• What Photography Is

    Date posted: August 16, 2011 Author: jolanta

     

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve tended to look more than I actually see: scanning the room, sizing things up, and then making assessments. Since childhood, I’ve been trained for this kind of pattern recognition. Sadly, for my generation, seeing is becoming a thing of the past, largely because seeing necessitates reflection and a certain intimacy that requires time. James Elkins’ latest book, What Photography Is, takes a new, critical look at looking.

     

    “Elkins points to the fact that we often find ourselves inundated with images that are largely banal.”

    What Photography Is: James Elkins (Routledge, 240 pp, paperback, $34.95, ISBN: 978-0415995696).

    What Photography Is
    Jason Stopa

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve tended to look more than I actually see: scanning the room, sizing things up, and then making assessments. Since childhood, I’ve been trained for this kind of pattern recognition. Sadly, for my generation, seeing is becoming a thing of the past, largely because seeing necessitates reflection and a certain intimacy that requires time. James Elkins’ latest book, What Photography Is, takes a new, critical look at looking. Taking a marked turn away from Barthes’ punctum that photography is about memory and representation, from Krauss’s fascination with the indexical nature of the photograph, and from the late 20th century’s engagement with sublime subject matter, Elkins points to the fact that we often find ourselves inundated with images that are largely banal. Western culture has an endless carousel of hyper-real digital images, with details so intricate that they eliminate the necessity to see, save for the actual dust and debris of everyday life. With thought-provoking, page-to-page reproductions, What Photography Is reminds us that the act of looking is itself complex and that we often do not look or care to look at what is around us.

    Elkins is right. Photography has exhausted the necessity to represent the world. One need look no further than Google to discover that the world is a place of the ubiquitous image. Surfing its pages, one also finds that the act of looking is rarely rewarded with meaning. Yet, without engaging in Barthes’ melancholia, the reader will eventually find Elkins’ strongest point in his Sixth chapter, “Lingi.” Analyzing the unfolding of a horrific public execution, Elkins argues that images of this nature contain “an unpleasant, electric hurt in an image of the damaged body that is one of photography’s strongest properties.” Photography’s lasting power thus lies in its ability to seep into our sensory faculties, testing our capacity to comprehend the unfathomable.

    Elkins sees our situation in the advancement of technology as what it is: a mechanical operation. Yet the attempt to yank the umbilical cord that joins photography to representation is a difficult road. Ultimately, What Photography Is will frustrate the fine art photographer and illuminate the critical reader.

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