A Companion to Photography
Edited by Stephen Bull
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Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Bull, Stephen, 1971– editor.
Title: A companion to photography / edited by Stephen Bull.
Description: Hoboken, NJ, USA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018060332 (print) | LCCN 2018061636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118598795 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118598801 (ePub) | ISBN 9781405195843 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Photographic criticism. | Photography–Philosophy. | Photography, Artistic. | BISAC: PHOTOGRAPHY / Criticism.
Classification: LCC TR185 (ebook) | LCC TR185 .C66 2019 (print) | DDC 770–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060332
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: Hannah Starkey Mirror-Untitled, September 2015 (Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London)
Set in 10/12pt Warnock by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xvii
1 Introduction: Photography in the Twenty‐first Century 1 Stephen Bull
Part I Themes 9
2 Histories 11
Sabine T. Kriebel
3 Locating Photography 29 Christopher Pinney
4 The Participation of Time in Photography 49 Anthony Luvera
5 Photographic Acts and Arts of Memory 61 Martha Langford
6 The Indexical Imagination 85 David Bate
7 The Thingness of Photographs 97 Elizabeth Edwards
8 Beyond Representation?: The Database‐driven Image and the Non‐human Spectator 113 Katrina Sluis Contents
Part V Documents 369
21 “Things As They Are”: The Problematic Possibilities of Documentary 371
Ian Walker
22 Citizens’ Photojournalism: History’s New First Draft 393
David Brittain
23 Seeing Is Not Believing: On the Irrelevance of Looking in the Age of Operational Images 411
Edward Dowsett
24 Travel Books, Photography, and National Identity in the 1950s and 1960s, Seen Through the Prism of the LIFE World Library 429
Val Williams
Part VI Art 437
25 Photography’s Conflicting Modernisms and Modernities 439
Sarah E. James
26 Spectacle and Anti‐spectacle: American Art Photography and Consumer Culture 465
David Campbell and Mark Durden
27 What Can Photography Do?: Considerations on Photography’s Potential as Contemporary Art 483
Hilde Van Gelder
28 Practicing Desires: Authorship in Contemporary Photographic Art 501 Fergus Heron Index 527
List of Figures
Figure 2.1 The cover of William Shepperley’s A History of Photography (1929). Source: Sabine T. Kriebel. 13
Figure 2.2 Notice in Erich Stenger’s The History of Photography: Its Relationship to Civilization and Practice (1939). Source: Sabine T. Kriebel. 16
Figure 3.1 Yasuzo Nojima Nude torso (1930). Source: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Reproduced with permission. 32
Figure 3.2 Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). Untitled. n.d. Gelatin silver print. Source: Christopher Pinney. 34
Figure 4.1 Documentation of the making of Towards a Promised Land by Wendy Ewald. Photograph by Pete Mauney. Source: Courtesy of Wendy Ewald. 53
Figure 4.2 Documentation of the making of Open Shutters by Eugenie Dolberg. Source: Courtesy of Eugenie Dolberg. 55
Figure 5.1 Cover of Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001). 63
Figure 5.2 Susie Freeman, Liz Lee, and David Critchley, Cradle to Grave installation at the British Museum (2005). Source: © Susie Freeman, Liz Lee and David Critchley. Image courtesy of Susie Freeman. 63
Figure 6.1 William Henry Fox Talbot Crossed Muslin (1852–1858). Source: © National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library. Reproduced with permission. 94
Figure 9.1 Child recycling. Source: Fotolia.com. 136
Figure 9.2 Recycling at school. Source: Fotolia.com. 137
Figure 9.3 Boy and wind turbines. Source: Fotolia.com. 138
Figure 9.4 Man in “green” office. Source: Fotolia.com. 139
Figure 13.1 A Boots photographic services advert, aimed at women, from 1918. Source: Courtesy of Alliance Boots Archive and Museum Collection. 217
Figure 13.2 A Boots photographic services advert, aimed at women, from 1998. Source: Courtesy of Alliance Boots Archive and Museum Collection. 220
Figure 14.1 Maybelline, “The Eraser” advert (2011). Source: L’Oréal UK and Ireland. Reproduced with permission. 238
List of Figures x
Figure 14.2 Julia Roberts, Lancôme, “Teint Miracle” advert (2011). Source: L’Oréal UK and Ireland. Reproduced with permission. 238
Figure 15.1 Viviane Sassen, Kinee Diouf for An Other Magazine Fall/Winter 2013–2014. Styled by Mattias Karlsson. Source: Courtesy of Viviane Sassen. 261
Figure 18.1 R.H. Allan (2014). Caged Serenity. Source: © Rachel Hope Allan. Image courtesy of Rachel Hope Allan. On the edges of each photograph that comprise the diptych we can see exact same simulated (digital) emulsion marks, which on a traditional analog Tintype would be different and unique to each photograph: on Hipstamatic, they are the same on every image, produced by a computer algorithm.
