POSMODERNISMO

Though i could probably go on for ages about post-modernism, and Id probably

never get to a good definition, Ill try to focus on post-modernism in photography.
Photography was the ideal art form for the post-modern era of art. It easily replaced
painting when modern European art began to fizzle out in the 1960s. Photography
was able to capture reproductions of reproductions, things that already existed, and
created images of a reality that never really existed, even though it was
supposed to be a truthful art form.
In this era photographers no longer focused on realism, this was impossible. All
of photography had already been done so photography really wasnt even the
correct term. Re-photography was more appropriate. Photographers of the era
believed that the context in which an object was shot changed its meaning
and interpretation so the goal was to explore these options under different
circumstances. Many post-modern photographs were poorly composed or
gimmicky, and some people would argue that they had no real substance. Others
would say that they dealt with theoretical intellectual issues, versus the more
physical worldly issues we had previously seen.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind mass merchandising,
advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of
science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and
intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any
free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We
live inside an enormous novel.


"The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things"

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its
scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the
metaphysical, life is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited
to think small rather than big ironically, at just the point when some of those out to
destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between
Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it.
The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the
historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes,
postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have
faith.
Terry Eagleton [The Meaning of Life]


This is the very essence of the Virtual.

Live your life in real time live and suffer directly on-screen. Think in real time
your thought is immediately encoded by the computer. Make your revolution in real
time not in the street, but in the recording studio. Live out your amorous passions in
real time the whole thing on video from start to finish. Penetrate your body in real
time endovideoscopy: your own bloodstream, your own viscera as if you were inside
them.

Nothing escapes this. There is always a hidden camera somewhere. You can be
filmed without knowing it. You can be called to act it all out again for any of the TV
channels. You think you exist in the original-language version, without realizing that
this is now merely a special case of dubbing, an exceptional version for the `happy few.
Any of your acts can be instantly broadcast on any station. There was a time when we
would have considered this a form of police surveillance. Today, we regard it as
advertising.
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, pg 27


Postmodernism is characterized by self-conscious and deliberate intertextuality. One of the
best-known photographers who played with simulacra is Cindy Sherman. Sherman should be
termed a performance artist who restages images from mass media. Concentrating on how
women were represented by movies, she had herself photographed in a series of small black
and white photographs called Film Stills during the late 1970s. None of these theatrical re-
presentations can be traced back to any actual movie but all remind the viewer of movies they
have seen or have heard of and evoke the construction of women in the 1940s and 1950s.
Sherman is what can be called a post-feminist, or an artist who takes up feminist concerns,
not from a political and activist perspective but from a theoretical stance. Because society
manipulates the social being who is proved to be infinitely malleable, Postmodernism no
longer believes in the Modernist possibility of evolution towards a goal. There is only arbitrary
change, determined by the dominant class for its own purposes.

Everybody tries desperately to build a strong identity. What Im learning is that
identity is a big trap we build for ourselves. Its the biggest label we put upon.
When you give up your identity, you feel lost at first. But if you stay strong, you realize
that without that you can be who you want to be, who youre meant to be, who you
really areand not who you should be according to your identity. You are finally free
from your own chains. You are infinite.