Theory II: postmodernism, conceptual photography and the gaze

From the 1960s onward, photography moved to the center of contemporary art, and critics began to question the modernist ideas that had dominated the previous half-century: the original creative genius, the unique masterpiece, the purity of the medium and the photograph as a transparent window on the world. Conceptual artists used photographs as plain documents of ideas; postmodern artists rephotographed, staged and appropriated images to expose how media shape identity; and feminist, Black and postcolonial critics asked who looks, who is looked at and who controls representation. This lesson introduces these movements and ideas, together with the legal debates about appropriation that followed them.

Conceptual art and the photograph as document

In the 1960s, conceptual artists treated the idea as the essence of an artwork and used photography as a deliberately unglamorous way to record actions, systems and lists. The American artist Ed Ruscha's book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) presented flat, frontal photographs of service stations along a highway, a deadpan inventory that rejected the expressive fine print. Other conceptual artists photographed performances, earthworks or ordinary actions, with the photograph serving as evidence that something happened rather than as an aesthetic object.

In Germany, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks and other industrial structures from a level viewpoint, under overcast skies, and displayed them in grids of similar forms called typologies. Their method echoed August Sander's portraits and New Objectivity, and as teachers at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf they influenced a generation of photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, known as the Düsseldorf School, whose large color prints became prominent in museums from the 1990s.

The Pictures Generation and appropriation

In 1977 the critic Douglas Crimp organized an exhibition called Pictures at Artists Space in New York, presenting young artists who worked with images borrowed from mass media. Their work and that of related artists became known as the Pictures Generation. These artists argued that we experience the world mainly through images already made by advertising, cinema, television and magazines, and they made art that exposed how such images construct desire and identity.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977 to 1980) are black-and-white photographs in which Sherman poses as female characters reminiscent of 1950s and 1960s films, such as the young woman alone in the city, the housewife or the starlet. No actual film is referenced; the images are generic, which is the point. They show femininity as a set of roles constructed by media, not a natural identity. Richard Prince rephotographed advertisements, most famously the cowboys from cigarette advertising, cropping out the text and presenting them as his own work, which questioned authorship and the myths of masculinity in advertising. Sherrie Levine's After Walker Evans (1981) consisted of photographs of reproductions of Evans's 1936 photographs from a catalog, directly challenging the modernist ideas of originality and the male artist-genius.

Critics such as Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens and Abigail Solomon-Godeau theorized postmodern photography as a critique of originality and of the institutions, such as museums and the art market, that valued it. Krauss's essay "The Originality of the Avant-Garde" (1981) argued that the idea of originality was itself a modernist myth, sustained by the multiplicity of copies that photography makes obvious.

The Vancouver School and the staged photograph

In the United States, the staged photograph developed alongside the Pictures Generation. Gregory Crewdson made elaborate cinematic tableaux of suburban America with film crews and lighting, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia staged scenes and lit street corners so that passers-by appeared caught in theatrical light. Both blur the line between documentary and fiction that earlier photographers had tried to maintain. Critics often discuss them alongside Canada's Jeff Wall, showing how ideas moved across the border and the Atlantic.

Staged photography challenges the documentary tradition's claim to capture real moments. It also returns, in new form, to the composite and allegorical photographs of the 1850s by Rejlander and Robinson, and to the long tradition of history painting that Wall explicitly engaged.

The gaze

The concept of the gaze asks how looking involves power. The British art critic John Berger, in his television series and book Ways of Seeing (1972), wrote that in European art, men act and women appear: men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at. He traced this pattern from oil painting to advertising photography, arguing that images position the ideal viewer as male and the subject as an object of possession.

The British film theorist Laura Mulvey, in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), developed the idea of the "male gaze". Drawing on psychoanalysis, she argued that classical Hollywood cinema structured looking so that the camera, the male protagonist and the spectator shared a position of looking at women, who were displayed as objects of desire. Her ideas spread quickly to photography criticism and practice.

The American writer bell hooks, in "The Oppositional Gaze" (1992), argued that Black women spectators had developed a critical, resistant way of looking at mainstream images that excluded or degraded them, and that looking could itself be an act of resistance. Her essay widened the concept of the gaze to include race and challenged feminist theories that had assumed a white spectator.

Representation, race and self-representation

Postcolonial theory, influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), examined how Western images constructed non-Western peoples as exotic, primitive or threatening others. Photographers and artists from communities that had been photographed by outsiders began to reclaim representation. The American artist Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series (1990) staged scenes from a Black woman's life around a single kitchen table, presenting her own narratives of love, family and independence. Lorna Simpson combined photographs of Black women, often turned away from the camera, with fragments of text to question how images and language define identity.

In the United States, Native American photographers such as Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Zig Jackson and later Will Wilson have responded to the Curtis legacy; Wilson's Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange uses the historical wet-plate process to make collaborative tintype portraits of contemporary Native people, who keep a copy and have a say in how they are presented. Wendy Red Star, of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation, annotates historical photographs of Crow delegations with her own research, correcting and reclaiming the record.

Appropriation and the law

Appropriation art raised legal questions about copyright. When does reusing a photograph create a new work, and when does it infringe the original photographer's rights?

In the United States, fair use is decided case by case using four factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount used and the effect on the market. In Rogers v. Koons (1992) a court found that Jeff Koons's sculpture copying a photograph of puppies infringed the photographer's copyright. In Cariou v. Prince (2013) an appeals court found that many of Richard Prince's paintings incorporating Patrick Cariou's photographs were transformative fair use, while sending others back for review. In Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (2023), the Supreme Court held that licensing a Warhol image based on Lynn Goldsmith's photograph of Prince for a magazine cover was not fair use under the first factor, because it shared the same commercial purpose as the original, narrowing the reliance on "transformation" alone.

Practice: questioning the gaze

Choose three advertisements or magazine images that show people and analyze them using the concepts in this lesson. For each, ask who is looking, who is looked at, and where the image positions you as a viewer. Is the subject presented as an active person or as an object to be viewed? Does the subject return the gaze or look away? How do pose, framing, lighting and text work together?

Then make a small series of three self-portraits or portraits of willing collaborators that deliberately respond to one of the images: you might return the gaze, reverse the gender roles, replace stereotypes with self-chosen roles in the manner of Shelley Niro, or pair the image with text that disrupts its message in the manner of Barbara Kruger or Lorna Simpson. Write a short statement explaining which theory informed your response and what you discovered about how images construct identity and power.