Steven Skopik, "Significant Insignificance-Banality in Contemporar...
Runtime: 47 minutes
Over the last few decades banality has emerged as a dominant conceptual position and aesthetic sensibility. In contrast to reigning traditions of the early and mid 20th-century approaches that valorized technical flourish, formal virtuosity, and a relatively earnest expressive register much contemporary photographic practice has gravitated towards intentionally crude pictorial styles, quotidian subject matter and a general temper of ambivalence and irony. Contradictorily, this version of banality alludes to a lurking and often fraught significance. Such work acknowledges the photographic medium's many contradictions and communicative limitations, while embracing its nonetheless considerable-and enduring-representational allure.
