The Handbook of Photography Studies

Gil Pasternak, Gil Pasternak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field's persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike.

Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field's histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography's cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography's multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation.

Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field's rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

PART ONE
Histories and Approaches

Studying Photography in Shifting Academic Landscapes

GIL PASTERNAK

Writings about photography are diverse. Since the second half of the twentieth century in particular, a broad range of analytical frameworks has been used in the study of photography's multiple histories, production modes, uses, interpretations, and functions (e.g., Barthes 1981; Burgin 1982; Tagg 1988; Solomon-Godeau 1991; Batchen 2002; Edwards and Hart 2004; Olin 2012; Brown and Phu 2014). Each of these has considered photography from a different conceptual perspective, yet together they have led to the development of knowledge about the contributions the medium has made to challenge and redefine aesthetic values, social politics, scholarly research, communication practices, cultural tenets, the material world, and ways to process feelings and emotions. Due to their different concerns, these manifold approaches to the study of photography and its ongoing interaction with human life do not lead to a single coherent understanding of what photography is, what practices it encompasses, what makes its products meaningful, and m what specific ways. They have, however, highlighted the necessity to regard photography as an ever-growing, unstable plethora of visual and material trends of social and cultural applications that may or may not relate to one another (Batchen 1997a: 2-21). Students and experienced scholars new to the field of photography studies might thus find photographic scholarship unsystematic, ambiguous, inconsistent, perhaps also impenetrable.

The opening part of this volume demystifies the state of research in the field. Focusing on photographic historiography and the theories that have informed much of the field's distinct concerns since its formation, it describes some recurring research trajectories that underpin photographic scholarship. Along the way it maps out the contributions made by some of the field's most dominant scholars, occasionally also dissecting their most influential works. While wide-ranging in scope, it must be noted, however, that this part of the volume makes no attempt to cover every research trajectory that developed throughout the history of the study of photography. The authors identify key paradigms— "canonical history," "social history," "society and culture," "materiality"—and discuss the field's most noticeable research trends alongside the sources, materials, motivations, and agendas that have informed their development. The volume's first five chapters subsequently introduce a range of foundational studies in the field, demonstrating how they challenged or refined previous preconceptions of the role photography plays in social and cultural environments and how they reoriented photographic scholarship toward considerations of new subject matters and innovative research methodologies.

The emergence of writings on photography outside academia could be traced to various origins, in different historical moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and within amateur and professional environments alike (McCauley 1997; Nickel 2001; Frizot 2002; Sheehan and Zervigon 2015). Scholars in the field tend to agree, however, that Beaumont Newhall (1937, 1937, 1938, 1964, 1982), who curated the first comprehensive photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1937 under the title Photography 1839-1937, initiated a systematic, analytical, authoritative, and sustainable framework for the study of photography upon which both complementary and revisionist scholarly studies on the subject could later develop (Nickel 2001). Newhall had attempted to write the history, or at the very least a history of photography. As Marta Braun demonstrates in Chapter 1, his version of this history had acquired a canonical status and it still often informs studies concerning art photography at the beginning of the third millennium. We must be aware, however, that influential and useful as his approach to the study of photography might have been, it has some significant shortcomings. Newhall's history of photography prioritizes the study of historical photographers and photographs whose visual strategies helped him contextualize the artistic photographic endeavors that he supported. It also frames the history of photography as a story of a medium of visual expression, in which there is almost no place for photography's most quotidian uses. Whereas later writings on photography largely criticized Newhall's approach and stressed its limitations, it must be remembered that his history of photography made a strong case for the need to study this medium and, more specifically, for the incorporation of photography into museum culture.

A number of alternative analytical frameworks to the study of photography accompanied the one Newhall initiated, and witnessed its rise to power: In 1931 Walter Benjamin ([1931] 1999) published his essay "Kleine Gesischte der Photographie" (Little History of Photography). Having initially appeared in three instalments in issues number 38, 39, and 40 of the German journal Der Literariscbe Welt, Benjamin's essay delineated the growing susceptibility of photography to the influence of capitalist ideological values. Benjamin called upon his readers to develop a critical awareness of photographic professions and representational strategies with the hope that this way photography would turn into a medium of resistance to the capitalist organization of the social sphere. In 1936 Gisele Freund was awarded her doctorate degree for a thesis she wrote on dominant photographic uses, conventions, and practices in France of the nineteenth century. Approaching photography as a social force and entitled "La photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle," her study was published straightaway. An extended version featuring another section on press photography and photography in mass media was published in 1974 and translated to English in 1980 (Freund 1980). Professor of chemistry and amateur historian Robert Taft's exploration of the history of photography was published posthumously in 1938, under the title Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889. Focusing on uses of photography in the (North) American social environment, Taft (1938) argued that the emergence of conventional photographic practices gives rise to novel social values and interests that in turn trigger demand for the innovation of photographic traditions. Although Taft, as opposed to Benjamin, was not consciously inspired by any sociopolitical agenda, he also encouraged his readers to think of photography as an apparatus that operates through and within material culture, and that it is consequently capable of transforming prevalent social realities. In the late twentieth century, when photography became a subject of study in academia, photography scholars would become familiar with Benjamin, Freund, Taft and their approaches to photography, which differ from one another despite some similarities. When their writings were published originally, however, scholars gave them only sparse attention.

