Lorna Simpson

In Enwezor’s discussion of Lorna Simpson’s work, he traces Simpson’s development and interpretation of photographic theory. A hallmark of her theory appears to be the realization that photography is inherently subjective, enabling her to abandon documentary forms of photography and allow her to explore gender and race identities. The conflicting views that photographs are inherently objective or subjective have played an important role since its invention. In Talbot’s essay, photography was interpreted as an objective mechanical and chemical method devoid of human involvement. On the other hand, the numerous conceptual artists we have seen in class use photography to reflect ideas that are inherently their own. More troubling are straight photographers such as Evans, who produced documentary photographs of the tenant farmers’ plight. Although these are supposed to be objective documents that accurately reflects a historical moment, I can see how these photographs might viewed as subjective. By mere act of accepting an assignment to “document” the plight of tenant farmers, Evans is already predisposed to sympathizing with them and feeling the need to tell their story. Regardless, the objectivity and subjectivity of photographs seems to be essential to the ontology of photography and type of art artists produce. Another interesting discussion focuses on the relationship between language and image. In her work Easy for Who to Say, Enwezor contends that by replacing the portrait’s faces with letters that subsequently stands for Amnesia, Error, Indifference, Omission, and Uncivil, Simpson is able to produce a subjective photograph to inform the viewer of Simpson’s own views. This is interesting for me as photographs traditionally viewed as a better medium for story-telling, i.e. a picture is worth a thousand words. Instead Simpson seems to turn this notion upside down by using the letters themselves as indices as photographs are indices to their subject. As a result, it can be argued that the letters themselves contribute much more to the photograph than the faces that they cover.