Yesterday's post on photographic criticism picked up on some previous remarks about photographs being a part of the museum without walls, photography as a process of signification (or signifying practice) and photography between high art and popular culture. It tried to set the scene for part 8 of Rick's Sontag project.
What the post suggested was that if we are to understand photography's place in the world, then photographs need to understood as cultural messages; not as well or badly composed artistic images of the artist photographer engaged in a political fine art practice or documentary pictures of reality made by heroes and activists.
It then argued that photographic discourse can never be properly aesthetic and that it has borrowed the categories of aesthetic discourse (eg.,orginality, subjective expressiveness, formal unity, style and tradition, uniqueness of art object). That late modernist art discourse placed the emphasis on autonomy, purity, and self reflexivity of the work of art that was produced by promethean artist. That discourse, which evolved in New York with the abstract expressionists eventually shifted photography from being social documentary to a medium of privileged subjectivity, whilst accepting its mechanical mode of production.
There is an option to accepting Greenbergian formalism and then thinking of other kinds of photography as art corrupted by commerce, pictures of reality (eg., photojournalism) or kitsch. We can accept that we are surrounded by a world of images as signsand that we live among elaborate systems of images that feedback meaning through a network of images. These images often construct particular kinds of reality (eg., the freedom/bush bashing advertisements for 4 wheel drives) that then shape the way we view our life. From this perspective outisde of the art institution we can see that there are many diverse kinds of photography----aerial, medical, police, anthropological, advertising, family snap shots etc etc.
What is the implication? That a photograph has many different meanings depending on the context and use. Various institutions (the art institution, advertising) authorize certain meanings and dismiss others. Hence we have a politics of interpretation.
But that way of looking at photography leaves the ethics of interpreting photos graphs to one side; one that was traditionally associated with an ethics of narrative or story telling of a Eugene Smith. This kind of ethics is one in which we come to our sense of value in a particular narrative by experiencing them in context of others that are like and unlike them. We rely on our past experiences to make judgments and we confirm our judgement by making comparisons and through conversations with others.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 21, 2003 01:20 PM | TrackBack