Contemporary art circulates through ‘installation shots’. Overwhelmingly, artworks are viewed through eye-level photographs of depopulated exhibitions. Yet the historical affordances and limitations of the genre have seldom been theorized. This article addresses the ascendance of the installation shot as a process of industrial standardization shaped by market pressures. Departing from considerations of precedents in 1850s France, the article considers the rise of twentieth-century installation shot photography in the context of art’s declining self-evidence. The form, I argue, afforded a legible publicity photograph through which to advertise and disseminate exhibitionary appearances in the absence of other socially expedient means. A technique through which to achieve extra-artistic imperatives, the installation shot predominates within contemporary art. But it has been contested and negated. The article concludes with some reflections on how autonomy might be wrested from the circulation of art images today.
Thomas J. Watson (Mon,) studied this question.