I’m not so sure about curator, Lisa Hostetler’s premise for the new show at the Eastman Museum. “Personal and collective memories are so inextricably intertwined with photographs,” that the disappearance of the physical print in the digital age “is altering society’s relationship to memory.”
In “A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age” she has rounded up work from contemporary artists whose work speaks to the potential consequences of the medium’s metamorphosis. Often the photographic process and material are intregal to the work and that physical property brings the work closer to an art object than a digital image. Alison Rossiter exposes outdated paper, sometimes from the forties, and without a camera she creates stunning landscape-like images. And Phil Chang has mounted prints that were not fixed. They are fading away under glass and he promised to put new prints in a few days. Even without knowing the premise it is a sensational show, a feast for the eyes and even nourishment for memories.
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