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Photography: Theoretical Snapshots
Abstract
Over the past twenty-five years, photography has moved to centre-stage in the study of visual culture and has established itself in numerous disciplines. This trend has brought with it a diversification in approaches to the study of the photographic image. Photography: Theoretical Snapshots offers exciting perspectives on photography theory today from some of the world's leading critics and theorists. It introduces new means of looking at photographs, with topics including: a community-based understanding of Spencer Tunick's controversial installations, the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic viewing, snapshot photography, the use of photography in human rights discourse. Photography: Theoretical Snapshots also addresses the question of photography history, revisiting the work of some of the most influential theorists such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and the October group, re-evaluating the neglected genre of the carte-de-visite photograph, and addressing photography's wider role within the ideologies of modernity. The collection opens with an introduction by the editors, analyzing the trajectory of photography studies and theory over the past three decades and the ways in which the discipline has been constituted. Ranging from the most personal to the most dehumanized uses of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Latin America to Northern Europe, Photography: Theoretical Snapshots will be of value to all those interested in photography, visual culture, and cultural history. © 2009 Editorial selection and material J. J. Long, Andrea Noble and Edward Welch. Individual chapters the contributors. All rights reserved.
... 1 Newhall, 1980;Trachtenberg, 1980;Goldberg, 1981;Burgin, 1982;Bolton, 1989;Wells, 2003;Elkins, 2007;Kelsey, 2008;Long, 2009;Hershberger, 2014;Kemp, 1979;Kemp, 1980;Kemp, 1983;Amelunxen, 2000. Dve študiji si sicer prizadevata za bolj avtorski prispevek, vendar se svojega predmeta lotevata precej selektivno: Van Gelder, 2011;Emerling, 2012. 2 Edini relevantnejši poskus doslej ponuja Sabine Kriebel (2007). ...
Kljub temu da teorija fotografije velja za opredeljeno in uveljavljeno miselno polje, njena »zgodovina« zaenkrat obstaja le v obliki antologij raznolikih tekstov, iztrganih iz različnih kontekstov. Predlagan je zato osnutek za koherenten zgodovinski pregled najpomembnejših misli in mislecev o fotografiji, ki naj bi služil kot izhodišče za obsežnejšo in temeljitejšo študijo. Polje teorije fotografije se izkaže za mrežo razmislekov, ki se prepletajo, nanašajo drug na drugega in drug drugemu nasprotujejo in katerih ugotovitve se dopolnjujejo ter jih je mogoče smiselno povzeti. Fotografska podoba je kot produkt fotografskega postopka odtis resničnosti, vendar ima v postopku pomembno vlogo tudi fotografova dejavnost izbire določenega motiva in način tega izbiranja vzpostavlja prostor za umetniško dimenzijo fotografije. Fotografska podoba je sporočilo, toda sama po sebi nima pomena, pač pa je njena pomenljivost odvisna od teksta in konteksta, njen pomen je diskurzivno in institucionalno zagotovljen. Čeprav se fotografskemu kapitalističnemu spektaklu ni mogoče izogniti, se je vendarle mogoče fotografije posluževati tudi kot alternativne, kritične umetniške prakse. Izpostavljeni so tudi zastavki predstavljenih mislecev (filozof, kulturni kritik, likovni kritik, kustos, umetnostni zgodovinar, konceptualni umetnik): poudarjeno je, s katerega stališča se piše teorija fotografije, in posledično, kaj je pravzaprav vsakokrat njen predmet.
Chapter 5 addresses the visual character of ecological knowledge more directly, through an examination of ecology’s methodological foundations as a field science. The chapter emphasises once again the central importance of ‘the field’ as the location for the construction of ecological knowledge. Concentrating on the development and application of early ecological methods, it brings home the embodied and subjective foundations of ecological study, and demonstrates the profoundly visual character of field experience and methods. The most important instruments for ecological field study were undoubtedly maps and the camera. Accordingly, this chapter explores visual practices in field ecology, focusing especially on practices of mapping and drawing, and the role of photography as an instrument for scientific observation and record. The experience and methods of vegetation survey and mapping are examined, to think about the relationships between cartographic vision and photography, in the embodied cognition of ecological fieldwork. Examining in detail what field ecologists do, the chapter underlines the detailed visual methods of ecological field practice, and their reliance on photographic technologies for registering and communicating ecological objects and knowledge.