319
Figure 18.2 R.H. Allan (2013). Ladydrive #1 (Installation Image). Source: © Rachel Hope Allan. Image courtesy of Rachel Hope Allan. 1120 Digital Chromogenic prints, dimensions variable. Simulation and repetition are key tropes in “App photography.” 320
Figure 20.1 Uta Barth From … and of time. (Untitled 00.4), 2000; LightJet prints in artist frames; Diptych, 35 × 90 inch (88.9 × 228.6 cm) overall; Edition of 2, 2 Aps. Source: © Uta Barth. Reproduced with permission.
360
Figure 20.2 Laura Letinsky Untitled #54, from Hardly More Than Ever series, 2002. Source: © Laura Letinsky. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. 361
Figure 21.1 Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Tin Building, Moundville, Alabama, 1936. Gelatin silver print (1936). 17 × 23.2 cm (6 11/16 × 9 1/8 inch). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 376
Figure 21.2 Sarah Pickering, Denton Underground Station from Public Order (2003). Source: © Sarah Pickering. Reproduced with permission. 384
Figure 22.1 Mishka Henner, Unknown site, Noordwijk aan Zee from the series Dutch Landscapes (2011). Source: © Mishka Henner. Reproduced with permission. 405
Figure 24.1 Cover of LIFE World Library: Britain (1961). Source: Photo: Val Williams. 433
Figure 25.1 Cover of Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold’s Foto‐Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (Photo‐eye: 76 photos of the time), F. Wedekind, Stuttgart, 1929. Source: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild‐Kunst, Bonn. Public domain. 450
Figure 26.1 John Baldessari, The Spectator is Compelled …, 1966–1968. Photo‐emulsion and acrylic on canvas (59 × 45 inch).
Source: Courtesy of John Baldessari. 471
Figure 27.1 Peter Friedl. 2006. Theory of Justice (1992–2006) (detail). Newspaper clippings. Display cases: Stainless steel, Plexiglas, painted plywood, 100 × 160 × 75 cm each. Exhibition view at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2006. Source: Photo: Tony Coll. Reproduced with the permission of the artist. 489
Figure 28.1 Roundtable discussion, London, 2011. Source: Photo: Terence Dudley. Reproduced with permission. 502
Notes on Contributors
Malcolm Barnard is a Senior Lecturer in visual culture at Loughborough University (UK) where he teaches the history and theory of art and design. His interests lie in the theories and philosophies of fashion and graphic design and they are turning increasingly to photographic theory. His background is in recent French philosophy and he is the author of Graphic Design as Communication (Routledge, 2005), Fashion as Communication (Routledge, 2002), Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001) and Art, Design and Visual Culture (Macmillan, 1998). He is also the editor of Fashion (Routledge, 2011) and Fashion Theory (Routledge, 2007).
David Bate is an artist and writer based in London. He is Professor of Photography at the University of Westminster, London, UK. Recent publications include the books Photography: Key Concepts, second edition (Bloomsbury, 2016), Art Photography (Tate Publications, 2015), Zone (Artwords, 2012), Photography: Key Concepts (Berg, 2009), and Photography and Surrealism (I.B Tauris, 2004). Forthcoming works include a monograph of visual work called Notes on Otherness.
David Brittain is a writer, curator and former editor of Creative Camera magazine (1991–2001). He is MIRIAD Research Associate and Senior Lecturer in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University. David edited Creative Camera: 30 Years of Writing (2000) and conceived and was essayist for The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit (2009).
Stephen Bull is a writer, artist and lecturer. He is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton, UK. As well as editing this Companion to Photography, he is the author of Photography (Routledge, 2010) and Photography and Celebrity (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). He has contributed to books including Mark Durden (ed.) Fifty Key Writers on Photography (Routledge, 2013) and magazines and journals such as Source: The Photographic Review, Photoworks and Photography and Culture. His books of photographs include Meeting Hazel Stokes (Neroc’VGM, 2006), a series of found snapshots of celebrities with a theater usherette, which was also exhibited at Tate Britain as part of How We Are: Photographing Britain in 2007. He originated and hosts Desert Island Pics, an ongoing series of live events with Photoworks.
David Campbell is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University. He is a founding member of the artists’ group Common Culture and exhibits internationally. He has published on Sigmar Polke and art and commodity culture. With Mark Durden,
Campbell co‐wrote Variable Capital (Liverpool University Press, 2007) and Double Act: Art and Comedy (Bluecoat, 2016).
Paul Cobley is Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University. His books, include Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016), Narrative, second edition (2014), and the edited collections The Communication Theory Reader (1996), Communication Theories, 4 vols. (2006), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics (2010), and “Semiotics Continues to Astonish”: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs (2011).
Karen de Perthuis is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Her work exploring the intersection of fashion, media and the body has been published in a range of journals, including Fashion Theory, Cultural Studies Review, About Performance and Film, Fashion & Consumption, as well as in several edited volumes. She is currently working on a monograph, The Fashionable Ideal: Bodies and images in Fashion.
