Documenting the World

Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record

Gregg Mitman,Kelley Wilder

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226129259
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists' renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific. Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.

1

Introduction

GREGG MITMAN AND KELLEY WILDER

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Absent in its history would be images that defined historical moments and generations: the Battle of the Somme, the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. There would be no photos of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression, no family album of suitably posed great aunts. It would be a history constituted from, dare we say it, just artist renderings and the written and spoken word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history feels insubstantial, imprecise, and perhaps even unscientific. And yet photographic technology was not always a necessary condition for the accurate documentation of history. History’s “protocols of evidence and argument” long consisted of writing rather than picturing.1 But the introduction first of photography and subsequently of film in documenting the present created new types of records that altered notions of historical, legal, and scientific evidence; changed interactions among scientists and their subjects; and challenged the very construction and meaning of the archive.

The documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century combined the power of science and industry with a particularly utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to visually capture the world, order it, and render it useful for future generations. The “unifying sense of purpose,” evident in early manifestos like The Camera as Historian, which encouraged the scientific use of photography and film in documenting projects of truly enormous scope, is perhaps now less visible, buried amid the staggering quantity of photographs and films that such projects generated.2 In fact, the vestiges of the documentary impulse are still found everywhere: in storage freezers of scientific laboratories and natural history museums, in the attics and basements of private homes, in the archives of libraries and universities, and on websites, ranging from Archive.org to Youtube.com.

In the virtual world of images summoned by every scholarly query, we tend to forget the material dimensions of the visual. But the sheer mass of photograph and film documents that take up space in archives and consume vast resources in their virtual state on the web is a reminder that the materiality of photographs and films extends far beyond the chemistry, size, and format of a particular document. At 100 million images and counting, Corbis, for example, one of the largest sites for one-stop shopping for digital still and moving images, is dependent upon a gigantic physical infrastructure of fiber optic cables, routers, hubs, and servers that greatly expand the material footprint of the archival image. It is merely the tip of an iceberg, amassed over a century of collecting via photography and film. Whether we measure in quantities of acid-free solander boxes and meters of rolling stack shelving or by the electricity powering countless servers delivering the public interface of museums and galleries, online databases and image banks, it is clear that acquisition and storage far outstrip chemistry, size, and format as material aspects of the documentary impulse.3 Stopping at acquisition and storage would also only give an incomplete picture of the effect of this impulse. Each step of documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has physically transformed natural and built environments, altered the lives of human subjects, reconstituted disciplines of knowledge, and changed economic and social relationships.

This book is about the material and social life of photographs and films made in the scientific quest to document the world. We find their material and social traces in the impulse that drove their creation; the historical and disciplinary dynamics that surrounded their production; the collecting practices of librarians, archivists, and corporations; and the archives they inhabit. Together, the essays in this volume call into question the canonical qualities of the authored, the singular, and the valuable image, and transgress the divides separating the still photograph and the moving image, as well as the analogue and the digital. They also overturn the traditional role of photographs and films in historical studies as passive illustrations in contrast to active textual scholarship.

