Photographic Postmodernism

Douglas Crimp's article on "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism" is mainly a discussion of the idea of aura and how it relates to modern art photography and painting. It references the highly influential work "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin for much of its conceptual background relating to aura, which is defined as the work of art's unique finite and temporal existence as opposed to its universal reproducibility. It is observed that photography, through its reproducibility and multiplicity of existence, serves to undermine the work of art's aura, just as Benjamin had earlier described. For Crimp this led to a dilemma for high art as an institution to attempt to preserve any sort of aura that still existed in works of art. High art's reaction was to embrace not only the revival of expressionistic painting, but also art photography of the kind that had first served to undermine the aura of works of art. Expressionistic painting was ideologically opposed to the destruction of aura caused by mechanical reproduction, and was a wholehearted attempt to preserve and restore aura by "emphasizing the artist's hand or by creating highly individual visionary images that cannot be confused with one another."
However, art photography of the time, while breaking convention with traditional artistic forms, finally liberating the medium from the vestiges of photographic styles derived from painting, was developing an aura of its own, as was mentioned in the Jeff Wall essay "Marks of Indifference". This newfound aura surrounding art photography made photographs subject to the kind of connoisseurship that paradoxically had been made unimportant by mechanical reproduction. However, Crimp argues that the aura of art photography is fundamentally different from other artforms in the sense that the aura of photography is really just a "presence", or a concept of something separate from it's temporal existence, which he gives an example of with the works of Sherrie Levine where she appropriates images from other photographers and recontextualizes them. The photos have "presence", despite the artist never hhaving come into contact with the subject of the images.