Beyond Representation: Photography's Possible Worlds and Their "Magical" Power

Full text

1
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
FORUM
CHARLOTTE COTTON
Photography is magic
Aperture, New York 2015
Discussants:
Oscar Meo
Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger
Denis Curti
Benedict Burbridge
Ed. by Chiara Spenuso

2
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
OSCAR MEO
(Università di Genova)
BEYOND REPRESENTATION: PHOTOGRAPHY’S POSSIBLE
WORLDS AND THEIR ‘MAGICAL’ POWER
Throughout the history of aesthetics, it has often been said that
art has an ‘enchanting’ and ‘evocative’
1
power – that its objective
is metaphysical and that it has metaphysical properties itself. With
this in mind, the title of Charlotte Cotton’s latest book on photog-
raphy could be read as implying that she agrees with this outdated
point of view. The sentence «Photography is magic» could also be
interpreted as being similar to naive exclamations such as «Oh,
that’s magical (wonderful, sublime, etc.)!», that usually make art
experts smile. However, Cotton’s arguments show that she cannot
be blamed for dusty traditionalism, or, worse, for sharing the
same commonplace and meaningless ‘view’ as a culture-Philistine.
Cotton holds that her use of the word ‘magic’ does not refer
to the tricks performed by magicians at the theatre or the circus,
but to ‘close-up magic’ – a more intimate form of magic, which is
«often performed for a tightly knit sphere of fellow magicians and
small, discerning audiences» (Cotton 2015a, 1)
2
. Nonetheless, in
his uncharitable review of Cotton’s book, Daniel C. Blight consid-
ers her ‘magic’ to indeed be the magic that entertains adults and
children at the circus, and criticizes it for playing a part in con-
temporary consumerist society (Blight 2015). I think that Blight is
wrong. Cotton’s survey of contemporary photography has no re-
ductionist aim, and does not address the general public but a par-
ticular group of viewers who are fully aware and watchful of the
tricks performed by the photographer: their eye is not ‘innocent’. I
believe that Blight is also mistaken in his conclusion that «photog-
raphy’s magic lies not in its aesthetic preoccupations, but in its
digital spirit as algorithmic information, with, or ideally without,
an image». There is no ‘magic’ in obtaining images from algori-
thms, just as there was no magic in the ‘magic lantern’ or in ana-
logue photography, but simply a clever use of the laws of physics
1
‘Evocative’ here is used with the literal meaning of the Latin verb e-vocare: ‘to call out’.
2
‘Close-up magic’, also known as ‘micromagic’ or ‘table magic’, is performed very close
to the viewers. A typical example is street games based on sleight of hand and performed
on a table with playing cards or dice, balls, bars (such as domino tiles) and cups. Unfor-
tunately, often it is not ‘magic’, but a fraud.

3
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
(and, in the case of analogue photography, chemistry). Cotton is
aware of this, and is not interested in ‘low-cost’ illusions (such as
at the circus), nor in those at a high price (such as the ‘illusions’
involved in the art market to convince buyers of the ‘value’ of a
certain piece), and does not consider the mere use of a medium to
be ‘magical’.
Reading Cotton’s opening «Essay», she clearly believes that
what makes photography ‘magical’ is its ability to connect with
the viewer’s imagination: as magic, photography «creates the con-
ditions for us to explore imaginative possibilities, while sharing in
a slice of the real» (Cotton 2015a, 2)
3
. Unfortunately Cotton does
not explain why she uses the philosophically ‘outdated’ concept of
imagination, and she does not investigate what ‘real’ end the ima-
gination can lead to when it is set in motion by images. Does she
consider the imagination to be a mental tool which we use to con-
struct the aesthetic and conceptual meaning of images? Can we
use it to better understand the visual world and our relationship
with it? Does Cotton believe that photography invites us to use
our imagination to enter meaningful ‘possible worlds’? If this is
her thinking, the less radical group within visual studies (i.e. those
less critical of contemporary ‘iconocracy’) would perhaps agree
with her.
At the beginning of the «Essay», Cotton quotes the philoso-
pher Vilém Flusser in a passage where he considers the space and
time peculiar to an image to be «the world of magic» (Flusser
2009, 9). Flusser too bases the idea that photography is magical
on its relationship with the viewer’s imagination, but – unlike Cot-
ton – he thinks that imagination and magic have a more percep-
tive character:
Images are significant surfaces. Images signify – mainly – some-
thing ‘out there’ in space and time that they have to make compre-
hensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four dimen-
sions of space and time to the two surface dimensions). This spe-
cific ability to abstract surfaces out of space and time and to pro-
ject them back into space and time is what is known as ‘imagina-
tion’ (Flusser 2009, 8).
3
See also: «Magic is something that happens in the viewer’s imaginations» (Cotton
2015a, 3). She has elsewhere stated that what she wanted with the image sequence «is
an unfolding of pictures functioning very much like a magic trick» (Cotton 2015b).

4
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
According to Flusser, «the significance of images is magical»
(Flusser 2009, 9) because scanning an image with our eyes pro-
duces semantic relationships between different elements of the
image: theoretical concepts, such as ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘colour’ ap-
pear to the eye to be «states of things» (Flusser 2009, 43). In such
a way, after the Entzauberung (the ‘disenchantment’) of the world
effected by written texts, photography (as well as figurative paint-
ing) causes a ‘re-enchantment’.
Flusser is obviously referring to representational (and ana-
logue) photography. I think that the works collected in Cotton’s
book tell another story. Even when objects are real, photographs
are never representations of a three-dimensional reality, but are
greatly reworked presentations. Therefore, no re-enchantment of
the world occurs. The more that an image confuses the viewer’s
perception, the more it attracts his or her attention, and makes
him or her conscious of the act of looking. It is the semantic role of
photography and imagination that is involved: both of them create
and interpret signs (or symbols). In this sense, I think that Cotton
would agree with two of Flusser’s remarks: that the magic of the
images obtained through technical methods is ‘post-historic’,
struggling against ‘textolatry’, and that it is ‘of a second order’, sin-
ce it is not designed to change the world, but rather the meaning
of the world (Flusser 2009, 17-18, 25).
Unlike in Cotton’s previous book, The photograph as contem-
porary art, the book Photography is magic does not provide the
reader with a detailed map of artistic production, and the photog-
raphers represented in the book seem to have been selected ac-
cording to her personal view of the way they stir the viewer’s
imagination
4
. This organizational chaos can be justified by the
very impossibility of tracing a linear path between the artists’
points of view, motivations and solutions. Various genres, styles
and techniques intertwine and overlap, and the viewer is under
the impression that this creative chaos is evidence of the fluctua-
tions, the fluidity and the fragmentation involved in contemporary
art. Cotton herself states that what all these practices have in com-
mon «is an immeasurable quantity of active choices being made –
in a subjective and nonlinear fashion – by their creators» (Cotton
2015a, 10). This is confirmed by the collection of artists’ «State-
ments» at the back of the book: while only a few of them refer to a
4
This lack of a clear point of view is strongly criticized by Knoblauch (2015).

