Dumb documents: Uses of photography in American conceptual art, 1959--1969

This project examines the convergence of art and photography within the American context of Conceptual art from 1959 to 1969, now condensed by the terms Conceptual photography and photoconceptualism. These hybrid terms isolate a new art historical object, which emerged in the transformation of the medium of photography within Conceptual art practices, but which we only apprehend as such belatedly. The object is theoretical because it develops critical shifts that can no longer be comprehended by the question of medium, that is, by the question of what is irreducibly specific to a pictorial practice.;Conceived in its day---in antithesis to art photography---as "art that uses photography," photography was deployed as a conceptual tool---a means of information and communication rather than a medium vested with the task of specifying the formal conventions unique to its nature. Enlisting the medium's documentary applications, Conceptual photography functioned for the most part as secondary documents of an otherwise inaccessible object or ephemeral event. Borrowing the techniques of amateur photography, its presentation renounced virtually all marks of artistic craft and skill. As I argue, the partnering of the function of documentary photography with the idiom of amateurism yielded a third term, dumb photography, which ruptured the ideology of the document as it reflected critically on the relation between art photography and amateur photography.;My ambition is twofold: to outline a genealogical account of the dumb photograph and to evaluate its significance for the imbricated histories of Conceptual art and Conceptual photography. I do not propose to write a comprehensive art history of a subject whose development within the context of generic art defies the ordering of its objects according to traditional art historical approaches. My objective is not only to reconstitute a history of photoconceptual production but also to tease out its main theoretical models, which I then attempt to develop in relation to the questions raised by the dumb document that, as I argue, both challenged the central premise of Conceptual art and transformed the categories of photography,...