erged full-blown in the decade and distinguished it
from modernism’s formalist aesthetics that are
embedded in the idea of the unique object. Histori-
cally, although there was ‘‘modernism’’ in photo-
graphy, in the larger application of this term in the
art world, photography was often seems as the
proverbial second-class citizen because it was a
highly reproducible medium. In this way, photogra-
phy appeared to resist classification according to
traditional aesthetic categories, and instead called
for the revision and re-actualization of these cate-
gories. Hence the paradox: if there is some specifi-
city in the photographic image, it consists in its
elusiveness and its capacity to shift from one cate-
gory to the other, that is, precisely, in its lack of
specificity. In that sense, photography could be
apprehended either as a record of some exterior
reality, or as an interiorized vision revelatory of
the photographer’s own inner being. In most of
cases, it was both at the same time.
For Rosalind Krauss, ‘‘the photographic...had
come to affect all the arts.’’ (Michelson, 1987,
introduction) Photography was central not only
to advanced art but to society as well. Photography
critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau wrote:
As photography has historically come to mediate, if not
wholly represent, the empirical world for most of the inha-
bitants of industrialized societies (indeed, the production
and consumption of images serves as one of the distinguish-
ing characteristics of advanced societies), it has become a
principal agent and conduit of culture and ideology.
(Solomon-Godeau 1984, 76)
Although the decade is characterized by a wide
diversity of styles and uses of the photographic
medium, a primary distinction can be made be-
tween artists who used photography among other
forms of expression (without being exclusively
photographers) and those who came to be called
‘‘pure photographers.’’
Many artists of the first group, and especially
those who combined photography with texts, had
largely internalized art theory and assimilated into
their own art making. Following a conceptualist
and post-conceptualist realm, such photographers
tried to demonstrate the distance that separates
photography and its referent, despite their com-
mon identification.
Photography had been thus regarded as a parti-
cular semiotic system, the understanding of which,
far to be obvious, depends on visual and cultural
codes. Informed by French structuralism and
semiotic theories (Roland Barthes, Jean Baudril-
lard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault), as
well as by psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan) and
phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Louis Althusser), artists renewed and expanded
the conceptualist critique of representation. From
that point of view, photographic images were texts to
be deciphered rather than works of art to be admired.
For Rosalind Krauss, the photograph is ‘‘a meaning-
lessness surround which can only be filled in by the
addition of a text.’’ (‘‘Notes on the Index: Seventies
ArtinAmerica,’’p.66).
Two seminal essays by Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Death
of the Author’’ and ‘‘From Work to Text,’’ served as
references for the artists. According to Barthes:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a
single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a
variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centers of culture....Succeeding the Author,
the scriptor no longer bears within him passions,
humors, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense
dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know
no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and
the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is
lost, infinitely deferred.
(Barthes 1977, 146–147)
Not only did the captioned photograph incorpo-
rate verbal texts into visual art more than ever
before, but captioning so linked the visual with the
verbal that the visual was turned into a text. In
‘‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,’’
Krauss characterized the photograph as an
‘‘index,’’ an imprint of something tangible in the
physical world. According to her, indexes are
‘‘marks or traces [of that] to which they refer, the
object they signify. Into the category of the index,
we would place physical traces (like footprints),
medical symptoms....’’ Photography would belong
to that same category of motivated signs.
Among the artists who investigated the textual
dimension of photography, Victor Burgin is maybe
the most representative. Burgin’s work is a constant
questioning of the photographic medium as a sign-
producing device capable to influence social beha-
vior. Photography is for Burgin an apparatus of
power, an ideologically motivated representation
that has to be deconstructed, as can be seen in
Office at Night, 1985–1986. Burgin’s work is
informed by psychoanalytical theory, using it to
investigate the mechanisms of visual representation
as well as the return of the repressed in the cultural
sphere. But for Burgin photography is, above all, a
process of production. ‘‘Such a process, through the
technical manipulation of materials, mediates rea-
lity and constitutes an ideological intervention in
the world. This awareness corrects the ingenuousHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE 1980S