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Photography: History and Theory: History and Theory
History and Theory introduces students to both the history of photography and critical theory. From its inception in the nineteenth century, photography has instigated a series of theoretical debates. In this new text, Jae Emerling therefore argues that the most insightful way to approach the histories of photography is to address simultaneously the key events of photographic history alongside the theoretical discourse that accompanied them. While the nineteenth century is discussed, the central focus of the text is on modern and contemporary photographic theory. Particular attention is paid to key thinkers, such as Baudelaire, Barthes and Sontag. In addition, the centrality of photography to contemporary art practice is addressed through the theoretical work of Allan Sekula, John Tagg, Rosalind Krauss, and Vilém Flusser. The text also includes readings of many canonical photographers and exhibitions Atget, Brassai, August Sander, Walker Evans, The Family of Man, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sebastaio Salgado, Jeff Wall, and others. In addition, Emerling provides close readings of key passages from some major theoretical texts. These glosses come between the chapters and serve as a conceptual line that connects them. Glosses A substantial glossary of critical terms and names, as well as an extensive bibliography, make this the ideal book for courses on the history and theory of photography.
- GenresPhotographyArt
288 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2011
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February 9, 2014
I think this book is more a history of theory about photography, than a history of photography per se. Don’t get me wrong – it is no less valuable for that – but you don’t come away from this book knowing all that much about the dates and key moves in the development of photographic techniques in anything like a systematic way. Now, I’m not sure I need a systematic knowledge of that history – but it really is implied by the title.
Where this book is particularly good is in giving a series of glosses on key texts from the history of the theory of photography. These being Walter Benjamin’s A Little History of Photography, Roland Barthes’ The Rhetoric of the Image, Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
The book looks in quite some depth at many of the main problems of theory around the photographic image. I will need to read this book again – when I get time – but the key ideas I want to highlight here are around the indexical nature of the photographic image and the role of agency in photographic reproduction. Mostly because I think in some ways these might be the key ideas propelling theory around photographs.
Okay, so a photograph was originally called ‘nature’s pencil’ – we do tend to use metaphor to help us understand the new by reference to what we already know. Many theorists have been convinced that what is most important about photographs is that they are indexes – in much the same way that we have an index finger, also known as a pointing-finger – an index points to something else. So, smoke is an index of fire, for example – you see one and you assume the other. No one says a photograph is what it is an image of. Clearly, if you want to talk to your mum you would be better finding her, than finding a photograph of her. But as with Barthes and his famous book Camera Lucida makes clear, when your mum is dead and gone, finding the perfect image of her that brings her back to life for you in some way can become an important life’s task.
This indexical nature of the photograph is anything but simple. Not least because Peirce (the American Saussure) spoke about such systems of communication as not only being indexical, but also symbolic and iconic – hard not to think, then that photography might also be equally likely to be symbolic or iconic.
So, is photograph merely an aid to memory? Clearly not – I mean, it obviously impacts on our emotions in ways that have much more to do with how we have been acculturated than merely in reminding us of things from our past. Anyway, one of the clear and obvious things that photography does is to allow us to ‘see’ things we could never have seen. Our grandparents as children, for instance.
Perhaps we need to start by thinking about the most obvious thing about photographs – that they are eternally silent. This is particularly hard for us to do, I think. We are meaning making machines and as such we impose meaning on everything we see. It is hard for us to hear the silence of photographs because of this endless chatter of our making meaning of those images. This is the indexical role of photography brought to the fore. "This is a photograph of my brother, this of my sister" – and thus the whole index card box is filled and ordered and catalogued. This kind of ordering of the world – what can and should be referred to as hegemonic – is the exercise of a particular kind of power. Where this is particularly interesting in this book is in its discussion of a photographic exhibition that is often referred to in these texts – The Family of Man exhibition. Paid for by the CIA, it was clearly presenting a particularly ‘appropriate’ vision of humanity and society - a kind of Disney 'It's a Small World After All' vision. Not exactly one that was likely to challenge the existing power structures in place in our society.
