Audience 1 Florence, 2004 by Thomas Struth
Is photography art? Today the answer is simple, indeed photography is more popular than ever and arguably the visual art of choice for the masses, but half a century ago the debate still raged.
In a new book, Photography Today, writer, artist and lecturer Mark Durden analyses more than 500 works by 150 artists from the past 50 years, exploring the impact of various genres, from pop art to documentary.
Here Durden offers his insight on ten important photographic works from the book”.
The ten (from 150) photographers chosen for the article are: Thomas Struth; Sarah Jones; Peter Fraser; Saidou Dicko; Alfredo Jaar; Anna Fox; David Goldblatt; Joel Sternfeld; Gillian Wearing; and Erwin Wurm.
As you can imagine when you do this kind of selection it inevitably leads to often passionate discussion as to why some are chosen and some are not. See this discussion from Rangefinder Forum, which gets into the photographers selected as well as a broader discussion about art and photography. I liked the Andy Warhol quote: “Art is what you can get away with”.
To my eternal shame I’d never even heard of 8 of the 10 chosen (although I’ll now certainly try to find out more about them).