“Marks of Indifference” -- Maya

“The Anti-Photographers” and “Marks of Indifference” really confused me. I’m still not quite sure what the authors were talking about, mainly because of their vocabulary and styles of writing, I think. However, I did manage to get a few things from the articles. The most interesting thing about Nancy Foote’s article was how she discussed photography as an enhancer of art because of its ability to capture the image of a piece that otherwise the public could not view. For example, there are many site-specific works, such as “Spiral Jetty” that most people can only view through a photograph. Also, there are some works that are only present for a brief moment in time, and without being captured by photographs, they would have been lost forever. Foote says that it is photography that allows art not to be dependent on its physical presence. Jeff Wall’s article particularly engaged me because he analyzed the theories of Clement Greenberg, an art critic I have studied before. “Marks of Indifference” mainly discusses “the ways that photography decisively realized itself as a modernist art in the experiments of the 1960’s and 1970’s.” This was strange to me, because I thought that photography had always been modernist, as it was, at the time, the most modern of all art mediums. Greenberg places much emphases on media, saying that a major difference between old master style and modernism is the fact that rather than trying to work around the medium, as artists did in the past, the artist now emphasizes the medium. For example, the modern artist chooses to emphasize the flatness of a canvas, rather than try to make the image 3-D. I think this is true of photography for the most part. Photographers make the most use of their medium, and take advantage of aspects that are unique to photographs, such as exact realism, and also the ability to alter the image over the process of developing the photograph.