And I think this is where agency plays its part in photography. Even those who consider photographs as unproblematic indexes – and it is hard not to see them as this on some level, you push the button and what is before you is frozen in time. You push the button, and unlike a pencil, the camera takes everything in seemingly without choice. This is part of the reason for Barthes’ idea of the punctum – the little pin prick images give us despite all of the care of the photographer to present 'just' the image they hope to present, the pin prick that all too often pierces us to our core.
But we are eternally fooled by the lie that the camera never lies. That what a camera shows is exactly what we would have seen if we were there to see it. Except, of course, what a camera actually shows is nothing at all like what we would have seen. It is a bit like what we would see if we closed one eye, kept insanely still and were looking through a hole and if we were somehow able to get time to stop. As we tend not to look about the world with quite these restrictions in place the ‘reality’ of images starts to pale slightly.
There is also the fact that photographs are often taken because we are motivated to take them. We don’t take photos of just random crap – despite what you might think from spending five minutes looking at friends photographs on Facebook. Rather even the most banal of photographs are an attempt at narrative. We are seeking in some way to tell the stories of our lives with them. And the danger here is that we tend to also believe our own stories – ignoring that these images are highly selective and generally highly positive presentations of us. When was the last time you took a photo of yourself on the toilet? Not that I’m after such from all of my Good Reads friends, you understand, but the point is that there are things we can and do take photographs of and things we simply don’t – and not just with family photographs, but also there are things we take photographs of as documentaries, but that document only ‘our side’ of what is to be seen. We make images of what makes sense of the world - but that means fitting our images into an already existing way of understanding.
Sontag talks about this in her book On Photography when she quotes the Northern Irish at the start of the Troubles buying images of bombed bars and kids throwing stones or petrol bombs at armoured cars. They did this to show their kids in the future images of a world that barely seemed real to them and they were certain would seem utterly unreal to their children and grandchildren. But this is the world of Northern Ireland most of us ‘remember’ – it is perhaps worth reiterating that at even the height of the Troubles there were more people being killed in car accidents than in terror bombings. I believe more young people die from suicide than from car accidents or drug overdoses today in our unwarlike societies. You know, where you point your camera determines in large measure what you will see and what you will remember. Truth is a kind of story we tell and our photographs help us construct and tell that story - but it is a story.
Which brings us to Tagg and Sekula – two incredibly important theorist around these questions of ‘motivated images’ I guess you could call them who are discussed briefly here, but because I find their work so incredibly interesting, I have to say not in nearly enough detail.
Like I said, I am going to have to read this book again – it contains a wealth of information in very few pages and all illustrated with pictures along the way. Hard not to like a book that comes with illustrations…
Where this book is particularly good is in giving a series of glosses on key texts from the history of the theory of photography. These being Walter Benjamin’s A Little History of Photography, Roland Barthes’ The Rhetoric of the Image, Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
The book looks in quite some depth at many of the main problems of theory around the photographic image. I will need to read this book again – when I get time – but the key ideas I want to highlight here are around the indexical nature of the photographic image and the role of agency in photographic reproduction. Mostly because I think in some ways these might be the key ideas propelling theory around photographs.
Okay, so a photograph was originally called ‘nature’s pencil’ – we do tend to use metaphor to help us understand the new by reference to what we already know. Many theorists have been convinced that what is most important about photographs is that they are indexes – in much the same way that we have an index finger, also known as a pointing-finger – an index points to something else. So, smoke is an index of fire, for example – you see one and you assume the other. No one says a photograph is what it is an image of. Clearly, if you want to talk to your mum you would be better finding her, than finding a photograph of her. But as with Barthes and his famous book Camera Lucida makes clear, when your mum is dead and gone, finding the perfect image of her that brings her back to life for you in some way can become an important life’s task.
This indexical nature of the photograph is anything but simple. Not least because Peirce (the American Saussure) spoke about such systems of communication as not only being indexical, but also symbolic and iconic – hard not to think, then that photography might also be equally likely to be symbolic or iconic.
