Exceptional Position of Photography within the (Art) World
Walead Beshty, the internationally known photographer, professor and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles, will be blogging for us until the end of May 2012. Beshty’s concern is the exceptional position of photography within the (art) world today. Why is it “that a medium that was born less than two hundred years ago, in the midst of the industrial revolution, would be the primary contemporary vehicle of the western pictorial tradition?” In his blog series Beshty will “sketch out this theoretical problem, and reexamine the assumptions associated with that loose collection of practices and theories that we call the photographic, and attempt to propose broader, and perhaps more dynamic tools through which to understand it. This process seems best begun with a discussion of the functional construction of the category of photography.”
Walead Beshty
Walead Beshty (born 1976 in London) is an artist and writer living and working in Los Angeles. He is Associate Professor at the Art Center College of Design and writes for Texte zur Kunst, Artforum and many others. Beshty’s solo exhibitions include Travel Pictures at Thomas Dane Gallery, London (currently on view); A Diagram of Forces at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden / Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Hammer Project: Walead Beshty at the Hammer Museum, L.A.; and The Phenomenology of Shopping and Dead Malls at MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City. Selected Publications: The Photograph as Contemporary Art and The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography.