Photography

A Critical Introduction

Liz Wells, Liz Wells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000390643
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte

Now in its sixth edition, this seminal textbook examines key debates in photographic theory and places them in their social and political contexts. Written especially for students in further and higher education and for introductory college courses, it provides a coherent introduction to the nature of photographic seeing.

Individual chapters cover:

• Key debates in photographic theory and history

• Documentary photography and photojournalism

• Personal and popular photography

• Photography and the human body

• Photography and commodity culture

• Photography as art.

This revised and updated edition includes new case studies on topics such as: Black Lives Matter and the racialised body; the #MeToo movement; materialism and embodiment; nation branding; and an extended critical discussion of landscape as genre.

Illustrated with over 100 colour and black and white photographs, it features work from Bill Brandt, Susan Derges, Rineke Dijkstra, Fran Herbello, Hannah Höch, Mari Katayama, Sant Khalsa, Karen Knorr, Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas, Lee Miller, Ingrid Pollard, Jacob Riis, Alexander Rodchenko, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall.

A fully updated resource information, including guides to public archives and useful websites, full glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography, plus additional resources at routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9780367222758/ make this an ideal introduction to the field.

CHAPTER 1

Thinking about photography

Debates, historically and now

Derrick Price and Liz Wells

• Introduction
• Aesthetics and technologies
• The impact of new technologies
• Art and technology
• The photograph as document
• Photography, modernity and the postmodern
• Aesthetic debates now
• Contemporary debates
• What is theory?
• Photography theory
• Critical reflections on realism
• Reading images
• Photography reconsidered
• Theory, criticism, practice
• Case study: Image analysis: The example of Migrant Mother
• Histories of photography
• Which founding father?
• The photograph as image
• History in focus
• Photography and social history
• Social history and photography
• The photograph as testament
• Categorical photography
• Institutions and contexts
• Museums and archives

A knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike.

László Moholy-Nagy 1923

Thinking about photography

Debates, historically and now

Introduction

We cannot imagine a world without photographs. Photography permeates all aspects of our life, acting as a principal source and repository of information about our world of experience. It follows that historical, theoretical and philosophical explorations of photographs as images and objects, and of photography as a range of types of practice operating in varying contexts, are necessarily wide-ranging.

There is no single history of photography. As E.H. Carr has observed, history is a construct consequent upon the questions asked by the historian (Carr 1964). Thus, he suggests, histories tell us as much about the historian as about the period or subject under interrogation. Stories told reflect what the historian hopes to find, and where information is sought. He was writing in an era when libraries and archives were the primary research locations. Nowadays we usually start by researching online. But his note of caution remains relevant: fact gathering may be influenced by many factors, not least the particular networks used by web-based search engines. It is up to us to evaluate the status of our sources and the significance of our findings.

Furthermore, the historian’s selection and organisation of material are to some extent predetermined by the purpose and intellectual parameters of any project. Such parameters reflect particular institutional constraints as well as the interests of the historian (for instance, academics may be expected to complete research within a set period of time). Projects are also framed by underpinning ideological and political assumptions and priorities.

Such observations are obviously pertinent when considering the history of photography. They are also relevant to investigating ways in which photography has been implicated in the construction of history. As the French cultural critic, Roland Barthes, has pointed out, the nineteenth century gave us both history and photography. He distinguishes between history which he describes as ‘memory fabricated according to positive formulas’, and the photograph defined as ‘but fugitive testimony’ (Barthes 1984: 93).

Attitudes to photography, its contexts, usages and critiques of its nature are explored here through brief discussions of key writings on photography. The chapter is in four sections: Aesthetics and Technologies, Contemporary Debates, Histories of Photography and Photography and Social History. The principal aim is to locate writings about photography both in terms of its own history, as a specific medium and set of practices, and in relation to broader historical, theoretical and political considerations. Thus, we introduce and consider some of the different approaches – and difficulties – which emerge in relation to the project of theorising photography. The references are to relatively recent publications, and to current debates about photography; however, these books often refer back to earlier writings, so a history of changing ideas can be discerned. This history focuses on photography itself as well as considering photography alongside art history and theory, and cultural history and theory more generally.

As with any abbreviated history, this chapter can only offer brief summaries of some of the historical turning points and theoretical concerns that have informed and characterised debates about photography from its inception. Our aim is to identify some key questions and offer starting points for further research and discussion which are taken up in the following chapters and also through the references to further reading (in margins and notes). Photography is ubiquitous, and it penetrates culture in very diverse ways. Nowadays, it plays a central role within social media on the one hand, while being a major factor within the art market on the other. These activities go on alongside longer standing fields of operation (including but not restricted to: documentary and photojournalism; people and places; personal, domestic and family photography; travel, exploration and representation of cultures other than our own; commerce and advertising). The questions that we might ask shift according to the context and type of practice being considered; but whatever the field of operation, analysis of the role of photographic imagery is central to critical interrogations.

