The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture

Moritz Neumüller, Moritz Neumüller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317212362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture is a seminal reference source for the ever-changing field of photography.

Comprising an impressive range of essays and interviews by experts and scholars from across the globe, this book examines the medium's history, its central issues and emerging trends, and its much-discussed future. The collected essays and interviews explore the current debates surrounding the photograph as object, art, document, propaganda, truth, selling tool, and universal language; the perception of photography archives as burdens, rather than treasures; the continual technological development reshaping the field; photography as a tool of representation and control, and more.

One of the most comprehensive volumes of its kind, this companion is essential reading for photographers and historians alike.

1
Images, Photographs and Visual Culture

1.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

This publication is laid out in seven chapters, each of which may be read separately, although there is a certain hierarchical, or rather narrative structure. Naturally, there are points of connections between the contributions, and overlapping themes. The first chapter is maybe the most dense and hardest to digest. In exchange, the reader will be rewarded with a complete and often surprising spectrum of the main research questions in contemporary photographic theory.

Bernd Stiegler’s claim that the praxeological turn might open up “a different history of photography” and, indeed, a “Copernican Revolution of photography theory,” shows the profound changes we are seeing in our field. It is—together with Parr and Badger’s “revisionist” history of photography through the photobook (Chapter 6.2), Gael Newton’s view from the periphery (Chapter 2.1) and Friedrich Tietjen’s essay on post-post-photography (Chapter 7.5)—a true challenge for how we traditionally have told (ourselves) the story of the photographic medium. The translation of this particular piece gave us many headaches (my special thanks go to Claudi Nir for helping me in this monumental task), and some of the sentences and terminological intricacies might still reflect their origin in a German research context, which will make it a somewhat challenging text for American and British readers. However, I believe that the originality of the piece sets the right tone for the book, even if—as James Elkins has stated in his brilliant foreword—it may be “more articulate than many practitioners and scholars require.”

Another key contribution to this book is Alison Nordström’s elaborate analysis of the photograph as an object. I had heard her lecture on this issue more than ten years ago, at a conference in Birmingham, UK, organized by the great and much missed Rhonda Wilson. A woman with many obligations, Alison told me early in our discussions that she would not be able to write an essay, and that I should look for someone else to step in. But how could I accept that? Alison had been involved in the thought process for this publication from the very beginning, and had even helped with a preliminary list of possible contributors, some of whom have made it into the final selection of authors. Furthermore, one could hardly imagine anybody with more insight into the question of materiality of the photographic medium than she has. After many years at the George Eastman House, she is now an independent curator, and thus sees the museum from a privileged point of view that had to be included. Thus, I gambled everything on one card and asked her if we could do an interview instead of an essay, to address the questions of photographic materiality in the framework of recent technological, social and institutional changes. Alison has been rigorous in the editing process, to ensure that all the arguments are well presented and clear, and that the resulting interview captures both the dynamism and the passion that this subject engenders.

For similar reasons, Charlotte Cotton also elected the interview format. What interested me as a starting point was the motivation behind, and conceptual context of her two seminal books Photography as Contemporary Art and Photography is Magic. I have known Charlotte since the early 2000s and have followed her work closely, including many of the exhibitions she has curated around the globe. However, I had never had the privilege of having a longer conversation with the author of the two publications that nearly all my students cite in their artist statements and final theses. I was impressed by her precise verbal expression during our Skype conversation, and even more so when I listened to the recording afterwards and realized that Charlotte’s impeccable clarity allowed a direct transcription to the written page, with hardly any editing necessary. Perhaps the most surprising argument Charlotte makes is that 9/11 effected a more seminal change in the creative industries, particularly the editorial, publishing, advertising and commercial sectors of photography, than the establishment of digital technologies or the economic crash.

