PHOTO SESSION.

Evaluating Today's Art Photography

New York University New York, New York

December 2-4, 1999

For three days in December, nearly 100 art photophiles convened for "Evaluating Today's Art Photography," a conference hosted by New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies (NYU). The event's lectures and panel discussions featured "33 of the most distinguished participants in the world of today's art photography," according to conference director Anne Hoy. Hoy, a former curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), explained in her opening remarks that, "They represent all the important vantage points on current camera art and its recent past--the point of view of the artist, the critic, the scholar, the museum director, the curator, the auction house representative, the dealer, the private consultant and the conservator."

According to Hoy, these 33 cognoscenti were gathered to address a series of questions about photography's current state. Among them were: Why have art institutions, contemporary art galleries and collectors increasingly turned their attention to photography over the last 20 years? Why is photography now the most compelling medium for many critics? What distinguishes photographs, in terms of content, from other artworks? How does photography of the '80s, much of it full of ironic staging and appropriation, relate to that of the '90s? How will its form and content change in the future? What accounts for predictions of the death of the medium in its current state? The conference brochure also stated that speakers would address work that challenges cultural taboos and traditional definitions of the medium. It cited examples by artists who came to prominence in the '70s and '80s such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano and Cindy Sherman.

Unfortunately the makeup of the audience did not mirror that of the conference's speakers. While the event, according to its program literature, did not direct itself toward a specific group, the attendees consisted primarily of collectors of varying levels of connoisseurship, museum officials, art consultants and a few artists, critics and scholars. The low attendance rate of the latter groups may have been a function of the conference's $270 fee. This imbalance cast a shadow on the conference's ability to objectively evaluate the subject in question, particularly because many of the speakers and attendees stood in a potential vendor/client relationship.

In a majority of the lectures, speakers focused on the historical circumstances of photography that have led to its current state. Unfortunately, due to the conference's jam-packed schedule, where speakers and even panels of up to six participants were only allotted 45-minute slots and little or no time for questions and answers, many did not provide a thorough analysis of current trends. Other speakers focused too much attention on photographic works of the '70s and '80s, perhaps as a result of the conference's particular definition of "today," as noted in its brochure and in Hoy's opening remarks.

New York Times photography critic Vicki Goldberg set the stage for a discussion of an issue that would have served well as an overall theme for the conference--the divide between the worlds of fine art photography and contemporary art and the differences in the work produced for each market. In her lecture, "When Photography Became Art," Goldberg traced the history of this separation from the medium's inception to the 1980s when, she concluded, photography at last "got itself truly recognized as an art." While providing entertaining anecdotes, Goldberg oversimplified the conceptual and formal nature of certain photographic works produced in the '60s and '70s by artists such as John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha which hastened the medium's assimilation into the art market. She also failed to address this history's ongoing ramifications on the field.

In contrast, Carol Squiers, an editor at American Photo and of two anthologies on contemporary photography, examined one facet of the complex "gap between photography made by photographers in the photo community and photography made by artists in the art community." In her talk, "The 'New' Color Photography and Its Forgotten Past," she scrutinized the "differences" between the work of Germans Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, who each gained prominence in the art community in the '80s and '90s, and that of Americans Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and Neil Winoker, who exhibited primarily in fine art photography venues in the '70s and '80s. By showing shockingly similar images and citing interviews in which several of these photographers and artists discussed their influences, Squiers convincingly revealed strong stylistic and conceptual parallels between the two camps. She argued that since the art market "needs to perpetuate the idea of singularity and individual achievement as its way of offering a new and advanced art product," it has on occasion perpetuated this gap. While pointing out likenesses, she did acknowledge a key formal and practical difference in the work of both groups that hinders simplistic conceptual comparison--image quantity and size. She noted that artists "using" photography, such as Gursky, Ruff and Struth, have canonized the phenomenon of six- to eight-image gallery shows of over-sized photographs. Squiers asserted that this shift grants the photograph the traditional status of a painting, where the viewer engages in a direct physical relationship with the image plane that ultimately determines how the image is read. Such status also supports the photograph's definition as object, thus affirming its artistic value through a disassociation with traditional photographs, both fine art and commercial.

Photography critic A. D. Coleman also attempted to assess the medium's current trends and their geneses, but from a different perspective than that of Squiers. He noted that approaches to the medium such as "the classical view camera tradition," "the documentary style" and what he called "small camera poetics" were heralded at certain historical moments as paradigms that revealed the medium's "essence." Coleman argued that such distinctions were unfair to the medium's capabilities, and that contemporary work is produced in a context that he termed "open photography." Coleman explained, "the entire tool kit of the medium comprising virtually all of its tools, material processes and styles, from [its] very beginning to [its] immediate present has been recuperated and is available ... to contemporary practitioners without prejudice from the medium's critical, historical and curatorial establishment" or "from the market of photographic works." Although he sees a lack of predominant paradigms as positive, he prob ed the ramifications of this openness which, he argued, is homogenizing camera work internationally. Without paradigms to adopt or react against, will the medium's practitioners grow lazy, passively producing an international body of work that is largely similar in terms of content and style? Will new paradigms emerge and, if so, from where? He closed by calling for new ways of looking at the medium, which might prevent what he termed "pre-paradigm stasis."

