Fine art photography is like writing poetry, taking an everyday language and asking it to do things that are a little less conventional. But photography as a whole is a shared construction, it is what we are willing to call photography—no one gets to author it, it is hard to essentialize it, it’s what the group says that photography is.
What we call photography has so many different materialities, uses, and contexts and, though there are all kinds of new ways to capture information with technology, photography will be around so long as it remains a salient category for the “group.” That is what my work is playing in—this really broad common language. In my work, photography is a kind of box, something to push against or push out of, but not break—a field of play.
—Lucas Blalock, artist
Photograph by © Cory Rice
