Post-internet refers to practices that respond to the condition, from the late 2000s onward, in which the internet is no longer a novelty but an everyday given. The term originated with artist Marisa Olson, was theorized in Gene McHugh's blog Post Internet (2009), and Artie Vierkant's essay "The Image Object Post-Internet" (2010) became a key text. In photography, the very conditions under which images circulate across screens, social media, and stock databases become the subject.
Practices since the late 2000s that respond to the internet as an everyday condition rather than a novelty, taking the circulation, reproduction, and transformation of images as their subject.
What post-internet photography inverted was the hierarchy between the original and its circulating copies — exhibition documentation, stock imagery, and social-media posts became sites where the work itself takes place.
Kate Steciw harvests images from stock-photography databases, combining digital manipulation with plexiglass and found objects to present photographic structures. Artie Vierkant's Image Objects (2011–) treats exhibition-documentation images, altered by the artist, as independent works, suspending the question of whether the physical object or its online reproduction is the "original."*1 Sara VanDerBeek photographs sculptural assemblages built in her studio and then dismantles them, leaving the photograph as the only trace — an inversion of the hierarchy between thing and image that runs through this generation.
Lucas Blalock deliberately leaves the marks of Photoshop visible, exposing the labor of digital manipulation as part of the photograph's structure. Charlotte Cotton's Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015) surveyed more than eighty artists of this generation, framing their work as a recalibration of "the photographic" in the post-internet environment.*4
Amalia Ulman's Excellences & Perfections (2014) was a months-long scripted performance conducted through Instagram posts, making visible how authenticity is constructed on social platforms; the work was shown in Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern (2016).*3*5 A landmark of institutional recognition was Art Post-Internet at UCCA, Beijing (2014, curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham), which surveyed more than forty artists working with the centrality of the network as a given.*2
Many artists have kept their distance from the label itself. Yet the questions it names — the circulation, transformation, and materialization of images — were the first framework to confront head-on the present condition in which a photograph is at once a print and a file on a screen.
Adjacent lineages include the Pictures Generation, which questioned the politics of representation through appropriated imagery; Conceptual Art, which challenged the hierarchy of subjects; and Contemporary Still Life, which built criticality from attention to everyday things. Awareness that images are reproduced and circulated is what sets this lineage apart — read alongside those pages, the map becomes three-dimensional.
Lucas Blalock (born 1978) is an American photographer who photographs ordinary objects with a large-format camera and leaves visible traces of Photoshop manipulation. His work …
Kate Steciw (born 1978) is an American artist who draws images from the internet and stock-image databases, combining digital manipulation, Plexiglas, collage, and print …
Artie Vierkant (born 1986) is an American artist working across photography, sculpture, digital files, and online circulation. His Image Objects series treats exhibition …
Sara VanDerBeek (born 1976) is an American artist who assembles art-historical, archival, and urban fragments into temporary sculptures, photographs them, and then dismantles …
Amalia Ulman (born 1989 in Argentina) is an Argentine-Spanish artist who staged Excellences & Perfections on Instagram and Facebook in 2014. By posting a scripted fictional …