Strange Fire

Q&A: Charlotte Cotton

By Jess T. Dugan   |   October 1, 2020 

Charlotte Cotton is a writer and curator of photography. She has held senior posts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. She has held visiting critic and scholarly posts at art schools and universities including Yale University, The New School for Design, and California College of Art. Her recent books include Photography Is Magic (2015); Fashion Image Revolution (2018); Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and The Configuration of Self (2018); and the fourth, revised edition of The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2020).

Jess T. Dugan: Hi Charlotte! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m really excited about our conversation. You’ve had a dynamic, multifaceted career, which we will discuss more in a moment. But, to begin, can you tell me what originally led you to photography? What was your path to getting to where you are today?

Charlotte Cotton: Hi Jess! It’s a real pleasure for me to be interviewed by an artist I so greatly admire. I tend to be on the other side of the interview dynamic so I’m going to have to resist the urge to respond with questions for you. I’ve become more hesitant about speaking about my “path” into cultural work as time passes and the context is more remote and convoluted to explain. It’s nearly thirty years since I was an intern at the Victoria and Albert Museum and began to be able to picture myself as a curator. The context was very different from the realities of now – both in terms of the status of photography as a cultural subject, and the visibility of curators. In a nutshell, the bar was lower back in the 1990s, and the terrain of what has become photography as contemporary art was less institutionally controlled or defined. I think the most enduring aspect of my early curatorial trajectory that I still identify with and has some relevance to this particular moment is that it gave me a vantage point, a purpose and an education. What might look like a somewhat erratic path from the outside is, for me, a pretty consistent thread of seeking out situations, collaborations from which I could learn, and with the purpose of making things for other people to see and experience.

JTD: That’s really wonderful – I love that you embrace the organic nature of your path, which is something I think more people could benefit from doing. Along those lines, you currently work as an independent curator and writer, but you have previously held positions at several notable institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the International Center of Photography, among others. Talk to me about your decision to work independently. I assume it offers you more freedom and flexibility than you might have working as part of an institution, but it must also come with less stability. 

CC: An indomitable colleague at the V&A once observed that my career would be in reverse. I was a full Curator of Photographs by the time I was 26-years of age, which likely tells you more about the lowly status of photography at that moment than my precocious talent, and speaks to the many kindnesses from which I benefitted from the first generation of photography curators and my peer-group photographic artists in London. It’s worth remembering that both the V&A in the 1990s and LACMA in the late 2000s were not the outwardly secure cultural brands that they are today. My experience is that when an institution is perceived as failing, or expectations are low, innovation and openness to new creative ideas can be very high. Curatorially, you can leapfrog over what you “could” or “should” have been providing to somewhere truly exceptional, and I’d say that these are the scenarios in which I’ve always felt at my best. At The Photographers’ Gallery, there was a less hierarchical approach to curating – free of the restrictions of collections-centric curatorial work and with the space to figure out when an idea is meant to be an exhibition, a book, live debate, a commission, etc. In 2012, I left a job in an institution that was so obsessed with its own demise that it had lost its capacity to envision its future and serve its public in prescient ways. The choice to step out of a full-time, “director of the paperclips” role, as I call it, was very straightforward self-preservation. Did I really want to look back at the 2010s, one of the most remarkable periods of image-making and artist-led creative expression in the face of the wholesale privatization of arts education and the role of art and say, “I put a lot of effort into handling a really difficult and cripplingly political institutional situation with grace and fortitude,” or would I prefer to say, “I went there, I did this, I learnt so much, I met amazing people, I worked hard to fully understand my context, I was present.” In 2011, I travelled to Sydney, Australia, to interview the photographer Lewis Morley who was in his mid-eighties. He moved to Australia in the early 1970s, and had been a really significant interlocutor for photographic culture in Sydney – he must have worked really hard and purposefully at it. When I asked him about what happened during that period of time, he said, “Oh…nothing much,” and I am forever grateful to him for showing me how to script and edit your own narrative. In terms of the loss of stability that you raise, I think that all I lost was a false sense of stability. 

JTD: Talk to me about place: as you mention, you have lived and worked in many places around the world, and your view of photography reflects this global, diverse approach. How does location affect you and your work personally, and how do you think it affects artists and contemporary art photography as a whole?

CC: I think we live in oscillating states of being local, regional and global – and reacting to the conditions of all three. Maybe this is even more pronounced for artists and writers, where we are experiencing this on pretty much every level of our personal and cultural lives.  On (my) personal level of being here in Los Angeles while California burns, in a country where you can only hope that we are at the agonizing moment before the collapse of enforced nationalistic division and bigoted violence, and as a member of a species with its survival clock ticking at speed…the only way to cope is to concentrate on where you are at this given moment, and address what is urgent.  I interviewed the amazing artist Catherine Opie this year and her through line of creating to what is urgent is truly inspirational.  

