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Based in Los Angeles, Barth makes cool, precise works that emphasize processes of perception and vision unique to photography. This diptych shows two adjacent views of a Stockholm river scene captured in sensuous soft-focus; the right-hand panel, however, reveals a sharply rendered plank—perhaps the strut of a bridge—in the foreground plane of the picture. A surprising and complex meditation on figure and ground, surface and depth, this work seamlessly combines luscious, almost painterly effects with an incisive inquiry into the workings of her medium.
As both artists and professors at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, the husband-and-wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher influenced an entire generation of German photographers including Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky with their typological approach to the medium, in which a single archetypal subject is described through an accumulation of diverse examples. For more than three decades, they have systematically examined the dilapidated industrial architecture of Europe and North America, from water towers and blast furnaces to the surrounding workers' houses, all recorded against a blank sky and without expressive effects. As it developed in the 1960s, the Bechers' project chimed with Conceptual Art in its emphasis on impersonal series as well as with older traditions of objective photography as practiced by such artists such as August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt.
Between 1992 and 1996, Dijkstra produced a series of full-length portraits of teenagers on various beaches in Poland, Croatia, the Ukraine, Belgium, England, and America, describing the liminal state of adolescence with startling eloquence. Posing her young subjects before a luminous background of sand, sea, and sky, she imbues the portraits with an elemental, almost mythic quality that seems to transcend the carefully observed particulars of national identity and class. In this photograph, a skinny Polish girl in a lime-green bathing suit confronts the camera with a heartbreaking blend of awkwardness and studied nonchalance. Standing at the ocean's edge, she tilts her head and slips unconsciously into a classical contrapposto pose. Dijkstra captures this moment with her camera, deftly revealing the eternal within the everyday. Shot from a low angle against a darkening sky, the girl appears simultaneously large and small—monumental yet vulnerable, half exposed, half grown, halfway between innocence and experience. With its perfectly modulated blend of clarity and ambiguity, the photograph is a poignant depiction of Venus at the awkward age.
Like action painting, which it slightly resembles, this image—one of three from an outsized triptych of photograms—is the record of an artist's gestures. In his darkened studio, Fuss climbed a ladder and dumped a bucket of water three times onto separate sheets of photographic paper floating in a tray below, while simultaneously exposing each paper to a flash of light. In the resulting images, full of cosmological and subatomic overtones, the "shadows" record areas of light and vice versa. Shuttling between infinite detail and total abstraction, the pictures reveal figuration and abstraction to be two sides of the same coin.
Graham, an artist from Vancouver who works in a variety of media, built a giant pinhole camera and parked it in front of twelve different trees for one month in 1979. The public was invited to enter the camera to view the luminous image of the tree cast upside-down on the camera's back wall. In the early 1990s he again approached the subject, this time photographing ancient oaks in the English countryside. Inverted on gallery walls, the impressively large prints suspended the trees as if in the mind while insistently recalling the constructed aspect of all artistic representation. In 1998 Graham produced his definitive work on this theme, a series of seven monumental images of Welsh oaks printed on color paper to produce warm deep sepia and charcoal hues. The almost hallucinatory transformation wrought by the inversion of these images is profound, as disorienting as if the ground were to become transparent, branches become roots, and the sky fall.
Born in Leipzig, Andreas Gursky was educated in the heart of West Germany, first in Essen and then in Düsseldorf, where he became a "master student" of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie. Becher and his wife, Hilla, profess and practice a straightforward style of photography that catalogues, with clarity and dispassion, the unselfconscious structures typical of a culture. Gursky began by mixing these structural approaches with the traditions of Northern landscape painting. Initially he made easel-sized photographs of vast, softly hued landscapes in which tiny figures played. In the 1990s he expanded the scale of his pictures to wall size and the scope of his subjects to include cityscapes and interiors shaped by industrial, electronic, and other automated functions of modern life. In Schiphol the artist frames the tall clouds, low horizon, and perfect geometries of a runway in the windows of Amsterdam's airport. Deftly laminating the luminous skies of Baroque Low Country painting, the Romantic theme of the windowed view, and the abstraction of De Stijl, Gursky gives us a landscape layered with nostalgia, structured by modernism, and sealed behind glass—an expansive yet neatly delimited vista for human transport.
