> The profession's dying. The need for it is dying. Maybe it was never of > any value in the first place. "Professional".... hahahaaaa.... what are > we, brain surgeons? Sometimes it’s good to go back and look at how Stieglitz and others fought to have photography elevated from a technical craft to high art, which required a lot of persuasion and convoluted rhetoric, which continues to this day. Here’s something I ran across just yesterday. It’s an essay entitled “Erased Physiognomy: Theodore Gericault, Paul Strand and Garry Winogrand,” by Dr. Stephen Bann, Professor of Modern Cultural Studies and Chairman of the Board of Studies in History and Theory of Art at the University of Kent, east of London. “Roland Barthes has expressed with memorable concreteness the terms of the ‘anthropological revolution’ of photography which resulted in the establishment of a new type of visual communication. The photograph is, for Barthes, a ‘message without a doce’, and this implies the corollary that other types of images (and typically those in the tradition of Western painting since the Renaissance) are inevitably and irretrievably coded. Despite all that has been said about the coded character of photographic communication, Barthes’ point remains valid on a level which is not merely that of a truism. The photograph has, by virtue of its ontological status, the character of a document, whether it is a vehicle for codes, or whether it subverts them: its status as a trace, or in Peirce’s terms an index, implies a level of meaning that communicates irrespective of the photographer’s contrivance.” Now I have lost a lot of sleep at night anxiously wondering if my photographic documents are a vehicle for codes, or if they instead subvert them. I’m sure many of you out there are struggling mightily with the same issue.
