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1. At least 2 paragraphs long.
2. For Paragraph 1, summarize the main points that Charlotte Cotton is discussing. For example, give me an introduction to the reading, outline her thesis, discuss the photographers and their photography, subject matter, conceptual aspects of the work, the metaphors Cotton discusses, and so on.
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Photography Is Magic
1
Essay by Charlotte Cotton
20
Artists
Asha Schechter, Charlie White, Sean Raspet,
Lucas Blalock, Michele Abeles, Marina Pinsky, John Lehr,
Jason Evans, Talia Chetrit, Shirana Shahbazi, Erin Shirre!,
Joshua Citarella, Phil Chang, Elad Lassry, Alexandra Leykauf,
Victoria Fu, Yosuke Takeda, Emmeline de Mooij,
Hannah Whitaker, Taisuke Koyama, Soo Kim, Artie Vierkant,
Owen Kydd, Marten Elder, Matthew Porter, Brea Souders,
Sara Cwynar, Anthony Lepore, Andrey Bogush, Stefan Burger,
Chris Wiley, Brandon Lattu, Lotta Antonsson, Anne de Vries,
Brendan Fowler, Daniel Gordon, Brian Bress, Nancy de Holl,
Rachel de Joode, Arthur Ou, Bryan Dooley, Leslie Hewitt,
Yuki Kimura, Batia Suter, Eileen Quinlan, Lucas Knipscher,
Farrah Karapetian, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Daniel Shea,
Darren Harvey-Regan, Phil Maisel, Sara VanDerBeek,
Bianca Brunner, Go Itami, Annie MacDonell, Jessica Eaton,
Amir Zaki, Shannon Ebner, Clunie Reid, Antoine Catala,
Annette Kelm, John Houck, Elisa Sighicelli, Florian Maier-Aichen,
Will Rogan, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs,
Nerhol (Ryuta Iida and Yoshihisa Tanaka), Matt Keegan,
Sam Falls, Lindsey White, Walead Beshty, Takaaki Akaishi,
Abigail Reynolds, Matt Lipps, Miguel ngel Tornero,
Jon Rafman, Josh Kline, Timur Si-Qin, Letha Wilson,
Joshua Kolbo, Katja Novitskova, Kate Steciw, Carter Mull
349
Artists statements
377
Acknowledgments
378
Artist index
379
Reproduction credits
Essay by Charlotte Cotton
MAGIC
Close- up magicthe kind of intimate, right- in- front- of- you sleight of hand that
brings pure wonder and delightis the inspiration for this book, which gathers
the work and words of more than eighty artists operating in the related &eld of
photographic magic. The idea that close- up magic has bearing on the critical mass
of contemporary photographic art centers on their shared capacity to recalibrate
established creative forms in ways that relate to our collective present: to conjure
imaginative and open- ended experiences and trains of thought in the viewer.1
Magic in both realms is a multisensory experience that callsinstantaneously,
and without our consciously knowing itupon our capacity to script our own
sense of visual reality.
Lets begin by exploring the literal meaning of close- up magic, its characteristics and
contexts, and its e!ects upon the audiences that gather for intimate performances
each night across the globe. With their skillful dexterity and the subtle physicality
of their work, close- up magicians are di!erent from the charismatic illusionists
who perform dazzling visual spectacles to large theater audiences. Close- up magic
is a much more intimate a!air, often performed for a tightly knit sphere of fellow
magicians and small, discerning audiences. As the name of this form of magic
su’ests, the viewers sit close to the table and the intensity of the magicians rapid
prestidigitation. The typical tools of close- up magicians are decks of poker- size
playing cards, coins, cups, and balls. The magicians (ourishes and misdirections
are played out on and above green baize tabletops. The card masters of magic
(ip, slide, load, and pocket their ordinary, mass- produced decks of
cards; they focus their audiences attention upon force cards and they false
shu)e. The conception and authorship of sequences used in close- up magic
are acknowledged within the fraternity of magicians; each generation in turn
reconceives these tricksrespecting their origins, but testing how time- honored
maneuvers can be made to work their magic on contemporary viewers.
