Photography as a Natural Language

Hollis Frampton’s investment in the teachings of Ezra Pound led him to extend the properties of the ideographic picture—which Pound located within the Chinese written character—to photographic media. Working in the wake of abstract expressionism, Frampton revives a theme previously championed by Barnett Newman in an early exhibition of abstract expressionist work, to create an “idea-complex that makes contact” with everyday life, generated by ritual. Frampton’s first feature-length film, Zorns Lemma (1970, 16mm, color), which began as a series of photographic still images from 1962-63 called Word Pictures, provides a photographic translation of Imagist aesthetics. As previous scholars and the artist himself have noted, Zorns Lemma puts forth an autobiographical statement of the artist’s transition from poetry to still photography to moving images, while also mapping a history of art making. In this paper, I demonstrate that it furthermore establishes the transformation of the artist’s image theory, from pictures to embodied processes tied to everyday experience. I argue for the significance of Frampton’s theory of embodied images as a natural history and a means of historicizing photographic media within a larger narrative of art history. The paper will articulate the centrality of Zorns Lemma within the artist’s career as he explores the nexus of gesture, image, and text towards an understanding of natural language processing, which later informs Frampton’s experiments with computer processing.