Contemporary Photography Research Articles

Transformation: From a Glimpse to Observation-The Emergence of Conceptive Ideality in Contemporary Photography

In the history of artistic photography, from the decisive moment put forward by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to “Sleeping by the Mississippi” by American Alec Soth, photography itself has gone through a period from grasping the moment to a more subtle observation, from a 135mm film to an 8x10 large format camera, it is evident that a transformation has already underway in contemporary photography. This paper starts with the history of contemporary artistic photography, followed by analyzing the cause of the transformation and combining examples of large format artists to study how conceptive ideality was placed into their works. Therefore, it concludes the main characteristics of the conceptive ideality in contemporary photography.

Additional testimony. Photographs in the Prose of Daša Drndić

In this paper I will reflect on the role of photographs in the works of Daša Drndić. Mixing fictional and documentary modes is a characteristic feature of her texts. It is achieved among others by utilizing visual representations of the past. In my paper I aim to outline the strategies of visualization applied by the authoress (especially the traumatic, Holocaust-related experience), which materialize through photographs included in her works of literature. In the case of Drndić the visuals include for instance contemporary or archival photographs of places marked by the Holocaust and of Jewish inhabitants of Vienna as well as portraits of war criminals. Generally speaking, in her texts the photographs function as concretization (concretization) of the memory of injustice, of trauma and ultimately of the Holocaust. The photographs are by no means neutral images though they are commonly perceived as such. Interaction between the text (itself skirting the boundary between fact and fiction) and the image puts the latter in a position that is far from neutral. In Drndić’s case, the photos are often used as an inventory (archival) practice, but they constitute predominantly a way of overcoming the crisis, related to the intention of giving an account of the past, particularly a testimony of the Holocaust.

What Renders the Master’s House Unrecognizable? An Interview with Kajri Jain

I spoke with Kajri Jain over Zoom during the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Our conversation began with a discussion of her early fieldwork in the bazaars in India, probing into Jain’s own education and formative experiences. It then detoured into a critical unpacking of art history’s “sacred cows’, the need to fundamentally rethink the discipline’s deep intertwining with colonialism, and the many forms of baggage that non-Western art historians must carry on their shoulders. Jain’s suspicion of medium specific approaches led to a productive dialogue about anthropologist Michael Taussig’s work, theory fetishism, and several facets of contemporary photography in South Asia. We agreed about the need to continue to critique an elitist discourse that misunderstands the importance of religion, and the embedded nature of caste, in any reading of aesthetics and mass culture in the subcontinent. Ending with the question of how to decolonize, provincialize and globalize when engaged in pedagogy, Jain left us with much to contemplate. Keywords: visual anthropology, art history and decolonialization, Indian aesthetics, secularism and religion

Magical Thinking: Conversation with Geoffrey Batchen

His long-standing interest in the history of early photography makes Geoffrey Batchen the appropriate speaker to discuss the question of photographic magic. Therefore, our conversation oscillates between magic and realism, but also other antonyms within the medium: negative and positive, analogue and digital. Taking in consideration all these oppositional notions, Batchen suggests that theoreticians “need to acknowledge and embrace photography’s abstractions and contradictions”. Different contradictions within photography’s theory and history became pivotal in our conversation. We also discussed the indexicality of digital images. According to Batchen, the negative/positive system of traditional photography can be compared with the binary code of digital images, which “is therefore based on the same oppositional logic, the same interplay of one and its other, that generated the analogue photograph.” Moreover, digitality does not eliminate the magic character of the contemporary photographs; in this context, Batchen mentions the capacity of instant transmission of snapshots from one place of Earth to another. In conclusion, Batchen reveals some details of his upcoming book Negative/Positive: A History of Photography. Keywords: magic, indexicality, negative, digital, Barthes

