FOTO8 starts tomorrow in Brooklyn, NY

From the Blog:

foto8 - What's up at DUMBO?: "For more than 150 years, photographers have engaged with the question: 'Is photography art?', championing what in each era photographers felt to be the unique or defining characteristics of the medium. As times change these characteristics fall away into the categories of photo and art history, from pictorialism to modernism to surrealism to every other -ism. These categories as they have congealed make sense of how the past was made sense of in it's own time. Some photographers have disavowed art; others have insisted on it.

Abiding throughout all these permutations, however, has been the notion that a photograph derives some important part of its effect from its insistence that something happened before the camera, and that despite the idiosyncrasies and patterns of technologies and style and the categories of visual knowledge and information, something was there before the camera.

Photojournalism and documentary photography have taken many forms but at their heart of all witnessing is this nugget. Despite all of the forms that photography can take that can be called 'documentary', if there is a claim to the real then that indexed moment is given enormous respect. Concerned photography celebrates human accomplishment and decries injustice by bearing witness through authorial eyes. The 'decisive moment' celebrates the intuitive alignment of composition, information"