CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Photography
Photography made since the 1970s, when colour, large prints and later digital tools helped the medium stand level with painting.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Photography are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Until the 1970s most photography made as art was black and white and modest in size. That changed when William Eggleston showed his colour pictures of the American South in New York in 1976, and when Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld took large-format cameras on long road trips. Colour, once tied to advertising and family snapshots, became a deliberate choice.
Scale and invention followed. From the late 1970s Jeff Wall mounted staged scenes as backlit transparencies in lightboxes, and Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth later made prints several metres wide. Cindy Sherman cast herself in invented roles in Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), questioning whether a photograph records anything at all. Digital cameras and editing software, common by the 2000s, made seamless alteration easy. Documentary work continues alongside all this, from Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series (1990) to long projects on communities, often published as books.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Contemporary Pop
Contemporary Portrait Painting
Contemporary Portrait Photography
Contemporary Realist Portrait Photography
Contemporary Scandinavian Art
Contemporary Surrealistic
Contemporary Turkish Art
Contemporary Use of Textiles
Contemporary Vintage Photography
Cubism
Cynical Realism
Dada
Dansaekhwa
Danube School
Dau Al Set
De Stijl
Deconstructivism
Deutscher Werkbund
Die Brücke
Documentary Film
Documentary Travel Photography
Dusseldorf School of Photography
