Sarah M. Miller

This study examines multiple, competing concepts of "documentary" in American photography, as they were formulated and set into circulation through specific photographic projects and publications. Refuting prevalent theories of documentary as a singular genre or ideological imperative, this study instead historicizes documentary as a terrain of experiment and contest as the medium's cultural and artistic roles multiplied in the 1930s-40s.

In the twenty-first century, art photography has taken a dramatic turn toward materiality. Artists are working a wide variety of chemicals, processes, tools, and artifacts associated with analog photography, manipulating them as materials with conceptual and expressive potentialities rather than as invisible means to pictorial ends. “Photography Now” argues that such assertive re-materialization of photography in the realm of contemporary art is not, as is commonly assumed, nostalgic, but rather a generational endeavor to shift the public's understanding of photography’s broader cultural significance—and its key contemporary functions—from depictive to experiential. Emphasizing process as the site of meaning, the practices analyzed in this project dissect the technological structuring of visibility and attention, insert friction into inherited photographic conventions for formulating identity and experience, disrupt the algorithmic imperatives of pictorial labeling and data extraction, and mobilize photographic archives to political and affective ends—all to probe the changing relationships between photography and experience in the digital era. Photography is modernity’s paradigmatic interface of self and world. Recognizing its radical transformation as both a technology and a social apparatus, artists are replacing the twentieth-century question, “How do photographs represent?” with, “What does it mean to make photographs now?”