The Expanded Field and the Photograph as Contingency

In his article George Baker discusses photography as an expanded field and generates a traditionally innovative or innovatively traditional mechanism for theorizing the photograph--in Nancy Davenport's scribbling all over his graphical representation of modern photography and its relation to stasis/non-stasis and narrative/non-narrative. "She quickly grabbed my pen and paper and began to swirl lines in every direction, circling around my oppositions and squares, with a look that seemed to say, 'Well, what about these possibilities?' My graph was a mess. But the photographer's lines, though revolving around the field, had no center, and they extended in every direction" (140). What Baker and Davenport have drawn is a network, centerless, whose lines and channels expand outward, desiring and reaching and relating infinitely. It seems that through Baker's expanded field--in which "the terms involved only become more complex, the need to map their effects more necessary, because these effects are both less obvious and self-evident" (139)--he is repositing a theoretical and graphical model of photography as contingency. The cultural and aesthetic meaning(s) of the photograph continue to expand both in length/size, time, and complexity, more and more dependent on everything to make meaning--more and more essenceless. It appears the Baker is back where we started. The role of photography in contemporary aesthetics and culture is like traditional theoretical models/notions of photography itself: mere contingency.