Week 8 -What use is the term ‘expanded photography’ for thinking about the possibilities of contemporary photography?

The term ‘expanded photography’ is often used to describe the very broad nature of photography in many forms such as personal, scientific, journalistic, commercial or art photography and in which the boundaries between each form is often blurred as Cramerotti explains (2011).  This is a useful concept, given that we create and view so much photography content in our daily lives, it can be difficult to strictly categorise each form.

I’m also interested in photography as an artform, especially the concept of a highly composed scene, yet still relies on capturing the ‘perfect’ moment.  The medium of photography can be artistic and creative, however it is still recording a specific time and place at a functional level.  Artist, Huang Pang-Chuan, uses this element of photography to his advantage in his work, Last Year When the Train Passed By (2018) in which he takes photos from a train and then visits the people and places captured in those original photos a year later and photographs the changes and progress over that time as we watched in class this week.  Photography allows him to timestamp a moment in time, while building a chronological narrative and allowing us to wonder, what will happen next in another year’s time, or to reflect on our own passing on time.  Pang-Chuan’s photography is artistic, but he is also using journalistic and historical elements, therefore an expanded view of photography makes sense in terms of his work and I really enjoy his storytelling approach.

Expanded photography as a term, could be useful for the future of photography as the lines between the mediums uses blurs even further, as Lucy Soutter explains that the concept continues to expand over time into the future (2016).  It could be helpful for contemporary photographers to become expanded photographers themselves, taking on a range of work be it commercial, journalistic or artistic and potentially opening up further opportunities for work by combining various methods and skills.

References

Cramerotti A. 2011, ‘ The truth of experience. Notes of expanded photography’, blog post  Digicult, July-August, viewed 27 November 2020, < http://digicult.it/digimag/issue-066/the-truth-of-experience-notes-of-expanded-photography/>

Soutter L. 2016), ‘Expanded Photography: Persistence of the PhotographicPhotoResearcher 26, University of forward thinking Westminster, UK.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *