{"id":11927,"date":"2012-07-08T23:18:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T03:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=11927"},"modified":"2012-07-18T12:30:28","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T16:30:28","slug":"trope-the-well-made-photograph-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2012\/07\/08\/trope-the-well-made-photograph-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope: The Well-Made Photograph (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.<\/a><\/p>\n

The Well-Made Play<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to the Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica<\/a>, the phenomenon that became known as “the well-made play . . .\u00a0constructed according to certain strict technical principles, . . . dominated the stages of Europe and the\u00a0United States\u00a0for most of the 19th century and continued to exert influence into the 20th.” The EB goes on to say that “The technical formula of the well-made play, developed around 1825 by the French playwright\u00a0Eug\u00e8ne Scribe<\/a>, called for complex and highly artificial plotting, a build-up of suspense, a climactic\u00a0scene\u00a0in which all problems are resolved, and a happy ending.”<\/p>\n

\""Rineke<\/a>

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective,” 2012, cover<\/p><\/div>\n

The term has long since become derisive, if not pejorative. Yet the well-made play survives into the 21st century not only in the theater but in film (just about every romantic comedy) and TV (just about every sitcom episode). It has its counterparts in film and TV melodramas, which draw on parallel formulae, darker in tone but no less predictable. Prose fiction writing has proved itself not immune to the lures of standardized plotting, dialogue, and characterization; think romance novels and thrillers as genres.<\/p>\n

When I speak of the well-made photograph<\/em>, then, I use that phrase not as praise but in a derogatory sense, to describe a recurrent type of photograph produced according to strict if unstated guidelines \u2014 and, beyond that, a\u00a0recurrent type of photography project often (but not always) built around such pictures. I use trope<\/em> similarly, in its meaning as “a common or overused theme or device: clich\u00e9.”\u00a0These pictures and projects resemble each other to such an extent that, with minor adjustments, the images, their accompanying texts, sometimes even the project statements, are hot-swappable and interchangeable (as in the cases of Kelli Connell and Rick Odell, noted in the first post in this series<\/a>). In short, they all look basically the same.<\/p>\n

D\u00e9j\u00e0 Vu, All Over Again<\/strong><\/p>\n

What do I mean when I say that the vast majority of contemporary work in photography looks the same? To begin with, I mean that, in a literal sense, these “well-made photographs” reiterate the same elementary formal structure:<\/p>\n