PHOTO:Photo-Poetics

The exhibition “Photo-Poetics: An Anthology” examines an important new development in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualize their work within the history of art and visual culture. “In the last ten years, I started to notice the kind of work made in studios based on objects that carry a lot of meaning without actually being portraits”, says Jennifer Blessing the curator of the exhibition.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archive

This group exhibition features more than 70 works by 10 artists: Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag, and Sara VanDerBeek, who are representative of a new movement in contemporary photography that has photographers utilizing found images and material to tell a larger story.Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centers on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance, a sort of displaced self-portraiture that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings.  “Jaws”, a piece from Erica Baum, shows a worn copy of a paperback book with a still from the 1975 film peeking out from between the pages and Anne Collier’s photograph “Crying” shows the image of a woman featured on an album cover on top of a stack of records over a plain grey and black background. Lisa Oppenheim’s photo series, “The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else”, is shown using a Kodak Ektagraphic slide projector that clicks through images showing a hand holding various photos of sunsets against another horizon. For both artist and curator, the sound, heat and even smell of the machine and the watercolor effect it creates are just as important as the images themselves. The ten photos in Leslie Hewitt’s “Riffs on Real Time” include everything from found snapshots to old documents piled on top of one another and Sarah VanDerBeek’s “From the Means of Reproduction” is a photograph of multiple photographic reproductions, hung on a mobile. Driven by a profound engagement with the medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, traditions, and magic of photography at a moment characterized by rapid digital transformation. They attempt to rematerialize the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and creating artist’s books, installations, and photo-sculptures. While they are invested in exploring the processes, supports, and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of “Photo poetics”, an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object.

Info: Curator: Jennifer Blessing, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street), New York, Duration: 20/11/15-17/2/16, Days & Hours: Sun- Wed & Thu-Fri 10:00-17:45, Sat: 10:00-19:45, www.guggenheim.org