Barker's Photography's Expanded Field

As almost everyone who had posted on the blog expressed, Barker’s essay was quite a challenging read. To me, the central message conveyed by Barker was that, in postmodern era, photography has extended beyond merely depicting a scene or constructing a narrative, has also expanded spatially to challenge traditional notions of photographs as pure representations of reality. In this expanded field, photographs such as those by Cindy Sherman neither depict an unaltered scene nor construct a real narrative. Barker describes this postmodern condition of the photograph as a state between “narrativity and stasis.” In this condition, a series of documentary portraits is both a chronological narration of the subject and also static representations of the subject at different points in time. However, I fail to see how these characteristics exactly make a photograph postmodern as all photographs are able to invite the viewer into constructing his own narrative and also are static representations of a subject or event. Throughout his essay, Barker also seems to dispel the notion that the photographic medium has been “decentered” (219) by breaking with the traditional representative notion of photography. In its new form, photographs such as those by Orozco and or Sherman occupy a space that is beyond mere representational reality. It is through their incorporation of elements that are both simultaneously real -the reflections in “Extension of a Reflection,” the stone in “Yielding Stone,” and Cindy Sherman as the actress- as well as constructed -the objects in the reflections in “Extension of a Reflection,” the narrative or the stone rolling over the vent covering in “Yielding Stone,” and the many personas invented by Cindy Sherman- that photography is not merely decentered from its representative form, but expanded to construct its cinematic narrative. Barker also seems to possess an optimistic attitude regarding this expansion of the role of photography in contemporary art. To him, these new methods freed the photography from its mere documentary role and provided new ways through which the photograph can interact with its viewers.