This article considers the relationship between subjectivity and representational form. More specifically, it discusses the transformation in self-representation between life and death by the artist Roger de la Fresnaye, reflecting his modernist articulations of life to pre-modern, classicist figurations of death. For the artist, modernity could not bear the demands that dying made upon representation, as unable to fully accord death a sign. Modernity's dissolution of the subject annihilated the very permanence of identity and presence that death guaranteed, but without (...) its covenant of ritual and history. Instead, classicism provided a coherent anterior body, another face from which he could speak after death: ?one? would always be present to speak for him. The face therefore addresses culture through its specific appeal to, and demand of, time, space, and history. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between subjectivity and representational form. More specifically, it discusses the transformation in self-representation between life and death by the artist Roger de la Fresnaye, reflecting his modernist articulations of life to pre-modern, classicist figurations of death. For the artist, modernity could not bear the demands that dying made upon representation, as unable to fully accord death a sign. Modernity's dissolution of the subject annihilated the very permanence of identity and presence that death guaranteed, but without (...) its covenant of ritual and history. Instead, classicism provided a coherent anterior body, another face from which he could speak after death: “one” would always be present to speak for him. The face therefore addresses culture through its specific appeal to, and demand of, time, space, and history. (shrink)

This article considers photography’s role as a visual technology and the consequent effects of expanded frames of knowledge. At the very moment human vision and memory were called into profound doubt, photography provided a mechanical, prosthetic extension to perceptual experience. However, as a technology, it contains the potential for both revelation and control. In this article, photography is considered as a technique that: expands human perception; inscribes its own mechanical operations into new visual forms, therefore enframing and encoding visible knowledge; (...) and can be harnessed as a disciplinary instrument and technique of power. As a consequence, photography’s revealing of hitherto invisible dimensions of reality unfolds within a history of revelation, spectacle and power. (shrink)