Eric posted this to the photoart listserve. Listservers are fun and there are listserves for every interest. RWF

I'm cross-posting my first response to a discussion of the idea of "post-photographic age" on the photart listserve. It seems to intersect and perhaps will reinvigorate this affair that cannot end.

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. To the photographer, the phrase "post-photographic age" seems, on the surface, implausibly silly: if I am in this world making a photograph how can this be a post-photographic age? 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. 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. And expectations are important because photographs engage us according to our expectations. 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. 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. 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. 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. On the other hand, Cindy Sherman's late 1970's constructed "film stills" were much more perplexing to its contemporary audience. Under the weight of 150 years of image making, photography, which had moved from allegory and metaphor through document had suddenly become self-referential, taking on the image itself as it's subject. And though Sherman's work presumed a shared iconography, many of her early critics, obviously confounded, tried to outwit each other by guessing the actual film scenes from which the images were derived. Ideas that had existed and been refined and applied to photography since 1839 no longer sufficed to explain these photographs. 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." 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.

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. 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. So much of what we "know" about the world we know only through images - whether it be a space walk, a war, a famine or the Mona Lisa. And because these accumulated images substitute for the experience of reality, the world tends to reference photographs where once photography was a reference of the world: when you look at a photograph of a starving child in Rwanda, what comes to mind first is not STARVING CHILD, but other photographs of starving children in Somalia, Ethiopia, etc. If your visual memory is very acute you'll probably remember the better photograph before you really focus (if you do at all) on the picture of the starving child in front of you. Is not the single image important only to the extent that it is assimilated into our collective inventory of images? its meaning (if it retains any) adheres less to its specific subject than to the class or category to which the subject is subsumed: starving child, sunset over mountain, terrorist, space landing, landscape with horses. All photography becomes stock photography.

If indeed our memory of images is now our measure of the world then, perhaps, we are in a post-photographic age. It is not that photography ceases to exist (our post-industrial age surely accommodates industry), but that it refers only to itself. Ironically, it is photography's excess that has loosened its ties to its own subjects. With that mooring gone, its meaning is changed.

-Eric

10/15/96