In "Marks of Indifference" Jeff Wall explores the evolution of photography in the 20th century and the significance of different forms to a concept of photography as art. In the beginning he asserts that early photography was rooted in the pictorial traditions of Western art. Concepts of perspective, figuration, and composition dominated artistic sensibilities in photography. However, beginning in the 1920s, a rethinking of the nature of photography took place, attempting to achieve a spontanaeity lacking in the early pictorialist works. This, according to Wall, began the modernist tradition of photo-journalistic technique which was to form the paradigm of photographic technique for the greater part of the next half century. With the emphasis on capturing specific moments in time, the importance of composition was greatly diminished and a "photographic eye" or penchant for framing specific actions as they occur took precedence.
It is under these conditions that the movement of 1960s and 70s avant-garde art photography came to be, which itself greatly owes to the radical avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 30s. However, while the earlier avant-garde movement rejected pictorial representations in search of a radically different aesthetic experience, the new Conceptual art movement took the traditions of photo-journalism and "inverted and parodied" them. On one end, Richard Long's landscapes take photo-journalistic reportage and change it substantially by creating an artificial, artist created motif to replace the traditional, natural subjects of the landscape genre. On the other end of the Conceptual spectrum, Bruce Nauman's studio performance art took the technique of reportage and applied it to documenting staged events that were entirely created by the artist. Both of them reintroduce the practice of composition by the artist, but they do not revert to the early pictorial traditions. Instead they adapt the modernist techniques of photo-journalism and adapt them to their own ends, and in doing so contribute something new and valuable to art photography.
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This was a really hard writing for me to understand. There were a lot of words that I didn't understand and some of the concepts were ones that I haven't realy heard of before. BUt some of the points made about photography and its evolution through times was really interesting. I thought it was interesting in the beginning when Wall spoke of the hope to disconnect photography from the "worn-out criteria...as sheer picture making". I thought this was intriguing because he is going back all the way to when photography is first coming to be and it is the old argument of photography as art. And as Wall moves through photographic history it appears as though there was a sort of struggle understanding what photography was going to exist as; a copy of painting or create its own image. I have the opinion that it seemed as though in the beginning that it was merely going to be a copy of painting and it wasn't going to be a very successful art medium if it didn't distinguish itself as unique. I also thought it was a new idea when he stated that "every man is an artist" and that the masses had been kept from taking part in the photography era and taking pictures on their own. This was the first article that really seemed to address the mass as an entity who had been denied the opportunity to be apart of the controversial act of taking a picture and holding it up as either a copy or art. Overall this article was hard for me, however, there were many parts where i was lost and I feel that I missed the argument but these parts stood out to me the most.
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