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, inside its frame).3 these visions have moved. 1 "this is-writin /[a ieee of writin ] written on the , ",. I . "Parergon," The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Benningt & 1. McLeod (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) n14, 73. 2 On the 'medium' of photography, note John Tagg incisive remark: "There turns out to be no meaning to photography as such. The meaning and value of photographies cannot be adjudicated outside specific language games, whose playing-fields piece out a topography we must trace." "Totalled Machines," Grounds of Dispute, (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992), 129. 3 "Work in semiotics showed that there is no 'language' of photography ... there is, rather, a heterogeneous complex of codes upon which photography may draw. Each photograph signifies on the basis of a plurality of these codes, the number and type of which varies from one image to another." Victor Burgin, "Looking at Photographs ," Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin, (London : Macmillan, 1986) 143. 4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981) 115. 5 See Tagg's reading of Camera Lucida in "The Pencil of History," Fugitive Images, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: iana UP, 1995) 285-303. On 'reality' existing only rough representation, see also Geoff Bennington's remarks on the generalized (Derridean) text: 'Text is not a mediation between language and world, but the milieu in which any such distinction might be drawn." Axiom 2.4, "Deconstruction is not what you think," Deconstruction: The Omnibus Volume, ed. Andreas '" Papadakis et al, (New York: Rizzoli, 1989) 84. i 6 Burgin, 147. Underlying retina image from Helmholtz's TI-eatise on Physiological Optics, ed. J.Pc. Southall, (New York: Dover, 1962) 254. Oddly, Helmholtz oriented the retina to centre the (light) blind spot, rat ~ he dark area of the macula - the region of most c e VIsual reception. 7 Burgin; Mercer,"Skin Head Sex Thing," New Formations 16 (1992) 1-23; DiannaFuss,"Fashion and the Homo-spectatorial Look." Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 713-37. 8 W. Ellerton Fry, 1892, Historical Manuscripts, Zimbabwe National Archives, Harare; R. N. Hall, Great Zimbabwe , (London: Methuen, 1905). See P. Garlake, Great Zimbabwe (New York: Stein&Day, 1973); H. Kuklick, "Contested Monuments," Colonial Situations, ed. G. W. a) decoding (the social gestures, graphic designs, photographic characteristics, ... ); b) being inscribed as a viewing subject (identifying with the look of the camera, or with the positioning of its subject, or neither, ... )/ all staged within some institutional formation (family album, national archive, commercial gallery space, ... ). c) So, finally, a tripartite reading structure can be constructed to displace the 'photographic language': sti a ions have insisted, by contrast, that ed 0 a photographic image must be taken to a~~-rni'i"1'~es . its (discursive) framing. 'Self-evident ' meanings in any photograph will eventually recede into the negotiated space of viewing, usurped by others discerned through the same dot-codes, on the same stage. This is not to assert that the photograph is simply meaningless , nor to give way to a sense of 'all meanings being equal.' It is, however, to insist on the contingent stabilizing of dominant interpretations; insisting that the photograph relies on external prosthetics for its multi-coded stains to be internalized as art, evidence, documentary, ... These 'theoretical' accuraci ro nerringly discomfiting for much contemporary I otogr ic 'practice.' And the following corollary only a s disorientation: -the powers and dis/pleasures of how it feels to (be) look(ed at) are integral to an account of the subject of vision. A necessary accounting is required, then, of what it means to be enmeshed in "a mad image, chafed by reality " - the fraught and telling phrase posed by Roland Barthes as his final alibi for the photograph.4 (A phrase that holds no redemptive comfort for the artistic Self, the concerned Documentor, the meta-Theorist, or the empiricist Historian - especially when shorn from the sense 'prior' reality awaiting representation.)s Taken in. To see and to be held - at the early instan when an event begins to emerge from dappled paper shadows , imaged. It is at this moment that the photograph "now shows a 'thing' which we invest with a full identity, a being. With most photographs we see, this decoding...

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