ABSTRACT
If the 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of Postmodernism and a more conceptual form of art photography, the practices and theories developed in those decades seemed to spread out into several veins of cultural exploration in the 1980s and beyond. The early postmodern focus on Performance Art encouraged a wide-ranging investigation of the human body, with many photographers turning their lenses onto themselves as well as to their family members and friends. The urgency of feminist studies of gender and sexuality fed directly into the expansion of artists who trained their attention to issues of multiculturalism, and to the formation of individual and social identities over time and within particular historical and geographical moments. The New Topographical, architectural, environmental, and typological studies produced by many photographers, especially the Bechers (see Chapter 18), renewed interest in the landscape as a space of cultural identity formation as well. In each of these areas, a renewed debate centered around what might be called humanism, and momentous open questions loomed about what such a term or philosophy does, or should, mean in an era of diverse political, environmental, and social changes.
