Subject: Photography's Destinations
Date: 27 November 2007 03:29:10
From: ARTHUR OU
(To Discussion Forum initiated by Christopher Bedford)

That photographs are semiotic monads perpetually linked to the temporal moment of their exposure is an inherent characteristic that differentiates photography from other depictive mediums such as painting and drawing. This axiom not only applies to non-art photographs of the vernacular, quotidian types but also to the ones with full artistic intentions- photographs produced and intended to be art. Because of this coupling to time, photographs, although indexically anchored to their illuminated referent, become like time itself, always in constant flux, anxiously inserted back into the flow from which they initially came. Unlike painting, drawing, and sculpture, photographs can never reach an ultimate finality (perhaps this is even more true with digital processes). therefore, they remain propositions that suggest an idea or what something looks like at a given, chosen moment. In other words, they are propositions of the potentiality of the subject; they point towards the possibility of meaning.
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If photographs are propositions, then they are constantly in flux, necessitating a viewer that can also adapt and change, to be able to arrive at destinations that are heretofore not yet determined.