Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self

Charlotte Cotton has been at the forefront of the appraisal of contemporary art photography for over twenty years. As the first curator in residence at the International Center of Photography in 2015¿16, she opened the museum¿s new home on the Bowery in New York with her exhibition and program Public, Private, Secret. This book has developed out of the discourses that the exhibition prompted. Cotton has also held curatorial positions at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Photographers¿ Gallery in London; the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Katonah Museum of Art, New York; and Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles. She has been a visiting scholar and critic at institutions including The New School and NYU, New York; California College of the Arts, San Francisco; and Otis College, Los Angeles. She is the author of Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015) and The Photograph as Contemporary Art, and cofounder of Words Without Pictures and Eitherand.org. Cotton is based in Los Angeles, California.

Public, Private, Secret explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. Consciously framed by our present era, this collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional delineations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression; in fact, they multiply and expand the number of potential selves in the contemporary image-centric world. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. In so doing, they anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self- representation.