The past decade has ushered in tremendous upheavals in photography, both in the relatively cloistered world of fine art photography and the more wide-ranging territories of everyday image making. These transformations are diametrically opposed in character, but both have their roots in the increased availability of Internet-based plat-forms for image distribution (Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, etc.), and the drastic drop in the price of relatively high quality digital image-making devices (smartphones, DSLRs). These innovations have resulted in an era in which the production and distribution of digital images has become seamlessly integrated and nearly instantaneous, precipitating a vast worldwide image data-bank that is immediately accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Consequently, the nature of the photograph has been fundamentally altered. Transmuted into a field of pixels, it is untethered from the material world, allowing unencumbered circulation from screen to screen rather than from hand to hand, while lending it unparalleled malleability by way of powerful digital imaging software such as Photoshop, which has made the dark-room trickery of yesteryear seem crude by comparison.

Many of the ramifications of this shift in photograph icontology in the popular realm have been relatively well examined. On the one hand, there is an increasing sense that now nearly nothing escapes the camera’s lens, giving rise to the justifiable concern that lives may increasingly be lived for the sake of the resultant documentation, rather than for the experience of life itself. On the other hand, there is also the somewhat contradictory sense that this urge to document may in fact be redundant, and that everything has already been photographed. In other words, just as photography has reached the point of its greatest abundance, it may well have also reached the point of exhaustion. This does not necessarily mean that every possible picture has already been made, thought his astronomically improbable scenario increasingly feels like a real possibility. Rather, the sheer amount of images, and the near-constant immersion in their churning digital stream, has a way of rendering even novel images, or image types, into banalities. An overactive form of visual literacy becomes an affliction through which new images are so quickly assimilated that their affect is dampened, almost as a form of self-defense. If anyone sat slack-jawed and enraptured with even a handful of the images that cross their paths on a daily basis, after all, they might soon forget to feed themselves.

As this diminution of photographic affect began to gather momentum during the latter half of the previous decade, it began to muscle its way out of the popular realm and put pressure on artists who work with photography. By that time, the art world had begun to look beyond the grand cinematic photographs of North American artists such as Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, and Philip-Lorcadi Corcia, and the austere typologies of Becher school acolytes such as Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Candida Höfer, but there was no solid sense of new movements in photography to take their place. As with the rest of the contemporary image world, photography as a medium seemed to have lost its mooring. Gradually, how-ever, a group of North American artists began to emerge who responded to the world of dematerialized images in a manner that delineated myriad modes of opposition and expansion, mounted in an attempt to push photography forward at a moment when it seemed at an endpoint, and conjured up its historical essence in a time obsessed with the perpetual present. These artists are a relatively heterogeneous bunch, but they share some common ground. Most conspicuously, this kinship comes in the form of an engagement with photographic materiality.

The work of Mariah Robertson, Ryan Foerster, and Josh Tonsfeldt engages directly with photography’s basic building blocks, some which are rapidly becoming antiquated (photographic paper, photographic chemistry)and others which are taking their place (rolls of printer paper, inkjet ink). When Robertson splashes photo chemistry with painterly panache, or Foerster leaves expired sheets of photographic paper exposed to the elements, or Tonsfeldt prints ghostly inkjet images on the back of found photographs and splashes them with water, allow-ing them to bleed and drip into near indecipherability, they attempt to imbue photography with a physical dimension that was often overlooked, even before the advent of digital technology.

My own work, along with that of Elad Lassry and Erin Shirreff, takes a different tack in addressing photographic materiality, and hybridizes photography with sculpture makes images that read like product photographs and fashion spreads made strange through subtle and uncanny trespasses against standard operating procedure. He puts these images in colour-matched frames, which he has recently begun to embellish with alien sculptural elements such as tea towels, stuffed satin, and whimsically shaped pieces of powder-coated metal that recall the work of Jean Arp. Similarly, I wrap the frames of my photographs of architectural details of Los Angeles with materials used in construction or home décor, in an attempt to not simply picture the city, but embody something of its feel as well. Shirreff’s multifaceted work includes moody, chiaroscuroed photographs of what appear to be archeological relics, but are in fact sculptures that she makes specifically to be photographed, which are then destroyed.

