Writing About Douglas Writing About Douglas Writing

To my knowledge, the first time Douglas Crimp wrote publicly about his previous writing was in his article “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” published in October in 1980. Looking back at “Pictures,” from the same publication in the previous year, he admits: In my attempt to continue the logic of the development I was outlining, I came eventually to a stumbling block.… I effected that transition with a kind of fudge, an epigraph quotation suspended between two sections of the text.¹ The quotation was from Henry James’ ghost story “The Jolly Corner” (1908): The presence before him was a presence.

Douglas goes on to elaborate on that caesura by discussing Sherrie Levine’s photographs of other photographers’ photographs, writing: déjà vu. He added to his theory of postmodernism—which, in “Pictures,” he had expressed in his now-endlessly quoted line —a new, crucial inflection, something he was not yet ready to articulate when he.