Photography’s Expanded Field

This week I found Baker’s essay Photography’s Expanded Field particularly interesting and so I wanted to share a couple of my thoughts. Baker asserts that, far from being constrained by the limitations imposed by definition, photography has come to be part of a continuously expanding field. As Nancy Davenport demonstrated through her associative drawings on the top of Baker’s diagram, there is a distinct lack of a centre around which the fields of photography are expanding. Perhaps the diagram might better be depicted as a continuous flow of oppositions and non-oppositions, an expanding web of culture and nature, infinitely complex and intertwined. Regardless of the map’s structure, Baker emphasizes the importance of a constantly mapping and remapping its progression; “we need to enter into and explore what it might mean to declare photography to have an expanded field of operation; we need to trace what this field has meant for the last two decades of photographic practice, in order to situate ourselves with any accuracy in relationship to the putative dispersal.”

Through a retroactive method of classification he arrives at the state of new photographic practice as that of a coalescence of the principles outlined in his diagram; "stasis" and "non-stasis", "narrative" and "non-narrative", creating a medium greater than the sum of its parts; a medium expanding exponentially. Taking into consideration Baker’s concluding anecdote I found myself considering the nature of an expanded Klein group. Whilst the possibilities are endless they seem to be inherently linked to that which has come before it so that whilst the web/group may lack a governing centre point it does seem to rotate around certain governing principles from out of which it expands. Given the categorical structure of the group, I wonder if it is possible to shift the emphasis from the past to the future and expand the framework of opposition and non-opposition before it has necessarily been created? Is it possible to lay out a map for the future progression of photography as a medium? This is a question that has plagued me throughout the semester. It seems as though the consensus draws on the recognition of the past so that one might better comprehend the present; this present awareness and contextual understanding is meant to provide a platform upon which, one might look forward to predict the medium’s progression. I have found that very few tend follow through with the latter part of this analysis. Indeed, is there any point in doing so; certainly, there is much to be gained from understanding how the medium has come to exist in its current state, might there be as much to be gained from understanding how it will progress in years to come.