George Baker

This piece reminds me of the first Jeff Wall piece we read because I could hardly understand it at all. I'm going to take the phrase "photography between narrative and stasis" and describe what I think it means. It is described in the essay as "...photographic language between the movements of narrative and the stoppage of stasis..." and this might become the structuring condition for modernist photography.

To me, all photographs have a narrative and a stasis because they are snap shot with a story. One cannot look at a photograph without feeling something or making up a story behind it, if there isn't one already (in a caption, for example). Perhaps it is because film is such a big part of our lives now, photographs are becoming one of many shots in a moving picture. When we look at a photo we wonder what came before and what will come after. This idea reminds me of the picture we saw of the couple on the bed and the caption read something about "this is a time I know she loved me." When we see that, we wonder what their relationship was like, if they are still together now, even if they weren't even a real couple. At the same time, this photograph is one small moment, and it will always be frozen--therefore it is static and unmoving, forever.

So the fact that Baker is saying modernist photographs will have this title is a bit confusing to me because it seems that most, if not all, photographs have this mantra behind them. The only ones that might not are the strange conceptual photographs which invoke little to no emotion, in my opinion. Even they, though, have some sort of narrative which are probably more important than the actual photograph. The picture of the photographer getting shot by his friend is a good example of this. It obviously has a statis because the bullet or the "shot" of the gun gets captured on film, but the narrative behind it stays with the person as well.