Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital Photography

Katharina Fackler

doi:10.1515/culture-2019-0045

Abstract

Abstract This article addresses popular claims that photography has been “dematerialized” in the digital era. It engages a wide range of critical writings about photography from the early 19th to the 21st century to demonstrate that different versions of these claims have always formed an important part of photography criticism. However, rather than doing justice to photographs’ materiality or their complex entanglements with what has been considered material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, they have tended to somewhat limit our understanding of the medium’s material, sensory, and affective valences. This article argues that a sustained engagement between visual culture studies, sensory studies, and the new materialisms can help us understand more fully both analog and digital photography’s contingent position within the material world, varying sensory ideologies, and different subjectivities.

Highlights

In this epigraph, Fred Ritchin expresses a widely shared feeling about the shift from analog to digital photography
This article argues that a sustained engagement between visual culture studies, sensory studies, and the new materialisms can help us understand more fully both analog and digital photography’s contingent position within the material world, varying sensory ideologies, and different subjectivities
Tina Campt’s work on family photographs of black Europeans in the twentieth century takes a nuanced approach to “the photographic image as both an object and a site of affective attachments” [31]. Her methodology combines the “tactile” approach towards photographs as material objects proposed by Edwards and Hart with a focus on what she calls “the haptic.”4 The haptic, for Campt, is “a tactile and affective register,” which “serves as a direct link to a third sensory level through which [...] images register: the sonic” [19]. As they move scholarly thought on photography even further beyond the supposedly rational and cognitive and beyond an overemphasis on human agency, such works stand in a productive exchange with the new materialisms

Summary

Introduction

In this epigraph, Fred Ritchin expresses a widely shared feeling about the shift from analog to digital photography. As photographs are embedded in media ecologies that seek to account for differences among producers and consumers, they begin to resonate multisensorially beyond the material object This kind of critique often highlights photographs’ intimate entanglement with affects and emotions, moving analysis beyond purely semiotic notions of meaning. Her methodology combines the “tactile” approach towards photographs as material objects proposed by Edwards and Hart with a focus on what she calls “the haptic.” The haptic, for Campt, is “a tactile and affective register,” which “serves as a direct link to a third sensory level through which [...] images register: the sonic” [19] As they move scholarly thought on photography even further beyond the supposedly rational and cognitive and beyond an overemphasis on human agency, such works stand in a productive exchange with the new materialisms. Scholarly attention to these multisensory, affective, and “embodied modes of perception” (Campt 31) helps open up the critique of photography to racialized and queer experiences that defy easy categorizations, simplified causalities, and a dematerializing ocularcentrism

Photography and Materiality in the Digital Age

Conclusion

Works Cited