So, is photograph merely an aid to memory? Clearly not – I mean, it obviously impacts on our emotions in ways that have much more to do with how we have been acculturated than merely in reminding us of things from our past. Anyway, one of the clear and obvious things that photography does is to allow us to ‘see’ things we could never have seen. Our grandparents as children, for instance.
Perhaps we need to start by thinking about the most obvious thing about photographs – that they are eternally silent. This is particularly hard for us to do, I think. We are meaning making machines and as such we impose meaning on everything we see. It is hard for us to hear the silence of photographs because of this endless chatter of our making meaning of those images. This is the indexical role of photography brought to the fore. "This is a photograph of my brother, this of my sister" – and thus the whole index card box is filled and ordered and catalogued. This kind of ordering of the world – what can and should be referred to as hegemonic – is the exercise of a particular kind of power. Where this is particularly interesting in this book is in its discussion of a photographic exhibition that is often referred to in these texts – The Family of Man exhibition. Paid for by the CIA, it was clearly presenting a particularly ‘appropriate’ vision of humanity and society - a kind of Disney 'It's a Small World After All' vision. Not exactly one that was likely to challenge the existing power structures in place in our society.
And I think this is where agency plays its part in photography. Even those who consider photographs as unproblematic indexes – and it is hard not to see them as this on some level, you push the button and what is before you is frozen in time. You push the button, and unlike a pencil, the camera takes everything in seemingly without choice. This is part of the reason for Barthes’ idea of the punctum – the little pin prick images give us despite all of the care of the photographer to present 'just' the image they hope to present, the pin prick that all too often pierces us to our core.
But we are eternally fooled by the lie that the camera never lies. That what a camera shows is exactly what we would have seen if we were there to see it. Except, of course, what a camera actually shows is nothing at all like what we would have seen. It is a bit like what we would see if we closed one eye, kept insanely still and were looking through a hole and if we were somehow able to get time to stop. As we tend not to look about the world with quite these restrictions in place the ‘reality’ of images starts to pale slightly.
There is also the fact that photographs are often taken because we are motivated to take them. We don’t take photos of just random crap – despite what you might think from spending five minutes looking at friends photographs on Facebook. Rather even the most banal of photographs are an attempt at narrative. We are seeking in some way to tell the stories of our lives with them. And the danger here is that we tend to also believe our own stories – ignoring that these images are highly selective and generally highly positive presentations of us. When was the last time you took a photo of yourself on the toilet? Not that I’m after such from all of my Good Reads friends, you understand, but the point is that there are things we can and do take photographs of and things we simply don’t – and not just with family photographs, but also there are things we take photographs of as documentaries, but that document only ‘our side’ of what is to be seen. We make images of what makes sense of the world - but that means fitting our images into an already existing way of understanding.
Sontag talks about this in her book On Photography when she quotes the Northern Irish at the start of the Troubles buying images of bombed bars and kids throwing stones or petrol bombs at armoured cars. They did this to show their kids in the future images of a world that barely seemed real to them and they were certain would seem utterly unreal to their children and grandchildren. But this is the world of Northern Ireland most of us ‘remember’ – it is perhaps worth reiterating that at even the height of the Troubles there were more people being killed in car accidents than in terror bombings. I believe more young people die from suicide than from car accidents or drug overdoses today in our unwarlike societies. You know, where you point your camera determines in large measure what you will see and what you will remember. Truth is a kind of story we tell and our photographs help us construct and tell that story - but it is a story.
Which brings us to Tagg and Sekula – two incredibly important theorist around these questions of ‘motivated images’ I guess you could call them who are discussed briefly here, but because I find their work so incredibly interesting, I have to say not in nearly enough detail.
Like I said, I am going to have to read this book again – it contains a wealth of information in very few pages and all illustrated with pictures along the way. Hard not to like a book that comes with illustrations…
Displaying 1 of 1 review