geez, such a dense and nebulous article. I mean look at that:
"Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such."
I'm not sure if she's at fault for making every photography critic write like this, or is simply the exemplar of this sort of photography writing, but it feels very much of a piece with Charlotte Cotton's work: https://svbedu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/pim_...
Should they instead have said its essence dissolves into an indeterminate flux, its ontological status contingent upon shifting power geometries that animate its spectral form; as praxis, it is enmeshed in the web of institutional stratifications and independent forces shaping its ephemeral manifestations. Its cultural function tethered to contextualized modes of existence, rendering its artifacts intelligible only through mutable currencies of meaning circulated within- phantasmic tokens of a fragmented, non-linear chronicle. Absent a unified narrative, its obscure history flickers as a series of discontinuous incursions across a formless field of institutional spaces, a territory whose contours and boundaries are perpetually reconfigured; it is this field- permeable, unstable, and overdetermined- that warrants investigation, not the fleeting, insubstantial entity itself?
Off topic but... "Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel" is one cool name. Sounds like she should be the heroine in an Iain M. Banks Culture novel.
geez, such a dense and nebulous article. I mean look at that:
"Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such."
I'm not sure if she's at fault for making every photography critic write like this, or is simply the exemplar of this sort of photography writing, but it feels very much of a piece with Charlotte Cotton's work: https://svbedu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/pim_...
This looks like a paragraph which is meaningful in the context of a specific school of thought. It reminds me of the classic (that is, classic on HN):
> A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?
Some works are just hard to grasp if you haven't first assimilated the introductory works to the field.
To be fair, you quoted something the article quoted.
But to be even more fair, it was a paragraph that the author liked, and isn't wildly different from what was written.
This is just how some things are written for certain audiences. It reminds me of Zampano's parts of House of Leaves.
It's, as expected, a little bit of jargon. Nothing more.
Should they instead have said its essence dissolves into an indeterminate flux, its ontological status contingent upon shifting power geometries that animate its spectral form; as praxis, it is enmeshed in the web of institutional stratifications and independent forces shaping its ephemeral manifestations. Its cultural function tethered to contextualized modes of existence, rendering its artifacts intelligible only through mutable currencies of meaning circulated within- phantasmic tokens of a fragmented, non-linear chronicle. Absent a unified narrative, its obscure history flickers as a series of discontinuous incursions across a formless field of institutional spaces, a territory whose contours and boundaries are perpetually reconfigured; it is this field- permeable, unstable, and overdetermined- that warrants investigation, not the fleeting, insubstantial entity itself?
This would be a terrific, totally publishable abstract for an essay on photography criticism in a fine art journal.