THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND VISUAL

CULTURE

The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture is a seminal

reference source for the ever-anging field of photography.

Comprising an impressive range of essays and interviews by experts and

solars from across the globe, this book examines the medium’s history, its
central issues and emerging trends, and its mu-discussed future. e
collected essays and interviews explore the current debates surrounding the
photograph as object, art, document, propaganda, truth, selling tool, and
universal language; the perception of photography arives as burdens,
rather than treasures; the continual tenological development reshaping the
field; photography as a tool of representation and control, and more.

One of the most comprehensive volumes of its kind, this companion is

essential reading for photographers and historians alike.

Moritz Neumüller is a curator, educator and writer in the field of

Photography and New Media. He has worked for institutions su as MoMA
New York, La Fábrica Madrid and PhotoIreland Festival in Dublin. He is the
academic director of the Photography Department of IED Madrid, and runs
a postgraduate course for the IDEP sool in Barcelona. He is a regular
contributor to European Photography Magazine (Berlin) and Photoresearcher
(Vienna), and has curated exhibitions on artists su as Bernd and Hilla
Beer, Yamamoto Masao, Cristina de Middel, Stephen Gill, Gabriel Orozco,
Martin Parr, Chris Jordan, and Erik Kessels. Since 2010, he has run e
Curator Ship, an online resource for visual artists. Recent curatorial projects
include the Daegu Biennial 2014 (Korea), the Photobook Week Aarhus
(Denmark), and the exhibition Photobook Phenomenon for the CCCB center
in Barcelona.
 e Routledge Companion to
Photography and Visual Culture

Edited by Moritz Neumüller

First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Typeset in Bembo by Keystroke, Neville Lodge, Teenhall, Wolverhampton

 Contents
Contributors

Foreword: Unencompassable Photography

Introduction

1 Images, Photographs and Visual Culture

1.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

1.1 How to Do ings with Photographs:Towards a Praxeology of

Photography
Bernd Stiegler

1.2 e Photograph as Object

Alison Nordström in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

1.3 Photography and/as Art

Charlotte Cotton in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

1.4 Photography, Visual Culture, and the (Re)Definition of the Male Gaze
David N. Martin, Suzanne Szucs, and James W. Koschoreck

1.5 Unqueer, Lesbian, Trans: Shiing Gazes in Photography and Visual

Culture Today
David N. Martin, James W. Koschoreck, and Suzanne Szucs

1.6 e Selfie: More and Less than a Self-Portrait

Alise Tifentale
 1.7 Case Study: Migrant Mother. Race and Gender in the Making of a
Photographic Icon
Lisa Richman

1.8 Documentary Aritecture and the History of "Before and Aer"

Photography
Ines Weizman

2 Territories

2.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

2.1 Other World Histories of Photography: e First Century of

Photography in Asia
Gael Newton

2.2 Photographing the Mexican Revolution: A Case Study of Genre and

Functions
John Mraz

2.3 Either We Destroy Everything or We Save Everything

Timothy Prus and Marcelo Brodsky in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

2.4 Case Study: e Image of Perestroika. Russian Photography and Visual

Culture in the 1980s and 1990s
Irina Chmyreva

2.5 e Representation of Landscape in Contemporary Chinese

Photography
Yining He

3 Useful Photography
 3.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

3.1 Photography Goes to War

Rita Leistner

3.2 e Advertisement Industry is based on Fear

Erik Kessels in Conversation with Olivia Estalayo

3.3 A Farewell to the Family Album? (and Case Study on the Cultural
History of Wedding Photography)
Mette Sandbye

3.4 Aritectural Photography: A Medium as a Form of Useful

Interpretation
Rolf Sachsse

3.5 Case Study on the Photo Booth: Proof, Appropriation, Identity

Érika Goyarrola

3.6 Art and Activism

Swaantje Güntzel and Chris Jordan in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

4 Redefining the Photographic Medium

4.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

4.1 Resear-Based Documentary Projects

Stephen Chalmers

4.2 e Still and the Moving Image

Alexander Streitberger
 4.3 Staged Photography
Lars Blunck

4.4 Image–Text Intersections

Federica Chiocchetti in Conversation with Nina Strand

4.5 Tactile Photography

Moritz Neumüller and Andreas Reichinger

4.6 Photography at the Borderline

Roger Ballen

5 Rights and Markets for Photography

5.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

5.1 e Contemporary Art Market

Alexander Rotter in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

5.2 e Market for Photography

Simone Klein in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

5.3 Collecting Photography

Pavel V. Khoroshilov and Anastasia Khoroshilova in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

5.4 Copyright and the Art Market: Strategies of Control and Shortage
Wolfgang Ullrich

6 Dissemination and Education

6.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller
 6.1 e Photographic Display: A Short History
Alessandra Mauro

6.2 e Revised History of the Photobook

Gerry Badger and Martin Parr in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

6.3 Case Study on Shoji Yamagishi, Editor of the Japanese Photography

Magazine Camera Mainichi
Susumu Shimonishi

6.4 Case Study: Cuadernos de la Kursala

Jesús Micó

6.5 Photography eories and Photography Education: In Historical

Perspective
Peter Smith

6.6 Photographic Education: e Case for Visual Literacy in the Twenty-

First Century
Michelle Bogre

6.7 Case Study in Online Learning: Learning to Look Critically with e

Museum of Modern Art's Seeing through Photographs
Sara Bodinson and Sarah Meister

7 Outlook

7.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

7.1 Ki-off Images

Annekathrin Kohout

7.2 Shopping for God (and the Indecisive Moment)

Robert Cook

7.3 Case Study: LensCulture

Jim Casper in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

7.4 Homo Photographicus

Joan Fontcuberta

7.5 Post-Post-Photography
Friedrich Tietjen

Index
 Contributors
Gerry Badger is a British photographer, aritect and photography critic.
He has published a number of books, among them Collecting Photography
(2002) and The Pleasures of Good Photographs (2010), and is co-author of The
Photobook: A History (2004, 2006, and 2014).

Roger Ballen was first introduced to the photographic medium early on, yet
for many years his day job did not allow him to pursue his artistic practice.
It was only aer the publication of Outland that Ballen started to work in a
more systematic way; he is now fully dedicated to his artistic career.

Lars Blun is an art historian and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Nuremberg, Germany. He has published extensively on modern and
contemporary art as well as on the history and theory of photography.

Sara Bodinson is Director of Interpretation, Resear and Digital Learning

at e Museum of Modern Art, where she oversees the interpretive planning
process, the development of in-gallery and online resources including labels,
audio tours, online courses, and qualitative visitor resear and evaluation.
She wrote her master’s thesis on the Arab Image Foundation.

Mielle Bogre, an Associate Professor, Photography at Parsons Sool of

Design in New York, is a documentary photographer, copyright lawyer and
author of Photography as Activism: Images for Social Change and
Photography 4.0: An Educator’s Guide to the 21st Century.

Marcelo Brodsky is an artist and political activist whose work is situated on

the border between installation, performance, photography, monument and
memorial. Buena Memoria, his emblematic work of 1996, has been shown
more than 150 times in museums and public spaces around the world. In
2014 he initiated Visual Action, an organization dedicated to incorporate
visual culture in human rights campaigns.

Jim Casper is the editor and publisher of LensCulture, a global photography

network and online magazine celebrating current trends of contemporary
photography in art, media, politics, commerce and popular cultures
worldwide.

Stephen Chalmers has worked as a Counselor to Severely Emotionally

Disturbed ildren, and as an Emergency Medical Tenician, and taught
gang ildren photography before earning his MFA in Cinema and
Photography. He is currently a Professor of Photography at Youngstown
State University in Ohio and serves on the National Board of Directors for
the Society for Photographic Education. His work is in several collections,
has been widely exhibited and covered extensively by international media.
www.stephenchalmers.com.

Federica Chiocetti is a writer, curator and lecturer specializing in

photography. rough her photo-literary platform the Photocaptionist she
collaborates with international institutions, su as Foam and the V&A.
Recently she curated the 2017 edition of Jaipur Photography Festival. Co-
author of Amore e Piombo (Arive of Modern Conflict, 2015 Kraszna
Krausz book award), she is a PhD candidate in phototextualities at the
University of Westminster.

Irina Chmyreva, PhD, is a historian of photography and a senior researer

at the State Institute of eory and History of Fine Arts, Russian Academy
of Arts, Moscow. She was the art-director of the International Festival of
Photography PhotoVisa, Russia. Her book, Collection of Essays on History of
Russian Photography, was published in 2016.

Robert Cook is associate curator of modern and contemporary photography

and design at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, as well as a writer in the
field of art and culture.
Charlotte Cotton is an independent curator and writer, and currently
curator-in-residence at Metabolic Studio, LA. She has held curatorial
positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, e Photographers’ Gallery,
London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is the author of
The Photograph as Contemporary Art, and Photography is Magic.

James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History,

eory, and Criticism at the Sool of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the
author of Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, Stories of Art, Visual
Studies, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, and What Photography Is, all
published by Routledge. He is also the editor of various publications on
photography theory, landscape theory, and visual literacy, and is a leading
expert in the field of image theory.

Olivia Estalayo has worked in different positions in the publishing industry,

su as picture editor, translator and publishing assistant. She has lived in
Madrid, Brussels and London before returning to Barcelona.

Joan Fontcuberta is a Catalan artist whose best-known works, su as

Fauna and Sputnik, examine the truthfulness of photography. He considers
himself “a conceptual artist using photography.” In addition, he is a writer,
editor, teaer, and curator in the field of photography.

Érika Goyarrola holds a PhD in humanities from Pompeu Fabra University

(2015) with a thesis on self-referentiality in contemporary photography. She
is a teaer, writer and curator, and currently collaborates with Jeu de
Paume museum in Paris thanks to a grant from the Spanish Ministry of
Culture.

Swaantje Güntzel is a German artist. She studied at the Sool of Fine Arts
in Hamburg and worked as the assistant of Andreas Slominski. Her work
addresses the alienated relationship between humanity and nature with a
focus on the anthropogenic pollution of the oceans. Mu of her work is
inspired by scientific resear.
Yining He is an independent writer and curator, and the founder of the Go
East Project, whi aims at introducing contemporary Chinese photography
to the West. Her current resear focuses on the cultural identity and
photography representation in England, contemporary Chinese landscape
photography, and contemporary photography publishing in China.

Chris Jordan is a photographer, filmmaker, and conceptual artist whose

work looks into the dark corners of contemporary mass culture. Edge-
walking the lines between beauty and horror, abstraction and
representation, the near and the far, the visible and the invisible, Jordan’s
images confront the enormous power of humanity’s collective will.

Erik Kessels is a Dut artist, designer and curator with great interest in
photography. Since 1996 Erik Kessels has been Creative Director of
communications agency KesselsKramer. As an artist Kessels has published
over 50 books of his “collected” images like “In Almost Every Picture” and
“Useful Photography”. Kessels made and curated exhibitions su as 24HRS
of Photos, Album Beauty and Unfinished Father.

Pavel V. Khoroshilov graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State

University in Russian Medieval Art. He worked in the Ministry of Culture of
the Russian Federation and is the curator of exhibitions su as Grand T our:
Russian Version (MAMM, Moscow, 2015), and Moskau Berlin/Berlin Moskau
(Gropius Bau, Berlin/State Historical Museum, Moscow, 2003–2004).

Anastasia Khoroshilova studied photography and history of photography

at the Folkwang University of the Arts. Her works have been shown at
venues su as the 54th Biennale di Venezia and the Maison Européenne de
la Photographie in Paris. Since 2012, she has been teaing at the Rodenko
Art Sool in Moscow.

Simone Klein is the Global Print Sales Director at Magnum Photos in Paris.
She was previously Head of Photographs department at Sotheby’s Europe
for 10 years, supervising auctions in Paris and London. She is a specialist in
nineteenth-and twentieth-century photography, is a frequent lecturer and
jury member, and lives and works in Paris and Cologne.

Annekathrin Kohout graduated with an MA in Media eory and Art

History at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe. She works as a
freelance author and photographer in Leipzig and as a Resear Assistant at
the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Siegen.

James W. Kosore is an Associate Professor and Director of the PhD

program in Sool Improvement at Texas State University. His resear
interests include policy analysis and gay/lesbian issues in educational
leadership. As a solar/activist engaged in promoting issues of social
justice, he allenges the taken-for-granted social normalizations in the
public sools.

Rita Leistner, MA, Lecturer, University of Toronto, is a documentarian and

former war photographer represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery and is
currently at work on a film, The Forest for the Trees, about tree planting,
war, and the meaning of life.

David N. Martin is located in Austin, Texas. His photographic and visual

culture work addresses social justice and gender equity. As an educator, he
specializes in curriculum design, analysis, and online social learning
concepts. He holds a BFA, an MFA, and is currently completing thesis work
on his MA in Visual Studies.

Alessandra Mauro is the editorial director of Contrasto Publishing House in

Rome and the artistic director of the Forma Foundation for Photography in
Milan, where she has been responsible for the exhibition program since
2005. She is also consultant for photography at the Vatican Museum’s
contemporary art department and teaes History of Photography at
University of Rome – Roma 3.
Sarah Meister is Curator in the Department of Photography at e Museum
of Modern Art. Her recent exhibitions include Making Space: Women Artists
and Postwar Abstraction (2017) and One and One Is Four: The Bauhaus
Photocollages of Josef Albers (2016–17, with accompanying publication). She
co-directs the August Sander Project (MoMA/Columbia University, 2016–
20).

Jesús Micó is an independent curator specializing in the promotion of

emerging photography. Although he resides in Barcelona, he directs the
Kursala, the photography center of the University of Cadiz and his collection
of photobooks (Cuadernos de la Kursala).

John Mraz is Resear Professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y

Humanidades-BUAP (Mexico). He has published widely in Europe, Latin
America, and the United States on the uses of tenical images in recounting
Mexican history. He has curated many photographic exhibits, and directed
award-winning documentaries.

Moritz Neumüller is an educator, writer and curator, and currently directs

the Photography Department of IED Madrid. Furthermore, he runs an
accessibility program for the arts, called ArteConTacto, is Communication
Manager of the EU-funded ARCHES program, and the ief curator of the
Photobook Week Aarhus.

Gael Newton, as former Senior Curator of Photography, National Gallery of

Australia, was responsible for building a collection surveying the history of
photography across the Asia-Pacific, from whi two major exhibitions
resulted. She has a special interest in the first generation of Asian
photographers in the Asia-Pacific region and contributes to exhibition
publications on southeast Asian photographic history.

Alison Nordström, PhD, is an independent solar of photographs. She was

Senior Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House 2004–2013, and
Artistic Director of Fotofestiwal Lodz (Poland) 2015–2016. Recent
publications include Lewis Hine, Reading Magnum, Hiroji Kubota and Bert
Danckaert: Horizon.

Martin Parr is a British photographer, photojournalist and photobook

collector. He has been a member of the Magnum agency since 1994, and was
elected its President in 2014. He has published dozens of books and
photobooks whi have been featured in exhibitions around the world.

Timothy Prus is a curator, photographer and publisher at the Arive of

Modern Conflict, where he has edited prominent books su as Nein, Onkel
(2008). In recent years he has been developing strategies for collecting and
ariving, mainly in the fields of art and photography.

Andreas Reiinger is a computer graphics and computer vision researer

at VRVis, and a PhD candidate at the Vienna University of Tenology. He
has been involved in a variety of projects, including virtual reality
applications, lighting simulation, motion traing, video art,
photogrammetric reconstruction, but focuses now on tactile experiences and
inclusive tenology.

Lisa Riman, PhD, completed her degree in American Culture Studies at

Bowling Green State University. Her resear focuses on the role of
photography as art and cultural object that can reflect and also impact the
spaces in whi it is made and/or circulated.

Alexander Rotter became involved in his mother’s art gallery in Vienna

while he was still studying Art History. In 1999, Roer started at Sotheby’s
Contemporary Art Department in New York, where he worked for 16 years.
In Mar 2017, he became Head of the Contemporary Art Department, at
Christie’s New York.

Rolf Sasse works as curator, writer, and photographer. He held the seat in
design history and design theory at the College of Fine Arts Saar,
Saarbrüen, where he was also the vice-rector of Academic Affairs. He is
the author of more than 400 publications in photographic history, design,
aritecture, and sound art.

Mette Sandbye is Professor of Photography Studies and Head of the

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
She has published numerous books and articles on contemporary art
photography and photography as part of visual culture.

Susumu Shimonishi, originally from Hiroshima, is an artist and researer

in the field of photography in Tokyo. He was taught by Koko Yamagishi,
Shoji Yamagishi’s wife, at Musashino Art University from 1995 to 2002, and
has been researing Yamagishi’s arives since 2016.

Peter Smith is a writer and lecturer with over 30 years of experience in

teaing Art History and Cultural eory. He was course leader for an MA
in Photography at the University of West London, and is co-author of
Rethinking Photography: Histories, Theories and Education (2016).

Bernd Stiegler is professor of twentieth-century German literature and of

literature and media at the University of Konstanz. His resear focuses on
the history and theory of photography, literature and media, German and
Fren literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and media and
film theory.

Nina Strand is an artist and editor-in-ief of Objektiv, a Scandinavian

biannual art publication with a focus on photography and film, whi she
founded in 2009, together with Ida Kierulf and Susanne Østby Sæther. With
its “gallery-in-a-journal” format, showing, discussing and allenging
photography, film and video art, Objektiv was born with the mission to act
as a time-capsule, documenting where contemporary lens-based art is today.

Alexander Streitberger is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art

History at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), and Director of the
Lieven Gevaert Resear Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture.
He is also editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series.

Suzanne Szucs is an artist, educator and writer living in Roester, MN. Her
work has focused on investigations into gender and identity, and currently
explores the relationship of the body to the landscape. Her 15-year Polaroid
self-portrait project, Journal, In Progress, recently traveled with the
Lifeloggers exhibition.

Friedri Tietjen is Visiting Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art at

the University of Vienna. He is also the co-organizer of the annual After
Post-Photography conference in St. Petersburg (www.aer-
post.photography).

Alise Tifentale is a photography historian and PhD candidate in Art

History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was the
co-curator of the pavilion of Latvia in Venice Art Biennale (2013), author of
Photography as Art in Latvia, 1960– 1969 (2011), and founder and editor-in-
ief of magazine Foto Kvartals (2006–2010).

Wolfgang Ullri works as a cultural scientist and freelance author in

Leipzig. He publishes on the history and criticism of the concept of art, on
image-sociological questions, and on consumption theory.

Ines Weizman is a professor of aritecture theory at the Bauhaus-

Universität Weimar where she heads the Centre for Documentary
Aritecture. In 2014 she published Architecture and the Paradox of
Dissidence and together with Eyal Weizman authored the book Before and
After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster.
 Foreword
Unencompassable Photography

James Elkins

Photography is in astonishing flux. is winter, I have two engagements

with photography: to read this book and contribute whatever I can by way
of a Foreword; and to take photographs of the holiday season, using two
cameras. e first is a roll-over scanner, the SVP PS4100, whi I pull over
any surface to get a high-resolution scan. I plan on using that to take
“pictures” of things like people’s shirts, carpets, wallpaper, and ina plates:
it’s a kind of photography without lenses, and without people—a
postmodern way of avoiding having too many relatives in my holiday
pictures. e second camera is a Yashica Mat 124G medium-format TLR,
whi uses old-fashioned 120 format film. I have replaced the focus screen
with a brighter one, an operation involving nearly microscopic screws and
minuscule metal springs. e focus screens of those old film cameras are
magical: they have an intimate, grainy look and a shallow depth of field; and
on my camera, the image is reversed right to le. It’s an entirely different
world from the brilliant sharp digital screens most photographers now see.
is is by way of saying photography is multiple. It isn’t a medium, like
oil paint, and it isn’t just a social practice, a curatorial problem (as in the
excellent contributions by Erik Kessels and Alessandra Mauro), a market
phenomenon, or a tenology. Even in material culture studies, thing theory,
and actor-network theory, photography is an enigma. Alison Nordström
puts that well when she says “part of the way we have lived with
photographs is as things we kiss, things we burn in protest, things we rip up
in anger, things we write on, things we fold in half so that they fit into an
envelope, things we put in albums, or in frames on a gallery wall.”
Photography’s unmanageable diversity is very well reflected in this
Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture. is is a
wonderful book, with a really surprising diversity of contents. ere’s an
essay by Roger Ballen, meditating on his desperate images, and later there’s
a sober report about MOOCs at MoMA. ere’s an essay on “ki-off
images” (photos that get threads and viral streams started), and an unseling
apter on the current state of image copyright (it turns out forgers can
invoke copyright to avoid having their work analyzed). ere’s a wonderful
art of the cameras journalists brought to different wars, and, in another
apter, an overview of Chinese landscape photography, a subject linked to
the complex field of Chinese landscape painting, whi stretes from the
tenth century to the present. It seems there’s no limit to what counts as
solarship on photography, and that’s as it should be.
Given this multiplicity it makes sense that the theory of photography is in
spectacular disarray. I became aware of this when I edited the book
Photography Theory. I expected arguments about Peirce’s index, and I got
some; but many of the book’s forty-odd contributors didn’t have a position
on photography’s realism, and—what surprised me even more—they didn’t
have a reason for not having a position. It’s not surprising that photography
doesn’t depend on a single theory, whether it’s Peirce, Flusser, Bourdieu, or
Barthes, but it is surprising that many people don’t have any particular
theory, and don’t mind that they don’t. In this book, too, theory comes and
goes. Sometimes it’s front and center, and other times it’s as if photography
needs no special conceptualization. Bernd Stiegler’s opening essay takes
theory seriously, but he also theorizes theory’s dispersal (into a “pragmatic-
praxeological orientation”), whi may be itself more articulate than many
practitioners and solars require.
Along with the historian Erna Fiorentini, I’ve been writing a big textbook
on the visual world. Our apter on photography gave us special trouble,
because it seems to us people not only think about photography, but think
by means of photography. When we talked about focusing on problems,
making sharp analysis, contrasting one thing against another, and framing
our topics, we were talking in the languages of photography. is is a
variant on an old claim made by Joel Snyder, that vision is something we
picture, and the ways we picture the world are informed by photography.
ese sorts of Klein-bole conundrums aren’t solvable: they can only be
anowledged and articulated as well as possible.
Out of this nearly unlimited field I’ll just remark on three issues, whi
submerge and resurface throughout this book. e three have to do with
overlaps and new configurations of three fields: art history, visual culture,
and art theory.

Photographs and Language

Several theorists haunt this text, especially Mitell, Tagg, and Burgin. In
different ways they have insisted on the constructed nature of photographs,
on their entanglement in and dependence on language. Several essays show
how unseled people are about that legacy. Indeed, as Peter Smith says, “We
may . . . wish to step ba from a position of doubt,” and “accept that
photographs have a certain resistance . . . to theoretical translation and . . .
structures of meaning,” including language. at possibility has long been
open in image theory, most notably in the German tradition. A photograph,
as an exemplary visual object, might not sit easily with the discourse that
purports to present and support it, and that gives rise to what Jean-Luc
Nancy nicely calls “a distinct oscillation”: a relation that isn’t captured by
formulas like “imagetext” or “picture theory,” but resonates with concerns
voiced by Gumbret, Moxey, Boehm, and others. ere isn’t a simple
answer here: in the book On Pictures, And the Words That Fail Them, I
wrestled with the hope that images might be visible off to one side of
language. Eventually I decided it was more allenging to try to understand
how these bales work themselves out in academic discourse (as in the book
What is An Image?).
 One of the highlights of this book for me is the interview with Federica
Chiocei about words and images. A longstanding fear and mistrust of
images persists among writers; Chiocei notes Henry James’s mistrust of
illustrations, whi he felt despite the hundred-year tradition of illustrating
novels, whi has been documented by Paul Edwards’s Soleil noir. And now,
despite solars su as Jan Baetens (who is also a poet), and despite the
overwhelming academic approval of Sebald’s project, contemporary
novelists either avoid images or use them tentatively (Jonathan Safran Foer,
Jesse Ball, and Ben Lerner are among many examples). An enormous
amount of work needs to be done by curators, historians, and theorists to
elucidate the possibilities of writing that accompanies images. Writing with
Images, my own ongoing project, is a start; I think it’s important to look
precisely and slowly at individual artworks and books. Another option is to
create new forms: Maria Fusco did that with the Happy Hypocrite, and Tan
Lin with his re-laun of Seven Controlled Vocabularies. Resear into the
relation of photographs and words has to include academic writing—most
importantly, all of art history and visual culture studies, as in this book.

Politics
John Mraz’s interesting study of the political commitment of photographers
of the Mexican Revolution suggests the work that still needs to be done
about unanowledged political affiliation among contemporary
photojournalists. Lars Blun’s essay on “staged” photography draws on
Rudolf Arnheim’s distinctions between authenticity, correctness, and truth,
whi is a promising way forward beyond the impoverished discourse of the
NPPA Code of Ethics. People who police honesty in photojournalism pay
fastidious aention to staging and manipulation, but have nothing to say
about the staged nature of photography itself.
On December 13, 2016, for example, the New York Times published a color
photograph on its front page, showing a room in the Democratic National
Commiee headquarters. Later the paper had to apologize because the
photographer admied to removing a picture frame from a wall, because, he
said, it produced glare. An article in Petapixel, December 15, reprinted the
photojournalist’s Code of Ethics, and noted that the photographer was
correct to apologize. But the Code of Ethics does not capture the political
commitment of su a photograph—its dour, grim lighting and largely
empty space, connoting gloom over the recent Presidential election. It may
be anodyne examples like this, in whi there is none of the trauma Rita
Leistner and Susan Sontag describe in the case of war photojournalism, that
best show how the current conversation on objectivity and truth in
photography remains ethically inadequate.

Visual Culture and Art History

Visual studies’ interests, su as politics and the expanded field of
photography outside of fine art, are sometimes combined with residual art
historical and fine art values, su as the question of how “difficult” it is to
take a “good or great” photograph (as Mielle Bogre says). One possible
subject for photographic education—the subject of the penultimate section of
this book—could therefore be the difference between the leveled playing
field of visual studies, and art history’s ongoing interest in fine art, media,
and historical narratives.
Art history has also long been concerned with its narratives: the
Gombriian Story of Art, and, in modernism, the notion that one master
narrative leads from Manet or Cézanne through to postmodernism. Gael
Newton wrestles with a version of this when she asks about the assumption
that there is only one world history of photography, that “nothing originates
outside of Euramerica.” She associates that unitary narrative with
photographic tenology, whi developed in a few places and was
disseminated throughout the world. at is a temptation in photography
studies, but a deeper reason for the assumption is the art historical insistence
on a single narrative; and conversely, it hasn’t been so mu a “visual
culture or regionalist approa” that has counteracted the single narrative,
but a series of art historical studies beginning in the 1990s. A visual culture
approa to this issue would be to bypass it entirely. e more that solars
become interested in the differences between national histories of
photography, the more they enter into a field whose terms are provided by
art historical discussions. Essays like Irina Chmyreva’s “Perestroika
Photography” or Susumu Shimonishi’s are examples of contributions that
would fit well with art historical concerns. e interview with Chris Jordan
and Swaantje Güntzel on eco-activism is more a maer of visual culture: it’s
about politics and practice, rather than historical reception.
Visual culture’s strength has been the social, experiential, gendered, and
political life of ordinary images, like the family photo albums or wedding
photos in Mee Sandbye’s excellent contribution, Wolfgang Ullri’s essay
on contemporary trends in copyright in images, Alexander Roer’s firsthand
report of the auction scene, Lisa Riman’s study of the reception of
Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, or Érika Goyarrola’s informative history
and analysis of the photo booth.
is isn’t to say there is some special value in keeping visual studies, art
theory, and art history in distinct parts of the academy: it’s to say that
without a literature meditating on the intellectual genealogies of those fields,
studies of photography can end up as mixtures of partly incompatible values
and interpretive strategies, su as the embrace of popular media alongside
an investment in fine art, or a curiosity about art theory alongside an
interest in pragmatics.
Photography just gets more interesting ea year: less coherently framed,
more historically and materially diverse, more entangled in politics, social
life, democracy, epistemology, artificial intelligence, surveillance, ethics, the
market, and our everyday sense of ourselves. It is already complex well
beyond what any individual observer can encompass: surely an optimal
condition for a thriving intellectual field.
James Elkins
Chicago, IL
 Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

Why not skip introductions? Especially when it comes to compendiums,

exhibition catalogues and other anthologies of seemingly unrelated texts, it
might appear more practical and fun to flip through the book, ba to front,
have a glimpse at the index and then just start with any text of the
collection. e shorter ones with promising titles and lots of illustrations are
seen as accessible starting points. e next step would be to read the more
complicated contributions (recognizable not only by their length, but also by
long titles and la of illustrations). It is only aer being immersed in the
book for a while that we might consider going ba to the beginning, to
have a look at the preface and introduction – whi makes sense in a way,
because the texts were actually wrien in that order. In case you have
arrived at this place in this fashion, please allow me to welcome you and to
put into context what you have read so far, before you continue on with
your journey.
If you are a more methodical reader and have started the book from page
one, you will now find what you were probably looking for: A short
baground information to what to expect in the following four-hundred
odd pages, wrien by more than forty authors with diverse bagrounds
from around the globe: solars, artists, educators, curators, activists,
publishers; people who work in the advertising industry and for photo
agencies, auction houses, and arives; museum professionals and
independent writers, collectors, bloggers and computer scientists. It really is
a quite colorful crowd of individuals who have followed my invitation to
contribute to this compendium, with the aim of defining the current state of
theory and resear in this field, but also to create a foundation for future
solarship and study.
 e introductory texts to ea of the seven apters of the book will
follow the convention of briefly presenting the authors and the focus of their
work. ey also feature a sentence or two about why they have been osen,
including, where applicable, an anecdote of how we got to know ea other,
or why I appreciate their work. is might be a rather unusual and overtly
personal gesture, especially in the realms of Academia. However, I believe
that this glimpse into the editor’s kiten will be in the interest of the
methodical clarity and transparency of the work, as it helps to understand
the motivations behind the selection of authors and themes. Furthermore,
these elucidations will allow a beer understanding of the essays, case
studies, and, especially, the interviews, as they contain allusions to personal
relationships and ties within the photographic community. It should also be
mentioned that the personal links to some of the authors helped to convince
them to spend their valuable time on writing or adapting a piece for this
book, as many of them are not full-time researers and had no motivation
to contribute, other than to share their knowledge, and I highly appreciate
their generosity.
I also want to thank those colleagues who had to decline my invitation,
for various reasons (mostly la of time, whi seems to be the plague of the
twenty-first century), but were kind enough to put me in tou with other
professionals in the field, to cover a certain resear question. One of them
was Liz Wells, whose Photography: A Critical Introduction (2015) was also
one of my main inspirations when conceiving this book, together with
Elkins’ What Photography Is (2011), and Mirzoeff’s How to See the World
(2015), to name but a few.
Mostly, I would like to thank the photographers and artists who have
released their images so we can use them to illustrate the articles,
particularly Chris Jordan, for leing us use a detail of his famous Gyre
(2009) as the cover image of the book. It was thanks to Olivia Estalayo (who
coordinated the image rights for this book) that we managed to convince
them to help us make this publication visually more aractive.
Even if these images have not been expressly created for this book – while
the articles and interviews have – the fact that we may use them for a
solarly publication, not a fancy art catalog, is a treasured privilege that has
become less common nowadays (see Chapter 5.4). I will use the apter
introductions to speak about these images and their authors briefly, where
applicable and/or necessary.
e overall aim of this Companion is to provide a comprehensive survey
of photography and visual culture, whi addresses the main resear
questions in the field, su as truth value, materiality, gender, image rights,
the art market and many others, but also to map out the emerging critical
terrain around post-photography, tactile photography, social photography (a
confusing term to describe image-making for the social media). Besides
introducing the fundamental topics and ideas, this collection of essays, case
studies, and interviews also represents the diversity of the resear field and
the complexity that arises when placing photography in the visual studies
context.
In other words, what this book intends to be is a seminal entry point for
students and professionals in the field of photography, both theoreticians
and practicing artists. Photography, as of today, finds itself in a constant
dialogue with a globalized society that feeds on visual input. is does not
necessarily mean, of course, that people have become more visually literate
– at least, not as mu as could have been expected from a society where
everybody has become a producer and consumer of vast numbers of images
(see Chapter 6.6).
Cultural Studies has shown us ways to analyze the photographic medium
in the framework of Visual Culture: Photography as Art, as memory, as a
proof of things that have been, the photograph as an object, but also as pure
information, data to be mined and collected and (re)seared and stored by
maines, by an Apparatus, in Vilém Flusser’s sense of the word (2000:70). A
tool of repression and control, a useful device in the fields of the news, the
fashion and advertisement industry, tourism, but also in medicine,
psyology, and in the realms of political and ecological activism. e open
boundaries of the photographic medium make it unique, powerful and
vulnerable. Cameras and mobile phones produce still and moving images
alike; they can scan objects to be 3D-printed as photosculptures (see Chapter
4.5); they can be used in installations, projections and performances; and
they appear in publications of all kinds, including websites and blogs,
newspapers and magazines, pamphlets and posters, books and Apps.
If photography is treated as a material form of (and for) cultural
expression, further problems arise: How should photographs be collected,
conserved, showcased, marketed, described, valued, and spoken about?
Traditional views are contrasted with the new reality of an oversaturated
global market, as the current situation of ange has produced phenomena
su as astronomic auction prices on the one side, and near-to-free sto
photography on the other; a declining publishing industry, parallel to a
boom of fanzines and self-published books; the digitalization of arives, in
order to get rid of the physical materials, while preserving and indexing the
content; and many other paradoxical developments.
To summarize, the book you hold in your hand gives an overview on the
traditional way of looking at a photograph, in times of accelerated image
consumerism; in a world where peripheries have become centers; access to
visual information is seen as more important than property; copyle meets
copyright; the truth value of an image has become negotiable or even
superfluous. It also sketes out current and future discussions and
tenological developments that promise to reshape the field of practice and
investigation.
In this sense, the Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual
Culture gives an overview of the history and future of the medium, the field
of debate of photography as art, document, propaganda (including self-
propagation in the form of selfies), a pure selling device, or a new universal
language, with all its strengths and weaknesses.

References
Elkins, J. (2011). What photography is. New York: Routledge.
Flusser, V . (2000). Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion
Books.
Mirzoeff, N. (2015). How to see the world. London: Penguin.
Wells, L. (2015). Photography: A critical introduction. 5th ed. New York:
Routledge.
 1
Images, Photographs and Visual
Culture
 1.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

is publication is laid out in seven apters, ea of whi may be read
separately, although there is a certain hierarical, or rather narrative
structure. Naturally, there are points of connections between the
contributions, and overlapping themes. e first apter is maybe the most
dense and hardest to digest. In exange, the reader will be rewarded with a
complete and oen surprising spectrum of the main resear questions in
contemporary photographic theory.
Bernd Stiegler’s claim that the praxeological turn might open up “a
different history of photography” and, indeed, a “Copernican Revolution of
photography theory,” shows the profound anges we are seeing in our field.
It is—together with Parr and Badger’s “revisionist” history of photography
through the photobook (Chapter 6.2), Gael Newton’s view from the
periphery (Chapter 2.1) and Friedri Tietjen’s essay on post-post-
photography (Chapter 7.5)—a true allenge for how we traditionally have
told (ourselves) the story of the photographic medium. e translation of
this particular piece gave us many headaes (my special thanks go to
Claudi Nir for helping me in this monumental task), and some of the
sentences and terminological intricacies might still reflect their origin in a
German resear context, whi will make it a somewhat allenging text
for American and British readers. However, I believe that the originality of
the piece sets the right tone for the book, even if—as James Elkins has stated
in his brilliant foreword—it may be “more articulate than many practitioners
and solars require.”
Another key contribution to this book is Alison Nordström’s elaborate
analysis of the photograph as an object. I had heard her lecture on this issue
more than ten years ago, at a conference in Birmingham, UK, organized by
the great and mu missed Rhonda Wilson. A woman with many
obligations, Alison told me early in our discussions that she would not be
able to write an essay, and that I should look for someone else to step in. But
how could I accept that? Alison had been involved in the thought process for
this publication from the very beginning, and had even helped with a
preliminary list of possible contributors, some of whom have made it into
the final selection of authors. Furthermore, one could hardly imagine
anybody with more insight into the question of materiality of the
photographic medium than she has. Aer many years at the George
Eastman House, she is now an independent curator, and thus sees the
museum from a privileged point of view that had to be included. us, I
gambled everything on one card and asked her if we could do an interview
instead of an essay, to address the questions of photographic materiality in
the framework of recent tenological, social and institutional anges.
Alison has been rigorous in the editing process, to ensure that all the
arguments are well presented and clear, and that the resulting interview
captures both the dynamism and the passion that this subject engenders.
For similar reasons, Charloe Coon also elected the interview format.
What interested me as a starting point was the motivation behind, and
conceptual context of her two seminal books Photography as Contemporary
Art and Photography is Magic. I have known Charloe since the early 2000s
and have followed her work closely, including many of the exhibitions she
has curated around the globe. However, I had never had the privilege of
having a longer conversation with the author of the two publications that
nearly all my students cite in their artist statements and final theses. I was
impressed by her precise verbal expression during our Skype conversation,
and even more so when I listened to the recording aerwards and realized
that Charloe’s impeccable clarity allowed a direct transcription to the
wrien page, with hardly any editing necessary. Perhaps the most surprising
argument Charloe makes is that 9/11 effected a more seminal ange in the
creative industries, particularly the editorial, publishing, advertising and
commercial sectors of photography, than the establishment of digital
tenologies or the economic crash.
 One of the big aievements of visual studies is the inclusion of questions
of gender and identity into the discourse of art history, and it was clear that
this had to be reflected in the oice of authors and subjects of this book.
David Martin, whom I met at the 2016 conference of the Society for
Photographic Education (SPE), seemed to be the perfect oice. He proposed
to take on the task of (re)defining the Male Gaze together with Suzanne
Szucs and James W. Kosore. e only problem was that they produced
an article that was double the size of what I had asked for. So we agreed to
make two pieces out of it, and the best place to break the apter would be
immediately aer the discussion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. I am
deeply grateful for their brilliant double-contribution that explores the
complexities of the gaze through photography and visual culture.
If the gaze is directed at the reflecting display of a camera phone, we are
confronted with a visual form of expression that has become a decisive
cultural phenomenon in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the
selfie. When looking for somebody to reflect on this subject, however, I saw
that many authors demonized the selfie as a narcissistic and void gesture, a
caricature of the traditional self-portrait, and a pitiful side-product of the
democratization of photography. While I do share the opinion that for a
serious student or practitioner of photography, it is important to be able to
make self-portraits that go beyond the du-face gesture, and I feel deeply
disturbed when I see them taken at inappropriate places or situations su as
Holocaust memorials (if you do not believe it, google Shahak Shapira’s
Yolocaust project, or the photobook hashtag by Marta Mantyka), I wanted to
include a study on the phenomenon that goes beyond the common selfie-
shaming discourse. us, I was relieved when I found out that Alise
Tifentale—whom I had met years ago at the Kaunas photography festival,
when she was still editor of the formidable Foto Kvartals magazine—had
participated in a resear project called Selfiecity, together with a team led
by Lev Manovi at the City University of New York. Her essay reminds us
that funeral selfies and other faux pas “do not necessarily represent the
whole genre—rather they are outstanding exceptions,” and presents a case
study that shows us that there are significant differences among the selfies
posted from different cities, suggesting preferred styles and aesthetics.
At the same SPE conference where I met David Martin, I also heard Lisa
Riman’s talk on the other Migrant Mother, a Mexican woman with her
ild photographed by Dorothea Lange, one year before her world-famous
image of a Californian pea pier. Despite the similarity between these
images in aesthetics, emotion, subject, perspective, and pose, the Mexican
Migrant Mother has remained for the most part one of thousands of unseen
images within the FSA arive. Riman claims that the radical difference in
their circulation begs the question, why the 1936 Migrant Mother became
the icon while the 1935 Migrant Mother remained unknown. Further
complicating the reception of this New Deal Madonna, is the fact that the
human subject, Florence ompson, is actually of Cherokee descent.
However, the absence of any racial marker within the caption (and later the
title) made it possible for the national US audience to identify her as
European American, and see in her what they wanted to see: American
strength in the face of adversity.
e last contribution in this apter is also based on the comparison of
image-pairs. It starts with a personal memory of the author, whi leads us
to the core subject of the article, an analysis of Stefan Koppelkamm’s
documentation of buildings and streets in Görlitz and other places in the
former German Democratic Republic (GDR). He first photographed them in
1990, just aer the fall of the wall, and visited the very same places again,
ten years later. Always taken with the same lens, the same focal lengths and
from the same position, Koppelkamm’s arive of before and aer pictures,
according to the author, Ines Weizman, allows us to practice Walter
Benjamin’s “telescoping of the past through the present,” a stereoscopic
reading in the course of whi the past can be experienced and remembered
thanks to the montage of fragments of history. e issues at stake have been
further developed by Ines and Eyal Weizman, in their book Before and After,
whi shows image-comparisons as a means of analysis and surveillance.
I would like to thank Stefan Koppelkamm for allowing us to showcase his
Görlitz series, and Alise Tifentale for the illustrations to her study. e other
two photographs in this apter are by Dorothea Lange; one has become an
icon, the other is practically unknown, even though they show nearly the
same content and were taken only one year apart. ese images are freely
available for download on the website of the Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division, as are many other works from the FSA/OWI
Collection. I ose to show the standard, retoued version of the Migrant
Mother, but want to mention that in the original version a thumb can be
seen in the right foreground of the image. Lange had it retoued, for
aesthetic reasons, something that annoyed Roy Stryker, the director of the
FSA’s photographic unit, who insisted on the objective documentary
aracter of the project. In this context, it is recommended to also study the
contact sheet, showing the mother and ildren in the tent, taken at different
ranges and angles, in order to understand the making of one of the most
important photographic icons of the twentieth century.

1.1 How to Do ings with Photographs

Towards a Praxeology of Photography

Bernd Stiegler

It is well known that in the past years—in fact in the past decades –
humanities, cultural and media studies have taken various turns, whereby
the entire field of resear has frequently been reviewed and reorganized
and leading premises have supposedly been turned upside down so that now
they are ba on their feet (Bamann-Medi 2006).
So far, however, photography theory navigated in the shadow of these
new turns, twists, and anges and mostly followed—as well as the literature
studies—the conductive and dominant positions, su as semiotics or
phenomenology, discourse analysis, deconstruction or gender studies. Now,
one of the latest developments in visual culture and beyond is the focus on
action and use: a praxeology. A pragmatic– praxeological orientation of
cultural, media and image theory is promising a departure from established
categories and classification systems and a dynamization of the epistemic,
aesthetic and social processes.
But what could su a reorientation of photographic theory look like?
What are the consequences if the methods and practices, but not discourses,
epos, and sools or ideologies, take center stage? And—first of all—what
are the obstacles that need to be avoided?

e Scylla of Performing Images

It has become a trend in both visual theory and pictorial science to talk
about the power of the image. Whether W.J.T. Mitell believes the images
gain a life of their own, possess an actively formative power according to
Gerhard Paul, or as Horst Bredekamp suggests, form autonomous activities:
images are generally regarded as agents of their own power (Mitell 2008,
Paul 2013: 630, Bredekamp 2010).
If Bredekamp aempts to transfer the “Spee Act eory” onto visual
culture within his “Image Act eory,” then it will truly be turned on its
head, as Lambert Wiesing has pointed out (2013).While the “Spee Act
eory” of Austin and Searles determines language as action and therefore
part of a eory of Action, Bredekamp replaces man as the center of action
with images. In other words, it is no longer the humans who perform actions
through language, as it would have been within the Spee Act eory, but
images. ey—instead of human beings—become the acting agents. e
performative turn will continue turning until the human being has been
transformed from agent into the medium.
is recoding of the “eory of Action” definitely has dramatic
consequences, because now, according to Gerhard Paul, the entirety of
history has been delegated to images. He states that it is not only humans
but also (and especially) the images, that shape and affect history. Paul’s
book title BilderMACHT (ImagePOWER) emphasizes his views, that images
have a special force or even power and a life of their own (2013: 629). Su
aribution is problematic on both a political and a theoretical level. It feels a
lile bit like being taken ba to the text theory of the 1970s and 1980s—ba
then it was the “text” that wrote history and acted as its agent. e twists
and turns of the écriture were followed with a kind of fascination and the
expansion of the differential game into the infinite was made into a virtue
and a demand. Accordingly one had to “inscribe” oneself if one wanted to
say something, but it was the text actually doing the talking. ese periods,
when the world was made of wrien text, seemed over but now celebrate a
comeba within visual culture, in a modified form. Images, whi seemed
rather passive, now become key actors and performers.
However, images only come alive in movies (and in particular in films
su as Night at the Museum) and even there only on the screen and in the
midst of a narration to acting players. Otherwise, they are generally quiet.
us, the strong emphasis on the “Image Act eory” renders useless any of
the possibilities that an action or praxeological theory of images could offer.
If nowadays one wants to analyze the usages of images it has nothing to
do with the supposed independent existence of life, or with a non-linguistic
realm of signification and meaning, that opens immediately like Ali Baba’s
legendary treasure amber. Today, we must refrain from replacing text with
images. Otherwise, we run the risk of not only repeating the theory of the
history of the 1970s and 1980s in a different way but also feeding the magic
of the image and preventing people from being in arge of their actions.
e dawning of a post-historical age, whi had been proposed in the
same years, would not benefit the kind of Visual History that Paul describes
either. ough in his concept, Visual History tends to understand the images,
not as an active or rather generative power (“aktive bzw. generative Kraft”),
but to understand history as an effect of these images, as mentioned on the
inside of the book cover of BilderMACHT (2013).
We become witnesses to a new usurpation of history through the images.
And again, human actions are turned into images. However, images are
being used, manipulated, decoded and distributed as a medium for and by
these actions—be it consciously or not. How this is done and what
consequences follow would be the actual subject of the visual history. If the
intent is to be an independent and critical theory it would be beer not to
leave the conduct to the image. Because this is exactly how images take on a
position that was once occupied by discourses, epistemic orders, or regimes.
ey should rather be understood as elements of actions that first of all
deploy, transform and determine social orders. Images should be
investigated as part of everyday social life and action, rather than observing
their independent existence with fascination, or as if under a spell. In other
words, the question needs to be asked why images may seem alive or, what
makes them come to life? It is by no means an intrinsic force or power or
agens, that is, an “agency” that has also been aributed to objects and
plants. Animism cannot be explained by an activity of things, but through
the aribution of su an activity, whi makes them supposedly the bearer
of action.

e Charybdis of Standardizing Discourses

ereby, the second obstacle has been identified. No more than images,
should discourses (or whatever one is willing to regard as su) be
positioned as the only, or at least the decisive, force. In the first case, the
images become the agents, in the second case they are converted into merely
executive bodies. While the influence and relevance of discourses,
institutions, and so on should not be disputed, a different theoretical
orientation is necessary for a praxeology of photography. Otherwise, there is
a danger in understanding and describing acts and actions as pure
affirmations of previous power or knowledge systems. ese systems then
pre-determine the interpretation—just think of Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation
of Spielberg’s Jaws and the dominance of the Master-Signifier (2012). Hence,
the strange monotony of large parts of gender or post-colonial studies, and
also of psyoanalysis or cultural studies: objects—here images—primarily
serve an assertion of a previous theory, whi then runs on repeat. It would
be mu more important, taking the concrete methods and practices into
account, to describe not only the constitution of but also the shi in su
systems. Otherwise, the distinguishing feature of the action is missing: their
performance, whi, mandatorily, oscillates between affirmation and
innovation.
In a “classical” discourse with an analytical, post-colonial or gender
theoretical interpretation, the actions play a subordinated role to the
discourses; in a strict praxeological reorientation, this relationship would
have to be reversed. To recap, some theories of (visual) Cultural Studies and
also those of discourse analysis already proposed initial readjustments many
years ago. “History instead of Alemy” was a formula with whi the one-
sided fixation of photography theory on the indexical signs, as referred to
programmatically by Barthes, Krauss and also Didi-Huberman (1997), has
been criticized.
e multitude of photographic practice rather than Photography would be
another one. “ere is no su unitary thing as ‘photography’; only a
diversity of practices and historical situations in whi the photographic text
is produced, circulated and deployed,” programmatically proclaimed by
Stuart Hall (2003: 75), and shared by John Tagg (1993a and 1993b) and others.
Nevertheless, this text has already been coded in the eyes of cultural
studies and follows political, cultural, and social requirements. e aim then
is the liquefaction and revitalization of entrened social norms or, more
generally speaking, the transformation from nature to history. is was
already on the 1950s culture-critical agenda of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies
(1957): to decipher and unmask myths that tried to make nature from history
and transform the angeable to what supposedly has no alternative.
Signification practice and historicization instead of allegedly “natural”
interpretation would, therefore, be a third formula:
By practice, here is meant work on specific material, within a specific social and historical context,
and for specific purposes. e emphasis on “signification” derives from the fact that the primary
feature of photography, considered as an omnipresence in everyday social life, is its contribution
to the production and dissemination of meaning.
(Burgin 1982: 2)
Once more, it is clear, however, that the practices are explained by the
“social and historical context” rather than vice versa.
Nevertheless, this reorientation of photography theory already had
significant consequences for photography historiography: for example, the
“binary folklore” (Sekula 1982: 108) that separates documentary and artistic
photography; photography as an expression or document; imagination and
empiricism; affective or informative value; and metaphorical or
metonymical meaning, has been subjected to radical criticism. In other
words: the canon disappears and is replaced by social formations and
practices.
“e history of photography would be not the history of remarkable men,
mu less remarkable pictures, but the history of photographic uses”
(Solomon-Godeau 1991: xxiv, as cited in Holsba 2003: 7). ese uses are
now again the focus of resear, but are at the same time determined by
social theories and political assumptions.
Photography has, as Tagg stresses, no independence or authority of its
own, as“the indexical nature of the photograph . . . can guarantee nothing at
the level of meaning” (Tagg 1993b: 3) and even its evidence is just the result
of institutional practices. is “institutional framework” needs to be looked
at—and thus the focus shis from the photographs to the institutions.
Whether it is a study of juridical photography (Tagg 1993b); portrait
photography (Regener 1999); pornographic photographs (Solomon-Godeau
1994); copyright issues (Plumpe 1990, Tagg 1993b: 103–116); colonial (Hight
and Sampson 2002, Bate 2003), ethnological (Wiener 1999, Albers 2002) and
anthropological recordings; or psyiatric photography (Didi-Huberman
1997)—and many other examples could be added here—all these aempts
analyze photography in connection with institutions, aesthetic and scientific
discourses, and social practices. Once again: the existence and effect of the
power of su institutions and discourses, ideologies and semes should not
be denied and the considerations in regards to photography are being shared
— but not their explanation. ere is no need for a praxeology of
photography when the methodologies have already been pre-defined,
classified and typologized. In this interpretation, photographic practices are
seen as discourse stabilizers; they affirm those discursive systems from
whi they can be derived.
Photographs—in this interpretation—are merely visual standards and
enforcement strategies of pre-existing discourses, in an already standardized
world. However, the actions and methods of photography cannot be reduced
to standards alone, as they are not enough to understand the problem.
How this reasoning works can be studied with Allan Sekula: If you take,
according to him, the cultural meaning of photography, whi is detaed
from a “natural” one, seriously, we can no longer talk about an intrinsic,
universal and independent meaning of photography, but must apprehend the
truly conventional nature of photographic communication (Sekula 1982).
is means that photography only opens possibilities of interpretation, but
does not have its own meaning. So far, that is correct. Only through the
integration into concrete discursive situations does photography gain a
clearly defined semantic purpose. In turn, these photographic discourses
have the aracteristic of forming paerns, whi then have to undergo a
critical analysis. In this early essay (“On the Invention of Photographic
Meaning”), he distinguishes between photographs as fetishes or as
documents that have either an affective or an informational significance.1
e theoretical guideline is becoming clear: Photographs, according to
Sekula, have no meaning themselves. It is implanted in them within the
context of differently understood codes. Any meaning is therefore not
ascribed to photography in itself but is an effect of a social aribution. In
other words, the meaning of photography is embodied social power—
ideology. In this sense, Sekula criticizes the concept of photography as a
universal language; for him it is an expression of global domination.
According to the myth of the universal language of photography, this
medium is more natural than natural language, as it toues upon an
underlying system that is closely connected with the senses’ system of desire
and understanding (Sekula 2002: 283).
According to this theory, however, photography has two modes of
expression or discourses. In its aesthetic appearance, it is a direct sensual
experience (whi refers to the fetish function), and in the scientific
manifestation, it is a direct cognition of the world (in correspondence to its
informational bearing). ese imperatives are not only irreconcilable, but an
expression of a legitimacy of domination, consequences of a “historically
specific ideology and practice of representation” (Sekula 2002: 256):
As a symbolic practice, then, photography constitutes not a universal language, but a paradoxical
yoking of a primitivist, Rousseauian dream, the dream of romantic naturalism, with an unbounded
faith in a tenological imperative. e worldliness of photography is the outcome, not of any
immanent universality of meaning, but of a project of global domination.
(Sekula 1981: 21)

Nearly all of Sekula’s texts draw on Foucault’s power theory (with a clear
preference for the analysis in Surveillance and Punishment) and see
themselves explicitly as discourse analysis, whereby Sekula’s understanding
of discourse is “the forceful play of tacit beliefs and formal conventions that
situate us, as social beings, in various responsive and responsible aitudes to
the semiotic workings of photography” (2002: 255).
is discourse exerts a force, “that is simultaneously material and
symbolic, inextricably linking language and power” (2002: 256). Allan Sekula
suggests the discourse without exception as normalization and—quite
unfoucauldian—as a repression that needs to be “deconstructed.” Even
without explicit reference to Derrida, deconstruction is the strategy of
Sekula’s aempt to create a “critical theory of photography” and to find
“forms of resistance to combine culture and politics” (2002: 260).
Sekula’s analysis of the praxeology, the methodology of photography
cannot be understood without taking this general culture-critical impetus
into account. If photography as a practice is the confirmation and
enforcement of social standards and meanisms of power, whi need to be
criticized, however, then he is concerned with other, dissident methods.
e present ones have been already understood and in the sense of
cultural criticism, discarded: the world is not enough. With this, an essential
aracteristic of cultural criticism, deconstruction and discourse analysis has
already been named: standards and regulations, meanics of power and
control devices infect the colorful diversity with their insistent monotony.
Even if one can determine a wealth of highly heterogeneous practices, these
can be aributed to the same discursive or social systems. A uniform power
formation is concealed behind the diversity. Accordingly, it is mostly about
the greater source, the dark side of the force, whi casts its shadow on
everything and leaves lile room for any divergence. For Adorno, the non-
identical remains; for Barthes, it is the dream of the singular, not socially
normalized and coded; for Žižek it is the small flash of a moment where
everything could be different.

Towards a Praxeology of Photography

Yet what can elements of a praxeological theory of photography look like if

we reject the option of “acting images” on the one hand and one of the pre-
existing and leading discourses on the other? And what theories lend
themselves to develop concepts or terminology to fall ba on? For this
purpose, here are six short theses, first as possible reference theories, then
for conceptual basic orientations.

Turning Ba and Re-calibrating the Image Act eory

One option could be to turn ba Bredekamp’s Image Act eory to the
position where images as actors become media of action. However, even his
typology, whi differentiates between sematic, substituting and intrinsic
images, proves unsuitable, because it is based on the basic assumption that
“the ‘image’ is put in the place of the speakers, and not that of words”
(Bredekamp 2010: 51).
Moreover, the many proposed differentiations, particularly by Austin and
Searle, are not directly transferable to the use of photography and also
pursue very different theoretical interests. Nevertheless, their considerations,
as well as those of Ludwig Wigenstein in his philosophical studies, where
images are occasionally mentioned, offer possible evidence to mark the
theoretical path.
 e task will be to develop a typology that differentiates or rather brings
the various uses together. It will have to concentrate on the differentiation of
the smallest entities. eir interconnection and separation, association and
dissociation also play an important role, for whi semiotics developed
descriptive models.
Similar to the Spee Act eory (at least in the case of Wigenstein and
Searle), this theory of the use of photography would also have to negotiate
the question of their importance, and of production.

A Different Foucault

Foucault’s discourse analysis forms, as we have seen, part of the

paradigmatic references of photography theory. In his writings, however,
photography plays a marginal role; merely two texts are dedicated to
photography: both have a rather occasional aracter, but nevertheless dra
a completely different theoretical coding than the phototheoretical
approaes based on his writings might suggest. In his essays on Duane
Mials and Gérard Fromanger, Foucault is interested in the undisciplined,
transgressive side of photography that cannot be described as a standard or
disciplinary maine, as has increasingly become the norm.
Conversely, Foucault is fascinated by the highly heterogeneous history of
photography, whi could only be tamed in the end through its annexation
and through processes of abstractions and transformations into the
symbolical (Stiegler 2004).
Before, Foucault saw photographs as fascinating smugglers, hybrids and
hermaphrodites, images of the transition between essentially strictly
separate and independent areas. Even if we should avoid adopting a
different order of things, a logic of transgression (on the occasion of his book
Madness and Civilization Foucault himself called this a romantic
aberration), it seems to me that the reminder that not everything is
automatically part of a social standard, but is first undisciplined, is an
important sign. Moreover, the emphasis on the ameleon-like aracter of
photography needs further aention: e same images can appear in
different contexts and take on a completely new meaning. Yet it always
carries the baggage of its previous uses, whi is now “smuggled in,” to keep
with Foucault’s metaphor. ese types of migration of images would be
most interesting subjects for a praxeology of photography.

