Writing about photography – after almost 100 years of theorizing about it – is a complex task that requires responsibilities that go far beyond the intellectual. It seems that talking about photography is talking about everyday life itself, an everyday life that requires to be theorize. However, even though photography theory carries long and tiring years, there are places that demand a deeper look. The place that photography occupies, its role in the arts and its development as an essentially postmodernist medium, leave photography in a kind of conceptual limbo that usually has two equally radical effects: An arising stereotyping marks it as a means of arts amateurization or it simply becomes the most suitable medium for the development of artistic and advertising processes, leaving its place even less defined. I do not believe that photography is a pure creation of the spirit or the democratized cultural medium par excellence. I do not think that photography needs a specific place to act – otherwise its tentacle-shaped dynamism would be lost – or has to be designated as the field in which its contemporary development is the most consistent with the most recent artistic precepts. What I do believe is that there is an intermediate place between fiction and reality in which photography allows itself to exist a priori to the contemporary condition that defines it between the rules of the professional and the amateur. I imagine that place as a blurry no-place. It is because of the above that I do not intend to talk about the qualities and defects of those photographs that propose the aesthetics of blur, however, I intend to understand photography itself as a blurred entity that occupies an intermediate place equally lacking of sharpness.

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      In the first place, it is necessary to affirm that photography in its essence is not static, on the contrary, it has circulated through so many modules, therefore contexts, it has played with so many intentions – some more conceptual, others more formal – that to try to point out the moment when photography was born is a vague and meaningless exercise. But the question that arises here is not where and when was photography born; what seems to be worth asking is how to classify photography? I would like to clarify that when I talk about classification I am not talking about genres: classifying, understood as an archival technique, is not necessarily, in this framework, a way of ordering photographic history by separating each of those photos that make it up and stacking them in certain groups more or less related – landscapes or portraits; realism, pictorialism or documentary, silver salts photographs or Polaroids – to what they can show in the medium in which they are reproduced. Classification, or what can be understood as a logical way of understanding photography, only produces confusion. My attempt here is based on recognizing and rearranging, through a certain amount of photographs, the concepts that govern the appreciation of photography -of what we could call a postmodernist stage-,an approach which Barthes proposed [1] when he affirmed that photography is unclassifiable and that the slightest approach to framed it within certain genres is an exercise that becomes counterproductive: “(…) photography constitutes a system (or rather an anti-system) of references of which all objects, located on the same plane, are equivalent; Consequently, it does not involve a value system similar to the classical pictorial hierarchy”[2]. We return to the initial question because a rethinking of the rethinking is necessary – in the same way as a remake of a ready made – to shape a define certain words and concepts that have been said so far: How to classify photography? Where in the artistic field can photography fit? Does it exist as a means or as an end? But more importantly, what place does photography occupy in contemporary art? It might be the place of blur.

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     The history of photography – or the historians themselves – has been in charge of prioritizing the places that it has occupied. In its beginning, photography occupied a place that was, essentially,  the place of the real. The photograph was a document that represented reality as closely as possible. Photography as truth defined photography in its early years. This attachment to reality allowed photography to occupy a clear and transparent place in terms of what it represents, however,  the same characterization – which straight photography would later take over – undermined an imaginary that had fiction as its field of development. Photography as truth approached the world in the most objective and realistic way possible, renouncing manipulation despite the existence of a frame. This conflicts and dualities allowed photography to both approach different artistic media as being democratized under the domain of the amateur. 

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     Through the denial of the efficacy and usefulness of a genre-based classification system, we realize that photography may be in that place where genres are unified or deconstructed, it may be that the place we are framing is a place of crossing and exchange. In her work, Isabelle Waternux reflects about the genres in which photography is usually classified, making her photographs a sub-genre of an already complex notion of history: “For me, these images are portraits and not nudity in the academic sense of the term. These portraits simply take into account the expression of the body. Why does the common conception of the portrait give a preponderant importance to the face? (…)”[3]. Both the arts and morals have always drawn a boundary line between the genres that certain academies proposes and the ones that certain cultures accepts. This same line tends to go unnoticed in history, but the recognition of this thin succession of points allows the artist – in this case the photographer – to find their own discourse, a fundamental reflection for cultural development in a contemporary society: The skepticism towards a certain way of classifying the world is a political exercise. When the photographer realizes that his photography can become a sub-genre and begins the search for a visual identity, the history of photography itself begins to carry out a series of movements that reach both fiction and reality, what is morally accepted and what is immoral, what is and what is not. An example of how photography begins to transgress the limits and also begins to propose reflections that highlight the essentials of the medium, is the history of nude and its associations with the erotic and grotesque. Abigail Solomon-Godeau quotes, in a text related to the history of the photographic nude as a genre, Sylvie Aubenas saying that she "underlines, for example, that it is practically impossible to visually distinguish between what is legal and what is not." She continue saingy that "recent works on photographic nudes (...) show that there is a real difficulty in distinguishing, on the one hand, artistic nudes from erotic photography and, on the other, these two from academic nudes" [4]  

