Chapter Two 
Self-Reflexivity, Understanding… 

2.1 …and Photography 

One of the pivotal steps I took in the process of creating girl before a mirror was disengaging from a photographic debate. By the time of my exhibition gem at The Workshop Gallery, The Photographers Gallery (Spring 2000), where I presented inkjet prints of straight scans on canvas as if they were paintings, I felt very far removed from my identity as a 'photographer' and the issues I had considered important about my work for so long. What follows is an attempt to contextualize my background and approach to photography through a brief re-engagement with the above-mentioned debate, which goes something like this… 

Two arenas define photography. The first is the 160 year-old struggle of photography to achieve the status of art. This arena is articulated through the opposition held between empiricist essentialism and the debate over what means 'truth' in art. The second arena is articulated through the interdisciplinary theorizing of photography in attempts to understand what photography is and what its effects are. Don Slater writes: "The experience of photography…has been fundamentally structured by the sense that it is a realist medium…This characteristic links photography inextricably to modern vision, and in particular modern vision as exemplified in science: vision is a vehicle of knowledge and truth…in an empiricist culture. Thus, for example, the debate as to the aesthetic character of photography ('is it art?') conventionally rests on the distinction between scientific and artistic vision."(1)  

Photographs are the product of a mechanical instrument that operates on principles supported by empirical science: light reflecting off a surface passes through a lens onto a light sensitive surface, which is then treated by chemicals to form representational patterns with similar tonal values to that of the originating reflected light. In the final product, the photograph, "what is stressed is a guaranteed causal link with the physical world."(2)  In other words, the documentation of the object in a photograph is taken as proof of its existence and, therefore, true. In fact, "the first photographers were constantly insisting on the truthfulness of the photograph,"(3)  in order to make the process at all acceptable in Western European culture of the time.(4)  Alternately, supporters of photography's merits as art have spent the past century and a half refuting the realism 'inherent in photographs.'  

"In order to make the case for photography as art, the early pictorialists insisted on pictures which…frustrated the documentary capacity of the photos (by blurring them)…the resultant images could not be considered documents and must consequently be art."(5)  

Consequent to years of 'art or science' discussion, decades of image ubiquity have created a culture of 'seers'. Artists, critics and academics (and artist-critic-academics) have recognized that "images are densely rhetorical products,"(6)  "highly contrived and subjective…yet, for well over a century, there has been an agreement [between photographer and audience] to embrace the myth of photographic truth."(7)   

The duration of my first year at the University of Saskatchewan was overwhelmed by my refutation of the above-mentioned so-called 'agreement.' Experiences in discussing photography and digital imagery with fellow students and artists, where the great majority of whom thought that photographs are the purveyors of truth, forced me to take a position of opposition. Victor Burgin helps make the point when he states 
the largely unquestioned [my italics] assumption that the intrinsic and essential nature of the photographic apparatus is to record factual reality has been completely overturned with the arrival of digital imaging.(8)  

My feeling was that there is no embracing of the 'myth of photographic truth' on behalf of viewers since many of them seem to have little sense that photographs are densely rhetorical products.(9)  Since photographs are everywhere and largely unquestioned, people tend to believe that they know how to look at photographs, and remain uncritical of this tendency. However, in order to comprehend the complexity of photography one should be informed, that is to say, more critical, about how the medium has been deconstructed in modern thought and criticism. 

As stated earlier, the second arena of photographic debate is that of the theoretical. My work is informed by the history of photography, which is grounded in what I endearingly call a 'semio-structural-Marxist-hermeneutics,' to be explained on the following pages. These methodological approaches to photography are pitted against the approaches of 'straight' photographers, who rest on the side of aesthetics and who are primarily interested in technique and beauty. 

The semio-structural-Marxist-hermeneutics of photography is complex and my aim here is to encapsulate its complexities as concisely as possible: hermeneutics, the art of understanding, has been applied to understanding photographs using Paul Ricouer's ontological method: to understand the image; to explain the image; and to comprehend the image. This method is generally held by those who believe that the "critical impulse [of understanding] lies in the effort to avoid self-misunderstanding as far as possible. Because our understanding can mistake itself, every effort of understanding needs to be appropriated, strengthened and secured. Thus in every correct interpretation the very first task must be to become reflectively conscious of one's own fore-structure of understanding."(10)  

Thus, hermeneuts look at photographs with the desire and intention to deconstruct their own initial understanding of the image through subsequently explaining what they understand until they reach a more thorough comprehension of the image. And, as discussed in Chapter One, this end-point of comprehension becomes a second level of understanding, to be deconstructed even further. 

