Photography Objet Manque

1 Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” Art in America, January 1970, p. 79.

2 Ibid.

3 Malraux, quoted in Geraldine A. Johnson, “Introduction,” in Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 1998, p. 2.

4 Quoted by Roxana Marcoci in The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1830 to Today, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 12. “The Original Copy” exhibition raised provocative issues regard- ing the relationship between photography and its objects and was instrumental to me in the writing of this essay.

5 Rachel Harrison, “Rachel Harrison and Nayland Blake,” Bomb 105, Fall 2008, available at bombsite.com.

6 Among the notable recent shows that have included these art- ists and/or others engaged in the conceptual aspects of photography were “New Photography 2009” (2010) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, featuring six young photographers with a studio-based practice, and “The Anxiety of Photography” (2011), an overview of 18 artists at the Aspen Museum of Art.

7 See, for example, Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1975, p. 35. He writes, “Now it is essential to the notion of an image, or imitation, that it fall short in some way of its original; if the image were perfect—‘expressing in every point the entire reality’ of its object—it ‘would no longer be an image,’ but another example of the same thing (Cratylus 432; trans. Jowett).”

8 The show, curated by Andria Hickey, is titled “A Promise Is a Cloud.”

9 Emma Allen, “The New Collage: How Photographers Are Rewriting Our Stories,” Modern Painters, November 2010, available at artinfo.com.

10 Quote from an online video produced in conjunction with “New Photography 2009” at the Museum of Modern Art, available at moma.org.

11 Samuel Beckett, “Proust” (1931), in Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, London, Cadler, 1965, p. 23.


CLAIRE BARLIANT is a New York-based art critic.