“I’m more interested in asking the question than answering it,” says curator Carol Squiers,who organized “What Is a Photograph?,” opened January 31st at New York’s International Center of Photography. Squiers is walking around the ICP’s downstairs galleries as young men on ladders install the final works in the 21-artist survey. In a corner sit two sculptural-looking pieces by American artist Marlo Pascual. Each includes a chromogenic print as the base for three-dimensional objects. In Untitled (2010), an old-fashioned studio portrait rendered in sherbet hues is speared by a fluorescent tube resting on a large rock. Yet for photo traditionalists, Pascual’s hybrid creations might be considered some of the more conventional contributions on view. In fact, many of the pieces in “What Is a Photograph?” were produced without a camera.

Alison Rossiter’s moody abstractions, for example, are the outcome of simply processing expired film paper. In Russian USSR (Siberia), Rossiter took the Soviet stock she purchased off the Internet (it expired in 1957, untouched) and submerged it in developer. The shadowy configuration that surfaced in 2009 reveals the paper’s past life—decades spent, perhaps, on a dusty shelf in Novosibirsk. Rossiter more directly intervened with Fuji gaslight, expired film from the 1920s, by pouring chemicals onto the paper to painterly, erotic effect; the resulting negative space suggests a woman’s parted legs. Obsolescence is a recurrent theme for the contemporary photographers included in the exhibit, as 20th-century tools began to disappear with the rise of digital technology in the 1990s. For artists still interested in analog photography, the scarcity of, say, Kodachrome film has pushed them into new territory. “Because a lot of analog materials are no longer being manufactured, I saw a lot of people [making] a kind of last-ditch effort to use a medium that they’ve worked with for a long time and love,” explains Squiers. “But it just seemed to inspire this great burst of more experimental photography.”

This current phenomenon, when considered alongside earlier Conceptual art made in the seventies and eighties, such as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter’s painted photographs, proposes “an explosion of photographic activity,” says Squiers of the exhibit. Not everyone is resisting Photoshop, however. Computer manipulation plays a prominent role in the work of 27-year-old Travess Smalley, who assembles collages onto a scanner bed, then toys with the shapes further on-screen. His pigment print Capture Physical Presence #7 holds all the playfulness of a Matisse decoupage, while the planetary forms and Hypercolor shades in another composition conjure the primitive graphics of early MTV. A

similarly galactic motif appears in Letha Wilson’s gelatin silver Photogram New York (Nova Scotia) and again in David Benjamin Sherry’s untitled teal tableau, textured with sand and evoking the pocked surface of Mars. Testing the bounds of the medium, the most far-out of Squiers’s selections are the “durational photographs” by Canadian artist Owen Kydd. Mounted on display screens, these looped videos are framed like a conventional photographic object, but the images on view evolve moment by moment, as in Pico Boulevard (Nocturne), where the light refracted onto bric-a-brac in a storefront window changes with every passing car. As for where photography is headed next, Squiers sees it going “in a million different directions,” some of which, she adds, “artists are in the process of dreaming up right now.”

“What Is a Photograph?” is on view at the International Center of Photography in New York from January 31 through May 4, 2014; icp.org

Gerhard Richter, 16.3.03, 2003
Oil on color photograph.
Photo: © Gerhard Richter, Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Lucas Samaras, Auto Polaroid, 1969-71
Color instant print (Polacolor), with hand-applied ink.
Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

David Benjamin Sherry, Lower Yosemite Falls, Yosemite, California, 2013
Chromogenic print.
Photo: © David Benjamin Sherry, Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

James Welling, 0806, 2006
Inkjet print.
Photo: © James Welling, Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London

Christopher Williams, Supplement ’13 (Mixed Typologies) #3 (detail), 2013
Offset prints and tape on paper.
Photo: © Christopher Williams, Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Matthew Brandt, Grays Lake, ID 7, 2013
Chromogenic print, soaked in Grays Lake water.
Photo: © Matthew Brandt, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Marco Breuer, Study for (Metal/Day), 2000
Gelatin silver paper, burned.
Photo: © Marco Breuer, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

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