The art of magic is predicated on a dedication to practice: that is, repeating and
repeating each complex sequence of movements until it is embedded seamlessly
into the magicians muscle memory. But the ostensible repetition of movements
or outcomes in the performance of close- up magicthe gestures the audience
sees, or at least perceivesis often realized by a series of di!erent sleights of hand
with seemingly identical conclusions.2 The magicians movements are skilled and
fast, but not faster than the eye can seejust quicker than the visual systems of
1
1
What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of its e!ect but the magicians ability to su’est
any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive and more of them quite obvious. Adam Gopnik,
The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life, New Yorker (March 17, 2008): 5669.
2
The space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of MAGIC, a world in which everything
is repeated and in which everything participates in a signi&cant context. Such a world is structurally di!erent
from that of the linear world of history in which everything has causes and will have consequences. Vilm Flusser,
Towards a Philosophy of Photography (original German pub. 1983; this citation, London: Reaktion, 2000), 9.
Start Here
the brain can understand given the distractions that the magician puts into play.
Magicians harness our human tendency to believe that we are at liberty to direct
our attention at will, and that we can visually and cognitively unravel a magic trick
and attain a state of clear perception. By our nature, we assume that if a repeated
action looks the same each time then it is derived from a repeated process.
Once we enter into the tantalizing psychological frame and physical space
of close- up magiceven while we are consciously suspicious that a trick is being
performedour attention is deliberately guided by the magician into a realm
where the subterfuge can be camou(aged by carefully scripted dodging.
The audience in the nonsensical arena of close- up magic not only suspends its
disbelief, it plays an active part in the performance. As viewers, then, we feel
in control of our experience, set by the frame that the magician creates;
we automatically comprehend the experience as one that belongs to us.
A close- up magic trick can be heightened by magicians incorporating scripted
mistakes into their performanceswith a master magician, no fumble,
no awkward exchange with audience members is likely to be unintentional.
These purposeful (ourishes impart to the audience a perception of spontaneous
happenstance as the trick unfolds in real time. Most important, these mistakes
bring the act of magic into the present, and the sense that the progress of a magical
encounter is happening for the very &rst time. Magicians use language with great
speci&city in order to direct and misdirect our attentions.3 In e!ect, the magic
begins when its mechanics and linguistic tools are integrated into the evolving
present of the imaginary correlations of a tricks sequence.
It is important to remember that magic is not merely the sum of its technics
and orchestration. What the magician does is use his or her skill and tools to
create an arena within the viewers imagination for the magic to happen.4 The e!ect
of magic is in part after the trick, held in the stories we tell ourselves once the
experience is over. The audience turns magic into language and hence into meaning
and narrative, all the while knowing that it is impossible for language to fully
articulate the experience of magic and its playfulnessthose things are de&ned only
temporarily in the presence of the magician. A magic trick, like all performative art
forms played well, creates the conditions for us to explore imaginative possibilities,
while sharing in a slice of the real.5 It is we who &ll the empty cup, envelope,
or playing- card packet with the kaleidoscope of our temporarily collectivized
consciousness in the presence of magic.6
3
Once a natural, rather than supernatural, basis for theatrical magic is established, its undoubted ability to radically
disorder our epistemological assumptions about the world can be understood in terms of the magicians capacity to
establish and maintain a frame through which simulated power over natural causality is experienced as real. In this
sense, therefore, this form of magic is not only secular, but also simulacral. And it is the intentional presence and in&nite
malleability of this reifying frame, whether in the form of narrative or other contingent means, that brings simulacral
magic alongside its sibling arts, and not least the visual arts with which it now shares more conceptual territory than
perhaps at any other time. Jonathan Allen, Magic Show (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2009), 21.
4
Magic only happens in the spectators mind, everything else is distraction. Jamy Ian Swiss, quoted in Gopnik,
The Real Work, 58.
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PHOTOGRAPHY IS MAGIC
The connection of close- up magic to contemporary photography is in the idea that
magic is something that happens in the viewers imaginations. Like magic tricks, the
works of art shown in this volume provide visual frames within which we are invited
to focus our attention. Photographic magic opens us to multiple possible meanings
of our visual world, and calls upon our collective ways of looking at it; it also o!ers
us ideas of what that visual world might imply about our contemporary condition.
