A Companion to Photography

Stephen Bull

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781405195843
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118598801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

The study of photography has never been more important. A look at today's digital world reveals that a greater number of photographs are being taken each day than at any other moment in history. Countless photographs are disseminated instantly online and more and more photographic images are earning prominent positions—and garnering record prices—in the rarefied realm of top art galleries.

Reflecting this dramatic increase in all things photographic, A Companion to Photography presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore a variety of key areas of current debate around the state of photography in the twenty-first century. Essays are grouped and organized in themed sections—including photographic interpretation, markets, popular photography, documents, and fine art—and provide comprehensive coverage of the subject. Representing a diversity of approaches, essays are written by both established and emerging photographers and scholars, as well as various experts in their respective areas.

A Companion to Photography offers scholars and professional photographers alike an essential and up-to-date resource that brings the study of contemporary photography into clear focus.

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Introduction: Photography in the Twenty‐first Century

Stephen Bull

Photography in the Twenty‐first Century

In the twenty‐first century, photography involves everyone. With the use of digital cameras on hand‐held devices to take pictures, and with the distribution of images online, more photographs are being made and viewed than at any other time in history. Most people across the world are taking photographs, appear in photographs, are looking at photographs, and are talking about photographs. Simultaneously, certain photographic images have become firmly established as art in the rarefied space of the gallery, and such photographs continue to break records for sales in the auction room. In the light of all this, it is appropriate that the study of photography, from schools to undergraduate and postgraduate level, and as an area of scholarly debate in general, has expanded during the past few decades to create a lively and wide‐ranging discussion about the subject.

This Companion to Photography is a collection of essays covering key contemporary photographic debates. The book is organized into thematic sections, each Part containing chapters newly written for this book by specialists in their areas, representing a diversity of approaches to photography. Many authors will be familiar names to most readers, other authors have emerged as distinct voices in their respective spheres of study over the past few years. A few are publishing their writing in the context of a book for the first time, adding further fresh perspectives to the discussion. As a collection, this volume forms a resource for the central ideas relating to photography in the twenty‐first century.

Structure of the Book

Themes

While this Companion to Photography is designed so the chapters can be read in any order, there is also a sequence to the chapters and to the six Parts in which they appear. These Parts move the reader from more general themes relating to photography through to the final Part VI that focuses on the specifics of photography as art. Most chapters include one or more cross‐references to other chapters in this book, indicating where ideas, imagery, authors, and practitioners overlap (sometimes in harmony, at other times with a stimulating clash of views). Part I, “Themes,” contains six chapters, each introducing and debating a central theme. While these themes require consideration in their own right within the first section they also resonate across other sections throughout the volume.

Fittingly, Chapter 2, Sabine T. Kriebel's “Histories,” sets the scene for twenty‐first‐century debates by providing a history of histories of photography, from the nineteenth century up to now. Kriebel considers the approaches taken in a number of otherwise rarely discussed histories, such as Gaston Tissandier's pioneering A History and Handbook of Photography, first published in the 1870s, and Erich Stenger's The History of Photography: Its Relation to Civilization and Practice. The latter book presented a German perspective on photographic history and was translated into English in 1939, a year that marked both the eve of the Second World War and the centenary of the official announcement of photography. Each historical viewpoint that Kriebel analyses tells a differing story: from nationalistic histories, to those emphasizing technical quality, to art‐based perspectives where individual practitioners are foregrounded, and then, at the turn of the millennium, to a broadening out of approaches and a resistance to the fetishizing of artists/photographers as individual authors.

The histories that Kriebel considers tend to focus on certain areas of the world. In Chapter 3, “Locating Photography,” Christopher Pinney addresses the point that most histories of photography should actually be thought of as “histories of photography in Europe and North America.” In his chapter, Pinney demonstrates how photography was swiftly globalized, both via European and American photographers traveling from the West to the “rest” of the world, and also, vitally, through the rapid dissemination of the technology of photography across the planet. With this in mind, Pinney considers the consistencies and contradictions of what he proposes as a “world system of photography.”

Along with the spatial context for photographs, another key theme relating to photography is time. Often, Anthony Luvera argues in Chapter 4, “The Participation of Time in Photography,” theoretical discussions around photography and time have focused on ideas such as the brief moment of time in which the photograph is taken and the continuing existence of that image as time around it moves on. While acknowledging the significance of such important elements, Luvera advances these ideas. His chapter argues that the full process of making the photograph is an overlooked area that requires attention. Through the examples of a number of collaborative projects, Luvera suggests that this process often involves the cooperation of many participants and the conjunction of a range of social influences—before, during, and after the period in which the photograph is made.

In Chapter 5, another aspect of time is considered. Martha Langford takes in references from around the world to survey memory in relation to a wide range of imagery, from snapshots to art photography. Her chapter, “Photographic Acts and Arts of Memory,” is also broad historically, zooming out and then zooming in on photographic works across the decades—from the 1970s until now. With a focus throughout on how photography and memory coalesce and contradict, Langford's chapter provides an extensive catalog of the vital significance of memory and time to photographic practice.

