Beyond The Apparatus

The Fulcrum Press Gallery, Los Angeles, 2024

Fulcrum Press Gallery, Los Angeles

May 11 – June 15, 2024

Artists:

David Campany
Edward Cushenberry
Eduardo Consuegra
Don Edler
Luke Harnden
Steve Kado
Soo Kim
Jacob Murtle
Juliana Paciulli
Pacifico Silano

Before photography became a tool to fix the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional surface of an object, society relied on artists to depict reality. Photography relieved artists of this duty. It can be argued that the way we view the world since the invention of photography is through a series of images. This multiplicity of images has allowed reality to be bent to the will of its handlers, creating multiples that lead to multiple realities. Thus, images lost our trust to depict reality. Photography is no longer a reliable tool except to its user, and to those who believe in the merit of that user. So maybe, the power of the image has shifted back to the artist’s ability to use the medium of photography to depict reality.

It is the system of photography itself that is instrumental in asking the critical questions, and these questions, rather than the material that elevates the medium. Inherent in its use, photography has always reacted to both technology and science. Perhaps, having reached the edge of both, photography is moving towards a place where there is no longer a normal system, there is no order of operation, becoming a truly conceptual medium. And maybe, the material of photography is now only another simulacrum attempting to trigger multiple levels of memory in order to arrive at more malleable levels of engagement than the cold digital system that is the contemporary order of the day. If we, the users of the medium, continue to explore the ethos of photography, and its output continues to be dematerialized in digital form, where does that take us as a society and what is it that now constitutes a photographic object?

3 x Margaret Bourke-White, 2024. Installation view.

Teresa Wright as Margaret Bourke-White in The Margaret Bourke-White Story, 1960

Candice Bergen as Margaret Bourke-White in Gandhi, 1982

Farrah Fawcett as Margaret Bourke-White in Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White, 1989

Collection David Campany