Frame (Matter and Metaphor) (Reading Response 3)

Emerling’s Photography History and Theory represents a very comprehensive history of thought surrounding the medium of photography from its inception into critical postmodernism. As all things go back to, Emerling reiterates the lasting perspective of Clement Greenberg. Greenberg argues for medium-specificity, the idea that each medium has “unique and irreducible (53)” properties that cannot be done in any other medium. While this formalist approach separates aesthetics from ethics, one cannot help but wonder if part of this idea might hold true.

A great bit of chapter 2, “Frame (Matter and Metaphor),” outlines the ideas of critical theorist Rosalind Krauss. Krauss derived the idea of the modernist “grid,” the idea that modernist and medium-specific art is created to be autonomous, flattened, antireal, purely aesthetic. She combats the “myth” of the grid with what she calls “the index (54).” The index points to photography as inherently referential and signifying. This relates directly to the ideas of semiotics coined by Roland Barthes, who is featured in the gloss of chapter 2. Krauss describes photography as a means of representation, an interdisciplinary and textual means to an end. Pierre Bourdieu, a sociological theorist, on the other hand, sees photography as “a social index (58).” In this way, he sees photography as reinforcing social functions, an expression of social distinctions. These anti-aesthetic positions also thread with that of Victor Burgin. Burgin sees the making of photographs as creating a simulacrum. Photography exists within a politics of representation and realm of cultural production. Burgin argues that photography will never be reality; it will only be a screen for the author or reader to project their own perspectives on the real or the index of the real.

Michael Fried wrote Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. In this text, Fried defines art in terms of “compelling conviction (66).” For him, artistic work must have a relation to past work in the same medium, creating a “structure of intention.” Fried describes this idea in terms of the work of photo-based artist Jeff Wall. Wall creates an aesthetic experience by displaying his photographs as monumental works in light boxes, embodying photoconceptualism and experience of depiction. Fried examines art through “absorption” and “theatricality,” distinctly observing the relationship between photograph and viewer.

Emerling lost me at the end of the chapter as he began his discussion of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction theories. Despite this, it seems fair to conclude that the frame or “parergon” exists to activate photography. The image exists because of the technics of the event. Photography is both framing and de-framing of time. I’d love to unpack the points of Derrida in class discussion to come to greater conclusions about the frame.

What exists within a photograph versus what exists outside? What is the distinction between internal and external?