Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Dana Miller, Donna De Salvo,
Joseph Giovannini
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Yale University Press, 2011
Keith Cottingham's constructed photographs challenge viewers' perceptions of reality and their understanding of the medium of photography. Cottingham uses digital means (most often without a camera) to form figures, historical tableaus, and architectural spaces in his photographs, a process he describes as "combining digital tools and outputting as photo prints to create a kind of distorted looking glass." These digital tools also allow Cottingham to utilize a variety of methods in assembling his images, from making physical models and drawings to using computer-generated lighting systems. This top-to-bottom approach to construction ultimately means that nothing in Cottingham's photographs can be taken at face value, nor can they be understood according to the traditional characteristics of photography.
Cottingham was influenced by the way that Cindy Sherman appropriated reality through the characters and settings in her photographs, as well as by the photomontages of German artist John Heartfield. While Heartfield's photomontages from the 1930s and 1940s pointedly criticize the Nazi regime and the Third Reich, Cottingham's digital montages more subtly question the presuppositions that people make regarding identity, history, and reality. In two of his series, Fictitious Portraits (1992) and History Re-Purposed (1999), Cottingham used composites of anatomical drawings, digital photographic clippings, and clay models to create fictional beings. In his eerie Fictitious Portraits, androgynous, prepubescent boys are pictured against blank black backgrounds. When scrutinized, especially in areas that are not fully montaged, the realism of these portraits breaks down, leading the viewer to "question the alienation and fragmentation of image from matter." History Re-Purposed uses the same method of montage in portraiture, but also incorporates constructed photographs of animal and botanical specimens as well as landscapes to create a “fictional existence set in a period blended of the past, present, and imaginary" in order to "question historical authenticity."
That same year Cottingham had a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Krems, Austria. His constructed photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Fundación Telefónica, Madrid; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since 1999 Cottingham has continued to show at the Ronald Feldman gallery in solo exhibitions in 2004 and 2007 and in group shows including American Dream (2003), BLACK&WHITEWORKS (2009), and Resurrectine (2010). In recent years Cottingham has been extending his exploration of artifice into a new medium, creating the film Growth (2007), made up entirely of computer animation. Cottingham lives and works in San Francisco.
Keith Cottingham, Untitled (front view), 2004
Digital chromogenic print
64 3/8 x 45 3/4 in. (163.5 x 116.2 cm)
Edition no. 6/6
Cottingham's series Future Pre-Purposed — A Constructed Utopia (2004) includes constructed photographs of architectural spaces and of female figures that evoke stone sculptures set "outside" in empty spaces. The architectural spaces and figures of this series "tease out how social space is produced and experienced." Cottingham did not employ a camera to make these images; instead, he modeled and lighted architectural spaces using 3-D software. His interest in presenting the "illusion of photographic authenticity" is underscored when the images are printed as digital chromogenic prints. The building interior shown in Untitled (front view) (2004) suggests a church, with a long aisle lined with simple benches terminating in an altar or pulpit. The drama of the arching walls and the incoming light brings to mind both the public architecture of prewar Germany and more recent constructions such as the Cadet Chapel in Colorado Springs, designed by Walter A. Netsch (1962), and Tadao Ando's Church of the Light in Osaka, Japan (1989). However, the Netsch and Ando spaces are intended for communal and spiritual gatherings, whereas no people are present in Untitled (front view). This emptiness reinforces Cottingham's assertion that "these spaces are beautiful but there is a dark side, a coldness."
- LP
Keith Cottingham (b. 1965)
Born in Los Angeles, Keith Cottingham attended California Polytechnic State University from 1983 to 1985. During that time he explored drawing and photography. He later moved to San Francisco and attended Suite 3D- Center for Computer Art in 1987-88, where he learned digital montage techniques. He received his BA from San Francisco State University's Center for Interdisciplinary Programs in 1988. Cottingham first showed his work The Self and It's [sic] Other; the Beautiful; the Erotic; the Artificial in 1988 on Artists' Television Access, the weekly cable access program run by the experimental media arts gallery of the same name. His first solo show in New York was at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1999.