The Uses of Photography

This original exhibition examines a network of artists based in San Diego between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, whose experiments with photography opened the medium to a profusion of new strategies and subjects. 

The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium features early, groundbreaking work by artists such as Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems, who sought artistic media and formats adequate to address their turbulent, transitional era and its pressing questions.i

Exhibition overview from Museum website

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium traces a crucial history of photo-conceptual practice, focusing on an artistic community that formed in and around the young University of California San Diego, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. The work of these artists shaped emergent accounts of postmodernism in the visual arts and their influence is felt throughout the global contemporary art world today.