"Marks of Indifference"

Jeff Wall's essay on the "Marks of Indifference" was long and tedious, but had an abundance of body which left my head spinning with thought. He talked about photography as Conceptual Art, photojournalism, aestheticism, reportage, and amateurism. There were two parts that particularly interested me. First, the movement of photography being nonautonomous, and second, the reduction of art to minimal form by eliminating key characteristics of what the public deems art really is.

Wall talks about how Graham paired photographs with literature and created a piece of art that could stand autonomously with pictures and text together, but each component could not stand by itself. The two were dependent: pictorial literature. To me, that sounds natural, using a picture to further illustrate a point in an essay. But Graham made this pair an artform; he made the two lace perfectly together so that instead of simply holding use as a learning tool, the spead was aesthetically pleasing and beautiful. "Each photograph may be ... no more than an illustration to an essay, and therefore not an autonomous work of art." Making the photograph, which naturally usually stood on its own because of its high depiction quality, dependent on an a less descriptive art form sounds ludicrous. But then when you think about it, even a photograph which perfectly decpicts a scene is nothign without a caption to tell which scene it describes. The two were meant to be used together, but the fact of taking away the autonomy of a photograph was novel.

The second point that I found interesting was that the modern art was disposing of important elements of art. " Certain factors we used to think essential to the making and experiencing of art are shown not to be so by the fact that Modernist painting has been able to dispense with them and et continue to offer the experience of art in all its essentials." Modernist painting was able to eliminate such foundations suich as perspective, which sounds crazy, but became popular. The problem for phtoography was that it could not take away any key characteristics because it was a mechanical process. The "medium has virtually no dispensable characteristics" The way around this problem was through amateurization, which meant that "every man is an artist." Kodak put the camera in the hands of everyday citizens, making it easy to take pictures and document their lives. This transformed photography into a modernist medium.