Edward Dowsett is a practicing artist and writer. He holds a BA in Photography from the London College of Communication. His research interests include photography’s uses in the contemporary technological/media landscape, cultural theory, and semiotics.
Mark Durden is currently Professor of Photography at the University of South Wales. He has written extensively on contemporary art and photography. His Photography Today (2014) has now been translated into Chinese, Turkish, French, and Spanish. With David Campbell, Durden has co‐curated major exhibitions on consumer culture and art and comedy as well as co‐writing two related books, Variable Capital (2008) and Double Act: Art and Comedy (2016). They have also co‐authored an essay on Andy Warhol’s film The Chelsea Girls for the BFI publication Warhol in Ten Takes. Durden works as an artist with Campbell and Ian Brown, exhibiting regularly as the collective Common Culture.
Elizabeth Edwards is Professor and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre. A visual and historical anthropologist, she has held academic and curatorial posts at Oxford and London works on the complex relationships between photographs, anthropology, and history, in many different contexts from field to museum exhibitions. In particular, she has developed anthropological methods for the analysis of a wide range of photographs and their archives, drawing on phenomenological anthropology and material culture studies. She is especially interested in the social and material practices of photography’s historical and contemporary contexts, and has published extensively in the field. Her most recent book is The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885–1918, on the photographic survey movement England (Duke University Press, 2012).
Clare Gallagher is Lecturer and Course Director for the BA (Hons) Photography at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. Her photographic practice and research examine everyday domestic activities and experiences. Her current focus is “women’s work” and finding room for ingenuity and resistance to expectations about home.
Rachel K. Gillies is an artist, educator and writer. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton, UK, with Course Leadership of BA (Hons) Photography, and previously was Senior Lecturer and Course Co‐ordinator of Photography at Dunedin School of Art, NZ. Her practice engages with contemporary photography as it responds to digital process and visual communication.
Fergus Heron is an artist, photographer and Senior Lecturer in photography at the University of Brighton, with Course Leadership of MA Photography. His writing is included in Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation (London, 2014), Visible Economies: Photography, Economic Conditions and Urban Experiences (Brighton, 2012), and Eventful: Photographic Time (London, 2000).
Francis Hodgson is Professor in the Culture of Photography at the University of Brighton. He is the longstanding photography critic of the Financial Times and a former head of the photographs department at Sotheby’s. He is one of the founders of the Prix Pictet, the richest prize in photography, given for pictures on the theme of the environment and sustainable development. He has been a gallerist, a creative director in industries centred upon the photograph, and a curator. Hodgson is also an art adviser specializing in fine photographs who advises on many aspects of collections (public and private). Hodgson has served upon many prize juries and awards.
Sarah E. James is an art historian, writer and lecturer based in Frankfurt. From 20102017 she was a Lecturer at University College London, where she taught on photography and art in the twentieth century, photographic modernity, and art and culture during the Cold War. Her first book, Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain, was published by Yale University Press in 2013. Her second, Paper Revolutions: An Invisible AvantGarde, is forthcoming with MIT Press. She is currently a Paul Mellon Fellow completing her third book project, The Militant & the Mainstream: The Remaking of British Photographic Culture. She has published numerous chapters, articles and essays on photography and contemporary art.
Sabine T. Kriebel has taught photography and photography theory at the University College Cork, Ireland, since 2004. Her recent books include Revolutionary Beauty: John Heartfield’s Radical Photomontages (University of California Press, 2014) and Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2016), co‐edited with Andrés M. Zervigón.
Kathy Kubicki is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston University, UK, editor of peer‐reviewed journal Photography & Culture (Routledge). Her research includes poststructural philosophies, women artists, and psychoanalytic theory. Recently she contributed to Twenty Years of Make Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art (I.B. Tauris: 2015).
Martha Langford is Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a Professor of Art History at Concordia
University in Montreal, Canada. Her publications include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007); and A Cold War Tourist and His Camera, co‐written with John Langford (2011).
Matthew Lindsey is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at UCA, Farnham. He has exhibited works in a number of galleries and worked on various arts publications including Scope: A Visual Archaeology of Photography.
Anthony Luvera is an artist, writer and educator. He is an Associate Professor and Course Director of Photography at Coventry University. His writing appears in a wide range of publications, including Photoworks, Source and Photographies. His photographic work has been exhibited in galleries, public spaces and festivals including Tate Liverpool, the British Museum, London Underground’s Art on the Underground, the National Portrait Gallery London, Belfast Exposed Photography, the Australian Centre for Photography, Malmö Fotobiennal, PhotoIreland, Goa International Photography Festival, and Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie. He gives workshops and lectures for the Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery, Tate Britain, Magnum, and community projects across the UK.
David Machin is Professor of Media and Communication at Orebro University, Sweden. His books include, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2007), Global Media Discourse (2007), Media Audiences, 4 vols (2008) Analysing Popular Music (2010), and The Language of Crime and Deviance (2012), and How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Approach (2012).