JTD: That’s excellent advice. Let’s talk about how you discover artists who interest you: in your work and travels, you must see a lot of work by both emerging and mid-career photographers. What is it that most excites you about an artist’s work? Can you identify a unifying thread that connects the work you respond to most strongly?

CC: I think I respond on a very human level. Maybe my responses are grounded in the visual histories I carry and research but I think I respond to artists’ intentions and the entreaties they make for us to pay attention. I had so-called connoisseur tendencies trained out of me at the beginning of my curatorial journey, working as a curator in public institutions where I saw life-long curators do the best work when remaining committed to being open-minded generalists, and responding to what was culturally needed and hopeful at a given moment. I think I am also very mindful of clearing away my own peccadillos, biases and unrequited desires when responding to photographers’ work and not overshadowing artists’ intentions with my projections.

JTD: That’s a perfect segue to my next question. Your view of photography is expansive: you are obviously incredibly well-versed in contemporary fine art photography, but you have also worked in fashion photography and on commercial and editorial projects. How do you think the worlds of fine art and commercial photography intersect, relate to, and influence one another?

CC: At its most cynical, I don’t see a separation – both fashion and so-called commercial photography, and art photography are in the service of commodity industries, both susceptible to tokenism and erasure. At my least cynical, I think of fashion photography as a space of immediate responsiveness to the shifts in culture and with the capacity to platform the visuals of our time – our shared narratives. I’ve worked with fashion photography and observed the mechanics of commercial image-making for twenty-five years and it’s definitely a love/hate relationship; I can get really outraged by the squandering of its potential to evolve. It is a fascinating story and we are in one of the more hopeful and exciting chapters right now. 

JTD: Let’s talk about The Photograph as Contemporary Art. You published the first version of this book, which is a survey introduction to contemporary art photography, in 2004, and it quickly became a critical part of many photographers’ educations, often being taught in BFA and MFA programs. You mentioned in a recent lecture with Self Publish, Be Happy that writing a book of this kind is a massive undertaking, as it includes the work of nearly 250 photographers. So I’m curious: what originally motivated you to write this book? What was your process for putting it together? What were your hopes for it? 

CC: I should point out that The Photograph as Contemporary Art is part of the historic World of Art series published by Thames & Hudson and, therefore, I wasn’t pitching the book to a publisher, I was recruited to write it. Photobook publishing was very different back then – there was some innovative book publishing that would take chances on emerging photographers and writers but it was far from what we saw happening later in the noughties. The brilliant commissioning editor Andrew Brown approached me, I was the recommendation of the first author to be invited to write the book – Jeremy Millar – when his schedule made it impossible for him to accept the challenge. I think I knew I was ready, after a decade of curatorial work, but I had very little idea of what an undertaking it would be. You don’t until you try it, do you? I approached the process of writing the book as a curator – structuring the narrative initially by laying out xeroxes of images (it was the early 2000s…) and, as I wrote, staying focused on who the viewer/reader was going to be. I remember how useful World of Art titles were for me when I was at school and university and that gave me a baseline confidence in the scope of an art historical moment that I needed to grapple with. My hopes for the book were that it would be really useful at a crucial moment for the creative confidence of people 10 or 15 years younger than me at that point.   

JTD: Well, it clearly was! You have just published a new and expanded fourth edition with a new section and several new photographers. I love that you avoid the typical categories used to describe photography – portraits, landscapes, documentary, studio, etc – and have organized the artists by much more dynamic and interesting categories such as If This Is Art, Once Upon a Time, Intimate Life, etc. Tell me more about this new edition- what was added since the last edition that you’re particularly excited about?

CC: The new edition is the first time in the 16-year lifespan of The Photograph as Contemporary Art that I had the opportunity to revise the first 6 chapters. For previous new editions, I could only add another chapter and re-write the introduction. It took me a few months to pluck up the courage to re-read the book and dissect it, not least because it really was like revisiting a younger version of myself with the sharp focus of hindsight. Now that the book is printed and bound, I’m currently going through the classic “is this good enough? Is that it?” and experiencing the highs and lows of a watershed moment that I think is akin to how an artist may feel after they open a mid-career survey exhibition. And it’s an emotional process of summoning all of the people – artists and thinkers – who have shaped my understanding of photography as contemporary art since 2004, and the positions that artists can claim, and what they call for us to engage with at this juncture in human and art history. I’m grateful to my younger self that I clearly had the purposefulness to create categories that were closer to the motivations and strategies of artists than to conventional genre-based groupings of photography. Then, as now, I always try my best to not prescribe a position for contemporary photographers that is at the tail end of a separatist, institutional taxonomy of photography. I don’t think that this is the divining rod for artists. What I am allowing myself to see right now, as I page through the new edition, is how the 200 artists whose work has been illustrated in the previous editions of The Photograph as Contemporary Art and have been carried into the new, fourth edition are recontextualized and reanimated by the 200 artists cited for the first time. 