Drawing on a wide variety of photographic works, this chapter considers the expression of memory as a recurrent theme in contemporary art. A photographic art of memory must somehow resemble the mental act of remembering—how a memory enters one's thoughts and inhabits one's minds, the shape it takes; its sharpness, its nebulousness, its affectiveness, its veracity, and its trickiness. The chapter endeavors to sample the variety of images associated with memory, their translation into photographic works, and through selective close analysis, those sometimes subtle prompts that draw the spectator into this mode of photographic experience. Photography's appeal to memory derives from its indissociable relation to time, an extended present that is both backward‐ and forward‐looking, which is also a relationship to death. Many photographic acts are spurred by the desire to preserve a moment of heightened perception—to send a facsimile of this moment into the future.
Мета роботи. Це дослідження покликане доповнити загальну картину історії розвитку фотографії та її можливості впливати на реальність. Фотографія за своєю природою є технічним мистецтвом, але керує надзвичайно складною сучасною технікою людина. Питання «що таке сучасна фотографія?» набуває особливої актуальності в зв’язку з тим, що в XXI ст., завдяки введенню абсолютно нової техніки, виникає альтернативний розвиток фотографії. Методи дослідження. У статті прослідковується ланцюжок від появи перших фотографічних зображень до фотографій сьогодення. Особливу увагу було приділено розгляду ролі в культурі аматорської та побутової фотографії. Виявлено, що ці напрями фотографії доволі суттєво впливають на становище фотографічної справи як виду мистецтва. Аналізуючи зміст даних видів фотографії, було зазначено, що саме фотографії цих напрямків стають «дзеркалом реальності». Наукова новизна. Аналізуючи поведінку людини в сучасному культурному середовищі, можна зробити припущення, що людина, яка занурена у світ фотографічних образів, починає діяти та ідентифікувати себе як образ. Висновки. Намагаючись дослідити розвиток сучасної фотографії, неможливо чітко визначити її роль і розкрити механізми впливу фотографії на суспільство. Це пояснюється тим, що фотографія впливає на людину і культуру своїми власними шляхами, що призводить до неоднорідності формування реальності. Ще однією тенденцією є глибоке занурення фотографії в сферу Інтернет простору. Поширення соціальних мереж, блогів і сервісів мікроблогінгу дозволили фотографії стати засобом актуалізації віртуальної реальності або «реальної віртуальності» в просторі повсякденного життя.
Cet article propose un regard sur un ensemble de photographies afin d’étudier les transformations économiques et socioculturelles survenues au cours du xxe siècle à Ollagüe, une communauté autochtone du nord du Chili. Les ruines industrielles et la culture matérielle de l’exploitation du soufre y sont des témoins privilégiés d’une époque qui aspirait, dans l’utopie industrielle du xxe siècle, au développement économique régional et national. Les photographies permettent une interprétation fondée sur l’expérience et la mémoire. Elles permettent également une réflexion sur une pratique archéologique pouvant contribuer à la compréhension du contexte local d’une modernité complexe, avec ses propres expériences et spécificités.
The current elaboration of a post-phenomenological geography is mostly a theoretical effort. This paper aims to contribute to this theoretical stance from a practical point of view by proposing a comparison between the technique of repeat photography and the trajectories along which the approach of post-phenomenological geography has been outlined recently. From the engagement with a number of post-phenomenological interventions and an empirical case study – namely, a repeat-photography project conducted by the Italian amateur photographer Claudio Rigon at First World War cemetery sites on the Asiago Plateau in the Italian Pre-Alpine region – the paper derives a conceptual development of this outline. Drawing from the theorisation of photographic indexicality and the role of subjects and objects in the photographic act, it is argued that repeat photography, more than other photographic genres, simultaneously entails the agency and displacement of the human. In fact, the compulsory nature and strict rules of repeat photography (same subject, same vantage point, same frame, same atmosphere) liberate the photographer from the self-referential nature of creative photography and make room for other, non-human agents to co-determine the process and the final product. Repeat photography is envisioned here as a form of “being-with” through the image, a way to be attuned to subjects, objects and spacetimes, which is not, or not solely, human-centred, but can still convey an ethical aspect. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2018 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
Susan Sontag (geborene Susan Rosenblatt) kam am 16. Januar 1933 in New York zur Welt. Ihre Eltern Mildred und Jack Rosenblatt, säkularisierte Juden, hatten in Tianjin (China) ein Unternehmen für Pelzhandel. Als Susan fünf Jahre alt war, starb ihr Vater an Tuberkulose (Schrei ber 2010: 15f.).
Tins, cardboard boxes and albums hold one of the most prized and jealously guarded of all Wiradjuri Aboriginal 'material' possessions, the family photos. They are used to tell and recall stories, introduce people to kin, as items of exchange and as important statements of identity and belonging in the spatial and temporal politics of kinship. In this ethnographic study of Indigenous photo collections in south-east Australia, I argue that photos have the capacity to extend the face-to-face nature of kin-relatedness through time and space; they are important in negotiations of sociality; and they validate the past in contexts in which recourse to both myth and history have been constrained.
IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES'S subject is the significance of photography's defining characteristic: the photograph's inseparable relation to its subject, that which ''must have been'' in front of the camera's lens. Or so it would seem. The present reading of Camera Lucida argues that Barthes's essay actually shows photography's nature as dependent not only on the intimate relation to its object, commonly termed ''indexical,'' but in accord with its relation to its user, its beholder. An examination of Barthes's encounters with photographs in Camera Lucida reveals the way in which identification and misidentification figure into the viewing of images, and suggests that contact between the beholder and the photograph actually eclipses the relation between the photograph and its subject. Barthes's focus on the emotional response of the viewer disguises the fact that he misidentified key details in Camera Lucida's photographs, most significantly in a 1927 portrait by James Van Der Zee and in the ''Winter Garden Photograph.'' This latter photograph of Barthes's recently deceased mother as a small child is famously not illustrated in the book. This essay argues that it is fictional. These ''mistakes'' suggest that Camera Lucida undermines its ostensible basis in indexicality. The subject did not have to be in front of the camera after all. The present rereading of the text from this point of view articulates a notion of performativity according to which the nature of the contact that exists between the image and the viewer informs the way an image is understood. Barthes's desire to find his mother again through her photograph to a large extent acts out his desire to re(per)form and make permanent his relation to her, a desire that he elucidates in the process of describing his search for her picture and his reaction to it when he finds it. This performative element is charged with identification; the person the narrator (Barthes) seeks, in his mother, is himself. A close analysis of the ''Winter Garden Photograph,'' as described by Barthes, shows how performances of identification are inscribed with gender and familial configurations.
Configurations 6.3 (1998) 345-371
In opening his essay "Museums as Contact Zones," James Clifford transports his readers to the basement of the Portland Museum of Art to eavesdrop on a meeting that had been arranged between Tlingit elders, the Museum's curators, and himself to discuss the future of the Museum's Rasmussen Collection of Northwest Coast Indian artifacts. The curators, Clifford tells us, had shared his own expectation that the elders would want to focus their attention on, and to organize the discussion around, the objects in the collection -- but this proved not to be so. Although the artifacts were referred to from time to time "as aides-mémoires, occasions for the telling of stories and the singing of songs," it was the stories and songs that took center stage. The objects were left to keep pretty much to themselves, lying undisturbed "on the museum tables or in storage boxes," for the most part unheeded and, indeed, unseen, their role eclipsed by the cross-cultural exchanges -- in stories, songs, and conversation -- that they had occasioned. In Clifford's telling, the Museum thus emerges as primarily a scene of conversation rather than one of exhibition.
The imagery is a fitting one for Clifford's argument that museums should now be understood as "contact zones" that aim to facilitate a greater degree of cross-cultural communication between the different communities that are brought into contact with one another within the museum space. This entails that curators should conceive their roles in new ways. In place of the curator as the possessor of an authoritative knowledge that results in museum artifacts being arranged as the vehicles for a one-way transmission of messages, Clifford suggests that curators should rethink their relationships to the objects entrusted to their care and see these as artifactual mediators in, and of, complex histories of cultural exchange. It is equally clear, however, that the program Clifford proposes for the museum entails a shift in the ratio of the senses that are to be brought into play in the artifactual environment that the museum constructs. If, for the past two hundred years and more, the curator's role has been to arrange an authoritative message for the museum's public, this has been done by exhibiting collections in a manner calculated to render that message visible. This centering of the eye within a conception of the museum as an institution of the visible is now to be displaced in a conception of the museum's function that -- in the stress placed on dialogue across cultures caught in reciprocal, although unequally structured, exchanges -- views objects as vehicles for promoting complex kinds of cross-cultural talk and listening, rather than simply as collections that are to be displayed to be looked at. This becomes clear as Clifford outlines the difference between what the Portland Museum's curators had looked forward to obtaining from their meeting with the Tlingit elders -- that is, another context for the display of the collection, one rooted in and authenticated by an authoritative indigenous cultural perspective -- and what they actually got:
Clifford is not alone in suggesting the need for a change in the sensory regime of the museum. Indeed, the dominance of the eye has been put in question for some time now across a range of museum practices -- from hands-on exhibits that promote tactile involvement in the museum environment, through museums in which the sonic element predominates over the visual, to avant-garde experiments in which sound and vision are gratingly misaligned with one another. My purpose here is to place these concerns in historical perspective by looking at the processes through which the...
