Chapter 7 and Reading Response

In The Photograph as Contemporary Art, chapter seven talks about the revival and transformation of culturally recognized and popular imagery in contemporary art. I enjoyed a lot of the work mentioned in this chapter, but specifically speaking, I found Cornelia Parker's Avoided Objects series very interesting. Parker used microphotography to transform historical relics such as Albert Einstein's equations that were chalked onto a blackboard to expose the "physical manifestations" of important events of the past. The chapter said that Einstein's equation looked similar to "molecular-like structure" because of how close the photos were taken. The abstraction made these photos something more than Einstein's equation on a blackboard (which would be amazing in itself). Narrowing in on the fibers of each mark and smudge is capturing something equally as profound as the meaning and significance of the equation. The zoomed in marks exposed everything that is, and puts the tiny things in focus.