The past three decades have yielded significant changes in the creative production and intellectual interpretation of photography. Influenced, in part, by the German DADA movement in the early twentieth century, and later, by the work of Robert Rauschenberg and the Pop Art movement, artists employing photography today commonly construct photographs and use found imagery. Featured artists Christian Boltanski and Gregory Crewdson reinterpret the role of the photograph in distinctive ways, both arriving at submerged narratives that complicate meaning. Boltanski, foremost an installation artist, is known for his displays of anonymous appropriated photographs. His haunting installations, which purposefully confound the documentation of the actual subjects pictured, encourage a universal reading of human pathos. Crewdson, on the other hand, contrives his compositions for the camera, obsessively constructing an altered, cinematic hyper-reality.

For Christian Boltanski (b. 1944), the photograph is a complex form of visual currency. He is concerned with how private and public displays of photography construct meaning. In an early work, 13 images relatant les vacances d'une fille (1972), a meticulously arranged collage, Boltanski subjectively reorders appropriated images from anonymous, private sources. This presentation foregrounds the dissonant relationship between domestic photographs which picture human subjects with a particular historical past, and the viewer's response to the resonant codes of unidentified family snapshots. Boltanski's Monument (1984) is a constituent of his ongoing multimedia installations, exhibited primarily in churches, which incorporate serialized images of anonymous subjects in monumental grids. Configured within burial shrines and illuminated solemnly, Boltanski's appropriated photos create a visual field, a mock-framework, a memorial to unknown children. In his explicit adoption of funereal vocabulary, Boltanski resists an understanding of the photograph as a sign capable only of representing its original referent, in other words, the subject who existed at the moment of exposure.

Revealing the isolation and anxiety beneath the surface of American suburbia has been the focus of Gregory Crewdson's (b. 1962) work since his graduate years at Yale University in the late 1980s, where he first honed his "documentary-cinematic" style. Trips to New York galleries exposed Crewdson to the work of photographers Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, whose postmodern technique of appropriation undermined traditional photographic convention. Crewdson's work presupposes the viewer's indoctrination with the postmodern lesson that reality and its images are highly constructed. Heavily infused with the artist's subjectivity, Freudian themes and a personal iconography emerge in his photo-tableaux. While Crewdson's work subverts fairy-tale notions of the nuclear suburban family, there is little that is directly political in his work. Instead, he focuses on cinematic technical achievement, creating hyper-real worlds in which an unsettling light and isolated subjects signal a pervasive and discomforting lack of contentment.

Kate Coker
Louisa Hartigan
Eugene Rutigliano

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