I found George Baker’s “Photography’s Expanded Field” particularly difficult to read. There were many terms that he used that I was completely unfamiliar with, and he never explained them, which was rather frustrating. Plus, Baker’s two main terms, “narrative” and “stasis”, seemed to remain not only vague, but also completely undistinguishable from one another and their respective reversed opposites (“not-narrative” and “not-stasis”) by the end of the essay. It was almost as if Baker stepped further away from establishing these terms and explaining their relation to photography instead of developing these ideas through his essay.
What is “stasis” anyways? I understand the narrative aspect(s) of photography, not only in regards to the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, but also like what Cindy Sherman does, where her images suggest a further story or film that the still is taken from. But I just do not understand what “stasis” refers to, or even a photographer whose work exemplifies this. Although, perhaps I just missed that in Baker’s essay because I was distracted by my own attempts to make what I could of his selected images and diagrams. What really threw me was Baker’s discussion of “Klein groups and semiotic squares” (128). As far as I understand, he was displaying the polar opposites of various ideas pertaining to photography and/or art. But that was as much as I got out of that.
This essay definitely required prior knowledge, the lack of which had severely detrimental effects on my understanding of Baker’s argument and ideas. I think his approach to explaining contemporary art would be quite interesting and applicable to our discussions had I been able to understand what he was actually talking about….
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This article written by Baker was a very difficult read for me. The diction that he uses was hard for me and the lack of explanation for much of what he was saying was also hard to follow. From what I did understand and follow, however, was that there were many contrasts that Baker used when speaking about photography. Baker speaks of the narrative vs. Stasis. I understood his arguments for narattive and the way that pictures can be used for a person to see the world through the details of a photograph. The stasis, however, were hard to understand. I could read that there was a difference and that Baker treats the Stasis as the opposite of the narrative but I could not understand what the possible opposite of narrative could be. What I did see was his talk of photography and its expansion as a field and its continuous rejection of a specefic definition. But overall I must admit that I did have a hard time understanding this writing.
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