Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation proudly present Under Construction – New Positions in American Photography, a group exhibition featuring ten young American and Canadian visual artists who are all explicitly engaged in a fundamental reassessment of the value and significance of photography in the early 21st century. Even though the results of the artists' individual practices are very diverse, the mentality, methodology and presentation of their work show a number of remarkable similarities. A key characteristic is the investigative attitude they adopt in looking at the photographic image and its representation. This exhibition was first shown at Foam in Amsterdam in the fall of 2014.
The far-reaching digitisation of society exerts an unparalleled influence on a...
« It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye » Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography (1931)
Abstract photography challenges our popular view of photography as an objective image of reality by reasserting its constructed nature. In Walter Benjamin’s essay on the history of photography, the philosopher and critical theorist articulates photography’s « second nature » as its inherent ability to detach and abstract the visible from the real. Non-representational photography lives in this contested middle ground between material reality and photographic illusion—fact and fiction—first and second natures. Today, anyone who has a cell phone can take and send digital pictures instantaneously. In response to this snapshot culture, many art...