True Pictures? Contemporary Photography from Canada and the USA

North American photography of the 1950s and 1960s was for many years considered exemplary, as were North American visual arts of this period more generally. But when artistic photography in Europe began to strike out on its own paths in the 1980s, many younger artists no longer felt a compelling need to orient themselves toward American photography.

The large-scale exhibition True Pictures? responds to this state of affairs by presenting a more open view of contemporary photography in North America. In line with the artistic emancipation of photography in Europe, this exhibition identifies the late 1970s as a starting point for a fundamental shift in the understanding of photography in North America. The pictorial form of the large-format tableau was “invented,” used for the first time by Jeff Wall with his lightboxes. This exhibition focuses on the work of artists born between 1946 and 1989 and on the diverse, far-reaching consequences of this new understanding of photography.

Snoeck-Verlag of Cologne brought out a publication in German and English to accompany this exhibition, it can be purchased here.