Open Humanities Press has broken new ground with its translations of Filozokski Vestnik International. My interest here is with the 2007 issue-- The Revival of Aesthetics, which addresses the quest for the answer to the question – aesthetics: transformed, revived and renewed, or obsolete and passéist? – lingers on and is being posed and asked over and over again. It lives on as a minor academic discipline in philosophy departments where it is understood as a philosophy of art.

I am interested in this revival of aesthetics because over the weekend I've been selecting images from the altfotonet .org archive for the third online exhibition that is contemporary topographics and I need some text that goes beyond the cliched truth versus falsity that continues to dominate commentary about photography.

Photography is an invidious position after Duchamp, whose ready-made signaled the demise of traditional art whilst the emergence of postindustrial society and the decline of modernism, has meant that art has lost its previous “overvaluation”.

Modernists claimed to rejected beauty yet they continued to produce formally beautiful pictures.The New topographic movement in the 1970s rejected beauty for truth, whilst those contemporary photographers who reject truth embrace beauty--the essence of photography as art for them is beauty. Their assumption is to normatively constrain art photography to be beautiful even though the sublime or the ugly has little to do with beauty.