Roberta McGrath’s interdisciplinary work on photography includes Seeing her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body (Manchester University Press, 2002), “History Read Backward, Memory, Migration and the Photographic Archive,” in A. Grossman and A. O’Brien (Eds.), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower Press, 2007), Passport No. 656336, an essay on gender and politics in the work of 1930s émigré photographer Edith Tudor‐Hart, In the Shadow of Tyranny, Duncan Forbes (Ed.) (Hatje Cantz, 2013).
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His books include Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), Photography’s Other Histories (co‐edited with Nicolas Peterson, 2003), The Coming of Photography in India (2008), and Photography and Anthropology (2011).
Annebella Pollen is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of Art without Frontiers (British Council, 2020), Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury 2015), The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians (Donlon Books, 2015). She is co‐editor with Ben Burbridge of Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (Bloomsbury, 2018) and coeditor with Charlotte Nicklas of Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Katrina Sluis is presently Adjunct Curator of Research at The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Head of Photography and Media Arts at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University. Her writing and curatorial projects are concerned with the politics and aesthetics of the photographic image in computational culture, its social circulation and cultural value.
Hilde Van Gelder is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture. She is editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series, and editor of Image [&] Narrative. With Helen Westgeest, she co‐authored Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2011; translated into Chinese in 2014).
Ian Walker is a writer and photographer based in London. He has published three books on documentary photography and surrealism: City Gorged with Dreams (2002), So Exotic, So Homemade (2007) and Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia (co‐authored, 2013). Before his retirement, he was Programme Leader for the MA Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, and Professor of the History of Photography at the University of South Wales.
Val Williams is a writer and curator and Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the University of the Arts London. She is the Director of the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the London College of Communication and a founder editor of the Journal of Photography & Culture. Exhibition projects include How We Are at Tate Britain in 2007; Daniel Meadows: Early Photographs, National Media Museum (and touring), 2011; Ken. To be destroyed at Schwules Museum, Berlin, in 2016. Publications include: Anna Fox: Photographs 1983–2007 (Photoworks, 2007); Martin Parr: Photographic Works (Phaidon, 2001 and 2014).
Catherine Zuromskis is Associate Professor of Fine Art in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. Her work on photography and American visual culture has appeared in Art Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, American Quarterly, and various edited volumes. Her book, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images was published in 2013 by MIT Press.
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making. Therefore, the main acknowledgment is to the patience and belief in the project of the contributors, the series editors and the publisher. I thank them for persevering over the period that this book has taken to produce and I hope that the time it has taken has not made things overly difficult for those involved in the book’s creation. As I went through the chapters once again in final preparation for the manuscript, the quality of research and scholarship evidenced by the writings in this book became clearer than ever. Like me, I hope that the authors of the chapters—and you—will agree that the wait has been worth it. I give my thanks again to all the authors of the chapters in this book for their forward‐thinking, erudite contributions. I am certain that the ideas within each chapter will continue to be inspirational for many years to come.
The list of editors at Blackwell and Wiley‐Blackwell is, perhaps inevitably, also long. I thank Jayne Fargnoli very much for her invitation to edit this book and I am grateful to Julia Kirk and Allison Kostka for their enthusiasm and support throughout the Companion’s early stages. Since then, editors and editorial assistants have included Silvy Achankunju, Elisha Benjamin, Emily Corkhill, Susan Dunsmore, Mark Graney, Mary Hall, Rebecca Harkin, Catherine Joseph, Sindhuja Kumar, Claire Poste, Denisha Sahadevan and Milos Vuletic, I thank them all for their assistance and, again, for their patience.
Very many thanks for the support throughout the years of my colleagues, including those at the University of Portsmouth, University for the Creative Arts (UCA) Farnham, and the University of Brighton. Thank you too to my friends and family, who have always been there for me, even when I have not been around in order to work on the book. There are far too many of you to list individually, but I am grateful to everyone for the continuous encouragement, advice, and conversations that have helped this book to happen. The University for the Creative Arts generously match‐funded the budget for illustrations and I’m very grateful for this too. I continue to learn from and be inspired by the students that I teach, and I’m confident that anyone interested in the study of photography will find the ideas in this book inspirational.
Khadija Saye was a BA (Hons) Photography student at UCA Farnham when I was course leader there. After her graduation in 2013, Khadija’s excellent practice continued developing into a wonderful emerging body of work that had begun to be exhibited internationally. Her life and career were cut tragically short by the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, in which many people lost their lives. This book is dedicated to Khadija.
Introduction
Photography in the Twenty‐first Century
Stephen Bull
Photography in the Twenty‐first Century
In the twenty‐first century, photography involves everyone. With the use of digital cameras on hand‐held devices to take pictures, and with the distribution of images online, more photographs are being made and viewed than at any other time in history. Most people across the world are taking photographs, appear in photographs, are looking at photographs, and are talking about photographs. Simultaneously, certain photographic images have become firmly established as art in the rarefied space of the gallery, and such photographs continue to break records for sales in the auction room. In the light of all this, it is appropriate that the study of photography, from schools to undergraduate and postgraduate level, and as an area of scholarly debate in general, has expanded during the past few decades to create a lively and wide‐ranging discussion about the subject.
