At the fulcrum of recent conversations about photography has been a deceptively simple question: what defines contemporary practice? What is it and what do we value in it? Is it its ability to capture moments, scenes, and gestures from the world around us? Is it the opportunity images give us to reflect upon and provoke a deeper interrogation of contemporary modes of seeing? While it's a given that photography has become widely accepted as an art, a concrete definition of the medium seems as elusive as ever. On one hand, we encounter a staunch defense of "reality-based" photography via traditional film and camera optics; on the other, an increase in the use of photographs — staged, found, and digitally remixed — as one strategy drawn from among many out of the quiver of contemporary art.

I propose that we are no longer served by “a definition that enforces a zero-sum approach of "either/or" to the medium”. CPW’ 2009 Photography Now curator Charlotte Cotton recently used a great expression that I will invoke here; Rather than "either/or" why not "either/and"? (“Is Photography Over", SFMoMA symposium, April 2010)

For CPW’s 2010 Photography Now exhibition, I have selected two distinct groups. The first group, featured in The New Skew offers a variety of experimental approaches to image-making. These artists are deeply invested in photography but equally interested in pushing against the expectations of the medium. The second set of artists presented in The New Docugraphics, is a group who are working in a mode that has become increasingly the norm – the application of an ostensibly objective, New Topographical style as applied to documentary topics and personal experience.

The definition of the photographic has historically been tremendously elastic, encompassing a wide range of technologies, processes, and techniques. Why should it be any different now? While clearly, we're experiencing a certain amount of loss and transition from a predominantly chemical processes toward the digital, the world of photographic possibilities is as — if not more — wide-open than ever.

To see work featured in and read more about The New Docugraphics, click here