Activities can create bonds or loose associations between art photographers in our culture. Connections can take many forms in the making of photographs: eg., working on projects, going on fields trips, exhibiting, posting online work or collaborating on photobooks. Connections are important, as the early 21st century is quite unlike the latter half of the 20th century. The former has no larger historical framework, no inevitable world-historical orientation, and no commanding narrative that is strong enough in its actual unfolding in the art world to guide us in finding our way as art photographers.
We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. We no longer have any particular aesthetic modality to shape our activities, the way we would, once, describe realism, cubism, modernist formalism or even ‘body art’ or ‘land art.’ What we have in contemporary art discourse are the various slippery meanings of a ‘contemporary art’ shaped by three main currents.
Our futures as photographic artists are entirely within the resources available to us now in our contemporary world. Our sense is one of being in, or belonging to, this time, yet at the same time, keeping a critical distance from it. We realise that total immersion in the present—an up-to-dateness–is blindness. Our sense of being in this time, these times, and out of them at the same time, is because we are aware of the darkness of those currents in our contemporary times which cast shadows on both the past and the light of the present.
It is this sense of “uncanny untimeliness”, as distinct from being utterly of, and with the times, as they present themselves to us. This is the first and most striking feature of our current contemporaneity.