What is contemporary photography? In a prior commentary from September 2015, eight years ago, by this author, it was defined in this way: “Contemporary photography could be described as a photograph from our own time, compared to an image from a much earlier period. A relevant definition of the word contemporary is: “‘happening in the same period of time… of or in the style of the present or recent times…’ There are no bookends to defining a period for Contemporary Photography. It is a rolling and evolving view of photography from a contemporaneous moment in time… it is a reference to an image created that reflects our values, challenges, and perceptions today.” The following discussion is in many ways a continuation of this prior commentary on “What is Contemporary Photography?” At the end of the day, it is still “all about the image” as it reflects what is meaningful today; but the process through which we arrive there now is becoming very different.
It may be more appropriate to narrow our inquiry and to now ask “what is contemporary photography-based art?” It is too broad a topic to ask what is contemporary photography, with all the changes that have occurred in the last eight years. Many artists use a camera, or other image capturing technology, technique or device, to create an image. Yet, they are less likely to refer to themselves as “a photographer" and are more likely to consider themselves a multi-media artist, as their photographic work is embedded or mixed with other materials or media. The image created using a photographic technique may also be an multi faceted interpretation of the world around us as much as a traditional literal capture of the actual world. This challenges the appreciation of what is a photograph when included in the creation (or construction) of an artwork. In a sense, the classic statement by Ansel Adams, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it,” is taken to a different place.
Many “contemporary” artists continue to embrace long-held photography aesthetics. The reference to contemporary work does not exclude works that use traditional photographic processes to produce a 2-D image, such as a traditional silver gelatin print, digital inkjet print, or other historical form of printing on paper or other materials, such as metal or fabric. These are important and beautiful works. Yet, has photography today entered some new phase of fresh expression and creativity that justifies us revisiting what is contemporary (art) photography? Have artists today achieved something so different from all the other techniques developed for different genres of image creation over the last 190+ years? Here, the expression “contemporary" is intended to reference artists that press the boundaries of what a photograph is thought to be and how it is presented as an object of art. This is why we might now narrow our discussion to what is photography-based work rather than what is just contemporary photography.
Today’s artists are modernizing and adapting classic photographic methods in new innovative ways, passionately driven by current issues, such as climate change. Amanda Marchand, a Canadian photographer living in New York, uses photography to create abstract interpretations of endangered plants and birds. Marchand describes her motivation for this work: “These lumen collages from the larger work, ‘Lumen Notebook,’ are cameraless sun-prints made with a wide variety of black & white photo papers… I have experimented with at least 100 different papers, both current and expired… Every paper type and brand turns a different latent color — what I think of as the paper’s own ‘color alphabet.’ […] This series of photographs plays with the temporality of the lumen printing process to explore ideas around landscape, time, and our mortal planet. Each photograph references an endangered or disappearing species (bird, fern, wildflower).” The original photographic image is made by the lumen process, scanned using another image capture technique to create a digital file, and then printed, cut, and arranged into the final work. Two very different photographic techniques are used. Marchand’s lumen prints are artistically cut and arranged into shapes that, by her own vision, abstractly depict specific birds and fauna that reference these endangered or disappearing species. A two-dimensional image is converted into three dimensions floated in a frame; at the same time photographic, but not a photograph. Marchand translates historical photographic materials (expired black-and-white photo-sensitive paper) into a contemporary context, bridging the gap between photography’s origin and its current state.
