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March 16, 2010
Jonathan Tagg in the Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning says that:
In the fleetingly modish area of photography, which offered a relatively unconsolidated space adjacent to but displaced from the more solidified institutions of art and art history, debate in the 1970s turned on the search for alternative avenues of radical practice beyond the well-trodden paths of leftist documentary and reportage and outside the tramlines of realism and artifice that had dictated the parallel tracks of discourse on photography since its invention.
He says that his aim was to relocate the debate on realism and challenging the notion of a progressive “documentary tradition” by connecting an array of nineteenth-century modes of photographic documentation to the emergence of disciplinary techniques and to a new form of the State.
The point was not to offer a monolithic account; rather, the intent was to pluralize photography, to insist on the specificity of frames of meaning.
In contrast with this drive to pluralize and specify photographies, one might say that the persistent bent of photographic criticism from François Arago to Oliver Wendell Holmes and from Charles Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin had always been toward the totalization of photography, treating it as a homogeneous technology or singular medium whose meaning and historical consequences were somehow already immanent. Whether condemning photography’s alleged debasing effects or eulogizing its revolutionary productive potential, photographic criticism construed photography as a singular cultural force, for good or ill.
He adds that his argument was that photography could no longer be seen as a unified medium whose status and value were inherent within it--as the formalists claimed. Status, value, and meaning had to be produced — and they were produced locally and unevenly across a hierarchy of contingent and mutually defining cultural spaces in which what applied at one point might be totally at odds with what applied at another.
The discursive framing of a plurality of photographies effectively shreds the notion of “the medium,” whether conceived as an opaque material generating its own proper conventions or asa transparent vehicle mediating the efficient communication of meaning.
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