Latour’s Hybrid Images

Bruno Latour’s social constructivist approa undoubtedly offers a wealth of

possible connections, because the actor–network theory aempts to describe
and explain the production of scientific facts by incorporating the things and
spaces (Belliger and Krieger 2006, Smidgen 2013). ereby, this theory
consistently abstracts from discursive specifications, ideological formations,
and social standards. e reality is not stable, but unstable—at least that is
the assumption—and thus, with the help of numerous operations and
strategies, will be transferred to a more transient order. In this context,
Latour speaks of a “variable ontology.” Similar to tenology as a whole, the
use of photography and its status as “hybrid images” could be understood as
opportunities, to keep different agents and their associations together, and to
put them into circulation, a recurring practice. From this perspective,
photographic practices prove themselves as a procedure that makes dynamic
acts and volatile processes durable, to stabilize them.2
Uses are socially and historically variable practices that regulate the
circulation of, aribution of meaning to, and use of photography, and thus at
the same time ensure a relative stability. ey are necessarily connected
with institutions and discourses, as the reliability and readability of the
images can only be guaranteed in a socially recognized framework. Uses are
therefore recurring regulated and regulatory practices that determine how
we handle photographs.

Praxeology Instead of Ontology

For a long time photographs were understood to be visible traces, as
irrefutable evidence of the existence of the presented, its “it has been”
(Roland Barthes). erefore, photographs were initially classified as
documents, whether used in the media, in the family album, in books,
arives or collections. As digitization began to feed into the realm of
photography, and the end of the photographic era was proclaimed, it was its
documentary qualities, its “ontology” as a emical–physical symbol, that
suddenly lost its persuasive powers. But even if the sting of digital doubt
seems deeply ingrained within the photographic authenticity and evidence,
many of its tasks and uses have hardly anged. When we look at a family
album created with digital images, closely inspect the X-rays of a broken
foot together with the doctor, or view the image of the finish of the 100-
meter finals at the Olympic Games, our trust in photography remains. If we
trust the use of the images, or more precisely, if we assign them persuasive
powers via their use, it does not maer whether they are analog or digital.
In other words: We doubt photography, but still use certain photographs to
dispel doubt and produce evidence.
e one-sided focus on the documentary aspect has obscured the fact that
photography has always and above all been one thing: a practice. It is a
medium that is accessible through its use and has been proven to be
versatile, multifaceted, and almost universally applicable. If we consider it
from this point of view, our image of photography is newly configured.

Use Sools and Styles Instead of Eras and Groups

e praxeological turn opens up a different history of photography and with

it also a surprising and instructive insight into the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. When Miel Frizot (1998) promised, with his
monumental publication, a new history of photography a quarter century
ago, the use of photography already played an important role—nevertheless,
traditional categories su as epos and groups, sools and styles
remained. At the time, the reorientation was primarily directed against an
appropriation of photography through art history.
Photographic images were mainly viewed as works of art and assessed by
the guidelines of the “art-worthiness.” Yet, if we look at the history of
photography as the result of a partly stable, partly anging practice and at
the images as something that forms part of a highly specific use, then this
distinction plays a subordinate role. e ennoblement of photography as art
is irrelevant; the more significant question would be: In what way has
photography been used within the field of the arts? Are genres, epos, and
other classifications the effect of practices? Old categories— that oen follow
their mostly famous photographers and their sools, inventors, pioneers—
are now replaced by functions. Names become application areas and nouns
become verbs.

Verbs Instead of Nouns, Functions Instead of Categories

is would mean a—emphatically spoken—Copernican Revolution of

photography theory. Because the meaning of photographs or what they
represent is not owed to the nature of photography, but is the effect of its
use. e ontology of photography will be replaced by a praxeology, its
documentary aracter by distinct usage and practices. Sometimes the exact
same images are used in completely different ways and thus give a
completely different meaning. Since verbs govern this new ABC of the
photographic language, we see a world in motion. Photographs no longer
show the world at standstill, frozen movements and captured views, but are
part of an action that relies on ange, on acting.
“How to do things with photographs?” could be the central question,
based on the title of a famous book by the philosopher John L. Austin (1962).
A question that does not have just one answer, but necessarily many.

Notes
 1 Sekula’s point is that it is this distinction whi enables photography to be art at all: “e
invention of the photograph as high art was only possible through its transformation into an
abstract fetish, into a ‘significant form’” (1982: 103).

2 One of Bruno Latour’s articles is actually titled “Tenology is Society Made Durable” and offers
the example of the Kodak camera (Latour 1990).

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1.2 e Photograph as Object

Alison Nordström in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: Alison, you have been involved in looking at, writing about and
collecting photographs for many decades now. Nearly all the contributors of this book, in one way
or the other, underline that the great changes that photography has undergone in the last 10 or 15
years have to do with the digitalization, virtualization, massification, or democratization of the
medium, among others. I would like to speak about the question of “immaterialization,” if you
wish, and start the conversation by asking how important the materiality of the photograph really
is: its status as an object that was born into the real world, as opposed to an image on a screen?

ALISON NORDSTRÖM: I guess I should start by encouraging us to recognize the difference

between image and object. Of course, when people first experienced the photograph it was as a
thing. It was a piece of metal or paper and it was impossible to separate the thing from the image
it carried. What’s important to remember about the way photographs were is that their material
nature would ange what people did with them and what people do with a photograph affects its
particular meaning. Part of the way we have lived with photographs is as things we kiss, things
we burn in protest, things we rip up in anger, things we write on, things we fold in half so that
they fit into an envelope, things we put in albums, or in frames on a gallery wall. All of those
actions are part of the material culture of these things. Another key element of all this is that
things can live longer then we do. Most of the photographs that were made in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries have not survived, but the ones that have have a particular importance
simply because of that and many of them show the marks of their use in ways that may give us a
clue as to what they meant to the people who looked at them more than a hundred years ago.
When we think about photographic materiality we are oen thinking about vernacular
photographs: we are thinking about family albums, snapshots, those kinds of things, but I think
the materiality of photographs is also critical in how art photographs have been used, seen, and
understood. Pictorialism, for example, is not just the first international photographic art
movement; you can argue that it’s the first truly international art movement of any kind. I’m quite
certain that one of the reasons for that, is that it was very easy to make multiple photographs, put
them in envelopes, and send them off to salons and exhibitions in Sydney, Paris or Yokohama.
Compare this to paintings, whi were both one of a kind, and difficult to transport. So the ease
with whi photographs move around, whi is inherent to their materiality, has very mu
shaped the way we have experienced them.

MN: You said that the “ease to move around comes with the materiality of the photograph,” but
nowadays, photographs travel by electronic means, and they can do this precisely due to their
immateriality. Is this a contradiction?

AN: What travels so easily now is the image, not the object. Of course some digital images carry
informative metadata but objects accrue the marks of their use in very particular ways and part of
what we can learn from those marks is how they have moved around. How did this thing get from
where it was made to where I found it and where has it been in the meantime? It’s always
delighted me that material photographs have bas as well as fronts. With paper photographs, the
ba is conveniently inseparable from the front of the object where the image sits, and the ba of
the photograph becomes an intuitive vehicle for carrying the artist’s name, writing a caption,
adding a date. We’re all familiar with twentieth-century press photographs that carry the entire
history of their publication in rubber stamps and paper cutlines on the ba. With an image that is
moving around digitally, caption information doesn’t accrue in this way but is replaced. So I agree
with you that reproducibility of photographs and the ease with whi they are moved around are
key elements for both digital and analogue images but I don’t think they’re the same thing.

MN: Certainly not.

When I speak to photography students about their projects, I often ask them what the “final
product” of their investigation will be, that is, how the project will materialize. If their works will
be bought one day by a museum, where will the registrar put the number?

Or is this numbering on the object not happening anymore? So, maybe the question should be
broader: What happens when a photographic object enters a collection?

AN: In fact, I think you’re asking two different questions here. From a theoretical standpoint, a
photograph entering a collection becomes one more example of photographic use, but when this
happens it’s usually terminal. Photographs are slippery because they can be used (and thus
understood) in so many ways, and those uses can ange over time and as a photograph moves
from hand to hand, place to place. A photograph made as a family aide-memoire may enter an
ethnographical collection and become permanently fixed as “Young Woman from Fiji” even
though it wasn’t made with scientific intent. A Mahew Brady photograph whi might have
been photojournalism at one point enters the collection of an art museum and it becomes art. It
enters the collection of a history museum and it becomes history. e multivalent possibilities of
most photographic images and objects are not necessarily related to their materiality, but it is
things that we find in places, whether arive or bureau drawers, and the place where we find (or
put) a thing is one of the elements that will control its meaning.

Even now, aer the digital turn, we’re stu with the notion of photographic materiality as a
defining factor that instructs us in how an image should be read. ere’s this great word,
“skeuomorphism,” whi refers to the retention of design elements from processes that are no
longer current. We see this in the fake woodgrain of plastic tabletops and in the thing that looks
like a trash can on your laptop to show you how to throw something away, or even, when I take a
picture with my phone I get this lile aperture picture and the sound of a closing shuer. Even our
words for thinking about digital information, desktop, file, folder, are examples of skeuomorphism
that shows how old ways of thinking persist even though the tenology that drove them is no
longer the current one. Museums are literally conservative institutions; they keep things, and
museums are in the business of keeping tra of the stuff they keep. e easiest way of keeping
tra of stuff is to put numbers on it and while this can be done with a digital file there is mu
greater risk of the number geing separated from its thing. And if a material photograph is
slippery, its digital counterpart is even more so. ere are huge issues about originality,
authenticity and authorship that strike at the very heart of what museums have done for
centuries. So museums, art museums in particular, are really feeling their way with how to handle
born-digital works of art. Even when a photograph begins digitally but ends up as a print there is
information that we are realizing we want to know about this thing of whi we are stewards.
is is partly for conservation reasons. It will help future preservation concerns to know what the
bat number was on the ink cartridge used to make the print, but it’s also part of our effort to try
to preserve the artist’s intent, preserve the certain circumstances of its making. As we know,
whenever the information is physically separate from the image it’s quite likely something is
going to get lost. Whi is why traditionally in a museum, whether it’s a photograph or a plough
or a piece of Etruscan poery, you physically put the reference number that tells you where to
find all the other information on the thing. ere are examples of permanent and lifetime
metadata tagging but it’s not certain yet and certainly not always done. ere are people who are
working on this who are developing methods and they are generally coming from
photojournalism or the military. When quantities of digital images are being produced every hour
it’s essential that they are identified in a permanent way so that they can go directly into a file
because if you have to have an intermediary who’s tagging information onto these things you will
drown.

MN: Let’s return to museum practice again. I would think that the need to put a number on an
object will not disappear, even if technology changes, because it is also an institutional act, an act
of appropriation of an object, into its institutional sphere . . .

AN: It is part of what a museum does. Our other issue is not an intellectual difference but a ange
in scale that is so great that it becomes a ange in kind. It’s a question of authenticity. We’ve
always said this notion of “editions” for photographs is artificially imposed for reasons of market
value. It’s not artificial with prints, lithographs, and other works on paper because the printing
stone or plate deteriorates and the first prints made are beer, sharper, clearer with fewer flaws in
them than the last prints made. With photographs, this may have been somewhat true with
photographs produced from a negative, but certainly now you can make a million photographs
that all look exactly the same and it’s only an economic issue. Why does a photographer oose to
do the work in editions of three? To make them more collectible, to make them more aractive to
the people who want to buy them. Yet this is mu harder to control in the digital universe. Of
course artists sell videos, they license videos, they produce limited editions of artist videos, but at
least now we are still in a world where museums and collectors are acquiring things to put on the
wall and this is definitely worth thinking hard about. Of course we all, every day, consume images
on a screen, but it’s simply not the same experience as consuming them on a wall for lots of
reasons.

MN: Quentin Bajac, the new chief curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art,
says in an interview published in Alessandra Mauro’s book Photoshow that in the future,
museums will have to adapt to the virtuality of new art forms. But then, hanging photographs in a
space seems vital for how we experience them, and it is also part of the curatorial work, to place
images next to each other, or opposite to each other, to use the space to hide, to reveal, to explain
different aspects of the works, to surprise the viewers, to hold their attention, and so on.

AN: I think you’re right. At this point museums are still buildings, and exhibitions are still about
puing things into the rooms of that building. We still expect people to walk around inside of
those rooms in some physical relationship to the things in the room. In the future, of course, it
may be possible to have online museums. It may be possible to send visual experiences directly to
the ip implanted in your brain. It’s very hard to speculate. I do believe that regardless of what
happens in the future, these not-material experiences will be in addition to what we do now, not a
substitute for what we do now. Experiencing a huge Rubens painting, walking around, and seeing
it in a room will never be the same experience as looking at an image of it on a screen, and of
course it was intended to be known that way. In the future, artists will make work that can rea
their audiences in ways we can’t imagine and we may eventually bypass the material in that work
entirely but I don’t believe we will ever give up the material whether it’s a photograph or a
diamond. ings are part of our world.

e particular confusion with photographs I think is that if I take a photograph of a Louis XIV
air and show it to you, whether I show it to you on a screen or a piece of paper, you’re probably
not going to confuse that photograph with a air. You’re not going to try and sit down on that
photograph. But if I show you a photograph of a photograph it looks like a photograph. And if I
show you a photograph on a screen you may very well confuse that image with the actual paper
photograph that was then scanned. So that’s part of our confusion. ere is also the element of
ubiquity. We are surrounded by photographs. e number of photographs that I look at every day
is probably more than someone would have looked at in an entire lifetime in the nineteenth
century. So that affects the way we understand them too.

MN: How did you experience the transition from analog to digital, and how do you feel about
people who cling to the past?

AN: Well, again I think it’s an example of adding new possibilities, new arrows in your quiver,
rather than replacing them. e institutions that specialize in teaing so-called “alternative
process” have long taught daguerreotype and platinum and cyanotype, but they are also teaing
gelatin silver now as an araic process, because it is, but it’s still alive, and available for artistic
expression. Artists are always looking for the right medium to express their ideas. A good example
is Sally Mann’s wet collodion work. She’s making work using a nineteenth-century process not
because she clings to the past and not because she wants to make something look nostalgic or old
fashioned but because of the ambiguity of the kind of image this process lets her make. Chu
Close is making daguerreotypes because their reflective quality is exactly what he is looking for in
the image he wants to make. At the same time what we have here is almost like a parallel universe
rather then one thing superseding the other. I can look at images on my phone but also really
appreciate looking at an actual analog print. For young people I would say don’t burn any bridges.
Don’t feel that in order to be tuned into the future you have to reject the past.

MN: Or vice versa . . .

AN: Exactly. I am seeing young artists who are happily doing a digital video project shot on an
iPhone and then their next project will involve darkroom-made contact prints. So I think for
artists in particular we should just hang on to all of these things and be thoughtful about them. At
the same time in the ordinary world for non-artists things are anging very fast. I know when I
was most recently in arge of a museum collection one of the things I collected was passports
and identity cards because it seemed to me that the idea that you would prove who you were by
showing someone a photograph of your face was an old use of photography that would soon be
over, now that we have retinal scans and genetic coding. We’re going to see more anges
happening more dramatically in the ordinary world of useful photographs. You won’t carry a
passport, you won’t carry a driver’s license because there will be other ways of identifying you. In
the art world in particular though we need all the material we’ve got, we need every possibility
and then we leave it to the artist to sort it out.

MN: Photography is a special medium in the sense that it can be used in very different forms, and
for different purposes: that is commercial, applied photography, personal use, communication in
the widest sense, but also as a medium of artistic creation. In your curatorial work you have tried
to bridge the apparent schism between vernacular, useful photography and the art practice. Do you
think that this gap, if there is one, has widened, or have the two worlds of artistic and non-art
forms of photography grown together in the digital age?

AN: Well, you know, I think it’s an artificial distinction very oen. A lot of historical material was
begun as “useful” and became art mu later. Look at Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs of the
American West aer the Civil War. He made those photographs to help surveyors keep tra of
what they were measuring. ey were extremely useful photographs. ey were used at Harvard
to tea geology to undergraduates. Very useful. By the mid-twentieth century Ansel Adams felt
that these pictures validated the kind of art that he was making. By the time they appeared in an
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they had become art. In many cases these days
there is an economic motive to claiming images made with a non-art intention as art.
Daguerreotypes were generally made as aide-memoire. It’s only mu later that they were
collected by museums and private art collectors. is may have been because of appreciation of
their aesthetic but the result in any event was an increase in their monetary value.

e arbitrary distinction between art and not art has been going on for a long time. It’s intriguing
that Stieglitz took a walk ba through nineteenth-century photography looking for spiritual
ancestors, and because he was a pictorialist the pictures he identified as the art of the nineteenth
century were Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, you know, so, allegorical, beautiful,
out of focus. Beaumont Newhall with a very different agenda, an agenda to justify photography as
a modern art, took the same walk ba into the nineteenth century and he identified very different
photographs as his spiritual ancestors. In ea case they were claiming these photographs as art as
a way to separate them from the ninety-nine percent of the photographs ever made. We see this
again in the present day, it takes us ba to our discussion of scale, especially now that since it’s so
easy to take a photograph, everyone is a photographer. A lot of art photographers employ a
snapshot aesthetic now, but one of the ways art photographers separate their work from
everybody’s mother’s work, is in scale. If the photographic object is four meters across, your
mother didn’t make it even if it looks like an image your mother might have made. So with
photography more than painting there has always been this desire to separate art from the other
products of the medium. Pictorialism began when everyone had a Kodak, so the pictorialists
emphasized a different materiality, rendering their images as platinum over cyanotype, or with the
brushstrokes of bromoil. ey made things that were really hard to make, to separate what they
were doing from the snapshots that the Kodak girls were making. So again I think we see these
paerns historically persisting to the present day and it’s oen the final material form that affects
whether the photograph is considered as art or not. It’s the question you were asking your
students, are you going to make something? Again, it’s still things that get bought and sold. A
newspaper morgue that ends up being sold to a museum when it’s no longer useful as a way to
move photographs from New York to Paris becomes art, in a sense, by where we move it to.

MN: What do you think of the renaissance of the photobook as a medium, both in the sense of how
it is used by artists, and the intentions of scholars to integrate its history more into the “official”
historiography of the photographic medium?

AN: It seems there are a lot of different things going on. Obviously photographs have been put
into books and albums since the very first years of the medium. And it’s su a common way to
consume photographs that it’s almost invisible; we don’t pay mu aention to the implications of
the book form. I remember once looking at a very very early college “yearbook” that had been
made before the conventions of what a yearbook should be were established. It was lile
daguerreotypes set into a piece of wood. e idea of the book carries its own overtones of
elevation and validation; early photograph albums oen looked like bibles. ey had leather
bindings, and gold leering on the outside, because it was a way of making the photographs very
important. So that’s one piece of it today, a photo book makes the photographs more important
then a series of photographs on a screen. It also makes them more permanent, in a way, because a
photo book fixes a sequence and sequence is very important to the way we understand a group of
pictures. We don’t look at photographs one at a time anymore; artists always seem to work in
series. So that’s a piece of it. It’s also a physical experience. You hold the book on your lap. You
turn the pages with your hand. You might look at a book with a friend siing beside you but it’s
more oen a solitary experience, whereas with a large print on a wall or projected on a movie
screen there might be a hundred people looking at it at the same time. So as a physical experience,
a book has so many more elements than just its images. What kind of paper did they use? What
does that paper feel like on your hand? Is it mae? Is it thi and so like watercolor paper? Is it
shiny and glossy? How does that affect your understanding? e book is heavy or not heavy. It
does or does not fit easily on a shelf. All of those material qualities that a photo book has are part
of the communication bag of tris that a good designer or other maker of a photo book will take
into consideration. When you compare that to puing a photograph on a screen, the screen seems
very limited. I always say I love the smell of new books. I appreciate what happens when you peel
the cellophane off and there is that smell and even that sound when bindings open for that first
time. We relate to photo books with every sense we have, and they are also time based, more like a
movie than a still. Our culture is becoming dominated more and more by visuality because of the
way we consume things on a screen, and photo books allenge that not in a regressive way but in
a way that’s enriing. A photo book separates its images from all the other images that are
beeping and tweeting their way into our lives. And there is a market for them. We know how to
sell books. We haven’t quite figured out how anyone can make any money with images on the
internet.

MN: Do you think that the institutions have neglected the photobook as a medium? How important
were books to you, when you were working at George Eastman House?

AN: Well they were very important to me personally because I love them but I’m aware that
institutionally there were telling distinctions made amongst them. e Department of Photographs
collected photo books but they were usually very small editions, or hand made with real
photographs tipped in, or something like that. We were comfortable saying that something was a
work of art, appropriate for us. If it was a meanically printed photo book no maer how
wonderful it was, it went into the library. Now there were special sections of the library where the
books didn’t get rubber stamps on them and you couldn’t e them out and read them over
lun: some books went into these Library Special Collections. at was an arbitrary distinction
but a very real one.

MN: But you did include books in your exhibitions?

AN: I put photo books in exhibitions. I also put magazines in exhibitions. I wouldn’t argue that
puing the photo book in an exhibition elevated or validated the photo book. But it enhanced our
understanding of the photographs and of the artist’s intention. I’ve always been interested in the
mass production of photographs so I oen put popular magazines or popular postcards into an
exhibition to broaden our understanding of what’s worth looking at or what certain images meant
when they were being used in popular culture.

MN: My last question leads us back to the issue of the photographic object. You have been working
a lot with historic material, that is, with objects that have existed for many years before you held
them in your own hands. Lately, you are also very much engaged in festivals and shows, where you
work directly with contemporary artists who produce their work, or to say it in our jargon, who
“print their exhibition copies” directly for the purpose of being shown in a certain context, and
which are doomed to be destroyed after the exhibition closes. How do you see the difference
between dealing with “the work” itself, and the negotiation process with the image-maker?

AN: It’s exciting to work collaboratively with the artist to move from a “born digital” image to a
material object, however long or short its existence is to be. For starters, everything is the same
size on a screen and the size of a photograph, the scale of a photograph is a key artistic decision.
I’m always surprised as a curator when I’m talking to an artist and she says, “How big do you
want it?” I don’t believe that’s a curatorial decision or a design decision; it’s an inherent part of an
artist’s vocabulary. And that photograph’s size is a factor of its materiality. In addition to that,
what is an exhibition if it’s not moving your body into a room and physically maneuvering your
body in relationship to these things you are looking at? We see a photograph from a distance
when we enter the gallery. We see one image out of the corner of our eye while looking at the one
next to it. We step up close. We step ba. If it’s very big we may feel overwhelmed by it. If it’s
tiny, we may imagine holding it in our hands. Part of the experience of a photographic object that
makes it different from experiencing it as something on a screen is this haptic quality, this relating
to it physically. It may be in the future that it will not be important but it still is now. Of course
the artist knows his or her work and intentions best but what I may know about the physical
environment and cultural circumstances that the image-become-object will live in is also part of
the puzzle. Our shared goal is to make the audience experience of the work as meaningful as
possible. In the end, it’s about puing something in front of a pair of eyes and trusting those eyes
to see it.

1.3 Photography and/as Art

Charlotte Cotton in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: As a starting point, I would like to speak about a book you wrote 12 years
ago, when you talked about: photography as a contemporary art form, authorship, art versus non-
art and so on.

As you say, the battle is already won; photography is firmly installed as an art form, as an artistic
medium, or as a medium of artistic expression. But especially in the last few years it seems that the
arena has become much wider, photography is everywhere and in a very different way than
painting, drawing, sculpture or even video art. Could you summarize your standpoint from ten
years ago and say how it has changed in the last few years?

CHARLOTTE COTTON: The Photograph as Contemporary Art is a book that exists within a very
well-established series about the history of art and aritecture. I think it was important at that
time because photography as a contemporary art form hadn’t yet been fully established in the
publishing sphere as a cultural subject.

Possibly one thing that hasn’t anged is that the artist’s monograph remains the most dominant
form of photography’s representation within art publishing. It wasn’t that I dreamt up this subject
called “photography as contemporary art.” ere was definitely a need at that point for an
expansive and crowded survey book. And that was essentially the brief for the book: to define
photography as a contemporary art subject of the early twenty-first century.
At the time, in the early 2000s, we already knew that the dominant idea of photography as an
editorial form was very mu on the wane, with the beginnings of a phase of restructuring in the
publishing industry. Of course, the first version of my book was wrien pre-social media, so the
landscape was maybe a lile bit simpler, but the book was clearly about defining this idea of
photography as contemporary art.

e title of the book was actually osen by the really wonderful editor of the first edition,
Andrew Brown, and we had some “ba and forth” about it. For me, photography definitely was a
contemporary art form and we could have used a title like Contemporary Art Photography, but I
think that the introduction of the word “as” gives the idea that photography is many things and
this book was focusing on just one aspect. So there is an element of doubt or a metabolic element
to the idea of photography as contemporary art, whi proved to be a very astute title for the
book.

MN: Thank you for sharing this very interesting background information, which helps to
understand your intentions, especially when compared to the final outcome of the project. Has the
book grown beyond your expectations?

CC: I think my expectations for the book . . . well that’s a really interesting thing, I mean, talking
about a book when its intentionality is no longer living. What I intended for the book is very
different to the behavior of the book because once it is published it becomes this entity that you
have no control over. I’m more of an observer, a very particular observer, of what I produce, but I
have a very clear understanding that there is a difference between my intent and the received
meaning of the book. So in a way, I’m not the best reader of how the book stands today. But in
terms of my intentions, I wanted the book to be a book that the included artists would feel
comfortable—at least not misrepresented—by the structural organization into apters. I was
conscious at the time that I didn’t want these artists’ work to be illustrations of an overly imposed
theoretical set of ideas.

e apter headings are essentially non-academic, perhaps unconventional for the time, in the
sense that they are not following particular theories or art historical genres. ey seemed to me to
be groupings where there were shared investigations by the artists. e book was a allenge to
write because, of course, artists aren’t just one thing, as writers aren’t just one thing, but it was
done in a way that I felt was as generous and as respectful of the artist’s motivations as I could get
within a necessarily restrictive format. e book includes the work of over 220 artists with about
100 to 150 words on ea. My motivation was also to produce a book that was 50 percent female
practitioners and for there not to be any discussion about that, just an empirical fact. I think it’s
probably the resounding aspect that has remained as the evidence of my intent. It’s something that
I’d say I’m proud of, because The Photograph as Contemporary Art became a widely distributed
book with over 120,000 copies in circulation, and published in ten languages. I’m glad that at least
gender equality in the framing of art photography of the early twenty-first century made it into
the mainstream.

I keep my distance from the dissemination part of the story of Photography as Contemporary Art.
e book was published as part of a very reputable series and it’s very affordable, whi is great. I
think many of us suspected that there might be more books like that coming out soon aer; that it
would be surpassed by other books as the default introductory survey book for the field. As I
mentioned earlier, I think that photography within the arts sector maintained its very solid basis
of separation of the few from the many and using the monographic form. Maybe we couldn’t have
seen that in the early 2000s, that this would remain the mainstay of the general and pedagogical
discussion of photography.

MN: So the book has its own life, which is separate from your life and the context has changed.
Have the themes of interest to you in your writing also changed? Last year you have published
another important book, Photography is Magic, which is very popular amongst students and
practitioners, especially for people who work with installations or across media. Again, it is a solid
basis for new thoughts and ideas, as you lay the ground for a new chapter in photography. May we
say that?

CC: Yes, I think so. Many, many things happened in-between those two books and of course I’m
also a curator who is associated with institutions at points of ange, so Photography is Magic was
not only informed by the shiing landscape of photography at large, but also the full range of my
curatorial practices and what I was encountering and observing. I suppose what The Photograph
as Contemporary Art and Photography is Magic share is a focus on what we can call the trade
publishing arena. Between writing the two books I have wrien a lot for other people’s books and
for photography books within nie publishing, with small runs; somewhere I’d say between a
thousand and two thousand is the prey regular first print run for many of the books that we see
as being very defining within our field today.

I am sure in other parts of your book you are talking about those shis in dissemination and
publishing and the idea of photography publishing in the last ten to fieen years. So I don’t need
to go into that but Photography is Magic is definitely a return to that arena of larger print runs and
a sense of dissemination beyond the very small world of photobook publishing. You know,
curating at its very basic idea is doing things for other people, and the way that I approa
publishing is with that spirit. I always have a reader in mind for the texts that I write, and that’s
essentially what The Photograph as Contemporary Art and Photography is Magic share. My
fantasy reader is quite young and is at the point in life where a book or an exhibition can really
make a marked impression and indicate the possibilities of having a relevant and sustainable
creative practice. Photography is Magic felt like a really important book to do because I could see
that many of the artists included were being tentatively absorbed into what we might call the
‘photo-photo’ world, it’s a world that sits somewhat separate to contemporary art and that didn’t
feel like an entirely satisfactory celebration of the new stances and ideas about the photographic
that are at play in the work. e contemporary art world at large had lile problem with many of
the artists represented in the book, but it felt like it was important for me to write what I call my
“love leer” to the future, to create something that allowed these practices whi clearly go
beyond photography as contemporary art as it’s played out in the last fieen to twenty years and
create a platform for thinking of this work as photography. I knew that this survey book would
appeal to younger practitioners who are looking for some sort of validation for the work that they
are actually looking at, and making.

Another big subject about to broa is where pedagogy has gone for photography, particularly in
the last ten years, but I would say that in my very intensive teaing, mainly in the U.S., the
majority of the artists represented in Photography is Magic are incredibly special to students who
are coming up through the ranks. It just felt very important that there was at least a first aempt
to survey that work; to bring it together and celebrate post Internet practices within photography
without any shame or qualifying too mu within the existing history of photography.

You know this very well yourself, we’ve been through quite a profound psyic journey with the
idea of photography in the last fieen years and I was very mu involved in the more public
discussions about where photography was going, whether photography is dead, etc., etc. As we
came into 2012 I felt extremely optimistic about where photography was going, it wasn’t in the
obvious place, it wasn’t within institutions, it wasn’t really within the photo world, but what I was
seeing really excited me. It still excites me to see this very optimistic and artist-led moment in
practice that didn’t conveniently wrap itself into the tail end of the separatist history of
photography. So I needed to find somewhat poetic language for talking about what I thought was
happening right now.

MN: In an interview I did a while ago with the Spanish curator Alejandro Castellote and the artist
Cristina de Middel, they insisted very much on the fact that the changes in the photo world, at
least in the Spanish arena, are largely connected to the financial crisis, and a profound crisis of the
media. Maybe we could add the crisis of the higher education system as well . . . is this something
you observe on an international scale also?

CC: I starting conceiving Photography is Magic when I was ba in the UK from 2010, until early
2012, whi was at the point of the wholesale privatization of higher education in England. I was
extremely conscious of that as somebody who has only an undergraduate degree, gained at a time
when my education was subsidized, that I hadn’t gone any further, predominantly because I
couldn’t face the debt incurred by commiing to go on with higher education. ere are
convincing theories around personal debt as a way of state control, of suppressing people, and
with the privatization of higher education at that time, I felt strongly that this was a big wake-up
call for photography higher education. For me, the question was what it meant, for example, to
study for a photography MA or a MFA at the moment when we saw the bubble in the
“photography as art” market burst, and a sense that a frighteningly large constituency of students
undertaking MFAs were not doing it in the spirit of a liberal education and with a quest to refine
self-motivated ideas and creative practices, but to begin a career as an artist.

I wanted Photography is Magic to be a trade book that might rea the hands of eighteen-or
nineteen-year-olds and remind them that they own the future and that future may not necessarily
mean coming out of a BA or BFA program and going straight into an MFA. I thought that the
2010s would be an era where there would be a big question mark about the cost and the ensuing
debt of higher education in the arts. I’m perhaps answering the question you pose very differently
to Cristina, but it was acutely on my mind that I didn’t want what I produced to be something of a
fictional or non-reflexive account of photographic practices, given the economic and political
climate that we have been living through.

MN: Practicing artists, at least in Europe, received an important amount of state funding for many
years, yet they were dependent on a system where you had to be friends with political and cultural
decision makers. Due to the cuts that system doesn’t exist anymore and there aren’t any great
possibilities that you can live off, as an artist, as a photographer. So you need to reinvent yourself
and make things in different ways. Of course, the rise of the self-publishing segment represents a
door that you can open and gain success in a different way. A book used to be something that was
proposed to you once you were already an important artist. Something like a wrap-up of your
career at the end of it, whereas nowadays it’s a starting point for a career. Today, photographers
create their own distribution channels, their own dissemination and presentation proposals. For
many of the young artists, if there is one important thing you can learn from the well-organized
MFA (or any photographic program), besides finding your own voice and the academic discourse, it
is probably how to promote your own work because the institutions just don’t do it any more as
they used to, right?

CC: I collaborated with Iñaki Domingo for a show that was shown at PHotoEspaña 2014. Cristina
de Middel was actually in the project and it was a process of working with the artists and creating
a show that was very mu artist-led. I felt it very strongly in the conversations that we had that
Spain had a very particular civic relationship with culture, where museum directors and curators
were extremely powerful within the careers of individual artists and, aer the economic crisis, this
began to show itself as a failing system. I am just reiterating that I could really see Cristina’s
perspective when I was travelling to Spain and working on that project over the course of a year. I
think the reality is that we are all dealing with a highly precarious working environment. For
many of us the oices depend on your age. I mean, if you are young, you have no oice other
than to try to harness and perhaps redirect the time that we live through. For older people like me,
I think there are oices to stay put, to be very static, to stay still and allow things to ange
around you or, in the way that I have done, just move very fast. To know that there is no one
situation, there is no one hierary that can really address those anges in ways that mat one’s
personal aitudes, understanding and beliefs in the future. So we are all living through this time,
and some of that story is about tenical and industrial shis, others are about the behavior of
images and where that positions the kind of static practices around art, and others are more
psyic: what your aitude is towards ange.

But the reality is that even if you stayed doing exactly what you had done in the 2000s or the
1990s, the meaning of that is profoundly shied by what is anging around us. And we all have
to do a lot of thinking about those positions and our sense of privilege, that’s the big thing isn’t it?
At the moment, during 2016, there has been a real questioning of our sense of privilege and our
sense of the collective becoming really the last hope. What we can accept that we share is the last
hope. What is on my mind as I say this is the Public, Private, Secret exhibition and the relaun of
the International Center of Photography in New York, whi was a project that was definitely
shaped in the image of a time when our intelligence is all we have le.

MN: So, how did we get to this point? Which were the “negative milestones,” if this concept exists,
the big changes between the late 1990s and today, which have shaped our world in general, and the
world of photography in specific?

CC: Well, I think the big anges for the creative industries of photography were 9/11, the
establishment of digital tenologies and then the economic crash of 2008. I imagine that all of the
things we have been talking about are impacted psyically, economically, politically by those
three events. Most people would put the greater emphasis on the economic crash of 2008, of
 course. But I think for the story of photography 9/11 was particularly felt within the editorial,
publishing, advertising and commercial sectors. It affected the art world less directly; in fact if
anything it aggravated the sense of how art production is shaled to capitalism as luxury items
and investment commodities, very mu aligned with the playgrounds of the 1 percent. e
economic crash has caused an increasing sense as individuals that the structures we adhere to may
not serve us and may not protect us. I would say that for educators and curators, and artists as
well, this is the same: we entered a time in the late 2000s when there was a very definite sense that
the best you could do is uphold your ethics, your honesty, your sentience of the world on an
individual level without necessarily mu hope of anging the structure itself. at seems to be a
prevailing theme, particularly in discussions within pedagogy—about what it means to tea and
how to uphold liberal values within education when the systems themselves are not supportive of
that, and are in their own form of existential crisis. In 2012 I came out of a long run of full-time
employment in cultural institutions, and I wanted to talk about the allenges institutions face in
being able to grasp the importance of this creative moment. e irony being that the 2010s has
proved to be an incredibly interesting and exciting period within photographic history. But
somehow the structures neither supported the individuals, nor the flow of creativity, and that
seemed to be a severe problem: that photography as a cultural subject might miss out on its own
fabulous and ongoing story.

1.4 Photography, Visual Culture, and the

(Re)definition of the Male Gaze
David N. Martin, Suzanne Szucs, and James W. Kosore

e traditional notion of the Male Gaze, first conceptualized by feminist film

critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, focused on the objectification of women
through depictions structured to gratify a male heterosexual perspective. In
this apter, we will revisit this concept and investigate how that gaze may
have shied away from a primarily heterosexual perspective to a socially
dominant male perspective (maleness here referring to dominance rather
than specific gender, just as “whiteness” might refer to privilege rather than
race). With gender roles in an increasingly global and mobile society
becoming more fluid and complex, opening up visibility to LGBT
communities, along with a substantial post-feminist balash, we will
consider how the male gaze is shiing and how subsets of objectifying
“gazes” might overlap. We will explore whether the traditional heterosexual
male gaze has shied to a power balash with female bodies being turned
into lower status possessions, while pushing voyeuristic objectification onto
male bodies. is male deification aligns with the arrival of a homosexual
male gaze that appears to be more overt and accepted, yet whi reaes
ba foundationally to previous eras celebrating or shaming male beauty
(“Greek love,” Oscar Wilde, F. Holland Day, Robert Mapplethorpe). is gaze
may take the form of the “bromance” as well as athletics and advertising.
Included in an investigation of this “dominant gaze” will be an exploration
into the possibility of a lesbian and transgender gaze—does ea subculture
have the propensity to fall into this paern of objectified looking and if so,
where is the evidence and what are the implications? at evidence will be
explored through photography, film, dance, and other forms of visual culture
as this subject is expanded through the emergence of variant sexualities and
gender identities.

Complicating the Traditional Male Gaze

In the forty years that have transpired since the 1975 publication of
Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” proscribed gender roles
have become more outwardly complicated, with the integration of not only
the Feminist movement into American Culture, but also the widespread
discussion of and inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
(LGBT) identities into popular consciousness. Relying heavily on
heteronormative relationships, Mulvey established the concept of the Male
Gaze by asserting:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male
and passive/female. e determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, whi
is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at
and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be
said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
(Mulvey, as cited in Erens, 1990, p. 33)
 In this way, the active male spectator dominates and controls the passive
female performer. To fulfill his fantasies, she continues to exploit those
aracteristics desired by the male. Grounded heavily in Freudian
psyoanalytic theory (whi has since fallen out of favor), Mulvey makes
the argument that it is fear of castration (when he looks at the female) that
causes fear and repulsion, whilst it is the spectacle, as fantasy distraction,
along with the power of objectification (of the female) that relieves males of
this fear. Ultimately, his voyeuristic gaze allows both for subjugation of the
female and the affirmation of his own power.
Since its publication, “Visual Pleasure” has become one of the most
influential theoretical articles in the field, the concept of the male gaze being
applied across the spectrum of media, although Mulvey notes in the article
how “it is only in the film form that they can rea a perfect and beautiful
contradiction” (as cited in Erens, 1990, p. 38). It has also been criticized for
its narrow, heteronormative and essentializing approa. In a 2011 interview
she anowledges the limitations of her theory, noting that, “although the
textual approa stands, there are also multiple audiences and spectator
positions, multiple ways in whi different kinds of social groups are
distanced, or entranced by the images on the screen” (Sassatelli, 2011, p.
129). Indeed, as the Feminist and Gay Rights movements have made
dramatic inroads in terms of cultural visibility, the binary paradigm of
feminine/passive and masculine/active must be reexamined, as well as the
complicated reactions and responses to a male gaze as traditional gender
roles are in flux.
It might be useful to start with some contemporary examinations and
definitions. Sassatelli (2011) notes in her interview with Mulvey that it is
important to understand that “the male gaze is also the female gaze—namely
that women look at themselves through the male gaze” (p. 127). is is an
important starting point to help us understand that the male gaze is rather a
dominant gaze. As we live in a patriaral society, that dominance is,
indeed, primarily male (and heteronormative)—yet those who are concerned
with upholding that dominance might not be biologically male, rather they
will have an investment in the status quo. Additionally, a media-saturated
society that may be concerned with upholding the establishment most oen
carries on the narrative of objectification that supports a patriaral society.
us, there is a tendency to objectify “the other” (non-male, non-white, non-
hetero) against the “normalized” body (male, white, straight). However, as
the role of media in twenty-first-century culture has gone viral, along with
the uncontested rise of a free market society that prioritizes consumption
(without a Cold War adversary to apply some balance), understanding who
is being looked at and by whom, has become mu more complicated. e
result appears to be a web of gazing, with a dominant male, hetero gaze in
support of patriaral control, breaking down also into subsets of gazers and
gazees using a dominant gaze to exert control and experience pleasure in
dominance. Just as a master/slave relationship has been theorized to be
symbiotic, so too who controls the gaze, or finds power within the gaze, may
shi in unexpected ways. Add to this the myriad allenges to this dominant
gaze and we may find that its crisis is mirrored in a turbulent society.

Whiplash: Feminism and the Gaze

Mulvey was writing at the apex of Second Wave Feminism in 1975. For the
first time since gaining the vote in 1920, women were making strides outside
of the home, fighting institutional sexism and gaining control over their
bodies. Mulvey’s anowledgment of the visual oppression embedded in film
helped to shine light on how coded media representation had become.
Although advances were made, balash inevitably occurred. ird Wave
Feminism of the 1990s and early twenty-first century and contemporary
Post-Feminism has continued to push for a greater degree of inclusion.
Women have aieved at all levels, with the number of degrees earned by
women well over 50% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016),
women entering the workplace at unprecedented numbers and 2016
becoming a pivot-point with the first woman to be nominated by a major
party for President of the United States. As women have pushed into the
workforce and demanded cultural representation, the balash has been
palpable and thanks to the web, very easy to observe, especially towards
women daring to enter historically male territories.
In the article, “e Male Gaze and Online Sports Punditry: Reactions to
the Ines Sainz Controversy on the Sports Blogosphere” (Merrill, Bryant,
Dolan, & Chang, 2015), the authors investigate not only the treatment of a
female sports journalist by male athletes and their blogging fans, but also
the double standard that exists for women who aempt to enter that world.
Taking Mulvey’s (1975) essay as their starting point, the authors note,
e traditional patriaral structure of Western society has far reaing effects in the sexual
economy of media. Although it seems logical to assume that men and women play equal roles as
media consumers, most media content is designed to appeal to a male audience – even content
that is supposedly targeted toward women.

(p. 42)

As a woman sports journalist in a male-dominated world, Sainz is vilified

within the sports blogosphere through four main approaes, ea of whi
will feel very familiar to many women: objectification, questions as to her
credibility, claims of aention seeking, and a redirection of blame towards
the victim. Although it is demanded by her producers that Sainz dress in
tight skirts, high heels and the accoutrements of femininity that might not
be welcome in the loer room, she is at the same time undermined and
objectified because of it. And because of her physical appearance, she is not
taken seriously as a journalist. is considered la of professionalism then
snowballed into bloggers claiming she is merely an aention seeker, “one
post simply read, ‘Chi has a killer ass. She knows it. She wants aention’”
(Merrill et al., 2015, p. 51). Sainz is the recipient of the same arguments that
have been made repeatedly about rape victims, “the so-called, ‘she was
asking for it’ argument,” although “e more prevalent aitude was that the
Jets’ behavior and remarks, although in poor taste, were a product of their
saturation in a male-dominated atmosphere” (p. 52). is is where the
conflict sits. Sainz has stepped into a bastion of male exclusion as the
authors remind the reader that “a main facet of sports is the dominance of
men and the inferiority of women” (p. 41). Sainz reflects the inroads that
women have made and are making into a traditionally male club. As will be
explored later in this article, sports allow men to gaze upon their own
powerful reflections to the exclusion of female interruption. Women within
sports have been token or beautifiers and always referred to as interlopers
who might practice inferior sports, su as gymnastics. Oen their presence
has been by permission and always it has garnered less pay and less
recognition.
What happens when women make powerful inroads without permission
and they demand the same level of aention and compensation? e 2016
Olympics provides several noteworthy examples both of women breaking
barriers as world class athletes and of the systemic sexism that played out
around their aievements. Bloggers in this case, aided by the virility of
social media, made serious inroads in calling out the media on blatant bias
in coverage of female athletes. As The Huffington Post points out (Moran,
2016), the Twierverse lit up with users tweet-shaming the news media over
sexist remarks including the Chicago Tribune’s tweet headline, “Wife of
Bear’s lineman wins a bronze medal today in Rio Olympics,” whi
prioritized a male football player who was not even competing himself,
while not mentioning the name of the medaling athlete or her sport. Other
notable comments included referring to the gold-medal-winning United
States women’s gymnastics team as girls at the mall, giving credit for the
record-breaking swimming performance of Hungarian medley racer Katinka
Hosszu to her husband, and oen praising female athletes by referring to
them as a version of a male, su as Simone Biles to Miael Phelps, to
whi she humorously replied, “I’m the first Simone Biles” (Garber, 2016).
Perhaps one of the most egregious examples was the headline that
celebrated swimmer Miael Phelps tying for a silver medal, while
relegating record-breaking, gold medal winning Katie Ledey to a sub-
heading (Croe, 2016).

Women Looking at Women

As any group allenges the status quo, it is normal for balash to happen
and there have been plenty of examples of pushba to the Feminist
movement throughout its history; however, the 2016 Olympics stands out
because of the instant and unforgiving social media commentary on the
perceived sexism. is war of the Twierverse is notable for both who is
allowed to be an active player in contemporary culture and who should
remain passively on the sidelines. As women have become more active, and
trespassed more into traditional male territory, objectification of female
bodies has increased alongside of violence, whether physical or virtual,
directed towards women who aempt to infiltrate too far into the world of
men. e scandal known as Gamergate is another example that well
parallels the Ines Sainz controversy and highlights another territory once
considered exclusive to men that also traditionally greatly objectified
women.
e history of Gamergate (Lewis, 2015) involves the same group of targets
that tend to be applied to women seen as interlopers: objectification,
credibility, desire for aention, blaming the victim. In this case, the scandal
arose when a young, female game developer named Zoe inn, part of a
group of women game-makers and critics that called for more inclusion in
gaming, was accused by the male-dominated gaming community as having
used her sexuality to gain favorable reviews. What unfolded was a full-on
culture war between traditional gamers (white males) and women pushing
for inclusion who were also critiquing the oen misogynistic portrayal of
women in many video games—the ultimate objectification featuring women
typically with large breasts, very oen the victim of sexual violence. Women
who became embroiled in the controversy by speaking out against it found
themselves not only aaed online with mostly anonymous threats,
including death and rape threats, but also having to physically flee their
homes as their personal contact information was posted online by rabid
opponents. If the heart of Mulvey’s (1975) Male Gaze is rooted in power—
who has access, who may be an active participant versus a passive reflection
—Gamergate becomes a fiing metaphor for when that structure is
allenged as women demand inclusion rather than the classic role of
objectification. Kaitlin Dewey (2014) summarizes in her article for The
Washington Post:

But Gamergate, crucially, isn’t just about gender. It’s not, contrary to its name, even about video
games. At its heart, remember, the so-called “movement” (if an ambiguous hashtag with no
leaders and no articulated goals can be called a movement), was always about how we define our
shared cultural spaces, how we delineate identity, who is and is not allowed to have a voice in
mainstream culture. It’s about that tension between tradition and inclusion – and in that regard,
Gamergate may be the perfect representation of our times.
(“How representative is this ...,” para. 4)

e online response to the reboot of the classic movie Ghostbusters with

the four main leads recast with women is another powerful example of
balash towards an interruption of male territory. Long before its release,
the announcement and promotion of the film was viciously aaed by
mostly male fans of the original. e harassment of bla actress Leslie Jones
was so bad, that she felt forced to quit her Twier account. Never mind that
reboots are common and the film hadn’t even been completed, clearly, that
the cast leads would be female was a allenge to the traditional order
(Howard, 2016). Film and television remain heavily dominated by males,
with women in media still grossly underrepresented (Lauzen, 2016). What
became interesting about the reboot, is that the anger and overt sexism
became a part of the film with subtle references incorporated (Howard,
2016). e film actually offers a targeted commentary on the standards
applied to women, most notably when they have their first, very public
ghostbusting success. In the original film the male ghostbusters become
instant heroes, thriving in their notoriety. When the women succeed, they
are called to the Mayor’s office, presumably to be congratulated. While
given that appreciation privately, they are also told that they must keep
quiet about their success, that they are going to be exposed through the
media as frauds with the ghostbusting framed as a hoax and desperate
aempt at gaining aention. Sound familiar? Indeed, the difference in
treatment from their male counterparts is stark. It sits as a brilliant
commentary on who is allowed to join the club and most importantly, who
may be gazed upon as a hero.
 Adam Howard, in his article for NBC News (2016), has made the
comparison between the double standard applied to the female heroines in
Ghostbusters and the campaign of 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee,
Hillary Rodham Clinton. Indeed, it is hard not to miss the double standards
applied to Clinton through a media intent on upholding the patriaral
order. She has been criticized for every move she makes, at a degree mu
more intense than her male competitors, including “campaigning while
female” as described by Dana Milbank (2016) in a Washington Post editorial.
Rampant misogyny expressed through social media has aaed Clinton, as
well as her supporters. Unlike Gamergate, where mu of the vitriol was
anonymous, a great deal of the anger expressed towards Clinton and her
supporters has been through social media like Facebook where anonymity is
not guaranteed, suggesting that the perpetrators no longer feel a need to
hide. e message is clear: women should be voiceless objects and aempts
to disrupt that power structure will result in retribution.
Social media has allowed for this tension to explode. With the openness of
the web, anyone can have a voice and what we are seeing is women
demanding aention and inclusion, suffering brutal virtual aas (that spill
over into the real world), but retaliating to the misogynistic behavior
through social media. Where once one needed access to voice concerns,
social media allows for all arguments. is tension has certainly upset the
gaze. It has made clear that women are not content within the assigned
passive role and that traditional males are angry at having their dominance
allenged, whether in sports, gaming or any bastions of traditional male
exclusion. e Male Gaze, in a nutshell, is falling apart, and the status quo
doesn’t like it. Mulvey (1975) anticipated this when she wrote in “Visual
Pleasure,” “it faces us with the ultimate allenge: how to fight the
unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of
the arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the
patriary” (as cited in Erens, 1990, p. 29).
 e Unqueer in Visual Culture: e Refiguring of the
“Bromance,” Male Ballet, and the Male Nude in Fine Art
Photography

Clearly, the concept of the male gaze has significantly evolved since it was
originally proposed. e opening out of gender and the growing visual
representation of nonconforming sexual expressions has led to many “new”
things being seen, photographed, made, or represented in an increasingly
visual world. e visual arts have always been in the vanguard of breaking
new ground and two pieces in particular have an important role to play in
this evolution of “the gaze.”
e first of these pieces to examine is Mahew Bourne’s retelling of the
classic ballet Swan Lake (Drummond, 2003). Premiering in London in 1996, it
had an immediate impact in many areas: dance, theatre, queer culture, and
gender studies to name a few. In essence, Bourne had taken the original
Taikovsky ballet from the nineteenth century and recast several roles
typically played by female dancers to be played by male dancers. In the
original, the Prince meets a group of female swans, falls in love with a white
swan named Odee, is seduced by her alter ego, the bla swan Odile, is
forgiven by Odee, and is united in the final scene with Odee. In the
Bourne recasting, the Prince meets a group of hunky muscular male swans,
dances with “e Swan” (the male leader), then dances with the alter ego
bla swan “e Stranger,” and ends up dying with “e Swan” at the hands
of the other swans. e result is a powerful visual experience that appears to
cross gender lines and roles in almost every way.
At the time of the London premiere and subsequent transfer to Broadway,
there was mu discussion as to whether this was a “gay” ballet. e
discussion centered, obviously, around the fact that instead of beautiful
female ballerinas being the center of aention, and therefore the piece
revolving marvelously around the theory behind Mulvey’s (1975) Gaze,
ruggedly beautiful men were now the centerpiece of the work. But did that
make this piece a gay romance? Drummond (2003) points out that the male
version of the bla swan, “e Stranger,” not only dances suggestively with
the Prince, but also aempts to seduce his mother, the een. In fact, not
only does e Stranger aempt to seduce the een, he also dances
suggestively with many of the other women in the ballroom—a significant
departure from the original, as Odile only dances with Siegfried. It is this
(amongst many other points) that makes Bourne’s retelling so mu more
than just a “gay retelling” of Swan Lake; instead it is a work of visual art
that utilizes the male body in an entirely different way. While there are
clearly homoerotic arges to the whole production, Bourne is elevating the
maleness of the dancer and specifically the interaction between males not
only as a dance component but also using it as a sexually arged
component, widening the possibilities that it brings to the audience.
Ultimately it does not even maer whether it was a gay or straight ballet
in its retelling. What becomes important here in the context of the male gaze
and visual culture is that we have something different occurring in the way
that the gaze is developing and being used. No longer is the viewer
necessarily a heterosexual male and no longer is the viewing experience
centered and controlled by that philosophy. It could now be anyone who is
either gender fluid or non-conforming and so the principles of Mulvey’s
(1975) theory are thrown up into the air. A new kind of gaze is operating
here, a “gender fluid non-conforming gaze” if you will, from the people who
aended the show willingly, and a “get me out of here” gaze “effect” from
the people who were dragged along unwillingly by their partners and who
are unwilling to allow their somewhat fixed gazes to evolve.
e second important piece of visual culture to reflect on in this
development of the male gaze is the 2005 motion picture Brokeback
Mountain (Ossana, Samus, & Lee, 2005). Directed by Ang Lee and adapted
from a short story by Annie Proulx, the film tells the story of two men, Ja
and Ennis, over a twenty-year period in the American West. e story tras
their relationship together, sexually and emotionally, together with the
relationships that they have with others, while at the same time weaving in
the baground of the American West, both figuratively from the landscape
and socially and culturally through their familial relationships and work
lives. e motion picture, a critical and financial success, was arguably one
of the first mainstream movies to successfully subvert and twist the
traditional view of the heteronormative male gaze into something
completely different. It also stands as another milestone in the “unqueer”
representation of gay men in mainstream visual culture and photography.
Here in this movie we have a great example of what we will refer to as
the “unqueer” representation of gay men. is is not meant at all as a
pejorative classification, and we use that as openly proud, queer authors. We
use the term to refer to the aracters that the actors were playing; they
were seen as “ordinary” people who would “pass” as straight men in their
everyday lives, and indeed did. Whether or not they should have to “pass” is
not the question in a visual culture discussion. What is discussable here,
both in the context of the male gaze, visual culture (and queer cinema), and
photography is that the male aracters of Ja and Ennis were eroticized as
untouable sex objects as well as being presented as unqueer men. For gay
men, they were the ultimate desire; they seemed to (mostly) have it all. For
women, they were everything that they couldn’t have while looking like
everything that they might have wanted. For straight men, they represented
something that they either didn’t understand, resonated with a part of them
that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tou, or hated because it threatened them
in some way.
Next, let us look at how the audience for this movie anges the male
gaze from its traditional base as defined by Mulvey. In Mulvey’s original
theory, she argues that movie making is typically focused from a male
perspective and a patriaral point of view. As we have already mentioned,
the viewer is assumed to also be heterosexual in respect to the male gaze.
Just as in our example of the retelling of Swan Lake, Brokeback Mountain
introduces new things into the mix. In his article “eer Persona and the
Gay Gaze in Brokeback Mountain: Story and Film” (2008), Clion Snider
discusses that the gaze is dual, in this instance, between heterosexual
women and homosexual men. He also talks about how Brokeback Mountain
“caused a collective response from gay men that had not been witnessed
before” (p. 65), possibly because of this readdressing of the traditional male
gaze. But what made it so different? e first and most obvious difference is
that the photography and storytelling in this motion picture brought the
issue of gay male love and same sex araction directly onto the screen in a
very visual way, but the less obvious difference is that it was being done in a
way that had not been done before—in a heterosexually shrouded way.
e “normative” male gaze asks us to accept that what we are looking at
is for the heterosexual man’s pleasure and utility. In this movie, we see what
could be considered the usual trappings of heterosexuality: rugged, male
figures, towering landscapes, rodeo riders, and cowboys. Yet the gaze that is
provided to us is sexually geared towards one man loving another. In the
midst of all of this heterosexuality, the male sex that is portrayed is
homosex. ere is a very real possibility that any heterosexual man in the
audience wating is lulled into a false sense of security while wating and
then is caught unawares by Ja and Ennis kissing. is is, of course,
assuming that either they forgot what the movie was about (or didn’t know
in the first place). Still, the fact remains that the scenes that Lee has
constructed are ruggedly heterosexual in their context. is provides a stark
visual contrast to the emotional presentation of the love that is conveyed
between the two men that goes mu further than your average “bromance”
movie.
So what, if anything, does this do to the gaze, and what does it show us?
It shows us that, certainly from a film-making perspective (and for
performing arts in general), the traditional theory of the male gaze that
Mulvey presented in 1975 does not necessarily map to today’s more open
and adapted acceptance of non-normative sexualities and gender
expressions. While it may seem odd to refer to a theory as recent as 1975 as
the traditional theory, this evolution is, perhaps, as it should be. e
acceptance of su pieces like Bourne’s Swan Lake would likely have been
mu different in 1975 from that of 1996. Irrespective of whether his telling
of Swan Lake is gay or not, the acceptance of su blatant male on male
eroticism in visual media was at a far different position of tolerance in 1996
than in 1975. To understand the difference, one only has to examine the
issues that revolved around the artist Robert Mapplethorpe to get a glimpse
into how far this issue has evolved.
 Robert Mapplethorpe originally intended to be a graphic designer. He
studied at the Pra Institute in Brooklyn and then, aer discovering
photography as his preferred medium, became one of the most famous, and
perhaps notorious, photographers of the male figure of the 1970s and 1980s.
He was a portrait, flower, and statuary photographer, amongst other things,
in his (short) career, but in the context of this article what is important here
is the work he did in photographing the nude, both male and female.
Mapplethorpe did not shy away from things with his photography. With a
bold use of contrast and tone, and later color, he ose his subjects to
portray the world as he saw it. He wanted to record the world and then, as
he said: “One must ease the public into it—that’s an art in itself” (Caponigro,
2013). With that, he set out to record a catalogue of images, particularly of
men, that would shake up the landscape of figure photography in the 1980s
like no other artist had done with subject maer like this before. He
photographed men in sexual positions, on their own and with other men; he
photographed them plainly naked for the camera; and he photographed
them engaged in sadomasoistic acts. He pulled no punes in what he
showed the world with his camera regarding male sexuality. e biggest
pun of all, though, was that he himself was gay and so were most of his
male models.
Why is that so important in a visual culture discussion about the male
gaze and its evolution? It is important because unlike the “unqueer”
representations that we have talked about in the previous examples, this was
eer with a capital Q. ere could be no ambiguity in an image of a man
with a bullwhip stu in his anus or of a man hanging upside down, bound
by his feet, while his lover gently holds his crot. e previous examples
deal with a ange in the male gaze that is not directly about sex, or at least
not in the stunningly visual sense that Mapplethorpe’s work was. When
Mapplethorpe’s work arrived in galleries, it caused a stir for many reasons,
but as Beth E states in her 2003 article (“Men are Mu Harder: Gendered
Viewing of Nude Images”), female nude images are prevalent in society and
“the opposite is true of male nudes” (E, 2003, p. 693). E also cites Susan
Bordo’s The Male Body (1999), stating that “For many men, both gay and
straight, to be so passively dependent on the gaze of another person for
one’s sense of self-worth is incompatible with being a real man” (Bordo,
1999, p. 172). is means that when visual culture takes a trip into the realm
of male nude-focused art, all bets are off and the world gets turned upside
down very quily. Why? Because so mu of art is still controlled by a
male-dominated, heterosexual perspective. If that art also starts to deal with
sex and sexual acts, then it becomes even messier. Sex is always political,
primarily because it is about power. When the sex is non-normative, or in
this case, homosex, people get upset even faster, as was the case with Robert
Mapplethorpe’s work.
To more clearly understand why the public reaction to Robert
Mapplethorpe’s work was perhaps so visceral, let us look at how the
traditional male gaze functions when looking at artwork that subverts it. In
her 2003 article and associated study, Beth E, an Associate Professor of
Sociology at James Madison University, showed groups of men and women
a selection of nude images of men and women. ese images were broken
down into four main categories: art, informational (medical), pornographic,
and advertising. She recorded the responses of ea person to the images
and analyzed the data, language, and vocabulary that they used.
Interestingly, some of the images that were shown to the participants were
Robert Mapplethorpe pieces. She found that when viewing images of
women, men and women responded very differently, but generally in line
with Mulvey’s theory of the Male Gaze. Men respond to the nude female
image by reaffirming their status as men through their power position to
“encounter and pass judgement on the female form” (E, 2003, p. 697).
Women responded in a similarly evaluative way, whi is, as Mulvey offers,
through the way that males evaluate women. However, as E states, they
are also evaluating their own bodies at the same time.
E points out that things become far more complex when men view
images of male nudity, with most men either “implicitly distancing
themselves from homosexuality” (even if the images are not homosexual in
context) and some who “reactively construct their heterosexuality through a
disavowal of interest in male nudes” (E, 2003, p. 702). e women in E’s
study also find it difficult to talk about the images of naked men that they
are shown, although less so than the men.
So how does this manifest itself with the reception to Robert
Mapplethorpe’s work? His work caused su a public outcry that some
museums that had already commied to exhibiting the work refused to
show it, and others who did, notably the Contemporary Arts Center in
Cincinnati, became embroiled in an obscenity lawsuit that dragged on for
months. is was even aer Mapplethorpe’s own death from AIDS. e
wrangling would also have ramifications in the art funding world with
implications for the National Endowment of the Arts and their funding
process. Even before his death, his work was the subject of mu infamy and
media aention because of the subject maer and we can now see, from our
analysis of how the original theory of the male gaze works, some of the
reasons why. Asking a predominantly heterosexual male ordered political
world and a predominantly heterosexual male ordered art world to look
fondly on su works was a stret not just from an aesthetic perspective, it
also allenged everything that people had been conditioned to expect in
their viewing of artwork. His work did, however, expand the possibilities for
continued exploration of these themes by other artists and ultimately led the
way for the ongoing development of a different type of gaze that would
accept works like Mahew Bourne’s Swan Lake over seven years later.

