Hybridity: The reverse of photographic medium specificity?

Abstract

In medium theory—and, since nobody doubts that photography is a medium, the same will apply in the photographic field—notions of hybridity and medium-specificity are always closely intertwined, as if they were the obverse and reverse of the same coin. The very belief that media are ‘medium specific’, whatever this medium specificity may entail, opens the logical possibility of a combination, a blending or even a blurring of media, whereas the analogous conviction that media can never be limited to their specificity raises, no less logically, a set of questions on that impossible to define, yet always returning, issue of specificity. Following the theoretical preferences—and prejudices—of each theoretician, specificity and hybridity are defined in very different ways. Hybridity as a combination of media that are specific, for instance, is not to be equated with hybridity as the result of a crossing (in the almost biological sense of the term). The same goes for specificity as a quasi-Platonic essence, or, on the contrary, as the permanent reinvention of what it might mean to ‘be’ a medium. In this article, we will try to rethink a number of these very general but inescapable questions in the context of the field of photography. The study ends with a short presentation of the work of Henri Van Lier, a Belgian semiotician whose ideas offer a good illustration of the theses defended in these pages.