Two key figures in 20th century photography, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, point out the starting point. “The chronological limit for the selection of authors and works from the IVAM collection has been 1950 and these two photographers have served as starting points due to the profound transformation that both introduced in the concept of photography as a document and due to the validity of their approaches” says Enric Mira, curator of the exhibition.
“It must be specified – says Mira – that the exhibition has not been structured following a temporal sequence, but rather looking for thematic folds and aesthetic connections, a rereading of the works from the contemporary point of view rather than their specific historical framework.” A “photograph in the middle” of the discourse of contemporary art. “The works that make up the exhibition are within the creative practices that place photography at the heart of the sensitivity of our time.”
“To highlight the multifaceted way of being of the photographic medium, its technical and semantic versatility, whose incorporation into artistic practices has given rise to projects related to the body, memory or social and political issues as well as aspects of private sphere” indicates Mira. “There is no ordered succession of styles or artistic languages, but rather an intertwined plot of them: from the documentary, the recourse to the archive, photomontage and digital editing, appropriation and collage, performance, photo-sculpture , the installation or the staging”.
From this intertwined view, the exhibition is projected in different sequences: the reflection on the body and identity with works, among others, by Wolfang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, Douglas Gordon or the cultural construction of the landscape, Hamish Fulton, Andrea Gursky or Mira Bernabé . Views on the issue of gender and feminism, Laurie Simmons, Carmen Navarrete, Eulàlia Valldosera or the urban landscape and architecture with photographs by Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari or Gabriele Basilico. War conflicts and migrations or the effects of the mass media.
“We are talking about themes of social significance that have crossed artistic and photographic production from 1950 to the present under the poetics of post-conceptual, post-pop, action art, new objectivity, postmodernism, feminist art or the new documentaryism” indicates Enric Mira. “Our lives are increasingly photographic and photographs are in the middle of our memories, our knowledge, our personal relationships and even our social and subjective identity, as something inherent.”
Photography in the middle. Photography in the IVAM collection since 1950. IVAM. Valencia. www.ivam.es. Until the 2nd of June
