(Mis)Understanding Photography

Paperback First Edition Steidl 2014 folkwang.de (Mis)Understanding Photography—Works and Manifestos, a large-scale exhibition of key contemporary photo-works, projects, films and installations by a wide range of artists—Tacita Dean, Hans-Peter Feldmann, John Hilliard, Erik Kessels, Sherrie Levine, Ugo Mulas, Barbara Probst, Timm Rautert, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Timm Ulrichs, Gillian Wearing, Christopher Williams and more than 30 others—takes for granted photography’s centrality in contemporary art. Ever since its invention 175 years ago, artists have consistently questioned the nature of photography. Today artists acutely aware of the omnipresence of photographic images produce works exploring numerous aspects of photography: its materiality, its popularism, its psychological impact, its claims to objectivity, and its force in mass media. Against a familiar backdrop of the accelerating disappearance of analog photography and the simultaneously triumphal progress of digital photography, these works explore new ways of re-picturing and inhabiting that history.