This paper deals with photography’s wider integration in art, and its role in current Western-art institutional frameworks and their wider cultural/geographical inclusiveness. Arguably, photography’s presence in art, in the past fifty or more years, was defined by the work of artists that used photography to challenge art institutions and address issues of identity, and also by the increased discursive interest in the social functions of art. Three recent developments illustrate photography’s eventual de-marginalisation in art: a) the aggressive collection of photography (...) by art museums; b) the appointment of photography curators, e.g. at Tate Modern in 2011; c) and the eventual inclusion of photography exhibitions in art museums such as the National Gallery in London in 2013. This refers to photography meant to be art, but also reportage, advertising. Photography’s integration, which is residually linked to its development as a marginalised medium dealing with marginalised subjectivities, is perceived as institutional liberalism. However, this integration is also seen to neutralise photography’s inherent tensions and referential relationship to the world. This is because the presence of the work in an art-gallery highlights the work’s materiality and obscures cultural difference. Art as a discourse for the analysis of all photography coincides with the parallel decline of the authority of semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis and post-Marxist critique in photography theory. Through examples of photographs and recent exhibitions, this paper intends to explore the effects and possible wider reasons behind current discursive trends. These trends seem to illustrate a tension between embodied subjectivities, globalising and de-centring forces in late/advanced capitalism. (shrink)

This exposition deals with narcissism, narrativity, self-portraiture and photography. It illustrates a practice-based research project instigated in 2007 that aims to decode and recover narcissism as a useful sense-making scenario or system. This approach can help make sense of photography and self-portraiture in the present, and be employed in the development of visual strategies in photographic self-portraiture. Here I present the practical work that was produced and the theory that influenced my practice: namely, the revaluation of the relationship between self-portraiture (...) and narcissism, and ideas from the semiotics of photography and narrative theory. The three main sections of the exposition illustrate the chronological development of my work, and each section is divided into two parts. The first part of each section, which illustrates the theoretical aspect of this project, stems from a wish to reflect on my own art practice and increase my understanding of self-portraiture, while also interrogating narrative codes and devices in photography, such as the double, mise en abyme, and mirroring structures, and their association to narcissism. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, semiotics and narratology, I argue that narcissism in self-portraiture can simultaneously represent an imaginary withdrawal of the artist, a structure within the work, and a vehicle for narrativity. By eluding structured language systems, narcissism provides a vocabulary for narrativizing procedures, as well as meeting the artist’s/viewer’s modes of engagement. These ideas informed the practical component of the research project and provided the basis for a number of visual strategies employed in the development of the photographic self-portraits that are presented in the second part of each section. In this second part of each section, I also explain the different strategies adopted in producing my images; the role of codes, narrative devices, layering, and reframing for understanding the density of an image and its inherent narcissism. In the process I propose that narcissism should receive a much more central role in the consideration of images and the way they communicate with a contemporary audience. (shrink)