A different physical presentation of photography is seen in the portraiture of Lou Peralta. Peralta is a fourth-generation photographer from a family of portrait photographers living in Mexico City, Mexico. Photographs have been incorporated into other media for a very long time, yet Peralta’s Disassemble #13 (2023) is refreshingly contemporary while referencing the past. In a New York Times article written by Philip Gefter, “Transmuting Forms, Click by Click” (Oct. 17, 2013), the author discusses Robert Rauschenberg’s use of photography and his incorporation of images into collages and other mediums. Gefter puts Rauschenberg’s work into a context that other art-oriented photographers have struggled with: “In the 1960s photography was still dismissed in the art world as an upstart medium — utilitarian, commercial and journalistic. Yet throughout that decade photographs were hiding in plain sight in museums and galleries, where Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and others used them consistently to serve their own conceptual ideas.” Before photography began to be taken seriously as a genre in the 1970s, at which point the rather rigid rules of the genre became a hotly debated topic, it was these artists incorporating photography into their work in a more liberated fashion that set a precedent for the mixed-media, photo-based artists of today. Building on these pioneers, Lou Peralta has leveraged her extensive experience in portraiture to capture the energy of her subjects in a very three-dimensional, sculptural manner. That person’s portrait becomes a multi-layered assemblage of their place of origin and culture, as reimagined by Peralta’s deep passion to reveal who they are. It is again a photographic object that is not a traditional portrait.
Artists coming of age today will break many barriers and traditions with the tools, identities, and freedoms about which they are passionate. Their impact on the course of visual media is compounded by the now almost ubiquitous use of digital technology in image capture and processing that has rapidly accelerated and changed what photography has become. Hence, there is an increasing interest in art that is created for online enjoyment, with or without a physical construct such as a print. Digital technology first appeared on the scene around 1975 and became more widely available by 1995, although it was relatively expensive and of much lower quality than what is available today. The ease and availability of tools to edit, contort, modify, share, or export imagery into many platforms has exponentially expanded, and is widely embraced for new forms of visual expression, both static and in video. The visual possibilities of contemporary photography are endless so long as people exercise their creative instincts to give us new contemporary art. The magic of contemporary photography in today’s world emerges in new and unimagined ways and platforms. An artist can disseminate images through Instagram, other social media platforms, on NFT (non-fungible token) platforms where work is stored on the “blockchain” in cyberspace, and they can even use AI to create images without any need for image-capturing tools at all. All of this without oversight of editors, art directors, or other gatekeepers that might have previously dictated what images and art deserve to be disseminated.
Since its earliest beginnings in the 1830s, what we knew as photography captured people, places, and events that existed in our real world. While images have been fabricated since the dawn of photography, those manipulated images were sourced from real world images. The historic manipulation of images is well documented by Mia Fineman, a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in her excellent 2012 text for The Met’s exhibition by the same name: Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop. With the rise of Photoshop, similar editing programs, and artificial intelligence today, in all its current and future manifestations, images may now derive from sources other than our living, organic world of real people, real landscapes, and real events. Consequently, the bar has not only been raised for what is considered contemporary “photography-based” art, it has been shifted entirely. The production of “art” with images in our world has changed from real to appropriated, imagined, reassembled, and randomized. AI and other new technologies and algorithms have set a different measure for what can be defined as art. Throughout the history of the medium, as the technology for capturing images changed, what was appreciated as photography-based art also changed. As the use of Artificial Intelligence increases, we can no longer trust that an image is of our real world, and therefore is not a “photograph.” A photograph is, as traced to its root words, drawn with light. Instead, an image today may be entirely an unnatural fabrication. Whether AI will be used to construct what is asserted to be a photographic image or “photography-based” work may well, inappropriately, encroach on what we reference as “photographic” art.
One of the most fundamental and impactful changes over the last several years is who we know as an artist. The recognition and exhibition of works by a far greater diversity of people: people of color, Asian artists, African artists, LGBTQ+ artists, and many others who previously did not have a visible represented voice, has presented a tsunami of new works that were not previously widely seen in exhibitions, museums, and auctions. This may be the greatest fundamental change, in addition to technological changes, that will alter our view of “What is contemporary photography-based art” for today’s collectors. The history of photography, as previously written, was largely based on the work, stories, and legacies of Anglo men of Western civilizations. That is now forever changed. Artists such as Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke (Crow) native American, have come under greater focus. She uses photography to show herself positioned with background images, Indian textiles, and ceremonial objects to draw attention to issues important to her identity. There is a renewed interest today in Ming Smith, an African American female photographer, who broke barriers in the photography world in the 1970s. This expanded focus on who is making contemporary photography-based art today will presage a rewritten history of the photographic arts, globally.
