If this is art - The documentary photographs of conceptual art performances in the 1960s and

1970s
Once upon a time- Storrytelling in art photography tableau photography :work in witch
narrative has been distilled into a single image relates more directly to the pre-photographic
era of eighteenth-and nineteenth century western figurative painting creating narrative content
through the composition of props, gestures and the style of the work of art staged
photography

deadpan the type of art photography that has a distinct lack of visual drama - neutral
aesthetic

Something and nothing - how contemporary photographers have pushed the boundaries of
what might be considered a credible visual subject- ordinary objects conceptually altered
because of the visual impact they gain by the act of being photographed and presented as art

Intimate life - diary of human intimacy- what contemporary photographers add to this
vernacular style their focus on unexpected moments in everyday life, events that are distinctly
different from those the the average person would ordinarily capture.

Moments in history - the use of documentary capacity of photography in art

Revived and remade - a range of recent photographic practice that centres on and exploits our
preexisting knowledge of imagery the remaking of well-known photographs and the mimicking
of generic types of imagery such as magazine advertising, film stills or surveillance and
scientific photography

William Eggleston (los alamos) and Stephen Shore (a black and white photographic record of
the time he spend in andy warhols factory) (60s and 70s) establish colour photography over
black and white as the main vehicle for contemporary photographic expression
The early conceptual and artistic use of vernacular forms of photograhy bernd and hilla becher
(late 50s)

Early exploration of color photography as a vehicle for artistic ideas was not commonly known
or accessible until relatively recently : American surfaces(1999) , Los Alamos Project(2002)

Alec Soth part of egglestons legacy-elements of the deadpan aestethic-the conventions of the
nineteenth and early twentieth-century portraiture demonstrating the fact that contemporary
art photohraphy, while acknowledging its own history, draws on a range of traditions, both
artistic and vernacular, and reconfigures them rather than simply emulating them

Bernd and hilla becher students: Andreas Gursky,Thomas Struth.Thomas Demand,Candida

Hofer

IF THIS IS ART
The central artistic act is one of directing an event specially for the camera
Many of the works here share the corporeal nature of performance and body art but- the
photographic image is the work of art
The roots of such an aproach lie in the conceptual art of the mid-60s and 70s
Marcel Duchamp-Fountain only photographs remain of the original fountain, taken by Alfred
Stieglitz, seven days after the work was rejected by the judges of the armory show
Sophie Calle- Suite Venetienne (1980) The Hotel (1981)
Performance played a major role in chinese art in the 80s and 90s- Beijing East Village
Oleg Kulik- I bite America and America bites me joseph beuys protest against the vietnam war
photographys role in making and showing alternative realities
Melanie Manchot- Gestures of demarcation (2001)- this scene is not a performance being
photographed but an act created for the express purpose of being photographed
Jeanne Dunning psychological connotations of the human body the blob embodies the
embarrassment and vulnerability of human physicality
Banal diruption of daily life: Tatsumi Orimoto Bread man

Erwin Wurm One minute sculptures

Gillian Wearing
Bettina von Zwehl three part series that portrays subjects when their appearance is not
controlled by them.von Swehl asked a sitter to wear clothes of a certain colour and agree to
undertake simple tasks.For the first part of tge series, her subjects went to sleep wearing white
clothes, were woken, and then photographed with the vestiges of slumber still clear on their
faces.
Shizuka Yokomizo- a similar complicity between photographer and subject Strangers
nineteen portraits of single figures photographed through downstairs windows of houses at night

The inscribing of cultural and political meaning onto the human body has been reinvigorated by
contemporary art photography
Ni Haifeng the artists torso is painted with motifs from eighteenth century chinese porcelain
the words of his body are written in the style of a museum label or catalogue entry, suggestive
of the language of the collector and the social implications of trade and colonialism

