Contemporary Photography and Theory

Concepts and Debates

Sally Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Contemporary Photography and Theory offers an essential overview of some of the key critical debates in fine art photography today. Building on a foundational understanding of photography, it offers an in-depth discussion of five topic areas: identity, landscape and place, the politics of representation, psychoanalysis and the event. Written in an accessible style, it introduces the critical literature relevant to photography that has emerged over recent decades. Moving beyond seminal works by writers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, it enables readers to explore an extended canon of theorists including Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben. The book is illustrated throughout and analyses a range of works by established and emergent artists in order to show how these theoretical concepts are central to understanding contemporary photography. These 15 short essays encourage readers to apply critical thinking to both their own work and that of others. They are the perfect starting point for essays as well being of suitable length for assigned readings, making this the ideal resource for learning about contemporary photography and theory.

Part One
Photography and identity

We understand and negotiate the significance of photographs of the self on a daily basis: the portrait is perhaps the most popular form of vernacular and professional photography. However, what does it mean when fine art photographers engage with the genre of portrait photography? The chapters in this section consider how photographic history and writings on subjectivity can help us to understand what connects works by a diverse range of artists including Eileen Perrier, Zoe Strauss, Bettina von Zwehl, Hasan Elahi and Vivian Fu.

Chapter 1 considers the portrait through the categories of the honorific and the subjugated portrait alongside writings on subjectivity to demonstrate how particular kinds of ‘self’ are constructed through these categories. Chapter 2 looks at how two contemporary genres of portraiture – the blank portrait and the intimate record – comment upon and extend these early categories of photographic portraiture. To conclude this section, Chapter 3 will examine the impact of digital technology on the production, dissemination and meaning of photographic representations of the self.

1
The honorific and the subjugated portrait

Grace (2000) by Eileen Perrier is a series of twelve colour photographs. The images are all head-and-shoulders portraits taken in a studio with a neutral blue background and soft, flattering lighting. The subjects are posed; they are all seated with their body at a slight angle, their head is turned to the side and they gaze over their shoulder, above and to the left and of the camera. They are all smiling (Figures 1.1 and 1.3a-d).

Figure 1.1 Eileen Perrier, Grace, 2000. © Eileen Perrier. Courtesy of Eileen Perrier.

Figure 1.3a,b,c,d Eileen Perrier, Grace, 2000. © Eileen Perrier. Courtesy of Eileen Perrier.

This simple description belies these images’ engagement with the complex history of photographic representations of the self. As outlined in the Introduction, the history and meaning of photography is not singular. As such, photography is best understood by examining the interconnected discourses that give a range of analogue and digital technologies concerned with recording and producing images social, cultural and historical meaning. These discourses are constantly being written and rewritten, with new meanings forged and others abandoned. Many artists who work with photography are not concerned with refining or consolidating these meanings, but commenting upon or contesting them.

Perrier’s work is a good example of this. While, at first, Grace seems to be easily readable within the genre of portraiture – in particular, in relation to the honorific codes descended from painting that have dominated the formal photographic studio portrait since its invention – it does not simply reproduce these conventions but quotes them as a means of commenting upon them. In order to better understand the nature of Perrier’s interventions we need to explore the history of the photographic portrait.

The photographic portrait

Historically, portraiture was a privilege that belonged to the few who could afford to commission a painted likeness. However, the invention of photography allowed for the mass production of portraits. As such, the advent of photography is often seen as a technological development through which the privilege of portraiture was democratized. For example, in The Genius of Photography Gerry Badger writes that ‘everyone, thanks to photography, was given an identity – the daguerreotype portrait was a magical proof of existence’.¹ However, the way in which the photograph was able to function as ‘proof of existence’ is complex. While the indexical nature of photography means that it does indeed attest to the physical existence of the subject of photograph. The meaning of the self that is produced through photographic representation is far from straightforward. In short, the identity ‘given’ by the photographic portrait was not the same as that bestowed by the painted portrait. Photography, through its distinct social, cultural, political and economic uses and meanings, offered a new kind of identity to its sitters.

Although the photographic portrait was popular and sought after, the new experience of the self produced by seeing one’s photographic likeness gave rise to a range of responses from excitement and wonder to ambivalence, dissatisfaction and fear. For some, the pleasure of owning a photographic portrait was sufficient in itself. This can be seen in the account of a portrait photographer who overcame the problem of impatient customers by giving them photographs of previous sitters. He testified that although some demanded another sitting, others were ‘entirely satisfied with the substitute’.² For others, being photographed was a more fraught process: Robert Louis Stevenson remarked of his – yet to be taken – portrait that he dreaded that ‘it will not be like me’.³ On seeing his photographic portrait Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, ‘I was really a little startled at recognising myself so apart from myself’.⁴ While the actor Charles MacReady suggested an ingenious solution to this problem of photographic likeness: he would send his portrait in oils to be photographed.⁵

Thus, we can see that photographic likeness, so naturalized in discussions of photography as an indexical medium, is complex: we must learn to recognize ourselves – and others – in photographs.⁶ As such, rather than ‘magically’ making the privileges of the portrait available to all, photography transformed the understanding of the self that had been the subject of the painted portrait.

