Conceptual photography is an investigation of photographic production. As a construction, it articulates a binary relationship of methodology to content. Unlike experimental or fine art photography, it relies on mechanical process to express the intention of the artist. The work in this exhibition is generally characterized by a non-visceral content which confines its meaning to measuring, locating, limiting or defining directions uncommon to pictorial photography. In fact, images which hitherto have been the collective source of photographic culture are here incorporated into structures or formats that are alien to a tradition of illusions. The camera is used to isolate and analyze lateral movement and seriality (not as an analogy for motion). The coding devices encourage the viewer to re-read the actual process to create a reflexive awareness. Time and Language in conceptual photography are equal to light and space.
There are now logic and ideas in photography and individual photographs. Not just things, or people, or decisive moments. There are other concomitants like scale, materiality, anti-decisive moments, metaphor and motion which are independent of the classical elements of light, tone, expressiveness and likeness . . . -- Robert Leverant
The work in this exhibition was selected because of a preoccupation with the objectification of photography. The privileging of the image is considered moribund. It is this inquiry into the nature of the object that unites the independent works of this exhibition into an aggregate of philosophical speculations. The issue confronted by the artists here are so divergent from the normal functions of photography that they can be considered ideologically different in both development and origin. The issues now involve ideas as a primary source for the practice of photography. The relationship of these ideas to the visual object exists as a referential state between idea and representation--as clearly calibrated as the marks on a ruler. The meaning of the object is always recognizable for what it is.
Regardless of the intellectual powers attributed to certain historical photographers, their immersion in an orthodox tradition has diluted the radicalism -- their importance is prolonged by imitation and not consciousness.
Empty enigmas, arrested time, signs which refuse to signify, giant enlargement of the tiny detail, narratives which come full circle: We are in a flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself. A universe of fixity, or repetition, of absolute obviousness, which enchants and discourages the explorer. --Robbe-Grillet
Conceptual photography in its purest form has displaced the image and the sophistry of seeing with a new arrangement of visual ordering, namely: the idea, process, and the meaning of photography itself. A conceptual photographer always begins at the beginning in a search for authenticity and the work in this exhibition is no exception. My thanks to Carl Loeffler whose assistance and resources have made possible an exhibition of photography that goes beyond the scope of those who manage the art in this area. Additional thanks to Samuel W. Samore who shares one-third of the responsibility of this exhibit.
This essay first appeared as the introduction to the catalogue West Coast Conceptual Photographers (San Francisco: LaMamelle Art Center, 1976). It was subsequently reprinted in Thomas, Lew, Structural(ism) and Photography (San Francisco: NFS Press, 1978), p. 95. © Copyright 1976 by Lew Thomas. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Lew Thomas at lthomas16@aol.com.
