'This looks like a tree, but really it's me,' she said, apparently without irony. 'That's the beauty of photography, you see. (A point I might return to ultimately.)
'But it hasn't been easy. Harnessing photography, harnessing photography to me. Indeed, no. To begin with, Nature took all the credit: her hand, her pencil. What tosh, Talbot, what tosh. (With your prescient vision, couldn't you see it was only ever going to be about me?)
'So came Modernism. Well damn me. Medium-specific: photography was suddenly all about photography. (What about me?) And, then there was Sontag's On Photography (we're talking the early 1970s). At the back of the book she reproduces a list of all photography's applications, the so-called 'fields of photography' derived from Roget's International Thesaurus (third edition); 31 entries, can you believe? Thirty-one entries including astrophotography and photospectroheliography. (And, nothing about me.)
'When Winogrand claimed 'I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed', I thought I might die.
'Well, thank the Lord for the advent of Post-Modernity. It freed us from the medium-specificity of photography-for-photography's-sake. Allowed for relativism and revisionism; even found a space for post-colonism and feminism. But, my, it was dull. Thought October would never end. Couldn't understand a word. Crimp and Kraus: what were they on about?
'But, in his attempt to follow in the footsteps of Foucault, Tagg made it all possible, possible for photography to be all about me; according to him, the medium had no inherent meaning, so it could be harnessed to anything.
'So, back to that tree. Of course we all know it's not a real tree. It's a photograph of a tree. Check out your semiotics, sweetie. Check out Magritte, if you find it easier. That wasn't a pipe, and this is not a tree.
'No, my time has come. At last. Photography is finally all about me.'
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