"Structuralism is based…on the realization that, if human actions or productions have a meaning, there must be an underlying system of conventions which make this meaning possible."(11)  The triads of sign, interpretant and object (referent), or sign, signifier, signified, are used to deconstruct photographs to their visual equivalents of linguistic components. The sign is informed by the signifier and signified in a relationship that is dependent on the cultural conventions we bring to it (i.e. our fore-structure of knowledge). The goal of a Structuralist approach to the photograph is to reduce our knowledge to its constituent parts in order to understand better how a photograph comes to mean. 

Semiotics introduced the terms 'denotation' and 'connotation' to the language of image deconstruction. Where denotation refers to conventional understandings, connotation points to the implications that construct these conventions, adding a further method by which to understand how we understand photographs.(12)  Roland Barthes, who insisted we should study texts, not authors, in our aim to understand, largely informs semiotics. An example of semiotic image deconstruction is found in Barthes "Rhetoric of the Image," where the author reduces a Panzani pasta advertisement to the sale of 'Itailanicity' rather than pasta: pasta does not sell pasta: 'Italianicity' sells pasta.(13)  

Finally, Marxist Theory shows how photography is seen through subjective eyes. Marxist theorists argue that the economic mode of production determines social, political and cultural norms and that the objective of the ruling class (the state) is to maintain class distinction, and therefore the economic mode of production, by any means necessary. Louis Althusser felt that there were two forms of subjugation: the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. An example of the repressive state apparatus is the police force, which uses physical intervention to prevent individuals from rebelling. The ideological state apparatus is also a medium of repression.(14)  The individual is transformed into one who thinks he is free but whose thoughts have really been engineered by ideology. To say it differently, the individual believes he is autonomous but has actually been manipulated by ideological propaganda. A classic example of the ideological state apparatus is the American Dream, whereby (North) Americans believe that if they work hard, they will flourish, despite all proof to the contrary.(15)  

Within the semio-structural-Marxist-hermeneutic approach to understanding photographs, all meaning can be reduced to its constituent parts, and these parts are understood to be arbitrary, conventional and ideologically formulated. I hope the reader can empathize with my frustration over such responses to my images as: 'you must be very proud of your body' (as stated in Chapter One), 'but Risa, I can't get past the image of your naked body to see what more is there,' or such questions as 'why do you try to make your photographs look more 'artsy' by printing the black border around them?' Such comments and questions are so sorely lacking in critical inquiry when it comes to photography, and they impacted so strongly, that I came to a point where I decided to stop attempting to inform viewers of the complexity of images. 

For a long time, my work was overwhelmed by my attempts to squeeze into my images everything I understood about them and spit this information back out at the viewer, which didn't leave me a whole lot of room to do what I really wanted to do: make art. I was too involved with trying to justify the medium. For, despite my genuine engagement with and interest in the ideas offered by the photographic debate, my sense of recognition of myself in the ideas, and the ways that these ideas have given me greater insight into my work and the world: despite these considerations, the images themselves and my defense of them are, ultimately, beside the point. 

In Camera Lucida, Barthes states "in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes."(16)  In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Martin Heidegger states "in order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e. listen abstractly."(17)  In my case, I chose to look away from photographs altogether, to pay attention to what I considered the periphery of my practice, so that I could begin to see at all. 

2.2 …and Narcissism 

The concept of narcissism in relation to my worry is intriguing. On the one hand, there exists the popular notion of narcissism. This notion assumes that if one is dealing with issues of the self, particularly representations of the self, one is behaving in a self-absorbed and isolated manner. This assumption implies a certain arrogance of personality in the 'narcissist' based on imagined self-love and self-pride – as in the Classical myth from which the term 'narcissism' derives. On the other hand, there is a notion of narcissism that assumes the individual to be void of self-identity, relying on reception and response by the external world to gain a sense of individuality. These 'narcissists' lack "inner experience. They must look to another person's reaction to gain any sense of themselves…To help these people sense themselves…one must hold a mirror up to them."(18)  

I was horrified when I read Eugene Gendlin's essay, quoted above. I both recognized and disavowed recognition of myself in these concepts – which is, I suppose, the point. And I admit to more than once feeling the fear of embodying some deeply pathological sense of self. These two views of narcissism suggest that the 'narcissist' experiences either a lack or an excess of self. One can see how refuge might be found in a sense of solipsism – Descartes certainly did, when he "established a certainty of self as a result of the clarity and distinctness with which it perceives itself."(19)  In the face of such prospects of self I have often experienced 'some kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world" in a "certain metaphysics of interiority."(20)  

This discussion of narcissism is intended to parallel my earlier discussion of social expectations vis-a-vis norms of behavior and self-identification. Gendlin states that "the fully developed person is supposed to identify with the ego. The ego derives from social reality. With a traditional ego one identifies with…socially given roles, " and he suggests, "'narcissism' is the only alternative."(21)  If being normal means identifying with socially given roles, where does that leave people who don't quite fit in? "[Theodore] Adorno was convinced that what passes for 'normality' is in truth a kind of madness, and that the 'sickness of the normal' is the same disastrous pattern as the sickness of those whom 'the normal' consider to be sick, only the pattern is present in a different way."(22)  

Constructs of 'normality' and 'sickness' both intrigue and inspire me. I know, through conversation and experience with others, that not everybody thinks of him- or herself in the ways that I do – I have been told so explicitly. Yet at the same time, it does not take much time in getting to know people for them to present their own forms of worry, neurosis and control. The only difference is that some forms are subtler than others. 

For a long time I was very hard on myself when I caught myself engaged in self-talk. I worked very hard at not worrying. I was verbally self-abusive and simultaneously self-assuring when I found myself behaving in ways contrary to the social norm (see my previous description of the 'shhhhhhhutup' performance and the description of Onion Joy in the upcoming section.) Gendlin's suggestion "that instead of thinking in terms of the 'self', we should think of different styles, patterns, and dimensions of experiencing," moving "beyond the dualisms of mind and body, reason and emotion, self and other, inner and outer, that have so deeply pathologized the modern self"(23)  is thus very comforting – even empowering. 

2.3 …and Breakthrough 

Moving away from the photographic image, to what I referred to as the periphery of my practice, I created three pieces that were not photographic: Onion Joy, Handled Denim and Chasing Tail. The creation of Onion Joy coincided with the creation of what was to be the last photographic series in my archive (Eighteenth Saskatoon Series), in July and August of 1999, and the beginning of my engagement with Conceptual Art of the 1970s, 80s, and 90's. 

I spent the summer mulling over the previous year's work, responses to the work, and interpersonal experiences. One Advisor's suggestion that I seek counseling since I was often close to tears during discussion of my work stuck with me. In a period typical of my worry, I became fixated on the expectation that, in public, one must be emotionally detached from her work and the issues that surround it. On one hand, I felt I must be going mad since, in fact, I did find it difficult to maintain a cool demeanor, thus making myself vulnerable not only to comments about my work, but about my emotional stability. On the other hand, I felt determined not to give in to the idea that I was psychologically unsound simply because I feel vulnerable about my work. I would rather be vulnerable than impervious, and still I felt like Sophie Calle who said, "I'm not in love but I show all the signs,"(24)  though in my case I needed to confirm that I wasn’t crazy, even if I do show all the signs. Ultimately, I felt a lack of control over my emotional responses in knowing that any rational person would not make herself so vulnerable. 

In my performance/installation, Onion Joy, I wanted to defend myself against the idea that one must protect oneself from attack by suppressing vulnerability, while simultaneously fighting against the notion of emotional detachment. David Michael Levin writes: 
"If we do not trust our own experience, if we do not believe in the possibility of trust; if we do not have any faith in the truthfulness of the individual's experience, then we have succumbed to the self-destructiveness of nihilism."(25)  

Onion Joy was motivated by my need to be vulnerable or emotional, if I happened to be so, rather than to crush my instincts, and I deeply needed to trust my experience and to allow it to come through in my art. 