5
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
‘school’ or a ‘current’, most of them claim that their work is a hy-
brid, based on various art forms, techniques and genres. On this
point Cotton observes that «the very idea of separate disciplines
of art is now defunct» (Cotton 2015a, 12). This view is put into
practice throughout the book, where the reader finds a mixture of
photographs of installations which themselves contain photo-
graphs, pseudo-sculptures and pseudo-paintings, photographs of
photographs, collages, intermedia works (whereby photographs
interact with videos, inscriptions, sculptures, paintings, and ob-
jects trouvés), references to the trompe-l’œil, and so on. This mix-
ture could make a malevolent reader think of the taxonomy of ani-
mals in Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia, but he or she would be
wrong in this association: the book is a mirror of what happens in
contemporary art.
The works represented in the book highlight how the use of
digital technology largely contributes to the polymorphous char-
acter of contemporary art and to media mixing. Can we consider
this explosion of subjectivity to be proof that photography is ‘ma-
gic’? According to one meaning of the term ‘magic’, my answer is
yes: Cotton’s survey shows how photography can interact with
other arts, mix together forms and structures, and make up com-
positions based on modalities which are impossible in a three-
dimensional reality. To put it simply, I think that we can consider
contemporary art to be magic because it entails endless possibili-
ties, and opens up worlds to us which are different to, but just as
meaningful as, our own.
Cotton’s book shows that Flusser’s view is no longer rele-
vant. The aim of digital photography is not to turn three dimen-
sions into two, or to transform concepts into ‘states of things’. In
the age of the Internet (or – to use the term preferred by Cotton –
‘post-Internet’) and Photoshop, photography is following the same
path as that taken by painting since the beginning of twentieth
century. At that time only a few innovators (for example Paul
Strand, Duchamp, Man Ray, Lázló Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky)
experimented in ‘abstract’ photography or mixed ‘abstraction’ and
‘reality’, whereas today there is continuous experimentation
5
. Te-
chnological development both requires and stimulates the crea-
5
Susan Sontag wrote already in the Seventies that «far from confining itself to realistic
representation and leaving abstraction to painters, photography has kept up with and
absorbed all the anti-naturalistic conquests of painting» (Sontag 2005, 114). Her state-
ment is even more true today.

6
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
tion of new language and a ‘meta-photographic’ consciousness, i.e.
a reflection on photography within photography. The view that
photographs are presentations is an essential part of this con-
sciousness
6
. Would Cotton subscribe to this claim?
Where ‘presentation’ and ‘meta-artistic’ consciousness are
concerned, it is impossible not to refer to Duchamp’s readymade –
‘artwork’ that is indistinguishable from the object because it is the
object itself. According to Cotton, «the readymade is a resonant
concept for today, in the sense that many artists are co-opting ex-
isting object-commodities (including photographic images) into
their work – intact and unmanipulated» (Cotton 2015a, 15). It
would perhaps be necessary to specify that a work is not a pure
readymade when the artist includes objets trouvés: if he or she
puts a photograph together with other objects (and, among them,
readymades), the result is an ‘assisted readymade’
7
, and if he or
she modifies a photograph, the result is a ‘rectified readymade’
8
.
Furthermore, the result is not a readymade if the artist takes a
photograph of a work that has been realized in such a way: he or
she only performs an authorial and traditional action, and the
product is not a presentation, but a representation.
A well-known form of magic is using a particular medium at
the same time as deceiving viewers about it being a medium.
When art succeeds in concealing itself, it succeeds in being art: ars
est celare artem. According to a ‘strong’ interpretation of this an-
cient saying, artwork must appear to be natural (not fictitious,
forced, or artificial), confuse the perceiver, and lead him or her to
take the representation of reality for the reality itself. This aim has
6
That does not mean that the great ‘representational’ photographers are not aware of
the fact that every representation is an interpretation of the world and also of photogra-
phy itself, and therefore that the ‘subjective’ point of view is essential. An excellent ex-
ample is Robert Frank’s Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey, where the artist plays with our
‘imagination’ (or with our skill to interpret signs in order to detect meaning) and i n-
cludes some ‘abstract’ elements. He shows the wall of a building, the lower part of a flag,
and two women standing at the windows of their apartments. The face of one woman is
in the shadows, while the face of the other is occluded by the flag. They are watching an
event that we cannot see, and are only indirectly informed of by the title and a symbol
(the flag). We have in front of us two anonymous people (two ‘nobodies’) in an anony m-
ous building, who are watching something that is – for us – a non-event, a non-thing.Ab-
straction vs. reality, invisible vs. visible, sign vs. referent, imagination vs. perception:
Which one wins?
7
According to Duchamp, even paintings are «‘readymades aided’ and also works of as-
semblage», because tubes of paint are «manufactured and ready-made products» (Du-
champ 1973, 142).
8
A famous example is Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q.

