PHOTOGRAPHIC EXCEPTIONALISM

Asserting that photographic education is an understudied area of photographic historiography, this article makes a case study of the entry of creative photography into US higher education in the post-Second World War period as a means to extend Stephen Bann’s notion of “photographic exceptionalism” beyond the historiography of nineteenth-century visual culture. Charting the trajectories in post-war America of two creative photographic pedagogies, the integrated model identified with Moholy-Nagy and the medium-specific one identified with the proponents of what is here called “Aspen modernism” (Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams and Minor White), it is argued that there is an Other to mid-twentieth-century photographic exceptionalism that signals its vulnerability. According to Bann, photographic exceptionalism still substantially informs thinking and writing on photography: so how did it survive postmodernism? The final section of the article looks at the legacies of the separatist model for what is now called “art photography” in relation to the institutional landscape of the art world. It is argued that the Photo Boom of the 1970s set in motion a new, institutional medium-specificity for photography and that this too has its vulnerabilities.     

OTHER PHOTO-GEOGRAPHIES

When the aim nowadays is to write history, in this case, to explore a certain period in the history of Contemporary Portuguese Photography, we will always encounter the problem of what to frame and what to illuminate. Walter Benjamin wrote that history was like a “mosaic” or the result of “illuminations”, while Bruno Latour spoke about the opposition between the modern and the primitive that seems to reflect the way history of art, especially that of photography, has evolved in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This article aims to disclose the more hidden and lesser-known history drawing upon Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal history to trace a view of Portuguese photography in the 1990s and 2000s and to describe the manner in which Portuguese artists came to assert themselves. It will contextualize the way their photographic language began to distance itself from the narrower practices of photography with which they had at first been linked.     

NEW MIXTURES

Some have talked about a crisis in documentary photography since its inter- and post-war heydays. But more recently a new kind of art-documentary has developed with a self-reflexive approach towards the limits and the possibilities of photography. The spectrum between documentary and art provides photography with a specific opportunity to address difficult subject matter between the personal and the political. Leaving the discussion of “the politics of representation” — so dominant in the 1980s — aside and instead departing from a handful of newer theoretical framings which try to formulate an ethically responsive, activist and transitive form of photographic agency (such as Roberts, Thrift, Butler and Azoulay), this article identifies and discusses a current in contemporary photography of new conceptual strategies of socially and politically engaged documentary. This strategy is called “new mixtures” because it mixes hitherto separated photographic forms such as family and cell phone photos, reportage and conceptual and archival forms. It is identified as a global tendency, but more closely exemplified by the work of Scandinavian photographers Kent Klich and Tina Enghoff. As such the article identifies what is called both a “social” as well as a more “positive” take on both theory and photography, which has taken place in the decade that photographies has existed.     

Photo-Graphy, “The Shadow In The Cave,” Its Pain And Love: The ethics of photography

This paper maps out photography’s newer ethics by examining Boris Mikhailov’s Case History that often stirs controversy over its bold depiction of human misery. The paper criticizes the idea that photographers should not represent “the other’s pain”: an idea that has sabotaged the medium’s inherent visual desire in order to prioritize its moral responsibility. In that idea is found a resilient Platonic antagonism against image, a logo-centric prejudice that marks a biased demarcation between art and politics in photography theory. The paper challenges this photographic Platonism through recent arguments that illuminate the medium’s inter-regimic, dialectical, redemptive roles (Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay, et al.). With this theoretical challenge, the paper aims to outline a new ethics of photography for an era in which the image’s “pandemic” growth is resetting the mode of human communication and the role of photography.     

The Floating Face: Garbo,Photography and Death Masks

A number of writers have noted the influence of Ernst Benkard’s 1927 book of death masks, Das Ewige Antlitz, on Modernist artists and writers of the inter-war period. This article links it specifically to the emergence in the late 1920s of a very particular way of photographing people, termed here “the floating face”, which is epitomised in publicity portraits of Greta Garbo. It is suggested that this photographic convention is linked to changing attitudes associated with war, to the techniques of cinema, and to surrealism, but also to the influence of Benkard’s book. The resemblance between the death mask image and movie star portrait is significant for an understanding of the origins and affective impact of a certain photographic style. This essay also suggests that the death mask as a figure in film and photography theory emerges out of this particular style of photography, and this specific social and cultural context, but then becomes applied to “the photograph” in general. It is argued that the idea of photographs as like death masks is overdetermined by the social and cultural context of 1920s Europe.     

