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They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication. - Dennis Oppenheim on his use of photographs.(1) This statement by Dennis Oppenheim introduces paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. For many years curators, critics and historians have corroborated this reductive understanding of role of photography in Conceptual Art. Sidestepping aesthetic properties of conceptual photographs is convenient; it simplifies distinction between Conceptualism and more material-based practices of Pop Art and Minimalism. Taking artists at their word, writers have also been able to divorce conceptual photography from history of photography more broadly, maintaining a rigid distinction between conceptual and fine art photography of same moment. As we know, however, intentions of artists and historical effects of their work are rarely synonymous. For example, artists who have benefited from renewed critical and curatorial interest in Conceptual Art in last decade have themselves resisted label conceptual.(2) This is understandable - no practicing artist wants to be pigeon-holed as an example of an historical movement. Yet conceptual designation has been crucial to historical understanding of this period of Along same lines, conceptualists' contrary stance on photography should not be accepted at face value. Despite their professed disregard for photography, conceptualists participated in an important transformation of medium, fueling a rise in prominence of photography that attracted critical attention in Pictures generation of late 1970s and early 1980s.(3) First-generation Conceptual Art is an important point of origin for continuing success of photographs by artists who do not consider themselves to be photographers in traditional sense.(4) The conceptual artists' very lack of investment in photography allowed them to generate new possibilities for medium. However, they were not alone in this enterprise. Fine art photographers during late 1960s such as Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander shared with conceptualists an interest in identifying and subverting conventions of photographic vision. The refusal of conceptualists to take photography seriously on its own terms is rooted in earliest definitions of their project. From beginning, ideas were prioritized over material form in which they were conveyed. Sol LeWitt provided a seminal formulation of this notion in his 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art: In conceptual art idea or concept is most important aspect of work. LeWitt dismisses material form of piece as secondary, an afterthought so to speak: When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of planning and decisions are made beforehand and execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.(5) Due to its apparent immediacy, photography was an apt medium with which to pursue this idea-driven art. Critic Lucy Lippard approached Conceptualism from a slightly different angle, coining term the dematerialization of art in late 1960s.(6) Framing conceptual works as a form of disembodied sculpture, notion of dematerialization has been one of main obstacles to serious study of conceptual photography. Like LeWitt, Lippard acknowledges that conceptual works might take a physical form, including photographs, but she does not see object as site of art idea. …
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