15.2: Defining Post-Modernism in Photography

Defining Postmodernism in Photography

Postmodernism in photography is best understood not as a single look or neatly unified style, but as an attitude—a way of approaching images with skepticism, wit, and critical distance.¹ Rather than asking photography to be pure, autonomous, or faithful to some essential medium-specific identity, postmodernism asks what photographs borrow, repeat, conceal, perform, and circulate. In that sense, postmodern photography is less about a consistent visual formula than about a cluster of strategies: quotation, appropriation, staging, fragmentation, pastiche, irony, and critique.² What links these practices is not appearance alone, but a shared suspicion toward the old certainty that photographs transparently deliver truth.³

One of postmodernism’s key breaks was its rejection of modernist formal purity and medium specificity. Modernist criticism, especially in the mid-twentieth century, often valued works that appeared to concentrate on the unique properties of a medium—what painting could do as painting, what photography could do as photography. Postmodern artists and critics pushed against that logic.⁴ They treated photography as something porous and impure: a medium already entangled with text, performance, film, advertising, fashion, television, archives, and the museum.⁵ This meant that photographs were no longer asked to stand alone as self-contained aesthetic objects. Instead, they could function as cultural signs inside larger systems of representation. That shift helps explain why so much postmodern photography feels hybrid by design.⁶

As a result, postmodern photography openly embraced contradiction. It could be theatrical and analytical, seductive and critical, funny and unsettling at the same time. It quoted earlier images while questioning originality. It borrowed from commercial culture while exposing how commercial culture manufactures desire. It could appear cool and detached while addressing deeply charged issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and power.² ⁷ This embrace of hybridity and irony was not just a matter of style; it reflected a broader understanding that meaning is unstable and that images never arrive innocent. A postmodern photograph often behaves like a sentence already filled with other people’s words.¹ ³

This way of thinking was deeply shaped by post-structuralist theory. Roland Barthes challenged the idea that meaning is anchored securely in authorial intention, arguing instead that meaning is produced through a network of signs and through the activity of reading.⁸ Michel Foucault complicated the very idea of the author, treating authorship not as a natural source of meaning but as a cultural function—a way institutions organize discourse and authority.⁹ Jean Baudrillard, writing about simulation and the collapse of stable reference, pushed the problem even further: in a media-saturated culture, images may no longer point securely back to a real original at all.¹⁰ For photography, these ideas were explosive. They offered artists and critics a vocabulary for understanding the photograph not as a guaranteed truth-object, but as a coded, circulating sign.

That theoretical shift helped destabilize one of photography’s oldest claims: indexical truth. Traditionally, the photograph had been valued because of its physical relationship to the world. Light touched a surface; something had been there. Rosalind Krauss famously described photography’s signifying power in terms of the index, emphasizing its material connection to a referent.¹¹ Postmodernism did not simply erase that connection, but it did insist that indexicality alone does not secure meaning. A photograph may be indexical and still be staged, cropped, captioned, circulated, manipulated, or ideologically framed in ways that radically alter what it seems to say.¹¹ ¹² In other words, the problem was no longer just whether the photograph had a referent, but how that referent became meaningful within culture.

It is also important to remember that postmodernism in photography was never confined to one national script. The language of appropriation, irony, citation, and constructedness traveled widely, but it did not mean the same thing everywhere. Similar strategies could emerge in very different local histories and under very different pressures: dictatorship and memory work in Latin America, postcolonial identity in Africa and South Asia, state socialism and its aftermath in Eastern Europe, consumer spectacle in the United States, or media critique in Western Europe.¹³ So when we describe postmodernism as a photographic “language,” we should not imagine a single accent. The grammar may travel, but the stakes remain local. That is one of the most important things to keep in view as this chapter unfolds.¹³

Footnotes

¹ Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also Peter Gratton, “Jean-François Lyotard,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

² Douglas Eklund, “The Pictures Generation,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2004, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

³ Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); see also PDF excerpt, Photosoup/WordPress file.

⁴ Rex Butler, “Rosalind Krauss: between modernism and post-medium,” Journal of Art Historiography 23 (2020), University of Birmingham ePapers.

⁵ Quentin Bajac, Photography at MoMA (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), preview at MoMA.

⁶ Diarmuid Costello, “Pictures, Again,” conference paper discussing the shift from medium-specific modernism toward the non-medium-specific “picture,” University of Warwick.

⁷ Bill Roberts, “Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism,” Tate Papers 18 (Autumn 2012), Tate.

⁸ Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” trans. Richard Howard, PDF hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, UPenn Writing. For Barthes’s broader thinking on photographic meaning, see Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, excerpted in Cornell University course materials.

⁹ Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” lecture text, PDF hosted by The Open University, Open University. See also University of Pennsylvania PDF, UPenn.

¹⁰ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, PDF available via Internet Archive. See also Simulations, Internet Archive.

¹¹ Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81, PDF scan, JSTOR/MIT Press copy via course archive.

¹² John Tagg, quoted in a thesis discussing photographic theory and institutional framing: “Photography as such has no identity…,” The Art-Union and Photography, 1839–1854, University of North Texas digital library, UNT Digital Library.

¹³ Luis Camnitzer, “Global Conceptualism: Reflections,” post: notes on modern & contemporary art around the globe, MoMA, 2015, MoMA Post. See also Quentin Bajac, Photography at MoMA, on the expansion of international contemporary photography within museum discourse, MoMA.

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