Photography as Expanding Form: Virtual and actual expansion in the work of Saron Hughes and Martina Corry

This article considers the notion of expanding photography in relation to the work of Saron Hughes and Martina Corry. Both artists produce work that challenges conventional readings of the photograph. Hughes’ A1 Still Life causes pictorial confusion — within photographic representation— and suggests the possibility of virtual expansion. Corry’s Colour Works series also generates pictorial ambiguity, yet this arises from the actual expansion of the photograph. Shaped into three-dimensional forms, Colour Works posits the photograph as an object. These distinct examples of expanding photography both employ folding as a method. Their contrasting approaches converge in their exploration of the fold’s ability to transform a flat paper surface into a three-dimensional form. This article explores the operations of the fold through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Hughes’ and Corry’s expanding photography correlates with accounts of internally and externally generated media expansion (derived from Rosalind Krauss and Peter Osborne). The virtual and actual expansion of photography here will be read in conjunction with art historical and theoretical notions of medium.     

THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

The photo artists Michael Reisch and Andreas Gefeller are visualizing environments, man-made landscapes and architectural surroundings that could be perceived as standing in the tradition of documentary landscape and architectural photography or as being created for scientific use. Subtle visual shifts provoke moments of confusion and exceed the physical possibilities of the viewer’s perception in an imaginable extra-pictorial reality. By examining interlacing levels of realities — evoked by picture editing processes of digital and analog photographs — these phenomena will be denominated as Impossible Realities. Both artists practice perplexing “games” with distance and nearness, perceptible “mistakes” and seemingly “hygienic” views, leading viewers to doubt the authenticity — in terms of being not manipulated — of the photographs. The subjects hover between apocalyptic doubts and utopian perceptions of the ideal, stimulating reflections on preshaped ideas and concepts of pure nature, on human-influenced environmental changes and the charged relationship between urban environments and seemingly unspoiled nature (the very present sense of human absence plays an important role). Through the photographic process and the postproduction the images as ideas/imaginations and as material become hybrid constructions that could symbolically stand for the impossible but imaginable realities both artists evoke, varying between documentation and imagination.     

On the Scales of Photographic Abstraction

This article explores three key ways in which questions of abstraction have been and continue to be closely associated with photography: the tradition of photographs that desire to “be” abstract; the invisible but determining forms of abstraction central to capitalism and shaping of photography as a technical-historical form; and the technical-conceptual abstractions embedded in and structuring of photographic apparatuses. The exploration of these themes is pursued through analysis of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of photography, Lambert Wiesing’s analysis of abstract photography and Allan Sekula’s critique of capitalist modes of equivalence and exchange as these impact on the photographic. These analyses are pursued through exploration of the issues, processes and operations of “scale”, “scaling” and “scalability” entailed in these three modes of abstraction and in their critical and theoretical reflection. The aim of this strategy is to outline and to analyse the complex web of abstractions that are central to photography and the modes of scale that are crucial to abstraction in this context. The article suggests that to encounter or to think about abstraction photographically is to operate within some modulation of scale and that this may in fact be the closest one can get to envisioning the complexity of abstraction in the photographic context.     

Unseen Images: Gigapixel photography and its viewers

Photographs have long been recognized as providing a surfeit of information. This article takes up the recent emergence of gigapixel photography in its various forms as a technology in which the appeal of maximum image density is taken for granted. The article considers the “snapshot” mode of gigapixel photography as it reconfigures the conventional relationship of the viewer of a photograph to the place depicted. By providing an extraordinary quantity of photographic information for a viewer within every single frame, gigapixel “snapshots” produce images that anticipate the active participation of a future viewer, expect multiple reconfigurations of framing edges, and rely on unanticipated content for value and meaning.     

