Photography - a million years from 1972...

Jason Evans

It never ceases to amaze me that there are still photographers out there who still seem to think it's 1972. Photographers who are blinkered to fresh ways of seeing and seem to think that among other things clever juxtapositions and silly irony is still the way to go.

In a recent piece on aperture's online magazine - Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles - curator Charlotte Cotton makes a compelling case for photographers and curators to reconsider the photographic medium in this frantic digital age.

Every photographer who is interested in moving their practice forward should read and heed this piece. You can do so HERE.

Without giving anything away, here is the last paragraph from the article. Read this then read the rest.

It is clear that we are a million conceptual miles from where we were even nine years ago—when there was a pernicious idea that photography had to adopt the values, traditions, and rhetoric of other art forms and simultaneously deny its own broad lexicon of dynamic and quotidian meaning in order to have credibility. I look at the work of photographers such as Artie Vierkant and Kate Steciw, as well as that of Asha Schechter and Lucas Blalock, for instance, and get a mighty rush of excitement about photography’s bright new future. I find myself struggling to find the words to discuss their work—though I am neither short of opinions nor inexperienced at looking at new photography. My stumbling block is this: for the first time in my professional life, I am seeing independent photography that doesn’t operate in a conventional art-photography way … and I don’t know how to position myself. It is beyond the discourse that I know, and I experience this as a really positive expectation for the field of photography as art. This is why I think that those of us who have a genuine vested interest in the future of photography as contemporary art should open our doors and just let this new life come in.

Lucas Blalock - Untitled (Crystalline Screw), 2009

Carter Mull