Charlotte Cotton

Charlotte Cotton is a curator and writer, with influential work in contextualizing contemporary photography.

Because my images often involve storytelling I am interested on the thoughts of Cotton on the tableau-vivant area of photography.

Tableau photography has a history in pre-photographic era art including the eighteenth and nineteenth century figurative painting.  Today we still share the cultural ability to recognize props and characters and a frozen or 'pregnant' moment of a story being told (Cotton 2014).

I was able to watch the recording of the Living Image Symposium at Falmouth University that happened on March of 2019 with Charlotte herself as she discusses the project; Public, Private, Secret, a work for our era that bring works that discuss how images making and consumption are embedded in a larger scheme of  online behavior and social codes.  

She presents her photo projects like many others that start with a personal curiosity and investment.  She is diverse in form and narrative and also role she takes on but always with a desire to participate.  She has found her place working through curatorialy the issues our collective conscious has to carry- hopefully projecting our prevail.  

It's a new time for technology, and technology is affecting our identity unlike any other time in history.   

Cotton excels at creating spaces and in this project she imagined spaces for people to work out the extent to be both optimistic and skeptical. 

Though looking at her portfolio her work that interests me the most may be her book Photography is Magic.  

Richard Rivera describes it as "a tour de force of all visual media that may stray or touch in the most peripheral way upon any photographic means to create an image" (New Your Journal of Books).  Abstract, conceptual, and digital composites are all interests in my own photography.  And particularly how technology is reshaping photography.
  

Fig. 1: Slade 2020

Figure 1. Bren SLADE. 2020.

COTTON, Charlotte. 2014 The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Third edition. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson.

COTTON, Charlotte. 2015. Photography is Magic. New York, N.Y: Aperture.

Living Image Symposium. 2019. Falmouth University [online] Available at: https://falmouthflexible.instructure.com/courses/249/pages/the-living-image-symposium-charlotte-cotton-march-2019?module_item_id=26307 [accessed 12 May 2020].