The Photography Handbook

Terence Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415533027
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317309338
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Digital Media

The new edition of The Photography Handbook builds on previous editions' illuminating overview of the history, theory and practice of the creation and consumption of photographic images, and engages with the practical and theoretical implications of the explosion of new platforms for making, viewing and distributing images.

New materials in this edition includes new chapters on 'Photo-elicitation' and 'Photography and Technological Change', exploration and analysis of 'selfie' culture, and extensive discussion of the work and practices by a new generation photographic artists.

The Photography Handbook, Third edition also features:

• exploration and discussion of key photographic terms, including composition, framing, visualisation, formalism and realism
• analysis of the ethics of photojournalism, and ethical issues specific to digital photography practice today
• case studies illustrating different photographic production practices and specific related issues, including an assignment for the Guardian, the Libyan People's Bureau siege, and the work of war photographers
• a foregrounding of digital photographic practices, and exploration of areas including photographic manipulation, digital photojournalism, citizen journalists and copyright on the internet
• end of chapter summaries of key points, and an extensive glossary of essential photography terms.

The Photography Handbook, Third edition is an invaluable resource for students, scholars and practitioners of photography, and all those seeking to understand its place in today's society.

Chapter 1 Historical outline of photographic representation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315651200-2

‘Jeeves,’ I said, ‘have you ever pondered on Life?’

‘From time to time, sir, in my leisure moments.’

‘Grim, isn’t it, what?’

‘Grim, sir?’

‘I mean to say, the difference between things as the way they look and things as they are.’

(P.G. Wodehouse 1930: 18)

The history of photography over the last 180 years traces the emergence of a practice that has revolutionised our understanding of visual communication. We can therefore propose that, in contrast to the conventional approach of describing the invention and development of the medium, we should study the medium’s growth in social, cultural and psychological significance to offer an understanding of the photographic phenomenon. But in order to do this it becomes necessary to provide both the historical background and philosophical rationale for photographic representation. This can help us to understand some of the reasons and influences that might explain how the medium has attained such significance in contemporary society. Above all, photography can be seen as a product of its time, reflecting the intellectual climate of its origins, as well as operating as an instrument of social change. Nonetheless, perhaps the most basic and fundamental question that needs to be addressed is: why is it that photographs seem to appear so realistic? And is it this assumed realism that accounts for its widespread influence? Is the answer of a purely mechanical nature, arising from quite plausible demonstrations that the camera works in a similar way to the eye and thus provides the same sort of information we obtain in everyday perception? Or is it because we have been brought up in a culture that has developed a particular set of interpretative conventions and strategies that enable its members to perceive photographic codes as realistic images?

We shall see that the opposition of the realist view of photographic representation to the conventionalist theories has haunted photography from the first years of the medium’s invention and seems to be surviving today’s impact of digital imagery. While the accumulating evidence appears to suggest that the photograph cannot be so easily written off as presenting a simplistic window on the world, it may be neither advantageous nor accurate to speak of photography constituting one of several visual languages. Instead, the photograph should be considered as a special kind of phenomenon, which amounts to a complex system of representation drawing upon differing aspects of our cognitive processes and social interpretations.

Photographic Realism

Photography seems to record, rather than interpret, a piece of world in front of the camera … the camera and lens are often regarded simply as pieces of machinery which allow an image, a duplicate, of the world to be transferred onto film.

(Kuhn 1985: 26)

When we come to consider how a photograph is able to provide an accurate and detailed rendition of the subject, we find ourselves impressed by the realism of the image. In many people’s view, a ‘good’ photograph is one that most accurately ‘looks like’ the thing it represents. If we hold up a photographic print and compare it to the subject, the image can appear to look more or less similar to the original (see Figure 1.1).

However, the argument for photographic realism goes beyond mere appearance, for our knowledge of the photographic apparatus (the camera) and its mechanism (the way it operates) provides sound reasons for believing the photograph records ‘reality’. This realist view of photography is based on two central, and related, convictions:

1. The camera is similar in construction to the eye and forms an image in much the same way as our natural organ of visual perception.
2. We think of photographs as ‘looking real’ because they reflect the same pattern of light to our eye as the object itself would normally emit.

On face value, this would seem to offer a very straightforward and convincing argument. Both eyes and cameras are chambered in their construction and appear to operate by the same optical principles – those of the camera obscura. At one end of the chamber is an aperture where an iris controls the amount of light that enters and which is to be focused by means of the lens. This projection of light casts an inverted image of the ‘world outside’ onto the other end of the ‘chamber’. In both cases it is a light-sensitive surface – the retina of the eye, the charge-coupled device (CCD) or film in the camera – which records the visual image. Indeed, it has been these instrumental characteristics of the camera that have been used to explain the function of our eyes. For example, in the 1930s, the physiologist Sherrington (1937–8: 105) in describing the eye’s construction went so far as to identify it with the camera: ‘the likeness to an optical camera is plain beyond seeking. … The eyeball is a little camera.’ Such an approach appears to be relatively straightforward and non-problematic. It suggests that, when looking at a photograph, the viewer sees the same array of information that is normally picked up by the retina of the eye. The photograph is held literally to re-present what we would have seen had we been in the position of the photographer at the precise moment the shutter was released. While this form of explanation may seem an obvious fact of our visual perception, it had not always been thought to be so. Despite a general awareness of the phenomenon of the camera obscura, which had been noted as far back as the third century BC (Minnaert 1993), it was not until the seventeenth century, the age of rationalism, that a connection was made between the camera and the functioning principles of the eye (Lindberg 1976: 178–208). (See Figure 1.2.)

Figure 1.1 Tree at Upper Swell, Gloucestershire, 1997.

Photograph by Terence Wright.

