Chuck Samuels has been delving into the mise en abîme of photography, and the photographic portrait, since 1991. Brought together under the title Becoming Photography in exhibitions in two venues, these different bodies of work arise from two paradigms, in Sylvain Campeau’s view: the now-settled issue of the originality of an artwork and the current universe of “unending ramifications.” Campeau acknowledges that the evolution of Samuels’s practice, between appropriation of the reputation of “illustrious forebears” and contestation of the “hierarchy of people and genres,” fits within the “dissolution of barriers among media,” which are now all similar, all digital. “This desire to become the photograph,” he notes, “was deployed at the very moment when it could provoke only out-and-out rejection.”