사진의 수사학과 물질성: 신디 셔먼의 『무제 영화 스틸』을 중심으로

Abstract

Instead of providing a transparent window on the world, postmodernist photography is now itself regarded as a sort of sign, a translucent one at best. Sharing with postmodernists the conviction that there are only simulacra, no real referents, photographers are now satisfied with reproducing images of images without originals. This new tendency of photography reflects and encourages the crisis of representation, and the loss of the Real. But what does this supposed loss of the Real mean to photography, especially to the tradition of feminist photography, which aims at representing real and positive women? This paper is an attempt to answer this question in relation to Cindy Sherman's famous Untitled Film Stills. These stills show Cindy masquerading in conventional female stereotypes, such as femme fatale, pinup girl, housewife, girl in crisis. The postmodernist interpretation of this work is that Sherman's masquerades deconstruct woman by unmasking stereotypical images of femininity as mere cultural effects and thus promote the loss of the Real. This paper critiques such a postmodernist reading. By tracing the process by which the real is suppressed, erased, and then converted into the culturally constructed reality in Sheman's work, it argues that the consequence of this erasure of the real is dire. There are now no traumatic images, since the reading is systematically defended from any possible attack of the real. Such readings are ultimately politically conservative and even reactionary, no matter how leftist they may claim to be. This paper concludes that only the reader's conviction that photographic images are fragments of the real constitutes traumatic reading, a reading exposed to the attack of the real.