the world around us. It developed in the mid-
1960s as a result of artists’ interest in deemphasiz-
ing the work of art as an object and foregrounding
its function as a method of communication. Con-
ceptual photography often employs the use of text
and/or the serial presentation of images to articu-
late a particular premise or make a specific state-
ment. Ironically, the use of the documentary
potential of the photograph in conceptual photo-
graphy has resulted in its acceptance and current
ubiquity in the fine arts.
In the early 1960s, artists began to question the
material basis of the work of art. The paintings of
Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg intro-
duced a level of distance from the artist’s physical
involvement with the work of art to create a more
pictorial continuation of Marcel Duchamp’s cri-
tique of art’s objecthood. These works used pho-
tographic reproductions of everything from
astronauts, street scenes, and art works to celeb-
rity icons such as Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy,
and Marilyn Monroe to suggest the growing med-
iation of everyday life by popular culture. In
Germany, Bernd and Hilla Becher resurrected
the use of photography as typology perfected in
the 1920s and 1930s by such photographers as
August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch, pre-
senting works that examined the similarities and
differences between particular architectural forms.
Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965,
incorporated aphotograph of a chair placed along-
side a textual description of the chair and the
chair itself, demonstrating how photography
might be utilized in a work of art not for its
own sake but in the service of the articulation of
a philosophical principle or ideal. This under-
standing of the photographic medium as a docu-
mentary means towards the expression of a
concept, as an infinitely reproducible (and there-
fore somewhat ‘‘dematerialized’’) image that
resisted the status of a precious art object, char-
acterizes conceptual photography.
Conceptual photography flourished in the 1960s,
beginning with Ed Ruscha’s seminal photo-based
books Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, 1963, and
Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965, now recog-
nized as progenitors of the artists’ books genre,
and continuing with Dan Graham’s photograph
and text-based work Homes for America, 1965–
- These works privileged photography’s
more basic and essential properties to focus on
everyday forms of architecture as mere categorical
types in the world rather than evoking their indi-
vidual particularities. Artists such as Bruce Nau-
man, Douglas Huebler, Jan Dibbets, and Ger Van
Elk employed the photograph towards a different
end, creating situations to be documented by the
camera towards the expression of ideas about the
body and its role in the work of art or the
changes that occur within a given situation over
a certain period of time. The photograph’s ability
to record a performance, a given sequence of
events, or a linear progression of time or space,
resulted in its becoming a central medium for
conceptual art practice.
Other conceptual artists approached the circula-
tion of the photograph in popular culture as a
means of further distancing the work of art from
material production and locating it within a wider
cultural sphere. John Baldessari’s montage works
of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example,
employed images culled from film stills that were
arranged to create clever and at times humorous
relationships between various cinematic icons or
situations. Baldessari also combined banal photo-
graphic images with text in his dry, ironic paint-
ings of the 1960s, which contained deadpan
observations on everyday life. Many of Gerhard
Richter’s paintings employ specific photographs as
source material, such as his haunting seriesEight
Student Nurses, 1966, (using the portraits of the
eight young women slain by Richard Speck in
1965) or48 Portraits, 1972, consisting of portraits
of prominent composers, writers, scientists, and
intellectuals from the late-nineteenth to the mid-
twentieth century.
In the early 1970s, conceptual artists such as Vito
Acconci, Chris Burden, Gilbert and George, Wil-
liam Wegman, and Bruce Connor focused on per-
formances in the studio, the gallery, and in the
expanded field of the world outside, using photo-
graphy and video to capture these activities. This
work often focused on the body in terms of its
limits and endurance, its presence as a sexual sig-
nifier, and its general role in society. Acconci’s
Stretch, 1969, for example, employs text and pho-
tographs taken from the positions described in the
text to create a sense of the body’s position and
physicality even though one never sees the artist
himself. Other artists from the 1960s and 1970s,
such as Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Hamish
Fulton, and Lothar Baumgarten used documentary
photography to record their conceptual projects,
which concentrated on their personal interactions
with the environment. The resulting photographs
served to bring the art that was experienced or
created in the natural world into the cultural setting
of the gallery or museum.
At roughly the same time, a number of women
artists used photography to explore identity andCONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY