Theory Of Photography Research Articles

Intermediality and Theatre: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles

An American dramatist, availing herself of a sound design technique pioneered by filmmakers, weaves soul and rock songs into her plot in a way that might best be understood in terms of Roland Barthes’s theory of photography. The seemingly tortured logic required to formulate Wendy Wasserstein’s use of intermediality in The Heidi Chronicles (1988) belies the effortless way the properties of one medium can be integrated into the framework of another. In Wasserstein’s case, a visceral aural aesthetic with great cultural currency is spun into the theatrical event in a way that both complements and competes with meanings encoded via conventional dramatic devices. In the process, the expressive resources of popular music become a powerful adjunct to the meaning-making apparatus of dramatic realism. In the most basic sense, Wasserstein’s use of recorded popular music functions as an unusual, though highly effective, form of exposition. In the play, songs by Betty Everett, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Jefferson Airplane, and Sam Cooke perform—and in the process transform—the utilitarian task of providing background information necessary for the audience’s understanding of the dramatic action. This is not background or between-the-acts music. Rather, songs, and especially their lyrics, are foregrounded as an integral part of the plot. While comparable to the usual modes of dramatic exposition (dialogue, soliloquy, prologue/chorus, and narration), Wasserstein’s use of music is more subtle and efficient, capitalizing on the informational density of popular music 1 to guide the audience and connect the drama to a series of cultural and historical backdrops. But the songs do more than simply communicate information. They also, and much more dramatically, communicate somatically as resonant events in the lived experience of the audience. “Music moves us, quite literally,” Stephen Davies points out, “and often we are unaware of the small motions we make in response to it.” 2 When it comes to rock ’n’ roll music, “These material or ‘visceral’ properties of rock are registered in the body core, in the gut, and in the muscles and sinews of the arms and legs rather than in any intellectual faculty of judgment.” 3 “The

PRODUCTIVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS: INTERPRETING MEL BOCHNER'S THEORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Mel Bochner is conventionally considered a conceptual artist. Bochner, however, objects to the label and, having started his career as a painter, is now painting again. In fact he has been painting since 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of first generation conceptual art. How should Bochner's return to painting be understood? Perhaps counter‐intuitively, Bochner's painting is best understood with reference to his short‐lived and still little discussed photographic practice. The insights Bochner gained from his brief period of photographic experimentation are summarized in his work Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967–70). By reconstructing and interpreting the significance of Misunderstandings for Bochner's artistic development, I reveal that it is also productive within the broader context of the ongoing reassessment of the critical significance of photoconceptualism.

The Mausoleum of Youth: Between Experience and Nihilism in Benjamin's Berlin Childhood

Key sections of Walter Benjamin's montage-text Berlin Childhood around 1900 figure the relationship between human experience and modern media, with the sections that frame the text, ‘Loggias’ and ‘The Moon’, structured around metaphors of photography. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, and especially his seminal essay ‘Photography’, Benjamin develops, in the course of his book, a theory of photography's relationship to experience that runs counter to the better-known theories developed in such essays as ‘Little History of Photography’ and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, theories that are part of the broad currents of technological utopianism and, as such, emphasize photography's transformative potentials. In the Berlin Childhood, Benjamin instead emphasizes photography's role in the mortification and annihilation of meaningful human experience. Photography emerges here as the mausoleum of youth and hope.

Reflections about cinema and social photography in City of Gold

Fernando Meirelles’ film City of God is based on real events, and on a real community which shares the codes of aggressiveness, violence, death, easy money, revenge and leadership. From a functionalist point of view there is a consistency between film and community. But this article will focus on one of the film's characters, Buscape, for whom photography is a means to break away. Phillipe Dubois’ theories of photography in film serve as a basis to for analysing how Buscape achieves his escape.

Reflections about cinema and social photography in City of Gold

Fernando Meirelles’ film City of God is based on real events, and on a real community which shares the codes of aggressiveness, violence, death, easy money, revenge and leadership. From a functionalist point of view there is a consistency between film and community. But this article will focus on one of the film's characters, Buscapé, for whom photography is a means to break away. Phillipe Dubois’ theories of photography in film serve as a basis to for analysing how Buscapé achieves his escape.

