Abstract
Abstract Chapter four engages with photographic authorship, materiality, and archives. As the global art world embraced photography as a legitimate art commodity, curators and dealers were eager to discover new photographic artists in the dispersed, non-institutional archives of vernacular photography, particularly commercial studio photographers. Documentaries about such archival discoveries address legitimation in relation to not only the photographer but also the curator, dealer, or collector who claims to have discovered them. The photographers and collectors become parallel protagonists in narratives, affirmative and critical, about commodification, ownership, exploitation, and cultural recognition. The latter half of the chapter analyzes cultural and physical restitution, through documentaries that critically challenge and reverse the art world’s appropriation of amateur, studio, and press photography by returning the photographs to their original cultural contexts. Such films ultimately raise the question of how preservation might be rethought and what role documentary film may play in its reconceptualization.
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