7
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
posed a serious philosophical problem as long ago as ancient
Greece: is the enchanting and deceptive power of art positive or
negative? While Plato criticized art in general as a lie, Gorgias em-
braced it: «He who deceives is more honest than he who does not
deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not de-
ceived»
9
. Gorgias was not aware of that powerful instrument that
artists use to open up a world to the receiver, and that Cotton
binds to magic: the imagination. Nevertheless, he understood an
essential element in the relationship between artist and audience:
from the artist’s end there is the production of an illusion, and
from the receiver’s end there is a favourable attitude, a specific
aesthetic delight in being deceived. This argument is in keeping
with a ‘weak’ interpretation of the motto ars est celare artem. The-
re is no sign of an artist’s efforts, physical help (as regards paint-
ing, the geometrical scheme, outline, etc.), or trick of the trade:
nothing at all can be detected. Receivers can immerse themselves
in the fiction, even if they are aware of the trick. I think that the
following quotation from Cotton’s «Essay» gives an example of
this weak interpretation:
We see […] artists using classic ‘in-camera’ techniques […] with
digital tools, outwitting default settings to create the improbable
[…] [T]here are […] contemporary artists using classic SLR cam-
eras and precise lenses to create intensely information-laden and
layered images of details from the real world that mimic the filter
settings of Photoshop (Cotton 2015a, 11).
The ‘magical’ action is, so to speak, doubled: artists create an illu-
sion by pretending to use a different technology to that actually
used. Nevertheless, unlike street magicians who performs tricks,
they do not commit fraud. They try to realize the kind of agree-
ment that Sartre called a «pact of generosity» (Sartre 2001, 271),
but that is also a ‘pact of complicity’: the artist ‘honestly’ leads the
receiver in the illusory world, invites him or her to share the trick
and, sometimes, to indulge in imagery; the ‘wise’ receiver agrees,
freely deciding to play the game. Perhaps forcing Cotton’s inten-
tion, one could say that an artwork becomes ‘magical’ when this
pact is realized, and both artist and receiver contribute to the con-
struction of the meaning of a work, i.e. when semantics develops
in a pragmatic direction.
9
Gorgias, fr. 82 B 23 Diels-Kranz.

8
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
ANNA-KAISA RASTENBERGER
(University of the Arts – Helsinki)
THE TRICK BEHIND THE TRICKS
Written and curated by Charlotte Cotton, the book Photography is
magic offers visual delight, eye candy, and conventionalism. It is
ambitious to bring together works by more than 80 contemporary
artists who use photography in their art but whose artistic prem-
ises and contexts are very different. These are complex photo-
graphs, which are referred to using terms such as post-photogra-
phy, post-internet, new aesthetics and interface, because, roughly
defined, the works and photographs take advantage of tools avail-
able on the internet and of digital methods, as they recreate ob-
jects and surfaces that exist in the real world. The works, in a
sense, give physical form to digital structures. The common de-
nominator between these artists is that they «shape the possibili-
ties of our contemporary photographic landscape» as it’s written
on the back cover of the book.
Cotton ties together more than 80 different artists who use
photography in their art, using a concept that I think is, on the one
hand, visually enticing, and on the other, surprisingly conservative
and art-centred. I will clarify what I mean below.
Of course, linking photography and magic is not an original
idea in photographic history. The middle ground between photog-
raphy and magic has been staked out since the camera obscura
captured the three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional image
inside a box. The world changed into an image governed by the
laws of perspective, and verified by mathematical formulae. The
change from the three-dimensional world of noise to a two-di-
mensional image might have felt like magic, even if the central
perspective made the space into the realm of reason and science.
Historically – and perhaps even today – it is precisely the mimetic
and representative character of photography that seems magical.
Charlotte Cotton’s approach to photography and magic is
different: Cotton’s magic is ‘close-up magic’, involving conjuring
tricks, deception, and surprise. The focus is not on magic, which is
associated with the world understood and managed through sci-
ence, but on conjuring tricks, created in social and performative
situations. The audience is deceived, and the trick is successful in

9
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
an intimate and intense interaction with the participants. The ap-
proach chosen by Cotton creates an analogy between the photo-
graphic works selected for the book and a magician’s tricks. Ac-
cording to Cotton, both offer visual frames, to which we direct our
attention, and which also hint at our collective habit of looking at
the visual phenomena around us. Cotton also draws a parallel be-
tween the tradition of magic tricks and the history of photography
– from the fresh and experimental point of view of contemporary
magicians and artists. Consequently, the tricks of pulling a rabbit
out of a hat and sawing a woman in half are presented parallel to
references to the history of photography, cut-and-paste photocol-
lages, black-and-white photography, the darkroom, and Polaroids.
1. What’s behind the tricks?
Admittedly, the idea of ‘close-up magic’ is fascinating. Magic is
wonderful. And, certainly, readers will have reactions and feelings
of surprise when encountering many of the photographic works in
the book. However, in spite of Charlotte Cotton’s enthusiastic and
personal approach, her contextualising essay seems, in itself, to be
a conjuring trick. By drawing the reader’s attention to a collection
of fancy tricks as part of the history of photography and especially
history of art – Marcel Duchamp, Cubism and some other inter-
ruptions of the art history of 20th century – she limits her discus-
sion to a rather institutionalised context of art photography, while
at the same time, I think, ignoring the more essential questions of
the social and societal use and circumstances of photography and
photographic art.
I was surprised by Cotton’s concept, since, in our times, pho-
tography and the photographic, visual technology, and visual con-
trol strategies pose huge social questions that relate to humans
and human activity. The circulation of images; the function of im-
ages as part of human sociality and the creation of communities;
questions of authorship; the human relationship to technology;
the effects of digitisation; information technology; the military-in-
dustrial complex; control mechanisms; the environmental crisis...
The questions are huge, and photography and art institutions can-
not use magic tricks to make them go away. Sure, they can make
people look the other way – as they do in conjuring tricks – but
then the role of photographic art and photography institutions is
diminished and almost nullified. If – and when – art and photog-
raphy created in an artistic context have a place in the visual

10
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
world order, it is currently being forcefully redefined precisely by
the use of photography-based media. These are the questions on
which I was missing Cotton’s insight and curatorial expertise. Cot-
ton is known for her critical views on photography institutions. It
was precisely this critical approach and any new visions related to
the roles of photography institutions that I would have found truly
interesting. In her text, Cotton writes about artists, but a critical
analysis of the art institution that produces the artists and of its
potential new roles is missing. Or is the book’s target audience so
obviously aware of the discursive framework of the images that
there is no point in addressing this? If this is the case, the art audi-
ence is predominantly people who frequent galleries and muse-
ums, buy art, and consume art in very traditional gallery and mu-
seum environments.
2. Artists as prosumers?
Within her book, Charlotte Cotton has curated extremely interest-
ing artists, whose artistic premises, motives and photographic
practices are insightful and varied. Collage, montage, appropria-
tion, or the prosumer culture that we live in are visualised in the
artists’ works featured in the book. The book offers the selection
of artists to spend time with and return to. It gives tastings of ma-
ny fascinating artists and tempts a reader to look for more infor-
mation about them. It brings the reader back to on-line environ-
ment. Among the artists included, there are well-known names
who have offered acute insights into the post-internet or post-
photography debate. They also provide the context for the less
well-known artists. An example of these is Lucas Blalock, whose
comments feature prominently in Cotton’s text. I would like to
have seen Cotton’s references to some artists or to certain photog-
raphers more clearly identified, thus providing a frame of refer-
ence for the artists and linking the «Essay» to the photographs se-
lected. As things stand, the text and the images seem slightly dis-
connected.
One of the most interesting issues touched upon by Cotton is
the question of the role of the viewer, and consequently the rela-
tionship between photographic artists and everyday photogra-
phers. As Cotton states, never before in history have viewers had
this much skill and understanding of photography equipment and
tools, when compared to the artists whose images they view, and
neither have they had similar distribution opportunities for their

11
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
images as they do today. Although it is possible to reach huge au-
diences, there are strong image-driven subcultures or communi-
ties of like-minded people.
In the so called ‘prosumer culture’, the roles of the producer
and the consumer are becoming blurred, as consumers produce
content for social media services and consume content produced
by themselves and their peers. The term ‘prosumer’ was intro-
duced by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1980, when he described the
«pro-active consumer»
10
, who demanded mass-produced prod-
ucts that were highly customised. Since then, the term has been
used in various senses, but often it refers to people who both pro-
duce and consume media, or produce and consume creative con-
tent (for example, the use of image-sharing or social media plat-
forms). Prosumerism is essentially linked to the market economy
and, more specifically, to the production of customised products.
Indeed, companies are increasingly handing out their products for
testing and customisation, not to experts, but to consumers, who
improve them in order to get the company to produce products
that are customised just for them.
A large number of the artists create and distribute their im-
ages for a community, which not only shares a specific visual dis-
course but also produces and adjusts it, like its own visual slang.
Commercial organisations and their commercial interests have
always had a strong influence on photography. It is precisely com-
mercial mass production that once enabled the democratisation of
photography, turning it into an everyday thing for any man or wo-
man. It is no wonder, then, that contemporary artists are tempted
to blur the commercial use and control of photographs, but today
their methods are new and more targeted.
3. The contemporary role of a photography book?
After Cotton’s «Essay» at the beginning of the book, all the images
of the works are laid out in uninterrupted succession. With each
image, the caption includes information about the artist and the
work, while the artists’ statements are placed at the end. The im-
ages include exhibition documents from galleries, photographs of
objects and installations, photographs of photographs, and photo-
graphs printed in the book. When studying the book, I wondered
whether the layout was designed to produce a feeling similar to
10
See Toffler (1980).

12
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
browsing through a stream of images on a screen. When surfing
online, images without context are almost norm, and the differ-
ences between collages, documentaries, installation documenta-
tion, and images generated by an algorithm may be irrelevant, but
in this book I was expecting to find photographs that are groun-
ded in context and an analysis of the motives of the photographe-
rs. Readers looking to contextualise the works have to rely on the
brief and partly disconnected artists’ statements at the end of the
book, which is a shame. The artists’ statements are almost an iro-
nic part of the book: with their short snappy comments, they are
part of the machinery behind the art trade and the neo-liberal
market economy that, unfortunately, simplifies the debate on
works of art.
The selection of photographs in the book is visually consis-
tent, and although, in her «Essay», Cotton writes that the artists
are taking a critical position in relation to the media system, this
does not come across in the selection of non-contextualised art
photographs, and instead, the result is a conventional art book.
This is a shame, because it is not only photography exhibitions but
also photography books that are facing new challenges and oppor-
tunities, as they come into contact with digital environments and
image formats. Like digital information network environments,
the way of viewing images predominantly on-screen challenges
both the physical exhibition medium and the photography book as
a user interface, as well as the organisations presenting photogra-
phs. When the interaction between people increasingly involves
information technology, that is, when we increasingly interact
with each other using social networking sites, videos, blogs, vlogs
and live streams, our connection with each other relies partly on i-
mages displayed on-screen. In interaction enabled by information
technology, when viewing images on-screen, the medium of the
image diversifies. As, in most cases, photographs are taken with a
camera and made visible using various methods, photographs
cannot be explained only with reference to the visual interaction
during which the images are made visible. The materiality related
to images resists simple symbolic interpretations.
The digital culture revolution concerns the level of technol-
ogy, software, and various platforms, but, more importantly, it
concerns the content of art and the realities emerging along with
digital culture, such as those brought about by biotechnology and
genetic engineering in artistic practice, immersivity, interactivity,

13
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
online identities, and so on. It fundamentally influences issues
such as the status of a work of art (object vs. immateriality), inter-
disciplinarity between fields of art, and the change in the visual
language, or the ‘new aesthetic’, which means that pictoriality
permeates various forms of art and even retroactively influences
analogue technologies. Digital platforms and communities enable
the emergence of various communities (projects, collaborations),
and the presentation and dissemination of art, and the free distri-
bution of art on the Internet, outside traditional institutions. What
will happen to photography and art exhibition media when exhibi-
tion documentation, live streaming, and online distribution beco-
me more important and even replace physical experiences of spa-
ce?
How has the fact that screens have become the primary me-
thod of experiencing photography changed photography, and how
do images produced and used in a digital space work in a photog-
raphy book? An image printed on paper and laid out in a book is
an element within the social and cultural practices of consump-
tion, exchange and representation, which are challenges – and op-
portunities – for a screen-based image. Does a photograph be-
come a new or a different work or medium in these contexts? In
what sense is a photograph the same object when we see it on-
screen, in an exhibition space, or printed on paper in Charlotte
Cotton’s book?
DENIS CURTI
(Artistic director of Casa dei TRE OCI – Venezia
Editor in Chief of IL FOTOGRAFO Magazine)
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT
WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY
«We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is
there. We have been conditioned to expect […] but, as photo-
graphers, we must learn to relax our beliefs»
11
. This brief but
meaningful thought by Siskind is my starting point to take part in
the debate about the book Photography is magic, curated by Char-
lotte Cotton, in which she presented more than 80 artists who op-
erate in the field of ‘photographic magic’.
11
Quote by Aaron Siskind, very well known and often repeated even though the original
reference is unknow.

