KENNETH JOSEPHSON CONJURING IDEAS WITH A VISUAL SLEIGHT-OF-HAND

摘要

Experiencing the work of photographer Kenneth Josephson can feel a bit like walking into a theater and finding yourself backstage instead, suddenly viewing from an unexpected vantage: everything appears real, yet disorienting and unsettling. In many of his photographs, Josephson characteristically makes one wonder not only what is there in the picture, but how it came to be. There is no easy accounting for how he created "Girl Combing Her Hair, 1 959." Perspective and space hauntingly collapse in this picture of a partly visible woman pressed against a screen whose latticework contains more than two-dozen tiny variant images of her. What we think we see and understand in a Josephson photograph soon gives way to uncertainty and questions. This is particularly evident from the time of his innovative Images within Images series begun in the mid-1 960s, including such photographs as "New York State, 1 970." By 2000, when Josephson was given a retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, his international reputation as a pioneer in conceptual photography was already well established.