Artless Photographs
multimedia exhibit
“That a photograph can come to stand as evidence, for example, rests not on a natural or existential fact, but on a social, semiotic process.”
From the moment of its inception, photography has been hailed as a powerful documentary medium. Differing from more interpretive or subjective forms of visual representation, photography’s promise lies in its ability to replicate the natural world directly. Beyond this indexical relationship, however, photography has been defined by what lies outside its frame. To understand how photographs, particularly artless ones, become evidence, we must investigate the institutions that employ them, the networks they travel, and the social, historical, and cultural practices that surround them.
Artless Photographs examines documentary images taken in a range of institutional contexts that record exacting details about individual bodies and identities, while also generating diagnostic and predictive typologies. Through events as distinct as model castings in New York’s fashion industry, exhumations in post-conflict Spain, identity card sittings in a Cambodian refugee camp, and ethnographic and scientific observations in Siberia, Scandinavia, and Canada, the exhibition compels viewers to think critically about the power and utter mundanity of photographs and the practices that produce them.
Arguing that these seemingly “artless photographs” are anything but straightforward representations, we consider how the routinization of photographic production both de-emphasizes the role of the photographer and elevates the expertise required to interpret them. Artless Photographs displays these collected images alongside audio, visual, and textual documentation of the processes of their production to juxtapose what appears to be the placelessness of these photographs with their embedded institutional ecologies. In so doing, it explores how identities are mediated and underscores the ways in which alternative histories are produced as these images move through time and space.
Images courtesy of Craig Campbell (Natural Subjects), Ryan Chief (Busted Paper), Kristen Dobbin (Raseforskning/Racial Researches), JV8INC. (casting polaroids), Zan Ludlum (casting video and digital photographs), Esteban J. Parra and his lab group (iris photographs), Pete Pin (Ung Family Portraits), and Óscar Rodgríguez Alonso and the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (forensic photographs).
Curated by Lee Douglas and Stephanie Sadre-Orafai.
FotoFocus Photography Biennale
Sycamore Gallery - Cincinnati, Ohio
*** Trigger Warning: Some installations in this exhibition include images of human remains.***
