With the revaluation of a Postmodern Lee Friedlander in the wake of exhibitions like America by Car and his recent retrospectives at MoCA and MoMA, we have come to see how documentary photography relies on the rhetoric of the apparatus, the felt quality of the photographer’s presence and the play of impartiality that allows the body socius to emerge as a ‘pictured’ object. By contrast, a new... [read more]

With the revaluation of a Postmodern Lee Friedlander in the wake of exhibitions like America by Car and his recent retrospectives at MoCA and MoMA, we have come to see how documentary photography relies on the rhetoric of the apparatus, the felt quality of the photographer’s presence and the play of impartiality that allows the body socius to emerge as a ‘pictured’ object. By contrast, a new generation of photographers has witnessed the radical evacuation of social space vis-à-vis the increasing reification of public life. This has ultimately proved to be a crisis for documentary work of every kind — journalistic, artistic and even personal. To capture a picture of the social now means picturing the dispositif’s that coordinate planned transactions, public interactions and various sub-cultural factions. In such a scenario it is the exclusion of bodies that is most clearly associated with the ‘social landscape’. As a timely response these issues, this survey engages with a selection of photographs that actively avoid easy identification with a subject, catharsis or the tropes of objectivity. Instead, the works in The De-socialized Landscape present us with reflections on transience, ephemera, erasures, displacements and a subtle sense of the imperceptible line between real and staged settings. What seems to be emerging out of these new documentary forms is the disintegration of public collectivity, various signs of social atomization and the idea that the landscape itself has been ravaged by anthropocentric interests. Undoubtedly, that is their shared condition and the culture context that makes their appearance inseparable from the social field of exchange.

Sponsored by FAR (Foundation for Art Resources)

Artists in the Show: Nina T. Becker, Josh Cho, April Friges, Dong Jun, Joey Lehman Morris, Kerry Rodgers and Gabie Strong.