Photography is a form of magicor to put it another way, the photographic provides
cerebral experiences for the viewer that are equivalent to magic. Just as sleight
of hand facilitates, but does not fully materialize, the magical experience that resides
in the dynamic of our own imaginations, so too photographywhen liberated from
a pedestrian de&nition as the sum of its mechanics and materials, its chemistry
and softwarecan spark the occurrence of magic in our minds. The artists
represented in this book reconsider photographic traditions and implement new
skills that have been incorporated into the contemporary photographic repertoire.
These photographic tools for sleight of hand, which derive from the span of
photographys rich history, from analog through to its newest imaging technologies,
are all set within a framework of the present moment of visual culture.
Photography Is Magic privileges the potentials of ideas over the virtuosity of
individual authors or the perfection of techniques and mechanisms: as with
actual close- up prestidigitation, ideas are what ultimately allow the magic
to happen. The works shown here take into account the many ways in which
viewers relate to photographic media, materials, and image cultures in our
current media environment. They are potent in decidedly new ways, and
speci&cally because of the terms of engagement they propose: calling upon
our ability to construct meaning from our collective muscle memory
of making and consuming photographic imagery.
The artists featured herelike the magicians who masterfully tap into the
psychological and neural systems of the spectatorare astutely aware of their
viewers perceptions and trains of thought in ways that are grounded in our
shared visual culture. They not only acknowledge, but stage viewership at this
contemporary moment, in which there is unprecedented compatibility and
transparency between viewers and artists, a time unlike any before in history
in terms of our ability to comprehend, access, and use photographic tools for
capturing, rendering, and disseminating visual ideas.
5
Magiciansengage [our minds] in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them
from becoming schematized. Ibid., 67.
6
The pleasure we desire from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty it can be clothed in,
but also to its essential quality of being present. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (original French pub. 1863;
this citation, London: Penguin, 2010), 2.
3
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In close- up magic, the stakes are high in that the audience is often made up
of fellow magicians and discerning enthusiasts. Similarly, most of the artists
here operate in a circle of fellow practitioners with whose work they are in direct
and active discourse; they are navigating within the same image environment
as their near sphere of viewers.
Photography as magic is a protean idea, situated as it is in the experience of the
protean present. It is not a proposal for the future, nor is it a speculation about
the psychological or moral destination of new imaging technologies or the social
utility of photographic images. By the same token, the artists in Photography Is Magic
are not approached as the contemporary end to a linear, canonical history of art
photography, supplying a fresh vocabulary of stylistic surfaces to existing ideas.
Where we do see citations from photographys past, they are likely premeditated
camou(agesmisdirections, reanimationsessentially, knowingly made (ourishes
that create these magical photographic experiences.
By considering contemporary photographic practices through the lens of magic,
this book has a particular take on the current state of photographys presenceits
status as cultural materialwithin art. This is de&nitely not the full story of how
photographys analog traditions and materials have been interplayed in recent
years with phenomena such as the newly acknowledged medium of pixel- based
software, the predominance of digital capture, or the possibilities of 3D
rendering. In this context, the ways in which photographic materiality can
be experiencedwhat it can represent and promptare at play in importantly
encompassing and expansive ways.7 There are nuanced reconsiderations
of that materialitywhich of course constitutes an important part of the heritage
of photography as artbut clearly there are also equally valid and complex inquiries
into how to materialize contemporary photographic image culture, the scope
of which is set well beyond the con&nes of artistic practice per se. Among the
topics under investigation are: the extent to which technologies themselves are
authoring the images we see, how the movement and behavior of so many
of the images currently being generated can be considered forms themselves
within art, and how the pervasive automation of photographic rendering
has made software the dominant photographic medium.8
7
Each practice exploring these questions hinges on an implicit de&nition of what the photographs material is. These
investigationsconsidering the images material in terms of a container for manufactured desire (that needs not to be
photographic at all but simply act like a photograph) is a really inventive solution. Lucas Blalock, in A Conversation
with Kate Steciw, Lay Flat magazine blog, March 5, 2012; www.lavalette.com/a- conversation- with- kate- steciw/.
