David Campany: So present, so invisible: Conversations on photography

There is a lot of casual talk about photography, just as there is a lot of casual photography. But there have always been articulate voices, able to see past the obvious, around the distracting, and through the trivial to say something about the more profound aspects of the medium. Many of those voices have belonged to image makers.

The critic and exhibitions curator David Campany, often invited by photographers and museums to write about their practice during his career, talked with world-class artists – Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Daniel Blaufuks, Robert Cumming, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Baltz, John Stezaker, Paul Graham, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Jeff Wall, Lucas Blalock, Susan Meiselas, Victor Burgin, William Klein, Stephen Shore – to interrogate them about their past, the various creative phases they crossed over, and above all their rapport with photographic medium and reality. That is why these conversations transcend the dimension of the simple interview to reveal the close connection between art and author photography, between photography and the world, between thought and speech.

Because, as noted by the author in his introduction, “whether long or short, nearly all these conversations were open-ended. Neither party knew where we might be going or where things would end up. For me, that is always the real value of a conversation, as opposed to an interview (or a questionnaire). There is risk and excitement, a sense of mutual exploration and speculation”.