In Chapter 6, David Bate asks a series of questions about an idea and a term that has also seemed central to photography since the 1970s: photography's perceived “indexicality,” linking the photograph to the world. To suggest answers to his questions, for his chapter “The Indexical Imagination,” Bate goes back to the origins of semiotic terminology (using sources such as Roland Barthes' Elements of Semiology) and considers how these ideas came to be applied to photography. Bate does this in order to determine the roots of the term indexicality, as well as to suggest an updated and more sophisticated theory of our experience of photographs – one that emphasizes the spectator and their imagination.

Photographs, Elizabeth Edwards argues in Chapter 7, don't just relate to the world, they are part of it. Edwards' “The Thingness of Photography” contends that photographs are real, not just in the physical, material sense, but in relation to a wider range of sensory perception. This includes a discussion of the oral and the aural (as the experience of photographs often involves speaking and listening), as well as silence and gesture. Her chapter concludes with an examination of the physical context of the archive, where even the smell of printed photographs, stored in boxes, becomes important to the experience of the picture.

While digital images may lack some of the sensory properties that Edwards discusses, the development of the internet has led to a vast increase in archives in the form of databases of virtual information, in which photographs play a central role. In Chapter 8, “Beyond Representation? The Database‐Driven Image and the Non‐Human Spectator,” Katrina Sluis looks at where and how these digital images are seen. Encountered as part of almost incomprehensibly huge databases and retrieved for onscreen viewing, photographs online become “content” to be processed via metadata (such as information embedded into the file at the time of its making). This is often followed by the image being tagged, “liked,” and/or rated—via social media, for example, or photo‐sharing websites. These images, in terms of both their content and their surrounding contextual data, are, in turn, recognized—sometimes by human interaction, but often automatically. They then become linked and searchable elements of databases. If the “spectator” of the image is as likely to be non‐human as they are human, Sluis asks, what is the process by which photographs are now encountered, understood, and interpreted in the twenty‐first century?

Interpretation

The importance of interpretation provides the focus for Part II of the book. Since the 1960s, the semiotics discussed by Bate in Chapter 6 have become established as central to much of the formal study of photographic meanings. With Chapter 9, “Semiotics,” Paul Cobley and David Machin begin Part II by applying the semiotic ideas of “denotation” and “connotation” to a close reading of four photographs. As well as providing a clear case for the significance of elements such as pose, objects, and settings in the interpretation of photographs, Cobley and Machin go further, analyzing ideas from Charles Sanders Peirce to suggest that concepts such as cultural habit and emotional response must be considered too.

Matthew Lindsey also looks beyond photographs themselves to consider the importance of context and of text found with and within images—as well as the idea of photographs themselves as texts. Along the way, his Chapter 10, “A Culture of Texts,” reflects upon the conception of photography and how photography as a medium is interpreted. At the end of Lindsey's chapter, he examines case studies where text is a vital augmentation to the photographs and, beyond this, instances where words even replace the photographs entirely.

Case studies are also central to Kathy Kubicki's Chapter 11, “Psychoanalysis and Photography.” Further shifting the focus of interpretation to the role of the viewer, Kubicki begins by discussing key ideas from psychoanalysis, such as Freud's concept of “the unconscious” and Jacques Lacan's “mirror stage” (sometimes translated as the “mirror phase”) in order to explain the formation of sexuality and the subject. When considering these ideas in relation to the practice of Mary Kelly and Cindy Sherman, artists who experiment with the formation of the self, it is clear, Kubicki's chapter argues, that concepts from authors using psychoanalysis, such as Julia Kristeva and Laura Mulvey, should be acknowledged and applied to understand the work.

Mulvey is often associated with her immensely influential work on “the gaze.” Her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” first published in 1975, has continued to be debated and revised throughout the decades. In Chapter 12, “Reviewing the Gaze,” Roberta McGrath considers this essay and many other central concepts relating to looking. Her chapter, drawing upon ideas by authors such as Foucault, takes us from the emergence of photography during the nineteenth century, in a time of increasing spectacle and surveillance, to the development of the idea of the gaze itself. Broadening out from a focus on the individual viewer as subjective reader of an image and text, McGrath's chapter ends Part II, “Interpretation,” by reconsidering the gaze via debates about the wider sensual and political contexts within which photographs are seen and interpreted.

Markets

Most photographs have some relation to commerce. In Part III, “Markets,” four authors consider the range of ways in which photographs—and ideas about photography itself—are marketed. In Chapter 13, Annebella Pollen uses the UK company Boots (founded in Nottingham, UK, in 1849) as a case study in marketing photography to the general public. Studying how Boots advertised its photographic services, and examining rev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Themes
• Part II: Interpretation
• Part III: Markets
• Part IV: Popular Photography
• Part V: Documents
• Part VI: Art
• Index
• End User License Agreement