8
None of the new media authoring and editing techniques we associate with computers are simply a result of media
being digital. Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 148.
9
If we think about photography as a limited mimesis, as a poor copy, instead of a good (or indexical) one, then the
photographer is not a cataloguer of fact, nor a purveyor of reportage, but instead is participating in this centuries- old
activity of drawing the world closer, attending to its conditions, to the terms of our looking, and, in turn, trying to keep
the picture collapsing into image. Lucas Blalock, Drawing Machine, Foam, no. 38 (May 2014): 208.
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In this period, when a critical mass of artists is widening rather than attempting to
isolate the idea of photography, the discourse is opening up, linking contemporary
artistic practice to much older, and deeply human, histories of mark making,
envisioning, and modeling new paradigms in ways that take into account cultural
changes of the moment.9 Only time will tell to what extent the works created
by the artists represented here will be assimilated into a discrete history of
the medium of photography (somehow separate from the rest of art history)
that is conventionally thought to begin in the 1830s and is housed in encyclopedic
archives. Or, indeed, how photography viewed as a subject in academia or
a discipline in art schools will be maintained or reshaped in light of contemporary
practices. The photographic works shown here are not in a state of limbo; they
are not awaiting the appraisal of the institutional structures of art and a future
designation of cultural importance. Part of their signi&cance is in the purposeful
precariousness of their making and meaning,10 and in the rapidly evolving context
of viewership in which the artists create and operate. This accumulation of new
ideas and experiences of the photographic is generated through artistic practices
and motivations, creating imaginative possibilities from the contemporary image
environment at large.
Within this exciting recalibration of photographic ideas and materials is the use of
explicitly iterative processes: ideas repeat and morph over the course of the artists
practice. Photographic magic is an arena in which the meaning of an individual work
of art is invariably both contingent upon and equal to what is made before and after
it by its creator. This in&nitely additive way of working has created a new conceptual
framework for artists working with photographic ideas. The contributions that
Photoshop software has made to this new frame are undeniable, especially in the
hands and imaginations of younger practitioners who may have little or no psychic
ba’age of allegiance to photographys analog past.11 Photoshop brings the practices
and lexicon of automation, repetition, and versioning to the fore.
It is no coincidence that this is happening in the context of a networked,
commodity- centric culturewhere a wholesale movement away from privileging
the source or original is coded into every creative photographic gesture.
This opens up new directions for contemporary art photographers, who are helping
to de&ne our image world and questioning it from within, and who presume that
their works are experienced from the vantage point of this image- making epoch.
The conventional strictures of the marketplace have included a preference for
5
10
Precariousness is the centre of the formal universe in which nothing is durable, everything is movement: the trajectory
between two places is favoured in relation to the place itself. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How
Art Reprograms the World (Berlin: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), 49.
11
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generations mythos of
phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will
lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating and they will remain reduced to the freak- show
position of most twentieth- century tech art. Bruce Sterling, An Essay on the New Aesthetic, Wired.com, April 2, 2012;
www.wired.com/2012/04/an- essay- on- the- new- aesthetic/.
unique works of art, signature styles, and consistent methodologies that allow
viewers to distinguish one creator from another. Such conservative expectations
have done much to repress iterative photographic practices and discourses
concerning the inherent mutability of photography and its capacity for in&nite
reproduction.12 It is around these unstable conditions of photographic properties
and behaviorsrather than its institutional characterizationthat much of the
most pertinent contemporary art photography now pivots.13
CONSTANTS BECOME VARIABLES14
The great majority of the photographic works represented in this book were
made since 2010. Collectively, they provide a timely narrative of art photographys
relationship with the technologies of contemporary image culture; they also
implicitly show us the critical positions that artists are adopting within media
systems. Ours is a cultural chapter in which the actual and symbolic impact of digital
hardware and softwarethe tools that create the preponderance of todays images
begins to shape the story of the small constituency of contemporary art photography.
