The newly opened show at the ICP in New York is not one I’ll bother to go to. Having looked at their web page about it with a slide show of 15 images, I’d probably not bother with it even if I could hop on a bus outside my front door direct to the show.
According to ICP Curator Carol Squiers, What Is a Photograph? “will explore the intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s“, but I’m afraid it leaves me distinctly unimpressed. A few of the captions seem more interesting than the images, always a bad sign and to me in their attempts to probe photography itself, “the role of light, color, composition, to materiality and the subject” rather than reinventing photography they appear to have deserted it.
Which perhaps would not be important in itself if these works could stand on their own in the world of art, rather than occupying some of the very limited cultural space allowed to photography, but I doubt most can, even if most are selling well in the current art marketplace.
It is in part perhaps a matter of selection – there are many both past and present whose creative experimentation has been of rather more interest, from the earliest days of photography with Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard through people such as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy and on to guys like Henry Holmes Smith and Ralph Eugene Meatyard and others to the present day.
The issues which this show claims as the prerogative of these conceptual artists are those that every worthwhile photographer addresses each time they make an image, but the question that obsesses them is not ‘What is a photograph?’ but ‘What makes (or how do I make) a worthwhile photograph?’. To me it seems a distinctly more crucial issue.