14
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
The first matter I would like to address is about the lexicon
used in the book, which is, in my opinion, only apparently univer-
sally acknowledged. I do not think it is appropriate to refer to pho-
tography and magic in relation to the images that the book pre-
sents. Those presented by Cotton, are indeed not photographs but
images. Images often created artificially or heavily reworked with
IT softwares. Therefore, when one refers to the magic of photog-
raphy, I think, naturally, that it is due to chemistry and that is has
to be attributed to the wonder caused by shapes appearing slowly
on photosensitive paper. There should not be any aesthetic or con-
tent-related classifications. Photography (when referring to the art
that was invented in 1839) is one thing, the rest belongs to a dif-
ferent world: the world of images.
This research, according to Cotton, is bound to change the
relationship between the audience and the artist. The curator’s
premise on which the book is based is the idea that photography
really is magic, not because of the alchemy of materials, but as a
result of the imagination of the viewer. Magic lies in the viewer’s
power of finishing the artwork by using their fantasy, and, above
all, in the new relationship between the artist and the audience.
This vision moves the artistic act to the background: reduc-
ing its action to the mere image leaves no space for the develop-
ment of an artistic project. Once again I believe that photography
is at the same time a chance for storytelling, a document, a project,
a way to develop the artist’s memory and their interpretation, and
I think it is really impossible for photography to play this role with
poetics that only favour mere images.
After all, Cotton, who worked on this book with Harsh Patel,
has focussed greatly on building an editorial project that does not
need the reader to have a deep knowledge about photography and
this is one of the reasons for which I find the title of the book
strongly misleading.
Cotton actually declares her awareness about having written
a book which does not address a niche of photography experts,
but a wider public who is interested in the theme of digital, re-
gardless of photography.
The confirmation of this position comes as one reads the
three chapters: «Introductory essay»,«Photographs» and, particu-
larly, «Declarations of the artists». All the artists presented in the
book have a great knowledge about the Net and this represents to
Cotton’s eyes a great change, which started roughly ten years ago

15
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
and is now expanding. It is by now clear that the fact that anyone
has easy access to social networks and to the Web in general pro-
duced a closer and never-seen-before relationship between the
artist and the viewer, whose main traits are participation and di-
rect dialogue. At the same time, specifically, the debate between
artists has developed around the topic of how photography
evolved or has allegedly been superseded.
It is interesting to read that Cotton thinks that photography
has not at all been superseded, but it is now oriented towards
knocking down the wall that divides the artist and the viewer.
However, once again, I believe Cotton should not refer to photo-
graphs but to images when she declares her point of view.
Technology changes, culture changes, the perception of the
artists and their work changes, so Cotton clarifies her position: the
analogy with magic refers to the relationship that artists devel-
oped with the public and their imagination. Nowadays, the artist
must not worry about underlining the virtues of photography –
their main worry is how their work is viewed by an increasingly
sophisticated, informed and demanding audience. This point is
met with optimism by Cotton, because it deletes the dividing line
between the artist and the audience – with the risk, in my opinion,
of permanently deleting the role of critics in the production pro-
cess.
Cotton writes that in this historical moment there is a great
inclination to experimentation, with photographers working more
and more with sculpture, music, panting, etc. The institutions who
work with images should understand the direction in which con-
temporary photography is going. And this is true, but this book
has the ambition of being a guideline about contemporary photog-
raphy and a powerful counterweight to those who claim that pho-
tography is over. But I believe Cotton is not on the right path: all
images presented in the book are to be considered artificial crea-
tions and have nothing to do with reality.
BENEDICT BURBRIDGE
(University of Sussex)
MEANING, MAGIC, METAPHOR
What is Photography is magic [PIM]? What does it do? And how
does it do it? This short essay addresses these questions in rela-

16
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
tion to two reviews of the book written by Loring Knoblauch
(2015) and Daniel C. Blight (2015). The decision to pair these crit-
ical responses is based on the remarkably similar approaches they
adopt. Each, it seems to me, addresses PIM primarily in terms of
what it fails to do: a model of critical enquiry based on the view
that absence equates to deficit. To unpack the tendency and its im-
plications for an understanding of PIM a bit further, I identify
three types of absence that cut across observations central to both
reviews, along with the negative value judgements to which they
become attached. From here, I revisit the absences from an alter-
native perspective, sensitive to their potential as the creative and
critical tools through which meaning is produced, rather than as
the regrettable omissions maligned by critics. The intention is not
to endorse one view over another but, rather, to reflect on the im-
plications of the values we assign to absence, the agendas that in-
form those value judgements, and what these might suggest about
relationships between different forms of creative, critical and cul-
tural expression today.
The reviews share at least three observations/contentions:
1. Photography is magic is not about what it should be about
Knoblauch is very clear that she had hoped PIM would address the
same task as The photograph as contemporary art, Charlotte Cot-
ton’s popular 2004 Thames and Hudson survey, which is now on
its third edition (Cotton 2004). It didn’t. PIM is «neither a sum-
mary of all the photographic work made in the new millennium,
nor a narrower subset of digitally-minded so called formalist
work». Where Knoblauch measures the new publication against
an earlier book by the same author, Blight believes it fails to deliv-
er on its title, focusing on the wrong type of photography and the
wrong type of magic: this is not a book about «photography’s en-
during and complicated relationship to…“spirit”, and its various
esoteric traditions». It does not look at anything other than art
photography. And, contenting itself with an examination of rela-
tionships between art photography and ‘close-up magic’, it does
not explore potential links to the occult.
2. Photography is magic does not engage closely with any of
the individual art works featured
For Blight, this is mainly a matter of what he describes as the va-
rying quality of the projects: there are lots of different series fea-

17
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
tured and the book does not appear to differentiate between them
based on aesthetic or conceptual attainment. Blight’s own judge-
ment regarding the quality of the projects appears to take origi-
nality as its primary criterion, setting the ‘very interesting’ against
the ‘derivative’ and concluding that the derivative ‘overshadows’
the very interesting due to the ‘sheer volume’ of work included.
Knoblauch, by contrast, is concerned with the fact the book does
not explain or discuss any individual project and neglects to link
specific works to the different types of practice mapped out in
Cotton’s accompanying (?) essay. As a result, «thoughtful curatori-
al analysis […] is undermined by the lack of concrete and illustra-
tive examples».
3. Photography is magic should not say that it does not make
claims for the quality, value or historical importance of the
projects featured
Cotton is explicit about this and both reviews quote the same sen-
tence from her «Essay» in full: «the artists in Photography is Magic
are not approached as the contemporary end to a linear, canonical
history of art photography». For Knoblauch, this amounts to a
form of cowardice – an act «astonishingly and head-scratchingly
timid». For Blight, efforts to disavow a canonizing project ignore
the implications of the large-scale format and glossy production
values of the book itself.
The three points illustrate the extent to which important
parts of both reviews rely on the negative interpretation of ab-
sence, even when that absence takes the form of a double negative
(PIM should not claim that it does not claim…). In every case, these
judgements are based on alternative views of what the book
‘should have been’, what it ‘should have done’, what it ‘should ha-
ve contained’. The failure to meet these criteria is attributed, by
implication at least, to a series of negative characteristics or faults:
to cowardice, to arrogance, to ignorance. These traits sit in natural
opposition to a series of positive characteristics or virtues – in-
cluding courage, humility and intelligence – that, by implication at
least, the critics attribute to their own, alternative models. But are
there other ways of thinking through, around and about these ab-
sences? What happens, for instance, if they are attributed positive
characteristics – understood not in terms of a series of deficits
and/or failings but, instead, in terms of critical and creative tools
‘central to the production of meaning’? Let’s recap: PIM does not

