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12/3/08 8:43 PMAfterimage: The archaeology of photography: rereading Michel Foucault and the archaeology of knowledgePage 1 of 5http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_3_35/ai_n24225806/print?tag=artBody;col1

FindArticles> Afterimage>Nov-Dec, 2007> Article> Print friendly

The archaeology of photography: rereading Michel Foucault and the archaeology of knowledge

David BateThe French historian of discourse, Michel Foucault, made a clear distinction between the "archive" and the method that he describesas archaeological. While this method does not require a trowel to dig through the earth, the metaphor of digging provides a valuableimage of what the historical researcher needs to do. For Foucault, the historian must excavate an archive to reveal not merely what isin it, but the very conditions that have made that archive possible, what he calls its historical a priori. (1) This historical a priori is the"condition of reality for statements," the rules that characterize any discursive practice. Thus, the archive in Foucault's work isnothing so literal as rows of dusty shelves in a particular institution, but rather involves the whole system or apparatus that enablessuch artifacts to exist (including the actual institutional building itself). In this model, the "archive" is already a construct, a corpusthat is the product of a discourse. One must dig to make sense of the systems behind what one sees.In fact, Foucault's argument is based on the semiotic distinction between langue and parole in linguistics. The linguistic oppositionlangue and parole (grammar and speech) is used to demonstrate how any utterance is always a symptom of the system that allows itto exist. In this conception, any act of speech (parole) is a specific instance, an event, that gives evidence of the rules of grammar(langue), the abstract set of rules about language through which that event is allowed its form; a form, which of course, over time, can be reformed or changed. For Foucault then, any archive is an instance of parole, where one can deconstruct the rules of the"language" (langue) that underpins it. The use of this theory by Foucault to construct a model of thinking about the archaeology of knowledge has important consequences for the field of photography and the notion of the archive.In the first instance, the idea of photography as a type of "archive" has been around since the early days of photography. Whether it was (or is) an institution that wants to categorize its objects through photographs (e.g., criminals by the police, military and colonialcampaigns mapping land, a museum its artifacts, a family through its "album") or whether it is individual photographers whoconstruct a taxonomy of objects through their photographs (e.g., John Thomson's Street Life of London, Eugene Atget's Parisphotographs, August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century in Germany, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads, to name only a few), theaim is always the same: to provide a corpus of images that represent--and can be consulted about--a specific object. This means thatphotographs are almost always to be found within the conception of practice as an "archive."Everywhere around us, it seems, there are new digital photographic archives being constructed: cctv control centres, the various typesof people-based "democratic" Web sites like Flickr and YouTube, millions of cell phone camera memory cards, and personalcomputer hard disks--not to mention the many vast commercial and governmental computer data image files. All these new archives, with their taxonomic "tab" and keyword search finder systems, insinuate the archive as an expanded field of cultural activity whosehorizons appear more infinite day by day. For all these reasons, the "archive" is a central concept in the arsenal of cultural knowledge.So the idea of photography as an archive (an archival practice) is not so abstract or strange and not limited to the province of curators, academics, museum researchers, or picture agents. The archive is a crucial basic tool of "cultural intermediaries," pictureresearchers, editors, and agents, etc., where finding and naming something is an essential aspect of daily work, an everyday problematic. We might say the same applies to photographers as well, be they stock library photographers, art photographers, or evenamateurs: the taxonomy of "objects, things, and people" that are photographed have the issue of the archive in common. It might bethought then that the problems encountered--if not the actual situations--are similar for gallery curators just as much as they are fora photographer setting out to make some "work." The production, filing, and storage of images in archives within categories as well asthe occasional configuration (selection) from these archive materials into exhibitions thus demands an approach to how we use themand this is where Foucault's concept of archaeology might be useful.

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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]Now, while it is typically the task of the historian (or even photographer) to use the archive to explain an object (past or present),Foucault challenges that practice. He argues first that archives are not necessarily coherent (historians often make it appear that way by the first choices--the process of decision-making--they make in their work); and, second, "interpreting" an archive is a project thatalready implicitly accepts the underlying terms of the system. The archive "reveals the rules of a practice." (2) Instead, Foucault, likean archaeologist, proposes that objects and documents can be examined for what they reveal about a discourse. To this end, he is not,unlike the antiquarian, concerned with the provenance of objects: who made what, how, and where. To Foucault, it is more importantfor the archaeologist to search for the regular features of objects in their appearance, "the regularity of statements," which in factconstitute the discourse of any discursive practice. (3) From all this emerges a very different attitude whereby one is more concerned with the raw materials (the archaeological evidence from which descriptions are constructed) than with the "accumulation of fact" (therepository of the past itself).In Foucault's "archaeology of knowledge," objects, documents, images, and representations are so many parts of what make up adiscourse--not the other way around as is commonly conceived. A discourse is not the base for other knowledge. Rather, it is itself thesite of how knowledge comes to be constituted. In other words, archives of photographs do not reflect historical reality; they are thematerial, always incomplete, which form the "already-said," the basic construction of its description. Foucault, with his concept of thearchaeology of knowledge, specifically resituates the work of history (his book is about his own work, archaeology rather than history or the "history of ideas") as the work of discourse theory. Foucault argues four main aspects to this work: the emergence of adiscourse; its sustainability despite certain contradictions; the comparison of different discursive practices; and the analysis of changeand transformation in a discursive practice. From this rather abstract starting point in discourse theory, one can begin to define anddetermine how to conceptualize the archaeology of photography.I want to indicate some of the implications of this idea for the field of photography in approaches to history and photographicpractice. First, an archaeology of photography would be different from the history of photography. The history of photography, as it ismost often practiced, relies on identifying originality, naming authors, and their works and themes that contribute something "new."Genius, influence, and the extraordinary are key themes selected to represent the development of photography in a general history of photography--where the subject matter of photographs is often subservient to those categories. Typical narratives in the history of photography, for example, include where to situate its invention: in either England or France, posing the question of identifying thetrue inventor: William Henry Fox Talbot or Louis Daguerre? (A question about as important as the one asking how many angels cangather on the head of a pin.) An archaeology of photography would be less preoccupied with the individual rivalry between suchfigures, or the specific personal wishes of specific individuals "to photograph" (a history through "psycho-biography," which deniessocial levels of analysis) than with the issue of where and why it emerged as it did, what the photography was used for, and whatregular objects appear across the surfaces of all these photographs.[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]It is here that, for example, we would quickly regard the "surfaces of emergence" of photography in the nineteenth century as along afault line between "art" and "science." Art and science were two conflicting categories during the social and political revolution of industrialization. Art and artisan methods of production and purpose were challenged by the innovation of industrial processes suchas photography. Science, as a realm of rational knowledge, became inextricably linked with the sphere of the "entrepreneur," wherediscerning "amateurs" (like Daguerre or Fox Talbot) could begin to capitalize on their invention as an industry. And so it was that theindustrial revolution, via capitalism, changed the whole society, including the social and cultural relations of producers of commodities (e.g., agriculture, clothing, food, the picture-making industries) and the relations between people within communities--how they lived and how they were literally perceived. Industrialism and the specialisms of the new industrial world demanded thatthe status of the artist/artisan and the scientist/entrepreneur overlap in new ways because of the skills that new technologies

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demanded. This "crisis" in each category, art and science, is still manifest today among those who find it is impossible, even now (among photographers as much as historians and critics), to finally "decide" whether photography is an art or science. The opposition(though not a distinction) between art and science was obsolete, in that "photography" in fact demanded a combination of both; it was media. Indeed, it might be said that one key failure of the history of photography has been its inability to recognize how far theemergent uses of photography were instrumental in the very mutation of the existing fields of art and science. Photography was, inthis respect, crucial to the appearance of a whole new domain that, throughout the twentieth century, emerged and became unified asthe new media institutions and agencies--where both art and science were implicated and acknowledged.The archaeological approach brings a quite different perspective to the thinking, study, and practice of photography. An archaeology of photography would register the various and different "surfaces of emergence" of photography--from the complex of institutionsacross which photography emerged in the nineteenth century to the new twentieth-century developments (staff photographers andpicture editors at newspapers); the development and growth of photo agencies (including the new, vast industry of stock photography); the rise of advertising agencies whose owners became rich and powerful by mediating between clients andphotographers and dictating the images (art direction) and distribution. Then there are the uses of photography by state authorities(police, military, medical, legal), corporations (scientific, administrative, etc.), and individuals (family images, the sex industry, travel,and tourism). Across all these diverse discursive practices, the photographic image emerges as a media-driven "archive" whosestatements must not be taken at face value but are to be read as symptomatic of culture and its language. In this respect, for example, we might think of the appearance of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib (now an online "archive") as finally a publicacknowledgement of a type of archive, hitherto kept private, one that had long been overdue for discussion: the discourse of the "wartrophy" picture, a sort of perverted tourist photography. (A discussion that is difficult no doubt partly due to the obvious disturbanceit causes to popular discourses of humanism--witness Susan Sontag's response. (4)) An archaeology takes the issue of photography beyond the boundaries of technological innovation (science) that still dominate thepopular conception of photography as a "technology." Crucial here is the role of "art" as an institution, which remains a significantcomponent of the discursive archipelago of photography. During the twentieth century, however, the dynamic between art and massmedia culture has fundamentally changed. No longer is there such an explicit opposition as that defined by mid-twentieth-century critics like Clement Greenberg (famous for his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"), arguing for the autonomy of art from massculture, or the earlier vociferous critics from within photography like Alfred Stieglitz, who opposed "commercialism." Today, thecommerce between art and media accommodates much more exchange, each tolerating a reciprocal "difference," while trading likesuspicious frontier pioneers. Photography has been central in the mutation of that debate not least because it was involved in both artand mass media.The archaeology of photography would not try to overcome or "resolve" those contradictions and conflicts between the differingfunctions of photography in art or in media institutions like advertising, photojournalism, or photography used by the state. (Nor would it seek to collapse them together as some postmodernist discourses claimed.) Instead, an archaeology would attempt to show what separates the discursive practices, or indeed, what they might even unexpectedly have in common. For example, if we take thetheme of authorship, a key question in the history of photography, there are significantly different ideas about what an author is indifferent photographic discourses. In an art discourse, the name and biography of the author (photographic artist) serves a key function. Meanwhile, the same photographer within an advertising discourse would not normally be featured or named as the authorof the campaign. The photographer is seen as a technician involved in the production of the basic photographic image; and the publicauthorship (credit) for the photograph is attributed to the advertiser, the client who paid for it, and not the advertising agency thatmost likely conceived and directed it. The "author" of the advertisement is thus an abstract corporation; consequently people speak about the advertisement, for example, as a "Coca-Cola advertisement" or a "Levi's Jeans advertisement." No doubt this promotes brand identity over any individual (the creatives, art director, photographer, or computer compositor) involved in its production. Thecredit given to the brand for its creativeness is what counts. (5)