Around the time Onion Joy was in conception I came across Suzie Lake's "Choreographed Puppets." The piece was a series of photographs of Lake tied-up and manipulated like a marionette by two 'puppeteers.' In surrendering herself to the puppeteers, she gave up control of herself, making herself extremely vulnerable. Her intentional giving up of control moved me deeply because I had exerted so much energy towards being in control, rather than giving it up. 

My objective with Onion Joy was like-minded. First, I handed out small invitations to everyone I knew to donate yellow cooking onions – I collected 130lbs, my body weight. Matching my body weight was important for me in constructing yet another self-paradigm: my weight in onions stood-in for my body. I arranged the onions around a chopping block in the Snelgrove Gallery, intending to chop them uninterrupted, without wiping my eyes or nose, for one hour each day for five days. I guessed that one hour a day would bring me to the point of collapse: I believed I would not be able to endure it.  

Through this public performance, whose title references Carolee Schneemann's orgiastic "Meat Joy," I permitted myself to cry openly in public while removing the source of my tears from emotional state or stability. At the same time, I knew most people cry when chopping onions or when near chopped onions, thus I hoped to create an environment of connection between my audience and myself, depending upon their capacity to empathize. 

I learned a great deal about being open to unexpected possibilities through this, my first, performance. I found that, if permitted, I could have continued chopping onions for much longer than the one-hour sessions I had initiated. After the initial physical response to the onions, my body began adjusting to them over time.(26)  I also found my somewhat disinterested relationship to the onions and skins shifting once I began to chop, tending to them lovingly, gently and methodically creating conical piles of onions in front of the chopping-block. 

I knew the smell of onions would be obvious within the gallery, and I hoped that it would be understood not only as temporary, but also as conceptually necessary for the viewer's engagement with the work. Instead, halfway through the week, I was asked to stop performing and was required to cover the onions to reduce their smell, since the aroma interfered with the ability of people in the vicinity to conduct their daily work. Of course, this was upsetting, but I slowly became aware of the strength of the performance as a result of this request. I drew an ironic analogy between the social expectation of stoicism and the request to please stop chopping onions – that both vulnerability and chopping onions in public are inappropriate and burdensome behaviors.  

I am reminded of Marina Abramovic's 1974 performance "Rhythm 5," where she lay inside a perimeter of fire and lost consciousness due to oxygen deprivation.(27)  An unknowing audience had to intervene when they realized she did not feel the flames on her leg. Onion Joy would not have been a success had an intervention not occurred, since the underlying concept of the work was based on intervention of the personal. 

Handled Denim and Chasing Tail were projects where I consciously allowed my worry-induced nervous habits to dictate the materials and content of the works. Handled Denim began as a class duration project. We were instructed to form a collection and work with it without envisioning a final product. I used the project to attend to process rather than product – something I had rarely recognized in making photographs.  

Using as a starting point a habit of pulling lint and rolling it between my fingers, I dismantled a pair of jeans. While creating the 'fluggies' (balls of denim thread) by pulling and rolling one thread at a time, I was able to see in the partially handled pieces of denim the first three-dimensional objects I had ever created. Upon presenting the objects for critique, for the first time ever I was aware that viewers not only recognized my hand in the work – and the behaviors the work grew out of – but they offered a plethora of interpretations and means of access to the work that had nothing whatsoever to do with my intentions. This was an exhilarating experience: nobody wanted to know why he or she should care about how I pull lint, whereas I am often asked why people should care about me, in response to my self-portraits. 

Chasing Tail  was a live performance/reading of a list of over 300 'what-if's' – literally, all the worries I had collected over several months, no matter how banal, childish, melodramatic or clichéd. What was important about this work was that I permit myself the obsessive activity of collecting such a list, and then transform it into a public spectacle, thus breaking the boundary between what is public and what is expected to be kept private. 

