What is a Photograph? continues through May 4 at the International Center of Photography (New York). According to the catalog, the show explores the "intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s."

Writing in the New York Times, Ken Johnson says the show is "not urgently relevant." In a slightly more positive review, Lyle Rexer explains Carol Squiers curatorial pupose, "Her thesis is that something happened to photography in the 1960s and ’70s that made it impossible to look at art photographs – or any photographs, for that matter – in the same old way. That something was conceptual art, the movement that saw art as primarily a way of exploring ideas. Although it often yielded nothing more than ephemeral events or experiments, its impact is all over the art world... The cumulative effect of this upheaval was to shift the focus from the traditional decisions photographers make in order to control what happens in the frame to all the issues and questions that lie outside the frame: the photograph’s “construction,” distribution, display and audience response."

(Lyle Rexer has a fabulous new book: The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography)

Two pieces from the exhibition:

Grays Lake, ID 7 by Matthew Brandt

Untitled (C-1189) by Marco Breuer

March 8 addendum: Earlier in the week I failed to turn off the automatic flash and this was the outcome.  Unlike most of my compositions it is the product of a wide lens and the subject matter is explicit. But coherent with my usual practice (and perspective), accident plays a crucial role in what I find most beautiful here.  Would I have as quickly embraced the accident if I had not recently seen Brandt's work above?