Contemporary photography has found itself increasingly concerned with the meaning of reality and representation, and photography's position within an art historical context that has seen a shift away from inert image-recording towards conscious, stylised image-making.
Throughout the Twentieth century, documentary and object-based photography have remained staples of contemporary practice. Photographs of real subjects strive to create an effect of authenticity that replaces or reshapes the authentic thing; the image and the aesthetic overlay reality itself. The artist's choice in selecting what to photograph and how to record it is ultimately the choice between different versions of reality.
This idea is borne out in Kevin Capon's photography. Familiar objects, locations and found photographs are recontextualised, erasing their understood significance and creating a semantic void. Capon abstracts his subjects formally, often centring his chosen objects against a flat, monochromatic background, strongly enforcing a critical focus on the aesthetic character of the object. Speculative possibilities are rejected in favour of a more restricted focus on the formal potential of photography and the conceptual premise of the object.
Caryline Boreham's interior photographs share this referential function, with familiar settings used to index inscribed cultural information. Recognizable settings are subjected to a critical gaze which encourages viewers to reject the comfortable familiarity of the location and to focus on the cultural and social laws that govern our perception of the space. In this way, Boreham records more than the spatial and geometric properties of her subjects, also indexing an absent truth. This semiotic function is central to contemporary art practice.
Paul Hartigan's work demonstrates an interest in the formal qualities of photography. The accomplished painter and printmaker employs a system of abstraction and photo-manipulation to challenge the expected meaning of his selected objects, recasting them in a style that is strongly influenced by Pop Art and the advertising photography from which it developed. The objects in Hartigan's work are often trivial things--cheap, plastic throwaways--made to act as bearers of meaning by artistic selection. As such, cultural significance and ideological implications are brought to the fore, and the works come to offer a new view of the familiar world.
Running against this tradition is the work of Jane Zusters, whose recent photographs of the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes deal directly with literal images and the recording of human experience. Zusters' work is closely aligned with the photojournalistic tradition, however by placing the work in the context of fine art, the viewer is encouraged to universalise the scenes of destruction and desolation to find a common human element in the work. The photographs themselves are not mere indexes, but rather they embody an autonomous mediation between the physical world and the transcendental world of human experience. These documentary photographs, then, become an involuntary record of the human condition in the face of adversity.
The diversity of these art practices is characteristic of contemporary photography, a genre that has become as fluid and persistent as the advance of the technology that enables it. The uniqueness of vision and talent of these photographers is evidence of the validity of photography in contemporary art and the untapped potential of photography as a means of artistic expression.
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