When did photography first become “modern”?

Bayer-Hecht, Irene (American 1898-1991)
Bauhaus, Dessau (From a Balcony), 1925-28

Khalip, Yakov (Russian 1908-1980)
The Watch, 1936

Gowin, Emmet (American b. 1941)
Pivot Agriculture in the Snake River Plane, Washington, 1991

Steve Yates, Curator of Photography at the University of New Mexico Fine Arts Museuem, and Senior Fulbright Scholar, has been been pursuing these questions (and many other related topics) during the past 15 years. He has contributed an informative and thought-provoking essay for the upcoming issue of Lens Culture. In the meantime, please take a look at this very interesting website that reprises a comprehensive exploration of the history and evolution of “modern” photography.

Idea Photographic: After Modernism is a contemporary view of photographic history that addresses the work of more than 130 historical and contemporary artists including classic prints by pioneering modernists such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Pierre Dubreuil, Paul Strand, Alexander Rodchenko and Edward Weston and contemporary photographic work and installations by artists who began working beyond modernism decades ago such as Robert Rauschenberg, Betty Hahn, Robert Heinecken, Christian Boltanski, and Gerhard Richter. It finishes with a new international generation of photographic artists: Valery and Natasha Cherkashin, Laurent Millet, Jungjin Lee, Celia Muñoz, and Ana Mendieta, all of whom have discarded past conventions of modern art.

Thematic groups, some in which late modernist works are paired with earlier works, offer a comparative context and establish historical relationships among some artists. Themes include:

• Proto Modern Photography
• Limitations of the Medium
• Modern Form in Architecture, Landscape and Portraiture
• Photogram Aesthetic
• Constructed to Be Photographed
• Self as Subject and Simulacra
• Beyond Realism
• Cultural Landscape
• Postmodern Appropriation
• From the Avant-Garde
• Beyond the Medium
• Feminism as Ethos

It's quite a treat, and a great overview of the evolution of photography.

Posted by jimcasper at May 8, 2006 09:48 AM