Ingres and photographic vision

Abstract

The initial impact of photography on painting and the continuing interplay between the two remain one of the intriguing questions confronting the historian of nineteenth century art. Recognition of photographic history as a significant discipline in its own right has grown. rapidly in the last four decades, but a great deal remains to be done on the connection between the two arts. The pioneering works of Newhall, Schwarz and, later, Scharf, Coke and others, have already focused attention on the way in which photography acted upon the style and content of painting, a matter now widely recognized among art historians. There is no longer any novelty or surprise in discovering that a prominent artist made reference to, or in some cases actually copied, a specific photograph. The student today accepts the fact that such artists as Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and Degas made use of the works of Durieu, Villeneuve, Nadar, Carjat, Disdéri and others.     

LATENT IMAGES ON THE CAMERA’S WALL: Forensic aesthetics as photography

This paper examines the “algorithmic turn” in light of the “forensic turn” and seeks to consider the relevance of Forensic Architecture’s work for the theory of photography. First, I will analyze the role of photography as testimony in light of the concept of “forensic aesthetics,” and argue that with it, the role of photography as evidence is less related to its visible dimensions and more to its being a material trace—an invisible latent image that needs to be developed and animated. Second, I will diagnose the implication of the concept of “forensic aesthetics” in one of the agency’s first research projects: an investigation of US drone warfare in Pakistan from 2011 and argue that the concern that arose with the emergence of digital photography from a “post-photographic” era—in which the effect of digital technologies was perceived as the virtualization of the world—takes a material twist with forensic aesthetics. It is precisely the digitization of photography that enables it to maintain its indexical power, even at the cost of losing its limits as a medium.     

Rephotography and the Era of Witness

The unprecedented significance attributed to witness and testimony in diverse aspects of contemporary culture has shifted focus away from the idea of history as an objective account of past events, to personal narratives characterized by emotion and personal memory. By examining Gustavo Germano’s series of family rephotographs “Ausencias (Argentina)” (2006), this article addresses how the emphasis on witness in contemporary culture is reshaping our conceptions of photography and how photographs are used to relate to others and the past. Germano’s series uses rephotography as a tool to raise critical questions about photography, absence, testimony and history in the wake of the disappearance of tens of thousands of Argentinian citizens during that country’s military dictatorship (1976?1983). As the series simultaneously critiques and revives myths of photographic truth and presence, it signals an important change in contemporary culture that gives notions of the photographic witness and photography’s links to history new meaning.     

PHOTOGRAPHY

Disturbingly, one important constituent within the photographic habitus has remained conspicuously absent from most discussions in what has come to be called Post-Photography. This particular, which since the nineteenth century has routinely been considered a key stage in the photographic workflow, is the human photographer. Therefore, this article delineates the presence of the human photographer in photography, its first appearances, its rise to prominence and its subsequent fall. In doing so, it attempts to explain how we taught ourselves to think of photography as a human-centric form of art-making and whether we ought to continue thinking of it as such. It begins with historical accounts of photography’s “machinism”, it then discusses modernist accounts of photography as an act of artistic ingenuity, followed by several modalities that have recently become available through digital and networked technologies. The article concludes with an alternate account of photography today and the likely place of both human photographer and viewer within it in the foreseeable future.     

‘Mechanism’ Made Visible: Process and Perception in Henry Peach Robinson’s Composite Photographs

This article analyses Henry Peach Robinson’s method of making composite photographs in the context of widespread belief that the photographer’s ‘mechanism’ was perceptible in the appearance of his prints. By examining Robinson’s preparatory and darkroom procedures, as well as the photographer’s extensive writing about his photographic practice, I suggest that composite photographs invited viewers to pay attention to process, and to take it into account in their evaluation of an image. This attitude challenged key tenets of academic art theory – the paradigm for nascent concepts of art in photography – by refusing to subordinate manual labour to that of the mind. While many nineteenth-century critics rejected Robinson’s approach, the debates engendered by composite techniques reveal a persistent fascination with making that advanced photographic practice as a marker of artistic value.     

Contract or Disobedience?: Reframing Azoulay

The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay has profoundly reshaped the critical study of photography. The concept of “the civil concept of photography” is as intriguing as it is ill-defined. This essay seeks to clarify it. It begins by situating Azoulay’s theory in the single context that has most dramatically stamped her thinking — Palestine. It is in her thinking through photography and the Palestinian question that her debt to, and divergence from, the tradition of social contract theory is clearly seen. It concludes that Azoulay’s central concept — “the civil contract of photography” — is better understood when seen from the combined perspective of Schmitt’s theory of decision and Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience.     

