science and its industrial applications. Its expressive
potentialities, before being a matter of conscious
choice and personal vision, depend on technology.
In that sense, one of the reasons of photography’s
success in the 1980s is the fact that it became avail-
able to a growing number of people. The visual
possibilities offered by the technological progress
of photographic procedures gradually disengaged
photography from its traditional subjugation to
reality. Artists used various techniques, including
large format Polaroid photography, advanced elec-
tronics, multimedia, and digital imaging, to create
works that question issues of historical verity as
well as the conflict between reality and imagination.
During the 1980s, a system called DX coding was
introduced for 35-mm film. The cassettes in which
the film is encased were imprinted with an auto-
sensing code enabling certain cameras to automati-
cally set the film speed; this information can also be
used by processing laboratories to accurately
develop the film. In 1980, Sony demonstrated the
first consumer camcorder, and in 1984 Canon
demonstrated the first electronic (digital) still cam-
era. In 1985, Minolta marketed the world’s first
auto-focus SLR system (called ‘‘Maxxum’’ in the
United States). In 1987, both Kodak and Fuji intro-
duced inexpensive disposable cameras, the Kodak
Fling and Fuji Quicksnap. Both were sold in foil
wrappers ready-loaded with film, the complete cam-
era being given to the film processor after exposure.
Canon went on to introduce the RC-760 still video
camera in 1987 and the Q-PIC floppy disc camera in
1988, which led to the introduction and widespread
acceptance of digital cameras in the 1990s.
Such are the issues that preoccupied photogra-
phers in the 1980s: the technical particularities of
the medium which, along with industrial evolution
and the advent of digital technology, deeply trans-
formed its aesthetic premises; the role and function of
photography in the broader social and cultural con-
text of post-industrial societies; the place of human
subjectivity inside them, that of the body, its inti-
macy, disguises, mutations and mythologies; quota-
tion and play with the typologies and historical
conventions of the medium; coexistence of past and
present and the shifting relations between fact and
fiction. In this way photography is constantly taking
effect between the private and the public sphere.
Among the many exhibitions that seemed to show-
case these tendencies, we can retainImage Scaven-
gers: Photography, mounted in 1982 by the Institute
of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylva-
nia in Philadelphia;Appropriation and Syntax: The
Uses of Photography in Contemporary Art, mounted
in 1988 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New
York;20th Century Photographs from the Museum
of Modern Art, photographs selected by John Szar-
kowski and Susan Kismaric, mounted in 1982 at The
Museum of Modern Art in New York; andNew
American Photographs, mounted in 1987 at the Har-
vard University Art Museums.
The 1980s witnessed a particularly vital and
inventive period when the reciprocal influences of
artistic and commercial photography effected a
clear change in the way that artists as well as the
public apprehended photography. If the photo-
graphic experimentation in the field of fine arts
opened the way to advertising and other mass
media, permitting them to revise and renew their
communicational strategies, the artistic recycling
and appropriation of ‘‘low’’ forms of photography
offered to artists an inexhaustible universe of new
topics. From now on, not only commercial photo-
graphy can be considered as a form of art, but, more
importantly, artistic photography can be analyzed
in terms of communication and visual marketing.
Be that as it may, it is clear that the photographic
production of the 1980s cannot be apprehended
through compartmentalized stylistic categories. Ar-
tists knowingly called into question such arbitrary
divisions that confine and close off the art-discourse,
showing that photography is much more complex
and rich than it appears to be, a multidimensional
and ambiguous object. Indeed, toward the end of the
decade, the watchwords were hybridization and
interbreeding, topics that would be further elabo-
rated in the 1990s.
VangelisAthanassopoulos
Seealso:Appropriation; Araki, Nobuyoshi; Barthes,
Roland; Becher, Bernd and Hilla; Body Art; Bol-
tanski, Christian; Burgin, Victor; Conceptual Photo-
graphy; Coplans, John; Deconstruction; Flusser,
Vile ́m; Goldin, Nan; Gursky, Andreas; Image Theory:
Ideology; Krauss, Rosalind; Mapplethorpe, Robert;
Modernism; Parr, Martin; Photographic ‘‘Truth’’;
Photography and Painting; Postmodernism; Prince,
Richard; Representation and Gender; Representation
and Race; Ruff, Thomas; Semiotics; Serrano, Andre;
Sherman, Cindy; Solomon-Godeau, Abigail; Starn,
Mike and Doug; Struth, Thomas; Wall, Jeff; Witkin,
Joel-Peter; Woodman, FrancescaFurther Reading
Barthes, Roland. ‘‘The Death of the Author.’’ InImage-
Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, New York:
Hill and Wang, 1977.
Bu ̈rger, Peter.Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by M.
Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Burgin, Victor.Thinking Photography.London:Macmillan,1982.HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE 1980S