Abstract

Long neglected as a second-rate art, photography was accommodated in the art museum in the late 1970s, a development that coincided, chronologically and ontologically with the advent of postmodernism. This belated institutionalisation, triggered, no less, by the structural changes the museum itself was undergoing at the time, ushered in a reassessment of photography across the board. By the late 1980s, the modernist construct of (art) photography, singularly defined by the qualities unique to the medium itself, was overshadowed by an expanded lens-media field now widely termed “the photographic”.
The use of an adjective (“photographic”) instead of a noun (“photography”) not only signifies the referential character that contemporary lens-based practices have to photography but also points to the hybrid nature and “anything goes” liberalism of this novel category. Moving from the photograph to the indexical, still or moving, image, it accommodates under the same umbrella an array of media, formats, materials and sources: from Berndt and Hilla Becher’s industrial typologies and Walker Evans’s American Photographs, to Robert Smithson’s photographic documentation of site-specific works, Gregory Crewdson’s trompe l’oeil tableaux, Sam Taylor Wood’s video work and Wolfgang Tillmann’s heroine-chic magazine photographs.
But is there really an (postmodern) anomie in the photographic that effectively contests the old checklist values of the museum and the seat of photography as modernist art? Or, is it simply the profile of institutionalised photography, an ingenious way for museums to make use of the photographic material they have sporadically amassed over the last few decades, just another gimmick to meet the art market’s need for innovation and novelty by fetishising (once again) common experience? Can the photographic really lay claims to becoming the “most democratic of all arts”?