CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/15/2015

Photography is Magic

This week, we release Photography is Magic, Charlotte Cotton's superb, 384-page survey of contemporary art photography, published by Aperture. Featured artist Brandon Lattu, whose "Seven Projections" (2010) is featured here, writes, "For too long, photography has relied on a failed mimicry of human vision. The chosen direction and bounded rectangle can, like other aspects of representation, be used as political tools that fulfill the desires of some while controlling others and surveying all. The works shown here, from 2007 and 2010, try to get beyond the camera’s dependence on a single line from the photographer, through the device to the subject by recording omnidirectionally instead. Magic is a mystifying reordering of the expectations of a system of representation; photography was once seen as magical in this way. What is needed now is to go beyond magic—to overthrow, supplant, skew, shift the relationship of representational systems to power. Vision and representation are seductive and surprisingly malleable; if we are not fixed on a preformed model of vision, we can create a new model that is relevant to how life is lived now."