Nina Katchadourian Renovated mushroom , Mended spiderweb

Wim Delvoye mosaics of sliced salami and sausages
Delvoye mixes civic typographies normally used for inscriptions on monuments and gravestones
with the language of the quickly scribbled, casual note left on a dorstept or kitchen table.
David Shrigleys use of a consciously unsofiphisticated style of sketching and a perfunctory and
unauthored photographic look is crucial in signalling to the viewer that we are not being asked to
take the artist seriously, at least not on the level of dexterity or skill. Our enjoyment of the work
has more in common with our dauly experiences of toilet wall jokes and schoolroom doodles.
Mona Hatoum- Van Goghs Back - the ability of the medium to depict solid plastic forms, fleeting
events and combinations, and graphically reduce them to two dimensions

Georges Rousse rousse works in abandoned architectural spaces, transforming the sites by
painting and plastering an area

repetition
Tim Davis- Retail I photographed houses at night, each with a reflection in its window from
the multinational corporation across the street. The reflections were horrific reminders of the
reach of global capital even into our private lives, and at the same time were undoubtedly the
most beautiful things I've ever rendered; like stained-glass windows in single-storey American
suburbs, or the illuminated capitals of medieval manuscripts. All art can be understood to both
celebrate and criticize the culture it comes from. I want my work to run crashing through both

these functions, accruing energy from both. The camera loves everything in front of it equally. It
is overgenerous with its attention, and so has an enormous negative capability: it can uncover
while leaving all surfaces intact. The camera loves the world so much, the photographer must
act as critic.
the repetition of the night- time phenomenon -his idea becomes a theory of the contamination
of our privacy and consciousness by commercialism.
Olga Chernysheva

ONCE UPON A TIME

Although many of the photographs illustrated here are parts of larger bodies of work,
narrative is loaded into a single frame
How a scene can be choreographed for the viewer so that he or she can recognize that
a storz is being told
Jeff Wall
late 70s, 80s
his photographs are evidence of a detailed comprehension of how pictures are
constructed
An ornate style in which the artifice of the photograph is made obvious by the fantastic
nature of his stories digital manipulation
The staging of an event that appears much slighter, like a casually glanced-at scene
Insomnia is made with compositional devices similar to renaissance painting, the angles
and objects of a kitchen scene directing us through the picture and leading our
understanding of the action and narrative. The layout of the interior acts as a set of
clues to the events that could have led up to this moment/
The use of actors, assistants and technicians needed to create a photographic tableau
redefines the photographer as the orchestrator of a cast and crew
Jeff Wall displays many of his images on large light boxes, wich, because of their spatial
and luminescent qualities, give his photographs a spectacular physical presence.A light
box is not quite a photograph, nor is it a painting, but it suggests the experience of both
(another frame of reference into Walls work :bilbooard advertisements.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Hollywood series a series of portraits of men (the titles of each photograph tell you the
name of the man, his age, where he was born and how much diCorcia paid him to pose)
the pictures encourage a kind of storytelling in the viewers mind

Cinematic light
tableau photography imaginative blending of fact and fiction, of a subject and its
allegorical and psychological significance
Teresa Hubbard And Alexander Birchler
such a division of space and the suggestion of time are similar to the use in renaissance
altarpieces of different moments in the same picture
Sam Taylor- Wood
The death of Chatterton(1856) the idealized character of the young, misunderstood
artist whose spirit is smothered by burgeois disaproval, and his suicide was seen as his
last act of self-determination
in her photograph, Sam Taylor Wood revives the idealism bound up in the paintingplays the role of a contemporary court painter, portraying an artistic and social elite of
wich she is part
Tom Hunter
contemporary reworkings of victorian paintings
The way home is a direct compositional and narrative reference to John Everett Millaiss
Ophelia - the death of a young woman who had drowned on her way gome from a party
Persons Unknown series inspired by the paintings of Jan Vermeer
when historical visual motifs are used in a contemporary photographic subject in this
way, they act as a confirmation that contemporary lige carries a degree of symbolism
and culturar preoccupation parallel with other times in history, and arts position of being
a chronicler of contemporary fables is asserted
The 17th-century golden age of Dutch painting had had a massive impact on me: the
way they dealt with ordinary people, not kings, queens and generals. I thought if I could
borrow their style for squatters and travellers, it would elevate their status. In this shot,
inspired by Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, my next-door
neighbour is reading the possession order.
The exposure was about a second, so it was like sitting for a painting: she had to stand
still. I was waiting for the light to pour into the lens, rather than snapping at something.
Sarah Dobai
Red room reducing the specificity of a place and culture to such a degree that it
closes down our expectation of uncovering the where and when of a photograph