Huebler, who began his career as a Minimalist sculptor, abandoned the making of traditional art objects, saying: "The world is more or less full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add anymore. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place." The results—typewritten, bureaucratic-sounding texts accompanied by deadpan black-and-white photographs—were divided into three decade-long series: Duration, Variable (in which he attempted to photograph everyone in the world), and Location. This work was made in Bradford, Massachusetts, where the artist taught at a local liberal arts college for women. Focusing hypnotically on a snow-laden bush of spiky branches, the artist's humdrum subject—photographed twelve times from a fixed position at fifteen-minute intervals—is transformed into a readymade sculpture undergoing organic, material transformation, the various stages of a densely worked drawing, and a mirror in nature of the tonal reversal (from snow white to brush black) that underlies the negative-positive process of the medium in which he is working. With disarming simplicity, Huebler slyly redrew the parameters of the work of art to efface the traditionally elevated positions of the artist and the art object in favor of an elegantly conceived and simply communicated idea that exists fully only in the viewer's mind.
Lockhart is a Los Angeles–based photographer and filmmaker whose work draws on and extends the strain of Western visual culture characterized by precise, contemplative observation of the everyday, from Northern European paintings by Vermeer and Friedrich to the structuralist and ethnographic cinema of Michael Snow and Jean Rouch. Known for her "directorial" style of location scouting and obsessively realized mise-en-scènes, the artist displays a bravura talent for atmospheric and psychological effects, redolent with mystery, that both provoke and frustrate the viewer's desire for narrative resolution. It is also a remarkable reading lesson in the nature of photographic representation, with its play of reflections and doublings across a grid of windows that thrusts the protagonist forward into our space, as if he stood with us before this rain-soaked bedroom/skyline conflating interior and exterior—imagination and reality—onto a single plane.
Like his contemporaries Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham, Matta-Clark was instrumental in introducing architecture and public space as important subjects of Conceptual Art. Using abandoned buildings as his medium and wielding a chain saw as his instrument, he cut into the structures, creating unexpected apertures and incisions. In 1974 Matta-Clark operated on a two-story home in New Jersey that was slated for demolition, effectively splitting it down the middle. The light from the incision invaded the interior and united the rooms with a swath of brilliance. The artist photographed his work and created a collage of prints, the unconventional disposition of which re-creates the disorienting experience of the unprecedented destruction.
During the 1960s artists including Oppenheim and Robert Smithson sought to liberate sculpture from the pedestals of the gallery and museum, choosing instead to make ephemeral, antimonumental works inextricably bound to their sites in the world. Here, Oppenheim enlarged the patterns of a tree's growth and, by shoveling pathways in the snow, transposed the annual rings to the frozen waterway that separates the United States and Canada as well as their differing time zones. By juxtaposing man-made national and temporal boundaries, Oppenheim opened to question the relative values of the ordering systems by which we live.
In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned his living at Time-Life clipping articles from magazines for staff writers. What was left at the end of the day were the ads: gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models that provoked in the artist an uneasy mix of fascination and repulsion, disgust and envy. By 1977, Prince had begun rephotographing these ubiquitous images in order to, as he put it, "turn the lie back on itself." Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined pictures as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies—blurring, cropping, enlarging—that undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the image, revealing it to be a hallucination, a fiction of society's desires. Untitled (cowboy) is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy), one used to sell addiction in the guise of rugged independence. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to rampant individualism and illusion, Untitled (cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to images over lived experience.
In 1981, Sherman created a series of images showing herself squeezed into the horizontal, double-page format of the magazine spread. In each picture, the viewer loomed over the subject whose dramatically spot-lit poses—waiting for the phone to ring, crouching in terror, or staring catatonically into space—often implied an air of vulnerability, trauma, and even violence. By encouraging her audience to participate by proxy in the predatory "male gaze" reminiscent of Cinemascope B-movies and pornographic magazines, Sherman courted controversy; some critics felt that the works did not sufficiently stand apart from the objectification that they described so powerfully, and the magazine that commissioned the works ultimately rejected them for publication.
In the center of Struth's photograph is Giovanni Bellini's luminous San Zaccaria altarpiece (1505), which reigns over the adjacent paintings and all the surrounding space. The Madonna and Child and the saints share an attitude of deeply spiritual communion and radiate a field of calm beyond the airy apse in which they are ensconced. Through his mastery of light and perspective, Bellini created the illusion that the space exists just beyond the wall, while Struth used photography's trompe l'oeil effect to bring the marble niche forward, as if to float on the very surface of the photograph. Two tourist-pilgrims enraptured by the painting demonstrate its scale; others seated in the pews, also quiet and meditative, mark off the receding perspective. Everything in the photograph seems to exist in the same sensuous, orderly world—as if Bellini's and Struth's monumental images of sacred spaces washed in translucent Venetian light actually were of the same moment.
Unnoticed except for a few passersby, Ray spent an afternoon bound to a tree branch. Coming on the heels of the coolly inhuman Minimalist art that reigned for the preceding decade, the artist's gesture (executed to be memorialized as a photograph) inextricably binds the human body to the medium of sculpture. It is also a witty self-portrait of the artist as hapless prisoner to his own creativity that, in the manner of a good joke, leaves the viewer somewhere between amusement and concern.
Donnelly is best known for her performances, which are novel partly because they are rigorously undocumented—meant to exist for whomever was present, and to be communicated by word of mouth to those who were not, with all of the accretions and distortions of subsequent legend. To further complicate matters, she has also performed without informing the audience, as when she waited tables at the dinner for the opening of the 54th Carnegie International (in which her work was included), like a ghost visiting her own funeral. This withdrawal of the camera from the event points to her own ambivalence about the medium, as can be seen in the series of twelve unique prints collectively titled Satin Operator. Each image was created by the artist manipulating a rolled photograph on a flatbed scanner during exposure. The resulting variations are like individual performances which are then presented by the artist without mat or frame, pinned directly to the wall so that the work protrudes into the space of the viewer like a character in an unfolding drama.
From the moment of his first exhibition in 1988, at the age of twenty, Tillmans has been recognized as an artist of precocious talent. Conscripting such magazines such as i-D, Interview, and Index as his exhibition space, he published provocative pictures of youth culture's rituals, self-image, and style that looked nothing like high fashion. Their exciting transgressions and seemingly casual snapshot style seemed, however, totally appropriate to describing the texture of a nomadic counterculture whose very ethos is the elimination of all boundaries. Tillmans' first-hand attraction to objects was manifest from the beginning, but his still lifes rarely appeared in his early publications. Refusing to be narrowly cast as a pop culture "art star," Tillmans retrieved and printed his early still lifes in the mid-1990s and began to move deeper into this genre, seeking out the paintings of Zurbarán and Caravaggio. His continuing challenges to distinctions between low and high culture, and recently, between figuration and abstraction, and the lush beauty of his pictorial results earned him Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2000—the first time the award had been given to a photographer.
During the 1970s, Polke photographed widely—from Paris and New York to Brazil, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.The basis of this image is one of a series of negatives exposed in a bar in São Paolo, Brazil, showing a group of men drinking. Polke considers the darkroom a sort of alchemic laboratory in which he can explore infinite mutations of imagery. With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed this large sheet selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding wet paper to generate the woozy, hallucinatory forms.
For more than two decades, Ruff has been interested in how technology colors our perceptions. Titled jpeg to indicate the digital pictures from which they are derived, his newest body of work greatly expands the matrix of individual pixels in low-resolution files lifted from the Internet. The abstracted, nearly dematerialized quality of this photograph recalls other images of catastrophe, such as J. M. W. Turner's The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1835). The perceptual effect of this transformation—from the size of a computer screen to the grandeur of history paintings—is that the picture seems to fragment and explode before our eyes, trailing off into a seemingly infinite progression of tonal shifts from pixel to pixel and in every direction. The disquieting result is that the iconic image of the attack on the World Trade Center towers seared in everyone's memory becomes ungraspable and almost aqueous in its fugitive, slippery quality.