In Photography Is, thousands of phrases beginning with the words “Photography is”  are gathered from textbooks, blogs, adverts, press releases, and online forums, compiling them into a book that reads as both archive and manifesto. The result is a chorus of competing voices that refuses to settle on a single definition, instead revealing photography as a fluid, unstable system shaped by technology, culture, and belief.

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Print-on-demand softcover book
5.5″ x 8.5″ (13.97 x 21.59cm), 200 pages
Wallpaper and banner installations / Single-channel video
Site specific, variable dimensions (see below)

Photography Is presents more than 3,000 phrases that define one of the most democratic and ubiquitous of all art forms. Mirroring the ambiguous and untrustworthy nature of photographs themselves, each phrase is torn from its original context and reordered into a contradictory, chaotic, and revealing whole—photography without photographs. By outsourcing authorship to the collective, the work exposes how meaning in photography is generated and circulated today through networks, repetition, and noise. Photography Is serves as the foundation for everything that follows in my practice: a declaration that in the twenty-first century, the image belongs to everyone and to no one at all.

“The sheer volume and diversity of quotes are a great reflection of photography itself: sometimes intelligent, sometimes stupid, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, serious, funny, poetic, romantic – as diverse, different and contradictory as the people who utter them.”

— Joachim Schmid

“A surprisingly poetic and thought-provoking meditation on how the subject is discussed throughout our culture.”

— International Center of Photography, New York