References

Note: All web references accessed October 3, 2017.

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New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Caponigro, J. P. (2013, November 5). 22 quotes by photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe. Retrieved from
www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/blog/12366/22-quotes-by-
photographerrobert-mapplethorpe/
Croe, E. (2016, August 17). Katie Ledey broke a record. Miael Phelps
won silver. Guess who won the headline? Vox. Retrieved from
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miael-phelps-sexist-headline
Dewey, K. (2014, October 14). e only guide to Gamergate you will ever
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Drummond, K. (2003). e queering of Swan Lake: A new male gaze for the
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(Eds.), Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to
Queering the Discipline(s) (pp. 235–255). New York, NY: Harrington Park
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E, B. A. (2003). Men are mu harder: Gendered viewing of nude images.
Gender and Society, 17(5), 691–710.
Erens, P. (1990). Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
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’round the world. The Atlantic. Retrieved from
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that-should-be-heard-round-the-world/495653/
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2016-gender-divide-n580921
Lauzen, M. (2016). e Center for the Study of Women in Television and
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war. The Guardian. Retrieved from
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brieistory-of-a-computer-age-war
Merrill, K., Bryant, A., Dolan, E., & Chang, S. (2015). e male gaze and
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sports blogosphere. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 39(1), 40–60.
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Story and film. Psychological Perspectives, 51(1), 54–69.

1.5 Unqueer, Lesbian, Trans

Shiing Gazes in Photography and Visual Culture Today

David N. Martin, James W. Kosore, and Suzanne Szucs

In the previous apter, we began to explore how Mulvey’s (1975) traditional
notion of the Male Gaze has undergone a significant shi away from a focus
on the objectification of women through images meant to appeal primarily
to a male heterosexual audience. Now, instead, we contend that the gaze
itself has broadened to include a multiplicity of objectified paerns even as
the social contexts have become more fluid and complex. In this apter, we
continue to explore the complexities of the gaze through photography and
visual culture.

Re-Eroticizing the Male Body: Advertising, “Gay-Vague” and

Kissing to be Clever

Advertising is a discipline that is always evolving. It’s also something that is

a great marker and reflector of what is happening in the word around us
when it comes to examining visual culture. Most of us will, at some point,
have laughed at some “old” advert or commercial that we have seen
describing a product, service, or concept that today seems ridiculously out of
date. A glance ba through the arives of automobile adverts reveals so
mu just from looking at the imagery alone, without even resorting to the
text—men, cigars, pipes, family positioning, etc. So many of these symbols
are indicative of the social values that were prevalent at the time the advert
was constructed. Promotional materials for household appliances and,
heaven forbid, cleaning products, can bring gender divides and roles to the
forefront of any discussion regarding gender identity or sexuality. Truly the
male gaze (along with rampant sexism) seemed to have been in place in
advertising long before Mulvey ever commented on it.
But in the context of the evolving gazes that we have been discussing,
how does advertising, and specifically the body, fit in? In his article on the
“Gay Male Gaze” Wood (2008) states that “gay men report the highest level
of body dissatisfaction (Strong, Singh, & Randall, 2000)” (p. 45). ere can be
no doubt that this is something that has been pied up on by advertisers
and marketeers over time and has been used to influence campaigns. One
look at adverts for companies who run gay cruises will show the number of
muscled hunks and beauties who allegedly populate those boats. Presumably
the advertisers’ idea is that it will directly aract some people to book
passage, while motivating others to work out more so that they feel that
they can go. But Wood also points out that straight women have high levels
of body dissatisfaction too. It offers up the idea that this may be because
both groups are aempting to be sexually aractive to men. How does this
play into the fact that the male body appears to have undergone a ange in
the way it is used in advertising over the last few decades? e arrival of the
Pink Pound or Dollar in terms of spending may be one factor, as is the
continuing financial independence of women. But is it just related to gay
men and heterosexual women?
We have already toued on the issue of the “unqueer” in our discussion
of Brokeback Mountain. But the unqueer gaze can also be found in
advertising too. Over the last few decades there has been a curious
phenomenon of highly arged, erotic (some subtle and some not)
photographs of men that have been used to sell items of clothing and other
products. Calvin Klein, Joey, Gucci, Structure, Abercrombie and Fit,
American Eagle, and other outlets have all produced images that feature
seminaked men adorned in the latest fashions or miming the act of waing
the latest fragrance toward us. ese adverts, when using males, feature
mostly hairless, iseled, young men, embodying the “hunky buff boy” we
referred to earlier. Whether they are gazing out at the viewer or gazing at
ea other, the intent is clear: buy or use our product and you will be like us.
It’s an age-old marketing method that has stood the test of time. But now it
comes with a twist. e casual fli of a man’s nipple by the other man in an
Abercrombie and Fit advert invites the viewer not only to investigate the
clothing on offer, but also to cogitate on the sexuality of the models
displayed.
e male body is no stranger to being portrayed in art and to being
revered. Art History is liered with examples of the male body being
glorified and beautified. Indeed, one only has to look at sports to find the
male body as a thing of worship, albeit oen in a non-sexual way. It’s an
interesting paradox that it becomes safe for a male to gaze upon another
male in a pair of Speedo swimming trunks as he prepares to break a world
record, but not necessarily while he models them provocatively in a
photograph in a magazine. So, this return to visual adulation is not new.
However, the twist of sexuality brought with it, is. is is not Robert
Mapplethorpe’s portrayal of queer. Nor, in the fewer examples where
women’s bodies are employed in this manner, are these the standard
aempts at turning lesbianism into a heterosexual male fantasy. Yes, these
images do, in a way, give the passing consumer the opportunity to see
something that once would have been hidden away behind the wrapper of a
top-shelf magazine. at would imply that these are intended to be
presented as pornographic or adult. ey are not, as they are to be found in
the pages of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Men’s Health, Attitude, and other
“lifestyle” publications. is anging use of the body and sexuality and
advertising marks a new bran in the “unqueer” use of imagery, and in
certain cases also plays into the whole “kissing to be clever” phenomenon. A
phrase oen used by the pop singer Boy George, George used it to refer to
straight boys/men who kiss other boys/men to enhance their own appeal or
to make themselves seem more adventurous and aractive to others. What is
particularly new in this use of the body, whether male or female, is that
these men and women don’t look like the typical gay or lesbian person that
the media has previously used in their portrayals. Gone are the slightly fey
men, or, on the other extreme, the hyper masculine male; similarly, blurred
are the “traditional” lines of lesbian representations of masculine and
femme. Instead they have been replaced with masculine, feminine, powerful,
confident, and privileged people. ese people are “everything” that you
always wanted to be. Even when they are fully clothed, as in the Ray Ban
“Never Hide” adverts, the messaging is strong and powerful. Clearly, in the
light of resear su as Wood’s, this presents as an appealing prospect.
However, these adverts that feature “Gay Vague” aracters show that
visual culture and the male gaze have moved far beyond traditional
representations of sexuality and gender to a mu wider and more fluid
world than we have seen before. In the context of Mulvey’s gaze, what is the
wider implication here? Who are the images that are being used aimed at? If
they are being aimed at gay men and lesbians, then they are perhaps in line
with the body image discussion. If we apply original Mulvian principles
here, then we are le with a conundrum: are these really being targeted at,
or intended to be viewed from, the perspective of the heterosexual male?
at brings “kissing to be clever” sharply to the forefront, if so, and makes
the male heterosexual the plaything of the advertiser. It allows them to sell a
product through glamorous imagery, but also through the proposition of
sexual experimentation too.
Bordo states in her book The Male Body (1999) that the male in a Calvin
Klein ad that initially made her go weak at the knees, wasn’t staring “at the
viewer allengingly, belligerently, as do so many other models in other ads
for male underwear” (p. 171). Instead, he “offers himself non-aggressively to
the gaze of another” (p. 171). is, as we have just indicated, immediately
comes into conflict with our telling of the traditional male gaze. If
everything is supposed to be about how the heterosexual male sees the
world, and if everything is oriented toward the heterosexual male gaze, we
must ask: what does the look mean that this model is giving the supposedly
heterosexual man? If he is indeed offering himself to the viewer, to whom he
is offering himself becomes the question. is is the subtle re-engineering
that provides the marketing frisson that is perhaps sought.
Of course, there is always the simpler explanation that the gaze is being
developed in different areas and that the models are being osen to target
different groups and segments. We are not suggesting that advertisers are
aempting to turn the whole world bisexual, despite the arrival of “bisexual”
and gender-free fragrances su as the CK line. Aer all, why shouldn’t gay
men, lesbians, and bisexual viewers be treated to models gazing out at them
from the pages of clothing and fashion magazine? We have come a long way
from the days of the Sears catalogues being the only place where adolescents
could cat glimpses of people in underwear and advertisers have certainly
realized this. is catering to, and developing of, other gazes is an intrinsic
part of how visual culture reflects all aspects of our world. As aitudes
toward sexuality and gender have evolved, so too have the visual
representations in all forms of the creative arts.

Lesbian Chic and the Shiing Gaze

e term lesbian chic as a signifier of various social phenomena has had a

circuitous —and at times ironic—evolution. According to Johns (2014),
lesbian chic was originally coined in the early 1990s “to describe the sudden
emergence of fashion-conscious gay girls who saw style not as patriaral
oppression but as a tool for empowerment” (para. 4). As su, it represented
a post-feminist response to the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and
1980s that had viewed feminism as a collective response in opposition to the
patriaral dominance of society. Now lesbians were given individual
opportunities to “glam it up” and to socialize with like-minded women not
because of tyrannical male expectations, but rather as self-directed
enablement of their own desires. Nowhere was this given greater expression
than at the Café Tabac, a fashionable bar in the East Village in New York
that created a space on Sundays for glamorous, well-dressed lesbians,
activists, and celebrities, including amongst others Madonna and Naomi
Campbell (Johns, 2014).
It was not long, however, before this phenomenon would be co-opted by
the dominant, heteronormative culture for its own pleasures and desires.
What was at its inception a post-feminist political and non-normative
expression that resisted and rejected male oppression became instead an
entirely different phenomenon that was appropriated by the dominant
culture and subjected to male desire and to the male gaze. Lesbian chic
became a tool of the patriary to titillate men and to make money (Bindel,
2014).
e process of cultural appropriation is beyond the scope of this apter.
What is important is that in its transition from an authentic performance of
lesbian desire, lesbian chic becomes transformed into a “faux lesbianism”
(Bindel, 2014) devoid of its original intent to transgress gender and sexual
norms. It has undergone, in the words of Fegitz (2016), a “domestication of
the political and commodification of resistance” (p. 89). In this
popularization of woman-on-woman sexuality for the male gaze,
representations of the actual lesbian body are rendered irrelevant.
e commodification of homosexuality has participated in constructing queer identity as the most
stylish of “lifestyles” on sale, with the “‘hot lesbian” (Gill, 2008), the “lipsti lesbian” (Ciasullo,
2001) or the “femme lesbian” (Wilkinson, 1996) becoming representative of lesbianism as a whole.
(Fegitz, 2016, p. 96)

e erasure of the actual lesbian body creates the space for the insertion of
idealized female bodies that appeal to the imagined male audience.
We know that the media falls short on inclusivity and honesty when it
comes to portraying the actual lives of women (Randazzo, Farmer, & Lamb,
2015). As we saw with the 2016 Presidential Election, typical media
representation tends to discredit powerful women, while Lesbian and eer
women are treated to their own special version of invisibility. Whereas
Lesbian and Bisexual aracters are showing up more oen, especially in
cable-produced shows where bisexuality in particular has a strong presence,
this non-heteronormative sexuality tends to follow a hetero-standard.
Lesbians on shows like The L-Word (2004–2009) could mostly pass as
straight. ey are stylish and their community is self-contained, with lile
room for demonstrably but or transgressive aracters. To be viable, the
show needed to capture a hetero audience; the sex needed to appeal to the
male gaze. Nevertheless, Lesbians generally loved the show, oen gathering
in wating parties, desperate to see their community represented.
Lesbian photographer Kelli Connell’s project Double Life (Maloney, 2013),
literally reflects upon this la of diversity in Lesbian representation. Her
photographs of two women experiencing moments in a relationship, are
actually of one woman duplicated through digital tenology—she is
literally making love to herself. Whereas the project is focused on self within
a relationship, it does reiterate what many projects from contemporary
lesbian and gay photographers aempt to do—assimilate for a
heteronormative audience. One can look at Connell’s work and see a direct
link with Laura Letinsky’s Venus Inferred (McGuire, 2012): photographs of
lovers in their intimate spaces. Letinsky’s tableaus depict a rather
normalized version of sexual relationships, as do Connell’s despite the
digital, self-reflective twist. is trend towards an acceptance of a
normalized version of same-sex relationships mirrors the gay marriage
rights efforts of the past two decades. Advocates turned the conversation
away from gay marriage as a civil right and towards the sharing of narrative
stories that promote the sameness, rather than difference in gayness. e
slogan “Love is Love” equates gay love with any other kind of love,
reiterating that “we are more like you, than unlike you.”
is is a far cry from the photographic investigations of Mapplethorpe
and the early work of Cathy Opie (Salisbury, 2006). Both artists presented
raw, extreme images that allenged a heteronormative lifestyle. Like
Mapplethorpe, Opie pushed boundaries, rising to prominence by showing a
community, in her case leather dykes, whi had lile visibility in the
dominant culture. Her vivid portraits of this community looked ba at the
viewer with defiance and self-containment. A demarcation also shows in her
work—a departure from the celebration of difference, to portraits of Lesbian
family life, in her Domestic series, that celebrate the normalization of the
Lesbian family. Although Opie still maintains her right to be a pervert, this
work might suggest a shi in representation—from gayness as a societal
allenge to normalizing same-sex relationships, mirroring the similar
transformation of the broader gay and lesbian communities for the sake of
securing marriage rights.

Trans is the New Gaze

e final segment of this exploration of visual culture and the evolution of

the male gaze, looks at one of the most recent developments: the depiction of
transgender people in our visual world. We have already discussed the many
anges, twists, and turns that the gaze has taken since Mulvey published
her first article and no discussion of this topic would be complete without
exploring how transgender people are being portrayed. However, this
segment takes a different path from the previous ones in that it does not
aempt to necessarily answer all the questions that it raises. Instead, we
raise some points for thought and discussion in this new(ish) area of visual
culture. For some it may seem that transgender awareness is a new
phenomenon, but just as with all other sexual and gender variances we have
toued on, being transgender is not new; it has just received a lot more
visual publicity in recent years. Just like in the 1980s, when conservative
media made it seem like you could pi up homosexuality as easily as a box
of laundry detergent at the grocery store, the same thing seems to be
happening in the trans world.
Of course, representations of trans people in the media have existed for
many years. One can point to the experiences and advocacy of Christine
Jorgensen in the 1950s for some of the earliest media coverage of
transgender issues. Jorgensen, a former GI, underwent surgery and began
advocating for trans people in North America and around the world through
media pieces, interviews, books, and other opportunities. While she may not
have been the first person to have undergone surgery, she was possibly the
first to be so visible in visual culture aerwards, opening discourse through
photography in magazines and newspapers, at the coffee table, the working
man’s club, to the university lecture circuit. But even with people like
Jorgensen openly talking about their experience and being photographed,
the public has always had a mu more difficult time with transgender
issues than with other sexual and gender variances. is apter is not the
place to explore the whys and wherefores of why that is, but the
representation of transgender people in visual culture has not always been
helpful or friendly.
With a public that has had limited access to information about trans
issues and even less opportunity to interact with trans people, it is not
surprising that visual misinformation is so common. From the confusion in
people’s minds between transvestitism, drag kings and queens, transgender,
and intersex, plus the oen unhelpful representation of trans people by the
media, trans people have had a rough time of it. It is not necessarily
completely unfair to blame the public for their la of knowledge of
transgender issues when lile knowledge has been available, or has been
actively prohibited from being given in our education systems over the year.
But, by the same token, the public does not get a free pass in owning the
responsibility to educate itself either.
ankfully, visibility of trans people in our world is anging. With that,
comes an increasing shi in their overall representation in photography and
visual culture too. Aer Christine Jorgensen’s first brush with the media in
the 1950s, trans people were subsequently “represented” by the glamorous
and sexy Dr. Frankenfurter as the confusingly titled “Sweet Transvestite
from Transsexual Transylvania,” adding further confusion to the public’s
ability to understand trans people. ings got a lile more edgy in the 1980s
and 1990s with a wave of “gender bending” pop stars su as Marilyn
Manson, Marc Almond, Annie Lennox, and Boy George. However, as cis
singers carrying the “gender bending” tagline, while they may have done
lots for sexual expression and the ability to feel more at home in one’s own
sexual and visual identity, they did far less to bring trans issues directly to
the public.
e “teenies,” however, have seen a different approa. We have
photographers su as Jess T. Dugan in the fine art world documenting the
lives of trans people; TV shows su as Orange is the New Black featuring
trans actors like Laverne Cox; and personalities su as Chaz Bono
appearing on TV reality shows like Dancing with the Stars. TV shows that
are bundled with Amazon Prime shopping subscriptions are now featuring
transgender story lines, su as Transparent, the Golden Globe and Emmy
award winning show, that discusses transgender issues within a family unit.
At the same time models, su as Andreja Pejic, are beginning to have a
significant impact on the photographic world and fashion industry by
spearheading a more trans-inclusive environment. Caitlyn Jenner is now a
household name and she has been the cause of mu discussion around
trans issues, on all sides of the arguments, and for all points of view.
So how does this evolving representation of trans people impact the male
gaze? rough all the sections in this apter we have talked about how the
theory of the gaze was originally about how everything orients from the
perspective of a heterosexual male. If the subject is now a trans person,
either male or female, who is looking this time? When the TV shows that we
have mentioned are being constructed, from whose perspective is the gaze
that will wat them being built? ese are more difficult questions than
some of the others that we have looked at in this apter as we are now
beginning to add issues of gender identity to the mix. ese, by nature, are
different issues to those of sexuality, some of whi have previously been
discussed. Who is looking at Laverne Cox in OITNB? Are “people” looking at
her or do we/should we deconstruct this gaze further to understand whether
this is more complex? It’s tempting to think, and it would certainly be nice if
it were true, that in the time since Mulvey first put forward her ideas that
both viewers of visual culture and the visual arts, together with the makers,
have evolved to a point where the gaze is less about objectification or a
point of perspective. We have certainly posited that in other sections with
the suggestion that there are now multiple gazes in play. If we should decide
to deconstruct who is looking in the case of a trans gaze, then what would
be the outcome? While both sexuality and gender conformity can be said to
exist on a continuum, the application of this continuum to a trans gaze may
certainly complicate the ownership of the view. It also raises the question of
gender fluidity too; does the gaze or construction even have to be owned by
one set?
is idea becomes even more abstracted and interesting when the subject
becomes mu more visual, as could be the case of fashion photography
featuring the model Andreja Pejic. Fashion photography has always been
highly gendered; clothes themselves are nearly always gendered, with the
exception of a few fashion trends, and with the exception of targeted
campaigns su as the one by the fashion company “Totes” with their “It
looks beer on a man” campaign (whi is, in itself, highly gendered and
problematic), and the markets that fashion photography is aimed at are also
highly segmented and defined. What does the introduction of trans models
su as Andreja mean for the viewer, the art director, fashion stylist, and the
clothes designer? It’s an enormous step for transgender visibility issues,
inclusiveness in photography and media, and, it could be argued, also goes a
long way toward continuing to disassemble centuries of gender stereotyping
and conformity. For Andreja herself, it allows her to wear the clothes that
she wishes, to freely express her gender identity in her career, and to exhibit
her creative partnership with photographers and designers. For the designers
and photographers, it gives them new avenues to explore and new directions
to push their art. It also means that if they wish to, they can be free to
explore any gaze that they wish.
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, the discussion of
transgender visibility here is intended as a starter for discussion, to stimulate
thought, and to continue to move the conversation forward. Clearly the
world of photography and visual culture has seen great anges in this area
in a short space of time. As media and public opinion continue to react,
evolve, and accept transgender people into visual culture, this discussion can
and should continue to develop.

References

Note: All web URLs accessed October 2, 2017.

Bindel, J. (2014, Mar 6). Why I loathe lesbian ic. The Daily Mail.
Retrieved from www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2575270
Bordo, S. (1999). The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private.
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Fegitz, E. (2016). Consuming the lesbian body: Post-feminist heteroflexible
subjectivities in Sex and the City and The L Word. In A. Hulme (Ed.),
Consumerism on TV: Popular Media from the 1950s to the Present (pp.
89–108). New York, NY: Routledge.
Johns, M. (2014, September 24). e birthplace of lesbian ic. Curve.
Retrieved from www.curvemag.com/Culture/e-Birthplace-of-Lesbian-
Chic-169/
Maloney, M. (2013, Mar 7). Kelli Connell and the intimate other. Retrieved
from www.inthein-between.com/kelli-connell/
McGuire, K. (2012, October 11). Laura Letinsky: Venus Inferred. Retrieved
from hp://pressblog.uicago.edu/2012/10/11/laura-letinsky-venus-
inferred.html
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18.
doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6
Randazzo, R., Farmer, K., & Lamb, S. (2015). eer women’s perspectives on
sexualization of women in media. Journal of Bisexuality, 15(1), 99–129.
Salisbury, B. (2006). Catherine Opie: “Leather dyke” artist no more. Retrieved
from www.fnewsmagazine.com/2006-oct/catherine-opie.php
Wood, M. J. (2008). e gay male gaze: Body image disturbance and gender
oppression among gay men. In B. Lipton (Ed.), Gay Men Living with
Chronic Illnesses and Disabilities: From Crisis to Crossroads (pp. 43–62).
New York, NY: Harrington Park Press.

1.6 e Selfie

More and Less than a Self-Portrait

Alise Tifentale

Every self-portrait, even the simplest and least staged, is the portrait of another.
Jean-François Chevrier (1986: 9)

e Selfie and the Networked Camera

Since 2013, when the word “selfie” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, it
has appeared in controversial news and entertainment articles as well as
solarly texts in a range of disciplines including computer science, social
sciences, and psyology. According to the definition by the Oxford
Dictionaries (2013), a selfie is “a photograph that one has taken of oneself,
typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social
media.” is definition sums up all three key activities that are essential for
the selfie: taking a photographic image of oneself, using a camera on one’s
smartphone, and sharing this image on social media.
While Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis already introduced the concept
of the networked image in 2008, I would like to suggest a slightly different
term that shis the focus more toward the apparatus that produces the
image: the networked camera. It is an image-making, image-sharing, and
image-viewing device whose necessary features include hardware
(smartphone with a built-in camera), cell phone service subscription or
wireless Internet connection, online image-sharing platforms (su as
Instagram), and the corresponding soware. is combination facilitates a
streamlined production, circulation, and consumption of all kinds of images,
including selfies. Just as the networked camera is more than merely a new
type of camera, the selfie is more than a new type of self-portrait. Although
the selfie is reminiscent of self-portraiture in general and earlier
photographic self-portraits in particular, it is more and less than a self-
portrait. e concept of the networked camera helps to understand the selfie
as a hybrid phenomenon that merges the aesthetics of photographic self-
portraiture with the social functions of online communication.
At the time of writing (the fall of 2016), the aesthetic aspect of the selfie
has been most widely discussed by computer scientists involved in social
media analysis. Su resear treats all photos shared on social media in
general as an easily accessible data that can be analyzed algorithmically. For
example, Hu, Manikonda, and Kambhampati (2014) have detected and
analyzed the most popular subjects of photos shared on Instagram. Another
team from the field of computational social science has published an
analysis of selfies based on data sets containing millions of photos shared on
Instagram (Souza et al. 2015).
Meanwhile, social sciences and media studies provide a solid
methodological basis for thinking about identity construction and
performance of the self through photography shared on social media (see,
for example, Papaarissi 2011). An important body of solarship is
collected in a special section of the International Journal of Communication
(2015), edited by eresa M. Sen and Nancy K. Baym.
A parallel flow of publications puts the selfie in an exclusively negative
light, identifying the selfie with a “masturbation of self-image” (Mare
2013) or a “virtual mini-me” (Clark 2013). In another example the author
mobilized a wide range of concepts to discredit the selfie: “mainstream
corporate selfie culture,” “pathological,” “celebrity-fed stupidity” and
“insufferable idiocy” (Giroux 2015). While all opinions contribute to the
debate, in this apter I understand the selfie as a sub-genre of popular
photography and offer some considerations about methodological
approaes to studying it, leaving moral judgments and psyological
diagnoses to experts in those fields.

More than a Self-Portrait

e selfie is more than an image, and more than an image of the self. Apart
from the image, other essential aributes of the selfie include metadata,
consisting of several layers: automatically generated data (like geo-tags and
time stamps), data added by the user (hashtags), and data added by other
users (comments and “likes”). e importance of metadata has been
addressed by Rubinstein and Sluis (2013), but this element is easily
overlooked in the selfie-shaming discourse.
e means of the making of the selfie and conditions of its circulation are
as important as the image itself. e instantaneous dissemination of the
image via Instagram or other platforms makes the selfie significantly
different from its earlier photographic precursors (Rawlings 2013). As Sonja
Vivienne and Jean Burgess (2013: 281) have observed, “mu more important
than digital photography’s influence on the practice of taking photographs,
then, are the ways in whi the web has anged how and what it means to
share photographs” (emphasis in original).
e layers of data that accompany the image can help to study the selfie.
Data— time, place, number of likes and comments—is given and thus
analyzable with sociological and computer science methods. e implied
meanings and cultural functions of ea selfie and the genre as su can be
worked out only by interpretative methods—for example, from the
perspective of history of photography. Ideally, we should come up with a
combined methodology that would fit the hybrid nature of the selfie and let
us study all its components as per definition with equal aention.

Less than a Self-Portrait

One popular way of looking at selfies is as if they belonged to the same

category of images as the famous painted self-portraits of the past. e
similarity lies in the fact that both can be described as “images of the self.”
But focusing on this one aspect can only lead to sweeping comparisons
across cultures, centuries, and media, ignoring the historical specificity of
ea image and overlooking their radically different social and cultural
functions. For example, one author compared selfies with self-portraits by
Rembrandt and argued that “e selfie threatens to distract us from what
Rembrandt did: looking at ourselves closely, honestly, but compassionately”
(Judge 2014). Su comparisons are helpful only as mu as they let us
notice how different selfies on Instagram are from paintings in museums.
First of all, we have to anowledge all the profound ways in whi a
smartphone photograph differs from an oil painting on canvas. Furthermore,
the selfie is part of popular visual communication; its makers are not limited
to a narrow elite of highly skilled artists as was the case with painting in the
Renaissance. e selfie exists within an economy of fleeting, disposable
images, unlike paintings that were highly valued cultural artifacts. Selfies
typically are made quily and meant for an equally qui viewing on a
smartphone while commuting or on the go, unlike paintings that were made
to be revered and to withstand centuries.
us the selfie is less than a self-portrait, at least in the traditional art-
historical sense. is consideration also cautions against applying the term
“selfie” retroactively to photographic self-portraits made before c. 2010.
Many self-portraits in history of photography look seemingly similar to
selfies—self-portraits in mirrors, self-portraits made while holding the
camera in one’s extended arm, etc. But these images are not selfies because
they were not “taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social
media” as per the definition. ey are not products of the networked camera.
e term “selfie” is not just a shorter version of “self-portrait,” but has its
own historically specific meaning.

Case Study: Selfiecity and Selfiecity London

Notoriety and controversy in the selfie genre comes from a few popular
images that circulate in the news and entertainment outlets, su as
celebrity selfies (like Kim Kardashian’s selfies) or morally shoing selfies
(like the funeral selfies). Su images easily capture people’s aention and
soon become a symbol of the whole phenomenon. Yet they do not
necessarily represent the whole genre—rather they are outstanding
exceptions. But how to study typical selfies? How to define the genre and its
aesthetic conventions? As a case study that aempted to answer su
questions, I present resear projects Selfiecity (2014) and Selfiecity London
(2015), whi analyzed a sample of “regular” selfies as they were shared on
Instagram. Resear was carried out by Software Studies Initiative (called
Cultural Analytics Lab since 2017), based in e Graduate Center, City
University of New York. e team was led by Lev Manovi and included
myself, Dominikus Baur, Jay Chow, Daniel Goddemeyer, Nadav Homan,
Moritz Stefaner, and Mehrdad Yazdani.
Selfiecity combined a humanities perspective with social sciences and
computational methods. By offering a comparative reading of selfies from
different cities, this project aempted to quantify cultural difference and
translate it into concepts that can be measured and calculated by soware—
su as smile score, degree of head tilt or eye position. e object of study in
Selfiecity was a data set of 3,200 selfies shared via Instagram during one
week in 2013 from five global cities in all continents: Bangkok, Berlin,
Moscow, New York, and São Paulo. An additional set of selfies shared on
Instagram in central London in September 2015 was analyzed in Selfiecity
London, commissioned for the exhibition Big Bang Data (Somerset House,
London, December 3, 2015–Mar 20, 2016).
e starting point of this resear was a data set (Figure 1.1). During the
first stage of resear, the team downloaded from Instagram API
(application programming interface) 656,000 Instagram photos that were
shared publicly on Instagram during one week (December 5–11, 2013) and
geo-tagged in the central areas of the five cities. From these images, 120,000
photos (20,000 photos per city) were randomly selected for further analysis.
From these, aer several rounds of manual filtering, 640 images from ea
city were identified as selfies. is labor-intensive and time-consuming
procedure was preferred over searing images by hashtags in order to avoid
confusion, as hashtags could be in multiple languages or used incoherently:
not all selfies are marked with #selfie, and not all images with this hashtag
are selfies. en computational image analysis methods (su as soware-
driven face recognition and custom-made visualization tools) were applied
to create media visualizations, imageplots, and blended video montages.
Meanwhile, human researers provided estimates regarding the gender,
age, and mood of people in the images.
Among the most surprising findings was the fact that only 4% of all
images shared on Instagram were selfies (Figure 1.2). e custom-made,
interactive web application Selfiexploratory (Figure 1.3) invites all visitors of
the project’s web site to compare
Figure 1.1 Lev Manovi, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer,
Alise Tifentale, Nadav Homan, and Jay Chow. Selfiecity (2014). Data collection process for Selfiecity.
For a full color version of the art, see the project’s web site at www.selfiecity.net. Credit: Publicity
image for Selfiecity.
Figure 1.2 Lev Manovi, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer,
Alise Tifentale, Nadav Homan, and Jay Chow. Selfiecity (2014). is art represents one of the most
surprising findings of our resear: only approximately 4% of the images shared on Instagram were
selfies. For a full color version of the art, see the project’s web site at www.selfiecity.net. Credit:
Publicity image for Selfiecity.

Figure 1.3 Lev Manovi, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer,
Alise Tifentale, Nadav Homan, and Jay Chow. Selfiecity (2014). Screenshot of the custom-made
interactive web application Selfiexploratory that offers a set of tools to explore the Selfiecity dataset.
Web application Selfiexploratory is available online at www. selfiecity.net/#selfiexploratory. Credit:
Publicity image for Selfiecity.
selfies from our global data set. While the findings of Selfiecity and Selfiecity
London are summarized on their respective web sites and discussed in
greater detail elsewhere (see, for example, Manovi & Tifentale 2015,
Tifentale 2015, 2016), this apter focuses on methodological considerations
and difficulties.

Gender Inequality

In Selfiecity and Selfiecity London, the results of face recognition soware

were combined with human input, tagging all selfies as “male” or “female.”
More selfies were identified as depicting a female subject than a male, “from
1.3 times as many in Bangkok to 1.9 times more in Berlin. Moscow is a
strong outlier—here, we have 4.6 times more female than male selfies”
(Selfiecity 2014). Age estimates were connected to the gender guesses. e
findings showed that the majority of selfies seem to be shared by people in
their twenties. In Selfiecity, the youngest group was women in Bangkok
(average estimated age 20.3 years) and the oldest, men in New York (26.7
years) (Figure 1.4). In Selfiecity London, the age estimates ranged from an
average female age of 23.7 years to an average male age of 28 years (Figure
1.5).
Figure 1.4 Lev Manovi, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer,
Alise Tifentale, Nadav Homan, and Jay Chow. Selfiecity (2014). Median ages of people in the selfies
per city and gender. For a full color version of the art, see www.selfiecity.net. Credit: Publicity
image for Selfiecity.

Computer scientist Mehrdad Yazdani, data analyst of Selfiecity, addressed

the difficulties of “measuring the ambiguity of a selfie’s gender”: within the
results of human researers’ gender guesses, he discovered a gray area of
approximately 5% where these guesses became less confident (Yazdani 2014).
Besides, data showed that “the average gender confidence for males is less
than those of females” (Yazdani 2014, emphasis in original). Yet, as Elizabeth
Losh (2015: 1653) has rightly pointed out,

Figure 1.5 Lev Manovi, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer,
Alise Tifentale, Nadav Homan, and Jay Chow. Selfiecity London (2015). Estimated age and gender of
people in the selfies posted in the central part of London. For a full color version of the art, see
www.selfiecity.net/london/. Credit: Publicity image for Selfiecity London.

Categories for transgender, cisgender, and gender queer now being adopted even by commercial
social network sites were nowhere to be seen on the Selfiecity website. Systems that accommodate
more ways to tag images would seem to be essential tools for those studying how gender and
sexuality are performed online.

e demographical picture of the selfie-takers as it was outlined by

Selfiecity and Selfiecity London revealed the limitations of features that can
be extracted and analyzed algorithmically. e numerous computer science
studies of selfies continue to replicate the “male/female” gender division (see,
for example, Döring, Reif & Poesl 2016 and Dhir et al. 2016). Aempts to
include multiple gender identities have appeared in the field of social
sciences and social media studies (see, for example, Duguay 2016). Studies
informed by feminism have contributed to the growing literature about the
selfie, although they also tend to replicate the same binary gender identity
(see, for example, Guitar & Carmen 2014, Marwi 2015, McRobbie 2015,
and Murray 2015).
e majority of selfies in Selfiecity were taken by young women. is
finding inserts the selfie in a larger cultural trend of the twentieth century.
Amateur and family photography in general has been consciously feminized
since the early 1900s. e process started with the marketing of Kodak
cameras as devices simple enough for women and ildren to operate
(Niel 1998). Nancy Martha West has examined how Kodak’s marketing
and advertising strategies constructed an image of the “Kodak Girl” in the
1910s and early 1920s—she was the New Woman, independent and single,
“whose prey face and stylish costumes would contextualize photography
within contemporaneous discourses on fashion and feminine beauty (…) and
whose youthful image would signify the ease, pleasure, and freedom of
snapshot photography” (West 2000: 53). e aractive images of the New
Woman in Kodak advertisements served as role models, the camera became
a fashion accessory, and snapshot taking—a modern feminine pastime. Can
we draw parallels between the “Kodak Girl” of the 1910s and the selfie-
makers of the 2010s?
Within the Selfiecity data set, selfies tagged as “female” indeed appeared
to create a distinctively “youthful image.” First, the average estimated age of
women was lower than men’s in all cities. Second, the estimated age of
women in some cities was even below 23.7 years—the estimated median age
of all people in the selfies: 20.3 years in Bangkok, 22.3 in São Paulo, and 23.3
in Moscow (Figure 1.4). However, the twenty-something woman who took
photographs with her Kodak Brownie in 1913 was in a completely different
social and economic position within her society than the twenty-something
woman who takes selfies with her iPhone in 2013. e nature and meaning
of women’s image-making has anged between 1913 and 2013.
Yet there is an uncanny continuity in the gendered relationships to the
camera from the Kodak era throughout the twentieth century into the
Instagram era. Instagram selfies, just like the Kodak snapshots, are a product
of commodified urban leisure. Smartphones, whi oen appear in mirror
selfies, at times function as fashion accessories, just like Kodak cameras in
the 1910s or Zeiss Ikon cameras in the 1950s that all were marketed to
female audiences.
From a critical viewpoint, the focus could be on the woman’s passive role
as a consumer. Women, and all selfie-takers for that maer (and all other
social media users), would be seen as victims of the capitalist acceleration
who provide their unpaid labor to raise the sto market value of companies
who own Instagram and the like. From a more affirmative viewpoint,
emphasis would fall on participation, empowerment, and control over their
self-representation that the access to image-making and image-sharing tools
provides to women (Lee 2005, Sen 2008). e limits of su empowerment
as well as the moment when it turns into entrapment or exploitation,
however, still remain to be investigated.

Smile Score and Performing the Self

Selfies from all five cities were ranked according to the “smile score.” is
score was the highest in Bangkok (0.68 average smile score) and São Paulo
(0.64), whereas the lowest smile score was found to be in selfies posted in
Moscow (0.53) (Selfiecity 2014). Selfies were ranked according to the degree
of head tilt, and that ranking was further divided into groups of selfies
identified by face recognition soware and human researers as “female”
and “male.” e conclusion was that “women’s selfies have more expressive
poses; for instance, the average amount of head tilt is 50% higher than for
men (12.3° vs. 8.2°). São Paulo is most extreme—there, the average head tilt
for females is 16.9°” (Selfiecity 2014).
 ese findings first of all confirmed the hypothesis that there are
significant differences among the selfies posted from different cities and that
ea region has its preferred style of selfies. Second, smiling and striking a
pose in front of one’s smartphone camera can be viewed as active
performance of the self. It takes place within the limitations of the genre and
with a specific audience in mind (the person’s Instagram followers). e
performative aspect is present not only in front of the camera but also later,
while selecting images for sharing and (optionally) editing them either with
Instagram’s built-in editing options or other image-editing apps designed for
use on a smartphone. Numerous free apps have been made especially for
enhancing one’s selfies, like Meitu, BeautyCam, or MomentCam.
estions about performing the self in social media photography have
been asked before the emergence of the selfie (see Koskela 2004, Lee 2005,
Russo 2010, Burgess 2009, Lasén & Gómez-Cruz 2009, and Vivienne &
Burgess 2013). Su studies typically were based on case studies and/or
interviews. is approa provides an in-depth insight into people’s
motivation and expectations regarding their image-sharing practices, yet it
does not reveal mu about the shared images themselves. Aesthetic
qualities of the images are rarely discussed in detail, and the publications
contain few illustrations. Selfiecity, on the contrary, focused solely on image
analysis.

e Selfie in its Natural Habitat

How do we approa and understand the selfie as an everyday, social

photographic practice that is inseparable from the apparatus of the making
and sharing of the image? How do we historicize and contextualize the selfie
as a phenomenon of a particular time period, generation, specific medium,
and type of communication? One way to find answers points to the analysis
of viewing the selfie. e selfies we studied in Selfiecity and Selfiecity
London initially were viewed by their intended primary audience on
Instagram on a handheld device, most typically a smartphone. e most
common screen layouts of Instagram app (as of October 2016) shape the
perception of the content.
For example, the “home” screen of Instagram presents the images shared
by people whom one follows. Ea image takes up the full width of the
screen (Figure 1.6). Scrolling up reveals the caption and assigned hashtags as
well as other users’ comments underneath the image, whi is followed by
the next image, and so on. In this flow of images and text, selfies—just like
other types of images shared by people one follows—are viewed separately,
one by one, but at the same time they are perceived as a part of a sequence.
Furthermore, this sequence is unique for ea Instagram user because the
content of this sequence depends exclusively on whi other users one
follows. erefore a person who follows only people who share mostly
selfies, will see many selfies on their “home” screen at any given time, while
another person, following a different set of people, perhaps won’t ever see a
single selfie.
Another very common view is a “gallery” view whi one can access by
tapping on a user’s name—it is a grid of thumbnail-size square images
(Figure 1.7). Twelve thumbnails would be the average number of images that
fit a single screen when viewed on a smartphone. In this grid view, selfies
appear in the context of other content that this particular user has shared.
Figure 1.6 Alise Tifentale, Untitled [selfie], August 2016. Screenshot of Instagram app on a smartphone.
Figure 1.7 Gallery view of Instagram user Alise Tifentale’s account. Screenshot of Instagram app on a
smartphone, October 2016.

Finally, there is also a “sear” screen. is interface provides searing by

keyword within a single parameter at a time (“top,” “people,” “tags,” and
“places” are the available options as of October 2016). Sear results appear
in a grid of twelve thumbnail images per screen, as in a user’s gallery view.
is “sear” screen offers a view whi is the closest to an edited and
curated data set.
In all three views, images appear in ronological order of their posting.
Furthermore, the sequence of images on Instagram is live—updates appear
on the “home” screen as they are posted by people whom one follows.
Interaction from the viewer is welcomed and encouraged—one can activate
the heart symbol (“like” the image), post a comment, take and post their own
image at any time, and so on. Making, sharing, and viewing—activities that
were clearly separated in earlier moments in the history of photography—
now smoothly converge in a single device. is very significant aspect is lost
when images are extracted and removed from their natural environment.
We still have to find methods to measure and analyze the specific modes of
their viewing.

Notes for Future Resear

One line of further inquiry leads to an in-depth analysis of self-

representation in social media using methods informed by gender studies
and feminism. Another possible line of inquiry focuses on the performative
aspects of photographic self-representation in selfies viewed in the context
of history of photography. e question about spectatorship and
consumption of selfies is yet another field of further study.
Long before the era of digital photography, art historian Jean-François
Chevrier (1986: 9) noted:
We can no longer escape the obvious truth that every identification presupposes the mediation of
an image and that there is no identity that does not pass through this process of alienation. . . .
Every self-portrait, even the simplest and least staged, is the portrait of another.

In photographic self-portraiture in general, “tenology not only mediates

but produces subjectivities in the contemporary world” (Jones 2002: 950,
emphasis in original). Or, as Van House (2011: 31) has put it, “making,
showing, viewing and talking about images are not just how we represent
ourselves, but contribute to the ways that we enact ourselves, individually
and collectively, and reproduce social formations and norms.” Selfies are not
—or not always—plain mirrors of reality of the contemporary society. ey
produce a reality of their own. Just as mu as we talk about representation,
we have to talk about construction.
e selfie as a product of the networked camera and a new sub-genre of
popular photography provides a glimpse into a broader field of inquiry
about contemporary visual culture. Although we can download, count,
calculate, map, plot, and measure images as data units, computational
methods alone cannot provide all answers. Every Instagram user’s
experience of any given image is completely different. e keywords are
fluidity, subjectivity, and interactivity. e cultural and social functions of
the selfie are not fixed and universal. ey are established ea time anew,
based on ea maker’s relationship with ea viewer.

Anowledgments

is article is based on my experience while working on the resear

projects Selfiecity (2014) and Selfiecity London (2015). Resear was led by
Lev Manovi and his lab Soware Studies Initiative (now called Cultural
Analytics Lab), based in e Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Other members of the resear team were: Dominikus Baur, Jay Chow,
Daniel Goddemeyer, Nadav Homan, Moritz Stefaner, and Mehrdad
Yazdani. I wish to thank Lev Manovi for his generous advice, guidance,
and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Hon Sun Lam for supporting
and inspiring my work.

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Further Reading

Choi, G. Y. & Behm-Morawitz, E. (2016). “Tea Me About Yourself(ie):

Exploring SelfieTakers’ Tenology Usage and Digital Literacy Skills,”
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, July 18. Available from:
hp://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000130 [October 11, 2016]. (is rigorous
 analysis places the necessary emphasis on the apparatus of image-
making and imagesharing.)
Flusser, V . (2011) Into the Universe of Technical Images, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. (Flusser’s theory about the uniqueness of
photographic images provides a useful baground for thinking about
the selfie and other types of photographs circulating in social media.)
Manovi, L. (2016) Instagram and Contemporary Image. Available from:
hp://manovi.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-
image [October 11, 2016]. (is booklength study of photographs shared
on Instagram provides a framework for discussing the selfie as part of
contemporary creative photography.)

1.7 Case Study: Migrant Mother

Race and Gender in the Making of a Photographic Icon

Lisa Riman

In Mar 1936, Dorothea Lange made a series of photographs of a woman

and her ildren at a migrant camp in California. e photographs were just
a few of the hundreds that Lange would contribute as a photographer for the
Reselement Administration (RA) and later Farm Security Administration
(FSA) photographic unit. Lange was one of multiple field photographers who
contributed pictures to e Farm Security Administration–Office of War
Information Photograph Collection (FSA–OWI Photograph Collection) that
ultimately comprised 170,000 negatives. Compiled from 1935 to 1943, the
final collection of images is the result of a feverish drive to capture the rural
“American”1 experience of Depression-era poverty for a national audience.
Roy Stryker, the director of the photographic unit, told biographer Nancy
Wood that the goal was to “record on film as mu of America in terms of
the people and the land.” Stryker felt that the photographs were successful
and that the office “ended up with as well-rounded a picture of American
life during that period as anyone could get” (Wood 1975: 15). As a project
that would depict who and what was “America,” Stryker’s vision of the FSA
photographic unit transcended an individual vision to a national conception.
Exhibitions, monographs, and news articles containing photographs were
frequently titled to indicate that the photographs not only encapsulated
Depression-era subjects but also symbolized the “American” subject and
citizen.2
Today the landing page for the Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division Digital Arive website (Prints & Photographs
Reading Room | Prints & Photographs Division – Library of Congress)
highlights one of the photographs that was used, in the words of Rexford
Tugwell, “over and over again.” e page contains mostly small text with a
photographic banner streting across the top. e banner is a segment of
Dorothea Lange’s photograph, now known by the title “Migrant Mother,” a
picture from the series Lange produced in that Mar of 1936. It originally
had the caption
Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry ildren. Mother
aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea piers’ camp, because of the failure
of the early pea crop. ese people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500
people in this camp were destitute.

From thousands of images, a few rose to national consciousness. “Migrant

Mother” took on particular significance, not as one of thousands, but as one
that could represent the whole: an icon of Depression-era America. “Migrant
Mother” (Figure 1.8) is the most reproduced from the entirety of the
Photographic File. It is also one of the most famous photographs in US
History. Stryker looked ba on the photograph as “the ultimate . . . it was
the picture of Farm Security” (Wood 1975: 19). e image has been
celebrated as document, portraiture, photography, and as tangible evidence
of human resilience: American strength in the face of adversity. e
“Migrant Mother” functions as iconic; it reads as a symbol of the time in
whi it was taken. By acting as symbol, “Migrant Mother” illuminates one
part of Depression-era experience and also comes to encompass the whole of
the time period. e image becomes the time period. rough this process,
the image effaces other experiences by centralizing its own. Hariman and
Lucaites (2007) caution against the over-ritualizing of iconographic images.
In this case, the FSA produced an image that was widely and popularly
circulated as a New Deal Madonna. ey argue that photojournalism, whi
is the mode of production for iconic images, is an ideological practice.
Photographs then are “mute records of social performance” that activate
tacit identities (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 23). Amplified by the dominance
of straight photographic discourse, photographs were popularly read as
objective representations of the world. As a producer of cultural truth, the
iconic image constitutes individuals as citizens connected to collective
identity and community. Due to its authoritative gaze and limited
representation of events, the icon tends toward the reinforcement of
dominant totalizing narratives. While Hariman and Lucaites provide an
effective framework for considering how public identity is defined via visual
practice—with a focus on the ability to mobilize social critique through
image-texts—I believe it is also imperative to consider how circulated FSA
photographs mobilized public memory and reinforced normative national
identities. Neither the image nor the artist is at fault for the symbolic process
that iconic images take on. It becomes the responsibility of the viewer to
question what has been included and excluded from the frame. By
questioning, it becomes possible to reframe, reimagine, and to see anew
these once familiar images.
What is marked about the immediate and repeated use of this image is
that Lange made similar images earlier during her tenure with the RA/FSA
and these images remained in obscurity. My questions developed aer I saw
a seemingly familiar image (Figure 1.9) in the Library of Congress FSA–OWI
Digital Arives. In June 1935, a year before the icon, Lange made a similar
photograph and paired it with the caption: “Mexican mother in California.
‘Sometimes I tell my ildren that I would like to go to Mexico, but they tell
me “We don’t want to go, we belong here.”’ (Note on Mexican labor
situation in repatriation.)” e caption identifies the subject as Mexican,
overtly racializing 1935 Migrant Mother in a way that 1936 Migrant Mother
is not. 1935 Migrant Mother was never popularly circulated, nor did it
become an icon; it has remained for the most part one of thousands of
unseen images within the FSA arive. e similarity between these images
in aesthetics, emotion, subject, perspective, and pose is evident. eir
similarities make their contrasting destinies (forgoen versus iconic) stand
out in sharp relief. e radical difference in their circulation begs the
question, why did the 1936 Migrant Mother (Figure 1.8) become the icon and
why did the 1935 Migrant Mother (Figure 1.9) remain unknown? What does
the iconicity of the 1936 “Migrant Mother” illuminate about FSA
photography as a project of the Depression?
Historian Sally Stein writes, “Within a few years, the FSA office used this
photograph on an in-house poster to proclaim the multiple uses its growing
file of government pictures served . . . in major newspapers and magazines,
along with photography periodicals and museum exhibitions” (Stein 2003:
346). e qui and wide reception of the 1936 Migrant Mother has been
aributed to multiple aspects of the image, not least of whi is the
reference to the pictorial tradition of the Madonna with Child—Mary with
her infant son Jesus Christ. e images have been central within the
Catholic Chur and are oen noted as representing purity and virginity. As
a symbol, the Madonna image oen calls to the assumed devoted spectator
to respond with reverence and wonder. e Migrant Mother serves as a
referent to the Madonna. She is cloaked in loose-fiing clothing and holds
her ild close to her breast. In terms of racial constructions in the United
States, the Madonna and the Virgin Mary have been predominantly tied to
white identity. Historian Anna Fedele refers to the dominant construction as
a “patriaral white Mary” (Fedele and Knibbe 2013). e connection
between Lange’s image and the history of the Madonna highlights the
import of race and purity in the audience’s willingness and ease with whi
they receive the subject as sympathetic, in this case as worthy of help out of
poverty.
Further complicating the reception of the Migrant Mother as necessarily
white, the human subject, Florence ompson, publicly identified as
Cherokee in multiple interviews in the 1970s and 1980s with journalist Bill
Ganzel (Ganzel 1984). Regardless of whether ompson identified herself as
Cherokee with Lange, there are no racial markers within the wrien caption
to identify her as Anglo or Cherokee. e absence of any racial marker
within the caption (and later the title) made it possible for the national US
audience to identify the subject, ompson’s likeness, as European
American. e subject in the image was presumed white for almost four
decades and

Figure 1.8 Migrant Mother. Destitute pea piers in California. Mother of seven ildren. Age thirty-
two. Nipomo, California, by Dorothea Lange, 1936. Credit: Farm Security Administration–Office of
War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Washington.

Stein notes that in the years since the Ganzel interviews, studies of the
image continue to identify the “Migrant Mother” as white. For Stein, this
illustrates the power of a hegemonic gaze, whi centralizes white identity
throughout the historical narrative regardless of evidence suggesting
otherwise. e maintenance of the subject’s whiteness also provides insight
into the importance, or centrality, that assumed white identity played in the
circulation and reception of FSA images more broadly. I argue that the
images were funneled in to (or out of) popular view through a series of
editorial and political processes. ese processes functioned to reinforce and
reflect hegemonic constructions of poverty, citizenship, and motherhood.
Figure 1.9 Mexican mother in California. “Sometimes I tell my ildren that I would like to go to
Mexico, but they tell me ‘We don’t want to go, we belong here.’” (Note on Mexican labor situation in
repatriation.), by Dorothea Lange, 1935. Credit: Farm Security Administration– Office of War
Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington.

