Charlotte Cotton
[Curator and author, b. 1981, Cotswolds, England, lives in London.]
Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists’ endeavors.
The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed.
The fault line is the idea, that if it is about an idea, having twelve doesn’t make them any better.
We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.
I must say that in all the time I’ve worked in photography, portfolios have tended to be this mismatch of pictures that a photographer recognizes as being good pictures… And then there are the other ones, which I sometimes call “itchy-scratchy” pictures. They trouble you; you don’t know whether it is the picture or if it is a cue to what will happen next.
… I think that has become a sign of photography as contemporary art — how much time you will spend with the pictures that don’t appear as good pictures?
