Why Art Photography? Quotes

“Most common of all, however, is an ambiguity of meaning in which different interpretations – even mutually contradictory ones – may be held at the same time. Such interpretive conflict, which might have been regarded as artistic failure in an earlier moment of modernist autonomy or postmodern representational critique, is now regarded as a sign of desirable openness, reflecting the layered reality of experience in our time. It is not a coincidence that the younger photographers cited in this chapter are all women; feminist theory has been very influential in creating a more relativist worldview. The female photographers in this chapter are all starting from the position that identity is something to be negotiated rather than assumed, as reflected in their hybridized versions of portraiture.”
― Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography?

“The term “banal” is used most often in relation to the bland repetition of commodity culture. Artists and photographers turn to banal subject matter in part because it is familiar, producing what Eugenie Shinkle has described as “a kind of post-industrial realism, a turn away from the spectacular.”28 In an age dominated by the excesses of entertainment culture, banality can also represent a refusal of interestingness, a desire to underwhelm the viewer in the hopes of eliciting a more authentic or more critical response.”
― Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography?

“What does Duchamp's attack on traditional art forms mean for photography? First, it allows for the possibility that any photographic image, no matter how insignificant or visually uninspiring, can be assigned art value within an art context through the intention of the artist.”
― Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography?

“Henri Cartier-Bresson's approach exemplifies this interest in the autonomy of modernist photographs. Cartier-Bresson took many of his photographs as a professional photojournalist, reporting on conditions and events around the world in multi-image picture-stories. Yet he regularly republished single images from these stories in anthologies with little or no captioning, elevating them in the process from a context of journalism to art.”
― Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography?

“Modernist art photographs were meant to be autonomous, that is, to stand alone, without need for extra information. This is not to say that modernist images do not benefit from interpretation – photographic criticism came into its own in the modernist period – but the prevailing paradigm under modernism was that the best art photographs were entirely self-sufficient.”
― Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography?

“Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.”
― Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography?