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November 8, 2008
Inbetween taking photos of the roses in the garden and setting up at studio at Solway Crescent I have been exploring Photogenic Papers in an early issue of Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture from the early 1990s.These papers are online.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, rose, garden at Solway Crescent, 2008
In Photogenic Papers I came across a paper by Lena Jayyusi that explores and questions the way that the photograph is a semiotic object. This thesis is associated with John Tagg's The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988) and Alan Trachtenberg's Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (1989).
The photograph is culturally constituted account that holds to the polysemic character of the photo-image is one that I accept and work with, so I am interested in Jayyusi's criticisms.The paper is entitled 'The reflexive nexus: photo-practice and natural history' and Lena Jayyusi begins by saying that:
Much of the debate about photography has been framed in terms of a polarity between the cultural and "natural" character of photographs, at least explicitly. Implicitly, the very terms of the inquiry have turned on the recognition of a specific character to photographs derived from their mode of mechanical reproduction. Yet the task of inquiry, as presented, has been to deconstruct this 'supposition of reality', this appearance of a window on the world, and to replace it with the analysis of all the ways that a photograph is "culturally produced", and "ideologically inflected". The photograph, as a "semiotic" object, now becomes merely the manifestation and the index of cultural codes, and/or the site of ideological and historical practices
Jayyusi argues that the terms within which much of the inquiry has been framed (be it structuralist or post-structuralist in inspiration) has systematically obscured a number of features that are central to the explication of photo-practice, some of which are located precisely in this juncture of mechanical reproduction/symbolic production that has been assumed, yet analytically displaced, in much theory.
What are these features that have been analytically displaced? Jayyusi says they are:
* the embeddedness of photo-practice in an array of other mundane practices;
* the construal of a culture/nature dichotomy is misplaced;
* the insistence on the unconstrainedly polysemic character of the photo-image( the plurality of meanings available within it ) is largely misconstrued.
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