Existing Literature

ere are several histories, including Stein’s, whi consider Dorothea

Lange’s contribution to the FSA photographic unit and her efforts to make
pictures that would promote social justice. Several contemporary works
provide critical inquiries of FSA photography from feminist perspectives.
Andrea Fisher’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers
for the U.S. Government, 1935 to 1944: Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins,
Pauline Ehrlich, Dorothea Lange, Martha McMillan Roberts, Marion Post
Wolcott, Ann Rosener, Louise Rosskam (1987) centralizes the work of woman
FSA photographers, many of whom remain fairly obscure in the
historiography of RA/FSA photography. Jacqueline Ellis’ “Revolutionary
Spaces: Photographs of Working Class Women by Esther Bubley, 1940–1943”
(1996) argues that Bubley, unlike her more famous colleagues Lange and
Wolco, subverted FSA scripts by refusing to Other her subjects for her
audience. Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography of Lange, Dorothea Lange: A Life
Beyond Limits, positions Lange as anti-racist and democratic in her approa
to making photographs and captions for the FSA. Gordon discusses Lange
within the social contexts in whi she lived, including the influence of
feminism and sexism on Lange’s career. She finds Lange to be a trailblazer
for women in photography and for documentary photography generally.
is broad biographic account of Lange points to the social structures on
whi my resear focuses. While works like Gordon’s discuss the social and
cultural contexts in order to beer understand Dorothea Lange (Partridge
2013, Spirn 2009), my interest is to add to this body of work using a
comparative critical approa to understand the impact of straight
photographic discourse upon FSA photographic representations of
hegemonic and marginalized identities. is resear focuses on the FSA
photographs as a program within the framework of the New Deal in order to
ask how su a body of work was eventually distilled into a few images. In
further work, I analyze how Mexican mothers in the US were imagined in
comparison to circulated depictions of mothers as FSA clients.
Mu resear exists on FSA photography; the body of work whi
contains gendered analyses of FSA photography is a bit more comprehensive
than that whi centrally consider race. Two standout works that do focus
on race are Erina Duganne’s The Self in Black and White: Race and
Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010) and Niolas
Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA
Photography (1992). Duganne considers photographic representations of
Blaness created within the New York City area, some of whi include
FSA images. She argues that these images of poverty reinforce constructions
of Blaness while simultaneously calling for new readings of government-
sponsored art shows including “Profile of Poverty” (1965) produced by the
Office of Economic Opportunity. e show continued the goal of
“controlling the viewer’s inter-subjective understanding of poverty both in
terms of ‘the effects of privation and the effects being mounted against it in
the War on Poverty’” (Duganne 2010: 69). FSA photography was not the first
moment but is oen identified as a turning point when the photographic
medium was perceived as a producer of human documents. e project was
emulated by later endeavors including the 1960s White House Photography
Program, headed by John Szarkowski and created under President Lyndon
Johnson as part of an anti-poverty program. Duganne identifies FSA
photography as an influence on Steien’s interest in photography as
humanistic medium and on 1960s Civil Rights photography. Duganne
considers the humanistic documentary/social documentary approa as the
pivotal connection between FSA and Civil Rights era photography. Her work
emphasizes the lasting impact of the FSA Photographic Unit on other
photographic endeavors, whi seek to “effect social ange” or serve as
“historical evidence.”
Natanson also considers FSA photography as it intersects with race. His
work focuses on representations of African Americans in the arive. Using
a comparative contextual historical framework, Natanson considers
representation of Bla subjects who are the central focus, in the
baground, or alluded to through marketing or signage within FSA images.
He notes that two African American photographers were hired to the FSA
photographic unit and as su, representation of Bla subjects was greater
than it might have been otherwise. However, few images of African
Americans were reproduced in subsequent publications. Natanson regards
the specific oices of the photographer as variables that scripted
representation as objective. Natanson points to the different compositional
oices made by photographers with White versus Bla subjects. He
considers physical positions, camera angles (shooting down), and lighting
(distortion, deforming, “menacing shadows”) (Natanson 1992). Natanson
concludes that the depiction is less heavy-handed and more open to
interpretation in images of White subjects than in images of Bla subjects.
His approa is helpful in centering images that present open interpretations
and multiple meanings in opposition to those that are framed in su a way
as to lead the audience to limited, more heavily scripted conclusions about
the subject. Natanson’s work discusses race during the time of the New Deal
and the FSA in order to contextualize visual analysis: FDR and the New
Deal placed “‘national’ (i.e.: white) priorities above minority concerns.” He
also argues “there were hundreds of local administrators of New Deal,
programs for whom racial discrimination was second nature” (Natanson
1992: 14). is study is informed by the existing literature and builds on the
small body of works that focus on the FSA and social cultural contexts of
race and gender. I ose to focus on the racialization of Mexican mothers in
the US in order to complicate the dominant bla–white paradigm through
whi race is so oen discussed in the US. For the most part, the existing
works consider these contexts in isolation; it would be profitable to the
literature to see future work consider how constructions of race and gender
worked intersectionally within the formation of the File.

Historical Baground

Begun in 1935 and controlled by Presidential Economic Advisor Rexford

Tugwell, the Reselement Administration (RA) office within FDR’s New
Deal agency organized collaborative farming communities as a sustainable
response to the Dust Bowl.3 Criticized and feared as a socialist project, the
RA was by and large declared a failure in the court of public opinion. From
1937, the RA ceased as an independent agency. e office was transferred to
the Department of Agriculture and by June of that same year the RA was
absorbed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in hopes of revitalizing
rural rehabilitation efforts. e FSA integrated “the RA’s programs,
including the rural rehabilitation, farm loan, and subsistence homestead
programs” (Gaer 1941). FSA rehabilitation efforts included reseling
families, sustainable agricultural training, free medical care, and farm loans,
all of whi were developed to help rural families escape poverty. e
transition of the RA into the FSA did not remove all of the allenges
implicated by developing a national rural rehabilitation program. e
predominant understanding of poverty at the time also allenged the
success of the program. Poverty was popularly understood as a social state
found in urban spaces and whi resulted from the failures of the person or
family to whom it occurred. Tugwell had to make two elements visible and
palatable to the voting public. First, rural poverty was possible, real, and
widespread. Second, the families who were living in rural poverty deserved
help.
Within the RA and later the FSA, the Historical Section was established in
order to raise social and congressional support for the New Deal programs it
represented. Economist Roy Stryker was appointed head of the Historical
Section by Tugwell, and together they determined that the office’s central
focus would be a photographic file of America. Historian John Tagg notes
“Stryker and the FSA commissioned photographers to create a particular
sense of crisis of the American south and west, to represent social
disintegration and human misery within the terms of paternal philanthropy
of President Roosevelt’s reform strategy” (Tagg 1988: 14).
e resulting FSA–OWI Photograph Collection was made between 1935
and 1943 and its images, including Lange’s, were reproduced during the
Depression in popular magazines, art exhibitions, and poster campaigns. e
subjects represented in the circulated images served to visually construct an
image of the rural American family in the national imaginary, specifically
those who would be read as deserving poor. is was the population that
could hope to access FSA resources, and also served as a visual indication of
those who were most likely to garner sympathy and support for FSA
programs from the wider public. Historian and collection expert Carl
Fleishauer describes the collection:
 e photographs document American life from the middle of the Depression to the early years of
the War. And they tell us about some of the concerns of the Roosevelt administration and about
the roles of the three sponsoring agencies.
(Fleischhauer n.d.)

During the years the project was active, it served as a mode for informing
the masses. In the years since its creation, the collection has informed and
reinforced the national imaginary regarding individual and collective
Depression-era experience.
Although the FSA photographs were created within a cultural framework
that defined them as objective documents, the overaring claim that the
Historical Section was providing a visual survey of rural poverty in America
conflicts with distinct processes of selection that determined what was
ultimately circulated. e arive is not simply a collection of the frames
taken by FSA photographers. To the contrary, Stryker selected only 45
percent of those frames for inclusion in the official File. ose selected for
the File were printed and mounted on cards with corresponding captions
and became the pool from whi images were selected for circulation.
Although the selection of whi images to circulate could have been merely
based on aesthetics, it appears that racializing processes were also at work.
e selection process was not solely the work of Roy Stryker but was the
result of multiple interests, including those of the media, government,
RA/FSA regional offices, and the public.
Dorothea Lange’s 1936 Migrant Mother held many meanings for the
Historical Section. It meant wide circulation, popular consumption, and
credibility for the office. But the image, as Lange made it, was not born as
the “Migrant Mother.” As previously noted, the photograph originally held
the caption, “Destitute pea piers in California. Mother of seven ildren.
Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.” is caption has since disappeared in
favor of the title, “Migrant Mother.” Titles beyond captions are a
aracteristic that very few FSA images possess. e application of the title,
“Migrant Mother,” in lieu of the longer caption gives the image–text pair
mobility and timelessness that is less likely for the image when it is paired
with its more specific caption details. e caption details root the image in
the time and space where it was made while the title allows a broader range
of possibilities to be applied to the subject. As the “Migrant Mother,” the
woman in the image no longer has an age, a location, or a period in time;
she becomes more capable of representing mothers, ildren, and struggling
families anywhere. e mobility and easy appropriation of the 1936 Migrant
Mother as icon of American identity comes from the sloughing of the image
caption and from the application, or assumption, of her whiteness. e
exclusion of racial markers from both caption and title then becomes of
great interest to broader considerations of the File. In the context of this
limited case study, the 1935 Migrant Mother remains racialized by her
caption and as su she is le outside of the consumable space the 1936
Migrant Mother inhabits. e centralizing and normalizing of whiteness as a
requisite for the categories connected to purity, virginity, and good
motherhood also meant the FSA photographs reinforced and visually
constructed a body of the good, deserving American mother and she was
imagined over and over again as white. In everyday life during the
Depression, the construction of the good American mother likely le women
who were read, phenotypically, as Mexican, outside of the bounds of
accessing the categories of the “good mother,” “deserving poor,” and “US
citizen.” Su marginalization in the national imaginary is a likely
explanation, but not a justification, for the erasure of the 1935 Migrant
Mother from a life beyond the negative Lange first made.
e construction of the good mother was developed as part of a lasting
photographic record of America, whi Stryker saw as his ultimate goal for
the project. He described the project as one that was “showing America to
Americans.” He succeeded in his goal; evidenced by the continued use of
FSA photographs, particularly the 1936 Migrant Mother. But this is also the
weakness of the project. In the end, the 1936 Migrant Mother and 1935
Migrant Mother have had materially contrasting lives—one became iconic
and the other is barely known. is is indicative of a broader racialized
process of selection and circulation. ese processes rendered a broad study
of the US, the landscape and its citizens to a few “representative” frames.
e first, 1935, remained almost entirely unknown while the second, 1936,
became an icon and entered into spheres of fine art, popular culture, and the
national imaginary. is contrast can provide insight and spur new
questions about the creation and use of FSA images. I hope to prove in
future works that the iconographic rise of one and erasure of the other was
not a random outcome nor was it solely based on aesthetic selection. e
trajectories of these two images serve as high-profile examples of racialized
and gendered processes of selection by Historical Section staff, the FSA, and
media representatives. For purposes of circulation, the selection of white-
appearing women served to inform the national audience regarding RA/FSA
goals, specifically framing subjects as good mothers, rural Americans, and
deserving clients. e exclusion of Mexican mothers in the US from
circulated images le Mexican mother and families outside of the
boundaries of being imagined as a client, as a good mother, and as
American.

Notes

1 e phrases “American” and “America” are used throughout this article in line with their use in
the arival documents as signifiers of the land and citizens of the United States.

2 Some examples include Walker Evans’ 1938 MOMA exhibit American Photographs, monographs
like Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion

(1939), and news articles like Current History’s April 1939 “Refugees of the Dust Bowl: At the
mercy of disease, hunger and privation, 200,000 good Americans are living in misery.”

3 Centralized in the Great Plains, the Dust Bowl occurred in 1930 as a result of extended drought
and loose topsoil. e result was great dust storms, most notably “Bla Sunday” on April 14,
1945, whi le the land uninhabitable and impossible to farm.

References

Duganne, E. (2010) The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in
Postwar American Photography. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth.
Ellis, J. (1996) Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working Class Women
by Esther Bubley, 1940–1943, Feminist Review 53, pp. 74–94.
Fedele, A. and Knibbe, K.E. (2013) “Bla” Madonna versus “White”
Madonna: Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to
Marian Shrines, in: Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality:
Ethnographic Approaches. New York: Routledge, pp. 94–114.
Fisher, A. (1987) Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers
for the U.S. Government, 1935 to 1944: Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins,
Pauline Ehrlich, Dorothea Lange, Martha McMillan Roberts, Marion Post
Wolcott, Ann Rosener, Louise Rosskam. London: Pandora.
Fleishauer, C. (n.d.) Transcript of “About the FSA Collection”. e Farm
Security Administration/Office of War Information Photo Collection
(Library of Congress Journeys and Crossings), Moving image. Available
from: www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/fsa-abouranscript.html
(accessed 2 April 2015).
Gaer, J. (1941) Toward Farm Security: The Problem of Rural Poverty and the
Work of the Farm Security Administration. Washington DC: Govt. print.
off.
Ganzel, B. (1984) Dust Bowl Descent. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Gordon, L. (2009) Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. London, New York:
Norton.
Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J.L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs,
Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Natanson, N. (1992) The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA
Photography. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Partridge, E. (2013) Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning. San
Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Prints & Photographs Reading Room | Prints & Photographs Division –
Library of Congress (n.d.) Webpage. Available from:
www.loc.gov/rr/print/ (accessed 2 July 2014).
Spirn, A.W. (2009) Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and
Reports from the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stein, S. (2003) “Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and the
Paradox of Iconicity.” Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American
Self. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Miigan, International Center of
Photography, pp. 345–355.
Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories. London: Macmillan.
Tagg, J. (2009) The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture
of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wood, N.C. (1975) “Portrait of Stryker.” In This Proud Land: America, 1935–
1943. Boston: New York Graphic Society, pp. 10–21.

1.8 Documentary Aritecture and the History of

“Before and Aer” Photography
Ines Weizman

Both the movement and the immobilisation of thoughts are part of thinking. Where thinking
comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, the dialectic idea appears. It is the break
in the movement of thinking. Naturally the point at whi it appears is not arbitrary. In a word, it
is found wherever the tension between the dialectical opposites is at its greatest.
Walter Benjamin (1983: 595)

I must have been about twelve when I went for a stroll through Görlitz with
my parents and my grandmother one Sunday morning. We were visiting
from Leipzig. In contrast to Leipzig, Görlitz always seemed a lile deserted
and sleepy to me. e streets seemed emptier, the shops more tired and the
traffic slower. Even the trams, whi squealed dreadfully when they went
around the curves, could not disrupt the town’s strange absence. You were
actually not sure whether it was simply merely quiet or whether you were
alone. Added to this sense of seclusion was the knowledge of the actual
unreality of cultural and political life in Görlitz, for in this part of the GDR
people had access only to the censored state TV news and reports. ey were
unable to receive the frequencies of Western television or radio. e silence
at this eastern end of the “Valley of the Unsuspecting”, as it was called in the
1980s, thus referred not only to a bizarre Sunday reverie, but rather to a
town artificially kept at a standstill, the way politicians and officials at the
time presumably wanted it.
ings were particularly quiet that Sunday as we walked down Dr.
Friedrisstrasse, turned le at Berliner Strasse and crossed the Postplatz. I
jumped when suddenly, in front of the Chur of Our Lady, a group of
young men in Nazi uniforms and heavy boots came toward us. ey
laughed, were in high spirits and did not react in the slightest to our shoed
expressions. Anxiously I held my grandmother’s hand. A few steps later, we
caught sight of the big department store on Demianiplatz. A huge banner,
“Wählt Deutschnational” (“Vote German National”), hung from the façade.
e shop windows were decorated with Nazi slogans and related
paraphernalia. When we reaed Marienplatz, we were suddenly part of an
excited scene – uniformed men and people running quily across the
square. e square was full of freshly polished cars, crowded double-deer
buses – there was the constant sound of a tram – and lorries, again sporting
swastika flags. From a loudspeaker aaed to one su lorry a nasty voice
shouted at the crowd, horrible slogans that repeatedly emphasised the word
“German”. e terrifying sound of the uniformed men’s hobnailed boots that
eoed through the cobblestone square, and the sight of the eerfully
waving neighbourhood residents, who seemed to have lovingly decorated
their houses with these red flags, scared me. Having ended up right in the
middle of this sinister crowd, we found it difficult to move. Not until we
reaed Elisabethstrasse did we recognise tents and clothing stands that
explained this horrifying scene. ey were shooting a movie – a feature film
about Ernst älmann.1 It was only then that I noticed a lorry decorated
with red flags full of eering young people. Yes, they were wearing
costumes. In those days things were not always cordoned off or explained.
Since this movie scene was supposed to represent the Communist Party’s
election campaign, and its significance lay in the heroic (but failed) aempts
of their party leader to convince workers and citizens to elect his party in
1932, the eyes of the film crew and organisers were only on the red of the
leist party flags. I thought the scene was in impossibly bad taste, and I was
unseled by how colourful it was. For on the one hand a lot had obviously
been invested in creating this scenery. Where did all the many flags come
from suddenly, and the uniforms, the brown riding breees, the jaboots
and insignia of the extras? I was shoed that su props had been
manufactured again – or could it be they were originals? e aention to
detail in re-enacting the scene, the pains that were taken to provide the
correct décor – to enact movements, cries and reality – made me, an
involuntary onlooker of the spectacle, an accomplice, whi filled me with
revulsion and a certain feeling of guilt. On the other hand it was the first
time I had imagined this historical era in colour. Here a story was being
brought to life that I knew only from old bla-and-white photographs –
pictures that I had never understood as being in continuity with the places
of my ildhood I had grown to love. Seeing the town that was usually so
familiar to me transformed like this and so disfigured by the historical
scenario gave me an oppressive glimpse of the past.
I grew up in a state that defined itself historically as “liberated” and
“new”. In sool, it was suggested to us that the history of Germany under
National Socialism was the history of West Germany. us, I also felt the big
banner titled “Kauaus Wertheim”, whi covered up the inscription HO–
Kauaus (Department Store of the GDR Trade Organisation) in Görlitz, was
daring, for it referred to a shoppers’ paradise in the “West”. ese names and
pictures seemed to have slipped past the censors, but allowed me a glimpse
of what Walter Benjamin described as “the past fliing by”.
It was not until I saw a photo of a building in Görlitz that I again recalled
this event. At the same time it was initially impossible to tell from the photo
when it had been taken. e photographer’s calm, documentary and
investigative gaze at a rundown, empty house with faded leering and
bried-up ground-floor windows, from whose façade the layers of paint
must have peeled decades ago and all of whose windows had no doubt been
smashed with ros during some grim ildren’s game, evoked what I had
long since forgoen. e photo might just as well have come from the
period before the war or immediately aer it, or from the last years of the
GDR when I knew the town. In another picture of the same building that
was taken from exactly the same perspective, it is at first hardly possible to
date the photo more precisely. And yet you realise that this picture was
taken aer the first one. e enlarged window apertures, whi were
probably intended to make it possible to use the ground floor for shops, the
already renovated windows, and the large pates where the plaster had
been removed that now revealed the building’s briwork, prove that this
picture was no doubt taken aer the former. Besides, at the edges of the
second picture anges in the adjacent buildings are now visible, signs of the
construction boom that took place directly aer reunification. e signs
“Sindlers Blumenhallen” (Sindler’s Flower Halls), “Görlitzer
Vereinsdruerei” (Görlitz Union Print Shop), “Marmor-Billard” (Marble
Billiards) and “Gesellsaszimmer” (Assembly Rooms) with “an assortment
of beers” still recount how the building was formerly used. Yet though the
ornaments have been cleaned by sandblasting, one can still see damp
pates, cras and material damages on the building. To kno off the
plaster, a scaffold as tall as the house was surely necessary. But the scaffold
was already dismantled before the façade was given a new coat of plaster. It
seems as though this construction project was interrupted and that at the
time the photograph was taken it was not one of the successful projects of
the building industry. No doubt the building could tell us even more, for
aritecture is just as mu part of the history of forms of perception as
media and equipment su as cameras and audio devices. e building is
historically
Figure 1.10 Görlitz, Grüner Graben, 23 June 1990. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.

Figure 1.11 Görlitz, Grüner Graben, 17 September 2001. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.

so arged that it can itself assume documentary functions. It takes a reader

to interpret and bring to life the history inscribed in them, just as it takes a
photographer to capture his subject in the moment of “fliing by”.
 Stefan Koppelkamm documented buildings and streets in Görlitz and
other places in the former GDR in the summer of 1990 and visited these
same places again ten years later in order to photograph them once more in
the same way – always with the same lens, the same focal lengths and from
the same position. Koppelkamm’s arive of before and aer pictures allows
us to practice Benjamin’s “telescoping of the past through the present” (1983:
588): a stereoscopic reading in the course of whi the past can be
experienced and remembered thanks to the montage of fragments of history.
What is decisive for memory is not so mu the time of the observed event
as the moment when it was observed. In Koppelkamm’s pictures, buildings
are not only “seen” by the camera, but rather there are two opposing media
of documentation. Created in this eye-level duel are documents by means of
whi experiences, and memories, can be connected, communicated and
emotionally shared, allowing us to construct the past in retrospect. us his
work is different from the logic of the many “before and aer” city
monographs that were produced in the late 1990s and the early 2000s in
order to celebrate the ange, indeed the veritable transformation of East
German towns and cities aer reunification (Weizman 2007).
In the middle of the nineteenth century philosophers, artists and writers
still regarded photography as a threat to art. ey believed photography
could not be one of the “true” arts, for the camera was regarded as nothing
but a simple recording apparatus. ese critical perceptions and the general
rejection of the medium became particularly harsh when photography was
also accused of a certain degree of the in the public domain. e act of
photographing was purported to be tantamount to latent aggression. A
photograph was suspected of having stolen something from public property
and of having not only privatised it but also disfigured and distorted
Figure 1.12 Dresden, Sebnitzer Straße, 1991. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.
Figure 1.13 Dresden, Sebnitzer Straße, 2001. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.

it – as though the space had been robbed of its “soul” and truth. A similar –
perhaps somewhat araic – sentiment came over me as I read Niels
Gormsen and Armin Kühne’s book on the transformation of Leipzig
published in 2000.2 Here, bla-and-white snapshots were placed next to
high-resolution colour photographs that now made the same streets, houses,
courtyards and monuments that had once formed the “invisible” and
familiar baground of our lives look embarrassingly dilapidated, grey and
dirty. As though we had not thought so or deplored the fact before, new
voices aer reunification – and Gormsen and Kühne’s book reconstructs this
position once more – spoke everywhere about the “poor condition of the
East German cities”, and we all agreed that “a lot remained to be done”, as
though overnight we had appropriated what can be described as a
prerequisite for “westernisation”: the Western point of view. e moment of
transformation began not with the laying of the first bri, or with the
whitewashing of the old grey walls, but with the appropriation of a new
“way of seeing”, whi was demonstrated by the logic of the “before and
aer” photograph (Weizman 2004)..
A veritably radical ange had taken place in the urban centres of the
towns and cities of the former GDR in the early 1990s. Almost miraculously
the buildings began to burst into pastel bloom. ere seemed to be a
renascence of arts and cras. Once rejected literature on traditional
aritecture was rediscovered. Arives and photographic collections were
explored in order to adorn the renovated buildings with classical columns
and decorative sculptures, and the results in part were houses that in their
renovated state were even more impressive than they had been originally. It
was a biersweet experience for the local residents, who now realised that
over the years these lovely, colourful buildings had been concealed under
layers of dust and plaster eroded by acid rain. It seemed as though the stern
and sterile products of Soviet communism, whose favourite colour must
have been beige, had suddenly taken off their thi glasses, put up their hair
and were now showing off their beauty.
e many “before and aer” city monographs illustrate how photography
created its own interpretations of the cityscape and played a part in
correcting urban historiography. ey represent urban development not as a
continuation of the past, but rather as a process that is clearly in dialectical
contrast to it. us the books of photos aer reunification are part of a series
of representations, paradigmatic for the history of German urban planning,
that tried to testify to and illustrate the rapid ideological anges, the
“revolutions” and reversals. ese images of the city depict not only how a
place had anged, but also a new ideology. In those late-1990s books of
photos the “before” was represented as dreary, old and hopeless, while the
“aer” was meant to represent the new era and even the country’s political
awakening. Yet within its own ronological logic su a procedure leads to
a paradoxical confusion of eras. For instance, when newly renovated candy-
coloured nineteenth-century town houses are placed next to snapshots of the
grey, severe structure of the socialist town, and suddenly the nineteenth-
century town appears in the “aer” pictures of the twentieth-century town.
It is as if the original “before” had performed an incredible ronological
coup, repositioning itself aer the “aer”. ese photographs manipulate the
past as a ventriloquist does his puppet: he brings it to life, speaks his words
and confirms the status quo.
e interpretation that the “before” is beer than the “aer” is reversed in
the book Bilddokument Dresden: 1933–1945, published by the Dresden city
council (Saarsu 1945). It consists of pictures by the Dresden
photographer Kurt Saarsu, who, almost directly aer the bombing of
Dresden the night of the 13th February 1945, once more took pictures of
places that either by ance, or with the premonition that they might be
destroyed in the war, he had already photographed in the early 1940s. Here,
too, the photographer tries to point his camera toward his subject in the
same position in order to present the two conditions of the city “objectively”
and in a self-explanatory way. At the time they were still intended to
express the promise that the city would be completely rebuilt.
e motivation to document a city goes hand in hand with the
photographer’s sensitivity for political and social reversals. Even at the
beginnings of the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth
century, aritecture was appreciated as an ideal subject, for due to the long
exposure times only motionless situations could initially be captured on
film. People could hardly be pictured in these urban photographs.3 But it
was also during this period that urban planners, aritects and
photographers became fascinated with the specific task of recording and
documenting what would soon be lost and become an image of the past.
Photography was thus more than merely an artistic pursuit preoccupied
with capturing the image of the past, it was also a political instrument,
useful for promoting a large-scale transformation of the cities at the advent
of the modern age. Politicians, influential lobbyists and urban planners
realised that a regime could rewrite history by means of the collective
arive. In France, on behalf of the government, the Commission des
Monuments historiques was founded in 1837 and given the specific task of
documenting historically important monuments and outstanding
aritecture with the help of draughtsmen, araeologists, aritects and
monument experts.4 As early as 1851 the Société Héliographique was
founded within the framework of the Commission, and hired the five
photographers Edouard-Denis Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray,
Henri Le Secq and Auguste Mestral to produce a photographic inventory of
the national aritectonic cultural heritage. It was evidently anticipated that
this aritectural landscape would ange in the foreseeable future.
is assumption proved to be true, at least in Paris when Napoleon III
seized power in 1852 and soon thereaer decided to undertake a large-scale
restructuring of Paris headed by Baron Haussmann. When Haussmann
implemented his radical urban vision of a new modern Paris, he set up the
Service des Travaux Historiques, whi specifically addressed the
transformation of the city as a confirmation of the country’s strong political
leadership; not least, of course, it was intended to be a document of his
pioneering aievement.5 Among his team of historians he commissioned
the photographer Charles Marville to document the old Paris. e pictures
that Marville – who in 1862 became the official photographer of the city of
Paris – took between 1852 and 1878 before, during and aer the
transformation of the city were for a long time misinterpreted as nostalgic
depictions and a lament at the destruction of the “old Paris”. is simplifying
assumption was questioned by the art historian Maria Morris Hambourg. In
the late 1970s she took it upon herself to discover what Marville’s pictures
were really trying to say. With amazing solarly determination and
perseverance, over one hundred years aer the pictures had been taken, she
studied the camera angles and perspectives of Marville’s pictures in order to
reconstruct the location of the camera and the picture composition on the
maps of the old and the new Paris (Hambourg 1981: 9). Based on this
resear she was able to argue that Marville used Haussmann’s plans for
restructuring the city in order to decide where exactly he wanted to place
his camera:
. . . just as Haussmann pencilled his straight boulevards across the Byzantine topography of Old
Paris, so Marville worked along the path of the projected streets, photographing whatever would
be levelled to make way for them. . . . Marville’s pictures cut through the urban fabric almost as
ruthlessly as Haussmann’s pi-axe teams.
(Hambourg 1981: 10)

Marville’s photographs thus complemented Haussmann’s plans. e views

of the uneven, curving streets with cobblestones that had already been used
for barricades several times, and with derelict houses, do not paint a
nostalgic memory of the premodern city. Rather, they condemn it, for these
streets blo the way to the modern, hygienic and open city of the future.
Already contained in his view of the old city was the impetus of modernism.
It was his vision that transformed the present into the future, long before the
city was actually destroyed and rebuilt anew.
However, what is missing in all “before and aer” photographs is the
event. e event, whether it is caused by nature, human agency or a
collusion of both, is merely framed in the pictures. e time lag between the
two pictures is crucial. ose who wish to study these pictures in order to
analyse the consequences of an event must first draw aention away from
the figure (the person or the action) to the ground or baground (the city or
landscape), yet the analysis of these pairs of pictures nevertheless always
requires additional information and interpretation. e most widely used
“before and aer” pictures today are satellite images, yet in spite of their
precision they are bound by the limitations of tenology. On the one hand
satellites can cover the Earth only in intervals. e fastest satellites are able
to circle the Earth in approximately ninety minutes, but at higher altitudes it
can take several hours (Kurgan 2013). Important events one would like to see
by means of satellite photographs are oen missed. On the other hand there
are international regulations that limit the resolution of publicly accessible
satellite images to 50 cm per pixel, although images in higher resolution are
available to government agencies and to the military (Weizman and
Weizman 2014). Nowadays this restriction also complicates the work of
human rights organisations, whi use before and aer pictures to study
unlawful military deployments and violations of human rights by means of
satellite images (Weizman 2014). Regardless of whether this regulation was
instituted in order to actually protect privacy, or whether it was politically
or tenically motivated, the fact is that even 150 years aer the invention of
photography no human beings can be portrayed in the before and aer
photos, and neither a spatial nor a historical idea can be formed from two
documents alone. A mediator is always required who will encourage
navigation through history and provide stimuli for its analysis.
In his book Child of the Revolution, Wolfgang Leonhard describes how
difficult it was in 1935 for him and his mother to find their way around the
rapidly anging city of Moscow (Leonhard 1967: 14–15). Stalin’s ten-year
master construction plan had decided on a radical transformation of the city
and its skyline by 1945. us it was soon no longer possible for Leonhard to
navigate the city with his mother’s 1924 map. Most of the streets and roads
had either already been renamed, or been built over. But the present was
already regarded as an outdated “before”, and the future was already
propagated as “now”, so that one could only purase a 1945 street map.
Figure 1.14 Berlin, Kleine Hamburger Straße, 1990. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.

us the mother and son always used two maps: the city map of ten years
ago and the one showing the city ten years in the future. Here I have no
intention of bringing up the crudeness of Stalinist plans, expressed as early
as 1935 in su utilitarian decisions as the one to print no new city street
maps for twenty years. On the contrary, this bizarre anecdote about the
somewhat laborious use of two maps to navigate the
Figure 1.15 Berlin, Kleine Hamburger Straße, 2002. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.
Figure 1.16 Ziau, Marstall, 1990. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.

Figure 1.17 Ziau, Marstall, 2001. Copyright: Stefan Koppelkamm, Berlin.

city goes to show on the one hand that the present is not a ance
transitional stage, but rather a constituent connecting link of all views of
history, whi are actualised at the moment of observing, analysing and
questioning. On the other hand it directs our aention to that exciting
coming together of two documentary media, the representative medium and
the medium of the city or of the building itself. Stefan Koppelkamm’s
camera not only “sees” aritecture, but engages with its materiality and
mediality, making the history inscribed in the aritecture speak.

e notion introduced here of reading aritecture for its documentary

qualities refers to work done at the Centre for Documentary Aritecture, a
resear centre at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Working with time-
based documentary media su as film and photography, aritects,
filmmakers, artists, historians and theoreticians analyse buildings and the
built environment as documents or arives that can be read in their
performativity and materiality. See hp://documentaryaritecture.org.

Notes

1 e film Ernst Thälmann was produced and aired in 1985 as a two-part series for GDR
television.

2 Niels Gormsen was the head of the municipal planning and building control office of Leipzig
from 1990 until 1995 (Gormsen and Kühne 2000).

3 A famous exception is the picture of a bootbla that Daguerre took in 1838 from his studio,
whi had a view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. While the man’s clients did move, he
himself was shown in outline, as he did not move from his place in front of his air.

4 In Prussia, too, Frederi William IV created, in 1844, the office of conservators for artistic
monuments, for whi Albret Meydenbauer was later to develop a photographic surveying
tenique, in order to establish a monument arive (Wolf 2003).

5 In a leer to Napoleon III, Haussmann wrote: “. . . under my administration, the city of Paris is
determined to be within the rea of contemporary intellectual efforts. e history of the
capital needs to be wrien” (Hambourg 1981: 9).
 References

Benjamin, W. (1983). Gesammelte Schriften: Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 5/1,

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Gormsen, N. and Kühne, A. (2000). Leipzig, den Wandel zeigen, Berlin:
Edition Leipzig.
Hambourg, M. M. (1981). “Charles Marville’s Old Paris”, in: Charles
Marville, photographs of Paris at the time of the Second Empire on loan
from the Musée Carnavalet, ex. cat., ed. Jacqueline Chambord, New
York: Fren Institute/Alliance Française.
Kurgan, L. (2013). Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics,
New York: Zone Books.
Leonhard, W . (1967). Child of the Revolution, Chicago: Henry Regnery.
Saarsu, K. (1945). Bilddokument Dresden: 1933–1945, Dresden: Rat der
Stadt Dresden.
Weizman, E. (ed.) (2014). Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Berlin:
Sternberg Press.
Weizman, E. and Weizman, I. (2014). Before and After: Documenting the
Architecture of Disaster, London: Strelka Press.
Weizman, I. (2004). “Temporal Dyslexia”, in: Ferguson, F. (ed.)
Deutschlandschaft., Catalogue of the German Pavilion, Venice
Architecture Biennale, Berlin, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, pp. 228–233.
Weizman, I. (2007). “Critique without Memory, or Memory without Critique:
e Story of Post-socialist Transformation”, in: Koralova, I. (ed.)
Againstwithin, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Graz: Verlag
Forum Stadtpark, pp. 21–35.
Wolf, H. (2003). “Das Denkmälerariv Fotografie”, in: Wolf, H. (ed.)
Paradigma Fotografie. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 349–369.
 2
Territories
 2.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

e invention of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century was

not only a combined (and in some cases, parallel) effort of various
researers in different countries, but also a tenological strategy to satisfy
previously foreseen social needs, or, as Geoffrey Baten has put it, a
widespread social imperative (2009: 36). It has been argued that most of the
necessary elements of tenological knowledge were in place well before
1839: pinhole images seem to have been used by artists for thousands of
years, and the camera obscura became widely popular in Europe in the
Renaissance; finally, light-sensitive emicals su as silver nitrate were in
use from at least the thirteenth century (Punt 1995). us, the significant
question is not so mu who invented photography but rather why it
became an active field of resear at that particular point of time (Wells
2015: 13). It is hardly surprising that photography became an essential tool
for scientific rationalism—a meanical and apparently neutral
representational device, used as a yardsti and as an instrument for
validating theories on the performance of nature and for naturalist studies
on human beings, in su an “obscure time” as the nineteenth century, as
Alejandro Castellote has put it. He links this need to quantify, visualize and
prove—by means of photographic teniques—with the rise of Positivism,
“whi affirmed modern European individuals as the prototype of an
optimum model for mankind” (2014: 2). A positivism of rationality that had
been won through argument, tenology, and power.
Colonialism, war and photography have a shared history. First, because
the camera can be used as a weapon—Susan Sontag reminds us that the
language of military maneuver and hunting su as “load,” “aim,” “shoot,”
and “snapshot” is central to photographic practices; and that the camera can
be pointed at the other, or rather “the Other” (Sontag 1979). Second, because
photography objectivizes its subjects. In the form of images, the subjects can
be compared, possessed, and categorized. In the early days of the medium,
reactions to the man with the camera were oen skeptical and even
negative, sometimes as an intuitive rejection, others on a pseudo-scientific
basis: Just remember the (possibly true) stories of Native Americans who
refused to have their pictures taken because it would take away their spirit;
or Balzac’s obscure Theory of Specters, whi said that all physical bodies
are made up of an infinite number of layers, like skins laid one on top of the
other, and every time someone had his or her photograph taken, one of these
“spectral layers” would be transferred to the photograph, until nothing was
le of it (Krauss 1978). In both cases, the refutation is based on the fear of
being personally (in a bodily and/or spiritual way) affected by the image-
making process. In a way, they anticipated the symbolic relation between
photography and death laid down by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida
(1981).
Accordingly, it has become increasingly important to remember who is
looking and where they are looking from (not only what they are looking
at). Contemporary studies take this into account, and it is in this apter that
post-colonial practices are especially well represented.
“Other World Histories of Photography” by Gael Newton is a great
example of a text that goes beyond the historiography recorded from what
she calls a Euramerican point of view. While the role of London, Paris,
Berlin and New York in the invention and industrialization of the medium is
unquestioned, photography spread rapidly over the globe, far from the
geopolitical, economic and cultural axis of the major metropolises of Europe
and America. Newton, a former Senior Curator of Photography at the
National Gallery of Australia, focuses on the history of photography across
the Asia-Pacific region; however, her conclusions seem applicable to many
regions. While the different levels of solarship regarding Asia-Pacific
photography by foreign or local solars makes comparative studies difficult,
she still succeeds in giving an overview of the field that should aract
serious study, in order to transform Western perceptions of artists who had
been previously dismissed as inferior copyists of Western models.
Newton’s opening statement and focus on the Asia-Pacific region is
followed by three studies and an interview that treat concrete subjects in
other latitudes: Latin America, the former USSR, and China. We will start
the journey just south of the US border—a highly controversial demarcation
line these days. Originally from the field of film-theory and media studies,
John Mraz moved to Mexico more than 30 years ago, and is now considered
a preeminent expert on the history of Mexican photography, and Latin
American visual culture in general. When I found out—thanks to Rita
Leistner—that Mraz was to come to Barcelona in 2016 as a visiting professor,
we set up an initial meeting that soon led to a number of pleasant
conversations on the subjects of photography, politics, the art world and
academia. In one of these talks, I dared to ask him to contribute to this book
and he gladly agreed, proposing a apter on the photographic
representation of the Mexican Revolution. Only a few weeks later, the piece
—a brilliant summary of his writing on that subject—was ready, and he even
personally took care of the image rights!
If working with John was a stroll in the park, the interview with Timothy
Prus and Marcelo Brodsky was more akin to tightrope walking without a
net. I had unwiingly mixed an explosive cotail by pairing these two
authors. When we had a Skype conversation, we immediately dried off the
subject (the use of photographic arives for making art) in a way that made
it necessary to relocate the piece into this apter. Second, the ostensibly
vast differences between their aracters—an Englishman with an
anaristic world-view who has built up an arive and publishing house
like none other, versus an Argentinian photographer who had made the leap
into the art world and is now an activist for visual literacy—led to
controversy and heated discussions. And yet, the result of this exange was
an astonishing bridging of separate worlds, that only people with a wide
intellectual horizon and a free spirit can aieve: from Korea to Colombia,
from the 1968 movement to social media, from Europe to Latin America,
from physical to digital arives, from art to activism, and ba again. To be
honest, I was le open-mouthed during most of the conversation and some
of the details in the sharp debate only became clear to me when I was
transcribing them.
e next contribution is more structured and classifiable. It tells the story
of Perestroika Photography, in the form of a historic analysis, from the mid-
1980s to the 2000s. Irina Chmyreva is one of the major experts on the history
of Russian photography, whi is why she was invited, together with
Evgeny Berezner, to curate the main program of Houston FotoFest 2012 on
the subject. I have worked with Irina for many years, in different projects
and constellations, su as the steering commiee of the History of
European Photography project, and the European Master of Contemporary
Photography at IED Madrid (a program that I direct, and in whi she
teaes a workshop ea year). Her encyclopedic knowledge and elegant
writing have generated an easily digestible, and yet comprehensive
summary of photographic movements in the vanishing USSR.
e last contribution in the Territories apter is on the fascinating, and
highly contemporary, subject of Chinese Landscape Photography. e
author, Yining He, works as a curator and she was introduced to me by
Beate Cegielska, who is herself a remarkable curator and generous
networker. Yining is a graduate of the London College of Communication
with a MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography and a
regular contributor to many art and photography publications. Among
many other things, Yining initiated the Go East Project, whi aims at
introducing contemporary Chinese photography to the West. She is uniquely
able to explain the different methods of artistic practice that Chinese and
Western artists use to represent the landscape in a straightforward way—
take, for example, the importance of linear perspective in traditional
Western landscapes, whi has no equivalent in the representation of
Chinese landscapes. Moreover, she uses her transcultural thinking to
describe the situation of a country that is “in full swing,” but also lives with
the collapse of faith, disorder of value systems, conflicts of interests,
polarization of wealth, social apathy, rash impatience and so on.
Accordingly, she states, “in terms of bizarreness and absurdity, there is no
other country with whi one could compare today’s China to.” Within this
logic, it makes sense that Chinese photographers apply Western paradigms
to create images of alienation from their own culture, turbo-capitalism and
hyper-modernization in their country.
Of course, it is not easy to understand the value-systems of foreign
countries and their translations into a visual language. What seems
accessible at first glance becomes uerly complicated once we approa it
closer, as it’s impossible to judge beyond our own aesthetic tradition. e
intention of this apter is not to explain the world through photography,
nor to foster a multi-cultural understanding of photography around the
world. Rather, in this time of political protectionism, nationalism and
segregation, I try to provide small loopholes in the walls that separate us
from other (photographic) cultures. Hopefully, we will be able to tear down
more walls than the politicians promise to build, and not only in a
metaphorical sense.
Finally, I am very thankful to the authors of this apter who have
directly managed the image rights, in order to provide us with truly
stunning pictures from the second decade of the twentieth century in
Mexico; the 1980s and 1990s in Russia, including works by Olga
Chernysheva, Alexey Goga, Sergey Vasiliev, Valery Shekoldin, and Boris
Mikhailov; and contemporary China, featuring images by artists su as
Zhang Jin, Sui Taca, and Chen Xiaoyi.

References

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.

Baten, G. (2009). Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Castellote, A. (2014). Origins, memories and parodies. In: Catalogue of the
Daegu Photo Biennale. Daegu, South Korea: Daegu Photo Biennale.
Krauss, R. (1978). Tracing Nadar. October, 5(Summer), pp. 29–47.
Punt, M. (1995). e elephant, the spaceship and the white coatoo: An
araeology of digital photography. In: M. Lister, ed., Photography in the
Age of Digital Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 51–77.
Sontag, S. (1979). On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wells, L. (2015). Photography: A Critical Introduction. 5th ed. Abingdon:
Routledge.

2.1 Other World Histories of Photography

e First Century of Photography in Asia

Gael Newton

Histories

e first wave of modern-era photographic histories published between the

1930s and 1990s in Euramerica (i.e. the geopolitical, economic and cultural
axis of major metropolises of Europe and America) presented ‘foreign’
photography, if at all, as one-dimensional derivatives of the diaspora of
Western tenology and revolutionary camera art since the invention of the
medium in the mid-nineteenth century. e confident centrism of twentieth-
century photohistory books was buoyed by the role of London, Paris, Berlin
and New York in the invention and industrialisation of the medium. It was
also due to the reality that, until the end of World War II, the maritime
world of the Asia-Pacific had been subject for centuries to Euramerican
colonialism or trade imperialism.
Primacy in these twentieth-century texts is given to traing the global
spread of standardised photographic tenologies and the role of pioneer
national hero-camera artists. e assumption is that nothing originates
outside of Euramerica. ere are no ‘other world’ histories of photography.
 By contrast a visual culture or regionalist approa would privilege how
the medium was acclimatised and inflected by local photographers and their
clients and how the image productions in Asia reshaped both local and
foreign metropolitan perceptions. e biological and cultural evidence of the
vigour of hybridity, compared to the original models or inventors, might
also provide an alternative model for photohistorians seeking points of
difference rather than foreign dependence. For example, late-twentieth-
century photohistory accounts of photography in British India anowledge
Raja Deen Dayal for that connection with the Raj, but not so mu as one of
the first internationally recognised Asian photographers. e robust
indigenous photographic industry and unique domestic and devotional
genre of hand-coloured portraiture that flourished in India by the early
1900s aracted lile aention until the last decade. Felice Beato and
Raimund von Stillfried are celebrated as foreign photographers responsible
for establishing the genre of hand-coloured types and views in Japan but the
extensive international photomeanical publishing by turn-of-the-century
Japanese entrepreneur-photographer Kazumasa Ogawa has still to find a
solar-ampion. e unique longevity and scale of the vernacular
ambrotype portraiture in Japan from the 1860s to the 1900s long aer the
format’s disappearance in the West, while promoted by New York dealer
Charles Swartz, has gained lile academic traction. e post-World War II
impact of the Japanese camera on Western photographic art has similarly
yet to aract serious solarship.
Understandably, Western historians take special interest in regions where
their own nations have been involved and their countrymen active as
expatriate or immigrant photographers. On a practical level few solars can
afford to travel far, and must rely heavily on biographies, collections and
publications accessible in Euramerica. Regional collections and local experts
are harder to access and texts can be in unfamiliar languages. Histories of
photography are defined by the holdings of Euramerican collections,
curatorial and collector fashions, and by the art market.
Naomi Rosenblum’s hey A World History of Photography (Rosenblum
1984/2007), the only so-called ‘world’ work, was the first – and to date the
largest – globally ambitious survey of tenical, fine and applied art
practices. is publication bravely expanded the London–Paris–New York
axis of earlier publications to encompass middle Europe, Mexico and South
America. It has been issued in revised editions down to 2008 in Fren,
Japanese, Polish, and Chinese. Any future edition would almost certainly
include more contemporary Chinese photography. Non-Euramerican
photography as an entity, however, remains a ghostly presence. e
viewpoint remains telescopic from Euramerica to the distant nations.
e question is: Can there be an inverted ‘other world’ history of
photography that looks ba at a peripheral Euramerica?

Projections

In the early twenty-first century, travel for researers has not become
easier but digital communication offers multinational perspectives.
Photographic histories and critical publications outside Euramerica have
grown exponentially since the 1980s. e viewpoint in 2016 has been
reoriented and enried by multidisciplinary and multinational solarship
and by the post-colonial theory of a globalising visual culture. It is not a
Copernican shi in perspective but rather an awareness that ‘terra
incognita’ still exist.
Resear in the Asia-Pacific region, it must be admied, is allenging,
with no single extensive history of photography across national borders to
counterbalance the coherence of histories of Western nations. Despite the
relationships and bonds promoted by the ideal of ASEAN nations and APEC
(Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Forum, the geographic, racial, cultural,
economic and linguistic diversity across the Asia-Pacific is of a profoundly
different order to that of Europe and America.
e many exange programs, photofestivals and biennales of the early
twenty-first century suggest that for a globalised younger generation of
photo artists the exange between East and West, Northern and Southern
hemispheres, and Euramerican centres and their former colonial-era
peripheries are being recast. e exange is not equal. Many Asian-born or
ethnic Asian writers, solars and artists included in overseas events and
publications as standing for ‘the other’ are Euramerican born or based. Asia-
Pacific-based artists, solars and organisations can find that their control of
presentations of their national arts in foreign venues is constrained by the
venues wanting overtly national motifs or content. Curators wryly tell of
visiting foreign commissioners instructing them on whi of their local
artists are ‘good’.
e different levels of solarship about Asia-Pacific photography by
foreign or local solars makes comparative studies difficult. Internationally
distributed histories of photography published in Euramerica exist on India,
Hong Kong, Taiwan, ailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar),
China, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines – while local publishers in
Australia and New Zealand, Hawaii, California, Mexico and western Canada
have produced titles with modest international distribution. e west coast
of the Americas is of course within the region of the eastern rim of the Asia-
Pacific from an antipodean point of view. e extraordinary global rea of
the Californian-based and oen-born American modernists and Hollywood
films has not been examined in regards to the impact on Asia.
Japan is unique in having elaborate histories of photography produced
both in Euramerica and in Japanese for domestic consumption, and
extensive infrastructure and collections of international photography. e
largest collection of nineteenth-century British pioneer travel photographer
John omson, for example, was bought in 1990 by the Tokyo Fuji Art
Museum as part of the purase of 15,000 photographs from Los Angeles
collector Stephen White. China has become highly fashionable in the last
decade, with significant domestic and foreign publications on its earliest and
most recent photographers. Exposure to high-quality international historical
photography in most parts of Asia, other than Japan, is negligible. Reliance
on photographic literature is thus of particular importance.
Comparative literature courses have long been part of the Euramerican
academy; comparative photovisual studies are not yet in the lexicon. It is
essential that the stratigraphy of future photomedia history and visual
culture studies is not confined in national silos. Whatever moment or set of
artifacts and practices is being considered, the questions to be asked are:
“How was the imported photography acclimatised, and what was happening
at the same time in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region?”
Exceptional within Asia is the New Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the
Arts, whi has been an exemplary model in building national physical and
solarly resource in India. It has been a powerful presence in London and
New York for two decades, and has built extensive Euramerican networks.
e peer-reviewed University of Miigan-based online journal Trans Asia
Photography Review is a landmark venture for international communication
that welcomes Asia-based contributors but has limited funds for translation.
Pathways avoiding both overly tenological and hero-artist approaes
are well articulated in recent solarship, a significant part of whi
increasingly comes from regional solars. Bicultural Arab–American
Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism encouraged a sool of post-colonial
studies by Euramerican and Arabic solars. Said’s work included all the
various Asias but its legacy has been more in Middle East studies.
ere are several key theorists seeking to have a viewpoint that escapes
the arges of Said’s ‘orientalism’, including British anthropologist and art
historian Christopher Pinney’s evolving positions on colonial and post-
colonial Indian visual culture (Pinney 1997, 2008, Pinney and Peterson 2003).
Australian art historian John Clark (2011) has produced regionally based
surveys of twentieth-century East and Southeast modern Asian art including
photography. American cultural anthropologist Karen Strassler’s work on
Indonesian photography encompasses the role of Chinese–Indonesian
photographers in Java. Australian historian Susie Protsky (2015) has been
studying professional and vernacular photography in the colonial Dut
East Indies. Luke Gartlan, who is an Australian art historian and specialist in
Japanese and Middle East photography based at St Andrews University in
Scotland and is also editor of the journal History of Photography, has
developed a model of investigation that looks at the period from the boom-
up through the lens of individuals’ lives, their associates, and the
marketplace (Behdad and Gartlan 2013, Gartlan 2016).
 Photohistory-based dissertations in progress by Asian, Australian and
Euramerican solars will be of future value. e new National Gallery of
Singapore has made modern Asian artists of the twentieth century a core
goal of the collection, a task proving easier in traing traditional fine artists
than photographers. Twentieth-century Asian pictorialist, modernist, and
documentary photographers will have a new profile as a consequence.
Despite these advances, it remains to be determined how Asia-Pacific
organisations, artists and commentators are to aieve art historical
perspectives and cooperation across the region; to gain individual and
collective self-determination in their representation abroad; or to originate
local events and internationally respected reference works showcasing their
own view of the production of art in the West.
As Senior Curator of Photography, the author was commissioned in 2005
by the National Gallery of Australia to build a collection specifically
surveying the Asia-Pacific region from the 1840s to the 1940s. Some 10,000
works were added to the Gallery’s collection by 2014. Works were drawn
from Sri Lanka to west-coast Canada and California, and where possible
indigenous photographers were acquired and promoted. From the two major
surveys (Newton 2008a, b, 2017) and a number of smaller exhibitions, the
following Asia-Pacific observations might suggest what an ‘Other World
History of Photography’ of the late twenty-first century might look like.

