SAN DIEGO, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presents The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium at its La Jolla location from September 24, 2016 through January 2, 2017. The exhibition highlights a network of artists in Southern California who sought artistic media and formats adequate to address their turbulent era and its pressing questions.

The Uses of Photography examines a constellation of artists who were active in San Diego between the late 1960s and mid-1980s and whose experiments with photography opened the medium to a profusion of new strategies and subjects. These artists introduced urgent social issues and themes of everyday life into the seemingly neutral territory of conceptual art, with photographic works that took on hybrid forms, from books and postcards to video and textand-image installations. If photography had come to occupy a new, more prominent position in the art world of the late 1960s, much of the medium’s radical potential nonetheless remained latent.

Tracing a crucial history of photoconceptual practice, The Uses of Photography focuses on an artistic community that formed in and around the University of California, San Diego, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. Artists such as John Baldessari, Eleanor Antin, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others, employed photography and its expanded forms as a means to dismantle modernist autonomy, to contest notions of photographic truth, and to engage in political critique. The influence of these artists is felt throughout the global contemporary art world today, yet their common roots in San Diego—a military town far removed from the art world—has rarely been acknowledged. While these artists are celebrated internationally for their individual achievements, this exhibition is the first to explore how their practices emerged in tandem at a critical time and place.

Featuring approximately 100 works, The Uses of Photography presents an array of media, including photographic series, installation, slide projection, video, audio recordings, artist’s books, ephemera, and a program of film screenings. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue co-published by MCASD and University of California Press, featuring essays by David Antin, Jill Dawsey, Pamela M. Lee, Judith Rodenbeck, and Benjamin J. Young.

Artists in the exhibition include David Antin, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison, Louis Hock, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Babette Mangolte, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Lorna Simpson, Elizabeth Sisco, Phel Steinmetz, and Carrie Mae Weems.