Photography has made many quiet but primary changes throughout visual art and its discourse over the last thirty years. Artists like Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter were fundamental in changing the way we comprehend both painting and photography, blurring the boudaries that distinguish them by evacuating subjectivity adn hallmarks of artistic authorship. Artists associated with conceptualism and performance art, like Vito Acconci, Bernd and Hilla Becher expanded the formal criteria that defined photographs as art. Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham's so called confessional work embraced abject subjects such as transgressive sexuality, violence or dysfunctional families. It also established that there were no formal precepts of photographic correctness. Cindy Sherman and more recently Anna Gaskell point to the influence of film and psychoanalysis on photographic practice.

Photography has held a mirror to itself in its critical practice and been a force behind important shifts in art historical thinking. The diversity of practices within this exhibition reveal a quiet search and reconcilliation of internal symbolic order and a peeling back of the outer layers of history. This group exhibition represents much that is the power and misnomer of photography.

Esther Windsor