[lbo-talk] What is a photograph?

bitch at pulpculture.org bitch at pulpculture.org
Sat Jun 23 07:02:04 PDT 2007


heh. I was bushed from a long week, so I sat on the patio -- enjoying the incredible UNhumidity of a 72 degree F evening in a way I could never do in the hellhole, LimpDick.

Instead of reading the rest of Wendy Brown's book, States of Injury, I delved into Laura Kipnis's Bound and Gagged. Kipnis, as I understand, takes a cultural studies approach to the study of pornography and sex. Bound and Gagged is a meditation on class politics as they play out in the pornographic imagination.

The first chapter is a fascinating blow by blow account of how it is that Daniel DePew, gay, into SM, a bottom turned top by the ever present fact that "a good top is hard to find," and with utterly no interest in sex with kids, let alone murderous proclivities, was nonetheless imprisoned for 33 years for discussing a fantasy. That is, imprisoned after being entrapped by the US attorney's office, which spent nearly a million bucks and tons of labor power to convict the guy on conspiracy to make a snuff film. Which, when you read the case, it's hard to understand why, on the facts, anyone would see him as guilty --given the way the feds used tons of resources from the fbi psych unit to manipulate the guy. But when you read what happened during the trial, he was basically convicted on the fact of his gayness and interest in SM which the prosecutor said was really "Satan and Murder."

Anyway, the second chap is why I write. This one is on tranny porn. At the time, many tran porn mags were filled with ads for products to help transwomen dress and appear as women. But the bulk of ads was often of transwomen's photographs of themselves, put up for dating, meeting others, finding friends, sympathetic ears, etc. In order to get to the point of her analysis -- to look at porn like any other cultural product and ask about the meaning that circulate in and through porn, she takes a detour into the work of Cindy Sherman.

Sherman made a career of photographic self-portraits, dressing as various B movie type characters that animate our idea of various types of women: the girl detective, young housewife, starlet, whore, girl next door, etc. Kipnis writes, "At first glance, the similarities between Sherman's work and the TV (transvestite) self-portraits are striking: both put categories of identity into question by using the genre of the self portrait to document an invested "self."

Art critic Arthur Danto, in an introduction to a book of Sherman's photography asks, of course, "Is it photography?" Kipnis says he doesn't bother with the question, "Is it art?" but I think asking, "Is it photography?" is skating pretty close to that. I went to an art show over the weekend and was thinking about how I react to photography. I pretty much recoil from anything that seems like it's an attempt to capture "nature". They remind me of the paintings of trees decked out in vivid autumn leaves with river running from a distant mountain, the river curving through the forest, centered in the painting. Yeah: I snob. Hate it because you can buy this at Walmart's outdoor art sales. :) Similarly, I pretty much recoil from art show paintings in this genre.

Anyway, back to Danto's intro to Sherman's work.

"Sherman is not concerned with the standard concerns of the art photograph such as print quality. Further, the genre she's chosen to appropriate -- the film still -- is what Danto labels "working photographs." He includes under the rubric the kind of photographs that have a *purpose*, and are meant to perform some labor -- photos that are "subartistic." Danto does finally concede, on two different grounds, that Sherman *is* a photographer. First, because the camera is central to her work and the work draws on the language of photography. But more interestingly, Danto admits that the prejudice against "working photographs" is the basis of a class system in photography, in which an "aristocracy of proto-paintings" are allowed to lord it over "a proletariat of working photographs" that are actually often more meaningful to our everyday lives. For Danto, it was the political and aesthetic upheavals of the sixties that allowed these working photos to be perceived as vehicles for conveying meaning, and allowed everyday, unambitious photographs -- baby pictures, graduation photos -- to be taken seriously within an art context. These ordinary photos carry a "powerful charge of human meaning" because they condense the biographies of each of us." It's now possible to "recognize the deep human essence with which these lowly images were steeped, esthetics be damned."

"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube

Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)



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