20th century photographers
20th century photography
A01=Kate Palmer Albers
art
art history
art photography
artistic photography
artists
Author_Kate Palmer Albers
Category=AJ
christian boltanski
digital arts
dinh q l
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gerhard richter
history of photographic arts
history of photography
joel sternfeld
ken gonzales day
photo art
photo shoots
photograph
photographers
photographic arts
photographic critcism
photographic imagery
photographic medium
photography
visual artists
visual arts
Product details
- ISBN 9780520285279
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2015
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The compulsion to dwell on history on how it is recorded, stored, saved, forgotten, narrated, lost, remembered, and made public has been at the heart of artists' engagement with the photographic medium since the late 1960s. Uncertain Histories considers some of that work, ranging from installations that incorporate vast numbers of personal and vernacular photographs by Christian Boltanski, Dinh Q. Le, and Gerhard Richter to confrontations with absence in the work of Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day. Projects such as these revolve around a photographic paradox that hinges equally on knowing and not knowing, on definitive proof coupled with uncertainty, on abundance of imagery being met squarely with its own inadequacy. Photography is seen as a fundamentally ambiguous medium that can be evocative of the historical past while at the same time limited in the stories it can convey. Rather than proclaiming definitively what photography is, the work discussed here posits photographs as objects always held in suspension, perpetually oscillating in their ability to tell history.
Yet this ultimately leads to a new kind of knowledge production: uncertainty is not a dead end but a generative space for the viewer's engagement with the construction of history.
Kate Palmer Albers is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona.
