The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography

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Building Images, Building Spaces

Madeline Yale Preston

Over the last half century, photography has undergone a fundamental reassessment of meaning. Critical frameworks that evolved out of modernism and postmodernism have been re-configured or, in some cases, become outmoded.There now exists a large subset of photographic discourse that problematizes photography’s previous claims to originality and its status as an evidentiary medium. Expansions and revisions have been made to the idea of the “dematerialization of the photographic object”, as first introduced in conceptual art criticism. The once omni-popular fixation on Roland Barthes’ semiotics and metacodes about narrative content (particularly prominent in the 1980s) ¹ has, in some circles, ...