April 1 to May 14, 2009
Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 1, 5-7 pm

CATALOGUING ATTITUDES:
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE ARCHIVE

Curators: Beatrix Reinhardt and Siona Wilson

Myra Greene * Charlotte Haslund-Christensen

Tarrah Rajnak and Wilka Roig * Fredrik Marsh

Exhibition Concept: This exhibition will bring together a small group of contemporary photographers whose work suggests the idea of the catalogue or the archive. Each artist organizes his or her images into a systematic framework that provides a visual coherence and conceptual logic. Certain artists take the body as their subject and this is defined by gender and pose or by visual codes of ethnicity or culture. Others might address the cataloguing of space, place, and landscape. The idea of the catalogue was particularly important in the nineteenth-century when photography was understood as a ‘rational’ visual tool and allied with the emerging disciplines of, for example, anthropology and criminology. Although each photographer evokes a rationalizing attitude—in both subject and in technique—they do so in order to disrupt our expectations of an achieved rationality and to undermine the orderliness that is suggested by the systematic approach.