As contemporary art practices increasingly become more ephemeral and context specific, the question of photography’s status as a proper art medium seems to be challenged more than ever. Not so unlike what french poet Charles Baudelaire famously declared in 1859 about photography being a “handmaiden to the arts and sciences,” in a world of performance and installation art, photography has been employed as a record-keeper and documentor. Its role is to make the marketable the “unsellable” art being made today by embodying the concepts in an object that has the potential to be auctioned off and collected. In this regard, it is at the same time a placeholder for ideas that an artist has made manifest, and the “art” itself: the physicality of
