The world in the ground glass: transformations in P. H. Emerson's photography

Nothing could be less controversial now than to assert that a break in theory and practice separates modernist from postmodernist photography. Abigail Solomon-Godeau offers a clear, concise, and canonical statement of the postmodernist critique of modernist photography and its underlying assumptions about representation and expression. (1) She says that Sherrie Levine's appropriations of modernist photography demonstrate that work like Edward Weston's does not, as modernist accounts of photography claim, express an original and personal view of its subject. Rather, Levine reveals (according to Solomon-Godeau) that Weston's work merely leads the beholder back to the original motif or refers the beholder to a chain of images, each of which refers in turn to another image. Either way, Weston's picture fails as a viable vehicle for Weston's expressive purpose. For the first claim, Solomon-Godeau cites Levine herself:

  Sherrie Levine in fact remarked that when she showed her photographs
  to a friend he said that they only made him want to see the originals.
  "Of course," she replied, "and the originals only make you want to see
  that little boy [Neil Weston], but when you see the boy, the art is
  gone." (2)

When you look at Weston's photograph of Neil's naked torso, you're admiring a beautiful boy, not a work of art. Solomon-Godeau then explains the complementary argument, by which the photograph is part of an endless series of images that ultimately lets us see that all photographs defer meaning, rather than express it:

  Inasmuch as appropriation functions by putting visual quotation marks
  around the stolen image, its critical application lies in its ability
  to compel the viewer to see dialectically. In Levine's rephotographs
  of Eliot Porter's trees, the mere act of their confiscation,
  displacement, and re-presentation, enables the viewer to grasp
  immediately the wholly conventional (and, as Roland Barthes would have
  said, entirely mythological) scheme in which "Nature" is made to be
  seen as "Beautiful." (3)

When you're looking at Porter's photograph, you're not admiring a photograph of trees, you're entering, via the image, a chain of images representing natural motifs, and your response is not so much a response to Porter's photograph as a response to a conventional equation of nature with beauty. In short, Levine can again be taken to have staged, by both routes, an "uncompromising rejection of all notions of self-expression, originality, or subjectivity." (4)

Recently, Walter Benn Michaels explained the error of both sides of postmodernist photography's theoretical stance. (5) Put briefly, Michaels maintains that if you take the photograph to be art just because of your interest in the thing it pictures--if you join Levine in admiring the Edward Weston photograph solely for Neil's beautiful torso, or if you admire an untitled "film still" by Cindy Sherman solely for her skill in staging tableaux vivants--you're not admiring the photograph, you're admiring the thing it's of. (6) Thus, the photograph is meaningless. On the other hand, if you treat the photograph as if it were in quotation marks, as an element in an endless citational chain, and claim that it is therefore unable to express the photographer's intention, you're treating it as a mark (as a cipher in a formal code) rather than as a sign. That amounts to treating the photograph as an object--like any natural object, even. Not only is the photograph-as-mark open to all plausible intertextual resonances, any aspect of the beholder's experience (no matter how tenuous or arbitrary its relation to the photograph or the photographer's intention) might equally well be brought to bear on it. That's because once the beholder has determined to treat the photograph as an object, there is no way to declare the irrelevance of any aspect of the beholder's situation to the beholder's experience of it. Again, the photograph is meaningless. (7)

In Michaels's view, a photograph is meaningful (that is, ceases to be an object or a view of an object) only if it is framed. That is to say, only a frame can establish the difference between the photograph and the object it represents, or between the photograph as an object and the photograph as a (pictorial) speech act. One might counter that all photographs are framed, if only in the merest sense that the views they present are bounded. What happens, though, in postmodernist writing on photography like Solomon-Godeau's or Levine's is that the account makes no place for the frame, fails to take it into consideration or suppresses it. We might say, then, that what Michaels has shown is that when we propose a photograph as a work of art (that is, as a sign rather than an object), we are also implicitly or explicitly advancing an account of how it frames and is framed. (8)

I find Michaels's critique of postmodernism compelling. To his critique of postmodernist photographic theory, I want to add a description of a modernist photographic theory and practice that follows similar lines to reveal that, at what is arguably its inception, modernist photography was already more sophisticated than the postmodernist challenge to it can admit. In the work of Peter Henry Emerson, modernist photography had already come to grips with the challenges postmodernism was later to pose. Emerson considered and rejected two theories of art that are open to the kind of critique postmodernism proposes--one on which art conveys the artist's meaning by accurately depicting a world, and one on which art conveys meaning only in or as the presence of the experience to be conveyed. From within his theory and practice, he developed a third theory of art, one that emphasizes the function of the frame and is not subject to the kind of critique Solomon-Godeau elaborates. This should lead us to take the break between modernist and so-called postmodernist photography more critically than is now usual.