Reconsidering the Postmodern Canon

Jeanne Dreskin in conversation with artists Harry Gamboa Jr., Todd Gray, and Nicole Miller

Panel at Photo L.A. | February 1, 2020

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, notions of a "postmodern image," located primarily in photography, emerged within American art world discourses. The appropriative practices of artists later associated with the "Pictures Generation" became paradigmatic of what many critics and art historians saw as this theoretically inflected turn in image-making. In their efforts to articulate photographic shifts way from late-modernist tenets, however, preeminent histories largely foreclosed the inclusion of artists whose work remained invested in sociopolitical concerns and imbricated politics of cultural identity introduced during the civil rights era. Positioning a reassessment of these narratives as a point of departure, panelists consider expanded, intersectional notions of photographic postmodernism and their relevance to each of their practices, which share efforts to problematize the camera's role in both historical and contemporary constructions of identity.

This panel drew from my doctoral dissertation research, which grappled with how preeminent histories of photographic postmodernism—in their efforts to articulate photographic shifts away from late-modernist tenets—foreclosed the inclusion of artists whose work remained invested in sociopolitical concerns and imbricated politics of cultural identity introduced during the 1960s.