They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished.

They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary and nothing else as a residue for communication.

- Dennis Oppenheim forward his use of photographs.(1)

This statement on Dennis Oppenheim introduces the paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography through se. To hear the artists own 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 the photographs themselves as either ferocious animal information or uninflected documentation. For many years curators, critics and historians have corroborated this reductive understanding of the character of photography in Conceptual Art. Sidestepping the aesthetic properties of conceptual photographs is convenient; it simplifies the distinction between Conceptualism and the more material-based practices of suddenly Art and Minimalism. Taking the artists at their word, writers have also been able to divorce conceptual photography from the history of photography more broadly, maintaining a rigid distinction between conceptual and fine art photography of the same moment

As we know, however, the intentions of artists and the historical efficiencys of their work are rarely synonymous. For example, artists who have benefited from the renewed critical and curatorial interest in Conceptual Art in the last decade have themselves resisted the label "conceptual."(2) This is understandable - no practicing artist wants to be pigeon-holed as an example of an historical manner of moving Yet the conceptual designation has been crucial to the historical understanding of this period of work. Along the same lines, the conceptualists' contrary stance forward photography should not be accepted at face value. Despite their affirmed disregard for photography, the conceptualists participated in an important transformation of the medium, fueling a rise in the prominence of photography that attracted critical attention in the "Pictures" generation of the late 1970 and early 1980s(3)

First-generation Conceptual Art is an important point of origin for the continuing succes of photographs by the agency of artists who do not consider themselves to be photographers in the traditional sense(4) The conceptual artists' surpassingly lack of investment in photography allowed them to generate recent possibilities for the medium. However, they were not alone in this enterprise. Fine art photographers during the late 1960 as it is as Gary Winogrand and lee-side Friedlander shared with the conceptualists an interest in identifying and subverting the conventions of photographic vision.

The refusal of conceptualists to take photography seriously onward its own terms is stemed in the earliest definitions of their cast From the beginning, ideas were prioritized from one side of to the other the material form in which they were granted Sol LeWitt provided a seminal formulation of this notion in his 1967 essay "Paragraphs in succession Conceptual Art": "In conceptual art the idea or general [i]or[/i] abstract notion is the most important aspect of the work." LeWitt dismisses the material form of the piece as secondary, an "afterthought" thus to speak: "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."(5) owing to its apparent immediacy, photography was an apt medium with which to follow up this idea-driven art.

Critic Lucy Lippard approached Conceptualism from a slightly different angle, coining the word "the dematerialization of the art object" in the late 1960s(6) Framing conceptual works as a form of disembodied sculp the notion of dematerialization has been united of the main obstacles to the serious research of conceptual photography. Like LeWitt, Lippard acknowledges that conceptual works might take a physical form, including photographs, further she does not see the end as the site of the art idea. In the introduction to Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art intent from 1966-72 (1973), Lippard admits to a flaw in the idea of dematerialization, that "a piece of paper or a photograph is as abundant an object, or as 'material' as a ton of lead" still she sticks with the boundary because of her conviction that a "deemphasis forward material aspects" is key to the conceptual throw Thus Lippard gives critical support to single in kind of the central fallacies of Conceptualism. passage and photographs participate in the production of the work's meaning, however the existence of that form is repeatedly subdueed or denied.

The analytic original of Conceptual Art that Joseph Kosuth provides in his 1973 essay "Art After Philosophy" is plane more rigorous in undermining the visual, material aspects of the work of art. Playing an end-game with indulgent Greenberg's pursuit of the self-referential art percept Kosuth imagines a completely self-contained, tautological artwork, framed in language: " . the propositions of art are not factual, if it were not that linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical or plane mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal chain of cause and effects of definitions of art."(7) novel writers, however, have begun to remark immediately after a blind spot in this analytic formulation of Conceptualism. As British art historian John Roberts points public in his 1997 book, The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-76 the majority of conceptual artworks contain photographs, refractory visual elements that cannot be adequately matched according to or contained in discourse.(8) This dynamic is evident in Kosuth's admit famous works such as the same And Three Chairs (1965) in which the three instantiations of the word "chair" - a dictionary definition, a photograph and an actual chair - are not commensurable. The piece clearly demonstrates the failure of language to contain visual or physical form.