The Plot in the Photography of Modernity

The article analyzes the photography of modernity through the lens
of plot theory. It shows that the complexity of the story-line and plot of modernist
photography depends on its general conventional communicative status –
documentary or artistic. The story-line of documentary photography puts in its
center natural objects as such and natural relations between these objects, including
eventive relations. The plot of an artistic photograph overcomes its original
natural object-nature and takes photography to the level of object forms as
such and formal relations between object forms, thereby to a certain extent alienating
the form from the objects themselves. The combination of the story-line
object vector and the plot formal vector leads to the formation of the phenomenon
of the photographic image. The meaningful dynamic potential of this image
is constituted by a constructive contradiction of the reality of the object and its
form, which is beyond reality. On the contrary, postmodern photography goes
beyond its nature and links itself to the text. Thus, from the poetics of the visual
image, postmodern photography goes on to the rhetoric of the verbal concept
and loses independence outside of its declared field.
Postmodern photography is characterized, first, by overcoming the dichotomy
between the plot and story-line. Postmodern photography at the very “entrance
point” to itself doubts the reality and commonsensical nature of the depicted
object. This leads to the erosion of the distinct modernist line between
documentary and artistic photography. Photography “does not believe” itself,
therefore it is meta-documentary and para-documentary, and so it does not need
its antagonist – artistic photography. Secondly, the photography of postmodernity
sees relevance in the problem of the correlation between the narrative and anarrative
beginnings, as well as the external statement, title, and commentary,
included into the orbit of the photographic image. The text becomes necessary
for the photo, because only the text can verify it. The viewer now believes
(or does not believe) not the photo itself, but what is said in the juxtaposed text.
The article contains a selective analysis of photographs by Henri Cartier-
Bresson from the thematic cycle, published in his book “A propos de Paris”.