ARLES.- Luma Foundation opened the exhibition, Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, a major project exploring the rich history of mechanically-reproduced imagery from the nineteenth century to the present, organized by visual artist and theorist Walead Beshty. The exhibition in Arles also marks the launch of a major scholarly publication with new and historical essays, interviews and historical documents published by Luma and JRP | Ringier.
This encyclopedic exhibition casts a particularly strong perspective on the technical production of images. Picture Industry features a selection of over three hundred artworks and objects and includes photography, time-based media, painting and drawing, video, collage, and installations, allowing the public to literally walk through the history of photography, which developed with the help of new technologies. Reflecting upon the use of photography as a medium, the exhibition also offers the possibility to analyse the issues raised by this profusion.
Picture Industry comprises a substantial collection of books and magazines—culled from the artist’s extensive personal archives and various public collections, spanning a visual history of over one hundred and fifty years—weaves throughout the exhibition, illustrating the themes of the show. The project is further supported by a parallel program of daily screenings featuring a total of 16 films and video works.
Walead Beshty has been exploring and enriching this research over the years. The current edition of Picture Industry features an expanded conceptual framework and foregrounds, among other topics, the physical and mechanical work of various industries as they have been represented since the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. The exhibition includes contributions by dozens of leading post-war and contemporary artists whose work expands and intervenes into this technical history through photojournalism, abstract painting, conceptual photography and experimental video. The project reflects Beshty’s long-standing critical engagement with the mechanical, formal, political, and ontological dimensions of the photographic medium. Picture Industry is an ambitious and wide-ranging meditation on the ways that “work” and “industry” have been central to our understanding of the processes of image-making throughout modernity. The exhibition gathers a diverse chorus of artists, scientists, historians, critics, and contemporaries whose work has defined and advanced our understanding of mechanically-reproduced imagery as it has evolved through complex patterns of production, distribution, and consumption.
The exhibition is the latest iteration of a long-term project Beshty has researched and produced in a variety of formats and venues for nearly a decade beginning with Picture Industry (Goodbye to All That), a group show curated for Regen Projects in Los Angeles in 2010, in which the artist compared the entertainment and motion picture industries of Hollywood and the “culture industry” of mass media to its depiction and creative transformation by contemporary visual artists. Beshty then subsequently realized an updated version of the project for Luma Arles in 2016 on the occasion of Systematically Open? New Forms for Contemporary Image Production in La Mécanique Générale at the Parc des Ateliers. In June 2017, the exhibition travelled to the CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
