Letter From The Editor

Dear Readers,

After college I taught high school art in a tiny Oklahoma town. Yearbook was part of the curriculum, so I had a couple of photographers in the class. The two young female shutterbugs looked at me as if I was supposed to guide them in some way. I knew nothing about photography, so I hired an outside freelance photographer to come to our classes and give some pointers to my eager young journalists with their 35mms.

The visiting photographer turned out to be a very serious artist and he became a mentor to me. He gave my young photographers valuable advice about light, depth of field and shutter speed, especially for night photography at the football games—and don't forget to speed up the exposure when the cheerleaders are waving their pom poms! We had telescopic long-shot lenses, wide-angle lenses, flashes, a movie camera, 16mm film projector, and a 2x2 Yashica that I still have today.

I decided I wanted to learn more about photography too, so I stuck around in the high school darkroom as much as I could. I fell in love with the new medium, and the teacher introduced me to a group of art photographers in Tulsa, where I lived at the time. They turned me on to Larry Clark's work, and to this very day I regret not having lifted the local library's copy of Tulsa, his notoriously gritty book about the town's drug culture that's been out of print for nearly 25 years. There was no question in my mind that photography was fine art, and I couldn't get enough of it. I carried my Nikon with me everywhere.

In a way, photography has become THE tool of the artist today. The mere fact that everyone has a camera on their cell phones makes everyone an instant photographer. Not everyone walks around with a paint brush in their hand, but everyone has a camera handy.

Regular Artillery contributor Anne Martens is also a photographer—or an artist who uses the lens. She usually takes her camera with her on writing assignments, then lays these awesome photographs on me. More often than not, they end up on the cover. She has a magic touch with the camera. You can see it in every frame.

So it made sense to invite Anne to sit in as our Guest Editor for this photography-themed issue. Her knowledge of the medium and the artists that work in it makes this issue an extraordinary read with its blurred boundaries of what photography is today, how it will never go away, and how its alchemy still surprises, even though one doesn't have to wait for the print to emerge from the darkroom anymore.

—Tulsa Kinney

LETTER FROM GUEST EDITOR
ANNE MARTENS

SINCE THE MID-1980S, THE MUSEUM OF Modern Art's annual "New Photography" exhibition has proven itself a measure of emerging trends in contemporary art photography. That's where, last fall, I discovered the work of Dutch artist Viviane Sassen, whose images struck me as beyond categorizing for their intersection of established genres such as fashion and documentary, and their blending of a commercial sensibility with a personal and art-world informed aesthetic. Sassen grew up in Africa, where she makes her photographs, and you can sense the emotional connection that grounds them in authenticity even as her subjects project ambiguity.

Also last fall, at Platform LA, I came across Matthew Brandt's "Lakes and Reservoirs" series, which similarly carry hints of darkness and longing. Overtly connected to the medium of photography, the works in this series unabashedly mourn the analog paradigm. Brandt soaks c-prints, vestiges of an outmoded technology, in a sample from the body of water each image represents until the dye layers that make up the paper separate. This deterioration creates an unusual yet familiar visual appearance: peeled-off areas and stains and washes that alter the original colors. These effects aren't simply eye-catching but a means to convey how time and light—two key ingredients in photography—destroy as well as create.

These two diverse examples—and others in this issue—suggest the degree to which photography is now in a state of transformation due to shifting perspectives about its relationship to technology, artistic practices and arts institutions. In describing what MoMA's "New Photography" exhibitions of late have aimed to capture, albeit in language far more broadly relevant in scope, curator Roxana Marcoci has said: "In recent years, with the increasing turn toward the digital, photography's potential for constructing, archiving, and engaging with meaning in the world today has become more complex and varied in its range of possible representational renderings." A seminar on the state of photography, held in 2010 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, seemed a continuation of that message, with the addition of pointed discussions that implied photography's state of confusion.

A similar type of doomsday thinking had been on my mind when I wrote a pitch for the article that ultimately became the catalyst for this issue. Given my personal connection to photography (I have studied and practiced it with varying degrees of obsession since 1980), I wanted to address my own uncertainty about its current relevance in art. The ghettoization and even dearth of photography exhibitions in galleries and art spaces couldn't be explained away as an effect of the recent economic downturn. Adding to this collective uncertainty about the state of photography in art is the increasing proliferation of photographs in daily life, through social media, ubiquitous digital devices and online publishing. While this has led to an exponential increase in creative and viewing possibilities, it poses a challenge for artists whose practice centers on photography—a dilemma that is ontologically based.

A single article would have only scratched the topic's surface. Luckily, Artillery editor Tulsa Kinney re-proposed my pitch as a themed issue. We devised a series of questions as a rough guide to the topic: Are humans necessary to the photographic process? Can "straight" photography still shock and surprise? Is everyone a photographer now? Can video and other media embrace or even "be" photography? Who is working with the medium today in ways that challenge the status quo?

You might consider this issue a sampling of what's meaningful now, with articles about trends in photographic art practice, such as artists who cull images from Google's Street View; about the Lytro camera's vague promise to be the next game-changer; about photographers, like Thomas Demand, who work in film. We also pay homage to long-established photographers whose work has had staying power: Robert Adams, whose dark images of the American West's changing landscape have never been more relevant, and Weegee's knack for using his remarkable powers of perseverance and observation to find the humorous in death and crime.

After working on this issue, I feel reassured. If what is created today is so wide-ranging as to elude definition, then what is the problem really? All of this confusion has led to too many recent laments about the medium's decline when, in fact, the opposite is happening. Photography in the context of art is flourishing. Maybe that's all we need for now.