Cultural and Aesthetic Dynamics of Photography as a Form of Contemporary Art

Art-photography is a form of contemporary art that marked itself in the early 1960s. Its historical evolution has not been sufficiently studied. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to identify and understand the logic of the internal development of art-photography and its relationship with the external cultural context. The cultural and aesthetic dynamics of art-photography is associated with three historical stages: early, mature and late postmodernism (meta modernism) and the corresponding forms of contemporary art. The first stage (1960—1970) saw the realization by contemporary artists of the conceptual possibilities of photography. It was mainly the photographic documentation of process-action forms of contemporary art. The same period saw the birth and formation of the main artistic strategies and creative methodologies of art-photography: adherence to documentaries, the use of staging (directing), the introduction of seriality (typology), the combination of word and image. The second stage (1980s — 1990s) of art-photography functioning is characterized by further development and enrichment of established artistic tendencies and the emergence of new practices in which photographic material expands its subject matter and claims the role of a text that problematizes (thematizes) the represented reality. The development of art-photography at the third stage (2000s to the present) is determined by two main factors: the processes of digitalization and oscillation of contemporary culture and art, which leads to the transformation of the “mode of truth” of the photographic image and the strengthening of the importance of the aesthetics of the individual photographic frame. At the level of practice, this is expressed in the creation of photographic pictures where reality and fantasy images merge into a single whole and become indistinguishable. This effect was reinforced by printing photographs of enormous size and exhibiting them in museum spaces and galleries. Nowadays, art-photography, while remaining a form of contemporary art, seeks to go beyond it and acquire signs of aesthetic self-sufficiency.