In the last decade, photographic and film scholars like Gillian Rose, Joan Schwartz, Paula Amad, Elizabeth Edwards, and others have taken seriously the notion that questions of materiality and agency lie at the heart of photographic documentation.4 Shifting the focus away, as Rose writes, from “scientific description [or] artistic sensibilities” and toward the work that photographs and films as documents do in the world requires a close look at the urge to document the world in still and moving images. Influenced by structuralist philosophy, in particular Michel Foucault, scholars like John Tagg and Allan Sekula, to name perhaps the best known, delved into the social and political structures of photographic archives as early as the late 1970s, opening up a field of research in which the evidential and recording power of photographs was largely socially constructed and politically motivated.5 In this volume, we see the documentary impulse as part of a set of practices with epistemic intent, deeply influenced by the ideals and practices of late nineteenth-century scientific communities. The sheer excess of documentary material, coupled with the diversity of scientific disciplines that have produced and utilized it, far outstrips the ability of any single methodology or discipline to comprehend an impulse that has at times been gargantuan in its ambitions. Because photographs and films as objects move so readily across different cultural spheres—for example, from the family, to the courtroom, to the tabloid press, as Jennifer Tucker reveals in her analysis of the Tichborne claimant affair (chapter 2)—shifting their meanings accordingly, a mixture of methods and crossing of boundaries across the fields of photographic and film history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies is in order. In attending to the mobility, materiality, and mutability of photographs, for instance, Elizabeth Edwards is able to interrogate a photograph of Pasi, a Torres Strait inhabitant, taken by anthropologist A. C. Haddon, as both an anthropological object indicative of a sea change in anthropological methodology and a family portrait (chapter 5). “Meaning” and “fact” lie not simply inside the photographic material but in a set of relationships formed between the maker, the user, the object, and the archive.

Drawing upon scholars from across the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, Documenting the World interrogates questions of materiality and agency in the work that photographs and films do as evidentiary documents, narrative objects, and the stuff of archives. Despite the authors’ different disciplinary backgrounds, the essays share a commitment to make tangible the different material manifestations of photographs and films: in the making of the document as evidence (Tucker, Edwards, Geimer, Vertesi); in the narratives accompanying the circulation and recirculation of still and moving images (Edwards, Mitman, Ginsburg); and in the life of photographs and films within the archive (Klamm, Wilder, Blaschke).

These themes—documents and evidence, circulation and recirculation, and archival lives—offer a general structure to the volume. We open with acts of becoming, as photographs and films acquire evidentiary force in the world. The essays span more than a century, from the place of photographs and films as evidence in the Victorian courtroom and anthropology to the making of scientific documents out of manipulated digital images beamed back from the Mars Rover. Documentary images matter in the way that people imagine the past, make sense of the present, and envision the future. In his essay “The Colors of Evidence” (chapter 3), for example, Peter Geimer asks the provocative question, “How could it be that throughout the nineteenth century photographs were treated as documents, visual evidence, and traces of the real even though such a fundamental dimension of reality—color—was missing?” Photography and film have mattered literally, as Geimer shows, in imaginings of the past as a monochromatic world of black and white.

But what happens when the material and social relations of the documentary object are reconstituted, resulting in quite different stories and political ends from those initially intended in their making? In Gregg Mitman’s investigative journey into the many lives of a 1926 Harvard expedition film shot in Liberia (chapter 6) and Faye Ginsburg’s exploration of the repurposing of Nazi medical films by disability activists (chapter 7), we find the kind of productive work that can happen when documentary images take on second lives. The debris left by colonial and totalitarian regimes in their impulse to collect, classify, and control the world are being taken up by individuals whose ancestors were the objects of an imperial gaze.6 In these liberating acts, photographs and films are literally reborn through new social relations.

If photographs and films can be so easily repurposed, so too is the visual archive subject to being cast adrift from its moorings in particular institutional practices. With deep ties to the visual regimes of nineteenth-century bureaucratic management and colonial rule, and increasingly influenced by twenty-first-century commerce, the visual record is anything but neutral. Even in repurposing, the photograph, film, or archive carries with it traces of its origins and of its original institutional place. Stefanie Klamm details the complicated path taken by photographs to get into archaeological and art historical institutions (chapter 8), which then immediately begin to efface disciplinary presumptions and individual social biographies in order to envision the timelessness of the archive over highly individual times and places of production.

Why should these particular media be accorded the kind of attention we have outlined?

Over the last two decades it has become increasingly apparent that photographic technology, with its scientific overtones, has often been invoked to legitimize visual methods for investigating the world, as well as for recording and archiving it.7 At the same time a “pictorial turn” has informed scholarship in science studies.8 As historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of science became more attentive to the relationships between “making and knowing,” scientific images—whether illustrations, graphs, photographs, or films—became a site for investigating the practices at work through w...