ment archives of the publisher of the famous picture
magazine, he had access to literally thousands of
images. In 1977, he began re-photographing photo-
graphs from advertisements. By separating images
from their media context—that is, from their in-
tended significations—Prince enabled them to take
on other meanings. Saturated blow-ups of everyday
commercial imagery, his Ektacolor prints explored
photography’s capacity to transform reality into fic-
tion and fiction into reality. Prince became particu-
larly associated with fragmented representations of
the Marlboro Man, as inUntitled (Cowboy)of 1989.
Enlarged and cropped, these images became free-
floating signifiers of the mythology of American
masculinity, subtly displacing the visual and imagin-
ary relationship between the viewer and the artwork.
Another important artist of this tendency is
Cindy Sherman, who emerged in the 1980s not
only as an acclaimed photographer but as one of
the decade’s top contemporary artists. Sherman’s
Untitled Film Stills(started in the late 1970s and
continued during the 1980s) are a set of black-and-
white photographs in which the artist has costumed
herself to suggest the female types available in the
Hollywood movies of her childhood. Associating
femininity with masquerade, she addresses directly
the way mass media inscribe women into stereoty-
pical models of representation, distributing roles
and creating characters. Thus, Sherman establishes
a sort of dictionary of photographic poses, through
which the veracity of the staged image, as well as
the codes required for its reading, are seriously
called into question.
While Sherman works exclusively within the
photographic medium, she is not considered a photo-
grapher in the sense of traditional photographic prac-
tice. Within the realm of ‘‘pure photography,’’ as
exemplified by figures like Helmut Newton and
Henri Cartier-Bresson who inherited the tradition
of the straight photography of the 1920s and 1930s,
the theoretical debates also raged. Pure photography
focused on what made photography different from
any of the other arts—its ‘‘truth’’ to appearances and
its peculiar physical and formal qualities. The most
eminent spokesman for this formalist conception of
photography was John Szarkowski, the director of
photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, who more than any other individual in Amer-
ica had established photography as a high art, defin-
ing its terms of discourse and creating its canon, until
being challenged byOctobermagazine and its decon-
structionist aesthetics in the 1980s. As Irving Sandler
writes, Szarkowski had been to photography what
formalist champion Clement Greenberg had been to
painting. Szarkowski’s thesis was that photography
is a unique medium, which, as it evolved, progressed
self-consciously toward its own essence. This essence
was theorized in terms of inherent properties such as
time, the frame, detail, and the vantage point. In
seeking to identify photography’s ‘‘values, traditions,
masters and masterworks,’’ as Solomon-Godeau put
it, Szarkowski felt that photography was ‘‘purified of
its worldly entanglements, distilled into a discrete
ensemble of ‘photographic pictures,’’’ in short, trea-
ted with reference to itself only. Reflecting on his
contribution, Szarkowski commented: ‘‘I think I
took the risk of allowing photography to be itself
and show itself without being couched in the rubric
of philosophical or moral positions.’’ (Sandler 1996,
348) Szarkowski’s formalism was challenged again
and again through the forum ofOctoberparticularly
as it prompted him to dismiss the directions photo-
graphy took in the 1980s.
October’scontributors were not the only ones who
called into question this purist, documentary concep-
tion of photography. Many photographers rejected
this stance as well as Vile ́m Flusser’s assertion that
photography is the last step before the complete
dematerialization of the image. These artists, often
called impure photographers, focused on the parti-
cular materiality and tactility of photographic emul-
sions. In contrast to pure photographers, these artists
minimized photography’s traditional or ‘‘straight’’
role as a veristic window on the world. They loo-
sened up and expanded technique, cultivating the
grain in their images, utilizing blurred focus, crop-
ping, wide-angle distortions, and exploring color.
Some of these photographers also began, harking
back to the aesthetics of the Pictorialists, to manip-
ulate the surface, emulating the idiosyncratic
‘‘touch’’ of the painter and to enlarge the formats,
so that their photographs could compete with wall-
size canvases.
Artists like Joel-Peter Witkin and Giordano
Bonora (Untitled, 1986) especially exemplify the
furthering of the Pictorialist tradition of creating a
unique, painting-like works with subject matter that
evokes spectral or allegorical associations. Witkin,
like Mike and Doug Starn, Paolo Gioli, and Italian
artist Natale Zoppis, among others, used brushwork,
stacked multiple images, and manually colored their
prints, enhancing photography’s visual presence.
An important part of postmodern art theory saw
in photography a significant shift from production
to reproduction, the seminal article of Walter Ben-
jamin ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,’’ the often-cited support for this
viewpoint. In this view, inherent in the nature of a
photograph, the modernist boundaries between
‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ cultural forms are breached orHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE 1980S