through such services as Google Earth. For Henner, the need to travel to an actual place is replaced by finding that site in a shared space. Stenram reworks her found images through digital erasure and addition. Her process reveals the photograph as a fluid space rather than a fixed fact.
In the second section of Shore’s book, Sohei Nishino constructs complex cityscapes from a multitude of photographic prints. Nishino’s photomontages both shatter and reconstruct our perceptions. The apparent crisis in photography has been its relationship to factual reality; staged images have always undermined this claim to photographic truth. The underwater images by Christy Lee Rogers are fantastical, but they do record what has transpired in front of her camera and involve little or no digital alteration.
Manipulation of the image through digital means has its correlation in artist interventions. Julie Cockburn featured in the fourth section, cuts into, and stitches onto, photographic prints reinforcing the photograph as object. The last section of the book is perhaps a surprise, as art slips into photojournalism; it includes the work of Cristina De Middel who uses artifice to tell a story.
As a singular medium, photography is constantly splintering. Changes in technology, along with the many different uses of photography, has made definition illusive. No doubt, the current digital revolution, and increased usage of photography, has given the contemporary practitioner the feeling of drowning. It is then apt that a photograph by Christy Lee Rogers is on the book’s back cover. Her underwater figures, submerged in ill-defined depths, counterbalance Middel’s exploring afronauts. Between the two states of exploration and drowning, Shore provides coordinates for future reference. Scouting out new initiatives, this book stands at the beginning of an adventure inviting us to jump in.
– Reviewed by Stephen Clarke
Robert Shore is the editor of the visual-arts quarterly Elephant.
Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera was published October 2014.
