[audiobook] A Journey Into Matisse's South of France (ArtPlace) by Laura McPhee at Arts-Photography

Description

Photography can seem to capture reality and the eye like no other medium; commanding belief and wielding the power of proof. In some cases; a photograph itself is attributed the force of the real. How can a piece of chemically discolored paper have such potency? How does the meaning of a photograph become fixed? In The Disciplinary Frame; John Tagg claims that; to answer these questions; we must look at the ways in which all that frames photographymdash;the discourse that surrounds it and the institutions that circulate itmdash; determines what counts as truth. The meaning and power of photographs; Tagg asserts; are discursive effects of the regimens that produce them as official record; documentary image; historical evidence; or art. Teasing out the historical processes involved; he examines a series of revealing case studies from nineteenth-century European and American photographs to Depression-era works by Walker Evans; Dorothea Lange; and Margaret Bourke-White to the conceptualist photography of John Baldessari. Central to this transformative work are questions of cultural strategy; the growth of the state; and broad issues of power and representation: how the discipline of the frame holds both photographic image and viewer in place; without erasing the possibility for evading; and even resisting; capture. Photographs; Tagg ultimately finds; are at once too big and too small for the frames in which they are enclosedmdash;always saying more than is wanted and less than is desired.