Readings for March 6 Class
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
[Photograph from The New York Times Magazine of Wall in his studio.]
We are currently reading through Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph As Contemporary Art as the primary textbook for my History of Photography III at The College of Santa Fe. Chapter 2 (to be read for our Friday, March 6 class) is called Once Upon A Time and “considers the use of storytelling in contemporary art photography.” Charlotte goes on to say that “Some of the photographs shown here make obvious references to fables, fairy tales, apocryphal events and modern myths that are already part of our collective consciousness.” Some of the photographers that immediately come to mind are Yale professor Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sam Taylor-Wood, Justine Kurland, Anna Gaskell, Gregory Crewdson (another Yale faculty member), and of course Jeff Wall. We are going to focus on Wall’s work in class.
There is one outside reading on Wall and his work that is required for class. It is the The New York Times Magazine review, by Arthur Lubow, of Wall’s 2007 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (and which then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney