Still Photography

Installation view, Still Photography, Tang Teaching Museum, 2001

Installation view of Christian Boltanski’s Autel Chasel, 1987, in Still Photography, Tang Teaching Museum, 2001

Installation view, Still Photography, Tang Teaching Museum, 2001

The past several decades have seen our assumptions about photographed reality challenged; we now understand that photographs can capture a counterfeit representation of people, places, and things in the real world. Despite these manipulations however, these pocket-sized frozen moments in time continue to offer a way of seeing and remembering the “real thing.”

During the 1960s and ’70s artists explored photography’s potential to reach beyond mechanical reproductions of conventional subjects. Artists such as John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and William Wegman began appropriating camera-made images and using them in new ways that often confounded established ideas of appropriate subject matter. Their images — photography as well as video — addressed broader and more complex issues than was possible with existing media, especially that of straight photography.

Ever since Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began incorporating borrowed photographic imagery in their work, the “photograph” has played a central role in contemporary art. While this new generation has not departed entirely from traditional photography, these artists have experimented with new ways in which photographs can be understood as artworks. While some of these images, produced by some of this generation’s most influential artists, may strike us as documents, and others more as aesthetic creations, all retain their identity as photography.

Still Photography is organized by Tang Museum Dayton Director Charles A. Stainback.

Exhibition Name

Still Photography

Exhibition Type

Group Exhibitions

Place

Malloy Wing

Dates

Jun 16, 2001 - Aug 16, 2001

Curators

Still Photography is organized by is curated by Charles Stainback, Dayton Director, Tang Museum.

Artists

John Baldessari, Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher, Karl Blossfieldt, Christian Boltanski, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, William Wegman