It is no exaggeration to say that photographs snuck into view in contemporary art, starting in the ’60s. They were first seen as paintings, in the silkscreens of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, or as documentation, in a wide range of new and transgressive art styles such as earth art, conceptual art, and performance art. Artists who relied on photographic documentation, followed by their dealers and collectors, began to notice that photographs were interesting in and of themselves. Plus, photographs could be easily made, exhibited, and reproduced, something that couldn’t be said for earthworks or performances.
It helped, too, that photographs were part of what was fast becoming an overwhelming domain of camera images, an “image-world,” in Susan Sontag’s phrase, that encompassed movies, television, magazine picture essays, advertisements, and everyday snapshots and threatened to replace firsthand reality. In the ’70s, theorists, critics, and artists all started to look at photography with a fresh interest, recognizing it as a medium not just for making pictures but also for making meaning. It wasn’t long before contemporary art galleries were exhibiting photographs and video as a regular part of their schedules.
At the time, the art of photography was best represented in the public imagination by glorious prints of glorious nature made by the likes of Ansel Adams, but it also encompassed street photography and other modes of factual documentation. The new photography was different. Another photographer named Adams—Robert—showed us landscapes filled with suburban houses. John Pfahl, also of the new generation, made beautiful color pictures of what he called “altered landscapes,” altered because he put objects into the scene to produce amusing optical conundrums, like a hayrick that was visually transformed by a well-placed skein of rope into an outsize ice cream cone.
James Casebere, David Levinthal, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Sandy Skoglund, and others started staging their pictures in studios and on tabletops, taking cues from commercial studio photography and Hollywood scenography while rebelling against the belief that good photographs were unmediated slices of reality. Most radically, there were artists who decided to take photographs of photographs. Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince impertinently claimed the results as their own, leading to much umbrage among older photographers and many lawsuit-threatening letters from copyright attorneys. The point of this appropriation wasn’t theft, however, but to point out how overburdened we are with images, to the extent that we don’t often recognize what they are selling us, or why.