Fotofest focuses on haunting images of contemporary America

For the first time in is its 27-year history, Fotofest is highlighting contemporary U.S. photography. Organizers asked leading curators from different regions of the country to put together four exhibitions that represent "the exciting substance of new U.S. photography in works that look beyond the established conventions of this quintessentially American medium." Subjects range from war, poverty and celebrity to more philosophical issues about the place of American culture in the world. Here are some striking images from each exhibition, along with commentary from Charlotte Cotton, creative director of the National Media Museum in Bradford, England.

In The Road to Nowhere? exhibition, curator Natasha Egan has conflated a politicized photographic lineage, from the Farm Security Administration to Robert Frank’s "The Americans of the mid-1950s" to the New Topographics exhibition of 1975, with the socioeconomic reality of 21st century America in the wake of its earlier golden age. Her selection of 18 photographers convincingly narrates our melancholic and sometimes biting fables about America. 

"The Road to Nowhere?" is on display at Winter Street Studios.

The title of curator Aaron Schuman's exhibition, "Whatever was Splendid: New American Photographs," takes as its cue a phrase used by Lincoln Kirstein in his 1938 introduction to Walker Evans’s “prophetic” (to quote Schuman) book American Photographs. In a focused manner Schuman has explored the renewed timeliness of Evans’s photography, created in an earlier period of deep social and economic trouble in the United States. Both exhibitions ponder the circumstances and the consequences that a sensitive photographer in America must bear witness to.

"Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs" is on display at FotoFest at Vine Street Studios.

In the "MediaNation: Performing for the Screen" exhibition, curator Gilbert Vicario cites David Antin’s 1976 analysis of the then-emergent artistic form of video as taking its aesthetic and technical cues from the industry of television, by then a mainstream medium.....In an era where the personal computer has taken over from the television set and where telecommunications are secondary to our web-based conversations, he suggests that there are new vehicles and constructs for contemporary artists to co-opt and subvert.

"Medianation: Performing for the Screen" is on display at New World Museum,the Art League of Houston and Isabella Court.

The legacy of conceptual art since the early 1960s is the most pronounced historical underpinning of "Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers From Southern California" showing the work of eight artists who have graduated from Southern Californian art schools, selected by the curatorial team of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This theme reflects a nationwide refocusing upon a period when artists were preoccupied with what it meant to make art, and what art could speak of in a time of political and societal anxiety.  The ground that Robert Heinecken laid at University of California at Los Angeles, starting in 1961, for exploring photography outside of its traditional genres, nine concepts, or aesthetics still remains fertile.

"Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California" is on display at Williams Tower.