MoMA New Photography 2010

Traducción del español al inglés

MoMA New Photography 2010
By Alberto Noriega

This year's edition of New Photography 2010 presents four artists (Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager and Amanda Ross-Ho). Since the birth of New Photography (1985), it has presented the work of 70 artists from 16 countries. This year we can see 36 works by these four artists. The curator and organizer of the exhibition, Roxana Marcoci, highlights the seductive language of this selection, replete with references taken from film and the language of advertising, but with a vague hint of conceptual art. They are artists who explore the diluted boundaries of photographs that are spontaneous and of those which are well studied constructions, they show new frontiers that vaguely define the realm of a merely artistic or commercial photo.

Among the works are striking the photographs by Alex Prager, because they contain 'Pulp Fiction' hints and combine this cinematic gaze with the class that possess the images of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. This is how he constructs a film-wise and photographic narrative that instantly captivate us. His engrossed women are watching us from a confusing and studied instant. They seem from another time, and also their actions. Furthermore, their makeup is worthy of a melodrama, also their colourful artificial wigs, they’re wearing a very retro polyester dress and pose with the studied mixture of spontaneity and staging that Prager immortalised on film. It's just the story of a confuse instant. His work snatches conclusions on how each artist deals with the construction of a photograph and, paradoxically, on how to transmit spontaneity at the time. Alex Prager is a self-taught American that knows how to build a photographic narrative of its own, and yet filled with common references from other media that are (or were) outside the photographic realm.

Another artist of the photography that strongly emerges is Roe Ethridge, he realizes its shoots in an "editorial mode" and builds upon commercial images already in circulation, including dismissed images from his job as an illustrator for various magazines. He abandons conventional photography to support its most intentional inconsistency. Aspect that provides its works with a varying significance by the way they’re combined, sequenced and arranged.

Israeli photographer, Elad Lassry, defines his technique as if his photos had been consumed by all sorts of images, they have a clear reminiscence with issues related to consumerism, spectacular signs "Hollywood" type, billboards, illustrations and designs. It is an exhortation to reconsider what it means to arrive to a particular place of visual expression. Lassry photographs everything: vibrant colors, studio portraits of friends, celebrities, still-life's, textures, collages ... Elad Lassry thinks that his images mimic the condition of "not-art", in this manner he invites us to a visual world where his shots are "upended", either by a special distortion, double exposure or the amalgamation and overlap of several negatives ...

Finally, the work of Amanda Ross-Ho's, who leaves in his works the imprint of his hand and other tools, she uses discarded photos found by chance or big format pictures, in which she applies changes and techniques that allow to have a glimpse of the renegotiation of the concept of "creative process." Ross-Ho grew up in a family of photographers who dwelt in artistic and commercial areas. She spent hours as a child alongside her mother in the darkroom, and often she was full-time model for experiments and proof-shots that his uncle and father took. Developing her technique in this context, she has been able to analyze the intricate relationships that a piece needs to be considered as a work of contemporary art, or well, just one more commercial work.

Its curator tells us that these artists "start with a type of post-appropiative practice," Marcoci wonders what would have happened "whether in 1970 Richard Prince had questioned the issue of originality of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as if they were of his own." She concludes: "These young artists reinvest photographic authorship, create images that exist simultaneously with a commercial, and at the same time, artistic task. They recognize that photography is also a fluent medium."

The photographic exhibition is a journey through the border lines that blend the best of editorial, film, advertising, and photographic works, which fall into the category of contemporary art. Whether they are photos of the real world, from studies or a mixture of many, elevated or not, techniques; they are clear references to pop culture and to the visual industry in general. Is this swing and frolic with such different contexts what makes these photos to go from the magazines to our walls. Images that claim themselves as emerging art, possessors of a rediscovered intrinsic value, due to the juxtaposition of techniques and different proposed ways of reading the photographs.