British photographer and conceptualist Roger Cutforth (1944-2019) was born in Lincolnshire, England and studied painting at Nottingham College of Art as well as Ravensbourne College of Kent. As Cutforth found a passion for photography, he advocated for the medium during a time when viewing photography as a legitimate art form was still in its infancy.
Much of Cutforth’s work is centered on capturing and conveying information, subject, time, and place using a calculated sense of framing as well as color. Much of his work exists in a realm of recontextualizing reality, forcing us to reassess the presented information. On Cutforth, photographer and collaborator Ian Burn stated “Though a prominent aspect of the work seems to be the photographs, it cannot in any way be classified in normal terms of “Photography”, the use of the camera is not to “make” something but rather as a process for obtaining a type of information.”
Travelling to New York City in 1969, Cutforth’s first exhibition in the United States was titled Language III and featured at Dwan Gallery and expanding upon his dedication to sharing ideas and practices in the conceptualist field, he connected voices together not only between England and New York City, but globally. In 1969, Cutforth coordinated an exhibition at the Pinacotheca Gallery in Melbourne, Australia titled Burn Cutforth Ramsden alongside Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden. The exhibition became widely acknowledged as the first conceptualist art exhibition in Australia.
As a conceptualist, Cutforth used the world around him as a means to frame how he viewed contemporary art. His 1969 piece Noon time-piece, the selected work for Burn Cutforth Ramsden, was composed of thirty color photographs of the sky at noon displayed in a single row alongside a calendar and text containing the geographic coordinates of the location. Location and time are viewed on the same plane and Cutforth described Noon time-piece as ‘various conditions which amount to correspondence within its particular system and which affect it as a whole’.
Other notable features include MoMA’s Information (1970), London’s Lisson Gallery (1971), New York’s John Gibson Gallery (1974), MoMA’s Bookworks (1977), A duet exhibition of Alice Adams and Roger Cutforth at Hal Bromm Gallery in 1981, MoMA PS1’s The New Portrait (1984), and Hal Bromm Gallery’s Portraits (1986).