Narrative and Stasis

George Baker's Photography's Expanded Field is in essence the after effects of photography on the art world. There were many things that led to the invention and expansion of photography, and photography was also a key factor to the invention and expansion of other media. Baker argues that photography was not deconstructed to form film, but was expanded, meaning both media can exist together. However, with the new expansion, photography is no longer simply a snapshot of reality, an index to the tangible, it is turned into a still frame of a larger story, a moving story otherwise known as a film. Film, on the other hand, cannot exist without a reference to photography because each frame can be stilled to become a picture, or a representation of a tiny portion of a whole. Therefore, both photography and film coexist and exhibit components of each other. Photography can be talked about in film terminology, or solely photographic terminology, or both. "What would it mean to invert this exclusion, to locate a project not as the photographic suspension between the not-narrative and the not-stasis, but as some new combination of both terms, involving both narrative and stasis at the same time?" All this talk of expansion led to the thought of photography expanding to more than one field. Photography has potential to be the basis of more than one form of modern art besides cinema, just like sculpture was the founder of much of art.

i really liked how Baker talked about photography no longer being an isolated middle man between media, but a part of the whole experience of art. "Photography is no longer the priveleged middle term between two things that it isn't. Photography is rather only one term in the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities."