On Framing

When I see photographs by Anita Bunn, it's like television. I trust her framing, that this is what I need to see. But in this trust comes the realization that there is something beyond the frame. Television never allows for that realization.

While watching sports, the playing field is reduced to the site of action: the ball being thrown, caught, hit, etc. When my grandma tells me things she saw on the news, there is no room in the discussion for the other side of the story, or that beyond the frame may be a more important story.

Slavoj Zizek says it a little different. It's not beyond the frame, but between two frames. There are always two frames, the visible and invisible frame; the frame that displays the painting, and the frame created by the structure of our perception. There is the frame of presentation and the frame of subjectivity.

The frame and the realization of the frame create a gap, a gap where meaning is made. In this way, this photograph by Bunn does not create an understanding or appreciation of inside/outside, but something much more complicated. It depicts spaces of between and beyond.