oturn home > Sketch: index page > Map of photographic genres

Map of photographic genres

15 October 2001

Just to sort my thoughts and to understand what is photographed (and thereby what usually remains excluded), here is a map showing photography's genres (certainly not all) sorted by the opposition indoors/outdoors and private/professional. This is just a rough approximation.

Diagrammatic map of photographic genres

The blue line indicates family photography stretching across outdoors and indoors, including pornography.

Note: What I forgot to put in is of course journalism (photographic evidence of the assumed relevant/historical) stretching across indoors and outdoors on the right, professional, side.

It also becomes clear that a lot of 'photography as art' is located outside the bubbles in the map: run-down archtecture, NY city dwellings (Haacke, in a wider conceptual context); non-scenic landscape, neither nature nor city (early Jeff Wall); multiple people / non-events as variation of the typical candid street photography (diLorca), the work place, indoors and outdoors corporate space (Sekula); the non-scenic street detail: building sites, slushy snow on stairs, rats in the gutter (Tillmanns); billboards, magazine ads and own art work re-photographed, appropriated (Prince); the revolting, hijacked, inverted portrait (Sherman). All in their way conciously negating the above categorization.

Last update: 01 August 2004 | Impressum—Imprint