Photography and Abstraction
GEORGE BAKER

This essay revisits the photography and abstraction debates in order to shift their terms away from aesthetics toward the social understanding of abstraction as a process of modernization. Photography has always participated in such abstraction, whether its internal image-language is representational or abstract, documentary or pictorialist. Speculating upon the parallels between the historical development of photography and present capitalist forms, the essay details the earlier hopes that I placed in photographic abstraction as a response to the monetary abstraction of our current epoch of finance capital. Given the recent financial crisis, however, the crucial questions seem to have shifted: the essay will attempt to sketch the aesthetic strategies of such abstraction’s inverse and potential opposite, namely “photographic atavism.” Is there such a thing as an “aesthetic of the crash” for photography? What would it look like? How can photography perform within current regimes of abstraction and their collapse to contest or figure critically these same regimes?