by Jon Lackman | 26 February 2007 | Journals, Photography, Theory
In language that recalls the recent CAA panel devoted to the definition of architecture, the Spring 2007 issue of History of Photography devoted to “hybridity” argues in its introduction that “our postmodern age has transformed hybridity (both the process and the result) into one of its master codes, and perhaps even into one of its grand narratives. It is as if all signs have come to aspire to the status of mixed media, as in the nineteenth-century symbolist aesthetics … [T]he very success and quasi-universal dissemination of the syntagm ‘photography and/as hybridization’ — or one of its dozens of variations — avoids raising questions on a much more fundamental issue: what is photography? Although such a question is not very fashionable today, since it raises the spectre of essentialism and might suggest a return to the categoric distinctions of high-art modernism, we believe it is the central question that needs to be addressed today. The essays gathered in this special issue deal, therefore, with our ideas, beliefs, expectations, prejudices and surprises concerning what photography ‘is,’ ‘can be’ or, most importantly, ‘can do’ (and not just what it ‘means’ or how we ‘construct’ or ‘invent’ it, to quote just some of the well-known stereotypes of the day).”