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  Lets return to photography categorization as a way of understanding it and as a possibility of deconstruction. Rather than thinking of this classification as a problem, we must consider this classification as problematic in itself due to its lack of practicality. Could we think that fine art photography is a subgenre of photography? Is press, advertising or other media photography another subgenre of photography? What is the predominant genre in photography? On which side is the amateur when a painter decides to start doing fine art photography? On which side is the artist when the camera as a device becomes the democratization asset of popular culture?  Is this distinction necessary after saying that gender classification becomes counterproductive? The receiver ends up doing the easiest summary – we do not know if the most accurate –  when tries to answer all the questions previously formulated: “It is assumed that the artistic practice of photography, in one way or another, unlocks, neutralizes, upsets, etc., in short, it deconstructs genres. (…) Indeed, to say that the function of those who practice photography as artists is to displace or confuse gender distinctions, only makes sense if the genres in question possess the statute of a waiting horizon, instituted by the non-artistic practices of the photographs internalized by the receivers” [5]. The receiver, the one who is not behind the camera or in front of it, but in front of the photograph or in front of the product turns out to be the one who will determine the genre or non-genre to which that photograph belongs. But like everything that moves through a cultural circuit, has the risk of being legitimized by external factors to those that appear to be democratic: Cultural conceptions that approach the hierarchy of the arts condition the perception of what is seen [6]. From a curatorial exercise to an an audience ways of seeing, power discourses are generated and cross the boundaries of a history that defines – in terms of photography – what belongs to the circle of the arts and what to the mass media. The question shifts: How to define and identify the practices in which the artistic use of photography is suitable? We could risk two answers. The first is to understand art as what is related to technique, to do, and under this precept all photography activity would be connected in one way or another with photographic art. The second – it could be understood as less risky, less radical but more elitist both intellectually and culturally – has to do with what moves in the precincts of criticism, context and the public. However, when presenting those possible scenarios that appear to be clearly defined, we face reflections that turn these places into infertile ground: “(…) neither of these two ways of defining photographic art can constitute a generic definition capable of distinguishing it from other photography practices: the first, because it transforms photographic art in something coextensive with photography as such; the second, because it is an evaluative and non-descriptive definition (which makes it inapplicable) (…)”[7]. Is it possible that from here we can deduce that photographic art is not a photography sub-genre or genre? I think the right thing to do is to deduce that photography occupies a blurred place that limits between the first and the second, between what historically is and is not.

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     Between reality and fiction, a field of action develops. This space does not appear a priori photography, that is, the place is not a real but rather one that needs a conceptual and a formal construction. This place, to which we are looking for certain parameters or borders, apparently does not have ones: its construction depends on the crossing of the borders imposed by history, the same ones that we have been analyzing and those that we are looking for. The aim of this break is indecisive and unpredictable, but even so its field of action is found in a daily life where an approach to the real and the imaginary is made allowing the crossings of realities to make a differentiation between what is democratically accepted, what is subjugated by spontaneity [8] and what liberates from what presumptuously logical: “What is at stake are our ways of ensuring the identity and permanence of a world, of a familiar universe, through our visual access to reality. It does not seem to me that this experience is lived as a transgression of a generic institutional norm but, rather, as the staging of a limit situation for perceptual life” [9].

 

     We have already achieved a distinction – at least regarding to the subject who practices it – between photographic art and the functional practices of photography, but it is clear that one more differentiation, one more classification, is not the objective of this text. On the contrary, what occupies us now is to reflect on what happens between these two subjects – amateur and professional – who personify the fine arts and the media and thus describe the place that we have decided to call blurry. We now face the urgency to find a way to visually and theoretically exemplify the place we have emphasized.

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     The most successful form in which photography approaches this place is through staging. It is almost impossible that when mentioning staging in our head the association with the photographic genre does not come immediately. This would not be a problem if from the beginning we had not concentrated on distorting the role that genres have in the history of the development of photography, but when the term staging is used, on this occasion, it refers not to gender but to the way in which fiction and reality, those two imaginaries of main interest for our reflection, are capable of finding themselves under the same place, a place that, we insist, is blurred. When this crossing occurs under the setting of a specific scenario or situation, it is not clear what is meant. Is it referring to the artificial and the manipulation that exist under the precept that a photography is a proof of reality, a mirror of nature? Or on the contrary, is it alluded to the fictitious and is evidenced despite the fact that the medium in which its embedded can conceive what is seen as real? In the middle of this discussion, as a vector, a way of materializing the problems between the imaginaries of what becomes true or false, is the work of Jeff Wall problematizing not only the genre of staging, but also reflecting on the confrontation between painting and photography, media that we could also consider, at some point, as sub-genres of art.

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