Gary
you refer to the debate arising around photography in the period after 1975, and tha tthis debate involved a critique of aesthetic totalization, which cleared the way for a cultural history of the photographic image.

Who are the people you have in mind?

Pam
the people involved in critiquing both photography's indiscriminate appropriation as art and the formalist art history of photography, included Rosalind Krauss, Allan Sekula, Sally Stein, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Douglas Crimp, Victor Burgin, Christopher Phillips, and John Tagg.Their original essays were eventually included in their books and collectively it became the postmodern critique of photography. See in particular:

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985);

Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks, 1973-1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984);

John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988);

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991);

Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1982).

They worked from different perspectives and theoretical traditions --eg., Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and linguistics and they joined with certain contemporary artists in prompting photography to assume a central position in the larger project of postmodern criticism. In the pages of the journal October, photography became a favored object from which to extend theory.

There was an alternative literature and tradition that included Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Walter Benjamin etc)

Of course, there has been a big backlash against theory by cultural conservatives. The curators of the Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano exhibitions in 1988 and 1989 were rewarded with criminal trials and culture-war campaigns over their contents and funding as the conservatives exerted overt political pressure.

Gary,
Photographic history's identity as an academic subject is pretty thin. Does sit exist in the visual aret departments in universities.

Some of the above texts are familar from art school, but theory was never taken seriously there, and the ideas were ill digested, even by those teaching 'theory.' Moreover, the texts were difficult and along from photography as art.

yeah
some of the critique of formalism and photography as art was pretty crude. I remember Politics and Art people arguing that photography is not a visual medium or a class of imagery but a commodity that is subject to the invariable ideological distortions and "false consciousness" that characterize all superstructural products of bourgeois culture. So capitalism "traffics" and photography is taken as pure ideology, an empty vessel or conduit for the transaction of power relations.

As a negative critique it is too extreme and onesided--clearly some photography is art and recognized as such by the art institution. That's why I turned to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. Far more dialectical. Photography is both art and a commodity and he gives a positive role for art. Adorno is hard work.

Adorno has been sidelined by those in cultural studies who understand photography as a part of visual culture. Those who engage in theory, culture and media studies have no need for aesthetics with its central concern for the critical role of art in late modernity. McKenzie Wark, for instance, thinks in terms of the celebratory and the fan. What is not being done, from what I can see, is a critique of the Enlightenment way of seeing.

I've heard cultural conservatives go on and on about the reduction of the history of photography to discourse; and art historians saying that theory dismisses the values inscribed in works of art.

Both start from self-evident "art" with self-evident "values"--and they privilege style, aesthetic quality, individual talent, or individual photographs--and decry attempts to concentrate on cultural context, economics, and issues of reception.

Oh! To be 21 again.

the art/not art dialectic has haunted photography from the moment of its discovery in the early nineteenth century. It's boring. Much more interesting is photography's authority as a wayof knowing, and the way the supremacy of the visual has been theorised to explain our whole culture: technologies of seeing are characterised as the Western way of knowing. From this perspective, it is no accident that the very term 'enlightenment' is a visual metaphor.

Thus Heidegger characterises modernity as 'the age of the world picture'; the Frankfurt School critiques a primarily visual 'culture ndustry' of 'mass deception'; Debord celebrates its culmination as postmodernity in 'the society of the spectacle'; and Baudrillard describes a symbolic world composed entirely of copies (‘simulacra’) without originals.

The digital world is increasingly the world of images.

Les, why 21?

Gary---look at Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1999). The blub says that he moves beyond modernist and postmodern approaches to photography.

21 is the number of the order/table