The carte de visite

The carte de visite was patented by the French photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854. The carte consisted of a small albumen print, usually a studio portrait, mounted on a card approximately 2½ × 4 inches in size. Unlike the daguerreotype, which was expensive and unique, the carte was affordable, mass produced and easily distributed among friends and visitors. Thus, for many historians of photography it is with the carte that the true democratization of portraiture arrived: ‘The egalitarian eye of the camera … matched by the uniformity of the carte as an object.’⁷

However, it was not only access to the privilege of portraiture that produced the democratizing effect of the carte but the way in which the ‘material culture’ of privilege, the dress, gesture, posture and settings of the upper class, became available to everyone in the form of studio backdrops and props. The dispersal of the signs of privilege produced an anxious discussion around class for in the photographers’ studio previously rigid social boundaries suddenly appeared to be little more than ‘a combination of costumes and stage properties that could easily be simulated’.⁸

Also significant was the way in which the cartes themselves were a part of commodity culture. Cartes were usually purchased by the dozen, with the explicit intention of exchange, and it is estimated that 300 to 400 million cartes were sold in England every year from 1861 to 1867.⁹ In addition to your own portrait, it was possible to buy a vast array of cartes of public figures and celebrities. Displayed in photographic shop windows, these attracted crowds who were eager to see photographs of politicians, royalty, actresses and courtesans. This was a new pleasure, and several articles at the time drew attention to the disconcerting effect that the display of these disparate collections had. For example, a commentator in Art Journal noted that ‘the most curious contrasts may be drawn and the most startling combinations effected … when even the most hurried of passing glances reveals to us the facsimile of Lord Shaftesbury and Cardinal Wiseman, and of the French Emperor and Sims Reeves side-by-side’.¹⁰ As Rachel Teukolsky has noted, in the photographic shop window the ‘rigidly divided and stratified Victorian social world became an alarming jumble’.¹¹

The way in which the carte circulated is also key to understanding its significance. Previously, portraits either had a limited circulation among acquaintances who had a personal knowledge of each other or were located in specific settings in which the sitter already had an established role. The practices of sharing and consuming central to the culture of the carte meant that the photographic portrait began to circulate beyond the boundaries of personal knowledge or professional context. This meant that there was no certain way of distinguishing between the carte given by the sitter as a token of friendship, affection or esteem and the carte that was purchased. Furthermore, the studio settings and props common to all sittings meant that there was ‘little to distinguish between the cartes de visite of the anonymous and the eminent’.¹² In short, ‘as a highly mobile, standardized commodity, carte portraits easily slipped the leash of their intended functions to then take on ambiguous and potentially disturbing new meanings’¹³ and precipitate ‘novel social encounters’.¹⁴

Central to these novel social encounters was a new kind of public visibility in which ‘people began to report the curious phenomenon of a person being preceded by their photograph’.¹⁵ As such, Annie Rudd has argued that ‘cartes de visite were associated less with a personal, domestic conception of likeness than with a distinctly public one’.¹⁶ Here the ‘cartes’ semiotic complexity – their status as both objectified likeness and industrially produced commodity’¹⁷ is key. As Rudd notes the carte was printed on a card that gave the name of the studio rather than the sitter, as such the carte might be seen to be emblematic not the democratization of portraiture but of ‘the transformation of one’s face into a commercial product’.¹⁸ While the use of clothing and props in the photographic studio challenged the understanding of the ‘natural’ superiority of the upper class, it was the performance of the self as a commodified individual that allowed the middle class to emerge as a unique social group. However, the middle class was not the only social group that photography played a key role in establishing.

The subjugated portrait

In his seminal article ‘The Body and the Archive,’ Allan Sekula argues that the use of photography by institutions, such as the police, that sought to observe, categorize, archive and control meant that ‘photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have’.¹⁹ Sekula proposes that photography is ‘a double system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively’.²⁰ In the judiciary and medical uses of photography that emerged during the nineteenth century, the sitter is presented without the flattering or idealizing goals of traditional portraiture. As John Tagg has described the repressive or subjugated portrait, ‘The format varies hardly at all … workers, vagrants, criminals, patients, the insane, the poor, the colonised races – are taken one by one: isolated in a shallow contained space; turned full face and subjected to an unreturnable gaze; illuminated, focused, measured, numbered and named; forced to yield to the minutest scrutiny of gestures and features.’²¹ This directs us to an important caveat in the understanding of the photographic portrait as a democratization of privilege: the identity offered by the photographic portrait is not always desirable.

In order to better understand the subject-effects of the photographic portrait, we need to turn to the writings of the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Although Foucault’s writings encompass a wide range of subjects and them...