One of the big achievements of visual studies is the inclusion of questions of gender and identity into the discourse of art history, and it was clear that this had to be reflected in the choice of authors and subjects of this book. David Martin, whom I met at the 2016 conference of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), seemed to be the perfect choice. He proposed to take on the task of (re)defining the Male Gaze together with Suzanne Szucs and James W. Koschoreck. The only problem was that they produced an article that was double the size of what I had asked for. So we agreed to make two pieces out of it, and the best place to break the chapter would be immediately after the discussion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. I am deeply grateful for their brilliant double-contribution that explores the complexities of the gaze through photography and visual culture.

If the gaze is directed at the reflecting display of a camera phone, we are confronted with a visual form of expression that has become a decisive cultural phenomenon in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the selfie. When looking for somebody to reflect on this subject, however, I saw that many authors demonized the selfie as a narcissistic and void gesture, a caricature of the traditional self-portrait, and a pitiful side-product of the democratization of photography. While I do share the opinion that for a serious student or practitioner of photography, it is important to be able to make self-portraits that go beyond the duck-face gesture, and I feel deeply disturbed when I see them taken at inappropriate places or situations such as Holocaust memorials (if you do not believe it, google Shahak Shapira’s Yolocaust project, or the photobook hashtag by Marta Mantyka), I wanted to include a study on the phenomenon that goes beyond the common selfie-shaming discourse. Thus, I was relieved when I found out that Alise Tifentale—whom I had met years ago at the Kaunas photography festival, when she was still editor of the formidable Foto Kvartals magazine—had participated in a research project called Selfiecity, together with a team led by Lev Manovich at the City University of New York. Her essay reminds us that funeral selfies and other faux pas “do not necessarily represent the whole genre—rather they are outstanding exceptions,” and presents a case study that shows us that there are significant differences among the selfies posted from different cities, suggesting preferred styles and aesthetics.

At the same SPE conference where I met David Martin, I also heard Lisa Richman’s talk on the other Migrant Mother, a Mexican woman with her child photographed by Dorothea Lange, one year before her world-famous image of a Californian pea picker. Despite the similarity between these images in aesthetics, emotion, subject, perspective, and pose, the Mexican Migrant Mother has remained for the most part one of thousands of unseen images within the FSA archive. Richman claims that the radical difference in their circulation begs the question, why the 1936 Migrant Mother became the icon while the 1935 Migrant Mother remained unknown. Further complicating the reception of this New Deal Madonna, is the fact that the human subject, Florence Thompson, is actually of Cherokee descent. However, the absence of any racial marker within the caption (and later the title) made it possible for the national US audience to identify her as European American, and see in her what they wanted to see: American strength in the face of adversity.

The last contribution in this chapter is also based on the comparison of image-pairs. It starts with a personal memory of the author, which leads us to the core subject of the article, an analysis of Stefan Koppelkamm’s documentation of buildings and streets in Görlitz and other places in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). He first photographed them in 1990, just after the fall of the wall, and visited the very same places again, ten years later. Always taken with the same lens, the same focal lengths and from the same position, Koppelkamm’s archive of before and after pictures, according to the author, Ines Weizman, allows us to practice Walter Benjamin’s “telescoping of the past through the present,” a stereoscopic reading in the course of which the past can be experienced and remembered thanks to the montage of fragments of history. The issues at stake have been further developed by Ines and Eyal Weizman, in their book Before and After, which shows image-comparisons as a means of analysis and surveillance.

I would like to thank Stefan Koppelkamm for allowing us to showcase his Görlitz series, and Alise Tifentale for the illustrations to her study. The other two photographs in this chapter are by Dorothea Lange; one has become an icon, the other is practically unknown, even though they show nearly the same content and were taken only one year apart. These images are freely available for download on the website of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, as are many other works from the FSA/OWI Collection. I chose to show the standard, retouched version of the Migrant Mother, but want to mention that in the original version a thumb can be seen in the right foreground of the image. Lange had it retouched, for aesthetic reasons, something that annoyed Roy Stryker, the director of the FSA’s photographic unit, who insisted on the objective documentary character of the project. In this context, it is recommended to also study the contact sheet, showing the mother and children in the tent, taken at different ranges and angles, in order to understand the making of one of the most important photographic icons of the twentieth century.

