ABSTRACT
Photography has become a principal reference point in attempts to connect contemporary cultural production to the history of modernism. Photography has transitioned from being a principal reference point in the anti-aesthetic positions arising in the milieu of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s to become an important focus of recent revisiting of the category of art. This is also a way of framing the contemporary topicality of modernism, given the centrality of aesthetic reflection and autonomy to modernism and canonical accounts of it. Framptons film thus anticipates contemporary discussions on the role of photography in the elaboration of the fate of the categories of aesthetic separation, autonomy, and intentionality. One line of contemporary thought sees the photographic automatism as a resource for art, rather than a weakness in intentionality that needs to be overcome in the establishment of photography as art.