Lucas Blalock, John Houck, and Owen Kydd each deploy digital technology in novel ways, imbuing it with material qualities. Blalock takes a painter’s approach to Photoshop manipulation, making intentionally ham-fisted use of the powerful imaging software, foregrounding its presence in a manner that he often compares to Bertolt Brecht’s technique of alienation. Houck’s optically supercharged folded prints, which he calls “Aggregates,” are physical manifestations of a complex, multi-step process that begins with a computer algorithm written by Houck himself, harkening back to his days as a high-level computer programmer. Kydd, a former longtime assistant of Jeff Wall, takes the cinematic approach to photography pioneered by Wall and others and extends it to its logical end point, making use of digital video technology to create what he calls “durational photographs,” which use flat screen televisions as the supports for his subtly moving images.

Though the work of these artists is innovative, and has begun to move photography forward, it has also created a fascinating ripple effect backwards through photographic history. Artists such as James Welling, Jan Groover, Ellen Carey, and Barbara Kasten, who have each had robust careers stretching back decades, have begun to be seen in a renewed light. Welling has emerged as a loadstone for the current generation of photographic artists, a number of whom were his students at UCLA. His kaleidoscopic photograms of flowers, in particular, served to reassert the validity of working directly with the traditional materials of photography, while much of the rest of the photographic community were focused on the innovations brought on by digital cameras and large-scale inkjet prints. Similarly, Carey has worked with the unique qualities of Polaroid film for the majority of her career, whether painting on and with their pliable emulsion, or creating large-scale painterly “pulls” with the Polaroid 20×24 camera through a process of her own devising.Groover and Kasten approach photography as a means to document arrangements of objects and their interactions with light, which results in works that sit between sculpture and photography. Groover made the kitchen into her studio, creating photographs of profound formal beauty that are also subtle jabs at traditional notions of the proper place of women’s work. Kasten creates intricate, eye-popping assemblages in her studio that recall both the staid geometries and limited pallet of Constructivism, and funky, luridly-coloured 1980s design, like that of theMemphis group. The work of each of these four artists proposes the photograph to be either an object in itself, or a medium through which to create a unique type of quasi-sculptural space. They undeniably laid the ground-work for the younger generation of photographic artists working today, despite the fact that it was created before the current digital deluge. That this is the case should not be a surprise: as history moves forward, it shakes one’s sense of the past’s solidity, revising and renewing how it is viewed.

Ellen Carey is an internationally recognized photo-based artist and uses a large-format Polaroid 20×24 camera to create her well-known Pulls and site-specific installations. Considered a pioneer in the cameraless photogram and lens-based Polaroid photographic and contemporary art field, Carey is also an independent scholar, writing under her practice Pictus & Writ in the tradition of artist-on-artist. Carey lives and works in Connecticut.

Ryan Foerster embraces chance and the transformative effects of time, weather, and other organic processes in the making of his abstract photographs, typically placing light-sensitive paper on the ground outdoors for extended periods of time or covering the paper with dirt, leaves or food scraps. His multidisciplinary exhibitions often include a combination of sculptures, films/videos, and handmade ‘zines. Foerster received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was born in Newmarket, Ontario, and now lives and works in New York.

Chris Wiley has made photographs that depict vernacular architecture, particularly in the Los Angeles area. His latest series, titled Dingbats, emphasizes the physical qualities of the images by framing them in discordant materials like industrial carpeting, stucco, and vinyl flooring. Wiley draws connections between image and object while maintaining the seemingly arbitrary nature of the conflations.

Wylie has written essays for numerous exhibition catalogues, and is a regular contributor to Frieze, artforum.com, and Kaleidoscope, where he is also an editor-at-large. He has worked on numerous exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, was an assistant curator on the 8th Gwangju Biennial, and served as a curatorial advisor and head catalogue writer for “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 55th Venice Biennale. His work has been presented in recent exhibitions at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris and MoMA PS1, New York. Wiley holds a BA in photography and art history from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in contemporary art theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He lives and works in New York.

Curated by Chris Wiley