Artists from these marginalized communities give voice to a set of concerns not previously presented as dramatically and broadly in photography-based works. Karen Navarro is an Argentinian-born multidisciplinary artist with indigenous heritage and a person of color, living and working in the United States. Navarro’s work blends issues of identity with heritage, social involvement, and adaptation into her photography-based art. In the piece Subject #13 from the El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times) series, she brings her past and present together. She describes her work: “Belonging is intrinsic to our humanity and integral to our understanding of ourselves. […] Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, that value the visual image above all, have altered our sense of self and the very mechanisms for how we develop our external and internal identities and to which groups we belong. El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times) explores social media platforms and examines their role in how we present ourselves, as well as how we externally validate our identity online. […] The individuals photographed were selected by an open call on social media platforms and were asked to wear a specific color clothing based on the colors of the logo of the social media they contacted me from. Embossed on the paper are the words of popular hashtags. Acting as an invisible tattoo, these words are aspirational, a call to wear the seal of the virtual tribe you wish to belong to.”
The work of Daisy Patton is also an expansion of what we consider photography-based works. Patton is a painter and not a photographer. In her work, the photograph goes beyond the literal image, becoming a base platform upon which another form of art is launched. Patton comments: “In Forgetting is so long, I collect abandoned family photographs, enlarge them to life-size, and paint over them as a kind of re-enlivening, dislocating the individuals from their formerly static place and time. […] By mixing painting with photography, I seek to lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into a loving act of remembrance. […] Nearly forgotten people are transfigured and "reborn" into a fantastical, liminal space that holds both beauty and joy, temporarily suspended from oblivion.” However, she embraces the photograph as an important record, bringing forgotten persons back to a presence again in our world and our contemporary lives.
There is a presumption that when we ask “What is contemporary photography?” we are referring to an image, created using the tools of photography, that is a work of art. We exclude imagery that is used for many other purposes, in capturing moments of business, science, or leisure without the intention to create artwork or to express a point of view on larger emotional or societal issues. The expansive use of photography today requires us to no longer think simply in terms of what is a contemporary photograph, but to narrow the discussion to imagery used in the creation of art. The development of photography has taken us beyond the act of taking/making an image as an end in and of itself. The act of “drawing with light” is now merely a tool in something larger. The presentation of images has changed drastically, whether presented exclusively digitally or as a (sometimes manipulated) physical object. Art changes with time regardless of its physical manifestation. Photography thus becomes more than a visual record of the moment, but a component blended in with other media to express the current moment as a richer, conceptual object.
An image, and how it is presented as an object of art, changes with time in response to the changing desires and needs of the audience and the artist. The photograph either becomes a digital file existing on transitory file storage, somewhere in cyberspace, or a physical object of purposeful expression. This in turn changes how images are visually composed, constructed, presented, and shared. The contemporary nature of a work is seen in its unique presentation and construction that becomes very different from what others have done before this point in time; even though the artist may leverage a historical technique or format. The liberated use of media in the 1960s reflects a current shift in the photographic world in its movement toward photography-based art. With the emergence of AI generated images, we are seeing two bookends in the history of the photographic medium, the first in the 1960s and the second today. AI is changing the fundamentals of what we perceive as photographic — with new technological developments, our existing understandings may cease to exist. Even prior to the popularity of the AI generated image, the nearly ubiquitous and immediate digital dissemination of the photographic image has fundamentally altered the newer generations’ relationship with images. Confronted with a constant barrage of images, scrolling through infinite timelines of content, physical manifestations of work become fewer and farther in between, and consumption of art occurs mostly through a screen. Fine art photography-based work is merely a drop in the ocean of the billions of images created and disseminated each year, and as such their impact is often diluted.
Harry Callahan said in the 1940s: “The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a different manner; not for the sake of being different, but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.” An image separates itself from others when the thumbprint of the artist is evident. That thumbprint becomes visible to us in how they reflect space and time, light and sound in a moment that is relevant and contemporary to our time. So long as there are creatives making images, there will be new contemporary photography-based works that excite us. When enough artists challenge, in new ways, the photography “establishment,” there may be an epochal wave of change triggered, a new movement marked by photography-based art rather than by photographs.
