Subtly Subversive

Here's a useful quotation, used by photographer Pradip Malde on his website.  The author is setting up a discussion of Malde's work with the platinum process, but it's an interesting illustration of how, sometimes, being a bit conservative can be the more radical thing:

Given that so much contemporary art has been styled as a radical negation of the formal conventions of artwork, it is surprising that the fine art photographic print still maintains a credibility and force. The element of craft and technical expertise can seem retrogressive in an atmosphere of fevered conceptualism and self-conscious avant-garde dissonance. Certainly the photograph has been subject to this radicalisation with the 'snapshot', the vernacular photograph, the serial study, the neutral or 'deadpan' form, the confessional abject image, the conceptual photograph all finding favour within the contemporary art world. Indeed, all of these forms have been captured by the institutions, the galleries and the academies, so that in some sense they construct the new establishment. Within this frame the photographers who remain fascinated by the metier appear both conventional and contradictory. Conventional, in that they recognise a history which remains unresolved and open to development, and contradictory, in that they oppose the measured intellectual strategies of the conceptual in favor of a subtly subversive concern with form and content.

Tom Normand, Scottish Photography: a history (2007)

It would have been better written in plain English, of course, but academics are contractually-obliged to write in this constipated style, and it summarises recent photographic history in a neat way, I think.

St. Catherine's Hill, New Year's Day 2013