Photograph as Material

About Photograph as Material

A photographic print is paper, emulsion and chemistry, and some artists handle it that way. Dada collage already cut photographs apart, but a more physical approach gained ground from the 1960s. Robert Heinecken assembled photographs into puzzles, cubes and layered objects, and Lucas Samaras pushed and scored the still-soft emulsion of Polaroid prints in his Photo-Transformations (1973–76).

Recent practice often makes the result hard to classify. Maurizio Anzeri embroiders coloured thread across found vintage portraits, turning faces into masks. Letha Wilson folds and pours concrete into landscape prints, and Gwon Osang builds life-size figures covered in hundreds of small photographs of the sitter. Rosângela Rennó reworks discarded negatives and archives. Look at the object as well as the image: the curl, tear, gloss and thickness of the print often matter as much as what it shows.