ABSTRACT
As a way of thinking about images in circulation—on the move, in passing, passing by—I have chosen, in this chapter, to think briefly about live performance in relationship to photography. Though I will consider digital images and reference other modes of image capture, I chose to orient my commentary on photography and let photography stand in for image capture somewhat generally—even though that very “standing in” might ultimately be troubled by my comments here. I have chosen photography in part because of the common claim that the invention of photography provoked a revolution in “visuality”—one “more profound”, writes Jonathan Crary, “than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective.” 1 I also concentrate on photography because of recent work in media studies that situates the logic of the photograph as visual ground, fundamental to film and resilient in image culture. Arguing for the primary place of the “still” at the heart of moving images, such work struggles both to reassert the medium specificity of photography at a moment of its obsolescence and, at the same time, places photography as a kind of progenitor, and even template, of vital and subsistent visual cultural ways of knowing. 2 Such work also assumes the invention of the still with the invention of the camera and continues the long-standing assumption that photography exhibits “death at work”, to use Jean Cocteau’s phrase, offering “evidence” of irretrievable time. 3
