IMAGES TRANSGENRES
Discussions about photography today
Curated by : Pascal Beausse
21, 22 February 2003

Where is photography now?
Photography established itself in the 1990s as the dominant vector of artistic activity, fully embodying Walter Benjamin's paradigm of "art as photography."
Retro-gazers announced the medium's obsolescence while more optimistic observers saw the emergence of digital technologies as simply a mutation, albeit a major mutation, of the photographic image. As this extension has proceeded, photographers had to deal with the confusions and opportunities offered by this so-called "poor" image. In an age when the monstrous image makes narrative impossible, we are seeing a resurgence of the old, antagonistic pairing of iconodulist and iconoclast.
Where does that leave photography, whose fashion status seems to be declining now that the trendsetters are looking elsewhere as they reiterate the tired but, for the art market, necessary principle of "novelty.

"The traditional categories of representation, around which the system of photographic genres was logically constructed, have grown blurred at the edges. In view of the practices that now appear most relevant, it can be said that the classic dichotomies no longer apply. The documentary dimension that is inherent to photography is returning to the fore at a time when it is hard for art not to take on board the historical, political and social context in which it is produced. The successive reinventions of the documentary style have sometimes led to a mannerist fusion of this realist representation of the world with the mise-en-scène of its actors, as photojournalism couples with history painting. The advent of the digital studio as the site of the image's finalisation, if not its total creation, has revived all sorts of questions about photography's ontological relation to the real.

While genres have been legitimately transcended and hybridised, this process is still not one of dedifferentiation, the result of which would be that images lost any clear status and meaning. These discussions will articulate different artistic and critical positions, leading to an understanding of the way in which current photographic practices are now transcending genre. The goal is to replenish the different regimes of representation in a society that conceives of the image as a driver of emotions.

Pascal Beausse