Scenes of Life/Kentucky Mountains

Anya E. Liftig and Kathleen Stewart

The photograph documents the charged border between image and matter, the framed and the unframed, the seen and the noticed. The uncanny fullness of the photographic image points to the aesthetic acts of a photographic genre in social and political use and privileges discovered objects made vibrant in the moment they sink into the image and become impalpable. In its still life of framed matter, it enacts the generativity of cultural form and marks the moment of emergence in which the virtual becomes actual, the private becomes public, and the unmarked, discarded, or forgotten becomes newly and suddenly framed. As an act of cultural poesis—an aesthetic act that animates and literally makes sense of cultural forms and forces at the point of their affective, material, or imaginary emergence (Feldman 1994; Seremetakis 1994; Stewart 1996)—the photograph is not just a marker of a preexisting code or representation, but an active, transformative process that mimics the shifting practices of everyday life, the vitalities and exhaustions captured in a bodily gesture, the force fields and modes of agency resonating in a scene.

In this particular moment in the commodified hyperstimulation of the senses (Beller 1994), the cult of distraction (Gunning 1999), and the hypervigilant surveillance of spectacles (Dorst 1999), the power of cultural poesis is animated by the tactility of the common image (Taussig 1991). The still life fulfills a desire for respite from the fast-moving sensory stimuli in circulation (Stewart 2000a) and enacts a moment in which disparate elements come together in the density of a scene.

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