Narrative and Stasis

George Baker's Photography's Expanded Field is in essence the after effects of photography on the art world. There were many things that led to the invention and expansion of photography, and photography was also a key factor to the invention and expansion of other media. Baker argues that photography was not deconstructed to form film, but was expanded, meaning both media can exist together. However, with the new expansion, photography is no longer simply a snapshot of reality, an index to the tangible, it is turned into a still frame of a larger story, a moving story otherwise known as a film. Film, on the other hand, cannot exist without a reference to photography because each frame can be stilled to become a picture, or a representation of a tiny portion of a whole. Therefore, both photography and film coexist and exhibit components of each other. Photography can be talked about in film terminology, or solely photographic terminology, or both. "What would it mean to invert this exclusion, to locate a project not as the photographic suspension between the not-narrative and the not-stasis, but as some new combination of both terms, involving both narrative and stasis at the same time?" All this talk of expansion led to the thought of photography expanding to more than one field. Photography has potential to be the basis of more than one form of modern art besides cinema, just like sculpture was the founder of much of art.

i really liked how Baker talked about photography no longer being an isolated middle man between media, but a part of the whole experience of art. "Photography is no longer the priveleged middle term between two things that it isn't. Photography is rather only one term in the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities."

Photography's Expanded Field

I really struggled comprehending the diction and terms in this article which detracted from my understanding of the overall message.  From what I understood Barker is explaining the postmodernist movement in photography.  The defining characteristic of photographs during this movement is that they are part of a longer or larger story or scene.  Photographs represent a single still in a story that let the viewer construct a narrative.  

I thought it was interesting that Barker describes this as a characteristic of postmodernism because this did not feel like a new observation.  Many of the photographs we have looked at in class seem to be just a fraction of a story.  For example, Cindy Sherman's photographs where she purposely positions herself to look as though she is in a movie.  She even titles her photographs film stills.  Also, I felt that straight and documentary photography was, in a way, attempting to create a narrative of rural American life.  The photographs taken by Lange and Evans seem to tell stories about the lives of the people they are photographing.  Especially Evan's pictures of the tenant farmers families.  

Postmodernism might have been the emergence of photographers taking pictures with the intent of trying to allude to a longer story, but I feel like all along photographers have been telling stories with their pictures.  Therefore I felt confused by Barker's message for two reasons: first because his writing was unclear to an inexperienced photographer and second because I disagree with his argument.

George Baker

This piece reminds me of the first Jeff Wall piece we read because I could hardly understand it at all. I'm going to take the phrase "photography between narrative and stasis" and describe what I think it means. It is described in the essay as "...photographic language between the movements of narrative and the stoppage of stasis..." and this might become the structuring condition for modernist photography.

To me, all photographs have a narrative and a stasis because they are snap shot with a story. One cannot look at a photograph without feeling something or making up a story behind it, if there isn't one already (in a caption, for example). Perhaps it is because film is such a big part of our lives now, photographs are becoming one of many shots in a moving picture. When we look at a photo we wonder what came before and what will come after. This idea reminds me of the picture we saw of the couple on the bed and the caption read something about "this is a time I know she loved me." When we see that, we wonder what their relationship was like, if they are still together now, even if they weren't even a real couple. At the same time, this photograph is one small moment, and it will always be frozen--therefore it is static and unmoving, forever.

So the fact that Baker is saying modernist photographs will have this title is a bit confusing to me because it seems that most, if not all, photographs have this mantra behind them. The only ones that might not are the strange conceptual photographs which invoke little to no emotion, in my opinion. Even they, though, have some sort of narrative which are probably more important than the actual photograph. The picture of the photographer getting shot by his friend is a good example of this. It obviously has a statis because the bullet or the "shot" of the gun gets captured on film, but the narrative behind it stays with the person as well.

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.

Photography’s Expanded Field

There was much information offered in this essay on contemporary photography, yet the information was not easy to interpret. George Barker makes the vivid point that contemporary photography and art of today always seem to “focus on an object in crisis, or in severe transformation.” This idea goes along with the conceptual topic of postmodernism and how photography was changing during this time and continues to change today. I find the exact definition of postmodernism hard to comprehend because there are many elements that make it complete. The basic meaning I receive from postmodernism is that the focus and purpose of a photograph is continually being altered as time goes on, and postmodernism is a common stage for photography. Barker claims that traces of traditional photography are no longer apparent as evidence of it once being a popular artistic practice.

Barker brings up an interesting and very important topic concerning photography in which he argues that if the exact object and purpose of photography today is getting blurred, it is our job to discover what this field of photography means in order to understand why it is important today. Why do we care about photography at all? This topic is again jumping back to earlier discussions that we have semi-covered in class but didn’t necessarily resolve. These topics covered and related to the meaning of photography and basic but often boring questions of why it is important and subjects similar to this. Overall, I think Barker has a very interesting perspective and take on contemporary photography. At certain moments in the text although, the tone of the essay seems a little angry about the fact that photography has come to this point and has succumbed to this stage in art. This was a difficult essay to get through and I made my best attempt to understand Barker’s message.

Photography's Expanded Field

I would have to agree with my classmates that George Baker’s Photography’s Expanded Field was and extremely challenging piece to read. I find art historical writing to be the most difficult type of discourse to comprehend; it uses extremely sophisticated diction and requires a prior familiarity of the topics discussed. I felt that each time I was starting to understand an argument the author was making, the rest of the paragraph would drift off into the land of fancy art words and I would lose track of the point of the passage. I was constantly finishing a paragraph and then asking myself, “What did I just read?” I did not understand all the points the author presented, but I think that after several re-readings, I have caught on to the overall point. I found the main message of the paper to be that photography has not come to end! Baker seems to be addressing some art critics’ claim that photography has been replaced by newer, more complex mediums. He says, “Critical consensus would have it that the problem today is not that just about anything image-based can now be considered photographic, but rather that photography itself has been…outmoded technologically and displaced aesthetically” (203). Baker pleads that although modern photography produces works of art that look very different than the early photographs, “something like a photographic effect still remains—survives, perhaps, in a new, altered form” (204). Even though Rineke Dijkstra puts video camera recordings of her subjects next to their portraits and Sam Taylor-Wood supplements his photographs with audio soundtracks, the medium is still photography. He asks his audience, and the art world in general, to accept this “expanded field of operation” of new photography (205). Baker argues that the expanded field of operation in photography has followed a general trend to put images in motion, to make them less static and more narrative. He says, “The world of contemporary art seems to have moved on, quite literally, to a turn that we would now have to call cinematic rather than photographic” (203). Photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Cindy Sherman create photos that resemble film stills. Baker makes an argument similar to Walter Benjamin when he says that cinematic photography has called for the “expansion of its terms into a more fully cultural arena” (213). Walter Benjamin proposes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that films are a powerful way to mobilize the masses. Likewise, Baker is optimistic that cinematic photographs will travel to the public and effect popular culture. Contemporary, modernist, and post-modernist "cinematic photography" moved so far away from original photography that people began to question whether it should even be considered the same medium. But George Baker makes the argument that recognizing the new photography as photography is possible, and will be beneficial to the world, if one is flexible enough to accept the “expanded field.”

“Photography’s Expanded Field” - Lauren

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….