ABSTRACT
In what follows, I trace the formation of photography studies and its coincidence with postmodern art criticism in the 1980s, as well as their dual investment in both Atget and Benjamin. Many theorists of postmodern art legitimated and even institutionalized not only a discourse on photography, but also certain photographic practices that might be said to be constitutive of photography studies. The American version of photography studies in particular originated in the postmodern debate ostensibly as a reaction against a formalist narrative of modernism promulgated by Clement Greenberg, in favour of a conceptualist one begotten by Marcel Duchamp – and thus replaced one canon with another. What, however, is excluded from each of these narratives?
