Walker Evans was hired by the american government to document the reality of social conditions in rural provinces during a time of financial crisis, important because he presents something between reality and falsity, he presents a staged/edited version of reality, but it is closer to reality than what could have been represented in a painting. He brings authorship and intention into realist photography.
The photograph contains denoted meaning as well as allegorical meaning, suggested through the arrangement of symbols in the image. Imbuing the objective eye with human meaning. The problem of the unintentional in photography is referred to by Barthes as the punctum it is the aspect of the photograph which is not with holding a 'coded' message, something incidental in the photograph which happens as a byproduct of the artists intention, like the muddy road in Andre Kertesz's photograph The Violinists Tune
or the winter branches in the background of Tod Papageorge's photograph. So then the challenge in art photography faces this punctum or unintended quantity. Does the artist need to create his own work in which case the photographer does not wholly qualify because he has not created the entire city which he photographs from scratch. Michael Creed argues that art needs to assert its intentionality.
For me Thomas Demand is probably the most interesting example of erasing the Punctum in photography, by reconstructing photographs completely out of cardboard and paper, he becomes completely in control of what is photographed and so everything in his photograph can be considered intensional.
The other concept that Barthes's introduces is the time punctum, the inescapable knowledge every photo carries with it that time has passed since the photograph was taken and its subject will have changed.
His example of Alexander Gardner's portrait of Lewis Payne is particularly effective because it shows a man that you know will be executed. When you see the photograph you know that the man you are looking at is dead. This applies to places as well going back to the example of Anne Hardy's photographs when you look at them it seems implicit that the installation is no longer in place other wise the photo documentation would not be necessary.
The idea that nature records itself or has some sort of unconscious drive to record itself is quite interesting, I suppose it is less that it has a drive to record itself and more that we can choose to see certain aspects of life as artistic representation, the shadow or the fossil can be compared to the photograph although they have been created by chance or without human intention. But the idea that a photograph is existentially linked to a person in a way that is more deep than the link between a person and an art piece is quite interesting and it is this idea which i suppose Hiroshi Sugimoto challenges with his photographs of waxworks. Creating a delay between the creation of signs and the sign itself, I suppose this means that the photograph depicts the sign for a person and in taking the photograph the sign is created but because what is being depicted is not actually from reality there is a delay. I'm not completely sure but its another interesting idea to grapple with, I'm still struggling to wrap my head around the idea of a sign.
Taryn Simon was another fascinating example, photographs of simulations. So again working with a challenge between the reality of photography as being perfect representation like a shadow in contrast to other forms of simulation, the idea of the photograph as duplicate rather than trace. So rather than being the shadow left behind by reality photography can be seen as a duplicate or simulation of reality. Craige Owens talks about the doubling of photography with the example of a photograph by Brassai/ And by photographing other simulations this idea is represented. The analysis of specific work was also very inspiring, the photograph of the cryogenic freezing tank shows the fantasy of immortality, it is a simulation of life which is not real in the same way as a photograph keeps someone alive in a certain way. The look of the photograph gives very little away about what is really meant and so it is open to other possible interpretations but it is always a problem for me when a work of art needs to be described in order to be understood, but maybe it is the provocation of that description and consequent discussion which makes it interesting. The other example was of a simulated jury where Lawyers would watch the dury deliberating a fictional case in order to understand how they could best be manipulated. The idea of a simulation being enacted for the purpose of controlling real life events really interests me, especially in conjunction with my research into second life - the simulation can be used to facilitate the achievement of real life income or romance. This relationship between the real - the simulation of the real - the representation of the real - the documentation of the real - the intentional distortion of the real in the confusing representational format of photography - and the intentionally distorted representation of the simulation of the real!
Going back to Craige Owens idea of Duplication and comparing it to Rosalind Kraus's theories around Maison bloom the idea of a representation within a representation the infinitely deferred image. Neither part of the code or part of the real, a threshold at which meanings can arise. Sugimoto and Smithsons interest in a time before human meanings, Sugimoto's interchangeable sea scapes. Smithsons argument that the real world is an image. We no longer see the image as a map but as a way of talking about how reality is an image.