18
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
offer an analysis of individual projects, make judgements about
the quality of projects in relation to each other, or systematically
carve up the landscape it explores in ways that would allow read-
ers to place works of art within distinct and specific categories.
What are the possibilities here? The book consists of three com-
ponents: an essay, the footnotes that accompany the essay, and a
long series of images. The «Essay» talks about a diversity of topics
without referring to particular works of art, the footnotes intro-
duce a range of quotes from diverse sources that map loosely onto
the «Essay», and artists’ projects are not – to quote Knoblauch –
«organized chronologically, thematically, geographically, or even
alphabetically». So how are the three components linked? What
relationships do they share? How do the meanings of these three
authored statements shift and slide in relation to each other? The
footnotes, it seems, do not only reference sources cited in the «Es-
say». Instead they offer up a series of discrete quotations that
move freely between instructional and theoretical literature on
the topic of ‘close-up magic’ and scholarly accounts of fields in-
cluding photography, contemporary art, and networked digital
culture. Sitting within, yet also apart from, the main essay, could
these sources help to reveal a shared terminology and a set of pa-
rallel concerns, enacting the photography-as-magic analogy that
the essay itself describes in relation to the images? This line of
analysis can be extended to relationships between essay and im-
age, and between the different images, where motifs, ideas and
techniques recur, intersect and collide within a variety of iterative
sequences
12
.
This positive characterization of absence would raise some
larger questions. What, for example, are the responsibilities of
writers faced with a body of visual material? Do they respect the
conventions of rational analytical prose, pinning down examples
like butterflies in display cases? Or can they take a lead from the
subject they set out to explore, working through its implications
not just for ‘what is said’, but also for the ‘tools used to say it’;
enacting lessons at the level not just of content, but also of form
13
?
12
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa makes a similar point in his account of the book (Wolu-
kau-Wanambwa 2016).
13
Knoblauch comes close to entertaining such a possibility when she describes the high
level generalities’ on which Cotton’s written analysis relies. The pote ntial of this model
of knowledge production is swiftly dismissed: being «left […] to puzzle it out for our-
selves […] is […] frustrating […][and] smacks of tin-eared arrogance, like we know exact-
ly what she is referring to».

19
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
Where would ‘this kind of book’ sit in relation to the field of per-
formative critical enquiry gaining ground among academics, cura-
tors and the artists with which they sometimes collaborate
14
?
How would we assess this alternative form of knowledge produc-
tion? What criteria could we use? What are the political and cul-
tural consequences of these questions?
What of the claims made not to endorse the practices PIM
explores, the disavowal of canonization, and, particularly, the ten-
sions between such a statement and the book’s glossy production
values? When negative values are applied, these points are sug-
gested to demonstrate anxiety regarding the historical longevity
of the judgements made or, more simply, blind ignorance to the
claims about status and value typically associated with a publica-
tion that looks and feels like this one. Reframed as critical and
creative devices, those failings have the potential to establish
what may have already been a productive tension between con-
tent and form, with each serving to complicate claims made by the
other. More questions ensue: why can’t a glossy coffee table book
examine works of art as cultural symptoms rather than as high
points in a lineage of creative production? Could the posing of
precisely that question be what PIM is actually about? Such a stra-
tegy would not be new: examples stretch back through the twen-
tieth-century history of institutional critique, described by Blake
Stimson and Alexandro Alberro in terms of a dialectical forma-
tion
15
. When radical content is used to place pressure on specific
aspects of a conservative container, each can pose challenging
questions of the other. While synthesis is easily mistaken for co-
option, this ignores changes to both parties that this process and
interaction involves (Ribalta 2012, 64). The potential of such a
strategy may already be clear in parts of the reviews cited here:
when Blight asks (rather than states), if this «is […] not precisely
what a book of this nature attempts to do, by default?» and Knob-
lauch entertains the possibility that Cotton may not even be a ‘be-
14
In the UK, the main research assessment now groups Art History and Art Practice to-
gether, for example, a point with significant implications for the approaches to research
and its public presentation adopted by art historians. The possibilities of knowledge
production through means other than rational analytical prose were the subject of
Beyond Text, a major initiative launched by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in
2007. See http://www.beyondtext.ac.uk/. Blight has produced a number of interesting
texts that adopt a similar approach.
15
See Alberro-Stimson (2009).

20
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
liever’ in the works she has assembled – a point «which would be
interesting in and of itself».
This leads to a third point, pertaining to photography’s rela-
tionship to magic and its particular manifestation in the book. He-
re, Knoblauch breaks from the absence-as-deficit model, reflecting
on Cotton’s detailed unpacking of her central analogy: «she dives
into aspects of repetition, distraction, misdirection, scripted per-
formance, “mistakes”, imagination, historical tradition, active dis-
course with other practitioners, shared expectations, and camouf-
lage». And yet the negative value judgments are never far way: the
«time spent explaining the details leads to the conclusion that she
is both worried that we might not find the comparison as compel-
ling as she does and inordinately intent on proving just how per-
fect this clever connection is». Read positively? PIM explains the
links very clearly, unpacks their potential in detail, and supports
this using meticulous research. This is a point with which Blight
actually appears to concur: his extended and very interesting cri-
tique of the art-as-close-up-magic analogy based not on the quali-
ty of the parallel drawn but, instead, on the social and political
values that this version of magic photography is seen to embody.
All of which raises a final point, linked to aspects of the pre-
vious two. Blight sets up a distinction between art-photography-
and-close-up-magic and photography’s relationship to what he de-
scribes in terms of ‘digital spirit’. Aligning the former with post-
modern consumer culture, entertainment and trivial distraction,
he links the latter to modernity, politics and belief. If we set aside
the rights and wrongs of this distinction (and the extent to which,
as with so many binaries, the dividing line may be more porous
and/or uncertain than it initially seems) it is possible to reflect,
again, on the implications of the deficit-based thinking involved.
Blight takes for granted that PIM represents an uncritical and un-
witting symptom of the late-capitalist distraction it is also assu-
med to endorse: a negative value judgement that relies on the pre-
vious assumption that the book is either disingenuous about, or
ignorant to, the tension between its format and the insistence that
canon formation is not its goal. Set the first negative judgement
aside and the potential of the book to produce the socio-political
analysis made explicit by Blight becomes altogether clearer. Where
some scream critique, perhaps others prefer to smuggle.
The potential to offer a positive interpretation of absence
has important implications for the discussion PIM, but it does not