Sergey Bratkov
Italian School consists of a number of staged photographs which depict
performances of biblical scenes, enacted by children living in a youth detention
center. The children are surrounded by symbols unfamiliar to them, and through
their ignorance, seem to be victim of the game. Both the strong contrasts
between light and dark and the theatricality of the pictures subtly refer to the work
of Italian baroque painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio made use of

chiaroscuro and had homeless city dwellers model for the biblical figures on his
paintings - not unlike Bratkov did for Italian School.
Anna Gaskell
the physical beauty of the prints combined with the moral ambiguity of the
narrative
work that is in terms of narative meaning, socially subversive or difficult is often
carried an aesthetic that is rich and seductive to the eye
Inez van Lamsweerde
the widow complex character invested with religious, funereal and fashionable
qualities
Mariko Mori
the production values are like those of luxurious commercial image-making
the mixture of far eastern traditional arts with contemporary consumer culture
Izma Kaoru
erotic accidents
this is a homage to the device in fashion photography since the 70s of pairing
ideas of cultural and commercial beauty with abject social narratives
Katharina Bosse
empty interiors - architectural spaces contain a trace o an act that will generate
stories
crossing over from intimate to institutional spaces
Miriam Backstrom
room reconstructions in museums and domestic furnishing stores
at first the image could be taken to be a documentary photograph of a domestic
interior
our display of personal identity in our homes is not only commercially
reproducible but also easily mimicked

Deadpan

art photography outside the hyperbolic, sentimental and subjective

a way of seeing beyond the limitations of individual perspective
the deadpan arsthetic became popular in the 90s, especially with landscape and
architectural subjects
the deadpan aesthetic is often characterized as germanic : Bernd Becher \ New
Objectivity ( 20s and 30s ) \ Auguste Sander : encyclopedic approach they
created typologies of nature, industry, architecture and human society throug the
sustained photographing of single subjects
Andreas Gursky

two metres high and five metres wide prints

he used large format cameras for maximum clarity and digital manipulation to
refine an image

Bridget Smith
architecture of Las Vegas
the buildings are almost comically diminutive
photographing in daylight unglamorized impression of the city
Ed Burtynsky
while social, political and ecological issues are embedded into his subjects, they
are visualized as objective evidence of the consequences of contemporary life
Candida Hofer
cultural institutions
larga-format camera
Naoya Hatakryama Osaka (baseball stadium) \ similar to classical ruin
Axel Hutte
night-time photographs of cities are printed as large transparencies and then
framed in front of a reflective surface,which shows through the light areas of the
image
this adds a subtle luminosity to the works. light seeming to emanate from the city
Thomas Struths subjects are always interesting and stimulating, but rarely
proposed as an experience into which we can immerse ourselves
psychologically. The invitation here is not for us to feel part of the scenes or to
empathize with the relationships that are shown, nor to think of the images as
revealing heightened moments in time, but to wonder at their perspectives, at the
pleasure of scrutinizing them as photographs
John Riddy finds the most balanced vantage point for the camera
this conscious decision minimizes our awareness of the photographers
perspective on (and reaction to) the sites and aim to bring the viewer into a direct
relationship with the subject
Yoshiko Seino
places where nature has begun to reclaim a landscape from man-made effort to
use and shape it
how human neglect can give rise to a transformation back to nature
Jem Southam
Painters pool how the conditions of the site and the permutations of weather,

