Thoughts on Contemporary Photography: Photography's Expanded Field

Photography's Expanded Field by George Baker heavily references Rosalind Krauss' Sculpture in the Expanded Field, and essay that speaks of the changing world of sculpture. All mediums have gone through their changes in time but photography's seems to be rather dramatic and of course is also happening now. Baker says on the first page that "everywhere one looks the photographic object seems to be in crisis or at least in severe transformation.

Baker more or less states that the last time photography was the way it originally and historically started out was in the postmodern era. Within the last ten years photography has turned to digital reconstruction. It is now impossible for new photographers to make work that doesn't somehow involve itself in this conversation. Baker also references how some photographers like Wall and Gursky also make work that deals with the concerns of other mediums like historical art paintings.

Baker suggests that now more than ever photography's field is expanding towards the cinematic. Baker brings up many points to back this. Some are far stretched like diCorcia using strobes in his street photography.

Baker starts the essay off with the work of Nancy Davenport, Weekend Campus mad in 2004. He describes this work as "static moving image". He also says that it is "hesitating between motion and stasis."

When viewed continuously the panoramic images taken by Davenport do start to posses a feeling of motion. Baker mentions the film Weekend by Jean Luc Godard done in 1967 and I agree that these images have a very similar aesthetic to the car wreck scene in that film. (Below).

Baker talks about Abigail Solomon-Godeau's description of postmodern photography and how it is expanding rather than reducing. Baker also comments on how unlike sculpture, photography must have multiple fields. He also comments on how this has never been mapped anywhere. (this is basically what he does with this essay and his maps that I will later include.) This map is started between to opposing extremes, narrative and stasis.
Baker talks about how photography inherently freezes it's subjects in time, thus being stasis, but yet many photographs can also tell a story while being frozen, thus being narrative. He also comments how this duality makes for its importance in society. Baker uses August Sander as an example of this opposing combination.

Baker loses me a bit when he describes modernist photography as being neither narrative or stasis at the same time. What I have collected is that this means that the modern image breaks free of term and and of a certain expansion. Baker proposes that modernist expansion looks like this:

Baker goes on to fit artist into these categories, or rather who frontiered these categories. Baker says that Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills fit into not-stasis.

He contrasts this with James Coleman's long projected stills from an actual film or his slide projections with voice overs. He calls Coleman's work not-narrative. Baker then says that Jeff Wall's work bridges a gap between the two previous artists.

If you take out the artists names and instead just trace the movements and expansions the structural field looks more like this:

Of course the previous artist and these expansions inspire and effect photographers to come then expanding the field of photography even further. Baker says that in the 1990's artist began to push photography into what he calls "counter-presence" or in other words they push the still photograph into a world of social layers and unfinished pieces. He uses Sharon Lockhart's cinematic images and static films as an example of this. (Below are examples of Lockhart's work).

Baker says that the work of Lockhart combines narrative and not-narrative, thus changing the expanded film of photography since her work does not belong to one category.
Basically photography's new expanding field can take many turns and changes. Towards the end of his essay Baker says that "photography is no longer the term between two things that it isn't, it is rather only one term out on the boundary of a field where there are differently structured possibilities." This goes back to that same statement that we've been seeing, photography is no dead it is changing more than ever.
The only problem is that we must resist the urge (according to Baker) to "recenter" contemporary photography in the older expanded field map. Baker also says something along the liens of "if the photographic object is in crisis than we are entering a period when the terms invloved with it are too complex and the effects of them are less obvious." Could this be what we are looking at now? Photography has become hard to define because everyone has access to it now through digital devices and what not. These digital devices even change the language of photography. So is it that digital photography has not killed photography as we knew it but it has created a need for photography's expanded field to expand further into a new map? The old terms of photography do not always fit today photography because photography has radically changed even since Baker wrote this essay. Photography must expand, rather than deconstruct.
Here are some people that are making new "expanded" images if you will:

Of course images like Kelli Connell's digitally manipulated scenes would not be possible in a pervious field map of photography.

Same with Matt Siber's digitally manipulated images.

Then there are photographers who are changing contemporary photography's expanded field in the both the ways they shoot and edit. These following images look nothing like photography from past decades: