Reconfigured Reality
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Madison Museum of Contemporary Art 227 State St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
Reception: Friday, Dec. 9, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 6-9 pm
Somehow, MMoCA packs the history of contemporary photography into its tiny Henry Street Gallery. The powerful exhibit highlights techniques and styles from photographers, some lesser known and some with recognizable names: Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Still #3,” where she poses as a battered wife, certainly packs a punch. And how often do you get to peek at Andy Warhol’s party Polaroids? Narayan Mahon’s haunting “Cemetery, Nagorno Karabakh” (2006) records a desecrated Muslim graveyard. The exhibit runs through Nov. 2017, but you’ll want to visit several times to get the full effect.
Gallery Talk: Melanie Herzog, Thursday, April 13 • 1–1:30 pm: The Photographer is Present. The real, altered, and imagined spaces depicted in contemporary photography resonate with meanings that are variously social, historical, and sometimes deeply personal. The photographer may be visually present within the photograph, or the photographer’s presence may be implied as a spectator beyond the photograph’s frame. This gallery talk will explore ways in which contemporary photographers convey meaning in their photographs through the position they occupy – whether present within or absent from the photography – in relation to reconfigured realities they depict.
Melanie Herzog is a professor of art history at Edgewood College and a leading scholar on the work of Elizabeth Catlett. Herzog has also written extensively on the social documentary photographer, Milton Rogovin.
press release: Today, people increasingly rely on images to communicate, particularly photographs. The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art traces the recent transformations of this vital medium through Reconfigured Reality: Contemporary Photography from the Permanent Collection. This exhibition presents an overview of developments since 1970 that have helped define contemporary photography.
The origins of contemporary photography coincided with the elevation in the 1960s of photography from its traditional craft status to a fine art. This notion had been pioneered earlier in the twentieth century, notably by American photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, the latter the founding director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 1940. One of the first commercial enterprises in the United States to advance photography as art, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, was opened by Alfred Stieglitz in New York in 1905. Three years later Stieglitz renamed it “291”(after its address on Fifth Avenue). He broadened the context for new photography by showing it alongside the most recent developments in European and American modern art. Stieglitz was also notable for introducing fine art photography into museum collections.
These developments, however, did not lead photography to be universally accepted as art. The popularity of general interest magazines—the “picture press” as it was called—like Life and Look, which since the 1930s had assigned a pivotal role to documentary photography on their covers and in articles, had helped change minds. A growing interest in the subjective nature of the photograph was no doubt a critical factor. In mainstream contemporary art, the photographic image in Pop art during the 1960s—painted or printed—also contributed to revised attitudes.
By the 1960s, the new status of photography was being reflected in the establishment of photography departments in art museums and auction houses, the appearance of courses in the history of photography at the university level, the emergence of photography criticism, the proliferation of photography dealers and collectors, and the formation of major photography collections, both private and institutional. Of further note is that the early social history of contemporary photography saw the growing acceptance and inclusion of women photographers, in part the result of feminist reforms that challenged, by implication, the male dominance of modern photography.
Contemporary photographers have also had new platforms for the promotion and distribution of their photographs. In addition to galleries devoted to photography and the photobook (a publication of a single body of work by a photographer intended to reach a broad audience), some artists have more recently gotten their work out to the public in the form of “zines,” small circulation, self-published works of original or appropriated texts and images. More recently, fine art photographers have benefited from photo and text-sharing apps such as Instagram, which have provided a new generation of distribution platforms.
Other formats and stylistic hallmarks of contemporary photography, in addition to those already enumerated above, include the appropriation of borrowed photographic sources, for example, off the Internet; the inclusion of the photographic image in multimedia installations; the multi-paneled photograph and the photo collage. Most significantly, recent developments in contemporary photography have seen the near complete replacement during the first decade of the twenty-first century of film-based cameras and chemical processing with digital photographic devices and printing.
Digital photography allowed for an even greater manipulation of the image, further distancing the idea of an impartial record from the reality of photography’s abilities. As with all phases in photography’s history, the digital photography has a vibrant existence. It has found a natural and populist home in the online photo-sharing services provided by the camera phone, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat. The digital photographic image has become the pervasive visual language of our time.
Reconfigured Reality will be on view in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Henry Street Gallery through November 12, 2017. Exhibitions in the Henry Street Gallery are generously funded through an endowment established by the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation.