Peter D. Osborne - Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition: Commemorating the Present

In this book, Osborne demonstrates why and how photography as photography has survived and flourished since the rise of digital processes, when many anticipated its dissolution into a generalised system of audio-visual representations or its collapse under the relentless overload of digital imagery. He examines how photography embodies, contributes to, and even in effect critiques how the contemporary social world is now imagined, how it is made present and how the concept and the experience of the Present itself is produced. Osborne bases his discussions primarily in cultural studies and visual cultural studies. Through an analysis of different kinds of photographic work in distinct contexts, he demonstrates how aspects of photography that once appeared to make it vulnerable to redundancy turn out to be the basis of its survival and have been utilised by much important photographic work of the last three decades.

Peter D. Osborne is Senior Lecturer in the Media Faculty of the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. He is the author of several essays on photography and culture. His book, Travelling LightPhotography, Travel and Visual Culture, was published in 2000.

Cover Image Caption: Peter D. Osborne 2017

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research.

Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North

Edited by Gry Hedin and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud

Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City

Creative Retreat

Sarah Lowndes

Design and Visual Culture from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Art

Optical Deconstructions

Edit Tth

Changing Representations of Nature and the City

The 1960s-1970s and Their Legacies

Edited by Gabriel Gee and Alison Vogelaar

The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy

George Smith

Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition

Commemorating the Present

Peter D. Osborne

Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation

The Birth of a Medium

Paul Crowther

Geneses of Postmodern Art

Technology as Iconology

Paul Crowther

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Peter D. Osborne

First published 2019
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2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of Peter D. Osborne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Osborne, Peter D. (Peter Desmond), 1947 editor.

Title: Photography and the contemporary cultural condition : commemorating the present / edited by Peter D. Osborne.

Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018004272 (print) | LCCN 2018006784 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315818573 (E-book) | ISBN 9780415736251 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315818573 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: PhotographyPhilosophy. | PhotographySocial aspects. | Photography, Artistic.

Classification: LCC TR183 (ebook) | LCC TR183 .P4835 2018 (print) | DDC 770.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004272

ISBN: 978-0-415-73625-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81857-3 (ebk)

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To Bethany and Marion
And to the memory of all those who worked at 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert, 11th arrondissement, Paris in January 2015

My gratitude goes to:

The University of the Arts London for the research leave.

Steve Cross of the University of the Arts London for making some of the research possible.

Andrew Moye for the photography conversations.

Dr Philip Derbyshire for the philosophy conversations.

Alvaro Henao teacher and photographer, for his help with the Colombia connection.

Bill Schwarz for his encouragement and perennial intellectual enthusiasm.

And to my students of the last few years in Photography and in Media and Cultural Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London for allowing me to test drive many of the ideas encountered in this study.

Above all, my thanks for the generosity of the photographers whose work features in the chapters that follow. I only hope I have done justice to their creativity and to their insights.

Doug Aitken, USA, is a highly influential artist working in almost all mediums including photography as well as sculpture, installation and video. Much of his work reflects on the changes in the nature and experience of contemporary (mediated) space including the built environment and mobilised spatiality; a recipient of many awards and object of numerous studies. His work has been widely published.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico d.2002, was one of the founders of modern Mexican photography active from the 1930s to the 1990s. Influenced by Surrealism and pre-Columbian cosmologies his imagery of the everyday world often invokes older meanings still alive in the modernity of the present in a language we might call allegorical documentary.

Nina Berman, USA, focuses her documentary work in photography and film on political and social issues including the militarisations of American life and domestic violence. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Whitney and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and many other venues across the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Europe. She teaches at Duke and Columbia Universities.

Maeve Berry, Ireland, lives and works in Great Britain. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and in Asia. Essentially documentary, in approach it covers the human body, mortality, memory and landscapes and places transformed by use and consumption and subjective nature of objects. Her work has been published in a range of books and catalogues.

Rut Blees Luxemburg, Germany, lives and works in Great Britain. A photographer, artist and tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, much of her work is devoted to the depiction of urban spaces and forms. Some of her most renowned images are unsettling and atmospheric depictions of urban night streets, spaces and objects normally devoid of human figures. She has exhibited widely including as the Rencontres dArles Discovery Award laureate in 2011. She has published several books.