Legal Fictions
By Bill
Jones
published in Arts Magazine November 1991 (excerpt)
I once
thought photographs could be easily separated from their referents. And so I
was often distressed, even angered by theoreticians such as Roland Barthes,
Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss, who proclaimed photographs laminated to their
referents, or indexical Òtraces,Ó of prior events. Photographs, they said, were
evidence. The unfortunate part of this argument is that strongly
differentiating photography from painting severs the newer mediumÕs roots in
the art of misdirection and metaphor. Still, photographs do form a kind of
reality contract. And it is through an immersion in the photographic tradition
that the essential fictions within the body of photography become apparent.
A photograph
is also a rendering, a drawing in black and white, but unlike a drawing, which
has beginning, middle and end, a photograph is created all at once, its latent
picture done in a fraction of a second. PhotographyÕs alloverness fed back into
painting, marking modernism through minimalism. The evidentiary nature of the photographic mark created the sense of post-photographic
painting and sculpture as more the sign of the hand than the subject
represented, yet rather than revive a defunct pictorialism, the evidentiary,
documentary subject within photography extended the hermeneutic of painting
with its deficiencies and fallacies. The near accidental discovery, the
illusive incomprehensible nature of the light mark from the hand of the Other, simply reinforced the relationship between art and
nature lost to painting after the 19th century.
Unwanted metaphoric
constructions, generally termed fictions, are scattered throughout the law,
often marking major cultural shifts serving Òto make lighter the difficulties
associated with the assimilation and elaboration of new, more or less
revolutionary legal principles...Ó. Within the reality
contract formed by photography lie two legal fictions on which most of
photographic theory, art photography and photographic art are based. They are
the slice of life and the perfect moment. Each represents a pole in the
dichotomy that has informed photographic practice to this point.
These divisions
in the canon have made for some unfortunate misrepresentations, especially in
American art where a great deal of postmodern photography is considered
conventional and therefore overlooked or misunderstood and summarily dismissed
as uninformed and subjective. Conversely where the mantle of art is ascribed to
the photographer, photography itself is overlooked. In fact there is an art-historically
informed, technically astute, traditionally framed photographic practice that
has its counterpart in the new photographic interests in
Susan Sontag,
in On Photography, distinctly defines the slice of life fiction in terms of
pieces of reality, requiring of all photographs a casual objectivity locked into
place with its reality trace:
What is
written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation as are handmade
visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem
to be statements about the world so much as pieces of
it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
ÒBut at
the very boundary of the image the camera frame which crops or cuts the
represented element out of reality at large can be seen as another example of
spacing.Ó Here Rosalind Krauss not only restates the slice-of-life fiction but ties
it to the history of European photography between the First and Second World
Wars. This is the European model; August Sander, Eric Soloman,
the Surrealists and Bauhaus and Russian Constructivists, to Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students.
At this level the slice of life stands for objectivity, old and new.
Though drawn
from the same essential set of deficiencies and fallacies, the perfect moment
has come to stand for the often demeaned subjectivity in photography, because
it lacks the authority of the purely evidentiary slice of life. The notion of
the perfect moment has European origins, but as an expression of artistic
subjectivity has, over time, become associated with the American model; Evans,
Lange, White, Steichen and Stieglitz
to Weston, to Erwitt, Gowan
and Friedlander. As such, the perfect moment has become the subjective sign of the
artist in the photograph.
Both fictions
derive from the sense of capture inherent in photography, slicing and collecting
the pieces. And both fictions function through the pathetic fallacy, animating
the lifeless images. But the slice of life, with its empirical factoids, is
aligned with the notion of objectivity, while the perfect moment has come to
represent the subjective.
---