College of Fine Arts & Communication Blog

I discovered the term “break boundary” when reading Marshall McLuhan’s influential book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Coined by Kenneth E. Boulding (1910– 1993), who was a co-founder of the General Systems Theory, the term refers to the transformative point at which a system suddenly and irrevocably changes from its original state into something new.  I think about the water in relation to this term. By slow degrees, we are changing the ecological balance, the chemical composition of our oceans. Oil spills are just one small part of the problem. Global warming too is changing the weather and the way that water flows. I also think about this term in relation to photography, specifically, the language of photography in relation to the language of painting.

New technologies that allow for the manipulation of the image have changed forever the way we understand the photograph as a document of truth.  Certain celebrated photographic images of our time (I am thinking specifically of the photographs of Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Andreas Gursky) are not those that capture a single moment but rather those that are composed of many moments to suggest a single moment. They make us aware of the medium itself and they are interesting because they play with our understanding of the structure and language of the medium. They are composed much more like paintings and they make us aware that time has become, to a greater extent, a tool of the photographer rather than a fixed variable.

In a similar way, abstract painting also made us aware of the structure and the language of the medium of painting. I have always been drawn to the work of Mark Rothko. His paintings suggest windows through which to enter another dimension. His resonating squares of color suggest a boundary between here and there, inside and outside. These photographs, on the one hand, very simply reflect my love for the water but they also reflect the influence that painting has had on my understanding of photography. They play with the boundary between earth and sky and the boundary between photography and painting to suggest my belief that the language used to define and understand these two mediums has evolved, and that the emergence of a new language is upon us.