This Companion to Photography is a collection of essays covering key contemporary photographic debates. The book is organized into thematic sections, each Part containing chapters newly written for this book by specialists in their areas, representing a diversity of approaches to photography. Many authors will be familiar names to most readers, other authors have emerged as distinct voices in their respective spheres of study over the past few years. A few are publishing their writing in the context of a book for the first time, adding further fresh perspectives to the discussion. As a collection, this volume forms a resource for the central ideas relating to photography in the twenty‐first century.
Structure of the Book
Themes
While this Companion to Photography is designed so the chapters can be read in any order, there is also a sequence to the chapters and to the six Parts in which they appear. These Parts move the reader from more general themes relating to photography through
to the final Part VI that focuses on the specifics of photography as art. Most chapters include one or more cross‐references to other chapters in this book, indicating where ideas, imagery, authors, and practitioners overlap (sometimes in harmony, at other times with a stimulating clash of views). Part I, “Themes,” contains six chapters, each introducing and debating a central theme. While these themes require consideration in their own right within the first section they also resonate across other sections throughout the volume.
Fittingly, Chapter 2, Sabine T. Kriebel’s “Histories,” sets the scene for twenty‐first‐century debates by providing a history of histories of photography, from the nineteenth century up to now. Kriebel considers the approaches taken in a number of otherwise rarely discussed histories, such as Gaston Tissandier’s pioneering A History and Handbook of Photography, first published in the 1870s, and Erich Stenger’s The History of Photography: Its Relation to Civilization and Practice. The latter book presented a German perspective on photographic history and was translated into English in 1939, a year that marked both the eve of the Second World War and the centenary of the official announcement of photography. Each historical viewpoint that Kriebel analyses tells a differing story: from nationalistic histories, to those emphasizing technical quality, to art‐based perspectives where individual practitioners are foregrounded, and then, at the turn of the millennium, to a broadening out of approaches and a resistance to the fetishizing of artists/photographers as individual authors.
The histories that Kriebel considers tend to focus on certain areas of the world. In Chapter 3, “Locating Photography,” Christopher Pinney addresses the point that most histories of photography should actually be thought of as “histories of photography in Europe and North America.” In his chapter, Pinney demonstrates how photography was swiftly globalized, both via European and American photographers traveling from the West to the “rest” of the world, and also, vitally, through the rapid dissemination of the technology of photography across the planet. With this in mind, Pinney considers the consistencies and contradictions of what he proposes as a “world system of photography.”
Along with the spatial context for photographs, another key theme relating to photography is time. Often, Anthony Luvera argues in Chapter 4, “The Participation of Time in Photography,” theoretical discussions around photography and time have focused on ideas such as the brief moment of time in which the photograph is taken and the continuing existence of that image as time around it moves on. While acknowledging the significance of such important elements, Luvera advances these ideas. His chapter argues that the full process of making the photograph is an overlooked area that requires attention. Through the examples of a number of collaborative projects, Luvera suggests that this process often involves the cooperation of many participants and the conjunction of a range of social influences—before, during, and after the period in which the photograph is made.
In Chapter 5, another aspect of time is considered. Martha Langford takes in references from around the world to survey memory in relation to a wide range of imagery, from snapshots to art photography. Her chapter, “Photographic Acts and Arts of Memory,” is also broad historically, zooming out and then zooming in on photographic works across the decades—from the 1970s until now. With a focus throughout on how photography and memory coalesce and contradict, Langford’s chapter provides an extensive catalog of the vital significance of memory and time to photographic practice.
In Chapter 6, David Bate asks a series of questions about an idea and a term that has also seemed central to photography since the 1970s: photography’s perceived “indexicality,” linking the photograph to the world. To suggest answers to his questions, for his chapter “The Indexical Imagination,” Bate goes back to the origins of semiotic terminology (using sources such as Roland Barthes’ Elements of Semiology) and considers how these ideas came to be applied to photography. Bate does this in order to determine the roots of the term indexicality, as well as to suggest an updated and more sophisticated theory of our experience of photographs – one that emphasizes the spectator and their imagination.
Photographs, Elizabeth Edwards argues in Chapter 7, don’t just relate to the world, they are part of it. Edwards’ “The Thingness of Photography” contends that photographs are real, not just in the physical, material sense, but in relation to a wider range of sensory perception. This includes a discussion of the oral and the aural (as the experience of photographs often involves speaking and listening), as well as silence and gesture. Her chapter concludes with an examination of the physical context of the archive, where even the smell of printed photographs, stored in boxes, becomes important to the experience of the picture.
