“Can one narrate time,” asked Thomas Mann, “time as such, in and of itself?” Some photographers likewise (or conversely) seem to ask whether one can photograph a moment, decisive or otherwise, as such, in and of itself. Not the moment in which something or other happens (a speech, a kiss, a gunshot, a birth), but simply that in which a certain present reveals itself photographically. Can there be a photograph in which nothing happens but photography, some film’s exposure to some light that has been reflected off some object and concentrated through a lens?

Sophy Rickett’s photographs may not

Is there any mileage left in the idea of art as an oppositional practice, a set of moves made against the prevailing culture and its norms from outside its territory? For the Chapman brothers the answer would appear to be no. Why bother to fake an ideological purity when such a thing is an irrelevant impossibility anyway? Their game, rather, is to welcome the apparent inescapability of their situation and to juggle truisms until the viewer becomes disoriented by their dexterousness. You think contemporary art is a con, that it makes pretentious use of half-understood theories, and is deliberately