Realism does not consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are. Bertolt Brecht
My work explores the epistemological1 presumptions we make about ‘documentation’2 — that it is objective, and that it is unmediated by an ideology, a worldview — and the metaphysical3 underpinnings of that ‘documentation’. This is effected by exposing the act of documentation and by deconstructing4 its presentation.
For the uninitiated the Introduction is worth the price of the book. People that I’ve recommended it to say they’ve never look at photos the same way again. My favorite of the essays is A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law which, as a sidenote, it contains probably the best explication of Foucault’s ideas I’ve read.
A less jargony, yet not dumbed down, presentation of the explorations and meanings of photography over the past few decades.