Review: Cotton, Charlotte. (2004) The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Ch 1-2

I picked up this book because it is on the recommended reading list and because an electronic copy of the 2004 edition was available at no cost.  It is authored by Charlotte Cotton, an independent curator who has held a number of high status assignments, such as Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Head of Programming at The Photographer's Gallery, London, and former curator of photography at London's Victoria & Albert Museum.  

The book consists of seven chapters, a suggested reading list, and 222 photos (192 in color).  Cotton has structured it as a survey, "the kind of overview you might experience if you visited exhibitions in a range of venues," and so as not to favor style or substance, but to demonstrate the motivations and working habits of the photographers surveyed.  

Chapter One, If This is Art, looks at how photographers stage events or manage happenings as the basis of their work.  Largely, these are performance artists engaged in conceptual art, photographers interested in making a point.  And so we have all type of staged absurdities such as a man wearing loaves of bread, people being photographed after being woken up, or through a window at a prearranged time.  Text is scrawled on bodies or pasted, meme-like, next to a photo as a caption.  Bystanders write messages about themselves on paper with which they are photographed.  Plastic balls are scattered in a landscape.  A person stands in water for days and is photographed at regular intervals.  I'm sure these all seemed like really cool ideas when they were conceived, but frankly I found the chapter title appropriate.  

Chapter Two, Once Upon a Time, examines storytelling within a single frame, the art of tableaux.  Much of this is staged as well, but is more appealing than the work in the previous chapter, perhaps because it is based on narrative conventions and is thus easier to read.  The question raised here is to what degree the photographer has become a director managing more than just the camera. Much of it left me cold, apart from those photographers working with architectural space, such as the collection of theme rooms at a New York brothel, the Cuban classrooms, or the panoramas of factories, all of which present a more realist tone.  

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