Annotation: The Ambiguity of Value - Kelly Cannon

The Ambiguity of Value - Kelly Canon

Contemporary photographers have the luxury to use, investigate and reinvent different ways of photography, in this case the representation of the source photograph.

Daniel Gordon (1980) photograph sculptures composed of other photographs. He puts images together found on the internet. He forms these images to its originally shape with a cut and paste technique. After making the composition he makes the photograph and print result.

Gordon is interested in the transformation the camera performs on the things in front of his camera. The photograph is different from what originally existed.

Gordon's work is a reaction to the abundance of free images on the internet made available by search engines like Google. Now photographers have the choice of creating new ones or work with existing photographs. Even museums deal with this by acquiring collections of photographs which the author is unknown. This trend has implications on the value of photographs in general, authorship and intent.

Gordon is part of a new generation of photographers (VanDerBeek, Abeles) who turn the lens back on existing photographs. By mixing their own and other's photographs he use the medium's strength in replication to examine photographs as both subject and object. Their work resemble collage, a technique nearly as old as the medium. Photomontage and collage remove the context of the source photographs, creating disjointed composites that encourage unintended readings of the original material. However current photographers working in these field are more free, due to the quantity of photographs available, than earlier generations. Their representations were more loaded and had to deal with authorship and intellectual property. Now photographers can work almost anonymous because of the wide availability. It becomes easier to treat each photograph found online like an anonymous snapshot. This, however holds also a danger. When things like photographs become freely to take and use we challenge authorship and intellectual property.

The works of Gordon and others deal with this by turning back to the medium's foundation in reproduction. They recycle and expand upon the photographs' integrity as images and as objects. This reflexive treatment gives us the opportunity to confront, and explore constructive approaches to a changing image economy.