On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 09:36 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>
> I at least feel no need to read his personal life into such a
> beautiful, & as stated, abstract, image....
Doug, I would have to agree. It is not possible to give a photograph a
semiotic reading which the writer attempts because of the lack of index
and the same goes for poetry, which is another thing art photography and
poetry share. What happens instead in this article is an indexing of
homosociality as an exchange of women to follow Sedgwick here. Similar
problems arise with attempts to give a semiotic reading of a poem, since
attempts at indexing will find themselves outside the poem.
Since the writer is an artist writing about another artist he admires I
can be a little more generous and can see how he is trying to find a way
of understanding White's metaphysical aesthetics which sees the body of
the photographer as part of an interface between subject and photograph
where the 8 zones of grey between black and white IS contact with the
subject as it is with the photographer's body. White also sees this body
as a metaphysical anti-ego produced in contact with zones of grey which
also create affects and emotions. I like this idea of White's since it
can be applied to poetry as variation without a categorical difference
and clearly breaks with poetics and aesthetics inherited from Aristotle
and Kant's line.
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