>>2993634Once this isomorphism broke down (with the spectacular rise of mass-produced, commodified images in the mid-20th century, the increasing detachment of the visual signifier from its referent and of the referent from reality), the frame was figuratively re-incorporated in the image as, essentially, one more type of contents among others. Because it now belied the determining conditions of representation which avant-garde photography had historically sought to transcend, the self-referentiality of the frame became inadequate as a critical or aesthetic strategy for representing society, reality, and/or the individual outside of the predetermined possibilities provided by late modern capitalism. Formally speaking, this tension between reactionary commercialism and contemporary photography (to borrow from Benjamin again, the issue is not to think of *photography as being art* but rather of **art as being photography**) manifested in the 1970s as the increasing imbrication of conceptual- and performance-art with photography, film and video, on the one hand, and the increasing presence of photographs in galleries and exhibitions, on the other. The latter privileged the typical presentation of the photograph in a thin black or metal frame, centred by a white matte that covers over the edges of the actual print--a gesture which suppressed the specific representational potential of photographs in this moment, namely their seriality, ephemerality, and ubiquitous presence in and as the world beyond the gallery. The appropriation of mass-mediated images and cultural tropes by photography in the 1980s and 1990s indicated a renewed avant-garde attempt at representing (rather than merely reiterating or reproducing) the inherent abstractions of modern reality. [cont.]