Notes taken at the ICP exhibit "What is a Photograph"

The ICP exhibit "What is a Photograph" approaches its titular question in a number of ways. Sculptures like Jon Rafman's "New Age Demanded" series and Marlo Pascual's "Untitled" seem to take "photograph" to mean "any image made from outside the artist". They re-appropriate 2-dimensional images (in the case of Jon Rafman, images of paintings and art sourced from the internet) into sculptures by incorporating some 3-dimensional aspect.

Other answers to this question are more subtle. David Benjamin Sherry's "Electric Crimson Mountain" is certainly a photograph, even one taken by the artist, but it has been recolored using computer programs. The rocky mountain surface is dyed a monochrome red. Divorced from its physical self by the artist's actions, the rock face appears liquid.

Gerhard Richter interferes with taken photographs in a more physical way. In "18.2.08", we see a photo of a snowy mountainside, with drops of gleaming oil paint hardened on the surface of the paper. The paint has texture here, and the mountain does not. The concept of a photo as a window is challenged here, as the photo expands inward and the paint pokes outward, reflecting light, surreal.

Here, too, the photograph is defined as art produced using the medium of photographic paper. Eileen Quinlan's "Night Flight #33" has the poaroid film damaged by a liquid that appears to have created some sort of repeating pattern in the spaces it damaged.

 And yet, we also see arguments that the photograph need not be constrained to photographic paper, nor even a still image. Owen Kydd's "Pico Boulevard (Nocturne)" is a photograph of both a place and a period of time, using video footage of still objects displayed on a screen. In the photo I took for reference, the display shows a standing sculpture of a woman under a fluorescent light. By the reflection of cars going by, we can see that the video is taken through a clear glass window.

Over time, this image changes to several other images: A yellow wall, a loghtbulb in a dark room, a dirty white and green wall with a notch in it, a fluorescent light over a bike wheel and a tin sign on a wood panel wall, a glass shelf with glass sculptures on it, and a photograph of a political party with an award plaque.

In this exhibit are also examples of more conventional photographs with unexpected sources, formats, and themes. Yto Barrada's "The Belt, Step 1-9" uses photos as a storyboard, showing how fabrics are smuggled out of Tangier.