The year 1924 produced a series of crucial turns in Walter Benjamin's career. The years leading up to 1924, to which he later referred as his “apprenticeship in German literature,” saw Benjamin intent on a reevaluation of German Romanticism, and the development of a theory of criticism with deep roots in that very Romanticism. His major published works of the period included studies of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, a dissertation on Friedrich Schlegel's theory of criticism, and, in 1924, a major study of German baroque mourning plays, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama; in each of these texts, Benjamin develops his own literary theory from concepts and procedures evident in the works themselves, only to turn the new theory back on the text from which it in some sense sprang. The rhythms of Benjamin's practice and theory of criticism in these years contain two intertwined movements. On the one hand, his criticism entails the demolition or demystification of the unified work of art - what we today call its disenchantment. Benjaminian criticism reduces the apparently coherent, integrally meaningful work to the status, to name but a few of Benjamin’s figures, of ruin, of torso, of mask. In the study of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama he writes that “criticism is the mortification of works” (Origin, 182; trans. modified).
The extremes as points of orientation define the via regia of philosophical investigation for Benjamin. The first sentence that opens the main body of Benjamin's The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, after the epistemological preface, categorically states the direction as “the necessary direction toward the extreme” (Origin, 57). The extreme as point of direction and orientation, even as the “norm of conceptualization” (Origin, 57), is set off from a logic that defines the norm by the normal, the average, and the middle. It is in this direction toward the extreme that Benjamin finds his own intellectual procedure intersecting with that of Carl Schmitt, whose essay on the concept of sovereignty appealed to Benjamin above all because of this methodological intersection with his own mode of thought. When Benjamin, in his book on German tragic drama, explicitly quotes the one-sentence paragraph with which Carl Schmitt opens his book: “Sovereign is he who decides over the state of emergency,” his own epistemological preface has already articulated the logic of the extreme that underlies Schmitt's procedure. For Schmitt, the concept of the “sovereign” is a liminal concept (Grenzbegriff). “A liminal concept, ” he writes, “is not a confused concept as it is in the popular literature, but a concept of the extreme sphere. Accordingly its definition cannot be tied to the normal case, but to the liminal case.” At this point the intellectual worlds of Benjamin and Schmitt come to their closest encounter; from here they will move away from each other in opposite directions. Schmitt will become and remain a fundamentalist, Benjamin will remain a marginalist, being faithful only to the liminal border lines.
This article examines Escraches, a new form of political demonstration in post-dictatorial Argentina where hundreds of torturers and assassins, responsible for the torture and disappearance of 30,000 people, have benefited from amnesty laws. The lack of truth and accountability has had social and cultural consequences. The demonstrations, which challenge legalized impunity, engage with contemporary issues of memory and communication concerning the ‘Dirty War’ of 1976-83. The research focuses particularly on public sphere reactions to these communication strategies among young people with no direct personal memory of the violent repression that took place. The analysis is based on empirical data collected during 1998 through extensive interviews with young people from Buenos Aires.
Emotions are an important, but hitherto underexplored, component of historical consciousness and ethnohistorical practice. Extreme negative emotions evoked by traumatic historical events have strongly shaped collective memories of those events, occasionally repressing the memory altogether. More generally, understanding the past requires comprehending emotion and its cultural component. Two schools of thought in psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology and psychodynamic approaches, are discussed, with the applicability of each to ethnohistorical scholarship evaluated. Two examples drawn from the Northwest Coast illustrate the significance of emotion to ethnohistorical analysis.
This article presents the first empirically based analysis of how judicial proceedings against perpetrators of human rights violations – criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits – psychologically affect victims of those abuses. Policymakers, activists, and scholars frequently advance explicit or implicit claims about this impact, but generally offer no evidence to support them; at most, they provide a few anecdotes. This article combines insights from original interviews with therapists and lawyers with primary evidence from a comprehensive survey of published literature from social science research to personal memoirs. The article begins by summarizing psychological literature on how human rights violations themselves affect victims. It then examines the impact of trials, presenting a typology of ten psychological dynamics that connect particular aspects of process or outcomes with changes in victims’ psychology. Some dynamics are psychologically beneficial, while others are harmful. Although the empirical record is insufficient to draw conclusions about the relative significance of the dynamics or the prevalence of any, it is clear that the impact of trials varies tremendously from victim to victim. The article concludes by recommending (1) a de-emphasis of judicial processes in favor of other methods for healing the psychological damage wrought by human rights violations, (2) greater attention by courts to victims’ psychological needs, and (3) systematic research on the psychological impact of trials, including testing the dynamics identified in this article. Note: Since the publication of this article, a few new studies of the impact of trials on victims have appeared. Eric Stover’s The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in the Hague (2005) and David Mendeloff’s “Trauma and Vengeance: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Effects of Post-Conflict Justice” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2009) are among the most valuable.