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November 02, 2003
Folks. James Natchtwey, war photographer.
Link courtesy of Tao of Pauly
Great work:
Quite a contrast to the massive decampment of photographers from reportage on the world into studio tableaux and artifice in the 1980s. That was a period of postmodern art photography.
Photos become evidence for historical occurrences and they acquire a hidden political significance in our cultural history. From this trace perspective there is no single canonical history of the medium as once held by the modernist art institution; only a diversity of photographic histories. But we know that anyway.
What disappoints is the failure of photography to represent our historical lived experience of modern metropolis.
M. Dupain State Office Block, 1967
Where are the photographic histories of this mode of experience governed by shocks caused by the money economy and instrumental politics? Where are the photographic representations of this new structure of experience, with its destruction of the old values has affected us in our deepest core? It would seem that photography has failed to give us an adequate understanding of the reality of the metropolis.
So a gap opens up between our photographic language, the structure of our lived experience and social reality in a nihilistic modernity. What becomes significant is the difference between sign and thing, the difference between language and reality and the difference between meaning and experience.
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