JTD: For the sake of full disclosure, I’m very honored to be included in the new edition. And, as I know many other artists have shared with you, it is especially meaningful to me, as I read the first edition in 2004 when I was an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA. What is it like for you, as a curator and writer, to follow, and possibly collaborate with, artists over a long period of time, many of whom looked up to you from afar prior to getting to know you or working with you? How important are these personal connections to you, and in what ways do they inform your working process? 

CC: One of the loveliest aspects of the process of contacting artists to participate in the fourth edition of The Photograph as Contemporary Art is how many told me the same story about the book having a special meaning for their younger selves. It hadn’t really occurred to me that this would happen, not exactly, because it’s been many years now since the book has had its own life and meanings that are quite separate from me. It is its own entity. I think people obviously know that there is an author but are more likely to know the title than who was its scribe. One of my dearest friends, Jason Evans, once told me that I was the first person who took him seriously as an artist. I felt really understood by this, and it pinpoints what I care about and what I aim for in my connections with creative humans. As you say, it’s pretty well known that I don’t tend to curate the work of super-established artists who I just don’t see of what use I am to them or what I will genuinely learn from the process. I think I make a more useful contribution when it’s time for artists I have known for over twenty years – and especially women artists – to publish their survey book, and I should step up and scribe a narrative of their creative journey because I’ve been in close proximity to it. I’m more likely to first encounter an artist before they have graduated, or through an open call process, as a recommendation from another artist of someone whose work is really interesting, or if someone just contacts me and asks if I will take a look at their work. There are literally hundreds of artists whose practice I respect and I’ve met in these pretty informal ways, who, if The Photograph as Contemporary Art was a volume set of publications, would be included.  And, like you, like all the artists who are represented in the new edition, you are making your contribution to the very idea of what photography can reveal and narrate, and are also really committed to disclosing that path to artists who are coming up after you. All this said, I didn’t necessarily have a personal, long-term affinity with everyone represented in The Photograph as Contemporary Art – sometimes, it’s pretty much the fan girl within me who asked, feeling a little nervous that I might be rejected. And some artists did decline the invitation. It was really important to me that I sent all of the contributing artists to the 4th edition the draft texts about their work and there was the opportunity for these haiku-like descriptions to be ones that artists could stand by. There were less of the humbling moments for me in the text drafting and editing processes where I know the artist personally but it was well worth med going beyond what I am already deeply familiar, despite the occasional shame I felt about getting an artist’s narrative wrong in the first draft. It was through my failings that I could get to a place of intimately understanding the respective work of, essentially, strangers.

JTD: As you know, the mission of the Strange Fire Collective is to support work by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ artists, all of whom have traditionally been under-represented in the photography world. How do you think about diversity and inclusion in your work? Is this a conscious part of your practice?

CC: I’m so appreciative that you and Strange Fire Collective invited me in, thank you! Yes, it is a conscious part of my practice, and markedly since I became a permanent resident in 2015 (no longer a “legal alien”) in the U.S. This year, I finally banished my inner grateful immigrant-cum-global-flaneur (“flaneur,” like “brunch,” are words that I have issues with anyway, and I am now officially erasing) and commenced racializing my whiteness and going granular on where this can impact me right, right now. I am committed to being present in the U.S. at this juncture in history and even though it can feel like running a marathon wearing flip flops into a thick cloud of smoke, there is no way back, I am changed and redirected. In terms of the necessity to consciously address the repressive legacies of and implications for photography and image culture, Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (a co-curated exhibition at ICP in 2015-2016, a multi-authored book published by Aperture in 2018) is an explicit calling out of the biases of our beloved medium and the roots of its resilience as a still-powerful tool by which we can be seen. In a way, Public, Private, Secret represents my curatorial baby steps towards true diversity and inclusion in my practice because I structured it to explicitly speak to the forces that naturalize racism, sexism,  and the othering of personhood, and how artists forcefully counterargue against such repression. The bigger part of the journey is to write and curate generalized stories of photography – the histories – that are grounded in diversity and inclusion. Not separatist nor specialist – not alternate histories – but resilient photographic stories that can be amplified despite the still-operational contexts of white supremacist models of museology, publishing, creative industry, and art markets. The ongoing challenge is not how I react but how I respond. Meaningfully. And without being tokenistic or, in effect, anti-intersectional.

JTD: That is incredibly well said. Thank you, Charlotte. To conclude our conversation, what projects are you currently working on, and what’s next for you?  

CC: I think what’s next is to get more accurate and cut away at everything that constitutes a smoke screen to truly living through this moment. Right now, I’m writing a lot of documents for a project in Western Asia that will go live next year. The documents are not poetry by any means but they are a strange sort of record of what feels possible to imagine with my colleagues, and some traces of how my reconfigured self will write her love letters to the future. I’m profoundly grateful to have another axis on which to turn, and something remarkable to start building from the collective foundations up.

JTD: Fantastic, I am looking forward to seeing this new project when it goes live next year- it sounds wonderful. Thank you so much, Charlotte, for so generously sharing your time and insight with me today.