Photography as contemporary art is a subject that provokes heated discussion from every side of the subject. From one corner of the ring there are people who are so wrapped up in the issue of the distribution and use of images, in the post analog era, that the idea of a photograph as an object is difficult to parse.

Last year, in an essay about an exhibition at ICP entitled What Is A Photograph, James King, writing for Aperture, landed fully in that camp. He said, in part, “But articulating the relevance of the photography museum in the twenty-first century by displaying a group of photographs that resemble paintings and sculptures only produces an extreme polarization: the gap between the photographic 'objects' on view here and the myriad ways that photographs exist and circulate today is almost comical.

"While the exhibition included a number of interesting works," King continues, "a viewer could walk through the show without ever knowing that a photograph could be viewed on a cell phone, that it could exist as a digital file, that it could circulate on the internet, that it could be tagged, or even that it could frame and reproduce something which was once before the camera’s lens (let alone that it might exist in an application like Snapchat.)” [more]

An exhibition currently on view at the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, takes a different view of the same question. In Light, Paper Process: Reinventing Photography, the ways in which photographic images are produced is as mesmerizing as the images themselves. And the Getty has gone all out to make this information accessible, through artist talks and videos.

© Matthew Brandt, Rainbow Lake, WY A20, negative, 2012; print, 2013, courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum,

Light, Paper Process presents work by a group of artists whose images occupy a NY-LA axis shaped primarily by a short list of galleries: Yossi Milo, M+B, Von Lintel, Tanya Bokander and David Zwirner. The title of the show lets viewers know that although the images might look radically new, their makers are using some of the same materials that have been available for over a hundred years. In fact, a brief introduction offers 30 prints made between 1910 and the 1970s by such photographers as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy up through Jay DeFeo and Robert Heinecken that create a context in which the camera as a servant of the observable world has been ripped apart—literally, and in some cases, completely tossed aside—to be replaced by unorthodox methods and often bizarre materials, including dust from demolition sites, fire, and bodily fluids to name a few.

The result is a head-turning show of pictures that not only bend light, but subvert and transform the idea of one of photography’s oldest ideals, that of being written [graph] in light [photo]. Many of the works on view also posses a quality previously confined to the plastic arts of painting, drawing, and printmaking: surface quality. Here the smooth surface of enlarging paper gives way to tactile qualities in works by Marco Breuer, Chris McCaw, and Matthew Brandt that arise from their unique and often messy foundations. Here, "the pencil of nature" has been subsumed into the digital realm, whose inherent forms of alchemy expand the realm of creativity.

Read more about the work and process of the artists in this exhibition:
Matthew Brandt, Video; The Week
Marco Breuer, Early Recordings, by Mark Alice Durant
John Chiara, Video; DIY Camera by David Walker
Chris McCaw, Getty video; MOPA video
Lisa Oppenheim: Elemental Process, by Brian Sholis. Aperture
Alison Rossiter, Video; Revive, Light Work
James Welling, Video; interview, Wadsworth Atheneum

Light, Paper Process: Reinventing Photography continues at the Getty Center through September 6. Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA. Gallery tour, Wednesday, August 26, 2:30 pm