FotoFocus, the Cincinnati Biennial opened last weekend. Here are the main exhibitions with a couple of words written by Kevin Moore, its artistic Director.
This year’s FotoFocus Biennial has a theme—Photography in Dialogue—which describes the dialogue between contemporary photography, its history, other media (such as film) and between collaborating artists. Throughout much of the twentieth century, art photography was defined in a purist way: namely, as a documentary image, an aesthetic composition, often having some sort of significant social content. This “modernist” definition of photography held that photography was an art form according to its own discrete standards—that it was different from, say, painting in its ability to document “reality,” to capture time, to reveal “truth.”
Yet even during the twentieth century, photography was deployed in “impure” ways, enlisted in mixed-media art, conceptual art, collage, montage or in seeming imitation of painterly abstraction. Especially with the prevalence of digital manipulation, today such impure practices are more readily accepted. And while some might argue that traditional documentary projects still shape the core of art photography, the boundaries defining the medium—and defining the medium’s history—have been considerably expanded.
Kevin Moore, Artistic Director of the Biennial
FESTIVAL
FotoFocus Biennial 2014
October 8 – November 1, 2014
212 E. 14th St.
Cincinnati, OH 45202
USA
http://www.fotofocusbiennial.org
