Curated by artist Walead Beshty, the exhibition Picture Industry reflects upon transformations in the production and distribution of photographic images as realized through its varied constructions of the corporeal, from its origin as a scientific tool and a means of cultural investigation to its phenomenological effects on the viewer. The exhibition complexifies traditional accounts of the medium, drawing on its application within science and the humanities to contemporary art, and includes works and photographic documents by over 70 artists and practitioners spanning the late 19th century to the present. It posits a provisional, alternative history of the optical image, breaking with both the technologically deterministic approach of aesthetic formalism, and the semiotic fixations of postmodernism, and on this basis reflects anew on the contemporary condition of image production. Picture Industry considers not only the materiality of images and the technologies that form their reception, but also the conflicted social history that lies under their surfaces and shapes our complex contemporary image world .