While digital images may lack some of the sensory properties that Edwards discusses, the development of the internet has led to a vast increase in archives in the form of databases of virtual information, in which photographs play a central role. In Chapter 8, “Beyond Representation? The Database‐Driven Image and the Non‐Human Spectator,” Katrina Sluis looks at where and how these digital images are seen. Encountered as part of almost incomprehensibly huge databases and retrieved for onscreen viewing, photographs online become “content” to be processed via metadata (such as information embedded into the file at the time of its making). This is often followed by the image being tagged, “liked,” and/or rated—via social media, for example, or photo‐sharing websites. These images, in terms of both their content and their surrounding contextual data, are, in turn, recognized—sometimes by human interaction, but often automatically. They then become linked and searchable elements of databases. If the “spectator” of the image is as likely to be non‐human as they are human, Sluis asks, what is the process by which photographs are now encountered, understood, and interpreted in the twenty‐first century?
Interpretation
The importance of interpretation provides the focus for Part II of the book. Since the 1960s, the semiotics discussed by Bate in Chapter 6 have become established as central to much of the formal study of photographic meanings. With Chapter 9, “Semiotics,” Paul Cobley and David Machin begin Part II by applying the semiotic ideas of “denotation” and “connotation” to a close reading of four photographs. As well as providing a clear case for the significance of elements such as pose, objects, and settings in the interpretation of photographs, Cobley and Machin go further, analyzing ideas from Charles Sanders Peirce to suggest that concepts such as cultural habit and emotional response must be considered too.
Matthew Lindsey also looks beyond photographs themselves to consider the importance of context and of text found with and within images—as well as the idea of photographs themselves as texts. Along the way, his Chapter 10, “A Culture of Texts,” reflects
upon the conception of photography and how photography as a medium is interpreted. At the end of Lindsey’s chapter, he examines case studies where text is a vital augmentation to the photographs and, beyond this, instances where words even replace the photographs entirely.
Case studies are also central to Kathy Kubicki’s Chapter 11, “Psychoanalysis and Photography.” Further shifting the focus of interpretation to the role of the viewer, Kubicki begins by discussing key ideas from psychoanalysis, such as Freud’s concept of “the unconscious” and Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” (sometimes translated as the “mirror phase”) in order to explain the formation of sexuality and the subject. When considering these ideas in relation to the practice of Mary Kelly and Cindy Sherman, artists who experiment with the formation of the self, it is clear, Kubicki’s chapter argues, that concepts from authors using psychoanalysis, such as Julia Kristeva and Laura Mulvey, should be acknowledged and applied to understand the work.
Mulvey is often associated with her immensely influential work on “the gaze.” Her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” first published in 1975, has continued to be debated and revised throughout the decades. In Chapter 12, “Reviewing the Gaze,” Roberta McGrath considers this essay and many other central concepts relating to looking. Her chapter, drawing upon ideas by authors such as Foucault, takes us from the emergence of photography during the nineteenth century, in a time of increasing spectacle and surveillance, to the development of the idea of the gaze itself. Broadening out from a focus on the individual viewer as subjective reader of an image and text, McGrath’s chapter ends Part II, “Interpretation,” by reconsidering the gaze via debates about the wider sensual and political contexts within which photographs are seen and interpreted.
Markets
Most photographs have some relation to commerce. In Part III, “Markets,” four authors consider the range of ways in which photographs—and ideas about photography itself— are marketed. In Chapter 13, Annebella Pollen uses the UK company Boots (founded in Nottingham, UK, in 1849) as a case study in marketing photography to the general public. Studying how Boots advertised its photographic services, and examining revealing ephemera, such as the imagery on the photo wallets in which customers received their prints, Pollen focuses on the ways in which mass photographic practice is shaped by how it is sold. Her chapter, “Marketing Photography: Selling Popular Photography on the British High Street” considers in detail the extent to which consumers’ uses of photography conform with, and break from, those practices that are promoted to us. As well as being marketed as a product, photographs are also used to sell other things to consumers. Indeed, as Malcolm Barnard points out in Chapter 14, “Advertising Photography: Rhetoric and Representation,” it is the pervasive advertising images that we barely notice that are central to our lives. Revisiting and expanding upon some of the points analyzed in Part II, Barnard applies concepts from the work of Jacques Derrida to argue that the ubiquitous advertising photograph combines the belief in the photographic image as a truthful document with rhetorical staging. Barnard contends that, “Along with fashion (to which they are conceptually and commercially related), advertising and photography are probably what makes modern western life both modern and western.”
Appropriately therefore, it is the photography of fashion that provides the subject for the following chapter, Karen de Perthuis’ Chapter 15, “Fashion Image: The Complex World of the Fashion Photograph.” As a starting point, de Perthuis considers the argument often advanced that the home of fashion photography is the magazine page. Things have changed, de Perthuis argues, and the ordered, fixed magazine of printed paper has been overtaken by the algorithmic, shifting context of the online blog. Simultaneously, de Perthuis contends, fashion photography’s developing close relationship with art and with gallery exhibitions is further complicating the idea of the centrality of the magazine to the photography of fashion—and this suggests that we should expect more changes.
