Abstracting Photography- Walead Beshty

I love Walead Beshty's work- I really do. His prose, perhaps, could do with a little simplification- it was an incredibly dense article in theory, history, and vocabulary.

In Beshty's essay, he constructs a 22-page journey that meanders along photographic history and theory, making pit stops at many crucial moments along the way. From Barthes to Baker, he painstakingly tracks the rises and falls of photography as an artistic medium, moving towards the contemporary fear of the "death" of photography.
"…the Barthesian theorization of the "this has been" contained in the photographic image, has become the "this has been" of "Photography" itself." (293)
What Barthes refers to with "this has been" is the idea that there is both an objective and subjective record of something that has concretely happened; Beshty takes this a step further in arguing that the state of photography is spiraling into disintegration as the referent and context become further and further apart. 
By tracking the numerous idiosyncrasies of the medium, he is able to pinpoint multiple locations that photography falls apart, yet I would personally argue that these places are ripe to be mined of interesting work- isn't that what the Conceptual art movement set out to do with the murky referred/referent relationship that photography has? But he presses on, pointing out the conflicting nature of photography in its dimensionality (it's both an object and a compressed representation of another reality), its inherent documentative power (photojournalism, snap chat, etc), its utilization in shaping culture/politics (photojournalism, 'leaked' pictures, hacked data, etc), and its Cartesian functionality for categorizing things (Anna Atkins comes to mind). 
Through all these sources, it becomes apparent that he is interested in the subjective/objective duality of the photograph, and the 'dead' quality that it takes on in relation to the moment it endeavors to represent. Though the majority of people understand that photos are mere facsimiles, we are often swayed by 'visual evidence' that they seem to provide, even though the awareness of manipulation and tampering is ubiquitous. 
He basically comes to rest upon the suggestion that, by using new 'methodologies' to create photographs, artists can expand the meaning of photography while simultaneously questioning and critiquing the historical foundations of the medium. By abstracting photography, the viewer is helped to confront the inherent subjectivity of photographs; if the referent is absent, then what becomes of the photographic reference? His personal preference for exploring the 'in-between' spaces seems to parallel this murkiness that photographs often enter with the divergence of content/context.  

CAVEAT: Trying to do a reasonable summary that properly articulates all of his theory is well outside of my capabilities, as I'm not entirely sure what he's implying all the time; the essay is very complex and he speaks metaphorically quite often, which complicates things.