Artists or photographers? In MAP exhibit, they're both.
Glenn McNatt, Art Critic
Baltimore Sun June 7, 2005

Since the 1970s, critics have had to make a distinction between "photographers who are artists" and "artists who use photography." The difference has to do with the way artists who work with camera images regard the history and conventions of art photography.

I think of "photographers who are artists" as people skilled in the traditional techniques and methods of the medium. A list of their names would include the usual suspects in any discussion of "great photographers" - Eugene Atget and Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange,
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon, to name just a few.

In the other category are people who think of themselves as artists in terms of the traditional fine arts media such as painting and sculpture, yet also incorporate camera imagery into their work. A highly abbreviated list of these practitioners might start with 1930s modernists like Man Ray and go through Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman to conceptualists like
Richard Prince and Adrian Piper.

Obviously both lists could be extended, with many artists straddling the line. The point is, today there's an incredible diversity of approaches to photography, greater no doubt than at any previous time in the medium's history. And unlike in earlier periods, there's no particular aesthetic orthodoxy to which photography - or any of the fine arts, for that matter - must conform to be
taken seriously.

The enormous latitude for serious work is probably the most important lesson to be taken from
Human Conditions, the exemplary group exhibition of 12 contemporary artist-cum-photographers at
Maryland Art Place this month. The works in the show range from traditional (that is to say, early modernist style) "straight" photography to surreal collage, "new topographics" (a la the groundbreaking, similarly titled 1970s Museum of Modern Art show of banal industrial landscapes) to postmodern staged scenarios and minimalist-conceptual imagery appropriated from popular culture.

I was particularly intrigued by Emily Denlinger's vivid constructed images, which combine the look of a carnival puppet theater and a gilded cut-paper collage. Denlinger's dreamlike figures - derived from magazine illustrations, ads and the like - act out surreal dramas based on unspecified incidents in the photographer's life against a glittery three-dimensional background that frames them as if on a theater stage.

Mercifully, however, one doesn't need to be a psychoanalyst or the artist's mother to appreciate these flipped-out visual fictions, which have a peculiar logic of their own that somehow the heart readily grasps.

I also was impressed by Sarah Hobbs' beautiful, large-scale color interiors and Kelly Maron's oversized trompe l'oeil contact sheet, with its rows of nearly identical passport-picture-like portraits that add up to a remarkably subtle and sophisticated meditation on the nature of personal identity.

The show also includes works by Jason Hughes, Wes Kline, John Morris, Dan Schlapbach,
Jacqueline Schlossman, Arthur Soontornsaratool, Allison Turrell, Edward Winter and Ed Worteck.

Views expressed do not reflect those of Southeast Missouri State University.