Much as I might wish it were otherwise, in considering the Museum of Modern Art’s latest photography exhibit and catalogue New Japanese Photography it proves impossible to discuss the photographs themselves without simultaneously analyzing the show and book. […]
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Those core issues — the brevity of life, the spiral of time, the constancy of change, the cyclic aspects of history and human experience, and the enduring, unbreakable connection between humans and the natural world — weave constantly through Martha Madigan’s commentary on her own work and working method, and make themselves apparent in the work itself. […] Martha Madigan has worked almost exclusively with the photogram for the past three decades, patiently building up an extensive, interconnected body of work that has evolved into one of the most coherent and durable considerations of the photogram in the medium’s history. […] Gordin refers to his approach as “conceptual photography,” though by this he obviously means something much different from the haphazardly made, often amateurish or deliberately casual imagery generated as documentation of performances by conceptual artists since the 1970s. Carefully planned and meticulously crafted, Gordin’s images are previsualized as sketches on paper, which he then stages for the production of the negatives necessary to actualize the imagined image. […] A photographic image is a transformation of reality; when selected with consciousness and an intention beyond the recording of surface, it is inevitably a remaking of an event into the photographer’s own image, and thus an assumption of godhead. […] |
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