Photography's Expanded Field

I would have to agree with my classmates that George Baker’s Photography’s Expanded Field was and extremely challenging piece to read. I find art historical writing to be the most difficult type of discourse to comprehend; it uses extremely sophisticated diction and requires a prior familiarity of the topics discussed. I felt that each time I was starting to understand an argument the author was making, the rest of the paragraph would drift off into the land of fancy art words and I would lose track of the point of the passage. I was constantly finishing a paragraph and then asking myself, “What did I just read?” I did not understand all the points the author presented, but I think that after several re-readings, I have caught on to the overall point. I found the main message of the paper to be that photography has not come to end! Baker seems to be addressing some art critics’ claim that photography has been replaced by newer, more complex mediums. He says, “Critical consensus would have it that the problem today is not that just about anything image-based can now be considered photographic, but rather that photography itself has been…outmoded technologically and displaced aesthetically” (203). Baker pleads that although modern photography produces works of art that look very different than the early photographs, “something like a photographic effect still remains—survives, perhaps, in a new, altered form” (204). Even though Rineke Dijkstra puts video camera recordings of her subjects next to their portraits and Sam Taylor-Wood supplements his photographs with audio soundtracks, the medium is still photography. He asks his audience, and the art world in general, to accept this “expanded field of operation” of new photography (205). Baker argues that the expanded field of operation in photography has followed a general trend to put images in motion, to make them less static and more narrative. He says, “The world of contemporary art seems to have moved on, quite literally, to a turn that we would now have to call cinematic rather than photographic” (203). Photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Cindy Sherman create photos that resemble film stills. Baker makes an argument similar to Walter Benjamin when he says that cinematic photography has called for the “expansion of its terms into a more fully cultural arena” (213). Walter Benjamin proposes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that films are a powerful way to mobilize the masses. Likewise, Baker is optimistic that cinematic photographs will travel to the public and effect popular culture. Contemporary, modernist, and post-modernist "cinematic photography" moved so far away from original photography that people began to question whether it should even be considered the same medium. But George Baker makes the argument that recognizing the new photography as photography is possible, and will be beneficial to the world, if one is flexible enough to accept the “expanded field.”