Week 12

The essays for this week, George Baker's Photography's Expanded Field and Rosalind Krauss's Reinventing the Medium, are fascinating to read in an era where film and photography are closely intertwined.   The still image came first, and Baker argues that photography was not deconstructed to form film, but rather was expanded.  "Photography is no longer the priveleged middle term between two things that it isn't. Photography is rather only one term in the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities."  Through multiple frames strung together we are able to see a more complete and expanded narrative.  Krauss examines the work of Robert Coleman in her essay.  His photographs are presented as slides in a traditional carousel regulated by a timer.  Coleman seems to be elaborating on the "paradoxical collision between stillness and movement"  by essentially rotating photographs through a slideshow.  His work is the first step towards a more complete moving picture- the video.  Interestingly, just as Coleman begins to step from still image to a moving narrative, Cindy Sherman creates her pieces moving the opposite direction.  Her film stills seem to take snippets from moving imagery.   

The Baker essay raises one of my concerns in photography by stating “critical consensus would have it that the problem today is not that just about anything image-based can now be called photographic, but rather that photography itself has been foreclosed, cashiered, abandoned—outmoded technologically and displaced aesthetically.”  It seems that photographers are encouraged to divulge in a variety of media to convey their message.  Ann Fessler, a photographer professor at RISD, uses sound and installation in combination with her images about adoption.

In her piece, Cliff & Hazel, the walls are hung with enlarged color snapshots of the Fessler's family.   The center of the room is carpeted, with a comfortable sofa and a television (housed in a wooden cabinet to suggest age). A mobile of Fessler family photographs dangles over the TV, which plays a looping 23-minute video that Fessler made while visiting home for Hazel's 80th birthday. 
Another room installation, Everlasting, has only a carpet pad, no carpet; the upholstery on the sides of the five armchairs has been cut out: the comforts of the family room ripped away. Projected on a wall is a silent, black-and-white archival film loop of nurses wheeling babies, two-by-two, around the corner of an institutional hospital corridor. A 17-minute sound collage plays of some of Fessler's interviewees. The form is expressionistic—five discrete speakers pipe in overlapping voices—but the women collaborate on a linear narrative account, from pregnancy to sequestration to birth, then surrender and sorrow. 

While Fessler's roots are in the medium of photography, it has all branched out into other factions.  The onslaught of digital photography and the access that the general public now has to cameras makes me think that other photographers will continue to involved a variety of media in their work to preserve some sense of originality.