Documentation in an age of photographic hypercirculation

For over a century, the photographic documentation of art has been the site of debates concerning the contested relationship between original and copy, aura and authenticity, mirroring shifts in the conceptualisation of art’s cultural and socioeconomic value and its relationship to the public realm. This chapter argues that as photographic practices have become networked and tied to computational infrastructures, the processes which underpin art’s mediation become further complicated. Focusing on the work of artists Cristina Garrido, and Eva & Franco Mattes, it explores how the historic relation between the art object and its documentation is increasingly eclipsed by the relations between the artwork’s documentation and its audience.