15.4.7: From Constructed Scenes to Constructed Selves

Taken together, these artists make clear that the staged image is not simply a stylistic turn in photography—it is a conceptual shift. The photograph is no longer treated as a passive record of the world, but as something actively built: lit, directed, performed, and composed with intention.¹ What replaces the “decisive moment” is not chaos, but control. The image becomes a site where reality is not just captured, but constructed.

At the same time, this construction does not move photography away from truth so much as it reframes what truth might look like. In the work of artists such as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, the staged image produces a heightened realism—scenes that feel psychologically or socially true even when they are entirely fabricated.² In others, such as Sandy Skoglund or Joan Fontcuberta, staging moves toward the surreal or the fictional, exposing how easily the photograph can persuade even when it departs from plausibility.³ Across these approaches, the photograph becomes less about evidence and more about interpretation.

What begins to emerge is a broader understanding of photography as part of a larger visual ecosystem—one that includes cinema, advertising, installation, and performance.⁴ The staged image makes this connection visible. It shows that photographs are not isolated objects, but participants in systems of image production that shape how reality is imagined, circulated, and consumed. Once that connection is recognized, the boundaries between document and fiction, observation and performance, begin to blur.

This is where the next shift becomes especially important. If the photograph can construct scenes, it can also construct identities. The same strategies used to stage environments—lighting, costume, pose, narrative—can be turned toward the body itself. Identity, like the image, can be performed, repeated, and reimagined. The question is no longer only how reality is staged, but how the self is staged within it.

From here, the discussion moves more directly into the politics of identity, representation, and the body. In the postmodern moment, artists increasingly used photography to explore how race, gender, sexuality, and cultural belonging are not fixed truths, but visual and social constructions shaped by history and power.⁵ If the staged image reveals that the world can be constructed, the next section reveals that the self can be as well.

Footnotes

¹ Douglas Eklund, “Art and Photography: The 1980s,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/art-and-photography-the-1980s

² David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)

³ National Science and Media Museum, “Joan Fontcuberta: Stranger Than Fiction,” https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/what-was-on/joan-fontcuberta-stranger-fiction

⁴ Tate, “Conceptual photography,” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/conceptual-photography

⁵ Amelia Jones, “Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment,” https://faculty.winthrop.edu/stockk/SELF%20PORTRAIT/jones%20photo%20sp.pdf

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