Some of you might have wondered, what this here was about.

What did the artiste want to say?

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I went to see the State Of The Art Photography exhibition at the NRW Forum with a few friends yesterday, enticed by this pretty good photo on the poster:

All things considered, it was pretty disappointing.

There were a few gems – the poster photo by Alex Prager and his other pictures were pretty and the “Pissing Nazis” by Andreas Mühe worked both as good photography and as amusement – but besides that, the whole thing felt extremely mediocre. Give me a week or two and I could find a better selection of photographers that represent contemporary and “state of the art” photography just in my Tumblr feed and on Flickr.

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In fact, that is pretty much how the whole exhibition seemed to me: someone who followed a few good and a lot of hipstery-mediocre people on Tumblr took the first couple of them, checked their work, printed some of it big and put it in an exhibition.

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Now, I’m not necessarily dissing¹ the NRW Forum or even the exhibition. Sad as it may seem, what is presented there might actually be the current State of the Art.

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Just to make sure I’m not only bitching, here are some contemporary photographers whose works I enjoy, in no particular order and with just one quick look into my Tumblr and Flickr favorites:

• Kirsten Becken
• Jon Siegel
• Danny Santos

And there are many more.

If you want to be all artsy², there is one with pictures “taken in Google Street View”: 9 eyes

And hey, if you have iPads in an exhibition, you can always include Cinemagraphs.

To make the thing more contemporary and show the actual current state of photography, one could just as well grab a bunch of pictures with the Hipstamatic or Instagram tag from Flickr. Blown up to A1 size, most of them could at least fake to have some artistic value.³