Benjamin, Atget and postmodern photography studies

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as an Enlightenment-inspired paradigm for developing forms of professional-ized knowledge in modernism, 9 the critique of art’s aura, of art’s presumeduniqueness and authenticity, and of the impact of photographic reproducibilityon art, formed the basis of a larger critical enterprise that would counter thetraditional narratives of modernist art in the name of ‘postmodernism’. 10 During the 1960s and 1970s, conceptual art’s use of photography in waysother than those newly legitimated by photographic modernism highlightedwhat, by the 1980s, was theorized as photography’s functional rather thanaesthetic qualities – including indexical referencing, framing, and recording –functional qualities repressed from modernist narratives about photography’snineteenth-century origins. Conceptual works by artists such as Ed Ruscha,Robert Smithson, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Mel Bochner, used photographyas a framing or recording device for Duchampian ‘found’ images in the world: 11 Ruscha’s gas stations and swimming pools, Smithson’s signs and drainage pipesin Passaic, New Jersey, the Bechers’ manhole covers, and Bochner’s ‘actualsize’ body parts. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that Atget’s work, veritablestill-life depictions of empty Paris streets, doorways, and architectural embel-lishments, paradoxically was made visible to photography connoisseurs thanksto Ruscha’s considerably more ironic, deadpan depictions of gas stations onRoute 66, or his photographic cataloguing of every building along the SunsetStrip. 12 Surely, however, the coincidence of Atget’s canonization with a concep-tual art practice that called such efforts into question could only function asa confirmation of the latter’s threat to the former. Indeed, John Szarkowski’s1977 photography exhibit, ‘Mirrors and Windows’ at MoMA, which includedartists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, was characterized bySolomon-Godeau as an effort to neutralize the ‘challenge’ they represented tothe curator’s connoisseurial investment in photography (1984: 75).The conceptually based photographic practice that Solomon-Godeau char-acterized as ‘photography after art photography’ (75–85) highlighted not theformal and aesthetic qualities of photography lauded by photography aesthetessuch as Szarkowski, but photography’s referential function . In radical contrast,then, to Clement Greenberg’s characterization of modern art’s ‘self-critical’enterprise of paring down each distinct medium to its essential qualities (mostinfamously, ‘flatness’ in painting), Douglas Crimp would assert that postmod-ernism is defined by the fact that ‘the actual characteristics of the medium,per se, cannot any longer tell us much about an artist’s activity’ (Crimp 1984:176). Indeed, Krauss even suggested that Cindy Sherman’s photographs do not‘construct an object for art criticism but constitute […] an act of such criticism’(1990: 27, emphasis added). 13 It would seem, then, that for theorists of photog-raphy as the medium of postmodernism, the medium itself may be ‘practicallydeconstructive’, as Jacques Derrida ironically suggested in his own essay onBenjamin’s canonization (Derrida 1987: 175).But why Benjamin in particular in the 1980s? Though the scene of Americanart criticism had initially failed to acknowledge European art production during