The Camera Obscura

Although photography itself has a relatively long history, camera-like devices had been in use by painters and draughtsmen over many centuries. The artist’s camera obscura, which was to become the ancestor of the modern photographic camera, was only one of many related optical devices that were employed to transcribe a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional picture-plane. The art historian Kenneth Clark (1949: 37), for example, points out that during the fifteenth century Piero della Francesca used the camera obscura for creating perspective images of three-dimensional scenes. Clark also mentions that Piero knew Alberti and it was Alberti (1435: 79) who is renowned for describing the picture as ‘a window on the world’, a metaphor which has had a lasting influence upon the visual arts. However, it was later recognised by Leonardo da Vinci, among others, that the pictorial representation of space posed a number of problems. One central concern was that an accurate impression of realism was obtainable only if the image was viewed at the centre of perspective and with only one eye. Otherwise, a variety of ambiguities and distortions could be encountered. For example, Leonardo had observed and analysed the perspective distortion, which occurs at the edge of the picture when painting a wide field of view, and this phenomenon can continue to pose problems for the present-day photographer when using a wide-angle lens.

Figure 1.2 Camera obscura: engraving from Athanasius Kircher (1671) Ars Magna Lucis et Umbra, p. 709.

Courtesy of the Science and Society Picture Library, Science Museum.

Vision and Representation

The analogy between the eye and the camera was first proposed in 1604 by Johann Kepler (see also Barrett 2011: 101). It then came to play a central role in the psychology and philosophy of perception for the next 350 years. It also had the added benefit of providing a scientific rationale for Western pictorial representation. Kepler’s theory of vision had suggested there was a strong similarity between the way the eye functioned and the optical principles of the camera obscura. In particular, he felt that his analogy could overcome the classical problem of how images of objects that were far away and much larger than the eye could find their way inside such a small organ of perception.

The term camera obscura was derived from the Latin for ‘dark chamber’ and it has been suggested that this principle was observed by Aristotle as far back as 32 BC.¹ Going a little further back, Plato’s description of the cave bears a striking resemblance to the images (or shadows) projected on the interior wall of the camera obscura. It is no coincidence that Susan Sontag opens her account On Photography with ‘In Plato’s Cave’, though nowadays, according to Sontag, ‘this very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world’ (1977: 3). In the early eleventh century, the Arabian scholar Ibn Al-Haitham (usually known in the West as Alhazen) used a camera obscura in astronomical studies and went on to propose a theory of vision that relied upon a convergence of light rays. According to Schwarz (1985: 120), it was Kepler who, in 1611, was the first to invent the optical device known as the camera lucida. If this is correct, Kepler’s stature in the history of photography is further enhanced. Not only would he have been the first to suggest that the eye operated on the same principles as the camera obscura but his invention of the camera lucida would have provided Talbot with a drawing device that would have had a profound influence on the invention of photography some 200 years later. Perhaps it was Talbot’s (1844) association with this equipment that first led him to describe photography as ‘photogenic drawing’. The difficulties that Talbot encountered in using the camera lucida forced him to return to his earlier experiments of using the camera obscura to project an image onto paper and then to make that image permanent.

However, the important point for photography is that a theory of pictorial representation evolved which had a firm basis in the current understanding of the optical and physical mechanisms of vision. In our present age of digital technology we have inherited this tradition of developing representational systems that aim to replicate our current understanding of visual processes. For example, the goals of ‘simulation’ or ‘mimesis’ remain central to the development of 3D movies, which also aim to use our current understanding of our perceptual processes to achieve their effect. As well as today’s virtual-reality systems, a further consequence of the analogy has been the introduction of a sequence of analogies, between our perceptual systems and the currently available technologies.² These analogies suggest that visual representations should present themselves to the viewer in a way that emulates the human perceptual apparatus. This is one way in which systems of representation reflect current thinking and become typical products of their historical period (see Penny 1994: 199–213).

The philosophical importance of Kepler’s analogy was recognised by Descartes, and largely through his agency it came to have a lasting influence on the sciences and the arts alike. In 1637, Descartes, in his Dioptrics, described an experiment which demonstrated the analogy’s validity and served to explain how the image is formed on the retina of the eye. The experiment (performed initially by Scheiner) claimed to demonstrate the camera-like principles of the mammalian eye. A dissected ox-eye was placed in the blind of a window, looking outside. Some of the membranes were gradually removed from the back of the eye until it was thin enough to be translucent without breaking. These were replaced by tissue paper which was held to have a similar function to the ground-glass screen of a plate camera. As the room was darkened an inverted image of the world outside became visible on the back of the eye; as Descartes himself put it, ‘not perhaps without wonder or pleasure’. This was held to demonstrate conclusively that the eye, operating on the same principles as the camera, produced a projected image which could, in turn, be detected by the brain (see Figure 1.3).

It was Descartes who played a leading role during a period of dramatic change in philosophical and scientific thinking. Although he wrote little on the arts, his principles and methods (as well as his general contribution to the prevailing intellectual climate) instigated the seventeenth-century revolution in cultural thought. For example, this period, which set in chain a sequence of scientific advances that led to the invention of photography, was marked by the formulation of aesthetic theories that came to terms with the new technology of the medium of print. Furthermore, it can be seen as a period of redefining communication and the role of the reader in the communicative process:

From this moment on, gradually but increasingly there developed a race of authors who write to an indefinite body of readers, personally undifferentiated and unknown who accept this separation as a primary condition of their creative ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Historical outline of photographic representation
• 2 Pre-production
• 3 The photographic image
• 4 Post-production
• 5 Photo-elicitation
• 6 The documentary photograph
• 7 Photography as a cultural critique
• 8 The ethics of photojournalism
• 9 Photography and technological change
• 10 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index