Expanding Photography circa 1970: Photographic Objects and Conceptual Art
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q2wq9
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- The Photographic Object 1970
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- ISBN
- 9780520281479
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter explores the relationship between the work in the Museum of Modern Art's 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, and the contemporaneous activities of conceptual artists who were using photography--works very rarely discussed in relation to one another. It outlines their shared rejection of the values of modernist fine art photography and explores the different ways that they interrogated traditional notions of medium in their uses of photographs. Soutter’s analysis reveals the extent to which Photography into Sculpture expanded the notion of photography as art form within an institutional art photography context, while the conceptual artists employed a short-term strategy of treating photography as one non-art medium among several to challenge fine art aesthetics. In order to underline the paradoxes inherent in the ways photography was discussed and institutionalized at the time, Soutter’s examples of conceptual art using photography are drawn from the Information exhibition, curated by Kynaston McShine at The Museum of Modern Art, taking place in the same summer as Peter Bunnell’s Photography into Sculpture.
Soutter’s chapter is published in the book whose overall contribution to the history of photography has ramifications for how mixed-media photographic works are understood, both historically and in a contemporary setting. Her analysis draws significant parallels between strands of photographic practice that have been regarded as antithetical, namely the "anti-aesthetic" uses of photography by first generation conceptual artists, and the more self-consciously photographic mixed-media works that emerged from North American MFA photography programs in the late 1960s-early 1970s. The chapter provides evidence that photography circa 1970 had not fallen prey to what art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau has referred to as “a vitiated academic formalism.” On the contrary, Soutter argues that artists, curators and critics on both sides of the conceptual divide were radically expanding the possibilities for photography as and within art.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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