Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Lucy Soutter

The idea that a photographic work could be driven by a conceptual narrative rather than by formal elements or subject matter found within the frame was essential to the development of photographic postmodernism. Works by appropriationists such as Prince and Sherrie Levine certainly have striking formal characteristics. Prince's "Marlboro Men," for example, enlarged from cigarette advertisements, have a sensuous overblown color grain that evokes pointillism. Levine's versions of canonical black and white photographs are gritty, degraded by the levels of reproduction separating them from the original fine art prints. Part of the critical impact of such works comes from the transgression of photographic norms. But while the deviation from the standards of fine art photography connoisseurship could itself be viewed as politicized, the other half of the work's impact comes in the form of a critical metanarrative. In the criticism of the moment, appropriation and fragmentation were seen as strategies to empty the image and point beyond it.

Critics such as Craig Owens described this doubling in terms of allegory: works could have an ostensible subject matter (e.g., a cowboy stolen from a magazine ad) and an implicit commentary on representation more broadly (e.g., the "Death of the Author," the manipulative force of advertising, the cultural construction of masculinity, etc.). [13] The idea that pictorial work could function as allegory was extremely compelling; linking contemporary photography with the privileged discourses of literature and narrative history painting, the allegorical interpretation of works allowed them a satisfying complexity and multivalence and also created a new kind of viewer. Unlike the audience of modernist art photography who expected to see a self-sufficient autonomous image, the postmodern viewer could be relied upon to recognize oblique critical allusions without introductory explanation. In allegory, the speaker trusts the audience to make the metaphorical connection and to sustain it throughout the discourse. In essence, this metacritical mode allowed artists to maintain links with old-fashioned art values while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from them.

Allegorical readings often drew attention away from the formal aspects of the work, its explicit subject matter and its presentation. Thus critics tended to overlook the fact that postmodern photography was more expensively produced and packaged than any previously existing manifestation of the medium and also that much of it had a tremendous libidinal charge. In part, the current group of young photographers can be seen as toying with the sex and violence that was so often repressed in early postmodern criticism and as using ambiguous, disturbing images to resist any particular politicized reading.

A potential problem with postmodern metanarrative--unless grounded with pointed text as in the work of Martha Rosler or Victor Burgin--is that it takes a trained eye to determine whether the art really is critical rather than celebratory of the status quo it represents. Owens recognizes allegory in subtle stylistic fissures. As he says of Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills," "the uncanny precision with which Sherman represents these tropes, the very perfection of her impersonations, leaves an unresolved margin of incongruity in which the image, freed from the constraints of referential and symbolic meaning, can accomplish its 'work.'" [14] On the flip side of Owens's model lies the possibility that unscrupulous artists might play in the "unresolved margin of incongruity" without necessarily doing any "work." The politics of the art world have changed in the 1990s: "critique" is often assumed, but is no longer in fashion as the dominant mode. As a result, many art writers assume offhandedly that if a photograph appears to show fantasy, obsession, voyeurism, masochism, sadism or misogyny, it is in fact a critical commentary. At the same time, in the current mode of media-age detachment and sophistication it is also acceptable for works to posit a transgressive affirmation of politically incorrect tendencies. Like the metanarrative about the making of the work, the critical metanarrative is optional.