ROSALIND KRAUSS
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territory within the world of visual signs or icons. In the essay
"The Ontology of the Photographic Image," the film theo–
retician, Andre Bazin describes the indexical condition of the
photograph:
Painting is after all an inferior way of making likene es, an ersatz of
the processes of reproduction . Only a photographic lens can give us
the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep
need man has to substitute {or it something more than a mirror
approximation .... The photographic image is the object itself, the
object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No
matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in
documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very
process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the
reproduction; it
is
the model.
But what is important to understand about photography is that
it is the model deracinated, torn from the context of internally
generated meaning that has traditionally functioned within the
visual arts to supply what we might think of as a stable system of
symbolization. The photograph's status as a shifter is manifested
by its need for captions, for a process of naming that works
outside the image, just as there is a continual need to supply the
name or referent to the invocation of the words "you" and "I".
I am drawing a parallel between the shifter's or index's need
for a physical referent as a supplier of meaning and the relation–
ship of caption to photograph as a similar source of meaning.
"Image plus caption" is the important form photography has
taken as it spreads through mass culture: in the newspapers, in
the slick magazines, in television. It is also the form it takes in
Airtime,
for video art is obviously completely dependent upon
the photographic image joined to a spoken text. In the case of
A irtime,
the text, through its routines of narcissism and its
explicit linguistic dysfunction, makes very clear that art under–
stood as a species of index produces a form of selfhood that is
experienced only through the reiteration of physical presence.
A irtime
is not an isolated instance, nor is video a special
phenomenon. Photography is found everywhere in the field of
contemporary art.
It
is not only the most recent form of specula–
tive, collecting activity, but also the force that seems to have
haped the sensibilities of an entire generation of younger
