Taxonomy, Typology or Topology: Using Constraints to Model Specificity
Riffing theoretical framework
Open with Krauss’s principles of the post-medium condition.
Move to how Graw uses post-medium theory to assert the medium specificity of paint.
Next, briefly outline how Graw draws on the work of photographers such as Tillmans to provide context to her position that painting is the only form of visual art with the capacity to evoke the author’s “quasi-presence” through procedural interaction between process and product.
Transition into how I agree with Graw in most cases, providing examples of modernist and contemporary photography. Equipment includes commercially available cameras, lenses, enlargers, and black and white photographic materials such as film, gelatin silver paper, and photo chemicals.
Next, introduce a polemic that highlights critical flaws in Graw’s theory of painting specificity and is limited to mimicking the material agency and authorship of painting. Provide examples of my own work.
Briefly discuss how Greenberg’s model of specificity (per his essay, Modernist Painting) provides a theoretical foundation for my constraints-based model of novelty. This links to phenomenology through Husserl’s epoché (bracketing, suspension) and, paradoxically, Merleau-Ponty’s principles that body, mind, and world are inextricably interconnected. He asserts that self-consciousness and consciousness of ‘being’ in the world can only manifest through this intertwining, as without one, there is no ‘other’.
Research develops a topology classification to map and delineate existing taxonomical parts of analogue photography. This aims to redefine and reclaim the specificity of the medium.
Conventional lens-based image capture.
Embrace, harness and exploit constraints of the medium.
Debase the aesthetic heritage of the image through experimental darkroom techniques.
Vertical developing (why).
Omitting and reversing chemical processing steps in the darkroom during development (why).
Harnessing ambient light (fogging).
Hand-tearing paper prior to exposure to disrupt gelatin silver structures of the paper surface (why).
Pure photography (not hybrid):
Graw and Greenberg as baseline.
Remember to take it back to Krauss.
Include Uta Barth (“photography has always been a hybrid artform”)
Cite Cambridge or Oxford English dictionaries to define the following terms:
Taxonomy
Typeology
Topology
Classification