Observations

e revolutionary imaging tenologies developed in the mid-nineteenth

century were a response to an industrialising world in whi the speed of
global communication and transport of goods and people seemed to double
every decade.
From the late 1830s, syndicated news items on photographic inventions in
Europe were run in newspapers across South to Southeast Asia and the
Australian ports of Perth, Western Australia, and Hobart in Tasmania. Aer
the release of the secret of the daguerreotype in Paris in August 1839,
apparatus was dispated a month later from France to Calcua and was
being demonstrated down the coast of South America, the Pacific and
Australia in 1840–41.
Numerous expeditions are known to have carried daguerreotype
equipment in the 1840s, including the Fren trade delegation to sign the
Chinese trade treaty at Whampoa, Canton, in 1844. e ief customs
negotiator Jules Itier and two naval officials made daguerreotypes on the
journey and over a hundred of Itier’s images survive today as the earliest
extant photographs in Asia.
However, the industry’s growth relied on vanity. From the mid-1840s,
freelance photographers offering the alluring novelty of personal likenesses
as well as views, followed along the colonial or economic imperialist trade
routes around the Cape of Good Hope, Africa, and Cape Horn, South
America. Only a few hundred daguerreotype plates survive from Asia in the
1840s and early 1850s – victims of tropical conditions and fractured lives of
foreign communities.
In Euramerican metropolises photographs could be seen relatively easily,
even in the 1840s. Newspapers and leers suggest, however, that public
awareness of the new medium in far-off locales was far greater than the
scant surviving examples show.
e multiple-print photographic process, the collodion wet-plate, was
introduced in the 1850s. ese photographs were made using a glass
negative on glass with prints stru by contact on paper and made light
sensitive by silver grains suspended in eggwhite. Private portraits on paper
became more readily available in the 1860s and the new class of customers
found they could also construct self-scripted narratives in the new
accessories of personal travel and family albums.
e new photomedia products, like all others of the factory age, grew
exponentially by the week – satisfying and creating demand at the same
time. e exotic world beyond Euramerica provided endless new
experiences and a supply of bare-breasted native belles and skimpy
costumes unavailable in the colder northern climes.
 However, the global public also experienced photographic images in
woodcuts, engravings and lithographs based on photographs until the 1880s,
when high-quality photomeanical reproductions in leerpress became
available. Portraiture in the press increasingly made authoritative reference
to being ‘aer a photograph’.
e copyists might alter or improve the random excess of details in a
photograph but the nature and diverse range of camera vision – endlessly
improved in accuracy and spontaneity by a succession of improvements in
cameras, lenses and exposure times – profoundly affected the graphic arts.
e opening of the Suez Canal, telegraph lines unfurling across lands and
underneath oceans, electric time-keeping, transcontinental trains and ocean
steamers would enable Fren writer and tenology populariser Jules Verne
to predict in his 1872 novel that his protagonist Phileas Fogg could circle the
globe in 80 days. e time to rea the Asia-Pacific in the mid to late
nineteenth century had reduced from several months to just weeks but
Verne’s circumnavigation time was not aieved until 1889. Nellie Bly, a
modern American woman and investigative reporter, arrived home in New
York via Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Selements of Penang and Singapore,
Hong Kong, and Japan in 72 days.
Critically for photography, by the 1870s the world’s first broadly literate
and pictorially minded public had developed and were interested in
learning-by-looking. e public’s and the specialist’s appetite for
information, entertainment and everything new was fed by mass-print
culture and illustrated popular newspapers and journals. ough neither
Phileas Fogg nor Nellie Bly carried a camera – thus, although journalists,
keeping the new communication medium at bay – photography had reaed
most major port cities of the world by 1873. Indeed, ‘globe troers’ had been
collecting photographs from local shops for their albums for over a decade.
By 1889, easy amateur photography had appeared on the horizon with the
release of the first Kodak amateur’s roll film box camera but the laer would
not be every overseas traveller’s companion until the 1900s.
One who would instinctively understand the new world was Verne and
Bly’s contemporary, the Scotsman John omson (1837–1921). He was the
first professional photographer to photograph the Buddhist complex at
Angkor in Cambodia and undertake a comprehensive travelogue on China
between 1862 and 1872 while based in his studios first in Singapore and then
Hong Kong.
Because omson made his name from his work on the court of ai King
Mongkut in Bangkok, the ancient monuments in Cambodia and in Imperial
China, it is easy to forget that he belonged to the modern world predicted by
Verne. omson sought and gained acclaim as an exemplary figure in British
photography through publication, and became the model of the
photojournalist who worked outdoors and had texts accessible for the
public. King Mongkut was well aware of the value of omson’s
photographs for the diplomatic strategy of exanging portraits with
European royals and American presidents. By 1861 Mongkut had his own
native photographer, Francis Chit, and was assiduous about disseminating
his own image.
omson, Mongkut, Verne, and Bly’s audience were the new expanded
middleclass of armair travellers across the world, including in the Asia-
Pacific, catered to by the illustrated newspapers and new specialist travel
magazines like Tour du Monde (whi was launed in 1860). It was the
intimacy, the feeling of being on the ground and seeing through the eyes of
the photographer that distinguished omson’s work from earlier travel
photographers, who were equally tenically skilled but conformed more to
established styles of topographic art.
e audience for omson’s photomeanically illustrated publication
Illustrations of China and Its People, published in London in 1873–74 in four
volumes, was limited by its expense. is was followed in 1875 by a mass-
market compendium in photogravure: The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China,
and China. omson’s innovations in publishing his work relied on
tenological advances as well as a desire to rea a broader public. e new
tenique of wet-plate photography meant he could capture people and
places in a natural-looking way. is raised the bar on what the public
expected in realism and narrative structures, and eclipsed centuries of
artists’ romanticised depictions and magazine woodcuts.
 While rightly celebrated as a British photographic aievement,
omson’s productions, like those of all foreign photographers working
outdoors in Asia, relied on local labour and cooperation. For omson, and
topographical camera artists like Samuel Bourne in India or Walter
Woodbury in Java in the 1860s, eap local labour on field trips and an
acculturated servant class in the studio was uerly essential to the
economics of their endeavours. eir clientele was not exclusively
Euramerican; local elite clients native and foreign were also significant
customers. For many, including ildren, young women, wives, workers in
Asia, the very experience even of being photographed provided a sense of
autonomy and equality with Western models.
What Verne did not see in his focus on tenology was that the medium
was the message. He and omson stand at the birth of a mediated world
and a world stereotyped by photographs coming out of Euramerica but also
flowing ba in from across the world.
Despite omson’s innovations in his realistic images of foreign lands,
early studio portraiture in Asia was largely imitative of Western models.
is homogenised phenomenon is more discordant when misty parks,
Italianate buildings and props of rustic furniture are the badrops for
portraiture in the tropics. A trend toward oriental seings appears in the
later nineteenth-century Southeast and East Asian studio images oen in the
badrops of Asian-run studios. Indian studios are outstanding for
countering this trend with their taste for heavily reworked graphic seings
and colouring.
What made the most difference to the commercialisation of photography
by supplementing the income of portrait photographers, was the craze for
images of exotic types and indigenous royals – made possible in Asia by the
adoption of the reproducible wet-plate process print and especially the carte
de visite and stereograph formats. By the late 1860s, types and royal portraits
were a standard part of studio inventories, widely marketed in Asian port
cities, hotels and stationers, and also supplied to publishers across the world.
e genre of royal photography in the Asia-Pacific, from monars in
bejewelled costumes to bare-ested Pacific Island iefs, constitutes a
distinct genre of world photography. e public and social theorists were
confronted with a bewildering range of images of ‘royalty’ compared to the
symbols and style of European Kings and eens.
e ubiquity of Western-style photographic portraiture had particular
value for Asian and Pacific royalty. ey looked at Western tenology with
varying degrees of enthusiasm and quily learned to add the exange of
photographic portraits to the already established protocol of exanging
their Western-style portraits with Euramerican heads of state.
Maharajas were involved with the medium from the outset in the 1840s.
Most Indian rulers were photographed by the 1880s. ey usually appointed
foreign studios as their official or exclusive photographers. e Muslim
Nizam of Hyderabad appointed Jain Deen Dayal as his court photographer
in 1896. Recent monographs from Euramerican and Indian solars have
enried our understanding of Dayal and his sons’ and successors’ careers.
e earliest official royal photographers in Asia were employed by
Hamengkubuwono VI (r. 1855 to 1877). Swedish itinerant daguerreotypist
and photographist Cesar Düben (1819–1888) photographed the royal family
at the Yogyakarta Kraton in January 1858. In the 1870s Hamengkubuwono
VI appointed a Banda-born Dutman, possibly part Indonesian, Simon
Wilhelm Camerik (1830–1897), as his official painter and photographer. By
1875 Camerik had trained Javanese Christian Kassian Céphas (1845–1912) as
‘Photographist to the Sultan’.
Known as ‘hoffotograaf Céphas’ [Photographer Royal], Céphas served the
Sultanate and ran a successful commercial studio until his death in 1912. He
was revered and honoured for his commissioned antiquities photography for
Dut amateur araeologist, Dr Isaac Groenman. Seen in his later life as a
father figure for Indonesian photography, Céphas was a complex, self-
educated and literate figure of some genius. His work deserves further study.
In nineteenth-century Japan and China the rulers had a more circumspect
relationship with photography until modernisation around the end of the
century. e most astute early media monar in Asia was Rama IV, King
Mongkut (r. 1851–1868) of ailand, who even before his ascension pursued
modern European tenology that would aid his people. He unsuccessfully
sought a daguerreotype outfit from America in 1845. He granted foreign
photographers unprecedented access to make portraits of him in the various
costumes, Western and Asian poses he ose, and that they were free to sell.
From 1856 the king had portraits made by his own court photographers
Luang Wisut Yothamath and in the early 1860s by Francis Chit, the first
native professional photographer in ailand.
ere were few performers as enthusiastic as Empress Dowager Cixi
(1835–1908) of China who devised various hieratic, allegorical and ‘at home’
tableaux of herself for foreign consumption in the early 1900s. e British
een Victoria’s numerous publically disseminated formal and informal
portraits were well known to the Empress and may have been an
inspiration.
While Royal portraiture in Southeast and East Asia is distinctive, other
genres involving manipulation of the standard photograph on paper appear
in India and Japan that are particular to regions within the Asia-Pacific
region and are unlike hand-coloured genres in Euramerica, that were never
mainstream.
Robust genres of elaborately hand-coloured elite portraiture appeared in
India from the 1860s; vernacular styles for a broader class of customer
appeared from the 1880s. ese took the form of portraits over-painted to
provide some of the flat colour and decorative elements of traditional
graphic arts, oen with decorative mounts. ere was also the specialised
‘donor portraits’ for Hindu pilgrims aending worship of Shrinathji, the
Hindu god Krishna as ild, in whi photographs of at least the faces of the
donors are inserted into painted depictions of scenes from the life of
Krishna.
Despite the fondness Europeans had for being photographed in foreign
costume while abroad, Indian-style heavily coloured portraiture did not
appeal. e market for coloured photography in India has been almost
exclusively domestic.
e unique genres of Indian photography were brought to international
aention by the American Judith Mara Gutman’s 1982 publication and
exhibition of nineteenth-century photography, Through Indian Eyes. e
topic has been expanded on by British anthropologist Christopher Pinney
(1997, 2008) and since 2000 by the programs of the New Delhi-based Alkazi
Foundation. e first major exhibition of hand-coloured photographs, staged
by founder Indian collector Dr E. Alkazi, Painted Photographs: Coloured
Portraiture in India was held July–September 2008 at the Brunei Gallery,
London.
e tradition of coloured and reanimated hyper-real – even surreal –
fantasy photography in India continued strongly throughout the twentieth
century, becoming part of the international art market and an inspiration for
twenty-first century contemporary photomedia artist Pushpamala N. in
Bangalore.
Indian painted photography usually transformed the subject through
replacing photographic tonal naturalism and perspective with thi, flat ri
colour and decorative drawing. A quite different genre developed from the
1860s in the cooler temperate climes of Japan. A style of selective tinting
using dyes to enhance and provide colour to costume and bodies was
popularised in the 1860s by the leading foreign studios of Felice Beato and
Baron von Stillfried. e new format for costumes and views made use of
the pool of trained colourists capable of painstaking work for graphic print
artists but also eoed the tastes of its European originators. Beato had
worked with his brother-in-law James Robertson in making some of the first
hand coloured ‘types’ for sale in the mid-1850s in Cairo. Stillfried’s sombre,
selectively semi-transparent colouring le the dimension naturalism of the
camera intact. His misty European-style park badrops recall the
melanoly twilight of eighteenth-to nineteenth-century Romantic art in
Europe.
Millions of Japanese hand-coloured prints and elaborate albums flooded
into Euramerica at the height of the turn-of-the-century Japonisme aesthetic
movement that drew on oriental art for inspiration in a rapidly
industrialising world. It might be argued that the Japanese integrated and
made over foreign influences as an integral part of their modern culture
while in the West the oriental arts remained as décor.
 Adopted by Japanese-run studios by the 1870s, the production of tinted
Japanese photographs became a massive export industry catering to
travellers or enthusiasts for Japonisme in the West, lasting until well into the
1920s. e market appears to have been entirely foreign.
e Japanese ambrotype continued long aer the leather-cased portrait
ambrotype had been dropped for the new carte de visite and cabinet card
photographs on paper. Between the 1860s and 1900s, the Japanese developed
a style of uncoloured ambrotype portrait in a light plain kiri wood case that
sold in the millions at temporary stalls in parks and in permanent studios in
towns to mostly middle and modest working class siers.
e genre of hand colouring in India and Japan in very different ways
rejected the camera’s unique strengths in accurate perspective and tonal
delineation as merely an option, not an essence. ese formats corrected a
la in the monorome photographic model as imported. e existence of
both these genres prompts questions as to why the pool of miniature
painters in Europe was not similarly more widely pressed into the new
medium’s service so that the coloured print became a norm.
Any discussion of photography in the Asia-Pacific needs to account for
the operation of immigrant and touring foreign photographers in the context
of the presence and activity (or not) of local indigenous photographers.
Indian photographers flourished across the sub-continent from the late
nineteenth century, coexisting in major cities with foreign operators and
being patronised by foreigners including the Vice Regal circles, until
Independence in 1947.
By 1900 local Asian photographers were firmly established as competitors
to foreign operators in China, Japan and Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia,
immigrant and locally born Chinese formed the local photographic industry,
dominating in Indonesia and Singapore over Malay and Indian studios
despite considerable local populations. In the Philippines, Europeans
dominated well into the early twentieth century.
e Asia-Pacific region encompasses the western coasts of North and
South America, and the depth of the cultural exange between East and
West in photography is as yet a largely unarted field from a perspective
within this region. Modernism in California, for example, in the early
twentieth century has deep links to oriental art and ideas.
Pictorial art photography across Asia was active throughout the twentieth
century but has yet to be examined for relationships and paerns differing
from those in Euramerica. Asian modernisms are beginning to aract
serious study and have already transformed the perceptions of artists
previously dismissed as inferior copyists of Euramerican models.
e history of the Asian photographer at home and at work abroad and
across Asia will be a future study with no want of extraordinary images and
aracters. Finally, while the emphasis of this essay has been on Asian
photography, there remains scope for further resear into what anged in
Euramerica’s way of seeing, with the arrival in vast quantities of
photographic images of the Asian continent’s huge range of peoples, places
and events.

References
Behdad, A. and Gartlan, L. (2013) Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on
Colonial Representation, Los Angeles: Gey Resear Institute.
Clark, J. (2011) Modern and Contemporary Asian Art: A Working
Bibliography. A teaing bibliography for different courses in Australia.
Department of Art History and Film, Power Department of Fine Arts,
University of Sydney.
Gartlan, L. (2016) A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and
Early Yokohama Photography, Leiden: Brill.
Gutman, J.M. (1982) Through Indian Eyes: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-
Century Photography from India, New York: Oxford University Press
/International Center of Photography.
Newton, G. (2008a) “South-East Asia: Malaya, Singapore, Philippines”, in J.
Hannavy (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, New
York /London: Routledge, pp. 1313–16.
Newton, G. (2008b) “South-East Asia: ailand, Burma and Indoina
(Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos)”, in J. Hannavy (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Nineteenth-Century Photography, New York /London: Routledge, pp.
1316–19.
Newton, G. (2017) “Towards a History of the Asian Photographer at Home
and Abroad: Case Studies of Southeast Asian Pioneers: Francis Chit,
Kassian and Yu-Chong”, in S.W. Low and P.D. Flores (eds), Charting
Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia, Singapore: National Gallery
Singapore, pp. 78–90.
Pinney, C. (1997) Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs,
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Pinney, C. (2008) The Coming of Photography in India, London: British
Library.
Pinney, C. and Peterson, N. (eds) (2003) Photography’s Other Histories,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Protsky, S. (ed) (2015) Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-
Colonial Indonesia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Rosenblum, N. (1984/2007, 4th ed.) A World History of Photography, New
York:Abbeville.
Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books.
omson, J. (1873–74) Illustrations of China and Its People: A Series of Two
Hundred Photographs, with Letterpress Descriptive of the Places and
People Represented, 4 vols, London: Sampson, Low.
omson, J. (1875) The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China or, Ten
Years’ Travels, Adventures, and Residence Abroad, New York: Harper &
Brothers.
Verne, J. (1872) Around the World in Eighty Days, Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel.

Further Reading

e fourth revised edition of Rosenblum (1984/2007) has expanded coverage

of contemporary photographers. No other history has ‘world’ in the title
 histories but among the well-known general histories that were
published in the period are: J.M. Eder (GR/USA) 1932/1978; B. and N.
Nancy Newhall (USA) 1938/2003; H. and A. Gernsheim (UK) 1955/1988;
P. Polla (USA) 1969; J-L. Daval (FR/USA) 1982; J-C. Lemagny and A.
Rouillé (FR) 1986; P. Turner (UK) 1987; and M. Frizot (FR) 1998.
Allana, R. and Kumar, P. (2008) Painted Photographs: Coloured Portraiture in
India, Ahmedabad: Mapin in association with the Alkazi Collection of
Photography; Ocean Township, NJ: Grantha Corporation; Easthampton:
Distributed by Antique Collectors Club Ltd.
Benne, T. (2006) Photography in Japan, 1853–1912, Tokyo; Rutland, VT:
Tule.
Benne, T. (2009) History of Photography in China 1842–1860, London:
Bernard arit Ltd.
Benne, T . (2010) History of Photography in China: Western Photographers,
1861–1879, eds A. Payne and L. Stewart, London: arit.
Benne, T. (2013) History of Photography in China: Chinese Photographers,
1844–1879, eds A. Payne and L. Stewart, London: arit.
Dewan, D. (2012) Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs: Towards
a Transcultural History of Photography, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum
Press.
Groenveld, A., Falconer, J., and Walin, S. (1994) Van Bombay tot
Shanghai/From Bombay to Shanghai, Amsterdam: Fragment Uitgeverij.

2.2 Photographing the Mexican Revolution

A Case Study of Genre and Functions

John Mraz

e Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 offers an opportunity to examine the

different functions that photographs have served within the genre of
imagery produced in a particular and extraordinary situation: that whi is
aracterized by the rise of massive armed movements that have the
objective of radically transforming the existing socio-economic and political
structure, and that defeat the old regime to implant a new order. e
Mexican is arguably the most-photographed revolution in history, and
certainly the one of whi the most photographs have been conserved that
can be consulted. Prior to 2010, the historiography of its imagery suffered
from the fundamental misconception that Agustín Víctor Casasola was the
photographer of that civil war. However, during the Centennial celebration,
a number of studies appeared whi established that the Mexican Revolution
was photographed by many, some of whom were foreigners. e most
comprehensive analysis, and the only work in English, is my book,
Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons
(2012).
e revolutionary leaders (caudillos) quily developed a consciousness of
the importance of modern media, and recruited photographers to construct
their image, just as imagemakers saw the opportunity to express their
points-of-view, as well as finance their work. In the Mexican Revolution, one
photographed for a caudillo; for an illustrated magazine or newspaper; for
postcards that were sold in stores, or as news to periodicals or as souvenirs
to the very people who therein appeared. One photographed for the
individuals that came to a studio to have portraits made, or for family
and/or friends.
Most importantly, I determined that the photography of the revolution
was aracterized by commitment on the part of various photographers to
the different forces. A crucial result of the project was finding agency among
the photographers on the slimmest of evidence: the few scaered surviving
photographs in arives, the illustrated media that could be located, a ance
reference that linked a photographer to a cause. e allenge of establishing
commitment was made difficult by the fact that many images can be found
that are signed by different photographers. is is particularly true of
postcards, then a medium of mu importance and one of the few ways
news imagery circulated. e methodological difficulties notwithstanding, I
aempted to establish who made these images, to what ends, with what
intentions, for whom they were taken, and how they were utilized. e
paern of commitment I discovered has been lile commented upon in
previous studies (and almost completely unexplored in the photography of
other revolutions).
I believe that specific photographers can be linked to the contending
forces, in broad strokes – and with possibilities of erring – in the following
way. Manuel Ramos was the preeminent photojournalist of Porfirio Díaz’s
dictatorship, whi lasted from 1876 to 1911. e Heliodoro J. Gutiérrez
Agency was the first revolutionary photographic protagonist, linked to the
rebellion of Francisco I. Madero in 1910. Madero’s armed uprising began on
the northern border, where Arturo Escobar, who worked for Gutiérrez,
expressed his allegiance by traveling to cover it from Mexico City. Gerónimo
Hernández demonstrated commitment to Madero during his truncated
presidency (1911–1913). e photographer most engaged with the 1912
rebellion of Pascual Orozco against Madero seems to have been Ignacio
Medrano Chávez, known as “El gran lente” (e Great Lens). Emiliano
Zapata’s personal photographer was Amando Salmerón, but there were
other imagemakers connected to that radical agrarian struggle, among them,
Cruz Sánez. A photographer known so far only as “Hernández” appears to
have been the imagemaker for Domingo Arenas, a revolutionary from the
Puebla region. e photographers closest to Pano Villa were the Caú
brothers, Antonio and Juan. e eventual winners, the Constitutionalist
army of Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón, had many imagemakers,
although Jesús H. Abitia has been considered “The Constitutionalist
photographer.” Finally, Eduardo Melhado may have pictured reconstructions
of e Tragic Ten Days (February 9–19, 1913), and thus could be considered
as having been a supporter of the dictator, Victoriano Huerta, who
overthrew Madero.
e revolutionary photographers sometimes expressed their commitments
by picturing the caudillos on horseba, oen from low angles, and at times
silhoueed against balighting provided by a rising sun. ey also
photographed bales (although very few images of actual combat appear to
have been taken, in large part because the cameras were large and film was
slow). In general, they mostly dedicated themselves to documenting daily
life in camps and on the trains, as well as the triumphs of their leaders. For
example, one of the few wrien messages from a caudillo to a photographer
is Zapata’s missive to Amando Salmerón:
I recommend that you come immediately to this city, in the moment you receive this leer,
bringing with you your camera and other equipment necessary to take images of Chilpancingo,
the major points of combat, and the leaders, officers, and soldiers of the bad government, who
have fallen prisoner.

Photographs could also serve as object lessons for the opposition, as in the
gruesome image made by the Caú brothers of General Pérez Castro, a
guerrilla ostensibly aligned with Huerta’s forces, but who may have been
lile more than one of the many brigands who took advantage of the aotic
situation to loot, rape, and kill.
e photographs of the dead ieain were probably taken to celebrate
the victory over the reactionary forces, and demonstrate the control of
banditry by the Villistas. What might be called the “punctum” (à la Barthes)
in this photo – that whi elevates it beyond banal voyeurism of the morbid
and horrific – is Perez’s finger pointing to his destroyed visage. ose who
were going to be executed had an obsession with not being shot in the face,
so the Caús could either have arranged the arm to make the finger point at
the head, or they could have taken advantage of a serendipitous occurrence
to indicate how thieves, rapists and counterrevolutionaries would be treated.
In spite of what we might be tempted to think, photojournalists appear to
have played a relatively minor role in the photography of the Mexican
Revolution, because they did not leave Mexico City oen, and lile action
occurred there apart from e Tragic Ten Days. Few could be considered
“revolutionary” photographers – in the sense of being commied to the
insurgent forces – because the owners of the magazines and newspapers
functioned in terms of their class interests, buressed by the metropolitan
fear of and repulsion for the dispossessed masses who followed Zapata and
Villa. Hence they took the part of those in power, and their racist and classist
ideology expressed itself in anti-indigenous and anti-campesino (country
people) representations. Some regional studio photographers – su as
Abitia, Salmerón, the Caús, and Medrano Chávez – joined up with the
forces they believed in, but many simply stayed in their small cities and
towns, photographing the different forces as they passed through, and
selling them their portraits, making them into postcards, and sending images
to the metropolitan media.

Figure 2.1 Caú Brothers, e Executed General Pérez Castro, 1914. Courtesy of Archivo Histórico
Universitario BUAP.
 One su studio artist was Sara Castrejón, the only Mexican woman to
participate with a camera. Among the earliest female war photographers in
the world, and a pioneer in opening up women’s place in the imagistic
world, she captured the entrance of troops under the command of Jesús
Salgado, a Maderista follower, as they rode into Teloloapan, Guerrero, on 26
April 1911, the first photo of the southern insurrection. She recorded the
Salgadista–Maderista camp on the outskirts of Teloloapan, whi captures a
scale of operations seen in few photos during this period, including those of
World War I. roughout the revolution, she photographed all the armies
that passed through Teloloapan, and among her tasks was that of
photographing executions. Sometimes she made photos beforehand because
the families of the condemned asked that they be taken as souvenirs of their
loved one; at other times, federal officers asked her to document the
executions to provide evidence that they had carried out their orders.
Castrejón’s most powerful photograph is the portrait of the Salgadista–
Maderista colonel, Amparo Salgado, clothed in a fancy dress with floral
motifs, an elegant hat, and highly buffed shoes, whi stand in stark contrast
to the cartridge belts she wears and the rifle she holds (Color Plate 1). I
believe that Castrejón’s gender consciousness – her recognition and hence
representation of the active role women were taking in the conflict – led her
to make this complex, contestatory image, whi may also express a certain
commitment to Salgadismo–Maderismo in its first stages, and part of the
widespread elation for the end of a 35-year dictatorship.
e Mexican Revolution occurred in a moment that photography was
being transformed as a medium. Just as we find horses next to airplanes, and
ancient cannons on the same balefield as the most modern artillery, one
sees a great variety of photographic equipment: old and heavy cameras
appear together with the new, lighter, more portable ones that entered as the
war advanced. Many photographers used Reflex (Single Lens Reflex)
cameras, whi could be carried and operated in a handheld fashion that
enabled them to go to the news rather than wait for it to come to them and
their stationary apparatus. e Reflex cameras offered more mobility and the
capacity to capture action; the visor on top enabled them to focus on
subjects without covering their heads with a dark cloth. e other camera
employed by professionals during the revolution was the View, whi
required the use of a tripod. Some photojournalists, especially the older ones
su as Manuel Ramos, utilized View cameras; they were also generally
favored by postcard photographers, probably because they were an
instrument of great sensitivity and precision, provided the subject was
immobile. Finally, Kodak Brownies were popular among the wealthy,
although it appears that they rarely documented the war; and there is no
evidence that revolutionary troops made the quantity of small-format
photos that can be found in the World War I albums of soldiers from more
prosperous nations. e differences between the cameras determined, to
some extent, whether one captured scenes near combat or was limited to
posing groups, as well as the degree to whi photos were spontaneous or
directed. If, however, the variations between the cameras produced different
kinds of photographs with their particular aesthetics, in the distribution of
photos there was mu filtration between the genres, with photojournalistic
images circulating as postcards and vice versa.
According to their means, photographers adopted medium-format
cameras (5 × 7) – or smaller ones of 4 × 5 – whose mobility permied them
to move easily and capture spontaneous scenes. e new cameras, as well as
photographic equipment and materials, must have entered the country as
easily and constantly as did arms, munitions, uniforms, and supplies. e
daily omnipresence of image-making equipment – sometimes as ubiquitous
as other arms – created a consciousness that led to the construction of
wrien and visual narratives that incorporated them.
e varied functions of photographs made during the revolution were
aerwards compressed into an official story in the many picture histories
that were published by and from the Casasola Arive, beginning in 1921.
e Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana first appeared in 1942, and
was expanded and republished many times, eventually reaing 3,760 pages
with some 11,500 photographs. ere, the complex civil war was boiled
down into a bale between the “bad guys” – Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano
Huerta – and the “good guys” – Madero, Zapata, Villa, Carranza and
Obregón – despite the fact that the social revolution was really a result of
the struggle between the laer groups. Moreover, the fact that the only
photographer mentioned in these monumental series is Agustín Víctor
Casasola, the founder of the dynastic arive, wrongfully implies that he
was the author of all the photographs. In the end, one could say that the
Casasolas monopolized the photography of the revolution in somewhat the
same way as the party dictatorship of the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI) monopolized the legacy of the revolution itself.

References

Mraz, J. (2012). Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments,

Testimonies, Icons. Austin: University of Texas Press.

2.3 Either We Destroy Everything or We Save

Everything

Timothy Prus and Marcelo Brodsky in Conversation with

Moritz Neumüller

Note: This interview was held via Skype on December 15, 2016.

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: To get the conversation going, I would like to ask Marcelo to speak about
his latest project, which is a result of a collaboration with the Archive of Modern Conflict, if I have
understood it right . . .

MARCELO BRODSKY: With pleasure. My relationship with the AMC comes from the fact that
arival photography is a central tool for my creative work. When I was invited to participate in
the Bogotá Art Fair’s curated exhibition called Referentes (Referents), I immediately thought about
the AMC, because of Timothy’s relationship with Colombia, and the AMC’s holding of arival
material from there. I went to London to resear this material for a couple of days. e AMC
really has exceptional material that represents the conflict in Colombia in a unique way, because
they had been going from home to home, finding family albums that included personal histories
and narrations from the point of view of protagonists in this conflict. I found two albums: one of a
general, the other of a lieutenant of the Colombian army. In the later one, I found an interesting
link with other events, because this lieutenant, Jorge Mendez Galvis, had been trained for his
military career in the Sool of the Americas and was then sent to Korea, together with 4,000
other soldiers from his country, to fight with the Americans against Communism.

MN: May I ask Timothy, what he thinks about the outcome of Marcelo’s research?

TIMOTHY PRUS: It’s delightful if someone comes to the arive and discovers something new.
We have been very aware of the link between Korea and Colombia, but Marcelo brought a new
angle to this story. I mean, there are a thousand aspects of Colombian engagement in Korea, and
there is even a House of Victims whi is still functioning, and supported by the South Korean
government. Also, there is a massive literature on it, so it is not a forgoen story, as su. But
Marcelo definitively brought a new perspective, and for me, that is fantastic because the pleasure
is to learn something new. I really like when someone discovers a new story within an older
material. A new story is good, but what is key for me is to find a new way of telling that story,
one that escapes the ways similar stories have been told previously.

MN: So . . . did he achieve this goal? And what about the artistic value of Marcelo’s new
perspective on the archival material?

TP: As an artist who researes in an arive, you’ve got two problems: First, you find your new
story, that’s great! Job done. e other thing is to tell the story from a different intellectual or
emotional perspective. at’s the process that Marcelo has gone through. We both agreed that
Marcelo uncovered a new aspect of a story. e other question to discuss, as you rightfully say, is
whether materially and stylistically, he found a new way to tell it. And also, I would add, whether
it was told in an intellectually and emotionally inventive way.

MB: Every time I deal with an arive, I have to try to dig up emotional content in it, something
that is able to generate an emotional reaction. e kind of material that would ask you questions,
that would ask the viewer questions, to generate doubt, and to relate it to the own experience of
the viewer. It is quite complex. is piece, Foundational Myth, is a very large piece, and the
process of how the arival material becomes a piece is very interesting. Firstly, as a sket, I used
a seventeenth-century map of South America, by a Dut explorer, whi I had bought in an
antiquarian in Prague a few years ago, and it became the babone of the piece. A map where the
different territories of Latin America are connected.

TP: Maps are political constructions. For example, why is South America shown below North
America? It could be the other way round!

MB: Of course. When you see the Chinese version of the world map, China is in the center, and in
the Australian maps, Australia is on the top.

TP: is is totally it! So mu of what we accept from an arive or a photograph as being true,
and where we must really start, is that it is all lies, it’s all propaganda, the photographs especially,
all that we have to take from a ground zero. We must not accept any of the historical narratives
that we have been brought up with. Sorry, I’ll stop interrupting in a second . . .
MB: No, no, that’s not an interruption, that’s a conversation. I believe that ea time you approa
an arive of photographs, you are rewriting the history because you are looking into details that
were eventually forgoen and the pictures contain information that probably has not been taken
care of. e picture does have some kind of ingenuity as far as it has been taken from some kind of
reality, and therefore you can find things in it that were not perceived when the picture was
published, or when it was used for the first time. e new reading of the arive is an opportunity
of rereading the history, of constructing an alternative narrative. is is what the images in the
AMC enabled me to do, as they are pure content, pure information, pure visual elements. ere is
not necessarily any political orientation in those images. In this one particular album that I
researed—whi is naïve, it was made by a lieutenant for himself and his family—there is no
other political intention other than that he is sustaining his practice. Of course, it is his point of
view, but he also includes images that can be read in a different way, a different perspective, and
create an alternative narrative.

TP: at’s it, and that is what you have striven to arive in the work that you have made. And do
you think you have been successful in the two propositions that I outlined: the material and
stylistic part, and the more spiritual part? Are you happy with your work, or would you like to
have it done again?

MB: I am happy with the result. e map, in fact, is a map of the seventeenth century, and it does
not show North America, only us—South America—with Colombia on the top and Tierra del
Fuego down, and the rivers enabled me to connect, through a blood link, the situation of the war
in Colombia with the repression and dictatorships and other wars in the south. It’s something
subtle, not too obvious, but I like the mere fact that the blood river is coming down from the north
and reaing the Rio de la Plata, where we have our own history is a part of the connection. I
believe that the piece works. It is also the center of an upcoming exhibition, with the same name,
Foundational Myth, whi will include other pieces. One of them features interventions on
contemporary news images that document the finalization of the war in Colombia, and I put them
in dialogue with the album that showed the beginning of the war.

TP: As an Argentinian, how do you feel about the legacy of Bolivar and the mistrust that exists
between the south and the north of Latin America?

MB: at’s an interesting question. ere is a famous painting that shows the meeting of Bolivar
and San Martin in Guayaquil, in Ecuador. San Martin, who has already liberated Argentina, Chile,
and Peru, leaves the leadership of the anti-Hispanic revolution in the hands of Bolivar, who takes
over the fight against the Spanish Crown. It is an important image in the history of the Continent,
and the independence of our republics. I don’t think that there is mistrust between the north and
the south of Latin America. Less and less so. ere are common interests, there is a lot of cultural
dialogue and there is now a new center, Brazil, whi is related to everyone. We are all
descendants of immigrants, just like the ones that are floating on the Mediterranean Sea today. I
feel Latin American, whi is an interesting identity, at a moment when Europe is falling apart.

TP: But there is a long history of difficult relations between all the different countries of South
America . . .
MB: Obviously, but hardly as mu as England with France, or Germany with France, or Austria
with Italy!

(Laughter)

MB: e answer is yes, we have had some problems, but nothing compared with the wars in
Europe. Especially in the last century, we have seen a trend of coming together. e big problem
now is that the natural leader of the region, whi is Brazil, is in political turmoil, and that is
worrying me a lot.

MN: I was hoping that one of the issues to come up in this conversation would be Latin America,
and I am very happy that we are talking about it. However, I have to try to bring the conversation
back to the role of the archive. For the general public, archives are seen more as a playground for
historians, and the archives themselves have a hard time opening up to a more artistic approach. I
am saying this because, for the exhibition Photobook Phenomenon which I am currently working
on, we asked Erik Kessels to select images from the National Archive of Catalonia, and create an
installation in the exhibition space. If it had not been for one of the archivists, who is also a
photographer herself, this collaboration would have been—let’s not say impossible, but much more
difficult. The AMC, on the other side, is very open to artists. What role do artists play in the
reinterpretation of archives?

TP: I think what maers is a fresh approa. Whether someone is an artist or not is completely
irrelevant from my perspective. To bring a fresh spirit and a fresh vision to the repositories of
information that exist in different arives, that’s the game. Being an artist is just a job title to
earn a living. An artist has no special place in the interpretation and re-examination of history.

MB: It is true that an artist has to make a living and I am happy to say that my works sell very
well at the moment, so that helps. For example, at Art Basel, and also at the art fair in Bogotá, a
new work with arive material about 1968 around the world did very well—images that show
what was going on in the streets of Prague, London, Paris, Mexico, Bogotá, Cordoba, Tokyo,
Bratislava, Jamaica, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rome . . . I researed them in Picture Agencies
around the world and . . .

TP: One question: What do you think? Were the 1968 phenomena a heart-felt will of the people
for political ange or was it an excuse for a party?

MB: I believe that a good party is a very good political statement. A party of ideas: Let’s make
open love, let’s smoke some joints, let us introduce the young people to political issues and to
activism and to participation in the social discussions. If you have this all in a party in the street,
it’s great. Party and political discussion can be together; politics does not necessarily have to be
drama, it can also be a celebration. And 1968 was su a celebration . . .

TP: Total agreement. I also believe it was a mixture of the two. e difficulty is that from today’s
perspective, we can’t disassemble the wrien history to work out what was party-time and what
was political time, they are so interwoven; I guess there is no answer to that question now.
MB: It’s good that they are interwoven. Imagine that you mar with a woman in a parade in
Paris and then you spend the night together with this companion, and that’s fantastic, you are
fighting for freedom and then you make love . . . Make love not war! at’s excellent, that was the
1960s!

TP: So, why is it all so serious and without any humor now? What has happened?

MB: Yes, we are in a very dark time, Timothy. e 1960s was a time when the future looked
brighter. We live in a time where the future looks worse. And that’s why I bring ba ideas of the
1960s, through the images of 1968, because I believe that what we were discussing then, and the
way we were living, and the ideas that influenced our thoughts and our vision of the future that
we had in the 1960s were beer than the ones we have now.

TP: I have noticed, not only in Latin America but all over the world, a la of that spirit: humor,
laughing, party. Everything has become super serious.

MB: If you look at images from the demonstration in London against the war in Vietnam, with all
those young people waving the flags of the Vietcong, if you see their faces, they are having a
party. ey are really enjoying the possibility of having something going on in the streets of
London. Today we have a reaction of the marginalized of the political process. And the dark
moments that we are living in the US, with the return of fascism, in different manners, is scary. I
don’t know why. But as a Jew, I suffer. We have to remember that Hitler won an election and that
the Anschluss was accepted by the Austrians. What we are seeing now is the emergence of a dark
political force, whi is populism, and I believe that through art, through photography, through
action, we can resist. However, ‘68 was not a moment of resistance, it was a moment of joy, of
growth, of new ideas. We are at a more difficult moment now. Not as artists, or activists, just as
human beings dealing with all these ways of political reaction that are breaking Europe,
separating the UK and complicating the creation of a global identity. e parties and the openness
of the generation of ‘68 is an example that we can follow daily, with pride and with a positive
aitude. I agree that humor is the only way forward.

TP: In 1968, some kind of creative anary spread around the world and made political dissent
something that huge numbers of people would follow. It was fun. Now, we have CCTV cameras
and every step you make on social media is monitored. Maybe that’s part of the deadening down
of political dissent . . . I don’t know.

MN: Every step is monitored and then everything is archived by the big corporations, such as
Google and Facebook. How can we archive an alternative history than the one dictated by those big
players?

TP: In one extreme, in order to recreate the world we should destroy all the data: burn the books,
burn the arives, destroy the Internet, and start again. at’s not going to happen. What is
missing is the vision of the Internet as a temporary repository of thought and information. What
we think is stored there and will be there forever . . . it’s not! And that’s really a major issue.
Massive seas of information are being kept, but loads of interesting stuff is disappearing down the
drain.
MN: So either we destroy everything or we save everything . . .

TP: If somebody has the will to save things, they have to start collecting in a totally different way,
to the collecting of paper information. Of course I have, in a small way, been collecting
information, because you know it will slip through the cras, into the sewer and then into the
sea. It feels like the Library in Alexandria before it is smashed up. People are not copying enough
and recording enough. A heap of interesting information will be forever lost because we do not
have the strategies in place to store and save it. Of course, there is a lot of scanning and saving
websites, but it’s like a drop in the ocean, useless! Unless a proper effort is being made, no record
of our time that is substantial enough will exist in a hundred years’ time.

MB: And this ocean of information leaves us with no clue how to navigate it, so in the end, the
corporations who own the algorithms, they rule this ocean. It is more difficult than ever before to
keep independent sources and edited information that does not belong to corporations. at, I
believe, is very worrying for all of us.

TP: If you were alive in say 200 years’ time, you would look ba on us and say, Oh gosh, they had
su a tiny amount of data and they were unable to manage it. We will look like primitives
because we are so scared with the amount of data we’ve got. Like, when we look ba on
eighteenth-century encyclopedists who thought there was too mu information.

MN: Marcelo, you are the founder and president of Latin Stock picture agency. This market is
facing great problems, also, despite or maybe just because of the vast amount of photographic
material available nowadays.

MB: In the field of picture agencies, the content is becoming concentrated in fewer players. e
Chinese in alliance with Gey bought the Corbis arive, whi comprises one of the biggest
private image files of the US. is concentration leaves the smaller players behind. People devoted
to keeping smaller arives cannot sustain their practice anymore, and this leads to less freedom of
expression, not only in photography. is does not happen in art, whi is why art has become my
refuge. Art is not controlled by the corporations. You can have a more or less successful artistic
career, but at least you can do and say whatever you want.

TP: What can you do to fight this development?

MB: Become an activist and make art. For example, I am also the founder of a new NGO called
“Visual Action.” Our mission is to tea the human rights organizations how to use visual
language in their communication so they can survive in the digital world. We can learn how to
use these tenologies in our favor.

TP: So, how far can you go with no-ownership of the image?

MN: Counter-question: How does that work in the AMC? Because one thing is the physical
material, which the AMC legally owns, and the other how to make this material available to the
public, in the form of rights-free information? So whose is this material, at the end of the day?

TP: I would say it belongs to everybody, as a general rule . . .

 MB: Look: e picture industry is in decline because new models of ownership became dominant.
Particularly, the royalty-free first and the microsto later. Microsto is a distribution model
based on volume, and it is developed by engineers with algorithms and user-generated content,
not by picture professionals and image lovers that are strong in visual culture. It is a business
model based on large amounts of images and a small price per image, commoditization, sear
motors, algorithms, subscriptions and e-commerce. Once you could sell a thousand images for 500
dollars a month, the whole industry constructed around the copyright became obsolete. When the
idea of losing ownership prevails, the artists don’t have any income, they do not have resources to
keep their production going. Nowadays, we can only produce images for the art circuit, because
the copyright circuit is almost dead. And that is not good for the artists because they cannot live
from what they do. How can they finance their production? Being a photographer is very
expensive, you have to buy material, equipment, pay the laboratories, travel costs, and so on and
so forth. At the end of the day, it is only the people who go on vacations who shoot the pictures.
is is a loss of quality, as it does not allow us to build a body of work in a controlled and
professional way.

TP: I can accept to—agree to that, however, we also have to embrace the notion that now everyone
can be a photographer, and everybody has something to offer to the creative plate.

MB: Well . . . ere is a relationship and a tension between the creation of the general public, and
the creation of the artists. Not everyone can be a Picasso and Picasso was certainly part of an elite,
a model of a creative artist. I don’t believe in the possibility of gathering the production of billions
of people who upload their images daily on the Internet. I don’t believe that all these images can
be kept and be used in a meaningful way. Many of them look alike anyway. I believe that there is
a differentiation between these images and those produced by professionals who dedicate their
work and thought to the visual interpretation of the world. I believe that this might be a difference
between us and I accept it as positive because differences are useful and good for discussions.

2.4 Case Study: e Image of Perestroika

Russian Photography and Visual Culture in the 1980s and 1990s

Irina Chmyreva

Heroes of the New Time: e Mid-1980s—1990s

In the second half of the 1980s, several dozen noteworthy authors stepped
onto the stage of Russian photography. Only some of them emerged from
the alma mater of the preceding period—photo clubs—and several came from
photojournalism. Photographers of perestroika matured outside the
mainstream, in the young bohemian circles whi generated self-made
artists, musicians, and writers whose education was based on scraps of
conversations with nonconformist artists of the older generation, fragments
of available Western publications on art and style, contemporary music, and
festival films. Speaking of the photographers of that period, their motivation
for creation and building personal style was determined by individual
biographies but could be expressed in one concise word: time.

Chronicle of Changes

As is well known, the USSR collapsed in 1991 and its former republics
became independent states (one of them, the Russian Federation, became the
basis of what is today known as Russia). is process was caused by the
political, cultural, and economic anges inside the USSR, whi had
occurred in the 1980s: Mikhail Gorbaev was elected as Communist Party
leader in 1986; over the next two years he decreed the new principles of
development known as perestroika and glasnost. While the principles of
perestroika affected first of all economy and politics, glasnost dealt with
ideology and culture. e glasnost period initiated the fall of the Iron
Curtain. e process of the integration of Russian photography into the
global art scene started in the late 1980s. is process implied an exange of
information about the history and current state of development of
photography between Russia and the rest of the world.
Russia welcomed artists from Europe and the USA; most of them visited
Leningrad1 and Moscow. Cultural figures from Russia began to travel
abroad; some of them, including photographers, emigrated. Along with
diplomats who collected artwork, Russia was flooded with foreign collectors,
dealers, and gallery-owners. In the late 1980s, the first joint ventures were
established, including in the field of culture; offices of foreign cultural and
aritable foundations were opened in Moscow; aer 1989, international
human rights organizations officially came to Russia.

Glasnost and Photography

Glasnost uncovered many pages of the past concealed from the public in the
Soviet years. It facilitated the release of arives (state repositories were
disclosed and made accessible to scientists; materials from private arives
were published); this opening of the arives helped to develop a personal
aitude to Russian history in the society of the 1980s. Glasnost stimulated
discussion meanisms, resulted in the collapse of the one-party political
system, and facilitated publishing and journalistic activity. Periodicals whi
emerged in the late 1980s took an interest in topics never before covered by
the Russian print media and craved new visual materials in photographic
form.2
Long-serving photographers of the official printed press, i.e. Soviet
newspapers and magazines, were soon replaced by a new generation of
reporters, whi reflected the winds of ange. e new generation of press
photographers finally had the opportunity to connect with international
agencies and publishers directly, with no censorship; only the authors
themselves defined the way to interpret the reality in photographs. e first
national stringers emerged in 1986–1987, still in the USSR; they collaborated
with global news agencies and worked in the country’s hot spots that were
hardly accessible to foreign reporters. e Chernobyl disaster, civil
disturbances in Soviet republics, earthquake in Armenia, the Nagorno-
Karabakh conflict, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and
many other events became known to the world through photo reportages;
pictures from the USSR made the front pages of periodicals and newspapers
across the globe and drew readers’ aention to the country that had been
closed off for so long. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Soviet Union was
one of the major news suppliers in the world; Russian photo reporters were
becoming known and valued, and the photojournalists that emerged as a
result of perestroika—Igor Gavrilov, Alexander Zemlyanienko, Vladimir
Vyatkin, Viktoria Ivleva, Yuri Kozyrev and Sergey Maximishin—are now
recognized internationally.

Photographer and Artist as a Profession

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet and then Russian government
gradually stopped persecuting “unofficial” image-makers (meaning those
who were unemployed and refused to join artistic unions) for what was
called social parasitism or other ideological reasons. is process of political
relaxation started in the cities and then expanded into the provinces.
Alternative artistic associations began to form in Moscow and other USSR
cities in the 1980s; some of them, su as the famous studio on Furmanny
Lane in Moscow, were organized in the form of conventional art squats.
Among those who lived and worked in the studios were artists in various
media, including photography.

Photography. Installation. Experiment

e first installations based on photography were made underground in the

1980s. In the 1990s, they took over numerous exhibition venues in Moscow
and other cities, as well as abroad. In this contemporary visual art form,
photography reveals itself in all its diversity, creates new contexts and
anges its meaning consistent with the way of presentation. Photography
appears in aritectural and landscape objects created by Maria
Serebriakova: images printed on transparent media emerge through the
geometry of form. Photography is the medium selected by Olga
Chernysheva to create heroes of her amber performances. Photography is
a paern forming the collages by Andrey Bezukladnikov and Ilya Piganov.
Photography obtained a special position in the three-dimensional
aritectural space of exhibitions thanks to the work of Vladimir
Kupriyanov. He created objects in whi photography was the central
semantic part and at the same time an artwork inside an artwork, a
traditional photographic print inside an installation, a form of contemporary
art.
Kupriyanov’s 1991 installation Cast Me Not Away From Thy Presence . . .
was emblematic of anges. It consists of seven human-sized upright
sections, ea with a fragment of a group photograph showing workers of a
nameless shop at a nameless plant in the town of N. Ea fragment partly
eoes the neighboring one as if overlapping. Under these seemingly giant—
although photographed without angle distortions—figures of workers in
overalls, there are seven text fragments. e fragmented inscription quotes
Psalm 51 (Psalm 50 in Russian due to variance in numbering). In 1990, this
work was perceived as a depicted act of personal withdrawal from
“collective body”: ea part of the work emphasizes /spotlights one of the
people from the group portrait. e text is fragmented so that single
syllables are duplicated and acquire weight as if spoken by multiple voices.
e work by Kupriyanov drew aention to a “lile man” who found his
voice and—through the words of the psalm—hesitantly addressed the
Universe rather than immediate issues.
Valera and Natasha Cherkashin created “total photographic installations,”
whi represent a completely different form of work with photography.
Using crumpled newspapers and painted photographs printed on thin paper,
they literally produce carnival theater sets. eir installations—though for an
hour only, as at a real carnival—remove all stereotypes, granting liberty to
the viewer as in ildhood. e Cherkashins staged their interventions in the
lobby of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses—the citadel of Communism in
the Kremlin—as well as in museums and libraries. Wrapped in these
decorations, the viewer was immersed in the festive atmosphere of parting
from the bygone Soviet era, witnessed by the silhouees of Stalin
aritecture and faceless crowds on the bleaed photographs.
 Photography and Alternative Fashion

In the 1980s, alternative fashion became a significant part of cultural life in

Moscow, Leningrad, and the cities of the Baltic republics. e new
generation of fashion designers and artists expressed themselves in
constructing extraordinary garments, oen futuristic in intention; they
created the phenomenon known in the culture of that time as “alternative.”
e boundaries of the alternative were blurred. On the one hand, it referred
to high-end fashion created both by professional couturiers (young Valentin
Yudashkin and Tatyana Parfionova) and artists (like the self-educated
performance artist Alexander Petlura). On the other hand, alternative street
fashion was osen by young people as a way of self-expression to
remonstrate against depersonalization in the Soviet socialist society. Fashion
as performance, as a dedication to Russian avant-garde, and as catwalk
presentations of alternative looks were photographed by Sergey Borisov and
Andrey Bezukladnikov. Street fashion was embodied in photographs by Igor
Mukhin; portraits of fellow artists whose appearance expressed their mood
and self-identification were made by Stas Klevak (Figure 2.2). e laer
included new elements in his images when printing: he experimented with
textures, multiplication, and various toning teniques. Ilya Piganov
introduced fashion heroes of his photographs into a new object world; he
created “rugs” woven from images, panels in whi photographs were pieces
of a jigsaw puzzle; his photographs also turned into jewelry art objects.
Figure 2.2 Stas Klevak, from the series Walk of the Black Dog, 1994, Silver print. Courtesy of the
artist’s family, Moscow.

Figure 2.3 Sergey Vasiliev, In Russian Banya [sauna], 1981, Silver print. Courtesy of RUSS PRESS
PHOTO cultural project, Moscow & Sergey Vasiliev, Chelyabinsk.

150 Years of Photography in Russia

In 1989, the world celebrated the one hundred and fiieth anniversary of
photography; the exhibition entitled 150 Years of Photography was organized
in Moscow by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR and took place in the
Manege State Central Exhibition Hall. However, no catalog was published. If
it had not been for the people—professional photographers—the plans
adopted by the bureaucratic system to commemorate this anniversary would
not have resulted in su a massive event.3 However, in 1989, not only the
formal qualities of photographs and demonstration of work by unknown
authors but also the acceptability of most subjects in terms of ideology were
hotly disputed by the selection commiee of the contemporary section.
Eventually, despite the confrontation with a group of censors who made a
list of over 100 works to be removed from the exhibition hall, the show
opened to the public in full, with about 2,500 exhibits. at struggle with the
censors was not in vain and for the first time in the USSR, a photography
exhibition stood up to the official ideology maine. is was a sign of
anges, and new opportunities to make and show photography that was out
of line with Communist ideology.
150 Years of Photography in Manege introduced the public to the history
of Russian photography; it was then that many forgoen and even forbidden
names were retrieved. e exhibition sparked the interest of foreign
researers and institutions, provoked the aention and discussion of the
Russian audience and industry professionals, and encouraged the creation of
new photography collections in the country.

Emerging Photography from the USSR and Russia: Say Cheese!

and Other Exhibitions

e second half of the 1980s was marked by the growing international

interest in the younger generation of art photographers from Moscow and
Leningrad. is period brought “a breath of freedom” and encouraged young
talented photographers to express their artistic urges through tenical
media. e generation of photographers that emerged at the turn of the
1980s and 1990s can be still considered the brightest in terms of the strength
and variety of experiments in the history of Russian photography in the
twentieth century.4
e interest in Russian photography was to some extent based on the
interest in the country being in the process of transformation, and
photography was one the most evident records of lifestyle and anges
underway in Russia. On the other hand, photography was already
recognized by Western art historians as a contemporary art type and gained
the aention of gallery-owners and collectors from abroad. e coincidence
of these two circumstances—increased aention to Russia and recognition of
photography as art in its own right—laid the foundation for the success of
Russian art photography on the world stage: photography from Russia was
in strong demand at the famous first sale by Sotheby’s of contemporary
Russian art in Moscow, in 1988. Another case in point was the success of Say
Cheese! New Soviet Photography, an exhibition and catalog curated by
Viktor Misiano in European countries in 1988–1989. Say Cheese! was one of
the first examples of foreign financial support to art exhibitions in Russia.
When the country was going through difficult times, foreign foundations
and individuals supported Russian culture.
In the 1990s, Russian photography experienced a period of successful
personal development and striking private initiatives. Individual creative
and career growth of contemporary photographers supported by Russian
and foreign curators and art critics was brought to the forefront; what is
more, the standing of curators and critics in the international professional
environment was mu more important than their membership in this or
that institution.

Fine Art Print

In the context of photography galleries, “fine art print” is not so mu the
anowledgment of the inheritance of modern art photography from
pictorialism, as the recognition of photography’s unique nature, its peculiar
form of existence.
Although the Russian photography market is still in its infancy, one can
already say that the world practice of recognition of fine art printing as an
important aspect of art photography has found appreciation. Here are only a
few key names of the fine art print movement in the Russian photography
scene of the 1990s: Nikolay Kulebyakin, Igor Kultyshkin, and Vadim
Gushin in Moscow; Boris Smelov, Valentin Samarine-Till; Alexey
Titarenko, Alexander Kitaev, Evgeny Mokhorev in St. Petersburg.
e St. Petersburg bran of this photographic movement seems uniform
and recognizable in terms of style only on first glance. At the beginning of
their artistic path in the late 1980s to early 1990s, all these authors used
analog photography and gelatin silver-bromide print. However, as they
experimented further, they came to a parting of the ways. Alexey Titarenko
became known for long-exposure photographs and so-called “wet printing”
(i.e. printing on wet paper, where the effect resembles a wet-on-wet
watercolor painting, with tonal layers blending and contours becoming less
sharp). Alexander Kitaev is famous for toning large gelatin silver prints, and
Evgeny Mokhorev for creating tonally accurate anastigmatic images, sharp
from shooting through printing. Despite the differences in their styles, St.
Petersburg photographers may be called successors to the tradition of Boris
Smelov, an outstanding photographer and master of printing.

Conceptualism in Contemporary Art and Photography of the

1990s

Although the work by Russian conceptual photographers belongs to one of

the most popular and multifaceted movements of international post-
modernism, they build an intimate relation with national culture as a system
of concepts and codes, whi provides a source of inspiration and serves as a
reference frame for understanding their photography.
 One of the primary features of conceptualism is the focus on language
and autosemantic words, interpreted by an artist who shapes them to a
visual paradox. is movement of contemporary Russian art is represented
in photographic works by Olga Chernysheva (Figure 2.4). Her [Luk at this]
work is a play with transliteration and translation: the English word look
turns into [luk] whi sounds similar to the Russian word for “onion.” is
work, however, has another layer of a visual theater of the absurd typical of
conceptual art: onions are growing in boles on the window sill and the
Kremlin with onion domes is seen through the window. e artist creates an
audio-visual palimpsest in a concise photographic form.

Figure 2.4 Olga Chernysheva, Look at is, 1997, Silver print. (Look [luk] sounds like the Russian word
LUK (onion), the same word used to describe Russian ur domes, as in the Kremlin ures in the
window.) Courtesy of the artist, Moscow.

Andrey Chezhin and Sergey Chilikov, along with a number of other

artists who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, identify themselves as
photographers. ere are two centers of conceptual photography in Russia:
one located in St. Petersburg, the other in Cheboksary and Yoshkar-Ola.
ese last two are known as the capitals of the Volga Region Photography
Sool.
Andrey Chezhin carries on the traditions of Russian absurdist poetry of
the 1920s and 1930s that flourished in Leningrad (the former name of St.
Petersburg). Chezhin’s conceptual art is based on innumerable variations of
ideas and concepts taken by him as the rules of a game played in the world’s
art history field. One of his key projects—Knopka i Modernizm (A Drawing
Pin and Modernism)—is a fantasy about styles of great modernist painters
dealing with the image of a drawing pin. Chezhin ironically treats a pin in
its banality and mediocrity as similar to a cog in the Maine, whi could
be said of anyone in the Soviet state.
e conceptual photography of the Volga Region Sool is aracterized
by a series approa; staging of scenes/actions to the camera; double
disturbance of semantic connections (firstly, by the act of directing an
absurdist performance, and secondly, by the violation of composition laws
during shooting and printing); and intentional disregard of the quality of
prints. e last is also viewed as an act of bringing photography ba from
the fine art domain to the masses. e indisputable leader of this sool is
philosopher Sergey Chilikov. His doctrine was published as a book titled
Artseg: The Owner of a Thing or Ontology of Subjectiveness (1993). It has
become the basis for his multifigure paradoxical staged photography.

Entry of Photography into Museums

In the 1990s, many Russian state museums began to exhibit photographs for
the first time in their history and shaped the public perception of
photography as a cultural and artistic phenomenon. e State Russian
Museum in St. Petersburg was virtually the first museum in the perestroika
era that took the risk of exhibiting contemporary Russian photography. e
Photoarcheology exhibition (1993) was prepared by the curator and
photographer Dmitry Vilensky. Earlier, in 1989, the Pushkin State Museum
of Fine Arts presented a part of a large-scale project dedicated to Helmut
Newton:5 the exhibition of his art opened at three venues on the same day—
in the museum, the private Pervaya Galereya (e First Gallery), and the
editorial office of DI art magazine. By displaying photography, the Pushkin
State Museum of Fine Arts returned to its roots: in the 1930s, the Museum
hosted major all-Union photography exhibitions and presented collections of
some contemporary authors.
In the mid-1990s, regional museums in Samara, Kirov, Ivanovo, and
Yaroslavl worked to display temporary photo exhibitions. Over the next
decade, a few Russian museums worked with photography on a more
regular basis, including the Yekaterinburg Regional Studies Museum of
History and Nature (through its bran, the Metenkov House Museum of
Photography), and the Russian Museum of Photography in Nizhny
Novgorod.
e State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg only opened its doors in
the 2000s to photography of the twentieth century (among the most notable
events were an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, and a
retrospective of the classic of the Leningrad sool of fine art photography
Boris Smelov).

Festival Movement in Russia

e introduction of photography into Russian museums was to a large

extent promoted by national photo festivals. e festival movement in
Russia emerged in the 1980s in Yoshkar-Ola as a private cultural initiative of
Sergey Chilikov, a photographer, philosopher and prominent figure in the
Russian photography scene. Several other festivals came to life in Lithuania,
Latvia, and Ukraine; however, they were local and not connected to the
international photography scenes. InterPhoto, a professional festival of
photojournalism initiated in 1992 by the American photojournalist Lucien
Perkins, was hugely influential in Russia in the 1990s. e festival was held
annually until 2002 and its program included a competition for Russian
photographers, exhibitions, portfolio review, and workshops. InterPhoto was
the first festival in Russia with an international status and representation. In
the late 1990s, international photo festivals emerged in Nizhny Novgorod,
Novosibirsk, and other cities. roughout the 1990s and until 2007, the
Autumn Photomarathon Annual Festival was held in St. Petersburg as a
private initiative of photographers and philosophers of the city.
e first Moscow Photo Biennial took place in 1996. It is the best known
Russian photo event in the world, and it has been continuously directed by
Olga Sviblova. In 1997, the Moscow City Government founded the Moscow
House of Photography, also headed by Sviblova. In 2010, the MHP anged
its name to the Multimedia Art Museum.

Russian Photography of the 1990s and International Festivals

In 1989 (following the success of the Say Cheese! exhibition and a number of
publications on contemporary Russian art in European art magazines), the
film director Ivan Dykhoviny produced Krasnaya Seriya (The Red Series),
a film about Russian photography of the time. e film premiered at a
festival in Arles, France.
In the same year, the young Americans Peter Stevens and Miael
MacGregor arrived in Moscow. Initially, they hardly related to
contemporary art and photography. However, the vibrant artistic life there
forced them to plunge into their own vigorous artistic production. eir
collection and book, Manifest, were represented at numerous venues,
including FotoFest in Houston, USA, in 1992, and became one of the
landmark events in the history of world exhibitions of Russian photography.
Twenty years later, FotoFest again hosted an important exhibition on
Russian photography in the 1980s–2010s (Figures 2.2, 2.4; Color Plates 2, 3).

e Art of Contemporary Photography: Russia, Ukraine,

Belarus
New names and new movements continued to emerge, not only in the major
cultural cities Moscow and St. Petersburg but also in the provinces and
independent states forming around Russia. Only Russian participants in this
process were able to summarize the state of photography of the period. e
first to initiate and curate su a generalizing analytical project was Evgeny
Berezner. In 1994, the Central House of Artists opened The Art of
Contemporary Photography: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, an exhibition and
conference held under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Culture. It
was a conceptual selection of 70 authors representing various movements of
fine art and documentary photography. Photography was represented as an
independent field of contemporary art with its own language, poetics, and a
variety of teniques and methods. It was then that the first bilingual
catalog in Russia, featuring exhibitors’ work and biographies, was published.
e exhibition included a total of 693 works.

e 1990s—2000s: A New Language of Photography

e emergence of Russian photography in the late 1980s and early 1990s was
conditioned by the historical context of social and cultural anges in
Russia. Actual forms of Russian photo-reportage were guided by the
practices of foreign mass media; as was the case with other types of actual
art in Russia of that period, critical visual statements of new documentary
photographers and eccentric forms of new fine art photography addressed a
limited class of local intellectuals and foreign audience that was accustomed
to the plastic language of modernist and post-modernist art (see Color Plate
4). Moreover, speaking of Russia, one should remember that actual art, fine
art photography, and documentary photography were being developed in a
country whose society was living in various historical epos at the same
time. As a result, the position of photography in the Russian society of the
1990s was marginalized by the novelty forms of the visual image.
 e First Galleries

e first galleries of contemporary art and photography in Russia appeared

in 1989. eir activity started when the circle of consumers was extremely
narrow and the meaning of galleries boiled down to self-assertion by the
generation of art photographers who had enjoyed a cordial reception in
Arles in 1989 and found themselves on the verge of cultural isolation at
home. In this context it should be noted that 1991 saw the opening of the
first photography gallery in Moscow—Shkola (School), founded by Ilya
Piganov and headed by Irina Meglinskaya; following that, in 1997, Vladimir
Sumovsky and Alexey Rogov established the Russkoye Pole (Russian Field)
gallery of Russian documentary photography. Unfortunately, the lifespan of
both these initiatives was short.

Photography Magazines of the 1990s

In 1992, Sovetskoye FOTO (Soviet PHOTO) magazine was renamed Fotografia

(Photography); under this title it existed until 1997 when it was closed for
economic reasons.
From 1990 until 2000, the paper Retikulyatsiya (Reticulation) was
published in Cheboksary by the photographer Andrey Dobrynkin.
Fotomagazin (Photography Shop) magazine emerged in 1993 and also lasted
ten years. In 1996, the publisher Sergey Berezinsky from St. Petersburg
started the magazine Subyektiv (Subjective). It was published until 2003. e
Foto: Sibirsky Uspekh (Photo: Siberian Success) photography magazine was
published by Sergey Semenkov in Novosibirsk from 1997 till 2007. In 1996–
1998, the Moscow photographer Sergey Kasyanov published the Kamera
Obskura (Camera Obscura) magazine on fine art photography. In 1997,
Dmitry Kiyan launed the FOTO&video magazine, whi grew into the
industry-leading periodical. It was successfully published until 2016 and still
publishes online.
 In 1999, the first website on the history of and current trends in Russian
photography was launed in Moscow. e project was initiated and
permanently headed by Andrey Bezukladnikov, one of the members of the
Russian delegation in Arles in 1989.

Notes

1 During the twentieth century the city was renamed three times: beginning as St. Petersburg
from its foundation in 1703, in 1914, it was renamed Petrograd, in 1924 it was anged to
Leningrad and in 1991, ba to its original one.

2 us, in 1988 the Ogoniok (Little Flame) magazine published photographs by Dmitry
Vyshemirsky made in former Stalin labor camps (gulag), where criminals were held along
with political prisoners. Vyshemirsky photographed the labor camps in the Kolyma Peninsula
where fragments of camp life were preserved by eternal frost even thirty years aer Stalin’s
death. Many viewers were shoed, since these photographs, simple and straight, seemed
mu more convincing than words, in particular when the publication of previously concealed
documents implied that history had been systematically falsified.

3 roughout the preceding year, works for the exhibition were selected by a strong team of
professionals headed by Gennady Koposov (a well-known photojournalist and airman of the
Photography Department at the USSR Union of Journalists) and press photographer Mai
Nainkin (director of the exhibition); other members of the team were Evgeny Berezner and
Georgy Kolosov; the historical section was pied by the collector Mikhail Golosovsky and
staff of arives, museums, agencies, and libraries, including Elena Barkhatova, Tatiana
Saburova; the contemporary section of the exhibition was juried by eminent photographers of
the 1960s–1980s: Nikolai Rakhmanov, Valery Gende-Rote, Petr Nosov, Vsevolod Tarasevi,
Boris Zadvil, and the ief editor of Sovetskoye FOTO (Soviet PHOTO) Grigory Chudakov.
Evgeny Berezner built the collection of the contemporary section; and many authors were
included in the exhibition on the advice of the photographer Sergey Chilikov. 150 Years of

Photography was the first exhibition in Soviet history when so many photographs made before
the Revolution, including the earliest daguerreotypes, were brought before the public eye. e
Soviet audience first saw photographs from Russian family albums of tsars and their
 aendants, documents of military campaigns in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
centuries—works that had been stored in arives barely accessible even to researers. For the
first time since the 1930s, the exhibition included vintage constructivist prints, su as Pioneer
With a Horn by Alexander Rodenko; El Lissitzky’s photograms; works by pictorialists of the
1900s–1930s, su as Nikolay Andreev, Yuri Eremin, and their colleagues, former political
prisoners Alexander Grinberg and Vasily Ulitin. e official set of images of the Great Patriotic
War (as World War II is still called in Russia today), whi had been canonical since the 1950s,
was considerably expanded. e section of photography of the 1950s–1970s was supplemented
by amateur work representing Soviet photo clubs; the main official venue in Moscow exhibited
artists of the Lithuanian and Latvian sools recognized abroad but ignored by the central
Soviet press and publishing houses. For the first time in Moscow, the contemporary section of
the exhibition included work by numerous authors of the Volga Region Sool of Photography
—participants of the Analytical Biennial of Photography in Yoshkar-Ola, who had never before
engaged with official exhibition commiees. It was also the first large-scale all-Union
exhibition that featured the youngest Moscow artists united by Leonid Bazhanov in the
Hermitage Group, members of Anatoly Vasiliev’s eater and Continuous Experiences Group;

as well as Leningrad photographers representing various aesthetic groups.

4 e list of names, created works, collections of these works, and enthusiastic publications of
foreign professionals—there is every indication that in those years photography in Russia
experienced its renaissance despite the allenges of the time.

5 Before the Newton show the Museum hosted a Josef Sudek exhibition in 1985, but it was not so
widely covered by the international and national press.

References
Chilikov, Sergey: Artseg: The Owner of a Thing or Ontology of
Subjectiveness. Yoshkar-Ola /Cheboksary: AFIT–Vladikom, 1993.

Further Reading
Berezner, Evgeny & Vasily Tsygankov: Iskusstvo sovremennoi fotografii:
Rossiya, Ukraina, Belarus /Art of Contemporary Photography: Russia,
Ukraine, Belarus. Moscow: Autopan, 1994—e catalogue of the famous
exhibition of 70 key names of art photography of the 1980s and early
1990s; the first time articles appeared on different styles; and bios of the
contemporary photo-artists; Russian /English.
Berezner, Evgeny & Tina Sellhorn: Aufbruch: Die neue russisсhe
Fotografie. New York and London: Prestel, 1998—A selection of key
names of experimental Russian photo-artists in the time of perestroika;
English.
Dyogot, Ekaterina & Kathrin Beer: Contemporary Photographic Art from
Moscow. New York and London: Prestel, 1995—One of the most widely
covered projects on Russian photography abroad in the 1990s; English
/German.
Escola, Taneli & Hannu Eerikainen: Toisinnakijat /Seeing Different.
Helsinki: KIASMA Publishing, 1988—e first publication of
underground (unofficial) Leningrad photography in the time of
perestroika; English /Finnish.
Lavrentiev, Alexander, editor, and Christopher Ursii, Joseph Walker, etc.:
Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR. New York:
Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1991—is book “discovered” perestroika
Soviet photography for international audiences; English.
Miziano, Victor: Say Cheese! Soviet Photography 1968–1988. Paris: Editions
du Comptoir de la Photographie, 1988—e exhibition catalogue of one
of the first group exhibitions of perestroika Soviet photography abroad;
English /Fren /Russian.
Morozov, Sergey: Tvorcheskaya fotografia /Creative Photography. Moscow:
Planeta Publishing, 1986—e 150 years of the history of Russian
photography in the context of the world history of photography;
Russian.
Moynahan, Brian: The Russian Century. A Photojournalistic History of
Russia in the Twentieth Century. London: Chao & Windus, 1994—e
 most complete visual history of the Russian state from a foreign point of
view; English.
Mrazkova, Daniela & Victor Remes: Another Russia. London: ames &
Hudson, 1986—Wrien by famous Cze historians and art critics; a
classical review of Russian unofficial photography of perestroika;
English.
Neumaier, Diane, editor: Beyond Memory. Soviet Nonconformist
Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art. New Jersey: e Jane
Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2004—A
selection of interviews with photo and visual arts activists of the 1970s to
the 2000s; several critical studies; English.
Prudnikov, Vasily, editor: Grand-Prix a-la Russe: Photographs of Russian and
Soviet Winners of World Press Photo 1955–2010. Amsterdam: Silt
Publishing, 2013—A catalog of internationally recognized examples of
Soviet and post-Soviet photojournalism from Russia; English.
Rybinsky, Y ury: Photoestafeta, ot Rodchenko do nashikh dney /Photorelay,
from Rodchenko to Our Time. Catalogue of the Museum of Photographic
Collections. Moscow: Moscow House of Photography Publishing, 2006—
Catalogue of the unofficial museum of perestroika photography; Russian
/English.
Sviblova, Olga & Alexey Tarkhanov: SSSR. 1917–1991. Istoria v fotografiakh
/The USSR. 1917–1991: History in Photographs. Moscow: Moscow House
of Photography Publishing, 1998—e most complete visual history of
the Russian state from the Russian point of view; Russian /English.
Watriss, Wendy & Evgeny Berezner, Irina Chmyreva, Natalia Tarasova:
Contemporary Russian Photography. Catalogue of FotoFest 2012,
Houston. Amsterdam: Silt Publishing, 2012—e most complete
catalogue of Russian photography from the late 1950s up to 2012,
including 189 artists with bios and examples of their art; English.
 2.5 e Representation of Landscape in
Contemporary Chinese Photography
Yining He

Introduction

As an important topic in the history of Chinese culture, the landscape has

always been the primary subject of Chinese culture since ancient times.
From gardens to painting and calligraphy, from Feng Shui to novels, Chinese
views on landscape have been constantly evolving in the context of cultural
history, as expressions of the literati’s personality in the transition between
the Tang and Song Dynasties, and further becoming a symbol of Chinese
culture in the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties (Xin, 2015: 3).
e history of Chinese landscape photography can be traced ba to the
late nineteenth century. At that time Tung Hing, a Hong Kong photographer,
went to Wuyi Mountain and took photographs of mountains and rivers,
bridges and trees, temples and monasteries. Claire Roberts says, “while the
views were most probably the result of an expatriate commission, the
locations and captioning suggest an appreciation of the landscape from a
Chinese cultural perspective” (Roberts, 2013: 45).
Early Chinese photographers used a contemporary medium and an
aesthetic informed by Chinese literati history to create authentic
photographs, whi reaed their peak in the 1920s and 1930s. However,
only recently did landscape as a genre emerge again aer many years of
modern transition. As the object to be observed and interpreted, the
landscape theme of Chinese contemporary photography integrates with
Western conceptual art and various practical forms, showing its unique
appeal through its adoption of Chinese traditional culture.
In the past decade, from the Chinese coastline to the Yangtze River, from
national highways to the Great Wall, those natural or artificial landscapes
closely related to power, memory and identity have become the focus
represented through photographs by Chinese photographers and artists. In
addition, this theme has aracted the aention of art museums,
photography art fairs and galleries in China and abroad, resulting in three
major photography exhibitions: Open Frame: New Landscape Photography
from China presented by Singapore Yavuz Fine Art Gallery, and
CHINESCAPE at Times Museum, both in 2010; and Towards the Social
Landscape at the Lianzhou International Photo Festival in 2011.
e inaugural photography exhibition, Open Frame, was a large-scale
landscape photography exhibition featuring 43 works that reflected life and
social anges in contemporary China: “e artists included in Open Frame,
though at varying stages of their respective careers, all use facets of the
landscape—real, imagined, urban, industrial, pastoral, heavenly or watery—
to reveal China today” (Lenzi, 2010).
Meanwhile on the mainland, all six Chinese photographers included in
CHINESCAPE employed traditional large-format cameras. eir ritualistic
approa, and objective and calm gaze, together with the accentuated sense
of distance, have subtly illustrated that the CHINESCAPE is undergoing
great anges. In this show, the concept of landscape photography was
deconstructed against the different contexts and extended for new meanings
on various dimensions. However, the primary issue of the exhibition was not
about aesthetics and expression, but indicative of Jean Baudrillard’s
“hyperreality” and Guy-Ernest Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle,”
according to the exhibition curator (Han, 2010).
It should be noticed that some related comments and critical articles have
been published by individual or institutional platforms in recent years, but
systematic studies on Chinese landscape photography are laing. In other
words, landscape photography has not been taken as a primary subject to be
studied in academic circles.
is article will present some methods and methodology of contemporary
Chinese landscape photography. It will introduce and analyze how
landscape is observed and interpreted by the artists, and how it is connected
with the fast-anging reality in China. Of course, I will not try to
intentionally distinguish “styles” but will limit myself to summarizing the
most popular trends in the past five years. Next, I will compare Chinese and
Western landscape traditions, and investigate the different aracteristics in
landscape as a subject in both Chinese and Western photography. Finally, I
will discuss problems existing in the practice of contemporary Chinese
landscape photography and their causes.

Perspectives on the Visual Representative of Landscape

In terms of the method of photographic practice and the aesthetic paradigm

of expression, the subject of landscape in Chinese photography has been
interpreted in several ways.
In the late 1990s, Chinese conceptual photographers began to look for
inspiration from Chinese classical paintings and traditional philosophy,
trying to widely apply traditional culture and its symbols into conceptual
photography. Yao Lu and Yang Yongliang have been developing ideas from
the contradictions of real life, by cleverly combining Chinese traditional
landscape artistic conception with the circumstance of reality using digital
photographic tenology to explore and introspect the deep culture and
reality of their homeland.
Yao Lu pis the blue and green landscapes of Chinese traditional
paintings as carrier and symbol, and mixes those elements with the
construction waste seen everywhere in our daily life, creating a visual
illusion of poetic intention. e resulting images are full of conflicts between
the idyllic traditional visualization and the present reality carrying out
large-scale construction, generating the tension between traditional culture
and modernizing processes, and conveying a criticism on the modern
landscape fueled by capitalism. In Yao Lu’s opinion,
ere is a kind of artistic conception with pure beauty and poetry in Chinese traditional painting,
while the waste implying a destructive metaphor originates from once good things. rough the
visual expression, the ever-existing beauty is restored to its current appearance. It is seemingly
appreciated but in fact depreciated, being a sort of remembrance.
(Lu, 2008)
 Chinese new media artist Yang Yongliang was trained in Chinese painting
and calligraphy from a very young age but uses digital tools to capture time-
tested aesthetics. Permeated by Chinese traditional culture, his cuing-edge
creative process uses new teniques and soware to interpret older forms,
like Chinese landscape paintings. On his “canvas,” Yang applies the
customary teniques dealing with bla and white and harmonizes those
with brilliant color expressions to interpret the well-known ancient Chinese
story “e Pea Blossom Spring.” Seen from a distance, these vivid arm
rolls of Chinese traditional mountains-and-waters paintings are composed
from skyscrapers and debris from city dismantlement, implying the
connections between beauty and ugliness, illusion and reality. e works of
Yao Lu and Yang Yongliang are not only exhibited in art museums,
photography art fairs and art centers all over the world, but have also
aieved huge success in the art market.
Figure 2.5 Zhang Jin, e Circle of Change, from the series Another Season, 2011.

In spite of the fact that Western curators, critics and photography dealers
are seemingly obsessed with manipulated or sharply contrasted landscape
photographs, photographers su as Zhang Jin and Taca Sui—frequently
called “Chinese Aesthetics”—take different approaes in their photography
practice. Instead of creating sharply contrasted urban landscapes, they both
trekked to remote places in China and created series of landscape
photographs infused with the pleasure of imagination.
Zhang Jin is a freelance photographer based in Chengdu. In 2012, he was
awarded the most prestigious photography award in China, initiated by
ree Shadows Photography Center, whi aracted approximately 358
candidates that year. From 2010 to 2013, he traveled along the eastern
section of the ancient Silk Road from Xi’an to Yangguan. Whilst he was
there, he positioned himself inside the landscapes he imagined and shot a
series entitled Another Season. As he mentioned at the beginning of his
statement: “it’s the road of Buddhism coming to China, where I find my
enthusiasm for the grand desert. Moreover, it has my encounter with the
unknown landscape” (Zhang, 2012).
Figure 2.6 Zhang Jin, Entrance, from the series Another Season, 2010.

Taca Sui is another key figure of this movement; his previous photo series,
Odes, is a culmination of seven small projects inspired by the Book of Odes
(Shi Jing)—the oldest Chinese book of songs, poems and hymns. He spent
almost three years following an itinerary based on places named in the book
and visited them one aer another to take thousands of photographs. As the
artist said: “during the shoot, it was almost as if my emotion and artistic
direction were under the influence of some unknown force” (Sui, 2012).
Figure 2.7 Taca Sui, Dust, from Odes of Ya and Song, 2012.

Although they both have experiences of studying aboard, Zhang Jin and
Taca Sui’s works are adaptations of Chinese philosophical and aesthetic
concepts, especially through a dialogue with different kinds of
representations found in various Chinese poems and paintings. In an artist
statement published on Zhang Jin’s personal website, he says,
ere are traces from the ancient civilization, and the most important is an exploration for a seer.
ere are also natural creatures, whi persistently and simply exist everywhere regardless of the
dynasty or nation anges over time, with the primitive strength born from basic instinct.
(Zhang, 2012)
Figure 2.8 Taca Sui, Goddess in the River, from Odes of Zhou and Shao Nan, 2010.

Both Zhang Jin and Taca Sui’s photographs indicate a trend to resist the
manipulation of digital tenology. With a so contrast between landscapes
and the pale ground, they evoke the aesthetic of Chinese traditional brush-
and-ink painting by using traditional bla and white photography. e
formal austerity and timeless subject maer of their work set them apart
from the great majority of their contemporaries, relating Zhang Jin and Taca
Sui to the earlier masters of the medium rather than to current practitioners
of manipulated photography.
Following the same “on the road approa,” many Chinese photographers
take Western contemporary landscape photography as a reference, especially
the New Topographics who originated in the 1970s. Most of the artists in the
seminal show New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape,
curated by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in 1975, were
using a method similar to mapping the terrain, and turned their lens
towards the absurd and ugly urban landscapes of modern America. Shooting
from an objective perspective with large-format cameras, they created a
series of images for expressionless ordinary buildings and structures.
Influenced by the New Topographics, more and more Chinese
documentary photographers have joined the ranks of shooting the modern
social landscapes in China, from Luo Dan’s 318 National Highway to Zhang
Xiao’s Coastline, from Zhang Keun’s Yellow River to Zhang Wei’s Grand
Canal, and so on. Most of those photographers work for Chinese newspapers
and magazines. ey usually take a geographic region as the narrative
thread, su as the central area of Chinese culture—the Yellow River and
Yangtze River basin—or the landscapes of public infrastructure—canal and
levee projects, roads and transportation networks. en they grab their
cameras and set off on a road trip to document the alienated and absurd
scenes representative of modernization and reform in China.
Zeng Han is one of the first Chinese photographers who shot different
projects in the objective photographic language of social landscape. As
China’s urbanization sped up at the beginning of this century, in 2004 he
consciously paid aention to the subjects of theme parks and massive
construction projects like the ree Gorges Reservoir and the Qinghai-Tibet
Railway, as well as the artificial social landscapes that emerged in the
process of urbanization across China. Zhang Xiao began his series The
Coastline in 2009 aer quiing his job at the Chongqing Morning Post. He
was drawn to the ocean, driven to snap his shuer when confronted with
scenes of ange. “e coastline is the frontier of China’s reform,” he says,
“but also the first zone of impact from external culture and rapid economic
development” (Tanner, 2012). China has a very long coastline, streting
from the mouth of Yalu River in Liaoning province in the north to the
mouth of the Beilun River in Guangxi province in the south. In total, it is a
continuous 18,000 kilometers. ere have been great anges happening
every day in China since it began opening up 30 years ago. e cities are like
big construction sites speeding up their pace to cat up with the rest of the
world. All of this is particularly remarkable in China’s coastal areas.
 Meanwhile, Chengdu-based photographer Zhang Keun spent two years
photographing the banks of the Yellow River. He traveled on a fold-up
bicycle, following the river’s silted water from the coastal flats of Shandong,
heading west to the mountains of Qinghai. He usually took a journey for a
month at a time, lugging a large-format Linhof camera, a tripod and just
enough film with him. e emotion that lies within ea photograph gives
one a feeling of sympathy for the devastating floods and further destruction
that is happening in China. His oice of colors shows the oen-suppressed
news of how quily the river is rising and how it affects areas whi are
home to many people. Although the message is somewhat depressing, the
photos possess a hopeful quality: one that the strong nation will prevail. On
explaining the inspiration of the project, he said:
I was determined to go and follow its pace, with all my courage and only presentable equipment—
a large-format camera. at is the silent solemnity I can express. I have recognized that mountains
and rivers are nothing a photographer may properly comment on, and behaviors like growling,
making a bold pledge or a plaintive complaint on the presence of su an invariable being may
look inappropriate. Now, it’s the moment that I must wake up my silent soul to quietly keep wat
on it rolling for seasons, to stare at it through this journey, to drink a toast to it and sing a song,
and to have a sleep beside it.
(Landscape Stories, 2012)

e crowded coastline of Zhang Xiao and the peaceful Yellow River of

Zhang Keun both reflect the absurd scenes of China’s modernization
process, and have aracted the aention of the Western photography world
with their international visual language and style. ey have become
regulars at Western photography art fairs and award ceremonies, as well as
the most noticeable paradigm in Chinese contemporary photography, being
pursued and imitated by more and more photographers.
Almost at the same time, other artists su as Cheng Xinhao and Yan
Wang Preston shied their focus to the relationship between man and earth.
Keeping questions in their mind, they have conducted long-term
investigations, applying the knowledge of land surveying and cartography
into the practice of landscape photography, whi could be considered as the
exploration and examination of the methodology. Cheng Xinhao’s The
Naming of a River is based on the Map of Six Rivers of Yunan made by an
official in the Qing Dynasty. e production used geographical perspective
to take pictures for the landscape along 100 kilometers of the Panlong River,
and tried to use the “extended case study method” in anthropology to
propose a new way of observing time and space.
Similarly, Mother River is a four-year photographic project designed and
completed by the British-Chinese photographer Yan Wang Preston. e
project follows a simple “Point System” to photograph one of China’s
Mother Rivers, the Yangtze, with a precise interval of every 100 kilometers.
e Point System means that the locations are not subjectively selected by
the artist, but follow an objective system. Yan hopes this will demystify the
magical Mother River, to explore in-depth what this mighty waterway might
be. She has journeyed to frozen mountain glaciers, through dense forests and
deep gorges, and witnessed huge redevelopments along the banks of the
Yangtze.

From Chinese Cultural Roots

In China, many practitioners have osen the themes and expressive forms
of Western contemporary landscape photography; however, the artistic
conception of Chinese traditional landscape photography is still an
important issue in contemporary photographic practice. e following
section will explore the features of mountains and river landscape in
Chinese contemporary photography by briefly comparing different concepts
of landscape in the context of Chinese and Western culture.
In Chinese cultural history, amongst the oldest and riest of all human
civilizations, landscape figures prominently, and has long been considered
the highest form of Chinese painting. First of all, there are differences in
subject maer in Western and Chinese landscape art. Western landscape as
a genre in art began to emerge at the end of the fieenth century, covering a
variety of subjects. According to Eleanor Consten, “the Chinese landscape is
a representation of the universe and the spirit that creates and preserves it;
both are timeless and boundless” (Consten, 1942). Shanshui (mountains and
rivers), the symbol of timelessness and the intangible in Chinese culture, has
been the perennial theme of Chinese landscape art since the ninth century.
As previously described, many artists including Yao Lu, Yang Yongliang,
Zhang Jin and Taca Sui have osen the imagery of shanshui landscape to
express the connections between landscape and themselves and society.
Meanwhile, Lin Shu, a young photographer based in Beijing, was
fascinated by the work of ancient painter and philosopher Shitao. Over the
years, he has taken on the allenge of producing works on Chinese
mountains, including Huangshan, Mount Emei and many others, showing
how aesthetics and literal morality in Chinese shanshui paintings play their
parts in the process of his work.

Figure 2.9 Chen Xiaoyi, Cold Mountain, from the series Koan, 2014.

One of the most prominent features of Chinese photography is the

response to traditional Chinese philosophy and literati spirit, whi makes it
significantly different from Western practice. Over the centuries, the
traditional principles of Confucianism and Taoism have played a crucial role
in the practice of Chinese classical literature and traditional painting (Cahill,
1972: 25). As Miael Sullivan has put it: “Celebrated in ink for millennia,
the landscape in Chinese art embodies key philosophical and spiritual ideas
unmated by the Western canon’s descriptive approa to nature”
(Sullivan, 1973: 113). In short, traditional landscape art in China is not
devoted to nature, but to the artist’s response to nature, while representation
in Western landscape offers opportunities for extended contemplation of
scenes and scenarios (Wells, 2011). Influenced by Zen Buddhism,
photographer Chen Xiaoyi named her latest series Koan, and selected
abstract landscape photographs to conduct a photo-eting process; the
results of this cra are poetic and full of imagination. Using only bla ink
and printing on different Japanese papers, the color is derived from the
atmosphere of desolation and melanoly and the expression of minimalism
in ancient Chinese poetry and monoromatic ink painting.

Figure 2.10 Chen Xiaoyi, Seeds, from the series Koan, 2014.
 Finally, in order to visualize creative ideas, Chinese and Western artists
use different methods of artistic expression. e different ways of seeing
landscape lead to different results in artistic practice. For example, linear
perspective has become the means of constructing representation central to
the aesthetics of Western landscape since Mediaeval times, while
“perspective would only spoil the scope of a Chinese landscape; a centralized
composition would stop the spirit in its voyage” (Consten, 1942).
Nevertheless, the middle format, together with the loose contrast between
the so focus and pale grounds in Taca Sui’s photographs, evokes the
aesthetics of Chinese shanshui painting. Also, in terms of narrative, looking
at photographs from Another Season, viewers can enter and travel through
ea part of the picture, going from one to the other, without worrying
about the la of a uniform viewpoint.

When Chinese Landscape Encounters Absurd Scene

e landscape imagery of Chinese traditional culture is different from the

concept of Western contemporary landscape, therefore it is very difficult to
find exact words to distinguish the genres of landscape photography with
various aracteristics in the Chinese context. To distinguish contemporary
and traditional landscape photography, Cai Meng, Ph.D. in Chinese art
history, and the curator of the photography department of the CAFA Art
Museum, first translated the phrase “landscape” in the context of Western
contemporary photography into the “photography of spectacle” in 2009. He
defined the photography of spectacle as a special transitional phenomenon
in Chinese contemporary photography. It refers to a genre of photography
taking “artificial landscape” as subject, being guided by the calm, rational,
relatively objective ways of seeing.
Since the photography of spectacle regarded as a paradigm is more and
more frequently shown at photography art fairs and overspread in the news
media, young photographers—like migrating birds—flo towards the
photography of spectacle. It is globally popular, huge in size, and widely
favored. On the one hand, it adheres to the objectivity of documentary
photography; on the other hand, it is easily accepted by the art world under
the banner of conceptual photography.
In terms of content, photographers again and again reduplicate the focus
originating in American New Topographics photographers, whi is to
allenge the value system of the true, the good and the beautiful described
by modernism. Degraded American landscapes, suburban slums,
development zones resulting from urban sprawl—all of these subjects are the
concern of photographers, as well as the focus of irony.
Today, as the curtain of reform and opening has been lied for 30 years,
the urbanization and industrialization of China is in full swing,
accompanied by the collapse of faith, disorder of value systems, conflicts of
interests, polarization of wealth, social apathy, rash impatience and so on.
ese problems are all too common. In terms of bizarreness and absurdity,
there is no other country with whi one could compare today’s China.
Against su a baground, Chinese photographers apply the American
paradigm, using images of alienation to express their sentimentality about
modernization in China.
In the eyes of more and more photographers, taking a journey, usually
along a route with exact starting and ending points, su as along national
highways, rivers or man-made public landscapes, will experience a “boring”
tour (the landscapes seen are actually very different) in reality with
“passion” (in the expectation of being able to cat good enough images).
ey mimic the specific sema of spectacle photography, extracting useful
things on the tour and then editing those expressionless single pictures
without narrative continuity into a series of extended sequences. In the
context of su a spectacle, the natural visual effects make the production of
images more reliable, and photographers become full of confidence and a
sense of security. In addition, the alienation of those images from daily life
in big cities containing a lot of uncertain metaphors enries the
interpretation, fascinating photographers themselves.
In an article titled “e Reality and Unreality of Spectacle Photography,”
critic Zhan Bin observed:
 Contemporary photographers basically are not on the road of crasman or exploring visual rules,
whi are the products of a ri and stable society. Besides, the exploration of art form rules has
become cramped in a limited space, the whole concept of contemporary art is trying to stimulate
ideas and reflect the reality. us, the works of spectacle photography present a wealth of personal
expression, and they are not from self-consistent efforts of art, but fall in the situation of the “Lens
is a way of seeing reality, photography is a way of connecting us with reality”.
(Bin, 2015)

Conclusion

e concept of “landscape” is ri and plural, rendering its meaning in a

constant state of flux. As an object in artistic creations, “landscape” has
never failed to inspire and contribute to boundless materials and
imagination in the realm of Chinese and Western art. As artists carry out the
practices of photography, landscape possesses a significant organization
mode resulting from the interaction between given external and internal
factors, whi shows complex relations between artists and the world, the
landscape and the artists.
Influenced by contemporary landscape photography from the West,
especially New Topographics, landscape has gradually become an
indispensable subject in contemporary Chinese photography. From the
coastline to the Yangtze River, from national highways to the Great Wall,
those natural/artificial landscapes closely related to power, memory and
identity have always been a focus represented through photography by
Chinese artists.
Meanwhile, the cultural difference between Chinese and Western
landscape art, on the contrary, proves to be a catalyst in promoting
creativity and thinking about photographic practice and resear on the
theme of landscape. In Chinese culture, the art of shanshui represents the
interactions between the universe and all living things, and along with
Chinese traditional philosophy and spiritual thoughts has exerted a
sometimes imperceptible yet profound influence on some of the works by
young photographers.
 However, there are also many factors leaving the future of Chinese
landscape photography in doubt. In addition to photographers’ blind
following of trends, academia should reflect on the la of resear on
landscape photography. Nowadays, Chinese photographers should jump out
of the debate on the definitions of landscape/spectacle/topographic, to
discuss the cultural value of landscape photography as a genre of art
creation from a broader perspective. Moreover, photographers need to
proceed more from their own observation and interests, looking for the
diversification of expression related closely to the society, applying multiple
and interdisciplinary resear methods to expand the depth and breadth of
landscape photography.

References

Bin, Z. (2015) e Reality and Unreality of Landscape Photography

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 3
Useful Photography
 3.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

When anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put together his collection of

fieldwork photographs from the Amazon region, many years aer they were
taken, he was le with the impression of a void, a la of something the lens
is inherently unable to capture (Lévi-Strauss and Modelski, 1995). Craig
Campbell interprets this as a “binding condition” of photography itself: For
him, photographs, no maer how real or convincingly true they might seem,
“always fail” (1996: 58). In fact, Lévi-Strauss found the smell of his old
journals more apt to trigger his (affective) memory, and to bring him ba to
the savannas and forests of Central Brazil, inseparably bound with other smells – human, animal
or vegetable – as well as sounds and colors. For as faint as it now is, this odor – whi for me is a
perfume – is the thing itself, still a real part of what I have experienced.
(Lévi-Strauss and Modelski, 1995: 9)

Lévi-Strauss’s surprise when confronted with the failure of photographs to

have a mnemonic effect (while other sensory inputs make him remember
himself as a witness, as co-present with the artifact itself at a given time and
place) can be easily replicated by looking at family albums: “What? Did I
seriously have that haircut?”; “Who is the man beside aunt Mary?”, “Where
was this taken?”, etc.
Many of the key arguments for the usefulness of photography have been
dismantled by post-modern thinking; for instance, the idea of photography
as a truthful, objective and disinterested medium. e advent of digital
image manipulation has accelerated this process immensely, as it seems
easier to understand the manipulative power of Photoshop than other tris
the camera can play on us. e fundamental factor is, of course, the context
in whi an image is viewed. e history of misidentifications in photo
lineups and police portraiture is a good example for this argumentation
(Delgado, 2017).
Of course, retouing and cropping has always been an integral part of
image production. It also appears, in the form of cuing and tearing, in the
realm of family albums. I remember that my grandmother had to make use
of her scissors to remove ildren who made indecent faces or gestures on
the family photographs, whi of course made it all the more interesting to
do them. Choosing the right photographs, while throwing away those “gone
wrong” is another editing effect, whi can be incredibly useful, in the
creation of our family-image, and our (public) self-image.
Finally, photography can be used to ange the world. Despite all
warnings that a photograph is not a transcendental index of truth, but a
subjective interpretation of it, we still want to believe that what we see in an
image is true, and thus can be moved, made conscious and even called for
action. A well-known example is Napalm Girl, the picture by Associated
Press photographer Ni Ut, showing a badly burned young girl running
naked amid other fleeing villagers. Once the image made it to the newsroom,
John Morris had to convince his fellow New York Times editors to consider
the photo for publication because of the nudity issue, but eventually they
approved a cropped version. When he saw the image on the front page of
the New York Times on June 11, 1972, President Nixon apparently wondered,
“if that was fixed”—by whi he meant “manipulated” (World Press Photo,
2017). Other interesting details: e photographer, born as Huỳnh Công Út
in Vietnam, began to take photographs for the Associated Press when he
was 16, just aer his older brother, another AP photographer, was killed.
Aer snapping the photograph, Ut took the girl—called Phan i Kim Phuc
—to a hospital in Saigon, where she had numerous surgical procedures
including skin gras, before she was able to return home. Phuc was removed
from her university as a young adult studying medicine and used as a
propaganda symbol by the communist government of Vietnam. Later, she
was granted permission to continue her studies in Cuba, where she met her
future fiancé, another Vietnamese student. On the way to their honeymoon
in Moscow, they le the plane during a refueling stop in Gander,
Newfoundland, and asked for political asylum in Canada, where they now
live. But it’s not over yet: On September 9, 2016, Norway’s largest
newspaper published an open leer to Mark Zuerberg aer Facebook
censored this photograph, whi was on their Facebook page, and half of the
ministers in the Norwegian government shared the photo on their own
Facebook pages. Several of these posts, including the Prime Minister’s, were
deleted by Facebook. Nudity was again the problem—although this time it
was algorithms that decided not to publish the photograph. As a reaction to
the leer, Facebook reconsidered its decision and republished the posts later
that day, recognizing “the history and global importance of this image in
documenting a particular moment in time” (Kaa, 2016).
e story of this image has it all: e personal involvement of the
photographer, and his Vietnamese nationality, remind us of Sophie
Riestelhuber’s claim that photographers should rather work in places they
know and have control of, instead of going to far-away destinations to cover
conflicts they don’t understand. e manipulation and making of an icon
(whi could be compared to the making of the very different, but also
iconic image of the Migrant Mother; see Chapter 1.7), its role in the Anti-
War movement, the continuing problem with nudity, but not with violence,
in the media, and finally, the story of the photographic subject herself, who
is now an UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. e close connection of war,
images and lies is reconfirmed by another fact: Aer one of Phuc’s speees,
Rev. John Plummer, a Vietnam veteran who claimed he took part in
coordinating the air strike with the South Vietnamese Air Force, met with
Phuc briefly and she publicly forgave him, but later Plummer admied he
had lied, saying he was “caught up in the emotion at the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial on the day Phuc spoke” (11thcavnam.com, 1998). Maybe he was,
but the real motives seem to have been the urge to be forgiven, the longing
to be part of a story, and the identification with a visual representation of
what cannot be expressed in words. e contributing authors to this apter
talk about these issues at stake, and many more, from war photography to
activism, via advertising, family albums, aritectural photography and the
history of the photo booth.
 e first contribution is a highly didactic yet still personal text on the
relationship between photography and armed conflicts. I first met Rita
Leistner at the Portfolio Reviews of the Toronto Photography Festival and
was fascinated by her Palladium Prints, made from iPhone images while she
was embedded in the Afghanistan War. Later she sent me her book Looking
for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan—her own way of processing the
current “tenological turn in history,” with the help of McLuhan’s theories
—whi contained interesting references to drones and surveillance imagery.
us, she was the logical oice when I was looking for somebody to write
on War Photography, because she has not only thought about the theme, but
had also been present in active war zones.
Useful Photography, the title of the apter, is originally the name of a
magazine focusing on overlooked images taken for practical purposes, co-
edited by the Dut multi-talent Erik Kessels, a publisher, artist, provocateur
and co-founder of the advertisement company KesselsKramer. In the
following interview, whi took place in fall 2016 in Barcelona, Olivia
Estalayo asked him about recent developments in commercial photography,
agencies, and the ethics of the advertising business. As is well known,
Kessels is a keen collector of vernacular photography and the curator of the
widely acclaimed exhibition Album Beauty, so it is no surprise that Mee
Sandbye mentions his work in her article on the Family Album. Sandbye has
researed and published extensively on these themes, and thus was the
obvious oice to write on this “understudied part of visual culture.” She also
excels at linking “traditional analogue family photographs,” whi were
taken for a future audience, with the new form of recording our world, that
is, digital photographs taken by mobile phones, to be seen immediately by a
wide and distant audience. While many of the aspects and functions of this
kind of photography remain the same, the practice has anged radically:
Less family and more friends, more everyday experience and daily life
occurrences, more selfies, pets, and food. In other words: the everyday life
made public. is anticipation of the public dimension of a private issue,
love (in the best case), and the founding of a new family, is also the core of
Wedding Photography, whi is the subject of Sandbye’s case study.
 Aritecture photography, whi also falls into this category of useful, or
applied photography, has aracted less critical aention than “the history of
popular photography” (Wells, 2015: 7), maybe because it not only has to
“sell” (or at least show off) the building and its aritect, but also has a more
conceptual edge to it: It converts a three-dimensional structure into a flat,
publishable form that highlights the main aievements of the building and
its creator. In his enlightening essay, Rolf Sasse reminds us that
aritecture was the first playground of photography, and highlights the
medium’s role in the rise of Modern Aritecture. Sasse is certainly one of
the most prominent authors in his field: an aritect, photographer and
solar, his many writings cover practically all possible aspects of the
relation between the two disciplines, and their fusion into aritectural
photography. Recommended by PhotoResearcher editor Uwe Sögl, I had
asked Rolf the favor of curating a small exhibition on aritectural
photobooks for the first edition of Aarhus Photobook Week in 2014, and he
kindly agreed. erefore, I hesitated a bit before asking him for a favor
again, this time to contribute a piece of writing to this book. I truly thought
he would say No, and yet: Not only did he accept but he delivered a solid
and didactic essay, and a perfect entry point for anybody interested in the
subject.
Compared to heavyweight Sasse, Érika Goyarrola is still at the
beginning of her academic career. She recently finished her PhD in
humanities from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona with a thesis on
Self-referentiality in Contemporary Photography, highlighting the work of
Francesca Woodman, Antoine d’Agata and Alberto GarcíaAlix. It is fair to
say though that her articles and essays for journals and magazines have
aracted mu aention, as has her curatorial work, especially the
exhibition cycle 1+1=12. Encuentros de Fotografía Contemporánea at Institut
Français Madrid in 2014. To counterbalance the focus on the globalized
barrage of images taken by mobile phones, it seemed necessary to take a
closer look at the history of the traditional selfrepresentation maine, the
photo booth. Since its invention, nearly a hundred years ago, it has been a
fundamental instrument for autobiographical purposes and has become part
of one of the major strands of photography in the second half of the
twentieth century. Or as Goyarrola puts it, “the photo booth brought a new
style, and thus a new viewpoint of photography in particular and visual arts
in general.”
e last part of this apter is dedicated to photography as a way to
encourage critical thinking about the world we live in. And—even if a
handful of politicians and scientists still want to convince us of the opposite
—our world’s major problem today is neither terrorism nor migration, but
global warming, plastic waste and pollution of our vital resources, water, air
and soil. I met Chris Jordan at the Spanish festival PHotoEspaña in 2005, and
was so fascinated by his series on consumerism and waste that I invited him
to participate in the festival the following year, with the large-format images
from Katarina’s Wake. Since then, his work has become referenced and
widely exhibited all around the globe. It was only shortly before I contacted
him again to contribute to this book that I learned about Swaantje Güntzel’s
work, via an introduction by a common friend. While treating the same
issues (plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean), their way of working, and the end
products, could not be more different. I could not help asking her right away
if she would be willing to participate in a conversation with Chris and
myself on the subject of photographic eco-activism, and we set up a Skype
meeting. In the resulting interview, I limited myself to throwing in a few
keywords, to break the ice, and then let the conversation flow. It is
interesting to see that on both sides of the Atlantic, artistic work with an
environmentally concerned focus is still having trouble being taken
seriously by the art world, and not being put in the drawer of “activism,” a
term that according to Jordan, “is deeply infused with hypocritical judgment
and telling people how they are supposed to behave.” Güntzel adds that a
main problem for her is that collectors don’t trust her market value (as she is
not in the high-end segment of the art market yet), but just look at the work
in terms of “Would I want to have this in my living room?”, and then decide
that they don’t.
e difficult equilibrium between delivering a message and making the
work sellable (as art, as news, as a commercial product . . .) has been an
intrinsic problem of the photographic medium from the moment of its
inception. However, as photography is mu more than art, different to text,
film, or music, and due to its ever-anging role in society, as well as its
implied truth-value, this situation is unlikely to ange any time soon.
Due to the near limitless applications of the medium of photography,
clearly this apter cannot explain the usefulness of photographic images in
an exhaustive way. Medical, tenical, and didactic images have not been
taken into account, nor have fashion and editorial photography. We have
tried, however, to analyze some of the aspects and functions of the
photographic image in a way that can be applied to others. Mee Sandbye,
Rolf Sasse and Érika Goyarrola have helped to provide the useful images
for their articles, whi come from historic and contemporary artists, su as
Edouard Denis Baldus, Heinri Heidersberger, Ahmet Ertug, H.G. Es,
Hansjürg Bumeier, Brenda Moreno and Juan de la Cruz Megías. A special
thank you goes to Alasdair and Kirsty Foster for sending us their personal
wedding photograph from the 1970s (unfortunately, they have forgoen the
name of the photographer). Rita Leistner, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford,
orne Anderson, Chris Jordan and Swaantje Güntzel have allowed us to
use their own works, some photographed by collaborators, and the
illustrations for the interview with Erik Kessels come mostly from the
KesselsKramer website, except for the installation shot from his 24-hour
photo installation at the CCCB, whi is courtesy of Marc Neumüller
Esparbé.

References

11thcavnam.com. (1998). Pastor Admits Lying About Vietnam Bombing.

[online] Available at:
www.11thcavnam.com/education/pastor_admits_lying_about_vietna.ht
m [Accessed 22 May 2017].
Campbell, C. (1996/2016). e Ephemerality of Surfaces: Damage and
Manipulation in the Photographic Image. In: K. Zeleny, ed., Materialities,
 1st ed. London: e Velvet Cell, pp. 57–89.
Delgado, L. (2017). Mugshot’s Bias: A Semantic History of Guilt,
Photography & Culture, August, pp. 1–18.
Kaa, P. (2016). Facebook Changes Its Mind, and Says it’s Okay to Publish
an Iconic War Photo, Aer All, Recode. [online] Available at:
www.recode.net/2016/9/9/12864670/facebookphoto-ban-anged
[Accessed 9 Sept 2016].
Lévi-Strauss, C. and Modelski, S. (1995). Saudades do Brasil. Seale:
University of Washington Press.
Wells, L. (2015). Photography: A Critical Introduction. 5th ed. Abingdon:
Routledge.
World Press Photo. (2017). World Press Photo of the Year 1973. [online]
Available at: www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/1973/world-
press-photo-year/ni-ut [Accessed 22 May 2017].

3.1 Photography Goes to War

Rita Leistner

e camera requires one to be there—a photographer is denied the luxury of philosophizing from
afar.
Philip Jones Griffiths (1996)

Drawn to War

What draws a photographer to war? One photographer’s father was a

soldier, another was the ild of Holocaust survivors, some photographers
are born into conflict zones and begin documenting the war outside their
front door, some are looking for adventure or are running from their own
problems, while many are moved by political convictions. “I went to El
Salvador to see if the effects of foreign policy could be photographed, if it
could be visualized; and it can,” veteran conflict photographer Robert
Nielsberg recently told me. All have the personality trait that enables
them to run toward danger when others might (sensibly) run away. Most,
eventually, come to hold a sense of responsibility to witness and to try and
understand versions of living history through photography—so that news
reports will contain more truth than lies and the historical record might
contain at least some trace of what actually happened. War photography is a
sub-genre of photojournalism, whose most basic, primary tenet is to
function within the realm of the actual.
I became interested in war because of my uncle Herbert Leistner, an avid
reader of history, who had been a Messersmi Bf 109 aircra meanic for
the Luftwaffe during World War II. He came to Canada in 1951 from
Germany and eventually started a tool and die business with a Jewish-
Canadian entrepreneur named Al Hertz. Uncle Herbert rarely spoke of the
war, except to deride nationalism and mass movements, referring to the
Nazis’ surge to power. Somehow, as a ild, I took on a sense of
responsibility for what happened in Germany. At fieen, and clearly naive, I
thought that if I could become a witness to war, maybe I could do something
to prevent atrocities like the Holocaust from happening again.
I wanted to be a war photographer from that moment on, but I had no
idea how to make that happen. It took me another nearly twenty years to
photograph my first conflict. Cambodian government troops had opened fire
on demonstrators in Phnom Penh during the widespread unrest of the 1997
elections. It was before the digital age of photography and it wasn’t until I
had my film developed at a local lab that night that I realized I had been
shaking so badly all the photographs were blurry. A few years aer I
returned from Cambodia and before going to Iraq, Bob Nielsberg advised
me, only half joking, “Set your shuer speed to 1/500th of a second, shoot as
many frames as you can and hope to hell one of them is in focus.” What I’ve
learned is that to photograph in su high intensity situations, you have to
have a mastery of your tools and of your emotions so that you can shoot
composed, meaningful frames on instinct, in the heat of the moment. “Fear
is not what’s important; it’s how you deal with it,” James Natwey has said.
“It would be like asking a marathon runner if they feel pain. It’s not a maer
of whether you feel it; it’s how you manage it” (in the documentary film
War Photographer).
Before going to Cambodia, I had seen almost every movie made about
conflict photographers—Apocalypse Now, Under Fire, The Killing Fields,
Salvador, The Year of Living Dangerously—and had read widely about the
Vietnam War during my studies at the University of Toronto. But there is no
sool for war photographers other than a conflict zone. Over the next year
and a half in Cambodia, I learned on the ground from seasoned journalists,
especially Vietnam War media veteran Al Rooff who I had first heard of
when I saw The Killing Fields—a movie he hates for its fictionalization of
certain events on the eve of the fall of Phnom Penh, for whi Rooff was
one of very few photographers present. In Phnom Penh, I also met Phillip
Jones Griffiths who, six years later, wrote the foreword to a book I co-
authored, Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in
Iraq.

A Politically Engaged Photography

e journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approa; and it is impossible for
him to be completely objective. Honest—yes, Objective—no.
W. Eugene Smith, 1948 (Lyons 1966, 103)

War photography is political because war is political. e first war

photographer to aieve notoriety for this profession was Roger Fenton, who
was sent to the Crimean War (1853–6) by his employer, the British
Government, with direct orders to create images that would contradict
negative wrien depictions of the war appearing in newspapers, specifically
the reports of the Anglo-Irish reporter William Russell. British soldiers were
advised not to speak to Russell, whom the military establishment “despised .
. . claiming that he was a danger to security” (Figes 2010, 308). Photography
was only seventeen years old in 1855 and, with the rise of the illustrated
press (thanks to the invention of the high speed rotary press in 1843), was
making a mark in newspapers alongside text in the form of wood
engravings drawn from photographs. While the Mexican–American War
(1846–8) was the first to be photographed, the Crimean War was the first to
be covered systematically by photographers whose images were
disseminated in the illustrated press, notably the weekly Illustrated London
News (founded in 1842).
While Fenton would have witnessed a lot of death and destruction, his
pictures needed to be in keeping with Victorian sensibilities and the orders
of his employer (Figes 2010, 307–308). Fiy years later, during the Mexican
Revolution (1910–20), war photographers had clear and personal political
allegiances, aligning themselves with a wide range of armed groups, not just
the ruling Porfirio regime. Historian John Mraz uses the term “Revolutionary
Photographers” to describe those photographers actively working toward
political ange during revolutionary wars, in contrast to photographers
photographing post-revolutionary periods (Mraz 2012, 1–16).
In Regarding the Pain of Others, an influential book of criticism on the
subject of conflict photography, Susan Sontag refers to war photographers as
“spectators of calamities” and “professional, specialized tourists” (Sontag
2003, 18). Her assessments can rub photojournalists the wrong way, but her
warning is a powerful one that the best conflict photographers spend their
careers trying to heed: at it is not enough simply to witness—that would
be akin to war tourism. It is absolutely, quintessentially, morally necessary
to do something with what you have witnessed. Hence war photography
and photojournalism rely more urgently than other forms of photography
on the modes and means of dissemination of the work aer it is made.
Elsewhere in Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag anowledges war
photographers for their personal commitment, especially when this is tied to
political responsibility:
e photographer on the street in the middle of a bombardment or a burst of sniper fire ran just as
mu risk of being killed as the civilians he or she was traing. Further, pursuing a good story
was not the only motive for the avidity and courage of the photojournalists covering the siege. For
the duration of this conflict, most of the many experienced journalists who reported from Sarajevo
were not neutral.
 (Sontag 2003, 112)

Phillip Jones Griffiths, one of the most important and most politically
engaged war photographers, oen wrote about the role of photojournalism
in exposing lies, noting in one of several retrospectives, Dark Odyssey, “my
camera has given me opportunities to witness the deceit implicit in conflicts
and my goal is to see through the deceptions” (Jones Griffiths 1996, Ch.
Conflict).

A Very Short Summary of the History of Photojournalism and

War Photography

What we think of as modern photojournalism and war photography begins

around the end of the nineteenth century with advances in the printing
press and photomeanical reproduction (in particular the halone process
invented in 1880) (Carleba 1992, 150), the Kodak camera, and the Boer War
(1899–1902) (Whelan 2007, 12). Photojournalism experiences its next
flourishing in Weimar Germany (1919–33). is coincides with and is
influenced by the increasing involvement of political engagement in other
art forms of the period.
Artists like painters Oo Dix (a veteran himself of World War I who
painted from experience) and Max Bemann, playwright Bertolt Bret, the
curator and publisher Ernst Friedri, and creator of political photomontages
John Hartfield are producing scathing anti-war works aer World War I.
Friedri’s War Against War! is banned for showing graphic photographs of
maimed and disfigured German soldiers kept hidden from society in
institutions. Eri Maria Remarque’s historical novel All Quiet on the
Western Front describes the brutal physical and psyological hardships of
frontline soldiers in the field and aer they came home. e Nazis
disapproved of anything that criticized war and would suppress all these
works.
It is an explosive period for print media and the picture press—especially
in Germany, but also in France, the United States, Great Britain, Mexico and
elsewhere. Weimar, home of the Bauhaus sool of art and the influential
sool of journalism, the Hosule, is a hotbed for training politically
engaged artists. Moreover, the economic insecurities of the mid 1920s lead a
new, highly educated class of men and women into this new field of
photojournalism. Until then,
news photography was dominated by men of mediocre education, drudges whose greatest talent
was for being en masse in the expected place at the expected time when lu occasionally threw
one of them a fluke opportunity to shoot an extraordinary picture.
(Whelan 2007, 15)

Photography also offers more opportunities for the many non-German-

speaking exiles in Berlin who la the facility to read and write in German.
In 1931, Endre Friedman, a 17-year-old political exile from Hungary,
enrolls in the Hosule. He already has Hungarian friends in Berlin,
including his ildhood friend, the photographer Eva Besnyö. When his
family is hit by the economic crisis, Friedman has to drop out of journalism
sool to look for a job. He turns to photojournalism. Besnyö introduces him
to photographer Oo “Umbo” Umbehr and poet Simon Gumann, co-
founders of the Dephot photo agency. From the outset, Dephot is a
politically engaged photo agency, created by Gumann as a means of
combating fascism. It is also the first photo agency to adopt a freelance
model, paying photographers 50 per cent of sales rather than a salary
(Whelan 2007, 27).
By the time the Nazis come to power in 1933, Friedman, trained in
photography and galvanized against the rise of fascism in Europe, flees to
Paris along with other émigré photographers, writers and artists. In Paris, he
meets a succession of photographers and political activists, including
another Jewish political exile, Gerta Pohorylle, with whom he falls in love.
He teaes her photography and she encourages their political ideals. To get
ahead, they invent, out of a hybrid of themselves, the ultimate
photojournalist, “Robert Capa”—a dashing, courageous “American
photographer” under whose fictional name they publish both of their
photographs. But Friedman in effect becomes Capa, and Pohorylle, seeking
more autonomy (and credit) for her work, splits off under a new (less
Jewish-sounding) name, Gerda Taro.
Taro biographer Irme Saber describes what distinguished Capa and
Taro from other combat photographers at the time:
eir purpose was not to assume the perspective of the weapon typical of many combat
photographers. Rather, their emotional, solidarity-based involvement was an authentic expression
of their anti-fascist commitment. Taro and Capa sought to transcend the status of the eyewitness,
to aieve the perspective of the participant.
(Whelan, Schaber & Lubben 2007, 25)

David “Chim” Seymour is the third photographer in this trio of politically

engaged photographers to define modern war photography. e lightweight
cameras with faster shuer speeds just becoming commercially available
hugely facilitate their work, enabling them to move faster and with more
agility, to get closer to their subjects and to work in more variable
conditions. e most famous phrase of photojournalism, “If your pictures
aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough,” is aributed to Robert Capa,
but it is clear that the idea was a collaboration between the three
photographers.
On July 26th, 1937, Gerda Taro, one of the earliest, most intrepid and
innovative photojournalists and war photographers, is killed in action
following a fierce bale between Franco’s Fascist troops and the Republican
troops whom she supported (Whelan et al. 2007, 9–35). I have oen
wondered how different the history of photojournalism and war
photography might have been had Taro lived longer.

Embedded and Unembedded

“Embedding” has long been a necessary part of war reporting. How else
could photographer Felice Beato and his cameras have been present during
the Second Opium War in China (1856–60) if not for the access he was given
by the British military? And yet, 150 years later, on the eve of the Iraq War
(2003–), embedding was taken to a whole new level. e main aritect of
the American embedding system was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
Bryan Whitman. Whitman, along with Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld,
consulted with and was inspired by big Hollywood producers like Jerry
Bruheimer in order to design their media strategies (Knightly 2004, 533).
Bruheimer—the producer of commercial hits like Top Gun, Black Hawk
Down, and Pearl Harbor—had a long association with Rumsfeld, having
collaborated with the Pentagon under the Bush Administration on an ABC
prime-time entertainment series, Tales from the Front Lines (Ri, 2003).
In Bruheimer and director Ridley Sco’s blobuster Black Hawk Down,
the film opens with empathy-inducing scenes of soldier camaraderie (they
are the most absurdly handsome group of soldiers you will ever see),
capturing the audience into an emotional rapport with the American
soldiers right off the top. You learn nothing about any of the Somali
insurgents they are baling. ere is no question as to who the “good guys”
are and who the “bad guys” are, violations on both sides notwithstanding.
Embedding with the military can be like that. It’s admirable to feel
compassion for soldiers in war and, especially when they are your
protectors, it’s only human nature to want to protect them too. e problem
is that it only offers one point of view from one point of access. Embedded,
you can get fantastic, up-close photographs of soldiers firing missiles, but
you cannot, at the same time, photograph the destruction and death where
the missiles land.
Australian journalist Phillip Knightley, one of the most ardent media
critics of the embed system, describes its genius:
Every system that the Pentagon had tried for managing the media in wartime before now had
aroused the media’s ire precisely because it felt it was being managed. What if, instead of
managing the media, the Pentagon incorporated the media into the national war effort?
(Knightley 2004, 531)

But some journalists did work unilaterally (the official government term
for “unembedded”). ere were also photo editors who saw the need for
multi-sided reporting and I was not alone among colleagues who
photographed the war from both the embedded and unembedded camps.
 Case Study #1: Unembedded: Four Independent
Photojournalists on the War in Iraq by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad,
Kael Alford, orne Anderson and Rita Leistner

I am like you, scared of these things.

