Time and Narrative in Relation to Postmodern Photography

I thought Baker’s analysis of photography’s “expanded field” had some interesting ideas on the photograph’s relationship to narrative. In his article, Baker mentions that in an early paper, he introduced a new binary to describe photography with: narrative vs stasis. For Baker, even though photographs are by definition locked in time, the connotations of the image within the context it is viewed always place it within some temporal, cultural narrative. In this respect, photographs are paradoxically static narratives, bearing no direct relation to time or culture and yet also inextricably intertwined with context. At its most fundamental level, this binary is really the same question that we’ve been thinking about since the beginning of the class: is there a photographic essence, does photography have a definition, or is its meaning wholly assigned by context. Baker reframes this question by introducing the element of the photograph’s relationship to time. For Baker, the photographic medium is inherently fractured along this line of narrative and stasis, always attempting to be one or the other, failing at both. For Baker, this means the only successful kind of photography is that which explores the medium’s unique location between narrative and stasis, utilizing the photographic medium not ignorant of its obsolescence but instead willing to explore its limitations and paradoxes. “Film stills” and “still films” are two examples Baker gives of successful postmodern adaptations of the photographic medium, both calling attention to these concepts of narrative a stasis, delving into new territory in the border between photography and cinema.