Photography's Theoretical Blind Spots: Looking at the German Paradigm

In the last few decades, German photographic thought has remained neglected by the majority of Anglo-American scholars, who have instead pursued poststructuralist or postmodern approaches to photography's theorization. The central argument of this article is that largely because of the absence of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the German context, a very different “photographic paradigm” may be understood to have developed in Germany; one which instead of debunking such modernist values as objectivity, autonomy, and aesthetics, has instead reinvested them with dialectical and political possibilities. The reading and reception of prevalent trends in German photography theory has been greatly problematized because German photographic production, its history and surrounding discourses were divided from 1961 onwards, with the partition of Germany and the construction of the Berlin Wall. This German photographic paradigm has been largely ignored because of the historical and political rupture inaugurated by the Cold War. Via the construction of a brief comparative sketch of East and West German theoretical approaches to photography, this essay will maintain that these discourses offer crucial new ways of reconsidering photography in relation to visuality (as opposed to textuality), and, more specifically, in terms of the politics of seeing and the subject-object dialectic. If theories surrounding photography since the 1970s have sought to deconstruct the positivist, epistemological and aesthetic burden of its modernity, the German paradigm reveals that Anglo-American approaches to the medium have been equally encumbered by their postmodernity. In this German paradigm, it will be argued, we are given a model for a valuable dialectical and materialist rethinking of photography at a time when theorizing appears to have reached a critical stalemate.

Gazing at the Colonial Gaze: Photographic Observation and Observations on Photography Based on a Comparison between Aspects of the Work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron

The paper was provoked by viewing various selections of the photos taken by Bourdieu in Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part considers three stages in the production and consumption of Bourdieu's photos. The possibility that the third of these stages – the gallery display of Bourdieu's photos in the present – might be a betrayal of the sociology of photography and of art galleries that Bourdieu attempted in the 1960s leads to the discussion of the second part of the paper. Part 2 first contextualises the work on photography undertaken within the Centre de Sociologie Européenne in the early 1960s and then, secondly, discusses the emergence of divergent sociologies of photography in the work of Bourdieu and Passeron. The purpose of the discussion is to ask which of the theories of photography which developed in association with Bourdieu's photographic activity now enables us better to respond to Bourdieu's photographic products.

Performing the Relational Archive

This article addresses the recent changes in archival practices and discourse, and their implications for documentary photography and photographic theory. Exploring the work of artists such as Renée Green and Gitte Villesen, as well as the writings of Margaret Iversen, Jan Verwoert, and others, the first section of the article examines the severing of the links between photographic images and the events they document in the photographic theory of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the rethinking of these links today through the concepts of performativity and relationality. The second half of the article examines more closely the discourse of the archive in the last decade, focusing on the work of Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster. The article highlights the shifts in recent archival practices, from an excavation of past events and their traumatic implications, to viewing of the archive as a potential site for (re)constructing utopian visions.

What's in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection

This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a ‘mini-museum’ in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here I suggest that such approaches end up eliding the action-centred nature of Paka's ‘big name’-making ambitions. In response, I approach his photographic collection through an analytical framework deriving from Alfred Gell's seminal theory, Art and Agency (1998), which has hitherto remained marginal to Southeast Asianist anthropology. I argue that, more than merely symbolising or bearing his ‘big name’, Paka's photographs were agentive image-objects that actively instantiated it. I conclude by asking how such an analytical shift might encourage a reconceptualisation of ‘power’ and ‘objecthood’ in Southeast Asianist anthropology.

Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect

This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique photography's truth claim to the real by reading the photographic discourse of “indexicality” as a “symptom,” as defined in the work of Slavoj Žižek. The implications of this symptomatic relationship between photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question of photographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability of affect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant's notion of subjective universality as it is challenged by Barthes's theory of photography.

Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography

AbstractThis article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is more than apparent. In this context, the article discusses recent work by Roger Scruton, Dominic Lopes, Kendall Walton, Gregory Currie, Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, Noël Carroll, and Patrick Maynard in some detail. Specific topics addressed include: aesthetic scepticism, transparency, imagination, perception, information, representation and depiction.

