PHOTOGRAPHY WITHOUT PHOTOGRAPHER

From the 1990s onwards, photography has been used as a tool by many visual artists, explored in all its myriad forms and formats. This development has been received enthusiastically by both the general public and the art market.
Several decades earlier ? in the 1950s ? many artists from different artistic trends explored photographic language, in particular when producing their publications. The 1958 photograph of Yves Klein, Un homme dans L’espace! [A Man in Space!], continues to be an icon of this approach.
Several artists, such as Christian Boltanski and Hans-Peter Feldmann, use photography as the main medium of their works. Others, such as Ben Vautier and Sol LeWitt, use it only on a sporadic basis. Others, such as Paulo Brusky, Dieter Roth and Endre Tót, integrate photography in their works through different manners.
But all these artists develop projects in the form of publications, where the photographic format remains close to its traditional use. These projects nonetheless differ from traditional photography and photo albums to the extent that the artists use a wide array of manual and technical manipulation techniques and construct sequences that, from page to page, form coherent sets that develop over time and space.
This exhibition essentially displays books and images from publications and involves the collaboration of approximately thirty artists.

Curator: Guy Schraenen
Production: Fundação de Serralves