Editorial

This special issue draws on material from a symposium on photography and abstraction held in London. Organised by David Cunningham and John Beck, guest editors for this issue, the symposium flyer proposed the following questions:

When is a photograph abstract? What is the function of abstraction in photography? How does documentary, conceptual or formalist photography interrogate abstraction in its various social, economic and/or aesthetic forms?

This event and the questions about abstraction that it raises are timely. As many readers will be aware, in recent years there has been a growth of ‘abstraction’, and of interest in it, specifically within contemporary art photography. This interest was signalled by Lyle Rexer’s 2010 book The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, and the later exhibition in New York derived from it, held at the Aperture Foundation in 2012. This was followed by another significant show in 2014, also in New York at the International Center of Photography, with the accompanying publication edited by Carol Squiers, What is a Photograph? Arguably, Charlotte Cotton’s 2015 Aperture book, Photography is Magic, further consolidated the visibility of abstraction as present within photography. Lest anyone think this is purely a New York or Aperture centred affair there was also the 2012 London exhibition, Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography (Barnes) held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and this year, Geoffrey Batchen’s curated exhibition in New Zealand, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, also published as a book.

It is worth making two general points clear here. Firstly, abstraction as a term has many meanings and while this issue does not set out to explicitly plot them, it is quite clear that the term needs further clarification in its relation to photography. Secondly, the reasons why this interest in abstraction (or perhaps we should pluralise this term too, as abstractions) should re-emerge at this time are not clear: why is abstraction in photography re-emergent today? It is tempting to suggest, as some have, that this abstract ‘turn’ is the result of the digital world we live in, the ‘online’ life of Web2.0. There may well be arguments to be made about this proposition, whether it is the tedium of image feeds repeating the same endless tropes which have led to a rejection of the classic ‘representational’ forms of photographic image formerly so dominant within contemporary art photography. However, this is all probably far too simplistic an explanation, given that ‘abstraction’ has been present in many different ways in photography since its inception. Nevertheless, the papers in this issue do contribute towards addressing some of the questions raised by this perceived return to ‘abstraction’.

We are grateful to the contributors for identifying possible directions towards addressing these questions, and to the guest editors, whom we also thank for their introduction to this issue, which does much to lay out a field of related critical reflections.

The editors