The artworks brought together for Silver Editions 2017 demonstrate the breadth of contemporary photographic practice and the varying approaches artists employ when engaging political subject matter.

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge have worked for decades to disavow ambiguity in their work, collaborating not only with each other but also with labour unions and social justice movements to offer critical commentary on the world’s imbalances of power. Their contribution is a photograph made early in their career that elaborates this commitment. Nadia Belerique, two generations their junior, takes a contrasting approach. Her carefully constructed image posits ambiguity as a method for avoiding the constraints of identification and quantification. The methods by which she made the image and the interpretations she sanctions are deliberately opaque. Mark Ruwedel’s photograph is the one most in line with conventional notions of photography. It evokes nineteenth-century American landscape photographers and post-Minimalist and Conceptual artists of the 1970s. Yet his work also offers commentary on politicized subject matter: myths of American West and the complicated relationship between people and place they encourage.

These artists’ disparate relationships with their subject matter and their varying approaches to making pictures confirm the vitality and pliancy of photography today.