(Iraqi psychiatrist to a patient, in Abdul-Ahad 2005)

One hot September day in 2004, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, orne
Anderson and I had just returned to Baghdad aer covering the Siege of
Najaf, about a hundred miles south. During the Siege, the road to Najaf had
become notorious for frequent aas and kidnappings of foreign journalists
who, largely because of the embed system, were now seen as one and the
same as American soldiers. ey became human bargaining ips used for
political leverage or criminal exanges—kidnap any foreigner, and you’d
eventually find someone interested in paying to get them ba. A week aer
being abducted on the road to Najaf on August 19, Italian freelance
journalist Enzo Baldoni was murdered by the “Islamic Army in Iraq,” a
group linked to Al-Qaeda. Baldoni was purportedly beheaded on video,
although the footage has never been aired or confirmed (YouTube had not
been invented yet). We were relieved to be ba safe in Baghdad, with the
Siege and that road behind us.
at morning, Ghaith—a Baghdad-born writer and photographer we had
crossed front lines with in Najaf—had gone to cover a “routine bombing”
when, all of a sudden, American helicopters returned to the scene and fired
on a crowd of civilians. When Ghaith arrived ba at the al Hamra Hotel he
had a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his head and was in sho. He
said he had just photographed a horrible scene on Haifa Street in downtown
Baghdad; he had witnessed many deaths. (See Color Plate 6.)
Kael and orne, an American photojournalism duo who had been in Iraq
since before the invasion, were siing next to us in lounge airs by the
pool. We were discussing how the Western public had lile idea of what was
actually happening in Iraq. orne said he and Kael had a proposition. We
would bring our work together into a website and exhibition that focused
only on photographs not taken inside the military embed system, to show
people another side of Iraq and to emphasize these two distinct ways of
covering war. Ghaith’s devastating images from that morning would almost
immediately be published on the new website, iraquncensored.com (later
unembedded.com). ere would be images of the Mahdi Army fighters we,
along with a number of our colleagues, had been “embedded” with over the
last months (at the time it was considered a near treasonous act to fraternize
with “the enemy,” but today the Mahdi Army is one of the most important
allies of the U.S. in Iraq); photographs of the female patients at the al Rashad
psyiatric hospital I had been documenting for nearly half a year;
photographs of civilian victims of the war, as well as photographs of how
daily life still went on in Baghdad—picnics, weddings, amusement park
rides, etc. (See Color Plates 7 and 8.)
orne set to work right away building the site. We planned to use it to
raise awareness and money to mount an exhibition that would tour the
United States in an effort to present a picture of Iraq outside the headlines
and to sway public opinion against the war. orne forwarded the web site
to Margo Baldwin, a long-time antiwar activist, and the president and
publisher of Chelsea Green Publishing in Vermont. Our intent was not to
aa all embedded photography, but to highlight what we saw as an
imbalance in news coverage so big, we believed people had no true idea of
what was going on.
We were working in the tradition of Gerda Taro, Robert Capa and Chim
Seymour and other politically engaged photographers who ronicled the
Spanish Civil War (1936–39) as a way to inform the public about the fight
against fascism in Spain. We were inspired by Phillip Jones Griffiths’
Vietnam Inc., whi played a significant role in turning public opinion
against the War in Vietnam (Griffiths wrote the Foreword to our book); as
well as by Susan Meiselas’s Kurdistan web site akakurdistan.com (whi she
had funded with money from her 1992 MacArthur Fellowship); and by the
1983 collaboration El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers.
As independent photojournalists working with an independent publisher,
we were not motivated by whether or not we could keep “good embeds”
(good embeds would be on the front lines, bad embeds would be
photographing soldiers handing out candies) or about losing our jobs. In
fact, what we did with Unembedded would soon become a mu more
common way for war photographers to get their work seen by the public. As
newspapers began to disappear over the next fieen years, more and more
war photographers and photojournalists were self-publishing and seeking
independent funding. Today, most are using the Internet and social media to
get their work—and their politics—out there. And many more, like the
bloggers and photographers in Syria today, are reporting from their country
of origin—because it is increasingly too dangerous and too economically
prohibitive for foreign correspondents to travel to war zones. Moreover, the
evolution of smartphones into viable photographic devices in 2010 was a
critical turn for war photography, puing the power of photography into the
hands of countless more individuals than ever before.

Getting ere

e first rule of journalism is to get to where the story is. It takes enormous
personal and financial investment to get to a war zone. Working embedded
with the military makes war eaper for journalists and the outlets they are
working for. ere are photographers who work for and are paid by the
military, and there have always been freelance war photographers who foot
their own bills and hope to make their money ba through stringing and
selling stories and photographs aer the fact. e list of photography gear is
heavy and expensive enough, but add to that bullet-proof vests and helmets,
computers, satellite transmiers, possibly a bivouac tent and sleeping bag
and, if you are a woman, an array of culturally acceptable garments—maybe
even a fake wedding ring—depending on where you are going. e planning,
organization, resear and logistics of where to go, what to eat, where to
relieve yourself, how to get around, and what to do once you arrive is
formidable—before you have even taken a photograph. Once there, you need
a wha of U.S. dollars to pay for a translator, a driver, possibly armed
guards and a traing device (in case you are kidnapped), not to mention a
place to sleep and to arge your equipment. ere are no bank maines,
no hotels, oen no electricity or running water. You have to rely enormously
on the help of people who are already there, be they locals or journalists
who arrived before you.
Peter Howe’s 2002 collection of interviews with conflict photographers,
Shooting Under Fire, and Miael Kamber’s Photojournalists on War: The
Untold Stories from Iraq (2012) provide many accounts by war
photographers in the field.

Fixers and Translators on the Ground

ere would be no war photography outside the military embed system

without the involvement, assistance and cooperation of local citizens,
drivers, translators and “fixers” (resourceful individuals with local
knowledge who can help get a story) who provide indispensable help of all
kinds including translation and logistics. It is usually a business relationship
that is oen called upon to become something mu more personal because
of the dangerous and extreme environment you share. What has made the
biggest impression on me, is how oen strangers and fixers have put their
own lives at risk to save mine. No war photographer who has worked
outside the military embed system is without similar stories. Even today I
cannot think ba to these times without being profoundly moved and
affected by the kindness I was shown. (See Color Plate 5 for an illustration of
just one instance of this.)
Paul Watson, a Canadian writer and photographer who won a Pulitzer
Prize for his photographs of the desecrated body of an American soldier
being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 4,
1993, describes in his autobiography, Where War Lives, the guilt of
endangering the lives of others:
at’s always been the hardest part of the job for me: convincing good people, who get none of a
newspaper bylines’ ego gratification, to put their lives on the line just because I’ve decided a story
 is worth dying for.
(Watson 2007, 31)

e Hebron Bang Bang Club

As war becomes increasingly dangerous for foreign correspondents, and as it

becomes easier to get photographs and reports from journalists already on
the ground, local journalism is becoming more and more vital. In 2015 I
spent a month working side by side with photojournalists from the Hebron
press corps. ey called themselves the Hebron Bang Bang Club aer the
original Bang Bang Club, a group of South African war photographers they
admired: Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovi, Ken Oosterbroek, and João Silva
(“bang-bang” refers to the sound of gunfire). Working as a photojournalist in
Hebron, geing tear-gassed is so common it is barely a footnote to your day.
Every photographer in “the club” had been shot at least once. ey joked
that if it was a rubber bullet it didn’t count. e Hebron press corps get shot
at and tear gassed by day then go home to their families by night. For them,
there is no “going to war,” because they are already there.
But whether photographers are traveling to cover wars or are covering
wars where they live, a way to sufficiently monetize Internet and social
media content is still beyond our grasp. Embedded photography, or the work
of Military Photographers (employed directly by the military), could soon
become the only economically viable way to cover war. A cursory look at
the World Press Photo contest of 2015 shows that most of the winners work
for a handful of the few surviving magazines and newspapers that can still
afford to send journalists anywhere, or they are working alone. It begs the
question of how long the responsibility of recording the visual history of
human-made aos can be borne by a volunteer army of freelancers.

e First Rough Dra of History

 e greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians . . . have not been able to put an end to war.
Why place that demand on photography?
James Nachtwey (Linfield 2010, 60)

Journalism is oen called “the first rough dra of history.” I was born the
summer of the Tonkin Gulf Crisis in 1964, too young to remember mu of
the war in Vietnam from TV, and just old enough that it was being taught as
history by the time I reaed university. Today, at the University of Toronto,
I tea as history events I myself witnessed and photographed only fieen
years ago to students who were one year old in 2001, the year of the
September 11 aas in New York. It is a fact for anyone fortunate enough
to live to middle age, that our own experiences will become someone else’s
history in our lifetime. It puts a perspective on the work of war photography,
its value and necessity.
Most civilians think war reporters are nuts. Why would anyone
voluntarily go somewhere that everyone else is trying to escape? Miael
Herr—whose ronicle of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, has near cult status
with war correspondents—describes how some soldiers felt about them in
Vietnam: “ey only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless
fool who would put himself through this thing when he had oices, any
fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way” (Herr
1977, 208–209). Sometimes the reaction is the opposite. Going to a war zone
to take photographs can also be perceived as an act of generosity and
solidarity by civilians or soldiers who want someone else to see and share
their experience. is is the main reason anyone, anywhere helps another
person to tell a story. War photographers are sometimes dismissed as being
adrenaline junkies and danger-seeking tourists. But the best documentary
photographers, photojournalists and war photographers have a strong
empathetic side on top of being driven to witness history’s most dramatic
events.
War photographers spend a lot of time looking into the eyes of injured
souls. Trauma is all around. But the practice of reviewing and revisiting
what we have seen, whi is inherent to the job, is a kind of self-talk
prophylactic therapy. In this way, part of our self-care is built into our work.
Many conflict journalists spend the rest of their lives commied to the wars
they covered, going over and over them again, like Tim Page, who started
photographing the War in Vietnam in the 1960s and has never stopped
writing and publishing books about the war, including the 2002 Another
Vietnam: Pictures from the Other Side, whi honors the work of
Vietnamese war photographers.
Aer puing her long, storied career as a war correspondent behind her,
Martha Gellhorn, who had covered wars from World War I, to the Spanish
Civil War, to World War II, and the wars in Indoina, wrote: “For all the
good our articles did, they might have been wrien in invisible ink, printed
on leaves, and loosed to the wind” (Gellhorn 1988, 2). I would be lying if I
said I did not wonder the same thing about my work in Iraq and my
subsequent work in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine.
And yet, for journalists and war correspondents it is not just about the
end goal, but about what we do along the way, our process and behavior on
the ground, the people we meet along the way, the solidary and care we
show other human beings, what we do with the work aerwards. Going to
Iraq, publishing Unembedded, these were the right things for me to do,
regardless of the outcome. Like Gellhorn, we have seen that, “victory and
defeat are both passing moments. ere are no ends; there are only means”
(Gellhorn 1988, 3).

Case Study #2: Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan:

Smartphones and Social Media at War

Every new tenology necessitates a new war.

Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan and Fiore, 1968)

e history of nearly every conflict has a parallel story of humans using the
latest, most dominant tenologies to document them. e Mexican–
American War (1846– 8) and the Crimean War (1853–6) were the first to be
photographed with slow and bulky view cameras; the Spanish Civil War
signaled the birth of modern photojournalism with the invention of
lightweight 35 mm film cameras; Vietnam (1955–75) is considered the first
“Television War”; the Iraq War (2003–) was the first to be defined by digital
cameras and same-day transmission of media by the Internet and via
satellite, while the Arab Spring (2011) anged the game entirely when
civilians documented the uprising from within using their own
smartphones. Today, the World Wide Web and social media are rapidly
replacing newspapers and television altogether when it comes to the
dissemination of news as well as how it is consumed.
I am part of the last generation of photographers whose careers have
straddled the analog and the digital eras. My book Looking for Marshall
McLuhan in Afghanistan (2014) is a primer on the pioneering media theorist
that looks at the intersections of war, photography, tenology and language
at the moment in history when smartphones first go to war in 2010–11. A
key turning point was when Apple’s iPhone 4 became capable of making
photographs of a high enough quality that professional photographers were
confident using them for serious work. I had gone to Afghanistan in early
2011 to join an innovative social media journalism initiative called Basetra
—conceived by the savvy American photographer Teru Kuwayama—that
was using social media and iPhones during a military embed with U.S.
Marines. I joined Basetra because I wanted to be a part of this moment in
the history of photography and war and to see how the new tenologies
would play out in a military embed and in a country that tenology
seemed on so many other levels to have passed by. at experience was the
jumping-off point for my book. (See Color Plate 9.)
Table 3.1 A Rough and Incomplete Table of Tenologies and their Wars

Technology War Dissemination

 Technology War Dissemination

1838—View cameras on
tripods e Illustrated London News (1842)
1861—Portable Mexican– Invention of high speed rotary
stereoscope cameras American press (1843)
invented on the eve of War (1846–8) Beginning of the Illustrated Press
the American Civil War Daguerreotypes (not reproducible)
(Carleba (1992, 48))
Burmese War
(1852–3)
Crimean War Calotypes
(1853–6) cartes de visites
Second 1855–1880s
Opium War Collodion Portable Wet Plate
(1856–60) Process: printing copies on paper
(Felice Beato using negative/positive process
in China) photographs on paper of whi
American unlimited copies could be made
Civil War
(1861–5)
Spanish-
American
Invention of halone
Kodak Camera (1888) War (1898)
photomeanical process
4x5 Negatives, Tropical Boer War
Leipzig Ilustrirte Zeitung publishes
Field (1899-1902)
first photographs using halone
Cameras Russo-
process (1884)
Japanese War
(1904–1905)
 Technology War Dissemination

Mexican
Revolution Violence as entertainment
(1910–1920)
Graflex Press Camera
Rise of the Picture Press in Weimar
(1908)
World War I Germany, France, England, the
(1914–1918) United States, Mexico, Brazil,
Australia, Italy . . .
Rise of motion picture
Weimar Inter
film tenology to
War Period
influence still camera
(1918–1933)
tenology
—35 mm cameras:
Ermanox (1924), Leica
Spanish Civil Life magazine (1936–2000)
(1923 but only
War (1936–9) Newsweek (1933–)
commercially available
in the 1930s)
(35 mm gage film with World War II
sproets is first (1939–45)
Der Spiegel (1947–)
developed for use in Korean War
motion picture films) 1950–3

—120 mm film
cameras:
Rolleiflex
Sync Flash, 1935
Combat Graphic 1942
Nikon (1948)
Broadcast Television Vietnam War "e Television War"
 Portable Motion (1955–75) First Television Documentary
Picture Films
Film Cameras
Leica M3 1954
First SLR Cameras
with in-camera
metering
Falklands War
(1982)
1980 CNN
First Iraq War
Nikon FM2 1991 World Wide Web
(1990–1)
1994: Netscape Navigator
Bosnian War
(1992–5)
Satellite Transmiers
Beginning of the end of print
newspapers and magazines
Digital SLR Cameras Iraq War (2003–)
(thousands will collapse in the
next decade)
Web 2.0 (2004)
Smartphones Arab Spring Social Media and Internet
—phone cameras Afghanistan War Facebook (2004)
—professional quality Iraqi Civil War YouTube (2005)
photographs aieved (2014–) Twier (2006)
on iPhone4 (late 2010) Abduction of 43 Instagram (2010)
Super High ISOs and students in Snapat (2012)
ultralow-light-enabled Mexico (2014) Vine (2013)
cameras (still and Hipstamatic (2010): app creating
video) retro traditional printing effects.
Consumer grade drone New interest in permanence,
cameras traditional printing and material
printed objects.
 Surge in "fake news" and
"clibait" sites
Rise of ISIS
Syrian Civil War
(2011–)
Boko Haram
kidnaps 276
soolgirls in
Nigeria (2014)

An essential part of the Basetra project was a Facebook page created for
the Marines’ families ba home. I was astonished the military was not more
worried about controlling information in and out of the base. In fact, the
Facebook page eventually became a sore spot for higher ups because—and
why this surprised them I can’t explain—the Marines’ family members
would sometimes post articles or comments critical of the war. When
Kuwayama was asked to censor the comments, he was within his rights to
say no. e Basetra embed was a big success, lasting over six months,
even though it ended a few weeks earlier than planned. e Commanders
reaed their breaking point with social media, whi they were only just
learning was beyond their power to control.
Soldiers have always wrien, said, or photographed (from the moment
cameras became accessible to them) things the military did not want to see
published and the military has oen blamed the media for it. During the
Crimean War, Major Kingscote of the Scots Guards once said, “officers write
more absurd and rascally leers than ever or else The Times concocts them
for them, anyhow it is very bad and unsoldierlike of them” (Figes 2010, 309).
In Dispatches, Miael Herr describes the photo albums of American
soldiers during the War in Vietnam and the gruesome souvenir photographs
they’d made on their point and shoot cameras:
ere were hundreds of these albums in Vietnam, thousands, and they all seemed to contain the
same pictures: the obligatory Zippo-lighter shot (“All right, let’s burn these hootes and move
 out”); the severed-head shot, the head oen resting on the est of the dead man or being held up
by a smiling Marine, or a lot of heads, arranged in a row, with a burning cigaree in ea of the
mouths, the eyes open (“Like they’re lookin’ at you, man, it’s scary”); the VC suspect being
dragged over the dust by a half-tra or being hung by his heels in some jungle clearing; the very
young dead with AK-47s still in their hands.
(Herr 1977, 198–199)

Following the leak of the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs to the
CBS and The New Yorker in April 2004, Donald Rumsfeld, who had worked
so hard to control media reporting on the war, complained: “[American
military personnel] are running around with digital cameras and taking
these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law,
to the media, to our surprise” (Iraqi prisoner abuse hearings, May 7, 2004).
Using social media and smartphones in Afghanistan, I felt myself being
replaced by tenology and instant uploads that le no time for process,
reflection or analysis. It was more about “feeding the beast” as we called it,
than telling a story. Without a story, there was no context anoring the
meaning of my experience. Moreover, it seemed to me that the military
itself, in the face of its failing mission in Afghanistan, was craing under
the psyological dehumanization and ineffectiveness of its own super-
tenologies. When the Baalion Commander complained about Facebook
and social media as if we were somehow to blame for them, I told him that
the media, journalists and war photographers were, just like him, trying to
figure things out. When I got home, writing this book, Looking for Marshall
McLuhan in Afghanistan, was my way of processing this new tenological
turn in history, with the help of McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist who
invented media studies, anticipated the Internet and the World Wide Web,
and is best known for saying, “the medium is the message.”

References

Abdul-Ahad, G. (2005) We are Living in Constant Fear, The Guardian,

Mar 2.
Abdul-Ahad, G., Alford, K., Anderson, T. & Leistner, R. (2005) Unembedded:
Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, White River
Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company.
Carleba, M. (1992) The Origins of Photojournalism in America,
Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Figes, O. (2012) The Crimean War: A History, New York: Picador. (original
edition 2010)
Gellhorn, M. (1988) The Face of War, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
(original edition 1959)
Herr, M. (1991) Dispatches, New York: Vintage International. (original
edition 1977)
Howe, P. (2002) Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer,
New York: Artisan.
Jones Griffiths, P. (1996) Dark Odyssey, New York: Aperture Foundation.
Kamber, M. (2012) Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Keller, U. (2001) The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean
War, Amsterdam: Gordon and Brea Publishers.
Knightley, P. (2004) The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and
Myth-Maker from Crimea to Iraq, 5th edition, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Leistner, R. (2014) Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan, Bristol,
UK: Intellect Ltd.
Linfield, S. (2010) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyons, N. (ed.) (1966) Photographers on Photography, New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, Inc.
McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (2001) War and Peace in the Global Village, Corte
Madera: Gingko Press. (original edition 1968)
Mraz, J. (2012) Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments,
Testimonies, Icons, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Ri, F. (2003) e Jerry Bruheimer White House. The New York Times,
May 11. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/movies/the-jerry-
 bruheimer-white-house.html (accessed October 12, 2017).
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Watson, P. (2007) Where War Lives, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Whelan, R. (2007) This Is War! Robert Capa at Work, New York:
International Centre for Photography/Steidl.
Whelan, R., Saber, I. & Lubben, K. (eds) (2007) Gerda Taro, New York:
International Centre for Photography/Steidl.

Further Reading

History, Criticism, Case Studies

Apel, D. (2012) War Culture and the Contest of Images, New Brunswi, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone
Books.
Feinstein, A. (2006) Journalists Under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of
Covering War, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gustavson, T. (2009) Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype
to Digital, New York: Sterling Innovation.
Howe, P. (2002) Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer,
New York: Artisan.
Jones Griffiths, P. (2001) Vietnam Inc., Paris: Phaidon.
Kamber, M. (2013) Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Kamber, M. (2017) Photojournalists on War: Afghanistan, (Manuscript, to be
published).
Knightley, P. (2003) The Eye of War, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Lewinski, J. (1978) The Camera at War: War Photography from 1848 to the
Present Day, Secaucus: Chartwell Books, Inc.
Mraz, J. (2009) Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National
Identity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Said, E. (1997) Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine
How We See the Rest of the World, 2nd edition, New York: Vintage
Books.
Stallabrass, J. (2013) Memory of Fire: Images of War and The War of Images,
Brighton: Photoworks.
Walsh, L. (2016) Conversations on Conflict Photography (Manuscript, to be
published 2019).
Zelizer, B. (1998) Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the
Camera’s Eye, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Autobiographies and Biographies

Addario, L. (2015) It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War,
New York: Penguin Press.
Capa, R. (2001) Slightly Out of Focus: The Legendary Photojournalist’s
Illustrated Memoir of World War II, New York: Modern Library.
Chauvel, P. (2003) Rapporteur de guerre, Paris: Oh! Éditions.
Copaken Kogan, D. (2000) Shutterbabe, New York: Villard Books.
Gilbertson, A. (2007) Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of
the Iraq War, Chicago: e University of Chicago Press.
Kershaw, A. (2004) Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert
Capa, Boston: Da Capo Press.
Maclear, M. (2013) Guerrilla Nation: My Wars In and Out of Vietnam,
Toronto: Dundurn Press.
Marinovi, G. & Silva, J. (2000) The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a
Hidden War, New York: Basic Books.
McCullin, D. (2002) Unreasonable Behaviour, London: Vintage.
Page, T. (1996) Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden, London: Toustone.
Whelan, R. (1994) Robert Capa: A Biography, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Zhensheng, L. (2003) Red-Color News Solider, London: Phaidon Press.

Films about War Photographers

Fictions and Based on True Stories

Apocalypse Now, 1979. [Film] Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA:

Zoetrope Studios.
Frankie’s House, 1992. [TV miniseries] Directed by Peter Fisk. United
Kingdom/Australia: Anglia Television Films & Drama.
Harrison’s Flowers, 2000. [Film] Directed by Élie Chouraqui. France: Cinédia
Films.
Salvador, 1986. [Film] Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Hemdale Film
Corporation.
The Bang Bang Club, 2010. [Film] Directed by Steven Silver. South
Africa/Canada: Foundry Films.
The Killing Fields, 1984. [Film] Directed by Roland Joffé. United Kingdom:
Goldcrest Films International.
The Road to Freedom, 2010. [Film] Directed by Brendan Moriarty.
USA/Cambodia: Endocom.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 2013. [Film] Directed by Ben Stiller. USA:
Samuel Goldwyn Films.
The Year of Living Dangerously, 1982. [Film] Directed by Peter Weir.
Australia: MGM Studios.
Under Fire, 1983. [Film] Directed by Roger Spoiswoode. USA: Orion
Pictures.

Documentaries
An Unlikely Weapon, 2008. [Documentary film] Directed by Susan Morgan
Cooper. USA: Morgan Cooper Productions.
Full Disclosure, 2007. [Documentary film] Directed by Brian Palmer. USA:
Humint Productions LLC.
Kandahar Journals, 2015. [Documentary film] Directed by Devin Gallagher
and Louie Palu. Canada: Summit Road Films.
McCullin, 2012. [Documentary film] Directed by David Morris and Jacqui
Morris. United Kingdom: British Film Company.
Pictures from a Revolution, 1991. [Documentary film] Directed by Alfred
Guzzei, Susan Meiselas, and Riard P. Rogers. USA: GMR Films.
Restrepo, 2010. [Documentary film] Directed by Tim Hetherington and
Sebastian Junger. USA: National Geographic Entertainment.
Shooting Robert King, 2008. [Documentary film] Directed by Riard Parry.
United Kingdom: Revolver Entertainment.
The Mexican Suitcase, 2011. [Documentary film] Directed by Trisha Ziff.
Mexico/Spain/USA: 212 Berlin.
The Salt of the Earth, 2014. [Documentary film] Directed by Juliano Ribeiro
Salgado and Wim Wenders. France/Brazil/Italy: Decia Films.
Under Fire: Journalists in Combat, 2012. [Documentary film] Directed by
Martyn Burke. Canada: Juf Pictures, Inc.
War Photographer, 2001. [Documentary film] Directed by Christian Frei.
Switzerland: Christian Frei Film Productions.

3.2 e Advertisement Industry is Based on Fear

Erik Kessels in Conversation with Olivia Estalayo

OLIVIA ESTALAYO: When we think about Erik Kessels nowadays, we probably think of
photography and amateurism, vernacular photography, photobooks, and self-publishing. However,
you also have been running a successful advertisement company for more than twenty years, and
use photography in many different ways. How does this all fit together, and how did it start?
ERIK KESSELS: I was raised as a graphic designer, and illustrator; later on I went to work in
advertising and design. Over the years, I have a growing frustration towards photography that
was used in advertising because the photography in advertising is prey mu clié, very
polished, there is a lot of fake in there—the false illusion of a beautiful world, in a way. So I
decided to work with photographers that normally do not work in advertising. I hire documentary
photographers to work for clients, for instance I did a fashion campaign for Diesel with Magnum
photographer Carl de Keyzer; a beer campaign with Mit Epstein; and in Holland I do a lot with
Dana Lixenberg, Hans van der Meer, and Bertien van Manen. at’s how I got even more
interested in the photographic medium, and I started with my own work. I got interested in
vernacular and amateur photography of the mistakes, the imperfection that comes along. I really
hate the type of photography that you find in advertising because if you look at pictures from ten
years ago, nothing has developed, they still photograph cars in exactly the same way, perfume
advertising looks exactly the same way—there are all these categories, and they constantly
photograph things in exactly the same way over and over again, year aer year . . .

OE: And what is it that KesselsKramer does differently? I’ve read on your website that for you,
“the idea behind the project” is the important thing. Could you explain more in detail?

EK: Before I set up the company with my business partner, we had worked for other companies, so
when we started with our own company, we wanted more freedom, or at least we wanted to
decide ourselves who to work for, and how. We had our own values in a sense. at’s also very
important because from the beginning we were quite strict on what we would do and what we
would not do, and that is also a basis for what it is now because, twenty years later, we still feel
that we never made a work that is happily compromising. Advertising is a very opportunistic
industry, you know; if you bring enough money, all doors open for you . . . but not our door,
because we sometimes refuse clients or stop collaborating with them, if it doesn’t work for us any
more, even if they bring a lot of money. is is one of the things we find very important. All of us
have an ambivalent relationship with the advertising industry; in fact, most of us really hate
advertising, just like everybody else does nowadays. We work in a strange industry, but for me
this is also a motivation to make things different and to ange them. So, yeah, you could say that
KesselsKramer is quite different from other agencies, but it has just grown that way; we did not
plan this but we did have a certain mentality, a mentality to make our work look quite ironic,
sarcastic, humorous, if you want. Irony is very important, especially when used against your own
industry.

OE: In the installation 24 Hrs in Photos [see Color Plate 10] you show how much we are invaded by
photographs, how many pictures are made in a day—mountains! And that’s only the photography
produced and uploaded by individuals to certain platforms. We are also exposed to thousands of
images from advertisements. How is it possible we are not going nuts in this overexposure, over-
saturation in our ultra-mega-photographed world? How can advertising photography still reach
the customer? Isn’t everything said and done already?

EK: Of course, an average person today sees more images before lun than somebody in the
eighteenth century did in their whole life, so that’s kind of the world we live in nowadays.
Funnily enough, I think there are a lot of images that come to us through classic advertising but I
think there are even more images that come to us through other annels—Instagram, Snapat
and all the social annels. One could almost argue that images on Facebook, Instagram or
Snapat are also a kind of advertising, an advertising for individual people, who take pictures of
ourselves and show how great we are, what nice food we have, or how we spend our holidays. We
share it with everybody and that’s also a kind of personal propaganda. ese kinds of images have
long overtaken the advertising images you see on banners and billboards. Classic advertising has
been overtaken by all the images that we share constantly. e lifecycle of an image nowadays is
very short; we take pictures for the moment, not to keep them in albums or arives. e lifecycle
is maybe half an hour, or a day, then the image is gone.

Returning to your question: yes, we are bombarded with images that come to us via advertising,
but the problem has become a general one. We are at the peak level of image consumption; it’s like
a renaissance of the imagery. It can’t go mu more than this, I think, and at a certain moment,
the volume might actually diminish, at least that is what is being discussed now. For instance, I
plan to do an exhibition with only one image, as a counter-reaction. It’s quite nice to have only
one image and do everything with that one image. But maybe you ask the wrong person because
for me, the phenomenon as su is very interesting—the more the beer, because I filter from it
and I try to find new ways of looking at it. Generally speaking, though, people are geing tired of
this situation, so we could speak of a photo life crisis, you know, people when they are twenty-
three or twenty-four, they have so mu information in their heads that they experience a total
burn-out. ey call that the quarter-life crisis.

OE: I would also like to talk about the ethics and limitations of creativity in the advertising
business. What are the limits, if there are, and how much say do your clients have in these aspects?

EK: I think that’s a very important point. Our work in the advertising business is mostly
concentrated in Amsterdam and London, and things work differently in different contexts, and
different companies. Sometimes we have to do jobs that we don’t really like; however, for me it is
very important that I have my own ethics and principles, a set of rules that cannot be bent. For
instance, I try to fight stereotypical images in advertising, and I try to deliver the message in a
different format. If you follow your principles, you have to make drastic oices; for example, we
once “fired” a client that represented some 60 percent of our income, whi was not an easy thing
to do, but for us it was a decision of principles and thus a good decision, because we don’t want to
make horrible work, we don’t want to cross that line. Maybe it was a strange discussion because
one could argue that, when you work in advertising, you have already crossed the line, but I don’t
see it that way. With the work we do, we’ve also proven that we can ange things sometimes. For
instance, we did a mobile phone campaign for many years in Holland and we used many different
nationalities that were living in Holland, including migrants. Later I read an article by a
sociologist who said that this campaign had done more for integration in Holland than any
national campaign dealing with that problem, because it had su a wide rea in the media, and
drew a lot of aention to the issue of integration. So that is very nice to see, that you can
contribute to ange things in a positive way, even if you work for the purely commercial sector of
advertisement.

OE: Do you have any preferred campaigns? Or most hated ones?

EK: I think it is very interesting when you come up with ideas that make you feel uncomfortable,
you get scared of your own ideas—that is very good. It doesn’t happen every week, it happens
maybe a few times a year but it’s a great feeling when you are a lile disturbed by your own
ideas. For instance, we worked a long time for a budget hotel in Amsterdam. It was a very bad
hotel, and still is; a eap hotel. Twenty years ago it was our first client, and when I went there for
the briefing, the owner said he didn’t want any complaints anymore, he was si of all the
complaints he got, and our job would be to get rid of all the complaints. But then I saw the hotel
and it was a totally shit place, so we thought, maybe honesty is their only luxury, because there
was no other luxury . . . So we had the idea that we would always be very honest, with a certain
irony, but always saying the truth. For example, we made a poster for the hotel that claimed “Now
a door in every room!”, or “Now with a bed in every room!” or, “Now even more noise in the main
entrance!” and so on . . . It was very ironic and very real; in fact, it was almost anti-advertising,
because we always positioned the hotel as the worst hotel in the world and that made the hotel
very popular. ey had 60,000 overnights when we started and now they have more than 150,000
overnights. e hotel never anged but it became a cool destination, whi shows also that even
with anti-advertising and a bier irony you can rea a certain target group, in this case,
bapaers and students. And it worked really well, for a long period of time.

As I have mentioned before, in twenty years’ time we never did anything that I really hate now or
that I didn’t like to do, but of course there are works that nowadays I don’t even understand
anymore; they were so weird that it’s almost a shame that we sold them to the client. Most of
them probably fall in a time when the economy was going well, from 2000 to 2005, a period when
everything was possible, also creativewise. I think that creativity is beer when the economy is
good because then, creativity is almost like a bonus and goes further than necessary, a decadent
creativity, so to speak. Of course, it also has to do with the fact that clients are more willing to
take risks in times of economic wellbeing.

OE: Let’s speak about your working process: When you do a shoot, can you tell us a little bit about
the KesselsKramer way of doing it? Is there a special way of working? Any interesting
photographers or trends in this field?

EK: When I do a shoot I normally never go to the shoot itself. I select the photographer, talk to
him or her, have eye contact and talk about what has to be done. I find it important to be able to
have a fresh look at the work when it comes to me, without having been present, and having seen
the pictures in the shooting. Of course, I can only do this because in Holland we are very mu
spoiled with photographic talent; there’s a huge reservoir of people to oose from and we also
work with people from different countries. We work with photographers who make installations
as well and really build photographs as an experience and then take a picture of it. If you ask for
the trends, this is maybe one of them: you see a more performative part in photography nowadays
and the photographers see themselves as artists who create the images. Ideas and images.
Sometimes we ask the photographer to get involved in a mu earlier stage in the process, so that
he or she can draw from their own practice, rather than showing them a fixed idea that they only
have to reproduce. is trend towards performance in the picture is geing more and more
important, and I think it’s quite nice.
OE: Curator, art director, editor, artist, designer, publisher . . . could you please leave something
for the rest? You seem like a man of the Renaissance, in a moment when specialization seems the
trend; you show off a transversal way of thinking and working. Is advertising as a specialized form
dead—has it merged into art, social media, and publishing?

EK: I have always been doing many different things at the same time: I liked drawing, I was an
illustrator at a certain moment, then I went to art sool where I engaged with painting and
graphics. In the early 1990s, when you were a graphic designer you had to sti to that, but I
always did different things, from an early age, including exhibitions and books, at the beginning
not with photography but drawings and other media. I always wanted to break out a lile bit and
at a certain moment it became possible: with KesselsKramer we try to cross the lines between
different disciplines—making products, publishing books, making documentary films—thanks to
the passion of the people of our company and our own, it all came in a very natural way, and
sometimes it is a handicap because if people ask me, “What do you do?” it’s very difficult to
answer, but on the other hand it’s luxury. I realize that I’ve done many books and exhibitions with
the vernacular images that I collect but I have never had a gallery because I’m not dependent on it
financially so there’s a lot of freedom, because I have another income as well.

Having said that, I have to make clear that my art projects and the advertising business are two
separate things. e ideas are mixed together but never those different worlds. ey are totally
separated, and I see it like a playground, where all the different disciplines take place, and I don’t
feel any barrier or pressure. At this point, the company employs some fiy people, yet I never feel
any pressure or bad dreams, because it’s also what I do and I try to do my best, and so does
everybody else. And if it doesn’t work out, well, it doesn’t, and if it does, then we have a good
time.

OE: The campaign for the Dutch Funeral Museum “Tot Zover” is an example of your way of
working, I believe. There is a lot of black humor in the title “Open Due to Circumstances.” Is
sarcasm and irony the most common ingredient in your campaigns?

EK: Yes, we always try to turn things upside down. Irony and sarcasm is one way to do it.
Sometimes there is another way, for example, being very honest, or even a more humanistic
approa, but that is another thing. We made a campaign about organ donation, where audiences
were directed to a website, called jaofnee.nl (“yesorno.nl”), and they had the opportunity to vote
Yes or No to questions su as “If you could save someone’s life, would you do it?” ey could also
register for organ donation but whether they did or not was up to them. Organ donation is an
issue very close to the skin, so we showed the skin to make it more real. A simple but strong idea
for an important issue. In contrast, with other products or companies it’s quite nice to not take
yourself so seriously.

OE: That leads to my next question, about your campaigns for Women Inc, such as “Treat Me like
a Lady” [see Color Plate 11] or “Where is My €300,000?,” which were about raising consciousness of
gender equality, another important issue, but treated quite differently than the “Yes or No”
campaign, right?
 EK: It has been almost twelve years that we have been working for this client. e designers and
account managers of these campaigns are all women. e client has certain topics and then we
develop campaigns. For instance, the “Ladies” campaign is about healthcare, as it turns out that
women are still treated differently in hospitals, and in the health system in general: Certain tests
were developed only for male patients, as medical science is based on the male body, whi has
major consequences for the health of women. is is why the campaign is called “Treat Me like a
Lady.” ere is also a certain twist because when we do campaigns like these, we never use
retouing to make models look perfect. I mean, it would take only two seconds to clean their
skins in Photoshop, but I never use Photoshop in these cases, because an image is so mu more
interesting when there is imperfection in it.

EO: So, which would be your personal conclusions regarding the role of photography in the
advertising business?

EK: e advertising photography that I have done for many years now is probably very different
from what other people have done. If you write about the history of advertising photography you
can probably fit it into a small apter because it has followed very clear paerns, based on
cliés. When I started, Advertising Photography was still “a profession,” there was a pool of many
photographers in Holland that worked for advertising, at a certain moment, but that has all gone
now. Today, photographers who work in advertising are also artists who do their own exhibitions,
publish books, work editorially, and do other projects, besides occasionally taking on commercial
projects. I think that is a more healthy way of doing it because the traditional advertising
photographers are like master copiers, you know, they can do anything, like the painters in the
seventeenth century who were given concrete tasks, su as “you have to paint a still life with
flowers” and they made it perfectly—that’s exactly the same with advertising photographers. But
those are not the ones that I have hired for my campaigns for more than twenty years. Luily
that has also anged a lile bit; at least in Holland this kind of stereotypical photography is
substituted with a more creative approa, whi is good I think. e strange thing is that the
advertising industry thinks that it is beer not to use artists for advertising jobs, because they
could be too risky for the client, but clients really like it, they like to have a photographer that has
an original point of view, with an original take on their product. e advertising industry is very
narrow minded; it’s all based on fear, everything, fear of losing a client, fear of not geing paid
anymore, and so on. I am normally very open to my clients: if they are not nice people, why
would you work for them? I mean, life is too short to spend it with assholes, isn’t it?

References

All the projects and campaigns mentioned can be found on

www.kesselskramer.com.
 3.3 A Farewell to the Family Album? (and Case
Study on the Cultural History of Wedding
Photography)
Mette Sandbye

A Farewell to the Family Album?

ere are many stories about people who, if their house was on fire, would
make sure to save the family photo album before all other material objects.
And many have experienced it as a tragedy that their computer crashed or
their mobile phone disappeared and their personal photos were not saved.
Family photography is the most emotionally arged and personally
significant genre of photography. Historically the family photo album is a
material object of immense importance to many families. It is an object of
both banal conformity and deep affective value and personal meaning.
Family photography is practiced all over the world, and it is an enormous
consumer culture as well. Nevertheless, it is an understudied part of visual
culture. It is not until the last few decades that museums, academic solars
and even collectors have really started to take an interest in family
photography.
A family photo album is an object, whi is the product of a practice:
doing family photography. Like other forms of vernacular photography,
family photo albums are objects at the same time related to personal,
affective, social and cultural communication. All these aspects must be
included in an analysis. Family photo albums are about social and emotional
communication; they can be interpreted phenomenologically as ways of
understanding and coming to terms with life, happy moments and life
developments as well as more traumatic events; they can be interpreted
discourse-critically as a way to shape peoples’ lives and make them adapt to
cultural norms; and at the same time they document sociological aspects of
daily lives that we do not have access to from other historical sources.
In order to write about a given family album, we need to maneuver
between the global and the local, the general and the particular, the macro
and the micro level, ideology and emotion, and to be methodologically and
theoretically inclusive rather than reductive.

A Development in Four Phases

e family is crucially linked to the concept of “the good life,” and the family
photo album has historically been a place to articulate or perhaps even stage
our own family and our ideas of the good life. Photography was born in the
first half of the nineteenth century, around the same time as the modern
nuclear family was formed under industrialization and the growth of urban
life. Gradually family portraits, and later on other kinds of snapshots of the
family, became a way to represent, define and consolidate the modern,
urban nuclear family, and family photography became one of the most
widespread practices since the invention of photography. Most families own
one or more albums, at least before the more recent advent of digital
photography tenology. In his book La photo sur la cheminée. Naissance
d’un culte moderne (1983) Fren photo historian Bertrand Mary traces two
major steps forward for family photography: the first one was in the wake of
Kodak’s laun of the box camera in 1888 under the slogan “You press the
buon, we do the rest,” whi made photography easy and affordable for at
least a middle-class audience; the second was in the years around World
War I, where all the soldiers and their family members were photographed
before the soldier went to war. Following in Mary’s footsteps, a third phase
could be defined as the late 1960s and early 1970s, where the eap
Instamatic cameras were introduced, the cassee-loaded color film, the flash
cube, first in the United States and Japan and shortly aer in Europe.
Bertrand Mary states that out of the 15 billion private photos produced
worldwide in 1970, Americans alone produced 6 billion (Mary 1983: 255).
e 1970s meant an explosion in family photography, with teenagers as a
huge new market.
But in the last decade there has been a radical ange. We have entered a
fourth phase: e age of ubiquitous computing, web 2.0, social media and
the camera phone. Today, private photographs are widely produced,
consumed and circulated on computers, mobile phones and on the Internet.
On Instagram alone, more than 80 million private photographs are uploaded
every day, circulated and shared by more than 400 million daily users.
Where traditional analogue family photographs were taken for a future
audience, photographs taken by the mobile phone are most oen taken to be
seen immediately by people at a distance. And we can now access our
private photos dynamically, while we travel with the morning train to work,
or make them circulate in the night life a few seconds aer they were taken
on the dance floor. e photographic practice related to ubiquitous
computing indicates that photography has become a mu more embodied
and daily practice than before. Increasingly, everyday amateur photography
is regarded as a performative practice connected to presence, immediate
communication and social networking, as opposed to the storing of
memories for eternity, whi is how it has hitherto been conceptualized. Has
the – relatively new – solarly aention towards vernacular photography
kept pace with these new, radical anges? What implications does this
ange have for the family photo album? Today ea family member most
oen uploads his or her own personal images to various sites and social
media accounts. Is it a farewell to the family album?

Why Study Family Photo Albums?

Most writing and analysis within the history of photography is about art
and documentary photography. Mu less has been wrien on family
photography, despite the fact that it is the most widespread genre, especially
since the 1970s when amateur photography exploded. So basically there is a
huge amount of material wherein we can study how people live their daily
lives, how they conceptualize the family, and how larger societal anges
and developments are experienced, negotiated, handled and understood via
the personal gaze.
e family photo album depicts the history of “the family,” on an
individual as well as a larger sociological scale. On a personal level it has a
psyological meaning to most people. In family photos and albums we
create and perform our identity and we construct, shape and secure our
memories. On a philosophical, phenomenological level the family photo
album gives us a sense of living in and over time. Photography is an
invention linked to early modernity. Since the advent of modernity and
industrialization, whi on many levels made traditional values as well as
notions of time, space, distance and speed “melt into air,” to paraphrase a
famous sentence by Karl Marx, we have used family photography to secure
a feeling of living in time, including a feeling of a past, a now, and a future
death as the end-point. As Riard Chalfen writes: “Making family
photographs and organizing albums are modern additions to a human’s
many ways of symbolically defining and ordering the world” (1991: 14).
Family photography and albums can be used to construct alternative
histories to the official history writing, for instance based on material studies
and affect studies of the visual, and more recently many books, exhibitions
or web-projects have had that focus. Kim Yeon-Soo’s The Family Album:
Histories, Subjectivities, and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture
(2005) documents immigration lives under the Franco regime, like Riard
Chalfen’s Turning Leaves: The Photograph Collections of Two Japanese
American Families (1991) gives new insights into how cultural and diasporic
experiences are negotiated in an immigrant culture like the Japanese-
American. In Lengselens bilder (Pictures of Longing, 2009), Sigrid Lien
studies the role of private photography among early Norwegian immigrants
to the US. Many have been interested in and mu has been wrien about
the Norwegian–US emigration, but few have focused on the images as
historical sources. Ed Jones and Timothy Prus’ book Nein, Onkel: Snapshots
From Another Front 1938–1945 (2007) is a photographic survey of daily life in
the Nazi ird Rei, with highly personal, but previously unpublished,
images made by soldiers. At the website of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington one can also leaf through a private Nazi
officer’s family photo album, whi thus gives access to another, hitherto
rather repressed visual, affective history of the perpetrators. Many amateur
researers are occupied with finding, restoring and spreading private
images as alternative historical narrative, for instance “e Rescued Film
Project” (www.rescuedfilm.com), whi presents itself as
an online arive gallery of images that were captured on film between the 1930s and late 1990s.
Ea image in our arive was recovered from found film from locations all over the world, and
came to us in the form of undeveloped rolls of film . . . We believe that these images deserve to be
seen, so that the photographer’s personal experiences can be shared. Forever marking their
existence in history.

A New Interest

During the last decades there has thus been an increased interest in family
photography and albums. is invites several explanations: A commercial
explanation might be that the fine art photography market has been drying
up. ere are no more hidden “Atgets” to be found in aics, so collectors are
turning their aention towards amateur snaps. An academic explanation
might be the cultural and anthropological “turn” within the humanities, and
a more vernacular explanation might be that a shi to new (digital)
tenologies oen increases interest in old, dying tenologies, in this case
analogue prints and physical albums. Today there are numerous websites for
collectors of “vernacular photography,” and especially in the late 1990s and
early 2000s a number of leading art museums mounted exhibitions of this
type of visual material. Large international publishing houses have
published books – oen in relation to museum exhibitions – using su
snapshots. Common to these books, catalogues, and exhibitions, however, is
a la of deep analysis of the material reproduced. A typical example is
Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther
Collection,whi was the title of both a book and an exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2000 that featured amateur
photos from the 1910s to the 1960s. Photographs in the show were obviously
collected and exhibited because they were apparently innocent or honest
and, moreover, contained surreal or poetic qualities that were either latent
or unconscious. Collector omas Walther wrote in the book’s aerword
that the photographs on view “document a profound innocence, tremendous
pride and a unique sense of humor in American society. ere is no faking,
no strain, no theory here, only the simplicity and directness of capturing
moments of life” (Walther 2000: n.p.). Other typical examples are: Snapshots:
The Photography of Everyday Life (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
1998); Close to Home: An American Album (J. Paul Gey Museum, Los
Angeles, 2004); Snapshots: From the Box Brownie to the Camera Phone
(Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, 2005); The Art of the American
Snapshot (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2007); Miel Frizot and
Cédric de Veigy, Photos trouvées (Phaidon, London/NY, 2006), followed by
the exhibition Every Photograph is an Enigma co-produced by the Maison
Européenne de la Photographie (Paris) and the Musée Nicephore Niépce
(Chalon-sur-Saône) in collaboration with the Fotomuseum Winterthur
(Switzerland); and Christian Skrein, Snapshots: The Eye of the Century
(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004).
Another aspect of the new interest by museums in family and everyday
photography – inspired by new museum discourses about inclusion and
citizenship – is that museums oen invite their audience to contribute with
their own images. An example could be Tate Britain’s large exhibition of the
history of British photography in 2007, How We Are, whi was
accompanied by an exhibition called How We Are Now, consisting of
ordinary people’s contributions added through Flir. is was the first time
that Tate Britain included su material. An institution su as
Photographer’s Gallery in London regularly invites people to contribute
with their own family snaps, most recently with Family Photography Now, a
40-week Instagram project led by the gallery in 2016 in collaboration with
publisher ames & Hudson, whi “invites us to reflect on the emotional
rollercoaster of family life today on the love, fear, trust and aament that
exists between brothers and sisters, parents and ildren, stepfamilies and
in-laws, outcasts and adoptees,” as the project’s Facebook page announced
(www.facebook.com/pg/FamilyPhotographyNow/about/?ref=page_internal).

How Do We Study the Family Photo Album?

If we imagined a pool of images consisting of all the photographs produced

on a global scale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, less than 10
percent would probably fit into the classical genre categories of art and
documentary, whereas more than 90 percent would be vernacular, amateur
and commercial images. If we regarded the academic literature on
photography in the same way, the proportions would be reversed. It is not
until recently that family photographs have been given serious academic
aention. e best-known survey histories of photography, from Beaumont
Newhall’s to Miel Frizot’s, included very lile on family photography.
As Geoffrey Baten has stated:
the snapshot, precisely because this is the most numerous and popular of photographic forms,
represents an interpretive problem absolutely central to any ambitious solarship devoted to the
history of photography. Oblivious to the artistic prejudices that still guide mu of that
solarship, family photographs allenge us to find another way of talking about photography, a
way that can somehow account for the determined banality of these, and indeed most other,
photographic pictures.
(Batchen 2008: 124)

What tools, then, do theories of photography and critical solarship give

us to write about the “ordinary” family albums? One of the most cited and
influential theoretical works on family photography remains Fren
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle-brow Art (Un art
moyen) from 1965. rough empirical studies in a local context, Bourdieu
and his resear assistants demonstrated how deeply conventional and
ritualized family photography can be. In contrast, one could address another
photo theory milestone, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (published
posthumously as La chambre claire in 1980), whi takes a
phenomenological approa to photography, identifying the deeply personal
affection and even grief that family photos can offer viewers. Although both
were informed by the tradition of Fren structuralism, the two books by
Bourdieu and Barthes offer very different perspectives; the former focuses on
the social redundancy of the material, the laer focuses on the personal
affect of the user. Neither has mu of an eye for the producer of the family
album, or for the album’s uses in the performance of identity and its role in
ordering the world. Su a focus can be found among a later generation of
solars, su as Christopher Pinney, Martha Langford, Gillian Rose, and
Elizabeth Edwards, in addition to Baten and Chalfen, many of them
mixing methodological bagrounds from art history, cultural studies,
anthropology and sociology. Solarly aention towards personal
photography has been growing since the early 1980s, including seminal early
work by Marianne Hirs, Julia Hirs, and Jo Spence, among others,
inspired by feminist theory, discourse analysis, psyoanalysis, semiotics
and the development of cultural studies in the 1970s.
Mu recent resear has found inspiration in the tool box of the
anthropologist, su as ethnographic field work, drawing aention not only
to the individual image, but to the cultural as well as personal use of family
photography regarded as a practice. In her book on family photography,
Suspended Conversations (2001), based on Walter Ong’s theories of the
importance of sound and voice in cultural analysis, Martha Langford talks
about photography as an act of communication. Elizabeth Edwards,
moreover, has stressed the importance of tou and talk in family
photography and considers it part of an everyday oral culture. In many of
her publications (Edwards 2005, Edwards & Hart 2004), she stresses the
importance of considering private photographs as material objects and thus
to consider concepts su as intention, production, distribution, and perhaps
even destruction or subjugation of these private photos. Edwards calls
family photography an interactive medium, because it creates history and
makes feelings emerge that otherwise would not have been articulated, if the
images had not existed. Anthropological studies su as Edwards’ work can
contribute to regarding the photo album as relational, communicative,
active, and non-static material. Moreover, recent theoretical framings, su
as material studies, affect studies, and visual anthropology, have proven to
be fruitful supplements to the earlier more ideological and discourse-critical
approa to photography as representation. Studying family albums and
everyday photography in general thus stimulates an interdisciplinary
approa and an urge to be methodologically inclusive rather than
reductive. We must critically study the sociological and ideological aspects
of family photography, while simultaneously recognizing its emotional and
affective qualities and its ambiguity and mutability.

Art as a Tool of Analysis, from Analogue to Digital

Contemporary art works can give insight into these subtle functions of
family photography, and nuanced insights can be gained from studying the
family photo album, including its recent and very radical digital anges, as
it is treated, appropriated, imitated or re-circulated by artists. For several
decades now Fren artist Christian Boltanski has re-used all sorts of
vernacular and family photos in his photo-based installations, oen centered
on the Holocaust. In installations entitled Alters he has mourned the fate of
the many European Jews by using official sool photos of ildren from the
1930s. Or in the photo-book Sans-Souci (1991) he appropriated a full family
album from a German Nazi family in order to focus on what Hannah
Arendt has called “the banality of evil.” Among images of picnics and
birthday parties, recognizable by anyone, images of Nazi officers or Nazi
flags appeared in these absolutely ordinary, everyday life situations.
By appropriating their own family photo heritage, American artists su
as Larry Sultan (Pictures from Home 1992) or Ed Templeton (Deformer 2008)
have critically discussed the notion of the nuclear family structure in today’s
Western welfare society. German Joaim Smid has recirculated amateur
snapshots and family photos, in the beginning found at flea markets but
today on the Internet, in various exhibitions and book projects. With great
humor as well as phenomenological affect he thus points to the alternative
everyday history and narration to be found in this kind of material, not
unlike his German colleague Hans-Peter Feldmann, who became famous for
his small photo-books with appropriated vernacular photos in the late 1960s
and onwards. In the wake of the dissolving of the Soviet Union, artists like
Ilya Kabakov and Igor Savenko have also re-used family photos in order to
bring focus to the alternative histories located in this kind of material and to
propose a new discussion on Post-Soviet identity, with this private material
as a starting point.
Many of these art projects took place during a period when academic
studies showed lile interest in vernacular and family photography. rough
studying these art works, theoretical insights can be gained regarding the
function and the phenomenology of photography. Recently, many artists
have started to include and thereby to discuss the role of everyday digital
photography in people’s lives, most notably an artist like Erik Kessels. In his
installation 24 Hrs in Photos (Color Plate 10) he harvested an enormous
amount of amateur photos from 24 hours on Flir and heaped them into
huge piles – almost mountains – on the exhibition floor. By giving the
concept of photo-sharing a material, physical representation he conceptually
elevated a critical discussion of the absurd visual depiction of our everyday
lives that is not only taking place on a daily basis, but is spread and shared
on the Internet as some kind of meaningless pollution. In the American
Hasan Elahi’s web project Tracking Transience (2002–present), he uses
mobile phone, GPS and self-blogging teniques to document and upload all
his daily activities, resulting in an absurdly vast amount of photographs as a
radical form of self-surveillance. In this parody of modern authorities’
control of visibility he points to how mobile phone photos and digital
sharing possibilities have opened up new ways of self-monitoring as well as
of public surveillance.

New Digital Developments

e works of Kessels, Elahi and Smid point to the fact that today
photography, once again, is anging dramatically. Over the last decades,
analogue snapshot photography has more or less died out as digital
photography has become commonplace. Digital tenology has not only
anged the way the images are produced, but also the way they are used,
circulated and communicated. Photographs are now very widely produced,
consumed and circulated on computers, mobile phones and via the Internet,
especially through social networking sites. Web 2.0 affords an open online
participatory culture in whi connected individuals not only surf but make
many “products” through editing, updating, blogging, remixing, posting,
responding, sharing, exhibiting, tagging and so on.
So what happens with the family photo album aer Flir, Facebook,
Instagram, Snapat, Picasa? Can we still speak of it as one practice, or has
it diffused into all sorts of varied individual Internet practices? Insights from
the old practice are still relevant, as Sarah Pink says:
New amateur photographic practices are undoubtedly emerging, I caution against a focus on the
“new” so mu as on how more subtle shis are taking place as “new” and “old” meet. New digital
amateur photographic practices are beer understood as emergent in relation to both older
photographic media and tenologies and practitioners’ understandings of their potential.
(Pink 2011: 93)

So certainly, many of the aspects and functions of family photography

mentioned above, remain the same. But the practice has also anged
radically: Concerning what we find worth photographing in today’s digital
everyday mobile photography we find less family and more friends; more
everyday experience and hitherto-less-photographed objects su as food,
pets or clothes and other daily life occurrences; more young camera users (as
photography is a part of teenage culture more than ever); more self-
portraiture; and not the least: the everyday life made public. As Nancy Van
House says: “Whereas printed images and negatives are under the control of
the owner, digital photographs have slipped the bounds of materiality and
may have a life of their own outside the control of their makers” (Van House
2011: 128). Family and everyday photos are increasingly having short-lived
and ephemeral lives, on the one hand, and more mobile and public lives, on
the other. And with the growth of photographs in our daily lives, and the
extreme diversity of images, the notion of “family photography” as a specific
genre might have become obsolete as a result of the contemporary use of
mobile phone photography. Today, taking private photos is more about
communication, sharing a “now” as opposed to a “then,” and as opposed to
photographing for private storytelling for the future of the family,
ronicling its life for future generations.
e new digital possibilities have also paved the way for new possibilities
of using amateur photography as a political tool. From the involuntary
spread of the American soldiers’ snapshots from the Abu Ghraib Prison, to
the so-called Arab Spring or more recently various police killings of bla
Americans, the spread of amateur images on the Internet has affected the
political discourse. e police have also used data mining of photography on
social media to investigate cases su as the 2013 Boston Marathon
Bombing.
Photo sharing sites can also be used for collective commemoration, for
creating awareness of a specific issue or to complement “official history”
with other, “minor” narratives. In the “Lost and Found Project,” family
photos found in the debris from the tsunami in Tohoku in Eastern Japan in
2011 by firemen and the official clean-up mission were collected in a local
sool, cleansed and digitized by volunteers and both returned to their
original owners, if possible, and shared digitally as well as through
exhibitions. As the project website states:
ese pictures offer visceral feel for the presence of the people and their lives in the photos,
something that the press reports, videos and casualty figures cannot communicate . . . Today, we
can take pictures whenever and wherever, but one is reminded that a single photograph can have
a value that nothing else can replace.
(http://lostandfound311.jp/en/about/)

Apart from a whole variety of individual photo albums on social media

platforms depicting a person’s everyday life, friends and family relations,
the Internet hosts a forest of specific photo-(and text-) sharing sites
dedicated to specific issues, su as parents’ commemoration of their
deceased ildren or photo series following individual gender
transformation procedures, just to mention two examples.
Even though the traditional concept of “the family photo album” has thus
propagated into a variety of new forms, the importance of the genre related
to identity construction, a phenomenological experience of time and many
other aspects, still applies to the genre and its many sub-genres. And indeed
many still take photos of family life highlights su as celebrations and
vacations. Instead of mounting them in a physical cardboard album, storing
it on a shelf in the living room, digital family photo albums are created in
various forms or images are just stored in endless digital “piles” or sorted
into files on the hard drive, on social media sites or in the “Cloud.” But
increasingly, cameras are part of our daily lives and the images we take with
them, to keep or circulate, are important to study as well as the very act of
communication and connecting via digital everyday images. So yes, in many
ways it is a farewell to the family photo album, and a hello to an extreme
variety of alternative forms. But to look at photography as representation –
whi has dominated photography theory – must be complemented. Today,
what we used to call “family photography” must be understood
simultaneously as a social practice, a networked tenology, a material
object and an image, and therefore new practice-based, ethnographic or
participant-oriented studies are needed. Examples of su studies can be
found in Larsen and Sandbye (2014) and Cruz and Lehmuskallio (2016).
Having argued that family photo albums provide insights into people’s
daily lives and offer alternative narratives to official history, what one might
fear for the future, is a loss of images and access to images. is is a
paradox, since we have never photographed our daily lives and produced
private photographs as we do today. But what happens when or if the Cloud
breaks down, when new tenology and storing systems are introduced, and
our old digital images can no longer be retrieved or translated into new
formats? Whi kind of, and how mu of this contemporary ubiquitous
visual knowledge, experience and memory will then be lost?
Today, we oen experience the world through photography, and it is no
longer possible to go ba to some kind of “photo free” society. e
photographs are sometimes all we have to understand ourselves and the
world, as Susan Sontag argued in her latest book on photography, Regarding
the Pain of Others (2003). In the light of the recent explosion of private
family photo material on social platforms on the Internet the urge to do
fieldwork and resear on contemporary family photography, recognizing its
emotional and affective qualities as well as its ambiguity and mutability, is
even more relevant and needed. is kind of visual material opens up
another, and maybe more subtle, understanding of cultural similarities and
differences, whi is mu needed in a world where globalization sometimes
cements cultural differences rather than encourages understanding.

