Thank you.
The difficulty many experience with critical theory is that the theorists base
their arguments upon theories and concepts invented by themselves which have no
intellectual or cultural value outside critical theory.
It is because this is such an incestuous world that ordinarily one would leave
the incestuous to their own devices. Unfortunately this approach has invaded
photographic education so that unsuspecting innocents have this aberration
imposed upon them to the extent that photographic degree courses do not produce
photographers.
You say:
>I think it's important to differentiate between the photographer, the
>person who exposes film to light, and the viewer, the audience the
>photographer addresses.
Do you have difficulty telling the difference ?
> To the photographer, the phrase "post-photographic
>age" seems, on the surface, implausibly silly:
It is not just to photographers, and it is not a matter of seeming, the phrase
is, both on the surface and in depth, silly.
> if I am in this world making
>a photograph how can this be a post-photographic age?
Who is defining 'post photographic' and to what end ?
>On the other hand,
>if I am looking at a photograph in bafflement, with no clue to its
>intentions or meaning, the phrase may feel accurately descriptive of my
>experience.
The photograph is an artefact produced by a tool. You should be differentiating
between the photograph and the image. In no way can the phrase 'post
photographic' accurately describe your experience in this context.
> When Peter Bunnell dismisses Cindy Sherman as an interesting
>artist but not an interesting photographer he's acknowledging that,
>somehow, he feels out of photography's historical loop, that her
>photographs meet his expectations of photography problematically.
Peter Bunnel's comment makes his point but it is silly to put it on the rack of
analysis. Cindy Sherman is using photography as as a tool.
> And
>expectations are important because photographs engage us according to our
>expectations.
Perhaps, as critical theorist your expectations are too narrow.
> What we see depends on what we expect to see, and what we
>expect to see depends on some basic shared assumptions between photographer
>and viewer.
What we expect to see depends upon the breadth of our cultural vision as both
photographer and viewer.
I feel sorry for those poor souls whose vision has been blinkered by critcal
theorists.
> During photography's 1st century it was generally accepted that
>what photography did best was describe things: their shapes and textures
>and situations and relationships. Photography was an homage to vision, an
>expression of how we felt about what we were seeing.
I am sure that many photo historians could find sufficient exceptions to
invalidate that comment.
> However, when the photographer displaces the perceptual realm with the
cognitive, we need to
>come up with fresh words and ideas that explain what exactly we are looking
>at.
Nobody is displacing anything. They were both there, are, and ever shall be.
> Rejlander's wildly over the top, 1857 allegorical composite image, "Two
>Ways of Life", was easily understood in its time in relation to images that
>were the subject of paintings by Reni, Peruguino or Raphael.
This does not fit in with your comments on shapes and textures.
> On the other hand, Cindy Sherman's late 1970's constructed "film stills" were
much more
>perplexing to its contemporary audience. Ideas that had existed and been
refined and applied to
>photography since 1839 no longer sufficed to explain these photographs.
You are confusing the concept of the photograph, the artefact, with that which
is communicated by the photograph or the photographer.
>Face to face with the tangible implications of W. Benjamin's premonitions,
>Sherman's work only started to make sense when talking about it in terms
>of: "copies without an original/AUTHENTIC copies, spectators and
spectacles."
Has anybody asked Ms Sherman ? Or is not her perception of what she is doing
significant ?
> Just as Freud inaugurated a new experiences of reality that
>didn't exist prior to his theory of psychoanalysis, so, too, ideas
>associated with words like "detournement", "signs", "codes", "symbols" and
>"systems", offered a cognitive context in which to understand or at least
>discuss the photographs of Sherman, Kruger, Prince and Levine.
Only in terms of critical theory.
>The other day a radio commentator described Shannon Lucid's landing to
>earth as "picture perfect." By referring to an actual landing in terms of
>its photogenic qualities, he presumed that his audience had or could summon
>to mind an image of what a perfect landing would look like.
He was sayinhg that it made 'a nice picture' ! To take it any further than
that is breaking a grasshopper on the rack.
> Though not
>unreasonable, this represents a rather significant shift away from
>photography being a record of an event to an event being described as
>complying to what we have in our collective heads as an inventory of
>images.
No it does not. People said it in Pompei.
>. All photography
>becomes stock photography.
There is nothing peculiar to photography here. It is just that we see more
images produced photographically.
>If indeed our memory of images is now our measure of the world then,
>perhaps, we are in a post-photographic age.
Your conclusion does not follow from your argument.
> It is not that photography ceases to exist (our post-industrial age surely
accommodates industry), but
>that it refers only to itself.
That is patently untrue even in terms of your own definition.
> Ironically, it is photography's excess that
>has loosened its ties to its own subjects. With that mooring gone, its
>meaning is changed.
That conclusion is so confused in terms of its semantics that it is meaningless.
Please go back and define you terms clearly and not just within the narrow
confines of critical theory.
Terry.
-Eric