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<\/a><\/p>\nThe Next Big Picture<\/strong><\/p>\n With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography<\/strong><\/p>\n At first glance, viewers of \u201cWhat Is a Photograph?<\/a>\u201d opening on Jan. 31 at the International Center of Photography, will not even recognize the work on the wall as photographic. There is no easily identifiable subject, no clear representational form.<\/p>\n \u201cThe show does not answer the question,\u201d said Carol Squiers, the show\u2019s curator. \u201cIt\u00a0poses<\/em>\u00a0the question. It is an open question, and that\u2019s why I find this period in photography so exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Squiers pointed to Travess Smalley, who cuts shapes from magazine pages and colored paper and composes them into photo collages directly on a scanner. He considers the scan the negative for the print. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t necessarily call the result a \u2018photograph,\u2019\u00a0\u201c she said, but she wasn\u2019t ready to define exactly what it was.<\/p>\n Photography is vastly different in these early years of the 21st century, no longer the result of light exposed to film, nor necessarily lens based. As digital technology has all but replaced the chemical process, photography is now an increasingly shape-shifting medium: The iPhone, the scanner and Photoshop are yielding a daunting range of imagery, and artists mining these new technologies are making documentation of the actual world seem virtually obsolete.<\/p>\n \u201cPractices have changed,\u201d said Quentin Bajac, the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s new chief curator of photography, one of four curators at major institutions who spoke of the opportunities and obstacles of their jobs at this pivotal moment \u2014 photography\u2019s identity crisis.<\/p>\n The shift of focus from fact to fiction, and all the gradations in between, is perhaps the largest issue in the current soul-searching underway in photography circles. Questions swirl: Can the \u201ccaptured\u201d image (taken on the street \u2014 think of the documentary work of\u00a0Henri Cartier-Bresson<\/a>) maintain equal footing with the \u201cconstructed\u201d image (made in the studio or on the computer, often with ideological intention)?<\/p>\n Museums, for their part, are debating whether photography should remain an autonomous medium or be incorporated into a mash-up of disciplines in contemporary art. And photography curators, too, are questioning the quality and validity of new practices, as the ever-morphing ubiquity of social media challenges the singularity of the photographic image.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest problem facing curators and historians of photography,\u201d Mr. Bajac said, \u201cis the overflow of images.\u201d<\/p>\n MoMA, the first museum to create an autonomous department of photography, in 1940, perpetuated the idea that documentation of the actual world as in the work of Eug\u00e8ne Atget, Walker Evans and Robert Frank was the backbone of photographic art making. Mr. Bajac\u2019s predecessors \u2014 Beaumont Newhall, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski and Peter Galassi \u2014 presided over the field from what critics have, at times disparagingly, called \u201cthe judgment seat.\u201d Mr. Bajac acknowledges a definite change in that paradigm.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, MoMA is only one of the judgment seats,\u201d Mr. Bajac said. \u201cWe\u2019re writing one history of photography, while other people or institutions are writing simultaneous histories.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked why he thought he was offered the job at MoMA, Mr. Bajac, impeccable and youthful at 48, surmised that \u201csomeone who is not American, who is not linked or connected to that long history of photography, is more appropriate now.\u201d He arrived at the museum from Paris, where he had been chief curator of photography at the Pompidou Center and before that at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay.<\/p>\n In his inaugural exhibition, \u201cA World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio<\/a>,\u201d which opens on Feb. 8, the focus is on the practice in the photographer\u2019s studio as opposed to the aesthetics of the print, a clear shift in emphasis from museum canon. The works on view, drawn from MoMA\u2019s archives and arranged thematically, include 19th-century and contemporary material, and film and video.<\/p>\n This idea of the studio as both a laboratory and playground is exemplified by Charles Ray\u2019s diptych, \u201cPlank Piece I-II\u201d (1973), showing the artist pinned to the studio wall, in two different ways, by a large wooden plank \u2014 a conceptual performance for the camera.<\/p>\n A 2008 work by Walead Beshty of Los Angeles, who creates photograms \u2014 cameraless pieces \u2014 by exposing photographic paper to colored lights, verges on pure abstraction. Mr. Bajac said he was among the younger generation of artists in the recent New Photography series at MoMA whose \u201cpractices are entirely studio-based.\u201d<\/p>\n Many works in the show are by international artists like Constantin Brancusi, who considered his studio as much a photographic subject as his sculpture. Another such artist is Geta Bratescu of Romania, who lived in her Bucharest studio in the 1970s, during the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausesu, and made a 17-minute film, \u201cL\u2019atelier\u201d (\u201cThe Studio,\u201d 1978) acquired by Mr. Bajac for MoMA, signaling the recognition of video in a photographic context.