For this week’s blog post, I think it would be appropriate to relate a very specific sentence from George Baker’s “Photography’s Expanded Field” to the more general, overriding themes of the course (after all, tomorrow is our last class!). Although the readings we have done throughout the course of the semester have been extremely varied and diverse, one important realization I have had is that photography, as a medium, really cannot be defined at all. This is due not only to the fact that there have been multiple movements and styles in the history of photography, but also to the fact that this medium simply cannot be defined; I have come to terms with this, and I have realized that it is perfectly okay to be unable to define photography’s main purpose or role in the world. Baker says: “…the modernist photograph is that image that is paradoxically then both a function of not-narrative and not-stasis at the same time” (127).
The photography that Baker refers to seems to stand in a large, ambiguous grey zone; while the photograph does not succeed in telling a complete and wholesome story, it is also not completely unproductive and speechless. I really like this description, because it explains that it is okay for photography to stand in this middle ground of vagueness. Photography (specifically artistic photography) can be considered a means to an end – that end being artistic expression and meaning. And that’s enough. As long as photography brings some amount of satisfaction to somebody – anybody, really – then that is enough to justify its being. I am not completely sure how much sense this is making, I am just attempting to explain that photography’s success, failure, or purpose cannot be measured by anything other than one’s subjective reaction to the photograph in question.
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