1.1 How to Do Things with Photographs

Towards a Praxeology of Photography

Bernd Stiegler

It is well known that in the past years—in fact in the past decades – humanities, cultural and media studies have taken various turns, whereby the entire field of research has frequently been reviewed and reorganized and leading premises have supposedly been turned upside down so that now they are back on their feet (Bachmann-Medick 2006).

So far, however, photography theory navigated in the shadow of these new turns, twists, and changes and mostly followed—as well as the literature studies—the conductive and dominant positions, such as semiotics or phenomenology, discourse analysis, deconstruction or gender studies. Now, one of the latest developments in visual culture and beyond is the focus on action and use: a praxeology. A pragmatic– praxeological orientation of cultural, media and image theory is promising a departure from established categories and classification systems and a dynamization of the epistemic, aesthetic and social processes.

But what could such a reorientation of photographic theory look like? What are the consequences if the methods and practices, but not discourses, epochs, and schools or ideologies, take center stage? And—first of all—what are the obstacles that need to be avoided?

The Scylla of Performing Images

It has become a trend in both visual theory and pictorial science to talk about the power of the image. Whether W.J.T. Mitchell believes the images gain a life of their own, possess an actively formative power according to Gerhard Paul, or as Horst Bredekamp suggests, form autonomous activities: images are generally regarded as agents of their own power (Mitchell 2008, Paul 2013: 630, Bredekamp 2010).

If Bredekamp attempts to transfer the “Speech Act Theory” onto visual culture within his “Image Act Theory,” then it will truly be turned on its head, as Lambert Wiesing has pointed out (2013).While the “Speech Act Theory” of Austin and Searles determines language as action and therefore part of a Theory of Action, Bredekamp replaces man as the center of action with images. In other words, it is no longer the humans who perform actions through language, as it would have been within the Speech Act Theory, but images. They—instead of human beings—become the acting agents. The performative turn will continue turning until the human being has been transformed from agent into the medium.

This recoding of the “Theory of Action” definitely has dramatic consequences, because now, according to Gerhard Paul, the entirety of history has been delegated to images. He states that it is not only humans but also (and especially) the images, that shape and affect history. Paul’s book title BilderMACHT (ImagePOWER) emphasizes his views, that images have a special force or even power and a life of their own (2013: 629). Such attribution is problematic on both a political and a theoretical level. It feels a little bit like being taken back to the text theory of the 1970s and 1980s—back then it was the “text” that wrote history and acted as its agent. The twists and turns of the écriture were followed with a kind of fascination and the expansion of the differential game into the infinite was made into a virtue and a demand. Accordingly one had to “inscribe” oneself if one wanted to say something, but it was the text actually doing the talking. These periods, when the world was made of written text, seemed over but now celebrate a comeback within visual culture, in a modified form. Images, which seemed rather passive, now become key actors and performers.

However, images only come alive in movies (and in particular in films such as Night at the Museum) and even there only on the screen and in the midst of a narration to acting players. Otherwise, they are generally quiet. Thus, the strong emphasis on the “Image Act Theory” renders useless any of the possibilities that an action or praxeological theory of images could offer.

If nowadays one wants to analyze the usages of images it has nothing to do with the supposed independent existence of life, or with a non-linguistic realm of signification and meaning, that opens immediately like Ali Baba’s legendary treasure chamber. Today, we must refrain from replacing text with images. Otherwise, we run the risk of not only repeating the theory of the history of the 1970s and 1980s in a different way but also feeding the magic of the image and preventing people from being in charge of their actions.

The dawning of a post-historical age, which had been proposed in the same years, would not benefit the kind of Visual History that Paul describes either. Though in his concept, Visual History tends to understand the images, not as an active or rather generative power (“aktive bzw. generative Kraft”), but to understand history as an effect of these images, as mentioned on the inside of the book cover of BilderMACHT (2013).

We become witnesses to a new usurpation of history through the images. And again, human actions are turned into images. However, images are being used, manipulated, decoded and distributed as a medium for and by these actions—be it consciously or not. How this is done and what consequences follow would be the actual subject of the visual history. If the intent is to be ...