Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America
Citation
Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America.” October, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81.
A second part, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part 2,” appeared in October, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 58–67.
Both parts reprinted in: Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 196–219. (NOT consulted in this round.)
Relevance
The founding theoretical statement of October journal’s approach to photography as a semiotic index rather than an expressive or humanist document. Krauss draws on Peirce’s sign-theory to argue that photography’s essential character is indexical (a physical trace of the real) rather than iconic or symbolic — a move that implicitly challenges the humanist-expressionist reading of exhibitions like The Family of Man, where photographs were treated as transparent windows onto shared human experience. Though The Family of Man is not Krauss’s explicit subject, this essay establishes the theoretical vocabulary that later October critics (Sekula, Crimp, Solomon-Godeau) would deploy against the Steichen exhibition’s ideological claims.
October is named in CREDIBILITY.md as a Tier-2 peer-reviewed journal.
Key excerpts / pages
- Access status (2026-04-30): JSTOR URL
https://www.jstor.org/stable/778437attempted — returned HTTP 403; full text not retrieved. Body text NOT consulted in this round. - Journal, issue, and page range (October no. 3, pp. 68–81): carried from standard bibliographic citation in secondary literature, not independently verified against the article in this session.
- Part 2 (October no. 4, pp. 58–67): citation carried from secondary literature, not verified in this session.
- Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen does not engage extensively with Krauss’s theoretical framework directly — this essay is more foundational to the subsequent Sekula/Crimp/Solomon-Godeau strand. NOT re-fetched for page-level verification in this round.
Notes
- October was founded in 1976 by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson; this essay appeared in the third issue (Spring 1977), making it one of the journal’s earliest major theoretical statements.
- The indexicality argument became a standard reference point in photography theory of the late 1970s–1990s. Its relevance to Family of Man reception is indirect but structural: it provided the theoretical ground for critiquing humanist-expressionist photography as ideologically naive.
- Cross-reference to
src-sekula-1981andsrc-sekula-1986: Sekula’s Marxist critique operates in parallel with Krauss’s semiotic critique. - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: anchor for Family of Man reception. verified: false: JSTOR returned 403; body text NOT consulted in this round. Title, author, journal, issue, and page range carried from standard bibliographic citation in the photography-theory literature, not from a primary fetch.