Keenan's Response to "On ***** Media"

In discussing the concept of “Post Media”, Hovagimyan brings forward an example of how the introduction of one medium affected the approach to another. After the arrival of photography, the role of painting shifted to represent a more abstracted version of reality. The transformation that Hovagimyan finds more interesting, however (as do I), is the attempt to circumvent photography’s inherent tether to reality. The photographic form is designed to capture reality faithfully, but the effectiveness of the medium can often come from the artist’s ability to corrupt that design. In this way, photography that skirts reality takes advantage not of creativity through freedom, but of creativity through form. The juxtaposition of the photographic form’s boundaries and the artist’s ability to push those boundaries can create an artistic tension. By extension, video that utilizes live footage can play not only with its visual link to reality, but also with the viewer’s sense of time.

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent (1844)