| This dissertation provides a new narrative of art photography whose alternative perspective on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art history fully integrates photography into mainstream art practice, theory, and criticism. I explore the shifting rhetoric, practice, and reception of the photographic medium by investigating photography’s relation to mainstream modern and postmodern art criticism, to Conceptual Art, and to recent technological developments that have significantly influenced both the photograph’s physical form and the theoretical contentions of contemporary art photography. My close analysis of photographic works by Alfred Stieglitz, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, and Jeff Wall highlight the longstanding dissonance between theory and practice. While emphasizing that postmodernist photographic theory popularized the notion of a radical break in art photography, my aim in this dissertation is to provide an alternative which reveals the continuities of art photography.;Chapters 1 and 2 challenge Greenberg and Krauss’ theoretical characterizations of photography as literary and indexical, arguing that the photographs of Stieglitz, Woodman, and Sherman demonstrate photography’s multifaceted characteristics. My analysis of the artists’ works allows for a reassessment of postmodern art criticism. Chapters 3 and 4 explore photography’s reciprocal relationships with Conceptual Art, European–American institutional interchange, the reemergence of the painting movement, and advances in digital and print technology that made art photography a central form of contemporary art. While examining how the Conceptualists’ idea-centered photographic practice paradoxically led to the reaestheticization of the deaesthetized photograph, I construct a coherent account of art photography by connecting the photographic practice of Stieglitz, Ed Ruscha, and Gursky.;My narrative of art photography, integrating mainstream art theory and photography, constructs a theoretical genealogy which runs through Stieglitz-Greenberg-Krauss. In the final chapter, I rethink the postmodernists’ break from modernism and dismissal of the aesthetic through an understanding of complex relationships among the theories of Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, Jean-François Chevrier, and Diarmuid Costello. I explicate theoretical contentions surrounding photography through a synthetic analysis of the theorists’ concepts of photography/picture/tableau in relation to the modern and postmodern theory of medium. This analysis argues for a photographic theory that is simultaneously aesthetic and conceptual. With Jeff Wall’s work as an example of multilayered contemporary sensibility, I conclude with an account of art photography which bridges modern and postmodern photographic practice and considers the tensions and deviations of criticism, ideology, and artwork. |
