An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures

摘要

1.The art of photography has been persistently haunted by the image of human labor. My aim here is to demonstrate that this is so in more than one sense, and that these senses are inextricably connected one to the other. This haunting is more than a nightmarish parade of ghostly signifieds, but takes hold at the level of the ontology of the photographic sign itself. First problem: photography of work. Second and more fundamental (immanent) problem: photography as work. Third problem: the confusion of the two (the imbrication of immanence and reference). In short, the very being of photography turns on a vexing puzzle of labor and value.