Derrida queries to establish that deconstruction
has been happening since and before Plato. For
Derrida, deconstruction is simply what happens.
This essay discusses three thinkers, Jacques Der-
rida (b. 1930), Roland Barthes (1915–1980), and
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), to introduce some
ways deconstruction intersects photography.
The Photographic Text
Deconstruction intersects photography when one
recognizes photos as texts. How are photos texts?
Looking at a photo constitutes an act of reading.
Photos solicit interpretations. A caption accom-
panying a photo attempts to direct reading toward
a specific interpretation in part because interpre-
tations might occur other than the interpretation
the caption’s author intends, even if the author is
the photographer herself or himself. A photogra-
pher’s intention might irrevocably control a
photo’s interpretation if, rather than texts, photos
were windows opening upon existence. Neither
does the reader’s intention control the photo-
graphic text’s interpretation. The illusion of such
control requires the reader to ignore a photo’s
singular textuality.
One might argue that Ansel Adams’sEl Capi-
tan, Merced River, Clouds, Yosemite Valley (c.
1952), requires little if any interpretation since
the photo simply presents sublime nature: a spec-
tacular cliff face towering in the background,
clouds floating high to the distant horizon, and a
turbulent river crossing the foreground. But such
an argument forgets that the concept ‘‘nature’’
occurs in a nature/culture opposition laden with
philosophical assumptions. The account of nature
as a hallowed presence unpolluted by culture con-
stitutes one such assumption. The impression that
Adams’s photo gives of presenting nature bears
witness to an irreducibly textual effect: the persua-
siveness of the nature/culture opposition.
Deconstruction involves the dismantling of
major conceptual oppositions like the nature/cul-
ture opposition. In Adams’s photo one reads an
account of nature tied to the nature/culture oppo-
sition. Yet in reading the photo, when one remarks
such an account’s cultural specificity, the nature/
culture opposition begins to dismantle. Adams’s
use of black and white film to conjure the im-
pression of a starkly pristine natural landscape
emerges as a cultural enterprise informed by a
certain kind of preservationist environmentalism.
Destabilizing the nature/culture opposition it
evokes, the photo opens readers to questions that
the nature/culture opposition muffles. This oppo-
sition supports narrating Yosemite Valley as a
healing refuge free of urban stresses. Of course,
tourists experience Yosemite Valley as such a
refuge only by way of the tourist industry’s urba-
nizing interventions: roads, public toilets, tour
buses, a supermarket, a hotel, and so on. In decon-
structing the nature/culture opposition, the photo
moves one to ask: How can one’s desire for the
landscape to which the photo refers avoid being
thedesirefortheconsumerobjectYosemiteVal-
ley threatens to become?Deconstruction: A Variety of Postmodernism?
Redefining philosophical systems, political circum-
stances, and cultural artifacts (photographs, for
example) as irreducibly textual is a postmodern
gesture. Is deconstruction a variety of postmodern-
ism? A leading scholar of deconstruction, Christo-
pher Norris, argues against confusing Derrida’s
rigorous engagement with philosophical tradition
for what Norris calls postmodernism. For Norris,
postmodernism’s irresponsible relativism flees from
the duty to make ethical and political distinctions
and decisions. As Norris correctly points out, rather
than voiding ethical and political decisions, Derrida
elaborates their intricate conditions of occurrence,
however daunting and complex Derrida shows
those conditions to be. Derrida insists on rethinking
the European Enlightenment; on Norris’s reading,
postmodernism urges the Enlightenment’s aban-
donment. For Norris, postmodernists are pursuing
a questionable aesthetic rather than anything com-
parable to what Derrida calls deconstruction.
Norris’s partition of deconstruction from postmo-
dernism has some validity. But photography’s cross-
ing from modernism to postmodernism does entail
deconstructive processes. One relevant comparison
would be between Walker Evans’sBrooklyn Bridge,
New York City (c. 1929) and David Hockney’s
photo-collageBrooklyn Bridge, November 28 1982
(1982). Both photographers took advantage of the
pedestrian walkway that centrally traverses the
bridge. The walkway allows the camera’s lens to
follow the unexpectedly thin suspension cables as
they sweep gracefully from the photographer’s stand-
point to their convergence at one of the bridge’s
monumentally solid Gothic-arched towers.
Influenced by Alfred Stieglitz’s photographic
aesthetic of Pictorialism, Evans aspires to a
high-artimageofaniconofAmericanmodernity
celebrated as such by Joseph Stella’s paintings
The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted:
The Bridge (1920–1922) and Brooklyn Bridge:
Night(1922). Evans’s photo depicts the walkwayDECONSTRUCTION