The Anxiety of Photography, originating at the Aspen Art Museum and now on view at Arthouse, presents selected examples of work by eighteen artists exploring photography as a process and photographs as material media. If shows such as New Documents in 1967 presumed that photography indexed a real event, and Pictures in 1977 explored photography’s status as an image, the theme here is photography as what the curators call “a medium, a tool, an object, a practice, or, more often than not, some combination thereof.” It is a pluralist idea of photography that is thus described.

What is the context for this view of the medium? The curators cite James Welling and Christopher Williams as touchstones for the current generation. Both of these artists, who studied with John Baldessari at Cal Arts in the 1970s, adapted the extreme rigor of early conceptualism to allow for the investigation of sensuous phenomena and for reflections on photography as a historical medium.1 Some of the artists here, such as Matt Keegan, Sara VanDerBeek and Elad Lassry, have turned up in other recent surveys of contemporary photography, for example Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture (2010), which addressed “evolving attitudes toward the appropriation, recuperation, and repurposing of extant photographic imagery,” and Phot(o)bjects (2009), which asked “Beyond a carrier of an uninterrupted image, what else can a photograph be?” There are also others of the same broad generation, such as Wolfgang Tillmans and Walead Beshty, whose work might have fit here but is not included.2 Whatever the details of affiliation and inheritance that attach all these artists to one another, there are also tendencies that define sub-groups within the larger history. The Anxiety of Photography is pluralist, but it also delineates four different approaches to photography that have significance beyond the present exhibition and represent areas of innovative work in the field.

First, certain photographers undertake a basic questioning of the ideas that underpin normal understandings of the medium. Mario Garcia Torres and Matt Keegan are two representatives of this approach. Garcia Torres positions himself as a quixotic hero on a picaresque quest to uncover the lost treasures of conceptual art. As such, his work is irresistible to historically-minded critics and curators. Like an Indiana Jones of conceptualism, he has staged latter-day encounters with dusty monuments left by the giants of the 1970s: Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Robert Barry and Baldessari. In these works, Garcia Torres presents the profile of an ideal viewer—curious, intelligent and committed—perhaps too ideal to actually exist. Alignment Slide Dance (2011) is equally dependent on an exquisitely precise set of references; in this case, to the obsolescent technology of the carousel slide projector, embedded in late twentieth-century visual culture in countless ways, from Nan Goldin to Don Draper to the art history lecture. The work consists of a small room of projectors irregularly cycling through a sequence of artist-designed alignment slides (which look like test patterns) and projecting their grids on opposite walls. The installation’s mad-scientist clanking and clattering comes as a shock. It’s easy to have forgotten how noisy slide projectors used to be now that they are as common as gas lamps. Once again, Garcia Torres poses an encounter with a seemingly obscure point of history presented in a physically minimal form that nonetheless leaves big questions: does it matter that this entire apparatus is now replaced by pixels and LCD screens? Does it matter that the 35mm slide is now as historical as the daguerreotype? Insofar as photography finds itself haunted by technological obsolescence, Garcia Torres’s work is iconic of the medium.

In contrast, Keegan’s work also raises unsettling questions but addresses issues of perception rather than of history. Two works from the New Windows series (2008) begin with snapshots taken in the artist’s apartment where the superintendent was repairing an old window. By reworking elements of the same subject into self-referential photocollages, Keegan brilliantly transforms these sources into sophisticated optical puzzles. At a glance, the subject is recognizable and ordinary, but becomes more disorienting and subtle upon closer study. Is a photograph an image and is an image like a window? New Windows seem to be single and unmodified images, but maybe it is more accurate to say that they are carefully controlled compositions that, at first glance, resemble single images. Whereas Dada photomontage used radical shock tactics to underscore its artificiality, the New Windows use trompe l’oeil restraint to achieve a sense of disorientation.

Second, other photographers declare traditional distinctions between conceptual and commercial, between art and advertising, to be absolutely inconsequential, and benefit from a massively expanded range of source material available for exploration. Roe Ethridge and Elad Lassry share this approach. In Ethridge’s Thanksgiving 1984 (2009), the model, dinner and table setting are clearly artificial—with heavy makeup and too-perfect foods—as in an advertising or fashion spread, but we don’t have the contextual cues that would allow us to place the picture in one of those categories. Decontextualized, the image’s commercial qualities are uncanny. Lassry’s work also employs decontextualization. In Pink Bar (2009), a vertical aluminum-foil stripe bisects a published photograph of dancers in formation. With the dancers’ faces covered with pink foil dots, Lassry’s alterations convert the photograph into a kind of abstract diagram. These two artists may be the closest in spirit to the exhibition’s significant Pictures Generation predecessors. Ethridge, like Christopher Williams, has a sense of the commercial uncanny and Lassry’s practice of applying colored shapes over existing images exactly parallels Baldessari’s. In both cases, a few careful choices alter a commercial image to the point of strangeness without reducing its basic commercial quality.

Third, contemporary photographers might use the genre of still life to explore the circumstances and surface properties of ordinary things. This is the most familiar strategy in the exhibition, but in the work of Annette Kelm and Leslie Hewitt it is nonetheless of serious interest. Kelm’s Venice, Zurich, Brussels, drenched in luxurious color, is a study of cherries resting on two layers of cloth. The title refers to the subjects’ points of origin even if its explanation ultimately remains enigmatic. In contrast, Hewitt’s Untitled (Constant Emotion), one of three examples on view from her Midday Studies, refers specifically to places (Harlem, New York and Haarlem, The Netherlands) where mementoes of personal, historic and literary significance combine to set off sparks of meaning by their juxtaposition. 

A fourth option is to explore the material properties of the medium completely independently of representing a visual impression of a scene; making, in other words, nonrepresentational photography. This opens up continuities between photography and other forms of image-making such as painting, drawing or printmaking. Both Dirk Stewen and Liz Deschenes make works that fall in this category. In Untitled (2008), Stewen applies dark ink to a ground of photo paper. The interaction between the ink and the unexposed emulsion creates a surface rich in incident, which becomes the background for an elegant, spidery confetti-and-thread collage. In Black Panel 2 (2010), Deschenes also uses unexposed photo paper, creating a photogram by placing the paper outdoors to darken it, and then fixing the image with silver toner. As in Stewen’s work, the surface is nearly black but full of traces of the chemical process. Both of these techniques bypass the camera entirely, exploring photography as a material and chemical process.

For the photography that comprises this exhibition, in my opinion, “anxiety” is not the most salient or unifying quality, but the curators make a strong case for the importance of plurality and fluidity. If the ideal of making a single exposure in a decisive moment belongs to the modernist past, and the critique of this ideal belongs to a postmodernism that is equally part of the past, then the many new approaches in this exhibition point to a present that is still waiting to be defined.

• 1. Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, currently on view at L.A. MoCA, aims to provide a synoptic view of this period.
• 2. Tillmans taught at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, where Dirk Stewen and Annette Kelm both studied.