Your Daily Awesome

Tip of the Tongue is a new online photo mag, and features a great article by Charlotte Cotton from Art + Commerce in New York. In The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White she deftly and smartly delves into a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about recently.

I had doubts, of course, about photography’s moment in art’s spotlight. For instance, it was obvious that photography was undergoing a physical face-lift to meet the demands of sitting alongside painting and sculpture in vast art centers and at international fairs; the predominance of big digital C-prints, laminated behind plexi, in small editions, was establishing itself. The hyperbolic, carefully controlled, museum- and gallery-specific versions of photography, in which every prop and gesture can be attributed to the artist’s direction, have been the most pronounced arrivals in the art world. If you are, like me, schooled in the magic of photography’s willful embrace of luck, mistakes, and happenstance, you view the art world’s partial endorsement of this bastard form with some suspicion. I don’t mean to deride the awe-inspiring creativity of a handful of artists who showed us that photography was a supremely capable and elastic art medium and were honored with monolithic, monographic exhibitions. I mean to indicate that their ascendance into the center of art practice does not necessarily herald the acceptance or understanding of photography’s broad creative terrain as a whole.

I’m not suggesting that these artists [who work in black and white] are primarily undertaking a acts of re-thinking history; these are not merely descriptions of how to reinterpret the language of black-and-white photography just when the moment in photography’s journey seems to be paved with color LightJet prints. Their practice offers creative, in-process solutions to the potential quagmire in photography-as-contemporary-art’s current color manifestations, and also to our dislocation from the pertinence that photography’s history brings to bear on our current situation. Herein lies a timely, central issue for those of us who obsess about the future of photographic thinking. These projects are key propositions for what photography carries forward into the 21st century, as a bid for us to remember that photography is an act of making choices. This includes choices regarding methods and style of vision, which need not be defined by the fashionable, marketable production values of an era.

photograph by Anders Petersen