Reading a Book about Photographs of Photographs

We live in a time of information and sensory overload – we are bombarded, assaulted by images. Picture after picture – in print, in video, television, cell phone, on the sides of buildings and buses  - pictures are everywhere.  The artists featured in Lay Flat:02 Meta are photographers working with photographs of photographs. Very meta, right?

Photography has never had a very settled place in the art world.  Should artistic photographs record the world as it is? Should they try to emulate paintings?   And now that everyone (nearly) has a camera, who is and who isn’t an artist anymore? How can art exist in a culture so flooded with images?

It’s pop art and photographic collage in the digital multimedia age.  It’s ironic, and glib – and maybe creative and clever too.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Sometimes a picture is just a picture.

I am especially impressed by the work of Daniel Gordon who photographs still life sculptures created from photographs.