Recent developments in art photography, along with those in the commercial sector, are also approached in Francis Hodgson’s consideration of the market for photographs. In Chapter 16, “Value Systems in Photography,” Hodgson debates just what the values might be that relate to selling photographs. In an engaging and highly subjective text, Hodgson links the move from analogue to digital in the photography market to parallels in the marketing of other products. It is not just this digital shift that makes photography’s value systems so difficult to pin down, Hodgson argues, it is also the omnipresent protean nature of photography itself.
Popular Photography
The mass marketing of photography to the public, addressed by Pollen in Part III, led to a wider culture of photography in which the majority of people came to participate. The chapters in Part IV, “Popular Photography,” examine the results of this still‐developing culture. A culture which, considering its prominence in everyday life, remains underrepresented in the study of photography.
Key to this culture are snapshots, which, Catherine Zuromskis argues in Chapter 17, “Snapshot Photography: History, Theory, Practice, and Esthetics,” continue to “pose a challenge to scholars.” As the chapter’s subtitle indicates, Zuromskis looks at fundamental debates pertaining to four interrelated areas of discussion around snapshot photography. The chapter centers on the tension between the mass of snapshots and their individual use. While snapshot photography appears an undifferentiated culture, Zuromskis notes that each photograph is also unique to the people who are directly connected to it.
The culture of snapshots is generally perceived to have undergone a major change in the twenty‐first century via portable digital devices that enable photographs to be made and then made mobile instantly through online networks. In Chapter 18, “Mobile Photography,” Rachel K. Gillies focuses on recent analyses of this apparent shift. Gillies argues that photography was actually conceived as a mobile medium from the start, and that the ongoing modifications in photographic technology are a continuation, rather than a break, with this movement.
Developments in mobile technology have enabled fans of celebrities to gain an apparently closer relationship to the objects of their fanaticism through photographs and the networking of images. Fan photographs also have a history predating any digital apparatus. Stephen Bull’s Chapter 19, “Famous for a Fifteenth of a Second: Andy Warhol, Celebrity, and Fan Photography,” examines Warhol as a case study of a fan who, as a child and young man, venerated celebrities via photography in the 1930s and 1940s by
consuming publicity prints. In the following decades, having used photographs of famous people in his art, Warhol became a photographed celebrity himself. Warhol’s approach to photography and celebrity in the twentieth century prefigures much of the culture of contemporary fan photography.
The predominance of celebrity culture has seen it blend into the background of everyday life—so mundane that it is barely noticed. With their perceived indexical link to the real world, photographs, Clare Gallagher argues in Chapter 20, “Boring Pictures: Photography as Art of the Everyday,” are a way in which aspects of daily life can be made visible again. This is important, Gallagher posits, because it is quotidian events that are central to existence, not the more unusual disasters and triumphs that tend be the things recorded in photographs. In her chapter, Gallagher looks at examples of photographers who have brought the everyday to our attention. Along with contemporary photographic artists such as Uta Barth and Laura Letinsky, Gallagher also refers to the late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century photographs of Eugène Atget and Lewis Hine. Retrospectively, the work of Atget and Hine has come to be widely regarded as pioneering documentary photography—and it is to the idea of the photograph as document that the next section turns.
Documents
Ian Walker’s Chapter 21, ‘“Things as They Are’: The Problematic Possibilities of Documentary” begins Part V, “Documents,” by defining the terms “document” and “documentary.” The latter, Walker argues, is a much looser term, and one that has been applied to a wide range of photographs over the years. His chapter provides a valuable detailed etymology of “documentary” and its connections to photography—from the term’s earlier application to photographs seen to have an objective approach, to the increasingly subjective documentary work made across the twentieth century, and then to the multivocal methods and art‐based practices of recent decades. Walker’s text is, in itself, an objective description of a developing history as well as a subjective take upon that history. It provides the wider context within which the topics of the following chapters in Part V may be placed.
It is sometimes argued that the form of documentary photography established within the pages of magazines and books in the twentieth century (where professional photojournalists recorded key historical events) has now been superseded by the amateur photographs of events taken by participants or bystanders—who are often present at the event before any professional photographers might arrive. David Brittain considers this form of photographs as documents in Chapter 22, “Citizens’ Photojournalism: History’s New First Draft.” The chapter debates the changes in who makes these images and, just as significantly, the distribution of the photographs online. Does the power over images that was held by professional photographers, editors, and publishers now lie in the hands of citizens with mobile phones? To reflect upon this, Brittain combines established ideas from Walter Benjamin and John Berger with a wide range of more recent discussions, many drawn, appropriately enough, from online sources. His chapter examines the importance of user‐generated content, an ongoing development in the twenty‐first century that has seen those who were previously the subject of documentary photographs becoming active contributors.
