"Marks of Indifference" - Lauren

By the end of this essay, despite the fact that it was particularly tedious and difficult, l I felt as though it should have been the final reading for the semester, as it perfectly sums up all of the debates and discrepancies pertaining to photography that we have encountered thus far. Or perhaps, rather than summing up these issues, Jeff Wall writes in such a powerful manner that we are inclined to throw out all of our varying opinions regarding these matters and just nod our heads in approval of his arguments.

Although I highlighted much in this reading, what really caught my attention was Wall’s discussion of the cycle between modernism, reductivism, the rejection of depiction, and photography’s inability to “dispense with depiction and so… cannot participate in the adventure it might be said to have suggested in the first place” (72). Wall’s explanation that this inability is partially to blame for the fact that photography was so distanced from the art world in “the first sixty or so years of this century” is an especially interesting solution to this debate of whether or not photography is art (73). To blame the medium for its own failure, if one wants to dub it a failure, would seem to be very discouraging if this had ever been realized during this reductivist movement. Then again, as Wall alludes to at the very end of his essay, perhaps this is the only reason why photography was able to survive and now exists in its current state as an aesthetically appealing take on depiction of reality.

But my favorite part of Wall’s essay by far was the part about Ruscha and his “impersonation” of an amateur photographer (77). What I found particularly ironic, considering how whenever we see a photographer taking a photo of something seemingly random, we always wonder what it is he finds so interesting, is Wall’s statement: “Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations, and the existence of a book of just those pictures is a kind of proof of the existence of such a person” (77). Why is it, then, that the most random, mundane subjects seem to make for the best photographs?