ABSTRACT
The concept of the tableau is part of the answer to that question. The discussion involves transdisciplinary thought and historical work, but first, the discipline of ‘photography’. The old objective/subjective distinction began to fade, a process whose legacy is witnessed today, their virtual collapse across online social media image streams and practices. The return of the tableau was a recognition of the conceptual changes to these different histories and technologies, their re-evaluation, and their converging transformation in the status of photography, which now includes the contemporary recognition of their emotive value in changing time and space. The concept of the tableau in photography, then, is more than a fancy word for ‘picture’; it is symptomatic of a repressed debate: the active role that the photographer plays in staging and the visual arts in general and to the specific alterations in the ideological status of photography as a separate ‘medium’.