In the process of developing these three works, I identified four motivations that are the source of my work: worry, control, repetition and endurance. I have come to feel a strong alliance with the works of Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Hanne Darboven, and On Kawara. Abramovic's "Breathing In/Breathing Out" and "Rest Energy" are moving expressions of physical strength and limitation. I recognize myself in Calle's narcissistic acts of surveillance, in "Suite Venitienne," and self-surveillance, in "The Shadow." Hanna Darboven's ultra-rational data systems ("Wish Concert, 144 Verses") and On Kawara's volumes of millennia ("One Million Years") are lovely embodiments of the type of systematic effort I have engaged with in creating my archive. The works of these artists speak to me in their attention to repetitive, compulsive and neurotic tasks.(28)  Closer to home, I have been incredibly moved by the care with which Hanna Beitl salvaged and protected large weeds in hand-woven cocoons(29)  and the excesses of control and manipulation that Michael Maranda exerts on texts.(30)  

For me, the primary material of the collection has taken over everything I do. "What…matters is the systematic of the collection as it is experienced,"(31) and "in knowing that the procedures [in creating the collection], step by step, have been carefully and fully carried through."(32) And, as Frederick Barthelme would I hope relate to, rather than making art, which seems impossible for me to do, I chose instead to build an archive.(33)  
 
 

2.4…and girl before a mirror III 

Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collections. For it is invariably oneself that one collects. 
   Jean Baudrillard, The System of Collecting 

Shoot. be in a space and feel compelled to set up your camera. gather your equipment. extend tripod legs, mount camera on base, load film, meter setting, set timer. hit the timer button and move into the frame. get a feel for the space. or, gather as many different chairs as you can to your cabin's deck, transform your bedroom into a studio using borrowed black cloths the other students are using to hide the sun from the backs of their 4x5 cameras. One by one, set each chair in within the frame, sit down, have a friend focus the bellows and leave. take three shots: the chair, me clothed in the chair, me unclothed in the chair. make sure the air release, which you press with your left hand, is not visible. work in similar ways, intermittently, over a seven year span. Catalogue the negatives. yes, catalogue them. by city, yes, that's obvious.(34)  by series, been shooting by series, by frame number, chronological and physical. the year was added much later. count the negatives. figure out what belongs to what. apply the system. The archive has 899 items(35) . continue shooting, maintain the system as you go. Descriptors. hand draft descriptions of the images. make the images redundant. start by creating a page for each series. write each catalogue number on the page leaving space for descriptions. this is an image of me. write. look. write. print more contacts. look and write. decide not to substitute the entire Eleventh Toronto Series: let the single black image stand for it.(36)  transcribe to a computer document. create the file. type in the catalogue number. cut and paste up to the number in each series. go back and revise for each number. ctrl + c, ctrl + v, ctrl + c, ctrl +v. counting. enumerating. working with numbers. start video documentation. input the descriptors. type 'this is an image of me'. cut and paste almost 1600 times. back to the top. fill in the spaces. ctrl + c, ctrl + v, ctrl +c, ctrl + v.(37)  add bullets to the list. add numbers to the list. add periods to every item. down arrow, down arrow, end (.) down arrow, down arrow, end (.) down arrow, down arrow, end (.) almost 1600 times. print the document (72 pages). make a duplicate file and format for file card size. down arrow, down arrow, end (insert page break). down arrow, down arrow, end (insert page break). down arrow, down arrow, end (insert page break). almost 1600 times.(38)  back to the top. one line of text needs thirteen spaces to place the descriptor at the bottom of the page. two lines of text need 12 spaces to place the descriptor at the bottom of the page. three lines of text need 11 spaces to place the descriptor at the bottom of the page. print the first card file set. 100 at a time. write the chronological item number on the back of each card in pencil, one at a time, while reversing the order of the pile so that #1 is on top. print another set of contact sheets. one at a time. cut the contact sheets into individual images, stacking each series from last image to first, so as not to confuse them. sit at your desk. one at a time, write the catalogue number on the backs of the thumbnails, pull off a piece of blue tack, roll it into a ball, stick it on the back of the thumbnail, push it onto the file card. repeat. repeat. repeat.