seasons ald light constantly changed, each visit offering a new picture
Boo Moon
East China sea deal with how our sense of place is governed by permutations
of light and movements of water
Thomas Struth
Paradise every single organic element seems connected and impossible to
disentangle
Thomas Ruff
how we comprehend different subjects through the photographic form
how we understand a subject because of our knowledge or expectation of how it
is represented pictorially
great details \ blank expressions \ lack of visual triggers : confound our
expectations of discovering a persons character through their appearance
Hiroshi Sugimoto
waxworks portraits - how we unconsciously respond to photographic
representations of human forms
Rineke Dijkstra
vulnerability and physical self consciousness of her subjects as they were caught
in that transitional space of exposure between the protection of being in the water
and the anonimity of sitting or lying on a beach towel
SOMETHING AND NOTHING
playful conceptualism of still life photography
60s post-minimalist sculpture
artists technical skill are absent the viewer will therefore have a different
response from that engendered by traditional virtuoso masterpieces in art history
Duchamps ready-mades activate the same conceptual dynamic
they destabilize the notion of an object as a discrete plastic form without
connections to the enviroment in which it appears \ confound the permanency of
an art work
Peter Fischli and David Weiss
assemblages of mundane items
P.F and D. W created sculptural forms by fixing and balancing these objects
together and then photographing them against dull backgrounds with raking
shadows, lending a comic drama to their consciously unsophisticated temporary
sculptures

the unglamorous style of photography used suggests an affinity with another

strand of art making that emerged in the 60s the documentary photographs of
minimalist sculpture and land art
using a photograph in this way to disseminate an ephemeral artistic act or
temporary work of art
Gabriel Orozco
Breath on piano - the documentation of the highly fugitive act of breathing
Piero Manzoni
Richard Wentworth
reused or abandoned objects
understand alternative values or meanings of things through touch, texture an
weight
Jason Evans
how a fragile, fleeting phenomenon can be made to resonate through
photography
Anthony Hernandez
what is overlooked socially and politically as well as visually
Peter Fraser
how photography mantains the physicality of,often quite ordinary things while
opening up their potential imaginative and conceptual meanings
Wolfgang Tillmans
suits suggest the shapes of the bodies they once contained, like shedded
animal skin, and the act of undressing, creating a sense of sexual intimacy
Laura Letinsky
seventeenth-century duch paintings
narratives of domesticity and intimate relationships which can be read in the
remains of a meal
narrative potential
Sabine Hornig
spaces between the image and the objects

INTIMATE LIFE
how it borrows and redirects the language of domestic photography and family

snaps (what remains absent in such images, however are things we perceive as
culturally mundane or taboo)
the non-events of daily life: sleeping, talking on the phone etc
Nan Goldin
the ballad of sexual dependency consciously sequencing her photographs into
themes that directed the viewer to think beyond the specifics of her subjects
lives and about general narratives of universal experience
secual relationships, male social isolation, domestic violence an substance
abuse
her intense record of the impact of hic and aids- related illness,drug addiction
and rehabilitation on her and her friends lives offered art audiences a profound
engagement with this social issues,spelt out in personal terms
Nobuyodhi Araki
visual diary of his sexual life
yoko \ chiro my love \ tokio love (with Nan Goldin)
Larry Clark
lyricsl representations of teenagers
recording the teenagers nihilistic progress into adulthood
the rise of intimate photography offered a spur for the injection of a gritty realism
into fashion images
the fashion industry as a hole soon began to absorb these anti-commercial
gestures into its advertising and glossy editorial pages,prompting increased
media criticism that accused the fashion world of promoting child abuse, eating
disorders and drug-taking
Juergen Teller
go sees vividly recording the unglamorous, false hopes of the girls lives