Photography after Conceptual Art

The title of this session can be taken in two directions. One can, with Jeff Wall, see conceptual photography as ‘the last moment of the pre-history of photography as art’ and so see the large-scale, colour photography of Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Wall himself, as the realization of the ambition of the medium to become an autonomous art form. Certainly it has been welcomed by the museum, market and many critics as such.

Alternatively, the title might gesture in the direction of contemporary work that more clearly bears the traces of its passage through conceptual art. Much of the work that could be described in these terms is often produced by artists who employ photography alongside a range of other artistic media and activities to achieve their goals – Francis Alÿs, Sophie Calle, James Coleman, Tacita Dean, Louise Lawler and Gabriel Orozco. In the former case, photography holds its rightful place as a medium among other autonomous art forms; in the latter, photographic practices tend to blur the boundaries between the arts.

Do these twin poles of the pictorial and the conceptual continue to organize the field of photography as a medium for contemporary art? Should photography be approached through aesthetic categories that apply more generally to pictorial arts or does it require a distinct framework to do justice to its specificity as both a medium and a technical apparatus?

This session, which seeks to open up a debate about what is at stake in contemporary photographic art, forms part of large AHRC funded research project, Aesthetics after Photography, concerning the challenges of recent art photography to aesthetic theory. Papers that engage with substantive theoretical or aesthetic issues raised by post-1960s photography as an artistic medium would therefore be welcome, particularly in light of the oft-heard claim that the arts now inhabits a ‘post-medium’ condition. Proposals from artists, curators and academics are invited.

Click here to view the list of speakers and accompanying session abstracts.

• Prof Margaret Iversen, Dept. of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ; miversen@essex.ac.uk
• Dr Diarmuid Costello, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL; Diarmuid. Costello@warwick.ac.uk