Photography can be thought of as a medium, a tool, an object, a practice, or, more often than not, some combination thereof. Through approximately forty works, some of them created for the exhibition and some shown for the first time, The Anxiety of Photography examines the growing number of artists who embrace photography’s plasticity and ability to exist, sometimes uneasily, in multiple contexts.

The fluidity of photography can produce fundamental anxieties for both artist and viewer. Many of the works presented here reflect on the changing nature of our relationship to the materials and materiality of photography, as artists produce prints from hand-painted negatives, violently collide framed pictures, or arrange photographs and objects in uncanny still lifes. The “objecthood” of the image is powerfully expressed throughout the exhibition, both in front of the camera and in the presentation of the work itself.

This tendency toward materiality, part of a larger trend in contemporary art of the last decade, is accompanied by a reinvestment in studio practice and an interweaving of personal content within the work. Many of the artists included employ an expanded collage aesthetic and have fully digested notions of appropriation. Borrowed images coexist with photographs taken by the artist; images produced in a commercial context are reused within the artist’s studio.

By playing with the photograph’s three essential qualities—being flat, static, and bounded—artists are investigating just what a photographic object and a photographic practice can be. They use the puzzlement that photographs induce to compel a more careful state of looking, a more open dive into pictures. They are fully mobilizing photography’s resources.

The exhibition in Austin is presented by Arthouse at the Jones Center and the Austin Museum of Art.