21
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
close down the space for critique. Instead, it requires the task of
critical enquiry be approached in alternative ways, as attention
moves from the failure not to write some other kind of book and
onto the ‘delivery of what has been promised’: addressing strate-
gy, its effectiveness, its potential limits and the internal contradic-
tions involved. The indeterminate meanings of absence as a criti-
cal tool, for instance – the capacity for slippage, misunderstanding
and multiple interpretation – could itself be held up to scrutiny. In
which case, critics would face the vexed issue of intentionality in
our post-postmodern culture: a complex question indeed.
In summary: photography is magic. Appearances deceiving
(particularly in a culture as superficial as ours). Believing is cru-
cial, but you have to believe in something. The most important
question here: ‘believe in what?’
CHARLOTTE COTTON
(Indipendent Curator)
REPLY TO COMMENTATORS
Reading the critiques of Photography is magic by Benedict Bur-
bidge, Denis Curti, Oscar Meo and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger has
been a somewhat challenging experience for me. I reacted the
proposal made to me by Chiara Spenuso that she would find will-
ing (for which I am grateful) participants in her project to critique
Photography is magic with the inevitable dread that anyone out-
side of academia might feel. What choice did I have other than to
acquiesce and wait for the day when four textual projections onto
my most recent book would come into my email inbox? Like every
woman’s woman within the cultural sector, I do my utmost to re-
spect and support other women’s initiatives. I could have slyly
suggested that this wasn’t a great time for me to commit to such a
thing and for Chiara to come back to me at a later date; could I
have tried to shut down Chiara’s suggestion and not agreed to par-
ticipate in this editorial program? Instead, here I am, many physi-
cal, emotional and creative steps away from an intentionally tran-
sient gesture contained within the not-un-ironic format of a trade
book, attempting to respond to these eloquent critiques. If there is
anything that I can do in this situation it is to be permeable and
ingest these very thoughtful and intelligent texts. Like any human
being who is lucky enough to have the luxury of spare time in

22
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
which to think, I know it is my responsibility to accept the relative
failure of everything I do and create.
The greatest challenge for me to participate in this editorial
project has been to find a tone and a truthful structure for the
thoughts that have been prompted by reading these texts. Perhaps
in desperation, perhaps as a way to quell my anxieties, my mind
has thrown up a host of memories that reassure me that I have
been here before; my past is refreshed by its encounter with this
present situation. The first memory is of standing in a monograph-
ic exhibition I curated at Los Angeles County Museum of Art the
day before the opening with the artist, who had avoided confront-
ing his deeply personal body of work in exhibition form (it had
been a book previously) until the final hour. He didn’t thank me,
nor berate me but pragmatically endorsed the exhibition by say-
ing that he knew that his reading of the work – what he saw – was
unlike any other person. He acknowledged that I possibly had a
better understanding of what someone who didn’t know him re-
quired of a context and vantage point to engage with the work. I
suspect this came to mind for two reasons; that these thinkers he-
re can do what I cannot, which is articulate a certain context for
Photography is magic against which I don’t defend myself or dis-
pute their valid points of view, set within the framework of aca-
demia where I neither belong nor from which do I actively elicit
attention. I also think that this moment in my biography came to
the fore because it was a tense clarification of my role as a curator,
which in this instance was to deftly craft an encounter with an art-
ist’s practice that represented and protected him, while trusting
that the diverse audience who would come into that gallery would
feel a connection to this epic and vulnerable personal expression
because of the way I had curated the exhibition. Related to this, I
remember giving an awkward presentation to my colleagues in
the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in
1999, about my book (and exhibition) Imperfect beauty: the mak-
ing of contemporary fashion photographs, when asked if I could
(perhaps I was urged to) link recent fashion photography to the
art history of 17th century court portraiture. I thought that you
could, if it was a useful entry point for you but I didn’t think that
contemporary fashion photography needed that kind of alignment
to gain its cultural significance. I remember this exchange as my
first articulation of a preference that has manifest in pretty much
all of the projects that I have undertaken – to let my engagement

23
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
with the material culture, its makers, and its present day context,
be the guide of an idea as I shape it for public viewership. I like to
be ‘in it’, to move amongst, to channel, to scribe. With Imperfect
beauty, my quest was to create a cultural context that photogra-
phy’s largest industry would personally recognize (as opposed to
experiencing as some sort of gross caricature or unsuitable coopt-
ing of their production into the culture industry), and that each
teenager who stumbled on the book in their college library, or vi-
sited the exhibition version, could potentially feel an affinity be-
tween the collaborative spirit of fashion photography when it was
open to new talent, with their own youthful creativity. I also have
a vague recollection of the mutterings from the fashion theory cli-
que about my right as a ‘non-specialist’ to enter their terrain with-
out the academic credentials or their permission, and also to con-
duct inherently suspect research from amongst fashion’s image-
makers. The Imperfect book was designed by Phil Bicker, the art
director who had been the commissioner of many of the first edi-
torial stories by this last generation of fashion photographers to
make their mark on the genre. As with all of my publications – as
sole author, editor, and commissioner – aside from The photo-
graph as contemporary art, design collaboration is absolutely cru-
cial to the intentional meaning and the end result. As distribution
has become a less closed-off facet of publishing, collaboration and
some sort of say on the dissemination of my projects has also be-
come important criterion for what I produce. As with Phil Bicker,
David Reinfurt with the Words without pictures website and book,
Alex Rich with eitherand.org, and Geoff Han with the graphic iden-
tity of the new ICP, NY and my co-curated exhibition Public, pri-
vate, secret, Harsh Patel brought his authorship to Photography is
magic. I appreciate the authors here who picked up on his hand in
shaping the book, and I consider this careful working out of every
action to realize this book, along with (principally) the text editor,
managing editor and production manager entirely in line with my
continued belief in curating as an act of ‘taking care’ of the subject
at hand. Harsh joined me on this project because we both wanted
to create a container that was definitely a good value trade book
that would make its way onto thousands of bookshelves within
the Amazon.com-determined shelf life of a year (if you are lucky).
The ostensible ‘definiteness’ of a big book for an encounter with
emergent and transient practices was our own version of surrepti-
tiousness, and a conscious attempt to embed these artists’ critical