(39)  create a summary of each series and the number of images contained. create a graphic to visualize what how each series might be mounted on walls, if they are hung separately. edit video documentation. hang a few series on my studio walls, create stations in the studio with different components of the work to view. revise all catalogue numbers to reflect dates. print a complete set of images onto 4x5 photographic paper over ten days, ten hours a day.  order the images referring to the first file card set and contact sheets for comparison. write the chronological item number on the backs of all prints with grease-pencil. separate the prints by batches according to city. copy-edit all descriptors and confirm that they say what you want them to say.(40)  prepare a database. figure out how to format a text file for ease in exporting into database. tab separate the catalogue numbers from the descriptors, paragraph separate the date for each item. do this as many times as it takes to get it right. import into filemaker pro. meanwhile, make a final edit and enumeration. edit the list file and edit the card file. buy more file cards. add the chronological item number to each file card (number the pages in the file card file). print the set of file cards. meanwhile, start writing your thesis. using quark, make a scale model of the gallery(41)  with representations of the file cards hung side by side, touching each other, continuously. consider didactic panels. consider different ways of using the gallery. separate the file cards by city. separate each city's cards by series, laying them out on your kitchen table for visibility and access. using the first set of file cards and the printed images, mount thumbnails securely onto each card. first, remove the thumbnails and blue tack from a series from the first set of file cards. make a large ball of blue tack in the process. using double sided framers tape, a pair of scissor and a utility knife, cut a length of tape, mount two strips lengthwise on the thumbnail, trim and stack. comparing thumbnails to prints, and both to the descriptors, mount the correct image onto the correct card: pull the backing of the tape off with a utility knife, position the thumbnail and press down. 1585 times. discover intermittently that you've mounted the wrong image, figure out where you went wrong, search your boxes for duplicate contact sheets, re-print those cards, re-mount the images. get the mounting done in four days, between ten and fourteen hours per day. meanwhile, get chapter one written. secure the file card set in plastic storage boxes and hide them in a closet away from water or light. no need to worry about moisture in Saskatoon. begin scanning images. start at T.01.01.08.93. scan in batches of 100. each batch takes 3.25 hours. determine scanner and photoshop settings. scan 12, crop 12 to 432 x ? pixels, save. be systematic: the names of the image files must be readable and easy to import to the database. 0001v.jpg. 0001h.jpg. re-size for thumbnails at 100 pixels. t0001v.jpg. t0002h.jpg. horizontal and vertical. thumbnail or not. become even more uncertain about which software you will use, filemaker, www or director. which is the most effective for ease of use for all viewers?(42)  which is most representative of the nature of the project? which do I need to learn how to use, if possible in such a short period of time. keep considering database. start building a website. conduct a general word sort using word-processor. print. from the word sort, conduct searches in database and print batches based on word. do this only for words that appear over 25 times, to start with. figure out how you can create codes for each batch to include on each item's web page, linking to a list of items in that batch. allow the viewers to figure out the connection. create templates for the card pages and the image-only pages on the web site. deal with the web master who doesn't understand my description of uploading problems. figure that out through begging and humor. figure out the easiest way to create 1585 web pages times two. copy and paste the template over and over again (1585 x 2) and rename each web page. name the pages by item number: 0001c.html 0001p.html c is for card, p is for photograph. finish writing thesis. copy edit. edit. spend 4 weeks copying and pasting pages and links. design an invitation. produce and distribute invitation. design and create didactic panel. review gallery space, make a new and accurate scale model and prepare for installation.(43)  
 

