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Article: The photographic idea: reconsidering conceptual photography.
- Article from:
- Afterimage
- Article date:
- March 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Visual Studies Workshop. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.
- Dennis Oppenheim on his use of photographs.(1)
This statement by Dennis Oppenheim introduces the paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear the artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected ...