Abstract

The expansion of the fields of painting and sculpture and the instrumental use of photography in performance, body, land, and installation art practices since the 1970s blurred the boundaries between media and disciplines, bringing to the fore photography’s intermedia power mobilised as technical or material support in the wider field of the visual arts. What came to be termed in the francophone world photographie plasticienne and in Greek eikasteke photographia (often translated in English as ‘visual arts’ photography) emphasised experimentation and hybridity, a reworking of the medium’s aesthetic and poetic qualities, its temporality, material properties, objecthood, spatial complexity, and scale. The creative explorations of the medium itself by photographers would begin to shift as well, whether these were pursued by adherence to photographic realism, interrogation of the programme of camera aesthetics (à la Vilém Flusser) or resorting to older methods and cheap cameras as a kind of ‘photo povera’ against the imminent digital revolution. This text examines the shifts and turns in the appreciation of photography as and in contemporary art since the 1970s through the holdings of the Zepos & Yannopoulos collection of photographic-in-form works.