ABSTRACT
Photography is as closely associated with time as it is with chance. Photographers have always played with the tools of their time in an attempt to create new kinds of pictures that transcend expectations. Within contemporary art photography, staging has become widespread, even commonplace. Tableau photography takes its name from the French term “tableau vivant,” or “living picture,” in which actors or models, mostly in the nineteenth century, would be hired to act out a scene from a work of art or a literary source. Koch’s interest in the complexities of seeing shares commonalities with the staged photography of James Casebere, who, like the other Pictures Generation artists with whom he is associated, has sought, since the mid-1970s, to challenge the documentary model of photography espoused by John Szarkowski at Museum of Modern Art during the 1960s.