Banality,Memory and the Index: Thomas Demand and Hitler’s photographer

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin elucidates how photographic images enable the subject to elude death because by its very nature the image preserves the subject through the act of memory and remembering. This characteristic implies an indexical relation between the image and its referent and a reliance on memory’s capacity to recall such images. Problematising this position are photographs that are removed from their original context, detached from collective memory and forgotten, or images that, in their very banality, erase or negate meaning? This paper explores the disruption to photography’s meaning and memory in selected photographs by Thomas Demand that are restagings of photographs by Adolf Hitler’s official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. This paper analyses these photographs in terms of memory and indexicality and considers how banality can affect the circumstances of looking — a concept that is here applied in order to reconsider these images.     

Mines,mountains, and the making of a vertical consciousness in Germany ca. 1800

The insight that scientific theories are “practice-laden” has animated scholarship in the history of science for nearly three decades. This article examines a style of geographical thought that was, I argue, movement-laden. The thought-style in question has been described as a “vertical consciousness that engulfed science in the early nineteenth century,” and is closely associated with the geographical vision of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt’s science spanned nature’s horizontal and vertical axes, from Saxon mines to Andean summits, and from the currents of the ocean to those of the aerial ocean. In probing the origins of Humboldt’s vertical thinking, this article opens up a broader history about the industrial practices and travel cultures that originally animated it. Humboldt’s “global physics” first emerged within a context of vertical travel, up mountains and into mines and caverns. Rhythms of the body—lethal for some, “sublime” for others—became rhythms of the mind. A view of nature as set of vertically complementary spaces rippled through mining culture, Romantic art, and the geographical sciences. To trace the earliest routes of Humboldt’s science is to acknowledge the many actors—some celebrated, most unsung—who took part in the making of a vertical consciousness.     

REFRAMING DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY IN CHINA

This paper examines the changing cultural and institutional conditions that have indigenized “documentary photography” in post-socialist China. It highlights the interweaving of intellectual, journalistic, and curatorial interpretations of “documentary.” It argues that the promotion of “documentary” as a genre of contemporary art in this process undermines photography’s claim to truth but is crucial to the reformulation of Chinese socialist realism.     

Contemporary Photographic Practices on the British Fairground

The fairground is a somewhat magical and uncharted realm of illusion, deception, thrill and adventure. It offers a glimpse of the improbable and impossible, and a taste or touch of the unattainable. This article looks at the crossover of photography and the British fairground following the gradual take-up of photography in the post-war period. It briefly covers early traditions concomitant with the specialised practice of photography, then it identifies photographic practices on the fairground through distinct communities of engagement including professional and amateur photographers attracted to the spectacle of the fair, ethnographic explorers, dedicated enthusiasts, showpeople and the general public of “punters”. In each case photographs from these communities are presented as well as a selection of photographs depicting these communities of photographers in action. The article concludes with the current situation of camera phone technology, social media and digitally manipulated photographic art as a new aesthetic of the fairground.     

Mind the Gap Fissures and prospects of an impossible consensus. Archiving in Spain’s contemporary arena

This paper examines the organic response to violence on which the photographic archive is assembled, distorted and embodied from the late 1970s to date in the Spanish contemporary arena. Archive is understood as a toolbox for reconstructing, not only the memories of the past but, following Jacques Derrida’s influential thesis, the responsibilities and promises of the future. Drawing on Slavoj Zizek’s notion of the “parallax view” and Chantal Mouffe’s definition of “antagonism” and “agonistic pluralism,” this essay argues that Spain’s contemporary art scene shares an approach to the photographic archive that relates to its capacity to affect and to have a counter-effect by the means of movement and alternation; in other words, by displacing the very same representations and devices that have fictitiously constructed the hegemonic historical consensus. By pinpointing the fissures that emerge from apparent incompatibilities, such as the pairing of culture/barbarism proposed by Walter Benjamin, the case studies presented in what follows bring to light often-anaesthetized historical narratives. Therefore, this paper suggests that these cases act as historical agents in disguise, putting to work experiences with history while questioning the referential value of the image: its representational paradox and rhetorical dependence.