Accelerating semogenesis: an ecosocial approach to photography

Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen’s term ‘semogenesis’ refers to how meaning potentials are created through processes on many co-occurring time frames, most prominently those referred to as ‘phylogenesis’, ‘ontogenesis’ and ‘logogenesis’. The concept was originally infused with linguistic concern in an attempt to link a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) account of the lexico-grammatical and semantic strata with lived experience. In this article, the authors rethink the concept in order to (1) broaden its scope to the concerns of multimodal studies, and (2) accommodate how digital technology impacts on our communication practices. They do so by discussing semogenesis from a vantage point of ‘ecosocial semiotics’, a perspective that asks us to blend both sociological, technological, material and biological understandings of human activity. Taking digital photography as an example, the authors argue that digital media afford an acceleration of processes of multimodal semogenesis on all semogenetic time frames. Picking up the notion of ‘microgenesis’, a fourth, faster-than-logogenesis time frame that serves as a placeholder for any process enabling logogenesis, they suggest that this acceleration is driven by the global-scale introduction of digital technology. Through a discussion of select examples from the history of photography, specifically contrasting nascent photographic practice with contemporary photography, they propose that the development from camera to digital camera and the subsequent consolidation in recent decades of digital cameras into smartphones has had a profound impact, not only on practices of photography, but also on the processes of meaning making with photographic material.

A City on the Move

Research Article| December 01 2019 A City on the Move: Contemporary Photography in Bandung, West Java Brian Arnold Brian Arnold Brian Arnold is a photographer and writer based in Ithaca, New York. He currently works with the American Institute for Indonesian Studies developing arts programming between the United States and Indonesia. His photographs and books are held in a number of public collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive, the George Eastman Museum, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2019) 46 (4): 19–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464003 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brian Arnold; A City on the Move: Contemporary Photography in Bandung, West Java. Afterimage 1 December 2019; 46 (4): 19–37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464003 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search Organized by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist and featured in locations across Europe between 1997 and 1999, the groundbreaking exhibition Cities on the Move highlighted an evolving understanding of modernism based on the post–World War II cities of East and Southeast Asia. Curating a visual experience that mimicked the controlled chaos of late-twentieth-century Asian cities, the show brought together more than 150 artists and architects in an attempt to identify hybrids and commonalities in a pan-Asian cultural development that arose in the wake of colonialism and the Cold War, and has continued into the age of “hypercities”1 like Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kaula Lampur, and Tokyo. In discussing the development of Cities on the Move, Obrist stated: Ironically, this exhibition only travelled through Europe, securing the established divide between Asia and the Euro/America-centric visions of internationalism. Nonetheless, the exhibition opened new opportunities for discussion and innovation across borders,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Aestheticising the Post-Industrial Debris : Industrial Ruins in Contemporary British Landscape Photography

The article concentrates on contemporary British artistic photography and on how it represented industrial and post-industrial sites in the period of de-industrialisation. It starts with the examination of how British photography perpetuated an idealised image of the rural landscape as a locus of national identity. Industry and industrial architecture were excluded from this vision. By the end of the 20th century, de-industrialisation meant that many former industrial sites were demolished or redeveloped. At the same time, a growing appreciation of industrial heritage translated into an increased interest in post-industrial sites, also on the part of photographers. This paper investigates how contemporary landscape photography has sought to introduce the image of industrial ruins into the realm of collective visual imagination by drawing on aesthetic conventions of the Picturesque and the Pictorial, on the one hand, and on the conventions characteristic for developments in contemporary photography (from documentary aesthetics in the work of John Davies, through the “abject” in the work of Richard Billingham and Tom Hunter, to the post-pastoral landscape photography by John Kippin). Contemporary landscape photography attempts to reinstate the image of Britain’s industrial past into commonly shared imagination, where the conflicted nature of the country’s cultural identity – the clash between the “Northern” and “Southern” metaphors – reveals itself with particular force.

The Big Picture: The Materiality of Size in Ansel Adams’s Large-Scale Works

The prominence of the large-format photograph in contemporary art since the 1970s is often attributed to the desire to explore new pictorial and spatial avenues by moving beyond the documentary approaches that had dominated since the 1930s. While not an inaccurate characterisation, the focus upon the artistic impulses associated with large-scale photography comes at the expense of the material issues that enabled it. This article addresses the gap by examining two largely overlooked forms produced by Ansel Adams between 1930 and 1960 – the photomural and the folding photo-screen – in order to demonstrate the high level of direct engagement that existed between photographer and materiality, which resulted in large-scale works that addressed many of the same issues dealt with in contemporary large-format photography, but that also stood in stark contrast to the ephemeral, mass-produced, large-scale work prevalent at the time. By considering historical examples, from an era when materials and processes were very different, the article demonstrates the active, physical effects of photographic enlargement, revealing print size to be not simply a changeable option but an inherently material condition, honing our understanding of why a photograph is big by demonstrating how it got that way.

