ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the idea of the photographic event, or story that seems to be unfolding in the real world. Politicians and government officials in particular routinely attempt to make news images fit their ideological agendas. At least until recently, the people accepted most news photographs as more or less accurate portraits of facts and behavior. Allen Frame has been described as a photographer who photographs people in transitional moments and transitional spaces where anything or nothing could be happening. In the black-and-white portrait, the narrative drive is interrupted by the click of the shutter, which happened in real time, outside the depicted moment. Many photographs are built around constructed moments. “Bad Goods” is arguably energized by its unstable ambiguities. There is always a palpable distance, however close, between the people apprehension of the content of Wall’s images and their awareness of their resolute status as manufactured pictorial objects.