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Book
Review
Something Old, Something
New
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By 1995 and the apparent triumph of
anti-photographic (or photocritical) art,
camera artists with a wide variety of
attitudes and motives were deliberately
re-engaging the physical facts of
photography, that is, its materials and
processes, and turning to the history of
photography for metaphors, technical
insight, and visual inspiration. We call
the movement to return to old
photographic processes the antiquarian
avant-garde. So mixed are its motives
that it might not be credited as a
movement at all. Almost every
photographer who still enters a darkroom
inevitably strays into alternative
processes, even if only briefly. Yet
conversations with the artists and
familiarity with their work -- much of it
still unexhibited and unpublished --
reveal shared intentions, inspirations,
and imagery. Although the past informs
this work, it is the present that incites
it. ...
The antiquarian avant-garde is anything
but antique. It represents a varied
response to conditions undermining the
traditional practice of art photography
-- and the very idea of the photographic
object itself, not to mention the
photographic art object. It is a way for
a diverse group of artists, aware of the
issues clustering around photography in
the 21st century, to reimagine and
redirect the one truly modern medium of
image-making. ...
To paraphrase the philosopher
Heraclitus, it is impossible to step into
the same river twice. Artists can only
choose [old photographic] processes as
options, as arguments against a reductive
ideology of the photographic image and
the art object. What the artists of the
antiquarian avant-garde seek is the most
fruitful play between past associations
and current intuitions.
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