This is from the essay, Post-Photography in the book of essays, Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen (2002):
… Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.
… The suggestion is that a diminution of our collective faith in the photograph’s indexical relationship to the real will inevitably lead to the death of photography as an autonomous medium. The irony of this scenario is that photography as a separate entity might well be on the verge of disappearing forever, even as the photographic as a rich vocabulary of conventions and references lives on in ever-expanding splendor.
That’s in his introductory paragraph. I am going to skip to deep within the essay, to one of his examples that I find particularly interesting, even though it may not seem directly related to the previous:
… Equally ubiquitous [as the use of photography incorporated within built structures] has been the practice of constructing tableaux and then photographing them. What should we make of this? What should we make of a photography that induces the production of things? In one recent case, the things in question are simulations of various kinds of prison architecture, constructed and photographed by New York artist James Casebere. Two sets of things, the, models and photographs of models, each produced by the demands of the other.
[ ... ]
… some of Casebere’s interiors are eerily reminiscent of the inside of a camera, as if we are looking from the inside out, as if the architecture we are viewing is that of the photographic apparatus. Reminiscent of Talbot’s negative images of the windows of his country home, these cameras, these rooms, are all illuminated by a single blinding source of light. As viewers, we appear to be looking from the back wall of the space, standing in for (perhaps even becoming) the photographic image being projected there. This lighting modulates the stark whiteness of the surfaces and desultory objects that comprise these otherwise empty interiors. Actually, the whiteness of these rooms is something of an assumption on our part, for Casebere’s prints come tinted with a gray-blue pallor. Prisoners have this pallor, but so do monks confined to their cells (and photographers who spend too much time in the darkroom or computer lab). It is the color of incarcerated skin, of confession and repentance. This ecclesiastical aura adds to the impression of silence (some types of photograph are noisy, but certainly not these). Moreover, the selective lighting, minimal furnishings, and sepulchral tone of these images call to mind not only prisons and monasteries, but also art galleries — the very spaces where one might reasonably expect to encounter these photos in the flesh. It is as if cell, camera, and gallery (viewer, viewing apparatus and view) can do no more than endlessly reproduce one another. We are faced with the prospect of a photographic architecture that is continually in the process of turning itself inside out, with a photography building and demolishing its own parameters with equal fervor.
… we find Casebere broaching the very architectonics of photography. This time it is the traditional orders of sign and referent that are threatened, that is, the separation of real and representation on which the presumed veracity of the photograph has for so long been founded. In Casebere’s Prison Series, there is a constant referencing from one to the other, but no longer any originary outside source, no absolute ground. Real and representation, presence and absence, thing and photograph, are instead seen to share the sort of promiscuous complicity that calls all identity into question. Like Talbot, Casebere leaves us with that most troubling of apparitions: photography’s architecture as a site of deconstruction.
-Julie