The previous episodes of this technological narrative of photographya story that
began in the 1990swere strikingly di!erent from the events that are unfolding
today. Now, with the bene&t of hindsight, we can see that the end of the twentieth
century was dominated by concerns about the supposed impending obsolescence
of photographys analog apparatuses and materials. Serious questions were
raised about whether the hard- won identity of the medium of photography
as able to transcend its mechanics in the hands of artistscould be sustained
in the monolithically (and all too democratically) automated character of the
digital. The governing desire of most established art practitioners was to locate
the best ways for the new (at least new to art) algorithmic and pigment- based
rendering techniques to simulate the beloved heritage of analog photographys
history of craftsmanship; many sought some sort of equivalence in aims, skill
requirements, and aesthetic ranges from the new tools for photographic capture
and postproduction. In the late- twentieth- century image environment, much
of the focus was on ways to use digital tools for what was an essentially static idea
of how photographic art could be made and read. And this &xed concept extended
the shelf life of an equally entrenched idea: that a primary role of the photographic
12
Production thus becomes the lexicon of practice, which is to say, the intermediary material from which new utterances
can be articulated, instead of representing the end result of anything. What matters is what we make of the elements at
our disposal. We are tenants of culture. Bourriaud, Postproduction, 24.
13
The point for me is to propose and develop forms of post- representationalist photography and imaging wherein both
the materiality of a work and its relations of photography are intrinsic to what the work is. Trevor Paglen, in Julian
Stallabrass, Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: An Interview with Trevor Paglen, October, no. 138 (Fall 2011): 4.
14
Once software enters the pictureconstants become variables. Manovich, Software Takes Command, 157.
artist was to subvert the common usage of commercially available photographic
technologies in a critical, rare&ed, and quasi- timeless way to create enduring,
&nal object forms. This paradigm, it was thought, would preserve photographys
place within art.
The decisions that photographic artists faced in the early 2000s, by contrast, were
about how to respond to the increasingly a!ordable, high -end digital photographic
tools, and whether to accept these technologies as the new default for creative
image- making. Digital capture, Photoshop, and pigment printing (to name just
three digital tools that directly and indelibly impacted artistic practices in the
2000s) were received in a variety of ways by deliberating photographic artists.
Digital hardware and materials were rejected outright by some practitioners in
favor of the perceived authenticity and photographic continuity (albeit now with
rather nostalgic, even mournful, undertones) of analog and chemical techniques.
Despite a great decrease in the manufacture of photographic &lm and chemical
papers over the past twenty years, the disappearance of analog materials has not
become a reality thus far. Other photographic artists embraced the narrative
potential of imaging software to construct pictorial alternative realities, often
provoking uncanny reactions in viewers, residual belief in photography as a
veracious medium was now dismantled. Perhaps most important, digital tools
and their outputs became naturalized into analog working practices and thought
processes: some artists committed themselves to learning these new ways of
working like a second language, while others collaborated with technicians in
revamped photo labs to ease the incorporation of digital materials and techniques
into their otherwise essentially unchanged processes.
These generalized reactions had particular resonance for students in art- school
photography programs in the 2000s (many of the artists represented in this
book are among that constituency), when there was still a pervasive pedagogical
view that artists operated outside the commercially oriented technological
developments and other mainstream possibilities for image-making. In the &rst
decade of the new millennium, many art schools considered their training remit to
be part of a trajectory that started in the 1970s, in which artists used photographic
tools (such as large- format &lm cameras) that were as yet technically unsurpassed,
and were decidedly separate from the burgeoning industry for digital capture and
postproduction tools that were being adopted by the image- making industries.
In the realm of art photography, pixel- based software and scanning hardware were
likely to be hybridized with photographic &lm and chemical papers, extending the
life but not fundamentally changing the parameters of photographic possibilities
in art- school and market models. Furthermore, art students, alongside artists
employed as lab technicians, were discovering that Photoshop software could
be used in more innovative and meaningful ways than merely simulating analog
retouching and wet- darkroom techniques.
7
Photoshop has a dual heritage. It was born out of software development and shaped
into a commercial product against the backdrop of professional image- making
culture of the 1980s. The manual interface of Photoshops <ers and layers and
its step- by- step processes were set up to provide a continuous (although abstracted)
connection to the conventions of photographic methods. But Photoshops lineage
of code also features another aspect: algorithmic, strictly rule- bound procedures.