Socially latent images: Eva and Franco Mattes’s personal photographs

The age of ubiquitous photography has not only embedded the ability to easily share photographs, it has also constructed widespread expectations of content being shared. Such presumptions of sharing are profoundly influencing our relationship with photography, particularly as the hypervisibility of shared images produces an increasingly unstable invisibility of ‘unshared’ images. These contemporary concerns can be productively explored and theorized by considering the work of artists Eva and Franco Mattes. In recent works that use personal photographs, the Matteses reveal prescient insights into photographic concerns around latency, (in)visibility and shifting distinctions between personal/private/public. By investigating the Matteses’ works through these prisms, I argue that the age of social media entails internalized and naturalized presumptions of sharing. This has not only affected how and why photographs are taken, it transforms the status of contemporary photography more generally, creating conditions where once unshared/private personal photographs may now instead exist in a broader state of ‘social latency’.

Contemporary Photography Works of Ruang MES 56: Idea, Interpretation of Information, and Model of Creation

Ruang MES 56 is a contemporary photography-based Art Institute in Yogyakarta. This independent art institution has been widely known through its various worksin international arts events. The resulting works are not merely personal, butappear to be conceptually charged and based on preproduction information. Thisarticle will discuss the discovery of ideas, excavations, and interpretations ofinformation made by artists of Ruang MES 56 in the creation of works. Morespecifically, this research will dig deeper into what kinds of information artistsare searching for in the creation, and how they influence the appearance of thework they produce. The research data will be obtained through interviews andstudies of documents owned by selected artists of Ruang MES 56 members. Theexpected result of this research is the discovery of the created patterns of creation, and can reveal the process of transforming the information that has been collected into the form artworks.

Pin Up Style dalam Fotografi Fashion Kontemporer

Fashion becomes a social symbol that gives the cultural identity to a person. Pin up style has existed since the late 1950s. This style which is a combination of urban style and pop culture is identical with a light, tight, and semi-open dress. The image sticking on pin up style fashion makes the women called as "teasing ladies". The chosen genre is contemporary fashion photography that is a genre in photography which aims to show the clothes and other fashion items influenced by the impact of modernization.The result of this final assignment project is a series of fashion photography which uses the fashion style of 1950s that is pin up style. In every visualization of the creation of this photographic work, it aims to present the story based on the ideas and the concepts as well as to introduce the type of pin up style for each photograph. The background, the property, the make up, the hair style, as well as the surrounding objects are used to support the story in the resulted photographs. Keywords: pin up style, fashion, contemporary fashion photography

Land as Natural Resource: Representations of Mining in Contemporary South African Landscape Photography

Photographic explorations of mining have an extensive history within South Africa. Late nineteenth-century postcards produced by commercial studios celebrated views of industrial sites. In his 1973 social documentary project On the Mines, David Goldblatt challenged the positive narrative of mining in South Africa. Recently, contemporary photographers have explored the industry through landscape images that present multiple narratives, encourage diverse interpretations, and highlight the complexities of modern-day mining. These visual examinations emerge out of a widespread interest among young artists in exploring South African spaces and the uneven social relations that condition their production. This article discusses work from three South African photographers – Ilan Godfrey, Thabiso Sekgala, and Jerry Gaegane – who created projects in the past seven years about mining and its social and environmental impacts. It argues that their work shows how contemporary South African photographers are using landscape images to look at environments in a Lefebvrian manner: not as fixed places defined by their components, but as fluid social spaces that emerge from an ongoing set of interactions between social forces. In doing so, these three artists show how landscape photography can be an effective means of exploring structural inequities in the post-apartheid era.

Photography of daily living activities as novel styles for printed textiles hangings design

Textile printing designer must have a great deal of experience in elements selection. Printing textile design has a role in enriching the artistic taste besides its role in enriching the aesthetic environment of individuals because it is related to their everyday life, either through design motifs or Daily usage. The research topic selection was a result of novel trends knowledge of textile printing design , and the nature of daily life, which has become dependent on the photography and documentation of everything around us because of the rapid change of life ,events change around us and the desire to document them, so technological progress helped in this in all tools and its ease of use. Textile printing designer have to be in line with this changes and participation in it is not only the adoption of the Ancient arts, where the emergence of new plastic arts must be known to create a common language between his art and the generation that receives his work then there wouldn’t a gap between them, and there are new sources of inspiration. This research focuses on the identification of aesthetic components in the composition of photographs and attempts to formulate them in a new way to suit their functional purpose. Accordingly, the research problem can formulate many questions that we can address by what are the general features of the photography daily life activities in modern photography? What is the use of the philosophy of daily compositions and activities in photographs in the textile printing design? The extent to which technology, photography techniques can be used? Does this field require further research and study of the scarcity of Arab and foreign research and studies?Objectives: are studying and analyzing models of daily life activities, photography, and preparing innovative designs suitable for Printing Textiles Hangings based on the aesthetic values resulting from the artistic study. Methodology: Study concluded analytical, and experimental approach. analytic method. That deals with the analytical and artistic studies of photography activities in contemporary photography As well as an analytical study of the designs inspired by the study, and the experimental approach where the researcher conducts the artistic and applied experiments derived from the historical and analytical studies of the production of Printing Textiles Hangings