Some of the most influential photographic documents of the twenty‐first century have been viewed by very few people. Edward Dowsett, in Chapter 23, examines how, increasingly, it is rarely seen photographs and videos that can have a dramatic impact on society. Deliberately without illustrations, Dowsett’s “Seeing Is Not Believing: On the Irrelevance of Looking in the Age of Operational Images,” considers visual documents made of violent acts, including images of people being killed, where the act has taken place with its recording in mind. Generally, he notes, such documents are not looked at by a mass audience (although they do not go entirely unseen). Nevertheless, they are often widely known about and discussed, prompting responses from politicians, the military, and the public in general. Such “operational images,” Dowsett contends, lead to action.
By contrast, the photographs Val Williams discusses in Chapter 24, were designed to be enjoyed by a large audience and were extensively distributed in print over many years. In “Travel Books, Photography and National Identity in the 1950s and 1960s Seen Through the Prism of the LIFE World Library,” Williams looks at the image of Britain presented through the photographs in the American LIFE World Library series. These publications form an example of post‐war, post‐imperial subjective documentary, albeit a version under close editorial supervision. Examining them in the broader context of professional travel photography and amateur snapshots, Williams demonstrates how such photographs helped to create a popular and highly partial document of British national identity in the middle of the twentieth century.
Art
Part VI, the final section of the book, focuses on photographs in the context of art—a focus which may seem familiar. Photography and some of its best‐known histories emerged from the era of modernity (as Kriebel notes in Chapter 2) and many such histories are directly linked with collections and curators of modern art museums. It is therefore unsurprising that the idea of photography as an art is often central when the subject is written about.
Suitably, the Art section begins with Sarah E. James’ Chapter 25, “Photography’s Conflicting Modernisms and Modernities.” James traces the connections between modernity and photography from the nineteenth century up to the mid‐twentieth century. She argues that different ideas were invested in photographic modernism during this time. James examines how photography was used by the new middle classes as a way of reinforcing bourgeois consumerism, contrasting this with its (apparently) opposing uses by the avant‐garde as a tool of societal critique across the first half of the twentieth century. These seemingly divergent approaches, James argues, are in fact united by ideas of progress and change.
James’ chapter brings us up to the middle of the twentieth century. David Campbell and Mark Durden take the next few decades as the starting point in Chapter 26. Their chapter, “Spectacle and Anti‐Spectacle: American Art Photography and Consumer Culture,” also considers the idea of art photography in relation to commerce. The shift from modernism to postmodernism provides the context for the case studies of American artists and their work that Campbell and Durden examine. They start with Ed Ruscha, whose photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, using what the artist himself referred to as “snapshots,” could be seen as representing a halt to the progressive changes
of modernism. Campbell and Durden argue that the various artists’ works that they discuss (by Rusha, John Baldessari, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Philip‐Lorca diCorcia, and Larry Sultan) represent challenges to commodification and the culture of consumption.
In Chapter 27, Hilde Van Gelder examines recent art photography from a political perspective in “What Can Photography Do? Considerations on Photography’s Potential as Contemporary Art.” Van Gelder introduces two models for contemporary art photography: the “absorptive” model, based on ideas from Michael Fried, where the viewer is entranced by the esthetics of the photograph; and the “interventionist” model, where the real world is directly engaged with. It may seem that the esthetic model of art photography—in forms such as the constructed tableau—is dominant. But Van Gelder, drawing (like many other authors in this book) upon the writings of Ariella Azoulay, argues that the interventionist model is urgently required in order for contemporary artists working with photography to engage with current issues.
The majority of voices in this book are those of writers, critics, curators, and academics. The kinds of practitioners that Van Gelder refers to, making work in an art context, are often cited as case studies—but are rarely heard from directly. The final chapter in Part VI, and the last chapter in the book, attempts to redress the balance somewhat. Fergus Heron’s “Practicing Desires: Authorship in Contemporary Photographic Art” centers on a roundtable discussion about authorship in relation to art photography. The participants are the contemporary photographic artists Anna Fox, Tom Hunter, Neeta Madahar, and Martin Parr, the writer and curator Daniel Campbell Blight, and the magazine editor and writer, Richard West, with contributions from Heron (who chairs the discussion and who is also a photographer), and Stephen Bull. The themes relating to authorship that are debated include appropriation, influences, and collaborative work. The subject of appropriation raises many central questions around authorship, and so the group discussion is supplemented by an interview that Bull conducted with Joachim Schmid (a key practitioner of “found photography”) soon after the roundtable, and which was informed by the earlier debates. In concluding the chapter, Heron contextualizes the ideas from the roundtable and the interview by arguing that experimental art practices that involve photographs can reveal as much about photography as theoretical discussion.
Conclusion
It is fitting that the final chapter in this Companion to Photography emphasizes photographic practitioners and the importance of the practice of making photographs. This is a book about photographs. The writing within it illustrates photographs, rather than the other way around. The 27 chapters that follow are intended to accompany our experience of photography now and in the future, promoting the development of new perspectives on photographs as the twenty‐first century progresses.
Part I
Themes
