Academic Session 2: Warwick 2011
AAH Annual Conference 2011
31 March – 2 April, University of Warwick
Art Photography & its Markets
Session Convenors:
Juliet Hacking, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. jhacking@btinternet.com
Joanne Lukitsh, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Joanne.Lukitsch@massart.edu
Since the invention of the medium, writing on photography has sought to distinguish an aesthetic practice from instrumental applications in the fields of, among many others, science, travel and exploration, portraiture, fashion, and documentation. The recent designations ‘artists using photography’ and ‘Art Photography’ speak to the difficulty of claiming the medium solely for art even in the present day. Current scholarship conceptualises this as ‘art versus industry’ but does so almost exclusively in relation to the emergence of modernity and modernism in the
nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century photography is the most ubiquitous of instrumental visual media and sustains a thriving profile as an art form. Nonetheless the aesthetic claims of much contemporary work intended for exhibition differ little from those deployed in the nineteenth century. From the publication of The Pencil of Nature in the early 1840s to the contemporary identification of commissioned works by Penn, Avedon, Liebowitz and others as canonical works of art, the spectre of commerce haunts photography-as-art.
The session addresses therefore one of the last taboos in photographic studies: what role does commerce, actual and notional, play in determining a non-instrumental practice that is claimed for art? The papers will bring together a variety of subject areas, from different historical moments, in order to forge an expanded scholarly discourse: including, but not limited to, aesthetic strategies, editioning, curating, collecting, criticism, historiography and the market.
Speakers & Papers
Anne McCauley (Princeton University)
The Labor of Love: Amateurism’s Changing Status in the History of Photography
Barnaby Haran (University College, London)
The Invention and Suspension of Genius: Walker Evans at MoMA and Fortune
Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw (The Society for Photographic Education, Los Angeles) Marketing the Family in the Photography of Nell Dorr
Jennifer Quick (Harvard University)
Ed Ruscha and the Pop Economy
Jeff Rosen (Loyola University Chicago)
The Triumph of Transparency and Demise of the Printed Photograph
Juliet Hacking (Sotheby’s Institute of Art)
ContemporaryPhotography from China: Market Scholarship?