The conference's four panel discussions addressed the impact of current trends in photography on different segments of the market. Due to time constraints the issues debated were less developed than those in the speaker presentations, but certain timely questions were raised which, although unanswered in these forums, point to serious shifts in the practice of the medium, its critical response and market makeup.

The most fruitful of these was "Criticism Then and Now" which dealt with the function and ongoing relevance of postmodern discourse. The participants, who included Coleman, Timothy Druckrey, Kate Linker, Kobena Mercer, Squiers and Brian Wallis, asserted that postmodern theory as it was formulated early on in journals such as October, Screen and Afterimage was of timely use for both critics and artists in the late '70s and '80s. It established a critical vocabulary for evaluating art produced in reaction to dominant modernist ideologies and formal paradigms. Squiers and Mercer lamented a lack of criticality in current photographic art, while other panelists noted that certain questions raised by postmodernists concerning photography's social and cultural uses have not been fully resolved. Linker argued that a critical framework of the same intensity is not currently operative, and thus, contemporary photographic art and criticism seem more diffuse. She proposed that attention be focused on how digital imaging has altered terms formulated in the '80s about the photographic "real" (i.e. straight versus manipulated photography) and the "made" versus the "taken" image. The panel closed by pondering the recent and still evolving collapse of media boundaries and the blurring of lines between the art world and cyberculture at large. Several panelists queried how work produced in such a context, or lack thereof, will be critically assessed.

A second lively panel, "Marketing Contemporary Photography" which addressed the changes in gallery sales and marketing in the last decade, consisted of traditional New York City-based fine art photography gallerists with the exception of contemporary art gallery owner Roland Augustine of Luhring Augustine, who had to leave midway through the session, and Thea Westreich, an art advisor to private collectors. Augustine's departure and the lack of other contemporary art gallerists resulted in a one-sided examination of the division between the markets of fine art photography and contemporary art. While the panel recognized this split, he speakers spent much of their time addressing related but relatively inconsequential issues such as editioning practices and image size, both of which had previously been discussed at length by other speakers. The panel's predilections were evinced when two questions posed by Yancey Richardson, the panel moderator, were quickly glossed over. Richardson asked what role craft play s in the two markets and to what extent "the photographers showing in photography galleries are aware of contemporary aesthetic trends and critical issues in contemporary art, and conversely, if the artists showing in contemporary art galleries that are photographers are aware of the history of the photographic medium." The panel similarly skirted a question from the audience about the ongoing need for traditional photography galleries as a result of the blurring of media boundaries in exhibitions and artists' practices. Panelists also avoided questions about stylistic and conceptual trends in the medium, claiming that such issues were unrelated to their designated topic. Issues that were discussed included the last decade's rapid rise of photography exhibitions and venues, the difficulty of selling photographs made with the unstable materials of new technologies and the viability of marketing art on the Internet.

A third panel, "How Institutions Frame Today's Photography," included photography curators Sandra Phillips (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Sylvia Wolf (Whitney Museum of American Art) and gallery and museum directors Susan Torruella Leval (El Museo del Barrio), Lynn Gumpert (NYU's Grey Art Gallery) and Willis Hartshorn (ICP). Overlooking how contemporary trends in the medium are impacting institutional policies, the speakers delivered largely self-promotional, uncritical accounts of how their collections came into being. During Wolf's account of her experiences at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney, she off-handedly mentioned working closely with painting and sculpture departments when they acquired certain works by contemporary artists using photography. When questioned further about the dynamics of those instances, she replied that the acquisition budgets of photography departments are often not adequate to acquire certain works, and thus they are collected by other departments. She also stated that other departments often have different interests in the medium, so their display and acquisition of photography does not necessarily pose a conflict. Her responses concerning departmental financial disparities evidence an institutional lag in embracing the medium as an art form of equal value to painting and sculpture. Her observations on cross-departmental collaborations, while appropriate in certain instances, collapse in light of the simple lack of exhibitions and acquisitions of certain photographic works and non-photo-based works by photography departments.

The closing panel, "The Concerns of Current Artist Photographers," also missed the opportunity to hold a full debate. Rather than hosting a general discussion of issues facing contemporary practitioners, it featured 10- to 15-minute presentations by Tina Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Abelardo Morell and Lorie Novak. An open discussion took place only during the last 10 minutes of the panel. During this time, Barney, who is represented by a traditional photography gallery but has shown in both strictly photographic and contemporary art venues, challenged the underlying premise of the event. Barney argued, "The fact that there is a seminar here on photography itself is kind of prehistoric. That we have to sit here and discuss photography in this isolated room and isolate photography in itself ... is outdated." Ironically, this high profile conference ended acknowledging the impact of the conflation of photography with other media--an issue that repeatedly reared its head throughout the weekend--and the problem wit h holding such an insular event without a substantial presence of authorities from the art community at large.

KATHRYN ANDREWS is an artist living in New York.