The Question of Photographic Meaning in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida

This essay explores Ronald Barthes' thoughts on photography by constructing a narrative of development in his thought that reaches its peak in his last book, Camera Lucida. I claim that Barthes' engagement with photography revolves around the desire to develop a new kind of sight, a sensitive one, which penetrates the visible world deeper than our ordinary ways of looking. In Camera Lucida Barthes develops an original view regarding photography's relation to time, albeit a view that has been misinterpreted or simply ignored in philosophical discussions of photography. I interpret Barthes theory of photographic meaning as dealing with the temporal relation that unfolds between the photograph, the photographed object and the spectator and claim that it offers an insight not only into the meaning of photographs but also into the uniqueness of our existence, uniqueness that we tend to ignore or forget. My reading of Barthes opposes the prevalent interpretations of Camera Lucida. Barthes' project is seen as falling into one of two poles - understood either as a personal text about mourning, or as a species of some theoretical genus, i.e., as a psychoanalytic text or a general theory of photography.1 While it is true that Camera Lucida parts from Barthes' earlier structural texts and that in it he does not concentrate on the ways meaning is conveyed in the photograph, he does not abandon meaning as expressible and does not withdraw into a private, speechless realm. On the contrary, Camera Lucida, through its repeating and finally successful attempts to articulate the eidos of photography, serves as testimony to the desire to share meaning and to articulate it in language that is public and shared. Photographs pose a unique problem for Barthes: although there is nothing in them but the objects we see, an analysis of photographs on the level of their contents (through iconography and iconology) does not always fully exhaust the meaning we find them. Thus Barthes turns to the experience of looking at arresting photographs to show that the experience cannot be reduced to the photograph's features (it is not located on the level of details) nor can it be the outcome of the spectator's psychological constitution (the network of desires and expectations). In order to articulate the meaning we find in photographs Barthes turns instead to the concrete (an ordinary photograph, one that we find in our photo album) and develops from within it a picture of how meaning unfolds. Moreover, he shows us how our daily engagements as well as our theories conceal this meaning and suggests that the photograph, through its relation to time, can uncover this unique field of meaning. Now the philosophical significance of Barthes' work on photography often remains unexplored since he is considered mainly as a critic. However, I find in his writing, which is not always rigorous in the traditional philosophical sense, a unique conception of meaning: one that emphasizes the concrete as the locus point of meaning and wishes to use it to explore and sustain meaning. Language of Photography Barthes always treated photographs as reproductions of the real. In The Photographic message (1961) he claims: What does the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene itself, the literal reality.2 Later in Rhetoric of the Image (1964) he says: In the photograph ... the relationship of signified to signifiers is not one of 'transformation' but of 'recording' ... the scene is there, captured mechanically, not humanly.' And finally, he argues in a similar fashion in Cameral Lucida (1980): By nature, the photograph . . . has something tautological about it: a pipe here is always and intractably a pipe.4 Photographs, unlike paintings, do not allow us to distinguish the picture from the pictured, they are mechanical reproductions of reality and there is no gap between them and the real things they depict. …

As imagens como força

A partir da idéia de que as imagens são forças e não fatos ou formas, o ensaio elabora uma teoria da fotografia como o ocaso do sentido perseguindo as relações entre o contemporâneo e a imagem na antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade, em Marcel Mauss, Alfred Métraux, Georges Bataille, Murilo Mendes, Roland Barthes etc. Em seguida, refaz o percurso dos fotógrafos Horacio Coppola e Grete Stern para ilustrar um procedimento que se desvia do modernismo autonômico e letrado, lendo seus trabalhos como uma ficção sem autor, uma fulguração sem exterior, uma passagem instantânea do orgânico ao inorgânico, uma basculação entre obra e texto e um abandono da ação em favor da inoperância.

Shinrei Shashin: Photographs of Ghosts in Japanese Snapshots

Some Japanese snapshot photographs are believed to include images of ghosts, known in Japan as shinrei shashin. This phenomenon is examined in a series of personal interviews and an historical overview of ghost beliefs in Japan. Japanese ghost belief, imagery, and reference have roots in myth, folklore, and theater and can be found in mass media including film, manga, anime, novels, short stories, and now video games. But appearance in home media has been overlooked. The topic of ghost snapshots is seldom mentioned in Japan but is familiar to virtually all Japanese; even temples and shrines have remedies. Rather than attempting to offer a definitive truth or to judge the verisimilitude of the problematic existence of visualized ghosts, I consider logical ways whereby relationships among belief in ghosts, photographic representation, and Japanese culture can exist. This case study presents a challenge to the dominant theories of photography, when cross-cultural examples can necessitate a need to re-evaluate how we think about cultural dimensions of implication, inference, and communication in photographic representation.

Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography

This article explores Walter Benjamin's famous concept of the aura in relation to his writings on photography. Although Benjamin's “Artwork” essay charges photography with the decline of the aura of the traditional artwork, his essay on photography complicates this historical narrative, associating aura with early portrait photography but also with its successor, the commercial studio portrait. The childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, whose melancholy air serves Benjamin as an example of a paradoxical, post-auratic aura, recurs in his childhood memoirs, where the narrator projects himself into this picture. Benjamin's writings on photography thus develop an alternative concept of aura, one which transcends fixed historical or technological categories through the model of an imaginary encounter between viewer and image. This conception has far-reaching consequences not only for the theory of photography but also for its role within literature, as is suggested by Benjamin's empathetic engagement with the Kafka photograph and its incorporation into his own life story.

Practices and Flows of Digital Photography: An Ethnographic Framework

This article develops a methodological framework for undertaking empirical studies of practices and flows, of doings and circulations, of digital tourist photography. The article outlines what might be termed a non‐representational approach to photography concerned with affordances, actor‐networks, hybridized practices and networked flows of photographs. The article falls in three parts. It begins with rethinking photography theory. Traditional dualisms between affordance and practice are challenged, and photography is conceptualized as a hybridized, embodied performance. How digital photography changes photography's traditional affordances is then discussed. The third part discusses various methods to describe how affordances of digital tourist photography are used, twisted and resisted in concrete hybridized practices. I suggest undertaking multi‐sided ethnographies with ‘busy photographers’ to craft non‐representational accounts of mobile practices of photographing and flows of photographic images across various sites and actor‐networks. In a broader sense, this article is a methodological contribution to ‘the new mobilities paradigm’.

Travelling theories of family photography and the material culture of human rights in Latin America

Travelling theories of family photography and the material culture of human rights in Latin America

Travelling theories of family photography and the material culture of human rights in Latin America

From the display by relatives of individual and individuated images, or the erection of vast photo walls composed of portraits of the disappeared, to the creation of objects such as 'photo-pendants', photographic images have wide currency in the political arena of human rights struggles. As a mode of photographic performance and endlessly repeated gesture staged precisely for the camera, such images have achieved iconic status. And yet, despite the charged, emotive freight of these photographs, there is a tendency to overlook them, to view them as the mere props for human actions, rather than integral to human rights activism and the struggles for justice, truth and memory. Focusing on the deployment of photography in struggles for human rights in Latin America, this article aims (i) to raise questions regarding the political and emotional agency of this mode of photographic display and (ii) to reflect upon the theoretical paradigms available for approaching such image-events.

Photography that cares: Portraits from multi-ethnic Wales

This article, inspired by Roland Barthes' account of his search for a ‘just photograph’ of his mother (in Camera Lucida) and engaging with the author's own experience as a photographer, ethnographer and grieving son, makes the case for a photographic practice that is empathetic, reflexive, dialogic and critically engaged. It explores issues of photographic practice and cultural theory through text and images, including photographs and life stories from a portraiture project on mothers and daughters from diverse ethnic backgrounds who live in Wales.

On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts

274 I would like to acknowledge the support of a Leverhulme Trust research fellowship while working on this paper, versions of which were given at the 2005 Photography Theory Symposium in Cork and the 2006 annual conferences of the United Kingdom Association of Art Historians, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. I would also like to thank Jim Elkins, Michael Fried, Stephen Melville, Stephen Mulhall, Joel Snyder, and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts, and Claire Bishop, Dominic Rahtz, David Raskin, and Daniel Sturgis for their assistance with images. 1. James Elkins, ‘What DoWeWant Photography to Be? A Response toMichael Fried’,Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 941; hereafter abbreviated ‘W’. SeeMichael Fried, ‘Barthes’sPunctum’, Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 539–74; hereafter abbreviated ‘B’. The book to which Elkins refers is provisionally titledWhy PhotographyMatters as Art as Never Before. It has been widely previewed; in addition to various lectures and ‘B’, Fried has published short papers on Thomas Demand, JeffWall, and Luc Delahaye (‘Being There’,Artforum 43 [Sept. 2004]: 53–54; ‘Without a Trace: The Art of ThomasDemand’,Artforum 43 [Mar. 2005]: 198–203; and ‘WorldMergers’, Artforum 44 [Mar. 2006]: 63–64, 66, respectively). It was also the source of his 2005 Lionel Trilling On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts