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female issues and greatly added to the expansion of
the notion of photography, notably the Austrian
performance and body artist Valie Export, and
American performance and video artists Hannah
Wilke, Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, Adrian
Piper, and Cuban-American sculptor Ana Mendieta.
Towards the end of the 1970s, the influence of
feminist theory and poststructuralist philosophy
began to make its presence felt in the work of artists
such as the Americans Cindy Sherman, Richard
Prince, and Sherrie Levine, and Canadian Jeff
Wall. These artists followed their 1960s predecessors
in viewing the photographic image not as a precious
object, but as a cultural ‘‘text’’ which they would re-
frame and re-contextualize to make incisive observa-
tions about how the mass media and cultural pro-
duction constructs our sense of reality. Sherman’s
landmark 1977 seriesUntitled Film Stillsand Wall’s
photographic lightboxes address the pervasive
impact of cinema on our view of everyday life in
their presentation of seemingly ‘‘real’’ scenes, which
have been staged for the camera through the kind of
meticulous preparation and direction characteristic
of mainstream filmmaking. Levine, Prince, and other
artists such as Americans Barbara Kruger, Louise
Lawler, and Annette Lemieux appropriated pre-
existing images from commercial and art culture,
furthering Duchamp’s radical use of ready-mades
by extending this idea into the world of images.
Levine was especially notorious for her ‘‘rephoto-
graphing’’ in 1981 of iconic Depression-era Farm
Security Administration images by Walker Evans
that were identical in every way to the originals
except that they had been photographed from book
reproductions and titled ‘‘After Walker Evans.’’
The emergence of artists such as Thomas Struth,
Thomas Ruff, Candida Ho ̈fer, and Andreas
Gursky from Germany in the early-to-mid 1980s
marked an important shift in the conceptual photo-
graph in terms of subject matter and formal
appearance. The artists of this generation had all
been students of the Bechers and focused on such
time-honored subjects as architecture, everyday
people, and landscape. They distinguished them-
selves through their combination of the rigorous
precision and clarity of their mentors and the
seductive visual presence of painters such as Rich-
ter and Sigmar Polke. Struth’s images of crowded
museum interiors, Ruff’s immense head-shots of
ordinary German people, and Gursky’s technically
dazzling images of crowds, landscapes, and built
structures transformed the conceptual photograph
into a genre that could at once present images
taken to impart a specific meaning while retaining
a painterly sense of composition.

Conceptual photography in the late 1980s and

early 1990s took the visual style and idea-based

intent of the genre to address political issues of

gender, race, and sexual identity. Artists such as

Americans Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Lorna

Simpson, Cuban-American Felix Gonzalez-Torres,

and the Canadian collective General Idea often

used photography to make provocative, confron-

tational work about topics that ranged from hard-

core gay subcultures, to the position of African-

Americans in contemporary society, to the

ongoing crisis resulting from the spread of the

AIDS virus. Other artists during this period, such

as the Americans Cindy Bernard, Sharon Lock-

hart, and Christopher Williams and English video

artist Gillian Wearing, synthesized the interests in

documentation, performance, popular culture, se-

quential presentation, and rigorously aesthetic

composition, which have characterized the pro-

gression of conceptual photography from its incep-

tion in the 1960s. Lockhart’s 1994 seriesAuditions,

for example, presents a series of five images of

young children embracing for a ‘‘first kiss’’ in a

scene taken from the end of Francois Truffaut’s

1976 film L’Argent Poche(Small Change.) The

work combines the documentation of a ‘‘perfor-

mance,’’ an inquiry into the cinematic process and

experience, and a use of serial presentation to

define the children’s acts categorically as ‘‘audi-

tions’’ in a way that brings the histories of the

conceptual photograph together in a single work.

Her complication of this history, and the subse-

quent reinterpretations of the conceptual pho-

tograph by younger artists into the present day,

demonstrates how multifaceted the use of photo-

graphy in idea-based work has become since its

beginnings in the early 1960s.

DominicMolon

Seealso:Artists’ Books; Becher, Bernd and Hilla;

Export, Valie; Feminist Photography; Graham,

Dan; Gursky, Andreas; Kruger, Barbara; Photo-

graphic ‘‘Truth’’; Photography and Painting; Post-

modernism; Prince, Richard; Rauschenberg, Robert;

Renger-Patzsch, Albert; Representation and Gender;

Representation and Race; Ruff, Thomas; Sander,

August; Sherman, Cindy; Simpson, Lorna; Struth,

Thomas; Wall, Jeff

Further Reading

Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson, eds.Conceptual

Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

MIT Press, 1999.

CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY