urban ku # 100 ~ a new place # 2
Tuesday, August 28, 2007 at 10:27AM 
Life is like that sometimes • click to embiggenBeau Comeaux commented, on civilized ku # 54, that "...The far flung after-effects of the German coolness and detachment (as initially? proffered by the Bechers) has worn me down a bit as of late. The ironic pointing to empty, banal spaces has run its course for me, failing to interest or engage me."
I don't think that Beau is alone in feeling this way. While I don't think the 'coolness and detachment/ironic pointing' thing has run its course or that some very interesting work is not still being created in that genre, I have stated that "... I am emerging from a kind of modernist/postmodernist what-the-hell-is-what haze. After delving into the notions, it seems incredibly complex or equally simple depending on deep you want to go. I went deep enough to feel, at the extremes, like I was drowning in a sea of either simplistic sentimental dreck (modernism) or wretched intellectual/academic obfuscation (postmodernism).
That said, it seems that there is an emerging middle ground out there where the two cultural paradigms collide and out of the smashed particles a new stew is being brewed - perhaps a kind of post-postmodernism.
Photography-wise, a place where neither intellectual concept nor visual referent reign supreme. A place where the skeptical/questioning gaze of the camera does not descend fully into the 'end-of-the-line-everything-is-used-up' paradigm of postmodernism but rather, it creates a glimmer of it's-not-over-yet hope because, unlike radical postmodernism, the photographer actually believes that the referent matters.
A place where, even though the referent matters, the skeptical/questioning gaze of the camera never places it on an altar of idolatry that drips with sappy sentimentality. A place where the referent is addressed with a respect that preserves it's authenticity but still allows the photography-observer to move well beyond the 'actuality of the real world'.
A place where the denoted and the connoted co-exist on equal footing. A place where photography can both illustrate and illuminate."
Reader Comments (2)
Terrific comments. You eloquently outlined the problems that have been plaguing both academia and art, and have come to a hopeful outlook (instead of the hopelessness most of us arrive at).
Thank you for your positive comments.
Mark,
Some excellent thoughts on a topic I too have been wrestling with. I'm not much of an art historian and only vaguely aware of what's Modernism and what's PoMo, in the photography world, so please, throw out some examples of what you would consider to be Modernist photography, PoMo photography and your newly coined co-existing-little-of-both kind of photography
Brett