In Chapter 2 Douglas Nickel looks into one key alternative intellectual approach to the study of photography that emerged from the 1970s' encounter between photography and the academy. Recognized later as the "social history of photography," this perspective was initiated by art historians and photography practitioners as a rebellious reaction to the conservatism that had characterized museum curators and managers, art collectors, and dominant research interests in the discipline of art history. As Nickel explains, the social history of photography distinguished itself from earlier scholarship by addressing issues of industry, production, distribution, and class identity. While not restricted to the analysis of commercial, instrumental, or popular photography, it tended to emphasize the role of social structures and economic causes over the autonomy and expression of individual makers. The relevance of the works of Benjamin ([1931] 1999), Freund (1980), Taft (1938) and other like-minded photography scholars of the early twentieth century was established in this intellectual environment. To a greater or lesser extent, their thoughts on photography and their approaches to its study rapidly turned into some of the most significant points of reference, having previously been repressed by the louder voice of Newhall's canonical history of the photographic medium. Although lasting at full strength for less than two decades, the influence of photography's social history can be traced in much of the literature and artistic photographic practices that succeeded its heyday.

Indeed, the compelling and relatively inclusive methodologies that photography's social historians endorsed assisted in paving the way for the establishment of additional research paradigms that value the work photography and photographs are made to do in a wide range of diverse social, communal, cultural, and politically charged environments (see also Pasternak 2018). Considerations of photography's many involvements in adjusting everyday life, as well as in shaping private and collective experiences and values, have become some of the main trademarks of the scholarship that rose to power as the social history of photography grew weaker (e.g., Edwards 1992; Ryan 1997; Hirsch 1999; Batchen 2004; Lydon 2005). In Chapter 3 Melissa Miles discusses how the lessons learnt through the social history of photography prompted photography scholars, artists, fine art and documentary photographers to turn their attention to photography's symbiotic relationship with society and, more specifically, with culture. The photographic neo-Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories that photography's social historians helped advance continued to inform the sociocultural approach to the study of photography, yet specifically intersectional feminist theories, queer politics, and postcolonial discourses took the lead. Continuing to hold on to the view that photography must not and cannot be studied as a totality but only with reference to the specific sociocultural frameworks in which it is employed, scholars of the sociocultural approach argued that photography not only reflects society and culture but that it participates in interpersonal processes that condition their tangible and intangible actualities. Miles therefore also examines how scholarship of this research approach tackled ongoing tensions between photography's status as a trace of the social world and a cultural construct.

At the turn of the twenty-first century another research approach appeared in the field of photography studies, drawing primarily on treatment of photographs not only as visual images but also as portable, varying material objects (e.g., Schwartz 1995; Batchen 1997b; Edwards 2001; Edwards and Hart 2004). Having emerged in parallel to the growing culmination of socioculturally oriented studies, the material approach to the study of photography complemented the methodological toolkit their authors drew upon. Yet, it also brought to the fore a fresh set of interests and concerns of its own. As Costanza Caraffa demonstrates in Chapter 4, the material approach stemmed from a range of transdisciplinary studies that took inspiration from research in material culture. It stirred scholars to pay equal attention to the properties of photographs as flat images and three-dimensional objects. Simultaneously it guided them to investigate what roles photographs perform as such in interplays of individuals, society, and culture. According to Caraffa the dynamic relation between photography's visual and material qualities was largely overshadowed in twentieth-century photographic studies, mainly by the prevalence of the rhetoric of photographic indexicality; namely, by the assumption that photography's sociocultural significance lies in the inevitable connection between what photographs show and the physical realities that they reference. Elucidating the material approach to the study of photography together with its methodological underpinnings, Caraffa makes the case that the questions raised by the material strand have become even more pertinent to the study of photography in the context of digital environments.

The intellectual paradigms introduced above can help us visualize with clarity some obvious tendencies in photography studies. It must be made clear, however, that photographic scholarship can be clustered under a variety of other paradigms and that more often than not writings in the field tend to develop through consolidation of multiple methodological approaches. In Chapter 5, Jae Emerling surveys the absorption of theory into the study of photography as a means to supplement the background to the intellectual traditions that have underpinned the development of academic research on photography. His chapter looks most specifically at the influence of formalist, neo-Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and affect theories, among others. While inevitably this range of theoretical frameworks cannot account for all the conceptual models and research approaches photography scholars have embraced, Emerling mainly wants to demonstrate how any intellectual preconception or interest unavoidably affects the choice of photographic images, objects, practices, conventions, and uses that participants in the field's many debates interrogate. His chapter thus prepares us for the following parts of the volume in which the many other factors that have influenced research in the field are considered, from academic disciplinary traditions and sociocultural lived experience to geopolitical histories, popular photographic cultures, and prevalent photographic technologies of viewing and display.

References

• Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang.
• Batchen, G. (1997a), Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Batchen, G. (1997b), Photography's Objects, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Art Museum.
• Batchen, G. (2002), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Batchen, G. (2004), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
• Benjamin, W. ([1931] 1999), "Little History of Photography," in M. Jennings, et al. (eds.), Selected Writings Volume 2 1927-1934, 507-30, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Brown, E. H., and T. Phu, eds. (2014), Feeling Photography, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Burgin, V., ed. (1982), Thinking Photography, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Edwards, E., ed. (1992), Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
• Edwards, E. (2001), Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, Oxford: Berg.
• Edwards, E., and J. Hart, eds....