(1)Don Slater, "Photography and Modern Vision: The Spectacle of 'Natural Magic," Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995) 219/220. 
(2)Martin Lister, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) 10. 
(3)Florian Rotzer, "Re: Photography," Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Image (Munich: G&B Arts, 1996) 14. 
(4)"The nineteenth century's practice of photography was founded on an understanding of the medium as an illusion, and the realism of Victorian photography is properly understood as an artificial realism, in which the image offers the viewer a representation of reality, a typification, a conscious simulacrum – though a simulacrum that elicited a willing suspension of disbelief." Miles Orvel, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (North Carolina: U of NC Press, 1989) 77. 
(5)Roy Arden, "Vernacular Photography and Realism," Canadian Art, Vol.15 No.4 (Toronto, Winter 1998) 40. 
(6)Pollock in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squires, (Seattle: The Bay Press, 1990) 204. 
(7)Jonathan Green, "Pedro Meyer's Documentary Fictions," Metamorphoses; Photography in the Electronic Age, (Aperture Foundation, 1994) 33. 
(8)Victor Burgin, "The Image in Pieces: Digital Photograph and the Location of Cultural Experience," in Rotzer, 29. 
(9)It is important to note that there are two camps of viewers of photographs: those who are familiar with the theoretical and critical underpinnings of the medium, who represent (in my experience) the minority, and those who are not. 
(10)Grondin, 6. 
(11) Jonathan Culler "The linguistic Basis of Structuralism," Structuralism: An Introduction, ed. David Robey (London: Oxford University Press, 1993) 24. 
 (12)For further reading on denotation and connotation in image analysis, see Roland Barthes "The Photographic Message," Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977). 
(13)Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 33-37. 
(14)A parallel analogy would be the use of mug shots by police to define criminality in such a way as to impact not the bodies of subjects but their minds: "The immediate principle of punishment is to control action. This action is either that of the offender, or of others: that of the offender it controls by its influence, wither on his will…or on his physical power…that of others it can influence no less otherwise than by its influence over their will." Jeremy Bentham quoted in Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision and the Production of Modern Bodies (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996) 89/90. I will return to this thought in detail in my final chapter. 
(15)The preceding four paragraphs have been greatly informed by the lectures of Renate Wickens, September 1994 – April 1995, at York University, Contemporary Theory Through Photography. Please see my List of Readings and Works Cited for further readings. 
(16)Barthes, 53. 
(17)Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977) 152. 
(18)Eugene T. Gendlin, "A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism: The Significance of the Awareness Movement," Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, ed. David Michael Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987) 270. 
(19)quoted in Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) 13. 
(20)Jonathan Crary, "The Camera Obscura and Its Subject," The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998) 245. 
(21)Gendlin in Levin, 253. 
(22)David Michael Levin, "Psychopathology in the Epoch of Nihilism," Pathologies…, 31. 
(23)Levin, 12. 
(24)Linda Weintraub, Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970's – 1990's (Connecticut: Art Insights, Inc., 1996) 68. 
(25)Levin, 33. 
(26)However, I must admit that I have suffered sinus congestion ever since, and awaken each morning with terrible bouts of sniffling and sneezing such as I have never experienced before! 
(27)Weintraub, 61. 
(28)For excellent reading on these artists, and reproductions of their works, see: Weintraub, and Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen, eds. Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art (Munich: Prestel, 1988). 
(29)Hanna Beitl, "Lightness," MFA Thesis Exhibition, Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, September 1999. see archive at www.usask.ca/snelgrove/index.html 
(30)Michael Maranda,  "The Three Critiques," artist's collection. Maranda interpreted a translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, creating volumes of books containing pages of the letters of the alphabet, enumerated from the source translation (i.e. all the upper-case 'A's,' all the lower-case 'a's' and so on), and removing all letters to leave behind only the punctuation as it appears on the pages of the source translation. 
(31)John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The Culture of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994) 16. 
(32)Mel Bochner, "Excerpts from Speculation (1967-1970)," Ursula Meyer, ed. Conceptual Art (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972) 54-55. 
(33)"Instead of making art I filled out this form." from a reproduction of Berthelme's work of that name, Conceptual Art, 42. 
(34)"Classification precedes collection." Elsner and Cardinal, 1. 
(35)"The notion of there being a set of objects to which it [the object] belongs lends the object an extension beyond itself and upsets its solitary status." Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Collecting,' in Elsner and Cardinal, 8. 
(36)"The collection is never really initiated in order to be completed. Might it not be that the missing item…is in fact an indispensable and positive part of the whole, in so far as this lack is the basis of the subject'sability to grasp himself in objective terms?" Baudrillard in Elsner and Cardinal, 13. 
(37)"in art, banality soon becomes extraordinary."Daniel Buren in Meyer, 72. 
(38)"Serial monotony." Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Warburg's Paragon?…" in Schaffner, 50. 
(39)"What really matters is the systematic of the collection as it is experienced." Baudrillard in Elsner and Cardinal, 16. 
(40)"Descriptions are inevitably full of those autobiographical details and value judgments, memory lapses and mistakes, inseparably linked with the attempt to provide an objective account." Buchloh in Schaffner, 50. 
(41)"Art Consists of my action of placing [the] activity…in an art context." Joseph Kosuth in Meyer, xi. 
(42)"It remains characteristic of the collection that there comes a point when the self-absorption of the system is interrupted and the collection is enrolled within some external project of exigency (…the object ends up confronting one man with another, therby constituting itself as a message." Baudrillard in Elsner and Cardinal, 24. 
(43)"In the final analysis, the archive no longer seems to be a neutral accumulation of retrievable information, but the mediated result of experiences – in time." Kai-Uwe Hemken on Darboven in Schaffner, 114.