‘Roots-searching’ and contemporary landscape photography in China

This article aims to discuss a discursive turn of Chinese visual arts, using landscape representations from old and contemporary photographs of China, as well as painting and film materials. The discussion starts from showing the differences of defining the term landscape between Western and Chinese painters, arguing that they point to two types of realism underpinned by two kinds of cultures of seeing. It then moves on to the anthropological analysis of the landscape and how this analytical framework is useful in terms of understanding the ‘emotive reality’ in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Lastly, the essay attempts to point out that this legacy has been inherited by contemporary Chinese visual arts in form of a ‘roots-searching’ sentimentality, either in explicit or implicit ways, participating in the construction of the new reality and identity recognised by and shapes contemporary Chinese artists.

BACKGROUND AND LINEAR PERSPECTIVE: SPACE IN SELFY

The article is devoted to the changes in the space representing the background in the selfie through the historical experience of the self-portrait in the visual culture. The digital photographic self-portrait (selfie), which has become one of the most striking phenomena of the visual culture of our time in the context of historical experience of visual representation in the context of a rapidly changing cultural situation (transition from “linguistic” to “iconic turn”) in the context of historical experience of visual representation allows the author to focus on those changes which occur between the viewer and the model, the selfi-maker. The author also pays attention to the role of linear perspective in the issue under consideration, techniques and ways of reflecting Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces on the pictorial plane using examples of contemporary photography, paintings by Jan van Eyck (“Portrait of Arnolfini couple”) and Parmigianino (“Self portrait in a convex mirror”).

Sam Vernon, Rage Wave

Sam Vernon, Rage Wave Curated by Olivia K. Young, Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, Toronto January 12 – February 10, 2018

Sam Vernon, Rage Wave

Sam Vernon, Rage Wave Curated by Olivia K. Young, Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, Toronto January 12 – February 10, 2018

African Photographer J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial

African Photographer J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial

Control over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle of Copyright, Right of Publicity, and the First Amendment

Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks to the more general challenge of balancing privacy and freedom of expression in the digital age. At the outset of this essay, I describe the scope of the empirical project and the process of collecting data. Then, in three parts, I describe how photographers simultaneously collaborate with and control the subjects of the photographs they make in order to assert themselves as civic storytellers with broad free speech rights in our digital age. I identify a conflict between photographers and their subjects, which serves to maximize the aesthetic freedom of photographers at the expense of their subjects. This conflict resolves in the photographers’ accounts through their caretaking role over their photographs on behalf of the subjects themselves. I conclude with a brief explanation of why it matters to better understand these professional photographic norms in our Internet age when free speech and privacy are increasingly in conflict.

The Photomontage Activity of Postmodernism

For decades now, Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1980 essay ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’ has shaped our understanding of modernism’s aftermath, at least as it unfolded in North America and Western Europe. Less remembered, however, is the degree to which the procedures of disjunction, copying, appropriation, and outright theft that he highlighted were epitomised not just by contemporary photography, but by photomontage in particular. This article recovers the debates that led critics such as Crimp, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Christopher Phillips, Benjamin Buchloh and others to turn to photomontage as one of their principal objects of concern in what became known as the postmodern critique of photography. Why was montage tasked to perform this critical function, particularly by people around the journal October who had not otherwise devoted the balance of their writing to photography’s history? The article suggests that these men and women, along with the contemporary artists they foregrounded, manifested what Mary Anne Doane has called a ‘desire for signification’, a reaction in the late 1970s against the mute theatricality of minimalist and conceptual art. Photomontage reintroduced representation to contemporary art and to the canon of art history. But unlike the reemerging illusionism in painting that also manifested this desire, montage guarded against an uncomplicated realism by highlighting and critiquing operations of representation in a manner that painting no longer could.