Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives In Photography

VITAMIN PH: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY

EXCERPTS

SELECTED BOOKS

London/New York: Phaidon, 2006

What is remarkable about contemporary art photography is the seemingly paradoxical relationship between...the medium's diffusion across a varied mix of conventions, materials and technologies, which would seem to deny the clarity of meaning, and the reinvention of documentary representation.... Roughly thirty years ago, one encountered exactly the opposite. While it was clear to critics at that time that contemporary art had progressed into a post-medium condition ... a parallel development revealed a shift in representation . . . towards the “picture.” ... In [Cindy] Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-82), for example, the photograph does not document an original or a reality; rather, it depicts an endless cycle of representations of representations. . . . Today, this relationship between medium and representation has shifted: the rejection of the purity of the medium by some artists now corresponds to the insistence on photography’s traditional documentary capacities by others, who wish to convey evidence and faithfully reproduce the visual world, rather than generate endless signs of signs.

—from TJ Demos's Introduction