Allan Sekula – The Traffic In Photographs
How can we wprk towards an active, critical understanding of the prevailing conventions of representation, particularly those surrounding photography? The discourse that surrounds photography speaks paradoxically of discipline and freedom, of rigorous truths and unleashed pleasures. Here then, at least by virtue of a need to contain the tensions inherent in this paradox, is the site of a certain shell game, a certain dance, even a certain politics….
…By discourse, then, I mean the forceful play of tacit beliefs and formal conventions that situates us, as social beings, in various responsive and responsible attitudes to the semiotic workings of photography. In itself constrained, determined by, and contributing to “larger” cultural, political, and economic forces, this discourse both legitimates and directs the multiple flows of the traffic in photographs. It quitlely manages and constrains our abilities to produce and consume photographic imagery, while often encouraging, especially in its most publicized and glamorous contemporary variants, an apparently limitless semiotic freedom, a timeless dimension of aesthetic appreciation. Encoded in academic and “popular” texts, books…etc…this discourse exerts a force that is simultaneously material and symbolic, inextricably linking language and power….
…Above all else, the ideological force of photographic art in modern society may lie in the apparent reconciliation of human creative energies with a scientifically guided process of mechanization, suggesting that despite the modern industrial division of labor, and specifically despite the industrialization of cultural work, despite the historical obsolescence, marginalization, and degradation of artisanal and manual modes of representation, the category of the artist lives on the exercise of purely mental imaginative command over the camera.
From Modernism and Modernity, The Vancouver Conference Papers Mar 1981, The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2004.
