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June 3, 2009
Daniel Palmer is part of the ARC research project team for Genealogies of Digital Light along with Sean Cubbitt and Les Walking He is the editor of Photogenic: Essays, Photography, CCP 2000–2004, which seemed to be based on an earlier lecture series. Disappointingly, there is nothing online from the lecture series or the book. Though Photofile's two decade history makes it the longest lasting magazine on serious photography in Australia, it still has no online presence.
So I will turn to the work of Blair French, the author of Out of Time: Essays Between Art and Photography, and executive director of Artspace in Sydney. In Broadsheet vol 35 no 4, published by the Contemporary Art Society in Adelaide, he says:
Although founded within and by an early-1970s milieu focused upon modernist understandings of both art and documentary photography, the Australian Centre for Photography had become central to the development of various constructed, appropriationist, socially activist and theoretically rhetorical practices highly influential within the field of contemporary art (more generally in Australia from the early 1980s onwards).
He adds that it is interesting that almost a decade later, the terms upon which such divisions were assumed have themselves been eroded by a typically early twenty-first century ‘third way’.
This ‘third way’ generated out of a coalition between the overwhelming presence of photography across all spheres of life and cultural activity—the ultimate success of photography as the dominant structure within mass visual culture—and the broader forces of globalisation. I would argue that in the face of the flattening out of all photographic practice to an amorphous mass of imagery assessed simply in terms of visual attraction and content, the issue of whether any single image is based in ‘traditional’—modernist—photographic practices or in post-conceptual contemporary art practices, when treated in isolation is in and of itself irrelevant.
He adds that what is needed is the proper detailed tracing of historical genealogies for examples of contemporary practice needs to underpin a further process of critical discrimination:
It is crucial that this process entails consideration of the image’s relationship to the broader representational and cultural economies out of which it emerges and within which it circulates. Unfortunately, however, this quite basic form of critical analysis is resisted by a photographic culture advancing representational homogeneity under the guise of accessibility, responding to an insistent demand for distraction, entertainment and instant representational gratification and in thrall to the spectacle culture of the mass market.
I'm not sure how one would do that ----the image’s relationship to the broader representational and cultural economies out of which it emerges and within which it circulates.
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