Contemporary Taxonomies: Conceptual Documentary and the Photobook

The term ‘conceptual documentary’ has been used increasingly in recent years in response to certain shifts in photographic practice within the art world. As the market for ‘concerned,’ humanist documentary photography constricted considerably during the 1990s, documentary photographers came to focus less on far away places and more on their home towns, city streets, domestic spaces and daily lives. The cool, distanced and intensely analytical approach to documentary photography that is associated with the work of Frank Breuer, Paul Shambroom, Hans van der Meer, Stephen Gill, Raphaël Dallaporta and Mathieu Pernot also speaks to the tensions and sense of disconnection that dominates contemporary culture. According to the British Magnum photographer, Martin Parr, this conceptual documentary photography is the most compelling and pertinent form of documentary practice today because it addresses a need for order in a fractured and chaotic world.
By making sense of the world via an emphasis upon selection, documentation, editing and a narrow focus on often banal social, cultural and political phenomena, conceptual documentary photography can be understood as a symptom of the ‘archival impulse’ that Hal Foster identifies in much contemporary art. This paper will address the particular implications of conceptual documentary photobooks as expressions of the archival impulse. The recent proliferation and rapid rise in price and demand for photobooks has coincided with a shift in international curatorial practice in which artists’ books have come to feature prominently in major art museum exhibitions. With a focus on the books of the Australian conceptual documentary photographer, Matthew Sleeth, this paper will also assess the importance of photobooks as alternative sites for the exhibition and reception of contemporary conceptual documentary photography.

Dr Melissa Miles is a Research Associate in the Department of Theory of Art and Design, Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University. Recent scholarly publications include 'The Burning Mirror: Photography in an Ambivalent Light', published in the Journal of Visual Culture, and ‘Sun-pictures and Shadow-play: Untangling the Web of Gendered Metaphors in Lady Elizabeth Eastlake’s ‘Photography’’ which will to be published in Word and Image in 2008. Locally, she is a regular contributor to Eyeline: Contemporary Visual Arts, and her book chapter on Peter Booth was published this year in Brought to Light II, edited by Julie Ewington. Current research projects include conceptual documentary photography and the photobook.