scene Stella’s paintings investigate. Evans pro-
ducedhisphototobeanillustrationforhisfriend
Hart Crane’s poemThe Bridge(1930). In Stella’s,
Evans’s, and Crane’s wake, Georgia O’Keeffe’s
modernist painting Brooklyn Bridge (1948) also
offers a stylized rendition of the walkway perspective.
Evans helped to make the Brooklyn Bridge a must-
see artwork. Amateur photographers often seek out
the walkway scene inspired by Evans’s photograph,
by O’Keeffe’s painting, or by popular images based
on such modernist works. Countless visitors have
meandered the walkway, snapped photos capturing
a shot similar to Evans’s, and framed their Brooklyn
Bridge photographs for display in homes and offices
worldwide. The frisson of ‘‘art’’ these framed snap-
shots provide amateur photographers stems from yet
deconstructs the modernist aura Evans, Stella,
Crane, and O’Keeffe gave the Brooklyn Bridge.
However inadvertently, tourist photography quotes
the Evans’s photo, displacing it from the context of
modernism to various contexts that open the walk-
way scene to divergent interpretations. In the process,
the opposition between elite and popular culture
deconstructs, raising questions concerning the socio-
political values embedded in the distinction between
‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ art. Postmodernism embraces the
playful iteration of modernist works for democra-
tized enjoyment.
Postmodern photographers investigate the mod-
ernist legacy in experimenting with and questioning
representation. The postmodernism of Brooklyn
Bridge, November 28 1982embraces amateur pho-
tography’s deconstructive effects on Evans’s photo.
Hockney quotes the Brooklyn Bridge’s modernist
photographic representation in the idiom of casual
tourist photography to produce an artistically
ambitious work available to a popular audience.
Standing on the walkway approximately where
Evans stood, Hockney took dozens of photos: of
the cables, of the tower, of the walkway, and of his
own feet on the walkway. After having these
‘‘snaps’’ developed at a one-hour processing shop
such as amateur photographers use, Hockney then
assembled the photos into a collage. This ‘‘joiner,’’
as Hockney calls his photo collages, evokes time
and space, argues Hockney, in ways a single photo
cannot but that a painting can.Brooklyn Bridge,
November 28 1982playfully deploys the amateur
iteration of Evans’s modernist gesture while enact-
ing Pictorialism’s postmodern return.
Postmodernism and deconstruction do overlap
in questioning representation. This questioning
can have serious ethical and political implications.
Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger are two
photographers who make the postmodern inquiry
into representation sharply political. Sherman and
Kruger mimic and satirize the representational
conventions of painting, film, advertising, porno-
graphy, and fashion photography to interrogate
issues of gender, power, and exploitation. But one
would be mistaken to think that Sherman and
Kruger are merely suggesting that justice demands
more benign representations of women. These
photographers implicitly raise a more difficult
issue: How is one to evaluate the category ‘‘repre-
sentation’’ itself?Derrida: Representation’s Deconstruction
Is representation a value-neutral category? For
Derrida, ‘‘representation’’ bears questionable phi-
losophical assumptions that inform troublesome
institutional practices. Rather than calling photo-
graphs representations, one should welcome repre-
sentation’s deconstruction.
The definition of representation as the recovery
of presence emerges from ‘‘Western’’ philosophical
tradition’s dominant self-understanding. This tra-
dition would found itself on a presence. Philosophy
has claimed, among other entities, the good, spirit,
and the human as foundational presences. (Notice
that these presences assume their opposites: evil,
matter, and the animal.) Philosophical texts want
to recover a foundational presence for readers.
When these texts ask, ‘‘See what I mean?,’’ they
are claiming to have represented a presence. Philo-
sophy defines the text as a sign representing a pre-
sence that controls the sign’s meaning. Paul, for
example, knows Christ as the presence that con-
trols what Paul’s Letter to the Romans means.
For philosophy, one finally leaves signs behind
in retrieving a presence that one sees, intuits, or
knows. Knowledge arrives the moment reading
ends. This is the ‘‘See what I mean?’’ moment. In
this moment, signs recover a presence uncontami-
nated by signs. Signs, argues philosophy, are
detours on the way to the full presence (say, of
spirit) that is knowledge’s origin and goal.
Philosophy grasps foundational presences as
answers to the question: What is being? Philoso-
phy’s various answers to this question tend to con-
flate being with presence, yielding what Derrida
calls the ‘‘metaphysics of presence.’’ This metaphy-
sics inheres in philosophy’s understanding of lan-
guage as representation. But Derrida finds that
philosophical texts question this representational
assumption in dismantling philosophy’s binary
oppositions. A metaphysic’s coherence depends
on an opposition that favors one term at the other’s
expense. To function as a founding presence, spiritDECONSTRUCTION