I have to disagree with Walther Robinson, editor-in-chief at Artnet when he says: " We don’t have art movements any more, we have market movements. In the place of successive modernist and post-modernist aesthetic revolutions -- now decades in the past -- we have fads and collector enthusiasms, things like Japanese anime, Chinese photography and the new Leipzig painters."
I believe that we are in the midst of a major movement in photography. One that began more or less with Cindy Sherman in the seventies and continues today in the work of hundreds of artists using photography. The movement started a revolution in what is considered fine art photography: away from the formalist aesthetic of Harry Callahan, Brett Weston Ansel Adams etc and to an idea driven use of the medium whose top practitioners today are Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia, Andreas Gursky Cindy Sherman, Vik Muniz and many many more. It can be argued that all these artists are making photographs that are in some way about the sociological nature of photography itself. That sounds like a movement to me. It is this very shift in the use of photography that has resulted in a wide-spread acceptance of the medium along side painting, drawing and sculpture.
Further, to say that what has happened in photography is not a movement because of the multitude of approaches is not a valid argument. What is important is the break from tradition, in the same way that the impressionists broke from realism and the abstractionists broke from representation.
What makes the movement in photography unique is its non linear progression. In contrast, the movements in painting have for the most part followed one another: impressionism, post impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism, minimalism etc. with a few offshoots here and there (e.g. surrealism). The photographic movement is more like spokes on a bike wheel with the center being the break from the formal modernist ideals and the spokes being the various directions artists have pursued this break. But it is all part of the same thing; just explored in a different way. There are two excellent books that have explored this very nature of this non-linear idea: David Campany's Art & Photography and Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art.
It is difficult to tell where we are within the postmodernist photographic movement, but I sense that we are approaching the end in that newer artists seem to be combining the modern and postmodern standard. Its no longer okay to just use photography as a means to illustrate your ideas. The end result must now adhere to the pristine standards of the modernist ideal as well.
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