George Baker's introductory sentence - "I begin not with a negative, nor with a print, but with a screen." The wording of this, although, describing a photographically based project is a way that Baker is attempting to draw attention to the major point of this essay. The sentence plays on our understanding of photography, the way it is used, its once objectivity, and its now shift into new applications. He understands contemporary art as something "in crisis, or at least in severe transformation." Baker believes that the photographic practice still holds its earlier function although artists are now choosing to accompany or incorporate other forms with their work. It is still said though that something of the photographic effect still "survives" even through a transformation of traditional photography in a digital world. I think this is partially related to the loaded and learned referential agency of the photograph, for example the photograph of me and Russel Kirsch acting and presented as proof that I met him and the exchange happened in real life. The postmodern era is written as one that was attempting to expand the field of art and photography although Baker states that it was never really essayed on or "concretely expanded". Baker justifies his intention's of mapping this expansion on the basis that if the object of photography is "definitively slipping away" because of its expansion then we need to understand what that meant to the makers of art and photography in the past 25 years and how that has influenced the art makers of today. Baker proposes that the mapping of photography's expanded field be started by the "tearing" of "oppositional extremes". This is in connection to the idea of stasis and not-stasis, narrative and not-narrative, and the relationship between them all.
Bakers mapping shows the expansion as a way of broadening the application of forms and materials that are taken from culture and or influence it.
I was thinking about the work of Columbia instructor and photographer Brian Ulrich. Ulrich's photographs revolve around consumerism and the ways in which Americans interact with shopping, consumer goods, and the locations where these relationships are performed.
Image is from www.notifbutwhen.com
His project Copia is broken down into "chapters". In his most recent body titled Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls Ulrich has been photographing the locations that were once thriving shopping centers that are either barely keeping open or have completely imploded.
I am placing this body of work within Baker's expanded field because of Ulrich's use of found signage that once brilliantly hung as signage for bustling stores and had transitioned into non functioning words that were on their way of crumbling as the buildings they hung in would eventually be knocked down or re-purposed. The signs are installed along side the photographs to make an installation that Baker would most likely place on the plane of the "Talking Picture" narrative/stasis section of Bakers map. The photographs with the signage to me presents a sort of narrative that is carried even farther because of artifacts such as the signs that are physically presented in the installation. The stasis exists int he fact that the installation is not moving but this is a part that I am a little unclear about. I feel that somewhat the signage can actually transition the photographs into not-stasis because of the fact that something tangible from the world that the photographs show is now brought into the same space as the images? Does this sharing of the real world and the depicted one change the experience into one that does not reflect stasis?
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