PhotoWhat?: Expanding Fields

This week's article, Photography's Expanded Field by George Baker, was an overview of how photography has been theorized and how this theorization has fallen into a sort of loop that has not allowed recent developments in photography to be thought or mapped out.
According to Baker, the photographic object is one that is in crisis mode, seeing as it has now "succumbed" to digital recordings. To illustrate this point, Baker discusses Rosalind Krauss's ideas about the "theoretical object." This said object is one that encompasses how artistic objects, during the 1970's and 1980's, adjusted themselves within the parameters of photography, or in other words the interpretation of the photographic developed into other mediums. Now photography is doing the same thing as it pushes itself into the cinematic.
This is where the altered forms of photography can develop, and it is specifically these altered forms that need to be mapped out beginning with Baker's two terms "narrativity" and "stasis." Narrativity describes the ability of an image to contain narrative movement within itself while stasis refers to the ability of a photograph to be a stopped moment of time. These terms fall into line with how photography has always been looked at, terms of opposition. It seems that up until this point photography has wedged itself between ontology and social usage, between art and technology, and etc.

Now though, when describing contemporary photography usage, the terms of narrativity and stasis, among others, have left the photograph in the neither/nor. For the photograph is neither narrative, nor stasis, but rather a function of not existing as either one of these terms. Through a structuralist lens, the photograph is both a function of not-narrative and not-stasis at the same time, which has allowed photography to move from in-between two things to the center of an ever growing web of new forms.
While this has opened up photography to an "expanded field" of opportunity, Baker warns against some foreseeable problems. For instance, his first fear is the return to the traditional, to the medium-specificity that was the core of modern art. He also warns against the tying down of these new forms through new terms such as when Krauss's essay freed some work from the term "sculpture", only to find the work tied down by terms such as "architecture" and "landscape."
Finally, Baker describes the main problem with work thus far- the silent and complex nature of the effects of such work. This is why Baker feels that a mapping of the contemporary movements is necessary. The mapping would not only allow a greater understanding of what is occurring in contemporary photography, but it would also allow a deconstruction of these effects, thus opening more doors to more forms.
For now though, things are developing at a such a rate that the mapping of them seems nearly impossible as evidenced by the end of his essay, when artist Nancy Davenport "grabbed my pen and paper and began to swirl lines in every direction, circling around my oppositions and squares..." as an action to evoke all of the other possibilities.