Photography as Knowledge Infrastructure

Abstract

Photography may seem primarily a technology of image-making, but it was in fact a powerful mode of meaning-making in the nineteenth century, and its operation as such was actively under negotiation from its invention. This essay examines the photograph's status as both documentary object and artistic expression, drawing on examples including journalistic, political, and familial uses of the medium as well as the forms of entertainment it provided. As a force of knowledge production—whether helping consolidate emerging sentimental ideals of family relations, forwarding anthropological understandings of the world, or supporting the work of spiritualists claiming to commune with the dead—photography was used to clarify and shape people's ideas about phenomena they did not understand and often otherwise could not see. As such, it became a vital infrastructure for the transmission of culture and the consolidation of national identity.