Photography and art in general has built up a significant vocabulary which evolves from decade to decade—I think a contemporary photograph must take this into account and build upon that as well. We tend to move in fits and starts… someone like Stephen Shore comes along, and we’ve all suddenly got a new way to look at things. But for the most part people who are making art are looking at other art and we develop our vocabulary based on what we see and appreciate.

So I think that, by definition, a contemporary photograph should be part of an overall movement. There will be outliers, and those outliers may be significant enough to stretch the boundary of what is considered contemporary, but that happens rarely and after the fact.

All that is to say, it’s much more difficult to analyze this while you’re in the middle of it than it is to take a long hard look at work from a decade or two past and make connections and learn how things have evolved. Personally, I find much of the work that I see today to be overly intellectual and hyper-stylized, and it bores me. Two landscape photographers that come to mind that I admire very much, Beth Dow and Jem Southam, would seem to be outliers in that regard, but that’s the kind of work that I find interesting. I should add that what little work of yours that I’ve seen (I’ve just discovered your site about 20 minutes ago) looks great and I will be looking at more.

Just my two cents, sorry if I rambled a bit, but I do find this topic quite interesting.

http://landscapist.squarespace.com/journal/2008/3/21/urban-ku-178-gimme-another-break-fuzzy-logic.html

The implication is that you are contriving a photograph to look a certain way and it may take a lot of thinking and work for someone to creat the illusion of being ‘objective’. And you are being judged by the viewer as to your success in pulling this off. So you have to photograph per the ‘being objective’ rules.

Kinda harkens back to the old ‘fine art’ painting game in the 70’s; it does not matter what you paint, just as long as you do it differently, because that is what you are being judged on.

Seems shallow.

Anyone else want to add to this??

I, like you, don’t think that you can take out the photographer’s bias. And truth, is a very relative term and based on opinion. Also, I think that photographs, no matter what the type, without some emotion are less appealing, but this is just my ‘truth’.

That’s a loaded question and if you ask 100 photographers, you’ll likely get 100 different answers. Contemporary photography, I don’t think, is easily defined. But it’s more like photography without emotion…like a “way I see things” kind of thing. I think the idea of CP is to simply show the world, or snippets of the world, as objectively as possible. No easy task, imo. Personally, I don’t particularly like contemporary portraiture, since to take the emotion away from a person is essentially photographing a corpse.

But in terms of landscape photography, I think CP is the best way to approach it. Contemporary landscape photography, I feel, is the most truthful way to show our world, as it is…the good, the bad, the pretty, the not so pretty. There’s no pretense with CLP, and with how rapidly our landscapes are changing I feel it’s important to document the world just as it is.

Mark Hobson, I think, is one of the best contemporary landscape photographers around. If you don’t know his work, his site is: http://landscapist.squarespace.com/