Title: Photography Is Magic
Author: Charlotte Cotton (edited and with an essay by)
Photographs: VV.AA.
Editor: Aperture
Year of publication: August 2015
Place of publication: New York
Number of copies: 10.000
Book Size: 8 x 10 1/3 inches
Number of pages: 384
Number of pictures: 311
Price: $ 49.95
ISBN: 978-1-59711-331-1
Photography Is Magic is the latest editorial work of curator Charlotte Cotton, published in August 2015 by Aperture. Cotton brings together the work of over eighty artists engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice in the post-media era, and draws a parallel between this practice and magic, since both are leveraging on imagination and the spirit of surprising the viewer.
The publication is certainly one of the most debated books of photography of the past year. In the hyper-connected and hasty world of contemporary artistic production, this review comes even too late: Cotton’s work has already been widely analysed and debated in several magazines and websites, as well as on social networks. However, what struck me reading what has been written so far is that there was much talk about what the book represents (the reasons and the author's point of view, the political system in which it is inserted, the design and graphic choices, and so forth), and much less of what it presents, that is, a section of a very specific type of contemporary art photography.
In the review written for American Suburb X, Daniel C. Blight disagrees with Cotton’s choice of limiting – when comparing magic and photography – to the field of 'close-up magic', referred to magic tricks and juggling rather than to real magical practices, as traditionally and historically intended. Although the article is full of literary references, in reality it doesn't allow us to go into an actual study of the object in question: it is such an inflexible critique that prevents us from reading beyond the title. According to Blight, saying that 'photography is magic' is etymologically incorrect, and consequently the whole work is stranded from the start.
Loring Knoblauch, in his article for Collector Daily, focuses on examining the opening essay, where he hopes to find the key needed to navigate the huge range of pictures in the book, presented without any chronological or thematic chapter division, and to track down the 'curatorial perspective' that made Charlotte Cotton one of the most influential figures in her field. His expectation, no doubt legitimate, is disappointed by a number of shortcomings and inconsistencies, all lucidly argued – one in all, the total absence of direct links between the images and the concepts expressed in the text, which doesn't mention any of the 85 featured photographers. According to Knoblauch, "she has in effect set up a high level logic of generalities, laid it on a platter, and left us to puzzle it out for ourselves".
But who has taken the trouble to
really examine the images, instead of lecturing around them? In my humble
opinion, nobody, not even the same Cotton.
The collection she made is immense,
and allows us to review the works by celebrities of the industry, but also by
more unknown emerging photographers. The result is an excellent reference work,
aimed at both professionals and all those who are interested in the visual aspects
of contemporary culture. But its inclusive and serial nature makes it look more
like a handbook than a critic book, with the difference that, contrary to a
handbook, it doesn't contain any 'useful information' to the reader. I am not
referring to details of a purely technical nature – it is no longer necessary,
today, to make a distinction between analog and digital photography, posed shot
and snapshot – but a sort of 'visual paraphrase' able to identify the basic
elements of the style proposed in the book.
Through the selected photographers, Cotton insists on precise aesthetics – the aesthetics of the backlit screen, gif, Instagram and Tumblr, which brings everything back to a compositional level, regardless of the techniques used. The flat surface is the absolute protagonist: the table where the close-up, the colour, the assemblage and the interaction between different disciplines (collage, painting, sculpture, photomontage) are synthesized in a depthless image. Without judging Cotton's choice to focus exclusively on this niche, and indeed following on the metaphor proposed by herself, I would have appreciated if she had decided to analyse the image from a linguistic and formal point of view, just like magic tricks are revealed in manuals for apprentice magicians.
Moving one step away from the exact point where the structure of these 'optical illusions' is perfectly set up would have provided a further level of interpretation, perhaps less glamorous, but more incisive in a panorama of millimetre and blinding precision. This would also have enabled her to spare the book from the risk of both dizzying, or worse, boring the reader – my impression is that I browse the pages of the book exactly as I would scroll down a blog page, and in doing so the focus falls quickly – and of rapidly aging, resulting out of time and out of fashion too early.
Buy the book here