24
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
stances and versioning of existing photographic conventions with-
in the commodity system of trade publishing. Both of us have paid
our dues in the niche contemporary-art-and-photography-meets-
publishing arena where you can practically make a list of the 500 -
1,000 or so photobook buyers who will likely add your offering to
their library and then have to watch the secondary market esca-
late the price of said offering, and seal its fate. The majority of the
artists included in my book have similarly operated in this book
territory. My aim for Photography is magic was to realize a popu-
lar book that my ideal reader (I am a curator, I always have a fan-
tasy viewer in mind) – somewhere between the age of seventeen
and twenty-two – would receive as a gift from a loved one because
they are ‘into photography’ – no specialism or experience neces-
sary. I wanted more than anything for this book to be there for
that wonderful and fragile point in a creative life where seeing
your own predilections celebrated is a wonderful thing. I knew
from my extensive teaching in the 2010s that many of the artists
included in Photography is magic are the ones that BFA and MFA
students who haven’t run to the hills of conservatism are looking
at, reading their interviews and artists’ statements, just as I knew
that many photography students visiting the V&A’s print study
room wanted to study work by the young fashion photographers
who were setting out a counterargument for commercial image-
making. Additionally, Harsh and I aimed to create an image se-
quence that was analogous to the style of books and exhibitions
deployed by the included artists, and to not divide up these vari-
ous practices before their connectedness has had a chance to per-
colate, or reduce differentiation to a matter of technique or pro-
duction values or, indeed, make claims beyond my own reading of
these practices through the conceit of secular magic. That would
have been deathly – for me and the still breathing and changing
practices I have represented – or at least premature. The image
sequence, based on the flourishes and seeming repeats of close-up
card magic, slips between installation shots, images, and repro-
ductions of framed works and I hoped would be taken as in the
spirit of a gathering of artists who consciously work with the im-
age-object/photograph duality at play within contemporary art.
In 2012-2014, I was at a point in my life where I was ‘con-
sciously uncoupling’ from photography’s institutionalized obses-
sion with its own demise, and what I was seeing as the limits of
photography-as-a-subject, especially within museum culture, and

25
Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)
the marking of this artist-led wave of photographic unfixing. The
footnotes that run underneath my essay that the writers here re-
fer to represent the self-determined reading that nourished me
during this time. I thought long and hard about what it meant to
add footnotes to my essay, whether this would be the red rag to
academia since they are quite transparently the footnotes of an
autodidact taking cues from writing where the intentionality of
their authors to navigate their cultural landscape and express
what they felt was at stake at that moment is pretty loud and
clear. Just as many of the artists who contributed to the book are
explicit and even literal about the historical and contemporary ci-
tations in their art works, I felt that my essay should do the same.
Including the short statements from the contributing artists (the
majority were written for the book at my request to each artist to
think about a quotation that they could imagine a young practi-
tioner reading, writing out and pinning to their wall) was not iron-
ic in intention, rather a way for me to avoid the almost entirely
coopted trend of including artists’ short bios in survey books, and
also to make a nod to the artist-led thinking that prompted my
book. The red rag turned out to be the title of the book. Admitted-
ly, I should have expected that given my full cognizance that in
combination with the sheer loveliness of the book as an object, the
second meaning of the title would prevail – a giddy, unquestion-
ing, and generalizing hurrah for this slippery medium. I think that
I was hoping that the photo-photo world would receive Photogra-
phy is magic as an invitation to meet new photographic art prac-
tices half way, and not entirely hand over the future to the con-
temporary art world (who clearly have less problems with the se-
mantics of Post-Internet practice), nor leave it up to visual culture,
and network theorists to position photography-as-art in a broader
cultural narrative beyond the separatist history of the medium.
For that, I suspect I do deserve an intellectual slap on the backs of
my legs and to be told to stop showing off.
The strangest sensation for me is seeing here, as with other
critiques, and oxygen-grabbing trashing of Photography is magic
that Benedict Burbridge thoroughly unpacks, is the way in which a
previous book of mine, The photograph as contemporary art, acts
as a standard by which my most recent book gets judged. To be
clear, TPACA is part of Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series, an
enduring format with a transparent brief for its author to map out
an entire artistic field in a series of thematic chapters. Thanks to

26
C. Cotton, O. Meo, A.-K. Rastenberger, D. Curti, B. Burbridge
the brilliant 2004 first edition editor Andrew Brown, and Jacky
Klein for the second and third editions, I undertook the book writ-
ing equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle motivated by my gratitude as a
teenager to World of Art books the night before my school exams,
and as the possibility to write the story of photography in the
barely-started 21st century where 50% of the artists whose work
is included are women. The power of a very affordable book with-
in a highly respected art history series, geared towards non-
specialists, was beyond the expectations of everyone involved. As
a side-note, the book reviews in 2004 that I remember described
the book as ‘lazy’, without clear-enough boundaries or intellectual
merit, and an invalid perspective on photography. The fact that it
is taking a while for other such aerial views onto the subject of
photography as contemporary art to come along at a low price
point has definitely contributed to the book having been pub-
lished in over ten languages and with over 100,000 copies in cir-
culation. Twelve years on, I am of course used to this book going
before me and I have no hopes or interest in imagining that any
book that I have crafted since then will have the same impact – ei-
ther culturally or pedagogically. It is precisely a year ago that Pho-
tography is magic was published, now well into its second printing
and I take that as a sign that it is circulating as widely as I hoped,
and I have some anecdotal evidence-of-sorts that it has been a
useful spur to young people who are about to dip their toes into
the cultural arena. As I write now, thinking about these first se-
rious and thoughtful critiques of Photography is magic, I sense
that its beauty has faded, its transience feels tangible, and I have
to deal with whether the passing of my intentions as its meaning,
diminishes its worth for me. Perhaps it is the sensation that has
made this response so difficult for me to write. I’ll take solace, as I
sit in my home at sunset, just above Sunset Blvd, that I can pull my
one copy of Photography is magic from a cupboard, with all its fail-
ings and now-present expiration, and put it between some thrift
store finds that excited me because of the particularity of their de-
sign and their deviance from the prevailing stories of historical
moments in photographic practice and crack a not-un-ironic smile.