Aesthetics and technologies

The impact of new technologies

In the 1920s, when Moholy-Nagy commented on the future importance of camera literacy, he could hardly have anticipated the extent to which photographic imagery would come to permeate contemporary communication. Indeed, the late twentieth-century convergence of audio-visual technologies with computing led to a profound and ongoing transformation in the ways in which we record, interpret and interact with the world.

In recent years this has been marked both by the astonishing speed of innovation and by a rapid extension and incorporation of technologies within new social, cultural, political and economic domains. As Martin Lister remarked in 2009, we have ‘witnessed a number of convergences: between photography and computer-generated imaging (CGI), between photographic archives and electronic databases, and between the camera, the internet and personal mobile media, notably the mobile telephone’ (Lister in Wells 2009). Indeed, nowadays the mobile (cell) phone is also the camera.

We often see this ferment of activity as a defining feature of the twenty-first century and, perhaps, think of it as a unique moment in human history. But, in the 1850s, many people also thought of themselves as living in the forefront of a technological revolution. From this historical distance, it is hard to recapture the extraordinary excitement that was generated in the middle of the nineteenth century by a cluster of emerging technologies. These included inventions in the electrical industries and discoveries in optics and in chemistry, which led to the development of a new means of communication that was to become so important to so many spheres of life – photography. Hailed as a great technological invention, photography immediately became the subject of debates concerning its aesthetic status and social uses.

The excitement generated by the announcement, or marketing, of innovations tends to distract us from the fact that technologies are researched and developed in human societies. New machinery is normally presented as the agent of social change, not as the outcome of a desire for such change, i.e. as a cause rather than a consequence of culture. However, it can be argued that particular cultures invest in and develop new machines and technologies in order to satisfy previously foreseen social needs. Photography is one such example. A number of theorists have identified precursors of photography in the late eighteenth century. For instance, an expanding middle-class demand for portraiture which outstripped available (painted) means led to the development of the mechanical physiognotrace¹ and to the practice of silhouette cutting (Freund 1980). Geoffrey Batchen also points out that photography had been a ‘widespread social imperative’ long before Daguerre and Fox Talbot’s official announcements in 1839. He names 24 people who had ‘felt the hitherto strange and unfamiliar desire to have images formed by light spontaneously fix themselves’ from as early as 1782 (Batchen 1990: 9). Since most of the necessary elements of technological knowledge were in place well before 1839, the significant question is not so much who invented photography but rather why it became an active field of research and discovery at that particular point in time (Punt 1995).

1 For definitions see Gordon Baldwin and Martin Jürgens (2009) Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms. Revised ed., Los Angeles: Getty Publications.

Once a technology exists, it may become adapted and introduced into social use in a variety of both foreseen and unforeseen ways. As cultural theorist Raymond Williams argued, there is nothing in a technology itself which determines its cultural location or usage (Williams 1974). If technology were viewed as determining cultural uses, much would remain to be explained. Not the least of this would be the extent to which people subvert technologies or invent new uses which had never originally been intended or envisaged. New technologies become incorporated within established relations of production and consumption, contributing to articulating – but not causing – shifts and changes in such relations and patterns of behaviour.

Art and technology

Central to the nineteenth-century debate about the nature of photography as a new technology was the question as to how far it could be considered to be art. Given the contemporary ubiquity of photography, including the extent to which artists use photographic media, to posit art and technology as binary opposites now seems quite odd. But in its early years photography was celebrated for its putative ability to produce accurate images of what was in front of its lens, images that were seen as being mechanically produced and thus free from the selective discriminations of the human eye and hand. On precisely the same grounds, the medium was often regarded as falling outside the realm of art, as its assumed power of accurate, dispassionate recording appeared to displace the artist’s compositional creativity. Debates concerning the status of photography as art took place in periodicals throughout the nineteenth century. The French journal La Lumière published writings on photography both as a science and as an art.² Baudelaire linked ‘the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of today’ and asserted that ‘if photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether’ (Baudelaire 1859: 297). In his view photography’s only function was to support intellectual enquiry:

2 Lemagny and Rouille (1987: 44) point out that the subtitle for the journal was ‘Review of photography: fine artsheliography-sciences, non-political magazine published every Saturday’.

Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature. Let photography quickly enrich the traveller’s album and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons.

(Baudelaire 1859: 297)

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821–1867) Paris-based poet and critic whose writings on French art and literature embraced modernity; he stressed the fluidity of modern life, especially in the metropolitan city, and extolled painting for its ability to express – through style as well as subject-matter – the constant change central to the experience of modernity. In keeping with attitudes of the era, he dismissed photography as technical transcription, perhaps oddly so given that photography was a product of the era which so fascinated him.

‘Absolute material accuracy’ was seen as the hallmark of photography because most people at the time accepted the idea that the medium rendered a complete and faithful image of its subjects. Moreover, the nineteenth-century desire to explore, record and catalogue human experience, both at home and abroad, encouraged people to emphasise photography as a method of naturalistic documentation. Baudelaire, who was among the more prominent French critics of the time, not only accepts its veracity but adds: ‘if once it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!’ (1859: 297). Here he is opposing industry (seen as mechanical, soulless and repetitive) with art, which he c...