SALZBURG.- In the first half of the twentieth century, North American photographers produced work that was seen as groundbreaking and paved the way for the establishment of photography as a medium of creative expression. This leadership role has been largely lost since the 1980s, when European photographers struck out on their own. America ceased to be the uncontested benchmark for younger artists, and American photography has faded from the spotlight.

The exhibition True Pictures? proposes to revive the trans-Atlantic dialogue with a comprehensive overview of the output of fine art photographers working in Canada and the U.S. in the past forty years. It illustrates the significance of established practitioners as well as the range of the youngest generation of photographers. Themes such as sexuality, gender, and diversity, but also questions of form and suitable modes of presentation and reflections on a possible expansion of the concept of the photographic figure in many of the works of the altogether twenty-seven artists we showcase grouped in three generations.

True Pictures? tells the story of more recent North American photography, probing questions concerning its relation to reality and its veracity and shedding light on a continent’s self-image and visions of a medium in transformation.

First Generation

One question that was pivotal for many photographers’ conception of their art concerned the medium’s truthfulness. Photography’s relation to reality helped lend it legitimacy, but it also drew criticism—abstract and staged photography, championed by confident fine art photographers who emerged in the late 1970s, broke free from this bond tethering them to the real world. Beginning in 1977, Cindy Sherman, a leading figure of the period, posed in a variety of personae for her series of Untitled Film Stills, a probing study of stereotypes of femininity in the movies. Laurie Simmons later quotes one of these Film Stills in her Kaleidoscope House 13 (2000). Rodney Graham’s Media Studies ’77 (2016) shows the artist, styled to recall the actor Robert Redford, in the role of a college professor lecturing his students. The work consists of two large-format lightboxes, a medium with which the Canadian artist Jeff Wall rose to renown. One of his best-known works, The Thinker (1986), quotes the pose of Auguste Rodin’s iconic sculpture of the same title. Anthony Hernandez’s series Landscapes for the Homeless (1988– 1991), in which humans are present only in the form of the traces and detritus they have left behind, intertwines the documentation of modern life and a critique of society with landscape photography. In Untitled Slide Sequence (1972), Allan Sekula quotes motifs from the Lumière brothers’ earliest motion picture, the 1895 Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The critical engagement with and strategic reclamation of mass media is the defining trait of the art of the so-called “Pictures Generation”, represented here by Cindy Sherman as well as Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler. In Intérieurs parisiens, After Atget (1997), Levine appropriates sixty pictures by the French photographer Eugène Atget; her photographic duplicates raise questions about the original and its value and effect. Lawler, for her part, studies the mechanisms of the art market and the presentation of art. Ian Wallace’s Chelsea Exterior New York II (2014) analyzes the streetscape outside the Gagosian Gallery, New York, which is advertising an upcoming exhibition on Picasso and photography. Additional motifs and thematic aspects round out this survey of the first generation’s output: the spectrum extends from Nan Goldin’s frank visualizations of social issues that were considered taboo and Carrie Mae Weems’s analyses of racism and black identity in North America to James Welling’s hermetic Polaroid abstractions.

Second Generation

The novel strategies of subjective photography and media critique are often coupled with narrative approaches and explicit political messages or, occasionally, a blend of both. Stan Douglas’s Exodus, 1975 (2021) is a meticulously choreographed and constructed shot that draws a connection between two entirely independent events: the inception of the movement for the liberation of Angola on the one hand, the party culture that sprang up in New York’s dilapidated loft spaces on the other. Zoe Leonard employs different artistic means to broach the subject of migration. The process in which an image comes into being is central to her approach, and that also affects what appears in it. Consider, in particular, her photographic reproductions of existing pictures: for the series New York Harbor I (2016), Leonard rephotographed snapshots from the years after the Second World War. In his series There is no place like home (2000), Ken Lum, a son of Chinese immigrants, combines images and texts in arrangements reminiscent of conventional advertising photographs. Lorna Simpson’s Corridor (Night) (2003) juxtaposes the lived realities of two African-American women at two different moments in history. While many members of this second generation of artists grapple in diverse ways with social ills, some of their colleagues focus on a reflective engagement with the medium and display a penchant for opulence. Gregory Crewdson, in particular, is known for his lavishly produced pictures. Each shoot results in a kind of film still in which the artist seeks to capture the perfect moment, “freezing time.” The motifs of Christopher Williams’s pictures make for far less spectacular visuals; often alluding to advertising images, he typically limits his authorship to selecting the motifs, supervising the printing process, and designing the presentation.

Third Generation

In a world shaped by digital technologies, the rapid dissemination of mass media that exert a controlling influence over our perceptions, the advancing globalization of the art market, and the emergence of social media channels, photographers perforce shift their focus to new questions. Their work now wrestles with environmental concerns, wrenching political changes, systemic inequity and apparatuses of surveillance in the United States, the lives and rights of indigenous people, gender identities, racism, and the environments in which Black Americans live. To examine these and related themes, artists devise radical practices based on digital technologies, sometimes in a process that is also informed by sustained reflections on the medium. One artist who explicitly probes the genesis of works of art and harnesses novel technologies to create abstract images is Walead Beshty. He analyzes the premises of art in a globalized capitalist society and the contexts in which it is manufactured, but also the weak spots of these arrangements. The Canadian photographer Owen Kydd takes a similar interest in production processes that occupy a media middle ground between film and photography. His digital still lifes explore the representation of time in fixed images he calls “durational photographs.” Trevor Paglen both employs and interrogates cutting-edge technologies, developing conceptual projects that direct attention to systems of government surveillance, artificial intelligence, and manifestations of power and violence. Power structures and social and political issues are also front and center in Taryn Simon’s art. In the series The Innocent (2000), she adopts the medium of photojournalism to document the history of—mostly Black—alleged criminals who were wrongfully convicted. Ayana V. Jackson’s more recent work, including Anarcha (2017), scrutinizes the conventional gaze upon Black womanhood in the colonial era and highlights the ways in which the bodies of Black women are eroticized and fraught with connotations of the exotic. Comparable works by Martine Gutierrez and Meryl McMaster ask what it means to be an indigenous woman in the U.S. and Canada, respectively. Gutierrez puts her own body on the line to shed light on how gender identities are imagined in our society, while McMaster’s self-portraits delve into the world of mysticism, the individual’s roots in a community, and nature. Like the artists of the “Pictures Generation” before her, Anne Collier resorts to strategies of appropriation. For Mirror (2020), she adapted an American comic strip from the 1950s, changing the dimensions and framing selected details.