"This lack of certainty with regard to what constitutes Photography as an object of inquiry can be seen for all its abstractness as a mirror of the problem of theorizing the photograph, the clash between the apparent concreteness of the photographic referent and its slippery contextual play. Yet the term persists past its supposed theoretical and practical disintegration, and with it a forlorn pastiche of critical theorizations and aesthetic conventions that repeatedly confront a metaphor for their own self-imposed failure in the photographic image. In melancholic retrospection, the photographic object itself represents the loss of a unity, dispersed within an equally fragmented field that for the art historian requires it to be resituated, re-pictured..."
—from the appropriately named essay Abstracting Photography by Walead Bashty, currently the lead article at Words Without Pictures
That mumbo-jumbo gives me both a headache and the taste of vomit in my mouth.
ReplyDeleteTerrible, terrible writing. Are you sure it's not a spoof?
ReplyDeleteI'm with George Orwell on this one: "let the meaning choose the word, not the other way round". Writing as unreadably bad as this is evidence of muddled thought, deliberate pretentiousness or (most charitably) an inability to communicate.
I taste the vomit as well. I say we have a light leak meeting where we only converse in highly contrived art speak.
ReplyDeleteI hope it is a joke...
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like a review from The Onion. Or at least I hope it is...
ReplyDelete