Vito Acconci (American, born 1940), Photomatic Enunciation Piece ("Anything Goes"), 1969, Gelatin silver print, 25.1 x 3.8 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1994 (1994.186.2), © Vito Acconci.

The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
at 82nd Street
New York
212-535-7710
Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall
for Modern Photography
Photography on Photography,
Reflections on the Medium since 1960
April 8-October 19, 2008

Photography on Photography presents four decades of photographs by artists in the permanent collection who have made the medium their subject, taken on its claims of objectivity, and its ubiquity in modern life. Featured in the exhibition are works by Vito Acconci, William Anastasi, Lutz Bacher, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Robert Heinecken, Sherrie Levine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, Allen Ruppersberg, Karin Sander, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Andy Warhol, as well as recently acquired photographs by Moyra Davey, Kota Ezawa, Janice Guy, Josephine Pryde, James Welling, Christopher Williams, and Mark Wyse.

By 1960, photography had permeated every corner of American culture, and artists began to use the camera to break down boundaries between art and life and hierarchies between mediums. Andy Warhol and Vito Acconci each chose the popular automated photo-booth to reveal how ideas of the self are produced in the act of being photographed. Using the newly invented instant print camera, in 1967 William Anastasi covered a mirror with pictures of the mirror being photographed. In this allegory of the changing status of the photographic image, the perceptual gap between object and photograph is all but erased.

In the late 1970s, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine began appropriating photographs of others and claiming them as their own. Levine’s reproductions of Walker Evans’s Depression-era photographs disrupt notions of originality while conveying a sense of lost illusions and an inability to recapture the past. Prince’s strategies of manipulating found images — cropping, enlarging, grouping according to gesture or pose, and re-photographing black-and-white advertisements using color film — undercut a seeming naturalness and inevitability of a generic mass cultural image, revealing it to be a fiction of society’s desires.

In the face of the rise of digital photography, some artists have chosen to wed a Conceptual approach with “slow” analog photography techniques. In a 2001 photograph, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s careful framing, long exposure, and large-view camera magically animate a wax effigy of Fidel Castro, reviving that which is passing from history — including, perhaps, the artist’s own “old-fashioned” photography techniques. James Welling’s new series of large flower pictures is also an exuberant display of technical wizardry in the darkroom. The artist’s use of gels and filters to transform black-and-white negatives into prints with glowing, hallucinatory colors can be seen as a rebuff to the surfeit of digitally manipulated photography.

The exhibition ends with younger artists' work for whom conceptualism and the craft of photography are not mutually exclusive. In Josephine Pryde’s meditation on time and aging, Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Advanced Time Complex Capsules (14 Day Course), photography is complicit in a desire to turn back the clock on death and decay. Her work forgoes digital manipulation; instead, extending the tradition of photography is as important to her as questioning it. Mark Wyse makes technically assured, enigmatic images showing traces of past life or activity. The 2006 photograph included in this exhibition, Marks of Indifference #1 (Shelf), focuses on the jagged black lines left after shelves have been ripped from the white walls. The image is an apt metaphor for photography itself: a mute presence standing in for an absence.

Photography on Photography is organized by Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs.

Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987), Photobooth Self-Portrait, ca. 1963, Gelatin silver print, 19.6 x 3.6 cm each, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Rogers Fund, Joyce and Robert Menschel, Adriana and Robert Mnuchin, Harry Kahn, and Anonymous Gifts, in memory of Eugene Schwartz, 1996, (1996.63a,b), © 2008 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.