<\/p>\n \u201cFor Bratescu, of course, the studio was a place of open expression,\u201d the curator said, an escape from the pressure to create propagandist art glorifying Ceausescu.<\/p>\n Mr. Bajac also explores the studio backdrop, an artifice that divorces the subject from context \u2014 \u201cThe model or subject becomes a kind of specimen in scientific terms,\u201d he said \u2014 and the use of props and costumes for portraiture, from the draped curtain behind an\u00a0Auguste Belloc<\/a>\u00a0nude in the 1850s to Cindy Sherman disguises in 1983.<\/p>\n \u201cTaking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them,\u201d Irving Penn said, in a quotation on the gallery wall.<\/p>\n Matthew Witkovsky, the curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, echoed a growing consensus among curators that, today, the field is more pluralistic. \u201cOne wants not a judgment seat,\u201d he argued, \u201cbut strong judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n In the past, the role of the curator required tireless advocacy for the medium\u2019s legitimacy. Christopher McCall, the 38-year-old director of\u00a0Pier 24<\/a>, a museum-caliber private photography center in San Francisco with roughly twice the gallery space for photography as MoMA, sees that battle as ancient history.<\/p>\n \u201cFor myself and my generation, whether photography is art has never even been the question,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Today, the job calls for distinguishing serious photographic art making within the vast, visual cacophony of image making. What criteria are to be applied to what is called a \u201cphotograph\u201d when digital technology has revolutionized where, how and how often pictures are viewed?<\/p>\n The wall-size photographic print was already the rage in Chelsea galleries at the turn of the century (the 21st, that is), as digital files replaced the film negative. Thanks to scanners that can read imagery with optical fidelity, the evolution from chemical process to digital is nearly complete.<\/p>\n Yet several works in \u201cA Sense of Place,\u201d at Pier 24 through May 1, pose more questions than answers. Eric William Carroll\u2019s large diazotype prints \u2014 a process used for architectural blueprints \u2014 fill the gallery with blue-tinted shadows that resemble leaves, evoking a walk in the forest. For \u201c24 HRS in Photos,\u201d Erik Kessels downloaded and printed every photo uploaded to Flickr in 24 hours; an avalanche of images tumbles down \u2014 wedding photos, selfies and \u201csexties\u201d \u2014 the democratization of art made tangible, and threatening.<\/p>\n Lucia Koch, a Brazilian artist, registers a welcome degree of wit in her digital exploration of perceptual, as opposed to technical, anomaly: Her photograph appears to be a sun-filled hallway; in fact, it is the interior of a spaghetti box with two cellophane windows.<\/p>\n At the International Center for Photography, Ms. Squiers asked the essential question that permeates the field: What even constitutes a photograph?<\/p>\n While younger artists are incorporating chemical processes into their experiments with digital techniques, many \u201care still finding this need to make an object,\u201d Ms. Squiers said.<\/p>\n An example is Marco Breuer, who has several works on display with no visible relationship to photographic imagery. His work \u201cSpin\u201d consists of fine concentric circles scratched and embossed on chromogenic paper. The camera-less process still requires emulsion and developer, but the result is a one-of-a-kind handmade object.<\/p>\n Ms. Squiers also included the work of Christopher Williams, whose photographs compose an inventory of increasingly obsolescent film-based equipment \u2014 cameras, lenses and darkroom gear \u2014 as beautiful and precise as catalog product shots. The accompanying text adds detail about how the equipment was used. Such scrutiny suggests, with elegiac clarity, the end of the chemical era in photography.<\/p>\n Mr. Witkovsky, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is giving Mr. Williams his first museum retrospective, beginning this month, in a traveling show, \u201cThe Production Line of Happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a fully arrived \u2018history of art\u2019 in photography,\u201d Mr. Witkovsky said of the work by Mr. Williams, who applies an art historian\u2019s scrutiny to the social and historical implications of the medium in the mid-20th century.<\/p>\n Mr. McCall, of Pier 24, acknowledged that a curatorial consensus on the photography\u2019s future has not been reached. \u201cThere has to be some photographic process involved, some piece of technology that we acknowledge as photographic, but I don\u2019t think it means it has to be lens-based,\u201d he said. (But don\u2019t feel bad for the auteurs of representational photography in the digital age: Shown at Pier 24 are also Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky and Paul Graham \u2014 whose\u00a0photographic documentation<\/a>\u00a0of the \u201cauthentic\u201d moment continues a stalwart tradition.)<\/p>\n Mr. McCall dismissed the notion that experimentation with unconventional processes or the overabundance of images poses any threat to contemporary photography. \u201cIt\u2019s a benefit,\u201d he said, encouraging curators \u201cto analyze and think about images because they\u2019re everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Trying to define what a photograph is today situates the curator at a new frontier, Ms. Squiers suggested. While it\u2019s unclear where the medium is headed, she is certain that contemporary photographers are doing something that is disorienting yet ultimately transformative.<\/p>\n \u201cYou feel like the cord to the mother ship has been cut,\u201d she said, \u201cand now you\u2019re floating in space.\u201d<\/p>\n