Photography at its Limits:

Photography at its Limits

“In this historical world that is our own...the first political operator of protest, of crisis, of criticism or emancipation, must be called image, as that which is revealed as capable of breaking through the horizon of totalitarian constructions” Georges Didi-Huberman

In the public sphere, photographs operate in a declarative mode, leaving little room for doubt. They seem to relay the facts of the moment captured--who, what, and where--with a clarity that inevitably links the photograph to an exercise of power. Photographic technology assumes an asymmetrical relationship: either the person making the picture or the network enabling its circulation determine its meaning, while the person viewing it passively accepts that message. In the hands of governments and corporations, photography has helped construct an expansive field of visual images that defines power relations as natural, characterizes certain public and personal identities as proper, and deems specific interpretations of historical experience truthful. That which is not pictured and disseminated en masse through the glaring light of extreme visibility is, by contrast, diminished to the point of near disappearance.

The works presented in this exhibition are interrogative rather than declarative, contradicting the regimes of power that have naturalized and popularized the use of the photograph as a means of tracking and controlling the world at large. These artists either exacerbate to the point of parody images promoted as a priori truths or shared ideals or impoverish these visions in order to expose their contingency. Both strategies render photography political.  

.