CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Fact versus Fiction
Contemporary art that blurs documentary and invention, using staged photographs, fictional archives and altered histories to question evidence.
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About
Doubts about the truthful photograph are as old as the medium: in 1855 Roger Fenton made two views of the same Crimean road, one with cannonballs scattered across it, and historians still debate whether he moved them. Since the late 1970s artists have made such uncertainty their subject.
Jeff Wall restages ordinary moments with actors and props so they pass for candid. Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans's Depression pictures and presented them as After Walker Evans (1981). Joan Fontcuberta invented an archive of impossible animals, with specimens and field notes. Walid Raad's Atlas Group project attributed documents about the Lebanese wars to fictional sources, and Iris Häussler turned a Toronto house into the home of an imaginary reclusive sculptor. Hito Steyerl's essay films examine how images circulate and deceive. Titus Kaphar alters historical portraits to expose who they left out. Look for captions and archives that ask to be believed.
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