Tosca
The relationship between a still photograph and the live, moving performance from which it is taken can be extremely specious. To what extent is there a continuum? How far are they distinct? Further complications arise when the 'still' of a performance is no such thing, but has been created for its own sake although referring to some event somewhere else. In the latter case, therefore, where is the image and where is the performance? Does the 'life' of the action extend beyond the boundaries of the silver gelatin print? Additional problems arise from notions which would claim that a still reveals the essential of the action from which it has, indeed, been 'distilled'. But what can an inactive image really say about action and movement? In fact, how much is really understood about what movement is and what its form may be?
The trouble is that in this area of performance-photography theories of what the artists are doing are either too vague, being left at a simple statement that some relationship is being investigated without conclusions being drawn as to WHAT has been shown, or, conversely, critics have produced theories so complicated in their involved preciosity that they disincline the viewer from further thought. Nonetheless, the visual results are fascinating and performance-photography as an area of artistic activity continues to grow in importance in contemporary art.
Warner's exhibition stimulated many questions of this kind. He 'staged' seventeen of the turning-points in the action of Puccini 's opera Tosca in the form of framed, silver-gelatin prints. His intention was to investigate the transit of an image through various forms of expression. In this case, the images moved from words (the text