Everything Ahead of Us: Charlotte Cotton on What’s Happening in Contemporary Photography
By: High Museum Of Art
Tags: Photographer, Photography, Museums, Art History, Art

The “Moments in History” chapter is where I think there is the biggest leap in the past fifteen years. Back in the early 2000s, in the final death rattle of editorially commissioned photojournalism and some documentary projects, there was a direct shift towards books and exhibitions as the platforms for reaching audiences. I had reservations about how seamless a transition this could actually be in ways that both respected the strategies and viewership of art and also dealt well with the ramping up of the statement of authorship that a book or exhibition gives.

Dawoud Bey, Willie, 1996, Dye diffusion transfer print.

In an era that calls for our caution with news media, and media in general, and the meaning of patriarchal narrations of our lived realities, we more actively question who is the witness, who tells the visual story and when a photographic project is a true collaboration with a subject or a community.

Photographic artists lead our visual understanding of the time that we live through, and they do so from a genuine perspective of proximity, and that has really come to the fore in the past fifteen years.

How does your curatorial work inform your writing, or vice versa, and how does that affect your process of creating a photobook?

I think my curatorial energy really drives everything. On a fundamental level, curating is the action of doing things for other human beings: there is always an anticipated audience and an experience that a curator invites others to have. The big difference between curating and writing is that curating is a collective action — it’s very social — and writing is painfully solitary.

Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983, 1983, Dye destruction print.

I hold onto the idea of writing as the space where you are really free to think through an idea or feeling in a non-relational way and to understand what you truly think at that moment. This gets me through the worst of the pain of it.

With a book like The Photograph as Contemporary Art, which isn’t a curatorial project where its form and design are mine, I’m still image led. The major proportion of the time over the past year has been about committing to the artists and single works by them that are being added to the fourth edition, making sure I can do justice to each and every one in the haiku-like format of their representation, and curating where in the flow of the book they land. I literally can’t write until the image sequence is there.

In the age of the Internet, how do contemporary photographers have to think differently about creating and circulating their images? With this new mode of producing and disseminating work, what do you see as the benefits or hurdles for artists?

I think all contemporary artists respond in some way to the shifts in imaging technologies and platforms, some directly and with full-on experimentation, and others by holding the established ground of their practice.

Everyone operating in the creative space of art deals with how their work reads, and what viewership is, so there’s just no swerving of the current conditions for having an artistic practice.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields 182, 2009, Gelatin silver print.

I think the diversity of contemporary photographic practices is testimony to many, many artists thinking through their contexts in their own way, and there’s a very material sense of this being an “everything-at-play” moment right now — whether that be the spectrum of nineteenth-century processes being reanimated, the rephrasing of modernist photography, or the inclusion of 3-D printing and software coding into the processes of a broadening idea of photography.

An artist’s social media presence, especially for an emerging artist, can have a real impact on initial notoriety and, of course, it just is a way for us to get insight into the processes and recent developments in personal practice.

I sound hesitant, don’t I! It’s not that I think social media is a hurdle or a problem, just that it takes up time and is highly restrictive and intransigent in ways that making art is not. Of course, the big shift in circulation of photographic artists’ work in its primary form over the past fifteen years is the photobook. What a wonderfully creative form the artist’s book is. I suspect that has something to do with the reality that there is no guaranteed way to make publishing or authoring photobooks a profitable business venture, which saves it from full commodification or standardization.

Where do you go to look at photographs and find new work?

I think the idea of “new” work is a pretty relative term in the age of social media; maybe the question is, where do I find work that is new to me!

Even though it is almost eight years since I have worked full-time as a museum curator, I still hold to the open-door approach for any photographer who would like me to respond to a project.