Signi&cantly, these automated procedures permit any pixel- based element of an
image to be independently altered, with no material consequences to any other
image element. While this characteristic can be seen as a related but hyper
version of photomontage, or of compound- negative printing techniques,
Photoshop softwares inherent capacity to further liberate the photographic
from simulating the perspective of monocular human vision has brought about
a profound shift in the use and experience of the photographic in recent years.
Software has, in fact, altered every familiar relationship, every convention that
art photographers have developednotwithstanding the enduring qualities
and default characteristics that historic photographic materials supposedly a!ord.
Every move made in the process of photographic capture, crafting, and formal
resolution is now about active choices . By the mid-2000s, Photoshop began to have
a genuinely creative impact upon artists strategies. At the same time, it was the
prevalent application being used throughout photographic industries, marking
practically all commercial images with its perfecting aesthetic. The distinctions
between the tools and material results of professional and artistic working practices
were beginning to be undeniably porous.
In the same decade came the technological advent that would so completely alter
the baseline of contemporary art: the surge of social media and mobile- technology
camerasand with that, the ubiquity of socially networked photographic images
in mass circulation. The resulting changed environment calls so much about
the status of artistic photographic practice into question, especially in relation to
the networked production and access in the online image world.15 At this point,
the notion that art photography could be separated from the empirical mass
of contemporary image production simply by virtue of its craftsmanship, use
of particular apparatuses, or the viewing context of gallery walls alone began
to seem fundamentally beside the point.
15
Staging di!erent rates of circulation is one type of routine appropriate to art in digital economicsits a tactic
for escaping the blind spot that results from moving along at the same rate as the market. David Joselit, After Art
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 89.
16
Unlike the previous mode of authorship, where the artist or institution de&ned context, the divide between artist
and viewer becomes negligible when users of social media are able to more powerfully de&ne the context (and thus the
meaning) of an artwork. Brad Troemel, Art after Social Media, in Omar Kholeif, ed., You Are Here: Art After the Internet
(Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse, 2014), 39.
These twenty- &rst- century factors mark the profound changes in the broad terrain
of image culture and, concomitantly, in the values ascribed to and the readings of
artistic photographic practices. The conventional distinctions between artists and
amateurs, producers and consumers of photographic images and objects have become
unclear in interesting ways; indeed, these terms themselves are now increasingly
mutable and capable of being converged. Many of the artists coming through
art- school programs in the past decade have chosen to face head- on the deeper
meanings and implications of this paradigm shift as it a!ects creative practices
and the circulation of their ideas.16 We begin to see the tangible implications
of operating in this utterly new media environment, where the origins, behavior,
and reading of the photographic have all been culturally upended.17
Purposefully destabilized photographic practices are coming into play, and
photographic objects no longer necessarily constitute the formal conclusionthe
end resultof artistic inquiries.18 This artist- led approach has been largely at odds
with the prevailing characterization of art photography in art institutions and
marketplaces. Not surprisingly, these established centers prefer a more stable idea
of photographys cultural possibilities; certainly they have a vested interest in the
supposition that photographic art objects themselves can be somehow understood in
a di!erent way to the lived experience of making and viewing photographic imagery.
Photography Is Magic highlights artistic approaches that may be seen as belonging
to the same system of image versioning and (ux as any other authored
photographic idea circulating in the current image environment. The force
of the global developments that a!ect our image/media landscape are such that
the ubiquitous apparatuses and automated systems have now become constants.
Increasingly, contemporary art photographers are working with the possibilities
of creating variance within this visual system.19 They deploy destabilized practices
and explicitly iterative dynamics to create photographic objects and gestures
that are intended to be experienced in this moment of a decidedly (attenedeven
horizontalimage hierarchy. The systematized rules of contemporary image-
making have become the terrain that artists are using as a site of play, proving how
far they can go in creating contemporary experiences of photographic magic that
in the vein of real magicare orchestrated very precisely for the present moment
and contingent on activating viewers experiences and assumptions
of the contemporary visual world.
9
17
Culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-
creation tools used by mass- media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those
