Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography

Should they instead have said its essence dissolves into an indeterminate flux, its ontological status contingent upon shifting power geometries that animate its spectral form; as praxis, it is enmeshed in the web of institutional stratifications and independent forces shaping its ephemeral manifestations. Its cultural function tethered to contextualized modes of existence, rendering its artifacts intelligible only through mutable currencies of meaning circulated within- phantasmic tokens of a fragmented, non-linear chronicle. Absent a unified narrative, its obscure history flickers as a series of discontinuous incursions across a formless field of institutional spaces, a territory whose contours and boundaries are perpetually reconfigured; it is this field- permeable, unstable, and overdetermined- that warrants investigation, not the fleeting, insubstantial entity itself?

It's, as expected, a little bit of jargon. Nothing more.

I'm not sure if she's at fault for making every photography critic write like this, or is simply the exemplar of this sort of photography writing, but it feels very much of a piece with Charlotte Cotton's work: https://svbedu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/pim_...

To be fair, you quoted something the article quoted.

But to be even more fair, it was a paragraph that the author liked, and isn't wildly different from what was written.

This is just how some things are written for certain audiences. It reminds me of Zampano's parts of House of Leaves.

This looks like a paragraph which is meaningful in the context of a specific school of thought. It reminds me of the classic (that is, classic on HN):

> A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

Some works are just hard to grasp if you haven't first assimilated the introductory works to the field.