There is nothing any more but surface. Representation is all there is and can ever be. There, simply, can be no outside to this endless round of meaningless meaning. What we experience as reality is, in reality, the reality effect. The age of a life beyond the image has gone forever. Now, all we can know are media projections, the beams of flickering images, and the whirr of tape heads. 

 If surface is all there is, if what you see is what you get, then any claim of a photographic dialogue with the world is an illusion. If meaning is constructed within the frame, photography turns out to be far more deluded than art. 

 The implications of postmodern for photography are immense, most obviously if, pace Saussure, meaning is constructed internal to the frame: then photography becomes exactly like any other form of art. Having excised reference the photograph is reduced to a painting with light.