Performance and Photography

It has been argued that recordings of performance art lose the meaning of the work. However, I believe, (and it has become less valid of an argument since the 60s and 70s) that photography and videography have a definitive place in performance art. It is true many artists' work is not carried over well into a recorded form. Many of these artists, however, will record the work anyway as a means of distribution and for the artists' own records, so long as the original performance is not compromised. Other artists use recorded mediums as their primary and final form of presentation. Artists like Vito Aconcci, Barbara Probst and Jenima Stehli create most of their work in a studio or otherwise privately contrived setting and record it as stills or video. The recorded evidence is the work, and one of its advantages is that the artists has the option of removing some of the serendipity from a piece by re-performing, and the work can much more easily be manipulated to seem more or less believable to the viewer.

Barbara Probst is particularly interesting in this right. Her works involve the photographing of the same subject, scene, or action, from multiple angles at once with more than one camera. The images often are independent of one another in style, angle, composition, etc. and could stand alone as singular photographs. But, they are inherently tied together in their subject, and therefore work strongly as a group.

http://www.artnet.com/Artists/ArtistHomePage.aspx?artist_id=423838881&page_tab=Artworks_for_sale
http://www.murrayguy.com/barbaraprobst/main.html