References

Barthes, R. (1981 [1980]) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New

York: Hill and Wang.
Baten, G. (2008) “Snapshots: Art history and the ethnographic turn,”
Photographies, 1:2, pp. 121–142.
Bourdieu, P. et al. (1996 [1965]) Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Chalfen, R. (1991) Turning Leaves: The Photograph Collections of Two
Japanese American Families, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Cruz, E.G. and A. Lehmuskallio, eds. (2016) Digital Photography and
Everyday Life: Empirical Studies on Material Visual Practices,
Oxford/New York: Routledge.
Edwards, E. (2005) “Photographs and the sound of history,” Visual
Anthropology, 21: 1&2 (Spring/Fall), pp. 27–46.
Edwards, E. and J. Hart, eds. (2004) Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the
Materiality of Images, London/New York: Routledge.
Jones, E. and T. Prus, eds. (2007) Nein, Onkel: Snapshots From Another Front
1938–1945, London: AMC Books.
Langford, M. (2001) Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in
Photographic Albums, Montreal/Kingston: McGill-een’s University
Press.
Larsen, J. and M. Sandbye, eds. (2014) Digital Snaps: The New Face of
Photography, London: I.B. Tauris.
Lien, S. (2009) Lengselens Bilder. Fotografiet i norsk utvandringshistorie,
Oslo: Spartacus. (is book will appear in an English translation, by
University of Minnesota Press, as Pictures of Longing, in late 2018.)
Mary, B. (1983) La photo sur la cheminée. Naissance d’un culte moderne,
Paris: Métailié.
Pink, S. (2011) “Amateur photographic practice, collective representation and
the constitution of place,” Visual Studies, 26(2), pp. 92–101.
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador.
Van House, N. (2011) “Personal photography, digital tenologies and the
uses of the visual,” Visual Studies, 26(2), pp. 125–134.
Walther, T. (2000) Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas
Walther Collection, New York: Twin Palm Publishers.
Yeon-Soo, K. (2005) The Family Album: Histories, Subjectivities, and
Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture, Lewisburg: Bunell
University Press.

Further Reading

Baten, G. (2000) “Vernacular photographies,” History of Photography, 24(3),

pp. 262–271. (Another criticism of why vernacular photography has not
been included in the traditional account of photography’s history, by one
of the leading solars in the field.)
Hirs, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (An early, personal analysis of the
more traumatic sides of family photography, related to mourning and
memory.)
Rose, G. (2010) Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public and
The Politics of Sentiment, Aldershot: Ashgate. (A thorough fieldwork
study influenced by material culture studies, geography, and
anthropology.)
Sandbye, M. (2013) “e family photo album as transformed social space in
the age of ‘web 2.0,’” in U. Ekman (ed.) Throughout: Art and Culture
Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 103–
118. (An extension of my essay above, including examples of analysis of
digital web albums.)
Siegel, E. (2010) Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-
Century American Photograph Albums, New Haven: Yale University
Press. (A wider historical perspective on the subject.)
Zuromskis, C. (2013) Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images,
Cambridge: MIT Press. (A survey and a discussion of the amateur
snapshot in a broader political, social, and aesthetic context.)

Case Study on the Anthropology of Wedding Photography

As outlined in the first half of this apter, family photography is the most
emotionally arged and personally significant genre of photography. It is a
genre highly visible in modern culture, but nevertheless it has been largely
unrecognized and untheorized. It is not until the last few decades that
museums, academic culture and even collectors have started to take an
interest in family photography.
e commercial, professional studio portrait is also one of photography’s
many “middle-brow” genres (to use the title of Pierre Bourdieu’s mu-
quoted book on family photography, Un art moyen, or Photography: A
Middle-brow Art), whi has not really been considered interesting and
worthwhile to deal with other than for the photographer and the person
who paid for his or her own portrait.
One might claim that wedding photography combines these two genres:
family photography and the portrait. And if those genres are already quite
underestimated and overlooked in critical photographic theory, this fact is
even clearer when we talk about wedding photography. If we consult the
most important, internationally recognized and comprehensive books on the
history of photography, there is not a single line on this genre. is is
strange, because wedding photography is so common, so globally
widespread, something we all know and remember, even if we are not
married ourselves nor possess pictures of the “happiest day of our lives.”
In the last 150 years the wedding portrait – most oen taken by the
professional photographer immediately aer the ceremony and before the
celebration itself – has been a central part of the rituals behind and the
celebration of a wedding in most parts of at least the middle-class of the so-
called “First World,” from Japan to Europe and the US. Among family
photographs, wedding pictures occupy a special and very important role,
and they are oen situated in a place of honor in the family home: In fact, it
is here where the family begins.
Today, weddings – and their professional visual representations – are a
major industry deeply imbedded in bourgeois consumerism. e couple, or
sometimes still their parents, may spend tens of thousands of dollars on the
event. Today’s wedding photographers offer a whole range of “photo
paages” depending on the couple’s budget.
But here we will concentrate on the cultural history of the classical
wedding portrait. In spite of the ideology and the celebration of traditional
heterosexuality as well as bourgeois or middle-class values adhering to the
genre, concentrating exclusively on a Marxist, critical approa to wedding
photography would be to miss important other aspects su as an enduring
longing to step into rituals, as well as the deeply emotional significance or
implications of this kind of photography.
Oen the central or most important, classically posed portrait of the
newlywed couple – the object of this article – is supplemented by a whole
series of photos, sometimes including more “documentary” motifs su as
the exit from the ur and the couple cuing the cake, or material objects
related to the wedding su as the bridal bouquet, the cake, the gi table, the
limousine and the dinner or reception table decorations. All these images are
collected in a wedding album, whi serves as a strong mnemonic tool for
the couple and the family ever aer . . . or at least until the divorce. e
album or the framed photo oen holds a privileged place in the home: it is
shared, stories are added, it represents a cultural continuity and a feeling of
community across time, and it is preserved with affection and strong
emotion. It is thus important to regard the wedding photograph not just as
an image of something, but as a material object tainted with affect. As su
one can easily imagine a fictitious Hollywood movie where a person tears
apart a wedding portrait or erases the face of the beloved in the wake of a
break-up. Wedding photographs are emotional objects.
At a first glance, wedding photography is an immensely conventional
genre. A white bride and her groom dressed in bla, posing front-on in the
studio. Su is the typical wedding portrait in the 1870s. And this is how it is
still looks, from Madrid to Oslo, from Tokyo to Chicago. But as recent
resear (see the first half of this section) has highlighted how family
photography as a genre tells a multitude of stories, both private and
collective, and therefore is an interesting object of cultural analysis, these
insights apply to wedding photography as a genre as well. Behind the
seemingly unanged conventionality of wedding photography from the
second half of the nineteenth century until today, there is a whole
anthropology of both latent and manifest meaning and insights in the genre
when we take a closer look.
Wedding photography, as conventional as we might think it is, actually
follows the history of photography and its tenical as well as sociological
developments. At the same time, wedding photographs are a testimony to
the “grand cultural narratives” around them. If history has anged, so has
the wedding photograph. e imagery expresses the couple’s ideals about
happiness and the good life, and at the same time it is a mirror of the wider
societal development. Wedding portraits most oen amplify social
conventions, or sometimes play slightly critical or humorously with them –
with our view of marriage, gender, body, sexuality, economics, and even
photography itself.
 e tradition of the genre started in the 1860s, partly in the wake of the
Fren photographer Disdéri’s invention of carte de visite photography,
whi was a mu eaper tenology than photography’s earliest form, the
expensive daguerreotype with an exposure time of many minutes. In the
slightly frightened, or at least deadserious, look of the people portrayed in
the earliest wedding portraits one can see that it was not an ordinary man’s
everyday tenology but rather a quite unfamiliar situation to visit a
portrait studio.
Long into the twentieth century, the genre of the frontally posed couple in
the studio apparently remained quite unanged. We look at painted
badrops with fabulous upper-class aritecture with balconies, pillars and
enormous front steps, a romantic forest (Figure 3.1), or we meet the bride
and groom in imposing indoor environments located in front of voluminous
velvet curtains, gilded small tables and flower displays, surroundings that
are probably not mated by the couple’s own middle-or lower-class home.
Most brides are dressed in white, the color of innocence. But in the
beginning the bride was dressed in bla. In the upper-class we find the
white wedding dress dating ba to the 1870s, while the lower-class bla
wedding dress lasts well into the twentieth century. If the bride was a
widow, had ildren or was already pregnant, she still wore the bla dress
and made sure that the bouquet covered the pregnant belly. During World
War II in Europe, it was difficult to buy silk or other fabric traditionally used
for the wedding dress. Instead paraute silk became common.
e man, the powerful breadwinner of the family, should preferably be
the tallest, and here a top hat or a stool would help. He is oen also the
graver of the two, carrying the responsibility of the new family’s survival,
while the woman may well have a smile. Another example (Figure 3.2)
shows a married couple from a rural village in Denmark in 1910. e wife is
wearing her bla “Sunday best,” supplemented by a long white veil.
Traditionally, the veil represents innocence. e groom is standing on a box,
covered by the floor tapestry, in order to appear taller than the bride. On the
bride’s right side, we see a glimpse of the badrop carpet not fully covering
the
Figure 3.1 Wedding photography from the early 1900s. Anonymous, Belgium.
Figure 3.2 Wedding photography, from 1910. Photographer: Johanne Nielsen, Denmark.

bri wall behind the blanket. is indicates that the photo might have been
taken outside. eir facial expressions are rather somber, but they hold
hands, whi is not that common in the period. e most common is the
man slightly bending his arm, supporting the woman’s arm resting in his.
Or there is no physical contact, as in Figure 3.1, whi is from the same
period as Figure 3.2, yet probably from a more urban environment, judging
from the elegance of their clothes – his gloves, her dress embroidery – as
well as the slightly shorter length of her dress. e painted badrop
illustrating a romantic wood seing in the first image might paradoxically
also point to a more urban photo studio than the second one.
e genre remains relatively unanged long into the twentieth century.
e studio portrait was the most common form of expression; in the early
decades this was because of the dependency on strong skylights for the
heavy tripod camera with the big glass plate negatives. e invention of the
small-format portable, light-sensitive cameras with small negatives in the
1930s paved the way for reportage photography, whi had an effect on the
wedding portrait as well. Now it became increasingly possible to photograph
outside the studio, and wedding photographers slowly began to borrow from
reportage photography’s faster and more spontaneous expression. e event
itself, including the guests, started to be documented in the years aer
World War II, but the conventions and traditions of the posed indoor studio
portrait still dominated. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that the official
staged outdoor wedding portrait became common. Today’s wedding
photographers can work almost anywhere on land and under water. Hiring a
professional to document and celebrate the big day oen means the
production of a whole variety of images apart from the traditional portrait
of the newlywed couple thus constructing a whole visual narrative around
the event.
Figure 3.3 is the official wedding photograph of the Brussels-based Vafeas
couple, probably taken aer the marriage, when the couple has anged into
more modern, urban clothing. e photograph is the first, official marriage
portrait in a larger wedding album. It is accompanied by a printed card
saying: “Ady M. Hildersen, Michel Ch. Vafeas ont le plaisir de vous faire part
de leur marriage qui a eu lieu dans l’intimité à Bruxelles le 24 avril 1971.”
(“Ady M. Hildersen, Miel Ch. Vafeas have the pleasure of informing you
of their wedding, whi took place in private in Brussels, April 24, 1971.”)
e album also consists of more snapshot-like photos, documenting their
Greek–Catholic marriage act in the ur, as well as photos from their later
honeymoon. Yet it is this image whi is used as their official wedding
portrait. It is made in a classical and simple portrait style, where we only see
their faces and upper breast. ey pose with a gentle smile, hardly touing
ea other, apart from her hair almost touing his in. She is in white, he
is dressed in a suit, but nothing indicates that we are witnessing the formal
union of husband and wife.
e dress is typically long into the 1960s, where a simple and streamlined
style came into fashion. is was true for cars, aritecture, design – and
wedding dresses. Figure 3.4 is a Danish lower middle-class studio portrait
from 1962. e dress is short, cut just below the knee, and the design is
simple, as is the studio, with no romantic badrops or lighting effects. Also
the veil is now shorter and more practical; the woman’s mobility is
increased literally as well as symbolically. A hint of a rising sexual
emancipation is seen in the fact that the groom has his arm around the waist
of his bride. But he is still posing as the dominant, responsible person, whose
smile is not quite as bright as the bride’s. Although this couple has now been
married for more than 50 years, the portrait still holds a central place in a
frame on the living room shelves, now adorned with portraits of their three
ildren and the ildren’s new families. Had this 1962-wed couple been
divorced, this living room celebration of the family genealogy would
probably have been put away in a drawer, if not torn apart.
Figure 3.3 e Vafeas couple, Brussels, 1971. Anonymous wedding photographer.

From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s a whole new kind of
wedding photography gradually appears, in pace with women’s rebellion,
the hippie movement and the general “rebellion against the bourgeoisie.”
Society and all the bourgeois, patriar and materialist ideology adhering to
the concept of the wedding, was anging and under pressure. From the
1960s onwards, the traditional wedding uniform is allenged as well. Men
suddenly also wear white, topped with an untraditionally paerned purple
bow tie, as in the photograph of the wedding of Alasdair Foster and Kirsty
Jenkins in Scotland, August 1976 (Color Plate 12). Typical for the period, the
bride’s dress is homemade; also worth noticing is the similar length and
style of the couple’s haircuts. Likewise the photograph has a mu more
informal and non-professional aracter, as it is shot outdoors, as the couple
is about to cut the wedding cake.
Still, the ideologies and the amplification of social conventions of the
genre are rarely questioned. In today’s wedding portraits we do meet all
sorts of “rainbow” families, including “yours and my” ildren. Especially in
the 1980s and 1990s, the wedding (again) became extravagant and
glamorous, and the clothes are sometimes exaggeratedly glamorous with
meters-long veils. e photographers started experimenting with a mixture
of stagings of formal and dignified postures and seemingly candid, frivolous
or oen rather erotic motifs, pretending that we are viewing a moment of
intimacy between just the couple.

Figure 3.4 e wedding of Nelly Bruun and Ib Jensen, 1962. Photographed by Buch & Co, Nakskov,
Denmark.

Spanish wedding photographer Juan de la Cruz Megías’ portrait from

1997 (Color Plate 13), taken in southeastern, rural Spain, is a typical, and
very beautiful, example of today’s outdoor wedding portraits. e car and
the dress signal wealth and indicate status. Regardless of class and economic
status, many wedding couples subscribe to upper-class values, objects and
symbols on their wedding day, at least playing out a fantasy of future
wealth. e placement of the couple is somewhat untraditional and not
without humor; the groom is siing on top of the trunk of the huge white
limousine, the bride – dressed in a white dress with an almost absurdly long
and voluminous train, filling up the whole front of the image – is standing
in front of him as if honoring her husband. It seems that both the couple and
the photographer at the same time step into marriage as a patriaral system
where the woman is submissive to the powerful man, and (maybe?) slightly
mo it. Another typical feature is that the car is placed in a kind of
“original” landscape, whi seems almost untoued by modernity and
civilization. is seing anors the couple to eternity and unanged
traditions and values.
Historically, wedding photographers have oen posed the couple inside
some kind of framing, to express the unity of the couple as well as the
experience of crossing a “threshold” for good when you enter marriage.
Aer outdoor posing became common, we oen meet the couple in a
doorway, framed by the shape of a tree or a wooden avenue, posing on stairs
or centered in various forms of “gates.” Another image by Juan de la Cruz
Megías (Plate 14) plays with this idea by posing of the couple in a human-
size concrete tube, literally showing the marriage as a rite of passage. Also
here, the groom signals protection of his bride but at the same time she lis
up her skirt in a slightly sexualized and inviting pose.
Today’s wedding ceremonies are usually extremely photographed events.
Both the couple and the guests are constantly shooting with their own
smartphones, and many share the results on social media, seconds aer the
shooting. In some ures it is not allowed to photograph during the
ceremony because all this snapshooting is understood to ruin the
concentration and the gravity of the event. Photography has never before
been so trivialized, and at the same time it has turned into a social here-and-
now tenology where it is about sharing a streted now with others across
time and place. e established, ritualized wedding photographs, however,
still consist as dream-mirrors for our own and society’s ideas about
marriage, life, happiness and the future.
As, for instance, Lozada (2006) and Adrian (2003) have demonstrated
there are indeed global, cultural differences and specificities as well as local
framings in the look of, the use of and the emotional – as well as cultural –
meaning of wedding photography. Photographs are never context-free and
comparative studies of wedding photography practices and images across
the globe are waiting to be done. Having said that, it is nevertheless one of
the most historically, sociologically and culturally consistent photographic
genres.
e wedding portrait points to the fact that even though photographs
might be highly staged, conventional, uniform and ritualized, they at the
same time carry deep cultural as well as emotional meanings – in the 1800s
as well as today.

Further Reading

Adrian, B. (2003) Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in

Taiwan’s Bridal Industry, Berkeley: University of California Press. (An
example of a fieldwork study of a local version of a global phenomenon,
centering on its specific cultural meaning and emotional significance in
Taiwan.)
Baten, G. (2000) “Vernacular photographies,” History of Photography, 23(3),
pp. 262–271. (A pioneer claim to analyze what has been excluded from
photography’s history: ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought
by everyday folk, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the
heart but rarely the museum or the academy, including wedding
portraits.)
Bezner, L.C. (2002) “Wedding photography: ‘A shining language’,” Visual
Resources, 18, pp. 1–16. (Uses terminology from Victor Turner’s
 anthropological theory to analyze the rituality particularly of American
wedding photographs and albums.)
Lewis, C. (1997) “Hegemony of the ideal: Wedding photography,
consumerism, and patriary,” Women’s Studies in Communication, 20(2)
Fall, pp. 167–188. (An essay whi examines the consumerist and
patriaral ideologies framing wedding photography as well as the
general wedding industry.)
Lozada Jr, E.P. (2006) “Framing globalization: Wedding pictures, funeral
photography, and family snapshots in rural China,” Visual Anthropology,
19, pp. 87–103. (Based on fieldwork on visual anthropology in a village in
southern China, the author discusses wedding photography as a practice
situated between the local and the global.)

3.4 Aritectural Photography A Medium as a

Form of Useful Interpretation
Rolf Sasse

“. .. God said, ‘Let there be light, and light there was.’ You can say to the
towers of Notre-Dame, ‘Place yourselves there;’ the towers obey. us have
they obeyed Daguerre, who one bright day transported them to his home . .
.” (Janin 1839, 438). When Jules Janin described the method of photography
on the example of an aritectural site, the word ‘photograph’ had not yet
been coined. Aritecture was the first model of photography – and at the
same time it had the name of being the most boring application ever
invented for this form of image making. In his historical account of the first
hundred years of photography, Eri Stenger gave aritectural photography
no more than fourteen lines out of two hundred pages; other authors in 1939
did not even mention it (Stenger 1938, 17). But these authors had simply
forgoen that there had been Modern Aritecture, and that this would not
have been possible without photography (Sasse 1997, 119–121). By
becoming a medium aer being a method of recording for half a century,
photography established itself around 1900 as the motor of mediating
anything new in aritecture, especially anything naming itself ‘modern’.
ere had been forerunners like Edouard Denis Baldus who took
photographs of the new railroads in France in his laconic style today looked
at as a form of pre-modern vision (Pare 1982, 27/229).
His whole room was panelled with paper boxes containing photographs set into order by indices;
on this material he used to play like on a piano with an infallible memory, and thus, he could
make appear instantaneously any type of tiny images from this treasure when drawing or giving
order to someone. . . . All pictures honoured to be included in this collection had been occurrences
of his lifetime; the collection was a herbarium of his artistic delights.

Figure 3.5 Edouard Denis Baldus (ph.), Louis-Jules Bouot (Ar.), Toulon Railway Station, 1861.
Courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation,

2005.

(Schumacher 1935, 181)

What the aritect and city planner Fritz Sumaer describes about his
teaer Gabriel von Seidl, represents the common practice of the media
foundation of nineteenth-century aritecture, namely any type of
historistic practice – piing details from history as samples of ornament
and decoration, not from personal study in front of the actual edifices but
from widely distributed collections of photographic images for tourists and
construction builders. (Sasse 1997, 66–77). Other aritects of the late
nineteenth century, for example Henry Hobson Riardson, began to use
photography in two directions. Besides the collection of samples for
Riardson’s own practice, he started to distribute images of his works in
magazines, books and newspapers (Woods 1990, 155–163). ough hindered
by tenical obstacles in printing and binding, his employment of
photography for both arive and advertising shines a first light on modern
media practices before these practices began to ange aritecture
considerably.
With dry plate and autotype printing, photography had become a medium
in the 1880s and 1890s, and its common practice began to ange many
aspects of everyday life and thus aritecture, too. With the introduction of
the picture postcard between 1890 and 1907, millions of images began to
flood into the life of average people even if they could not afford to produce
images themselves or to buy expensive portraits being made by
professionals. Ea bar, restaurant, sports ground, and railway station had
picture postcards made of its own premises, and these were sold in
thousands to passers-by (Baumann & Sasse 2003). Collecting photographs
had begun even before the picture postcard. Aer portraits of opera singers,
dancers, and famous politicians, people had collected images from the World
Fairs in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. And photographers like Eugène
Atget had already started to produce vast collections of aritectural views;
as in Paris, nearly every city around 1900 had its own “Atget” to record
streets, places, markets, and singular houses (Sasse 1983, 69–98). us,
aritectural photography was omnipresent before World War I, and in the
Great War it was the most important medium to show the destruction and
loss created by enemy bombardment (Smidt 2016, 13–51).
But the most important role of aritectural photography was yet to
come. e newly established medium helped to constitute two significant
elements of modern aritecture: the concentration on straight three-
dimensional volumes and the loss of ornament, including the preference for
the simple white wall plus the curtain wall of glass and steel. e medial
quality of photography in this development was so overwhelming that it
helped to plant the notion of an “International Style” as HenryRussell
Hitco and Philip Johnson had named it in their exhibition of 1932
(Hitco & Johnson 1997). Roughly outlined, this development can be
aaed to four names, ea representing a different shade of the adventure
of modern aritecture in Europe. Walter Gropius anged the arive from
whi samples could be osen; Le Corbusier radically anged the use of
arives; Eri Mendelsohn implemented modern advertising in modern
photography to modern aritecture; and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe looked
neither at arives nor at advertising but used photography for the
constitution of his aritectural work in the most revolutionary way
conceivable. ese aritects ose their photographers carefully and
developed their own practices within the medium; Gropius and Le Corbusier
took, at least, amateurish photographs of their own building processes –
they had Lucia Moholy, Alber Renger-Patzs, Lucien Hervé, and a group of
photographic celebrities working for them. Mendelsohn became an
accomplished photographer himself, besides cooperating with Arthur
Koester, Herbert Felton, and Alfred Bernheim. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
always claimed not to be interested in photography but not only did Sasha
Stone – one of the best photographers in Germany – work for him but he
produced perfect photo-montages himself. Within less than a decade,
photography had established itself as the most important medium of
bringing modern aritecture into sight. Most importantly, from the late
1920s on, modern aritecture became a topic of the illustrated papers
whi, at the same time, propagated the new vision in photography
(Roessler 2009).
e result was a considerable ange in the relationship between
aritecture and media. From now on edifices were erected to be
photographed, filmed, and communicated in mass media (Zukowsky 1993,
15–31). Aritecture was seen as an important part of advertising and
propaganda. Be it the state propaganda of Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Soviet
Union, or Hitler’s Nazi Germany, any building of a sufficient size was
immediately published in magazines and books, on posters and displayed as
large-format photographs in exhibitions (Cze & Doll 2007). Without
photography, aritecture would never have become a maer of self-
representation for people like Walter Chrysler – the New York building
named aer him is mostly known through the photographs of Margaret
Bourke-White – or for companies like Ford in Detroit – its River Rouge plant
famous through photographs and paintings by Charles Sheeler. e
metaphorical and political power of aritectural photography can be
understood by looking at the first cover of the newly founded magazine Life
in November 1936: Margaret Bourke-White’s image of the ain of dams at
the huge Columbia River Basin near Fort Pe, Montana, is as emotive as
any propaganda photograph issued in the 1930s, clearly showing that U.S.
president Roosevelt’s New Deal program was as effective as the positive
outcomes of the European dictatorships – and this all shown by a magazine
cover with an aritectural photograph.
Stylistically, aritectural photography had anged substantially since
the turn of the century. From the yellowish to greyish so-toned recordings
of ancient and historic buildings whi still formed the basic vision in the
photographs of, e.g., Eugène Atget, over the mild shadows provided in pre-
World War I photography as in the English Country House book offerings
by, e.g., E.J. Bedford Lemere, to the expressionist views with stark contrasts
as provided by German photographers of the early 1920s su as, e.g., Hugo
Smoelz senior or the brothers Dransfeld, runs a long line of aesthetic
developments within the depiction of edifices. And there were a number of
sidelines given by panoramic views, by images taken at night, and by the
early evolution of photographic journalism. Parallel to this, there is a similar
history in the stylistic approa of picturing aritectural models whi
become more and more important in the establishment of the modern
movements due to the growing number of competitions (Sasse 2012, 25–
28). By the late 1920s, a canon of interpreting modern aritecture had
established whi most of the photographers followed, around the world.
Rectangular views on white facades under dark skies were the base of
showing the volume of buildings without decoration, thus creating a strong
sculptural effect. Where the straight axis could not be taken as a viewpoint,
there were strictly defined diagonal views from either 45° or 60° to the main
facade; early morning or late aernoon are the best times for taking these
photographs as the shadows are long and strong, and the sky can be filtered
into a dark grey, nearly up to bla. is canon can be viewed best by
looking at the picture postcards of the Stugart Weissenhof exhibition in
summer and fall 1927 (Baumann & Sasse 2003, 16–35). It can also be
exemplified in one photograph by Hugo Smoelz from August 1931: e
image of a small ur for Catholic tourists on the Northern German island
of Norderney, erected from plans by Dominikus Boehm, displays all the
elements of modern aritectural photography in order to praise modern
aritecture (Figure 3.6).
Astonishingly enough, the aesthetics of modern aritectural photography
stay the same in the 1930s despite the fact that the aritecture begins to
look different. Be it the elegant late modernism of the Italian fascism, the
clumsy neo-classicism of Paul Troost and Albert Speer in Nazi Germany, the
cake-like volume of Stalinist monumentalism, all of them were depicted as if
they were utopian dreams of the International Style made out of glass, steel,
and concrete. e monumentalism of these images refers to visual
approaes from antique, especially Greek, aritecture. While Le Corbusier
preferred to use a rather dry recording of antique buildings, as given by
Figure 3.6 Dominikus Boehm, Touristenkire Langeoog, 1931.

the work of Fred Boissonnas, later authors were more impressed by the
dramatic seings of, e.g., the Acropolis in Athens by Walter Hege who used
lenses of 2m focal length to obtain visual results not seen before (Kestel
1990, 185–207). By the mid-1930s, Hege had not only received one of the
early artistic professorships in photography but a number of commissions
from the Nazi regime, taking photographs of many newly planned and
erected buildings for Adolf Hitler and his government. During World War II,
aritectural photography underwent another important ange that was
already underway in World War I: the documentation of destruction
executed by enemy troops, either in the air or on the ground. In all cities
suffering from air raids, there were – either privately motivated or officially
instigated – campaigns to record the damages; in some areas, there were
even campaigns to document endangered buildings and their fixtures for
eventual reconstruction (Fuhrmeister et al. 2006). And, of course, in many
European cities, the photographers documented the destruction aer World
War II, resulting in famous books like Hermann Claasen’s Gesang im
Feuerofen (Singing in the Oven of Fire) or Riard Peter’s Dresden: Eine
Kamera klagt an (Dresden: A Camera Accuses), both from 1949. In Cologne,
the aritectural photographer Karl-Hugo Smoelz produced an album of
52 photographic pairs showing pre-and post-war scenes of the city and its
buildings; this album was handed over to the decision-making bodies of the
town for their political engagement in the reconstruction of the city.
But soon the war was over, both in Europe and in East Asia and the U.S.,
and there were dreams to be made true. As early as in August 1945, the
magazine Arts & Architecture started the Case Study House program. e
magazine’s editor, John Entenza, invited numerous aritects to plan and
execute eap houses for young families in the strictest terms of modernism
conceivable (Smith & Gössel 2002) e program ran until 1966 and produced
36 designs; nearly 30 were eventually built. More important was the
publication of these designs in the magazine. e photographs of Julius
Shulman and his Californian colleagues produced the dream world of 1950s’
wonderful life, of prosperity without energy limitations. is dream world
was seled by a media mix to whi aritectural photography delivered the
baground: home stories of Hollywood movie stars, politicians, and big
business entrepreneurs under the bright sun and the blue sky of both
California and the Mediterranean sea. e story of endless success and
modern luxury swept over to Europe and anged its view on aritecture as
well, mixing elements of the new fashion design with ideas of shaping the
interior of built dreams (Honnef 2012, 43–66). Magazines like the British
House & Garden or the German Film & Frau seled the imagination of the
Post-War West in a bright consumerism, mediated by beautiful aritectural
photographs in sets of five to eight images.
Dreams were not only realized in the private areas but in business and
even in social services as well. When the emical industry in West
Germany was fruitful enough, a company like Hoest could afford to erect
a concert hall in the most modern of forms, and a photographer like
Heinri Heidersberger placed himself in front of it until the weather
conditions were fine enough for him (Figure 3.7). e straight view, the
mirroring of the roof in the front water basin, the placed car as a scale
model instead of a human being – all this is applied modernism as in the
best U.S. photographs. Only the dark sky with bright clouds is missing and
has to be replaced by a photomontage, still an average operation in the
aritectural photography of the 1960s. is procedure was an easy task for
bla-and-white photography but a bit more difficult in color, but by the end
of the 1960s almost no one printed anything but color photography in
magazines and books on aritecture. e new connection between
aritecture and design whi developed within this decade moved away
from its vicinity to fashion and turned to advertising – a new car was placed
in front of a new building, people posed before modern aritecture to
promote canned food or pieces of furniture (Sobieszek 1988). Soon enough,
aritects would seek new commissions by submiing perfect color
photographs to any form of publication imaginable.
Figure 3.7 Heinri Heidersberger, Jahrhunderthalle Hoest, 1966.

But there was an important interlude. It was based on photography but

then abandoned the medium for concept art using film, video, and network
communication, and it started with a huge opposition against any form of
consumerism in aritecture – basically with an opposition to any strictness
in form and execution of aritecture, most of all against any form of beauty
(Meyer 1972). Again, the discourse was fought in photographs. Opposing
against too mu modernism in aritecture meant replacing facades of steel
and glass with big brutal blos of concrete; it meant proposing short-lived
experiments in the context of art exhibitions, and it meant using simple and
badly taken photographs when there was something to be documented –
and even these documentations were declared unnecessary from time to
time. Forerunners to these developments were the members of the
Independent Group from the UK, and their photographs were deliberately
taken without expertise, just like the eapest amateur images taken on
family holidays (Robbins 1990, 55–122). From this point, there was a
divergence in development in the U.S. and the European continent. Whereas
simple photographs were used by the conceptual artists in the U.S., leading
to cooperations by, e.g., the artist Ed Rusa with the aritectural office of
Robert Venturi, or Denise Sco Brown and their graphic designer Steve
Izenour (Venturi, Sco Brown & Izenour 1978), the European tradition
followed the student movements around 1968. Groups like Archigram in
London, and Coop Himmelblau and Haus Rucker Co. in Vienna conceived
concrete utopias of living in contrast to the average urban dwelling
programs, and their medium was short-term actions in public documented
by journalistic photography (Dueesberg 2013). e results were raw
montages of grainy images printed in low quality – from today’s viewpoint
clear forerunners of Facebook and Instagram imagery.
e utopian megastructure debates and the political activism in
aritecture during the 1970s was a manifestation of a criticism on the
modernity of the first half of the twentieth century, but there was another
epistemic critique of modernity, too. By the mid-1970s, modern aritecture
and town planning had destroyed more buildings and their surroundings
than the bombardments of World War II. In 1972, the UNESCO commission
released the World Heritage Convention, referring to the loss of both natural
and cultural heritage in the long run if there was no action taken. e
preservation of natural heritages had been instigated by the report of the
Club of Rome on the future of Earth on the assumption of ongoing
industrialization; the cultural heritage was constantly under pressure of new
development in aritecture and city developments. Interestingly, all
arguments were fought with photographs, and just like the collectors at the
beginning of the twentieth century, numerous photographers started to
catalogue and index all forms of aritecture that could soon be lost. At the
beginning of this movement, one can name Hilla and Bernd Beer with
their “anonymous sculptures” (Beer & Beer 1970). European
photographers followed in large numbers: Reinhart Wolf, Manfred Hamm,
Miael Smidt in Germany, the New Topographic movement in the UK.
At the same time the national trusts and administrations for building
preservation started to produce large inventories of edifices worth being kept
in their existing form; and in 1975, the European Commiee launed the
European Aritectural Heritage Year.
is development eventually began to form a global position of using
aritectural photography as a new form of interpretation – both as a
document of the aritect’s intention (whi it had been before) and as the
reference on the formation of history in itself. is could lead to the re-
investigation of even modern aritecture, as in the work of the Japanese
photographer and publisher Yukio Futagawa with his monographies on
Global Architecture. But it can be best shown in the work of Ahmet Ertuǧ
who had worked as an aritect and town planner before he led the earliest
building preservation campaigns in Istanbul and finally turned to
photography. His image of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne displays all the
elements of strict modernism in imagery, a preservational aitude to the
subject depicted, and the ri decoration of oriental art – all in one image
(Figure 3.8) (Ertuǧ 1999). In his later books, Ertuǧ integrated old and new
aritecture under the roof of one topic – like libraries, opera houses, or
domes – and exposed the next quality of medial usefulness in aritectural
photography: the openness to all forms of coding, decoding, and re-coding.
With different aitudes, this work is comparable to the oeuvre of a number
of other important aritectural photographers, e.g., Gabriele Basilico,
Gilbert Fastenakens, Waltraud Krase, Klaus Kinold, Tomas Riehle,
Margherita Spiluini, or the early works of Lewis Baltz.
Figure 3.8 Selimiye Mosque, Edirne (Aritect: Mimar Sinan), 2000. Credit: Photographed by Ahmet
Ertuǧ.

is is, of course, the program of post-modernism, and this development

would not have been possible without the large arives of aritectural
photographs that had been produced in the first century of this medium
(Caraffa 2011, 11–44). When Charles Jens propagated the lectures of post-
modernism as a fundamental critique of modernism in the early 1970s, he
could not foresee how fast the aritectural practice would assimilate to it,
and how fast aritectural photography would grow into big business (Niall
2016). Aesthetically, anything was now possible. Color photography reaed
its tenical peak by the 1960s, and most of the post-modern edifices were
imagined under conditions of subdued light, at sunset or in the early night,
thus creating references to the inside out and the outside in. Tenically,
there were no boundaries in making anything possible, from new lenses
with extreme wide angles to emulsions of enormous qualities in large-
format film sheets. Soon, the average format for good aritectural
photography was 8’ by 10’, used not only by professional photographers but
by artists like Stephen Shore, omas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Christian
Sink, André Merian, Stéphane Couturier and others who started to flood
the galleries just at the moment when photography was taken over by
digitalization. is was a slow development. At first, digital teniques were
used in print preparations, then in scan tenologies, before they finally
grabbed the primary tools in camera and processing; in the 1980s the
soware development ran under the heading of the digital darkroom. Today,
some of the photographers named here still use hybrid tenologies: ey
take their photographs on large-format films, then scan these and print
digitally.
Digital photography has a totally different relation to reality than the
processes used before: Any reference is free to be anged by digital
processing. is is, of course, equally relevant to aritectural photography,
and it has anged the view on aritecture considerably. And it has
anged the usefulness of aritectural photography, too: e printed
magazine is less and less important compared to the internet presence. us,
there is less need for singular photographs depicting the full building or its
facade but rather to show a sequence of images that simulate the tour
around it – ea photograph simply presenting one detail or two. Even
aritecture has anged under these conditions: Edifices from the offices of,
e.g., Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, or Frank Gehry do not have a front or
ba to represent the aracter of its owner; they have to be seen by walking
through or flying over. Developments like these lead to a double conclusion
of the photographers’ approa to aritecture: Artists like Armin Linke and
Iwan Baan work like bloggers or experts in social media, they produce
hundreds and thousands of simple images – thus following the lines of
Concept Art in the 1970s – whi have to be placed in installations, with
projections, or on sufficiently programmed web-sites; even books can only
give hints on what they produce (Linke 2016; Baan 2013).
On the other hand, perfectly styled and tenically mastered photographs
are needed by the aritectural offices, and there are still numerous
photographers who produce these images in large numbers. But, as can be
seen from the example of H.G. Es and his works for offices around the
world, even their work has anged considerably (Figure 3.9). Nearly every
building that he depicts already exists in perfect 3D renderings whi fulfill
all the needs of the aritectural photography in use until the 1990s. us, he
has to concentrate on details of the erected building whi communicate
important elements of being there. e office buildings in Hamburg’s eastern
Wood Harbor look like nearly every other nearby edifice being built by
large-scale investors with their own constructing workshops, so the
photographer has to find a view symbolizing the topographic – in Miel
Foucault’s terms, even the heterotopic – quality of the place. In the case of
Es’s photograph, this is the look out on the harbor through large glass
frames giving the whole scenery the seing of a film still. Deliberately, this
photograph was taken in bla and white although all digital imagery is
basically colorful. Any of today’s photographers have to find similar
solutions for their work – depicting a building is no longer the most
important part.
roughout the last decades, aritectural photography has undergone
enormous anges: Some of the tenical difficulties of the older practice
disappeared into a coherent use of soware applications, like the use of
sharpness or the shi of focal points. Most important is, as this history may
show, the new definition that photography has to give to any new form of
aritecture – if there is no facade, the access of the camera has to be
different to the monumental approa common in the century before. Color
or bla-and-white is a decision of taste and symbolic quality, not one of
tenique. But what has not anged since photography came into existence
is that aritecture needs the photograph as mu as photographers can live
on aritecture.
Figure 3.9 Astoc (Ar.), Office Building, Wood Harbor, East Hamburg, 2006. Credit: HG Esch (ph.),
Astoc (Arch.), Office Building Wood Harbour East Hamburg, 2006 © HG Esch.

References
Baan, I. (2013) 52 Weeks: 52 Cities, Heidelberg /Berlin: Kehrer.
Baumann, K., & Sasse, R. (ed.) (2003) Modern Greetings: Picture Postcards
of Modern Architecture 1919–1938, Stugart: Arnoldse.
Beer, H., & Beer, B. (1970) Anonyme Skulpturen, Düsseldorf: Art Press.
Caraffa, C. (ed.) (2011) Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art
History: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, I Mandorli Vol. 14, Muni
/Berlin: DKV.
Cze, H.J., & Doll, N. (ed.) (2007) Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der
Nationen 1930–45, Dresden: Sandstein Verlag.
Dueesberg, C. (2013) Megastrukturen: Architekturutopien zwischen 1955 und
1975, Berlin: DOM.
Ertuǧ, A. (1999) Sinan: An Architectural Genius, Bern: Ertuǧ & Kocabıyık.
Fuhrmeister, C., Klingen, S., Lauterba, I., & Peters, R. (ed.) (2006)
“Führerauftrag Monumentalmalerei”: Eine Fotokampagne 1943–1945,
Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, Band XVIII,
Köln /Weimar /Wien: Boehlau Verlag.
Hitco, H.R., & Johnson, P. (1997) The International Style, New York: W.
W. Norton & Company (originally published 1935).
Honnef, K. (2012) “Nur ja keine Trümmer…!” Der Wiederauau in
Deutsland fand seinen Spiegel nit in der Aritekturfotografie, in:
Breuer, G. (ed.), Architekturfotografie der Nachkriegsmoderne,
Wuppertaler Gespräche Bd.6, Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, pp. 43–66.
Janin, J. (1839) La Daguerreotype, in: Court and Lady’s Magazine, Monthly
Critic and Museum 17(10): 436–39.
www.daguerreotypearive.org/texts/P8390002_COURT_LADYS_MAG_
1839-10.pdf [2016-07-15].
Kestel, F. (1990) Walter Hege (1893–1955): “Race Art Photographer” and/or
“Master of Photography”?, in: Visual Resources, Cambridge, MA: Gordon
and Bea Science Publishers, 7.185–207.
Linke, A. (2016) The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen, Leipzig:
Spectormag.
Meyer, U. (1972) Conceptual Art, New York: E.P. Duon.
Niall, L. (2016) A Dictionary of Post-Modernism, Chiester: Wiley-
Blawell.
Pare, R. (1982) Photography and Architecture 1839–1939, Montreal: Callaway.
Robbins, D. (ed.) (1990) Exh.cat. The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and
the Aesthetics of Plenty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Roessler, P. (2009) The Bauhaus at the Newsstand. die neue linie 1929–1943,
Bielefeld: Kerber.
Sasse, R. (1984) Photographie als Medium der Architekturinterpretation.
Studien zur Geschichte der deutschen Architekturphotographie im 20.
Jahrhundert, Muni: Saur (Diss.phil. Bonn 1983).
Sasse, R. (1997) Bild und Bau, Zur Nutzung technischer Medien beim
Entwerfen von Architektur, Bauwelt Fundamente 113, Braunsweig
/Wiesbaden: Vieweg.
Sasse, R. (2012) A Short History of Aritectural Model Photography, in:
Peter Caola Smal, Oliver Elser (eds.), exh.cat. The Architectural
Model, Tool Fetish Small Utopia, Zuri: Seidegger & Spiess, pp. 25–28.
Smidt, G. (2016) Bombenkrater. Das Bild der terroristischen Moderne,
Emsdeen /Berlin: imorde.
Sumaer, F. (1935) Stufen des Lebens, Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters,
Stugart: Deutse Verlags-Anstalt.
Smith, E., & Gössel, P. (2002) Case Study Houses. The Complete CSH
Program 1945–1966, Cologne: Tasen.
Sobieszek, R.A. (1988) The Art of Persuasion. A History of Advertising
Photography, New York: Harry Abrams.
Stenger, E. (1938) Siegeszug der Fotografie, Bad Harzburg: Heering.
Venturi, R., Sco Brown, D., & Izenour, S. (1978) Learning from Las Vegas,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Woods, M.N. (1990) e Photograph as Tastemaker: e American Aritect
and H. H. Riardson, History of Photography 14 (2): 155–163.
Zukowsky, J. (1993) e Burden of History: Chicago Aritecture before and
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of Chicago /Prestel, pp. 16–51.
 Further Reading

Dethier, J. (1984) Images et Imaginaires d’Architecture. Dessin Peinture

Photographie Arts Graphiques Théâtre Cinéma en Europe aux XIXe et
XXe siècles,Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.
Loer, H., & Sasse, R. (2016) Architektur Fotografie. Darstellung –
Verwendung – Gestaltung, Transformationen des Visuellen Vol. 3,
Muni /Berlin: Deutser Kunstverlag.
Nerdinger, W . (ed.) (2011) Photography for Architects, Cologne: Verlag der
Buhandlung Walther Koenig.
Robinson, C., & Hershman, J. (1987) Architecture Transformed: A History of
the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present, Cambridge, MA
/London: MIT Press.

3.5 Case Study on the Photo Booth

Proof, Appropriation, Identity

Érika Goyarrola

e photo booth as we understand it today was invented in New York in the

1920s by the Russian Anatol Joseph. is new invention was the subject of
mu interest from the outset and, owing to its rapid global success,
contributed to the democratization of photography that had begun with
cartes de visite in the 1850s and, somewhat later, with the appearance of the
Kodak camera in 1888, whi allowed a distinction to be made between the
photographic practice and the tenical work.
e device consists of a booth with a curtain located in a public space,
whi users enter to photograph themselves: anonymously, without an
intermediary. e process is simple, fast and accessible. e maine
dispenses four to six different portraits on paper within approximately 10
minutes. e portrait’s formal simplicity and the fact that it is a single print,
with no copy, is what has generated a fascination with the photo booth
image since the beginning whi, together with the nostalgia about its
disappearance, is still with us today.
e photo booth primarily emerged in response to the need to generate
portrait photographs for official documents. is use was almost
immediately subverted, however, and the photo booth space became a place
where couples, families and friends posed in a casual manner, between the
recreational and the ritual, and thus anged the rigidity of the photograph
imposed as identification for legal validity. From an artistic perspective, this
dual official and recreational function made it possible to link the photo
booth with other approaes that questioned the regulatory, standardized
image. e aesthetics generated by this device have given rise to numerous
viewpoints encompassing various aspects treated in twentieth-century art,
whi will be developed here as follows: photography as identification or
proof; the questioning of authorship owing to the tenical aracteristics of
the photographic medium and the appropriation of images; and, finally, self-
analysis and introspection derived from the exercise of the self-portrait and
the political demands generated by the body itself.

Proof: Normativity and Subversion

Photography emerged in a positivist context and, owing to the meanical

and exact reproductions enabled by the procedure, soon won acclaim and
was used in scientific resear. In the mid-nineteenth century the
photographic process was seen as a way of capturing reality, something
whi was unimaginable some decades before. is explains why the early
years of the photographic medium were dedicated to documentary records.
e apparent reality and objectivity offered by the photographic image led
to it being perceived as truth, a confusion that still persists today. In the era
of the daguerreotype, photography was already being used by the police for
identification purposes. e photography service of the Paris Prefecture of
Police originates from the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, when
photographs were taken of suspects, and it was consummated in the 1880s
with the anthropometric system set up by Parisian police officer Alphonse
Bertillon. e Bertillonage system, whi included reports containing
physical measurements and aracteristics, was widely used as a universal
police identification system until it was replaced by fingerprinting.
Despite some initial doubts regarding the possibility of being able to
capture the physical reality of a person, since the person undergoes a
constant physiognomic transformation, judicial photography was used as a
tool for identifying people at the end of the nineteenth century (About 2012:
265), consisting of police files that allowed citizens to be eed and legally
identified. How the requirement for photographic identification arose is
symptomatic of what started to become a new way of relating identity to
image. With the birth of the identification photography industry, the
identification photograph has since become a constitutive part of identity
itself. In 1920s France, the number of foreigners grew considerably and they
were therefore obliged to hold a special identification card. e economical
cost of the photo booth, combined with the modest economy of the
migrants, saw the medium impose itself as a tenology for police use (2012:
268). From then on, the photo booth was installed in all European cities,
allowing widespread use of the personal document with photograph, and it
contributed to the citizens’ acceptance of their obligation to form part of a
record that would allow the State to control them. In fact, the early
adaptation of the new system of identification coincides with the emergence
of totalitarian regimes. Since then, the photo booth image has imposed itself
as proof or confirmation of an individual’s existence in society.
e photograph used in official documents as proof of identity is a strictly
coded image. is type of official portrait must reflect the identity of the
individual portrayed as objectively as possible, whi is why certain
recognizable features have been recorded from the outset: a simple pose;
face centered in the frame (although some also took full-body portraits);
sharp, white baground; neutral light and no shadow. e instructions
provided in the maines for obtaining an officially valid photo are clear, but
revealing: do not smile, maintain a neutral expression. e photo booth, by
virtue of its formal constriction and its automatism, imposes itself as the
perfect device for aieving this sought-aer neutrality, capable of creating a
standardization of the individual image. ese portraits are the opposite of
those made by an author, where the intention is to highlight the physical or
psyological aspects of the photographed subject or the photographer’s
gaze. However, this normativity of the photo booth image is contested, not
only in terms of appropriation of the device for recreational purposes, but
also with regard to artistic reflection.
Portrait, the work made by photographer omas Ruff in 1987 in whi
he portrays his fellow students at the Düsseldorf Academy, was inspired
precisely by the aesthetic norm of the photo booth. In his portraits, whi
are flat, without relief, there is a shi from the “neutral” to the vacuous,
emphasizing the dangers of seriality and uniformization as the death of
individuality, as demonstrated by the different totalitarianisms. In this
respect, we can also interpret the process of the disappearance of the subject
in the video Very Last Pictures (2006), by Hansjürg Bumeier, in whi the
artist covers his face and hair with paint until his image, true to the
aesthetics of the photo booth, disappears (Figure 3.10). Also similar is the
work of Anne Deleporte, ID Stack (1991), where she uses the fragments of ID
photographs—recovering the margins, not the part required for official
purposes—to compose faceless figures, manifesting the abyss of an absence
and an emptiness that we can relate to the vacuity shown on the faces
portrayed by omas Ruff.
Figure 3.10 Allerletzte Fotos [Very Last Pictures], 2006 (video, frames), Edition Typoundso,
Emmenbrüe, Switzerland. Credit: Hansjürg Buchmeier.

Official identification photography makes the photographed person an

individual, but in a different way: they are now a civil and legal individual.
Under the guise of freedom of the automatic device, what is generated is an
image that is already indelible, a process whereby the authority records and
registers the face. As stated by Ian Walker (2010: 29)
as for the photo booth, it could now only be read through a Foucauldian lens, aligned with the
police photo, the anthropological photo and the medical photo as an instrument of power and
knowledge, puing the subject firmly in their place in a prefiguration of the surveillance society
whi we all increasingly came to inhabit.

In this respect, the found photographs of Miael Fent (No Title, 2009) show
how official identity is coercive, and that the process of standardizing the
image involves an exercise of intrinsic oppression. is is aieved through
the use of five ID photographs found on an Italian bea in 2003, where a
boat filled with migrants from Kurdistan had landed. Similarly, Tomoko
Sawada, in ID400 (1998–2001), deals with the alleged identification capacity
of the objective maine, by interpreting 400 different identities, and
Mathieu Pernot, in the Photomatons (1995–1997) series, focuses on the
brutality of the identification process by depicting a group of ildren being
photographed in the photo booth.
 e very rigidity of normative photography, whi is intended to be the
purpose of the photo booth, simultaneously and almost immediately
generates a desire to subvert it, either through an amusing group portrait or
an artistic reflection that questions the very concept of identity. e intimate
space, the absence of witnesses and the unique nature of an image without a
copy incite and encourage the subversion of the normative.

Automation and Authorship: Appropriation

e automatic nature of the photo booth is related to the history of the

automaton, whi generated a powerful fascination throughout the
nineteenth century and was the subject of many literary works. It is no
surprise therefore that the first photo booths were placed in spaces for
leisure activities, su as in fairgrounds or shopping centers. People were
awed by the booth itself and by the object it produced: a portrait of the
photographed person on paper. e advertising of the time referred precisely
to this fun aspect, whi explains that not only is our identity captured in an
image, but that it is also a game in whi an identity is represented.
e first artists to use the photo booth were the Surrealists, in Paris at the
beginning of the century. Aracted by the “magical” nature of the device
and captivated precisely by the automatism of the photographic action of
the device—it takes, develops, fixes and dries the photos—the photo booth
became the artists’ favorite medium for portraits. André Breton, Salvador
Dalí, Max Ernst, Louis Aragon and René Magrie, among others, used the
booth either alone or in groups. ey used it as a plaything, breaking with
the orthodox aesthetic of the booth, puing it out of focus or extending the
depth of field (Pellicer 2011: 91). e desire, obviously surrealist, to break
with or transgress the socially established explains, beyond the eminently
playful, the face-pulling, the expressions of derision and the visionary
alienation of their portraits, common aracteristics that reinforced the
aracter of the group. Moreover, the Surrealist project of the
depersonalization and manifestation of a self that overrides the conscious
self finds in automatism, as is well known, a method capable of fostering the
emergence of the Surrealist image, one that reveals an unprecedented reality.
And in this sense it is possible to relate the automatic writing of the
Surrealist project with the automatism of the photo booth. In both cases it is
a way of revealing a hidden reality, that of the unconscious self and that of
the reality that escapes the human eye, and whose relationship Walter
Benjamin thematized here:
it is another nature whi speaks to the camera compared to the eye: “other” above all in the sense
that a space interwoven with human consciousness gives way to a space interwoven with the
unconscious . . . It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical
unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psyoanalysis.
(Benjamin 2004: 27)

is optical unconscious that Benjamin speaks of applies, in a similar way

to Roland Barthes’ punctum, to that whi eludes photography and goes
beyond the will of the author, i.e. the photographer. In this regard it is
interesting to note that, although it cannot be developed here, the concept of
photogénie—developed by Delluc and Epstein and closely linked to
Surrealism—whi at the same time began to be applied to cinema to define
its specificity, refers precisely to the ability of the image to reveal an
underlying reality. It is the plus de réel of Surrealist tradition that Epstein
identified with film.
For the Surrealists, therefore, the objectivity of the camera does not
correspond to an alleged empirical objectivity but rather to a revealing
objectivity. e work of art, in turn, becomes artefact or revealing object, in
the same way that the creative process and even the artists themselves are
depersonalized. It should be no surprise then that Breton said, in this respect,
that he preferred his portrait to be generated by a photo booth than done by
Man Ray (Chéroux 2012: 30). is dual ontological status of the image as
understood by Surrealism was illustrated in the last edition of the journal La
révolution surréaliste, about Magrie’s Je ne vois pas la (femme) cachée
dans la forêt, in whi almost all the core figures of Surrealism had their
portrait taken in a photo booth, with their eyes closed. e image captured
by the camera, the image of the figures with their eyes closed, alludes to
another image, not manifested, whi is the inner image in whi we
assume their gazes converge.
e automatism of the photographic action in the photo booth and the
formal neutrality of the resulting image are related—as indicated by
photographic historian Clémont Chéroux in the catalogue of the exhibition
Derrière le rideau. L’esthétique Photomaton, held at the Musée de l’Élysée in
2012—to Roland Barthes’ two fundamental concepts of thought: the death of
the author and writing degree zero. e semiologist criticizes the notions of
originality, genius and inspiration, and argues that the author was an
artificial figure constructed by capitalist societies in sear of individual
prestige. On the other hand, automation and formal constriction hinder the
possibility of an aesthetic linked to the notion of author. Barthes applies it to
a writing that cannot overlook the fact that it is itself, as language, a
symbolic code that escapes and goes beyond the meaningful intention of the
author. Literary modernism, with Mallarmé in the forefront, is about puing
language itself into effect in order to reveal both its expressive possibilities
and its limitations in showing reality. e ontological reflection on the
expressive medium aracterizes modernity: narration is relegated and the
critical proposals, while they inaugurate new possibilities, are also at risk of
falling into solipsism.
Barthes finds, however, the possibility of a “neutral” writing, a writing
without a desire for style that stresses its indicative ability. Barthes found
this possibility for the neutral in a particularly powerful form in
photography. Photography that does not seek through the skillful use of its
resources the choc photographique, discursive and stylistic intentionality, but
rather photography that in a simple and fascinating way makes absent
reality present. is fascination with an image that transcends all meaning is
especially present in vernacular photography and for a great part of the
twentieth century the photo booth was the most widespread and accessible
medium for this type of image. Stripping the author of the creative role and
position of central figure and analyzing this as a complex and variable
function of discourse, as proposed by Foucault in “What is an author?”
(1969), may lead to the inclusion of numerous voices as part of a common
discourse.
erefore, because of their popularity, these types of images have the
capacity to record a collective identity, and even an entire era, beyond the
great names under whi similar artistic discourses are housed. In the 1970s,
Jared Bark made a portrait of the United States, asking the inhabitants of
different cities to take a picture of themselves in a photo booth. He then
assembled and composed these portraits to create a new reading. Also
similar is Di Jewell’s work Found Photos (1977), where for over a decade
he recovered discarded images that were considered scraps or remnants—
many of them creased or torn and then put together again—from photo
booths in Brighton and London, thus reconstructing and enriing the
collective memory of an entire society already in demise.
e image produced by the photo booth is a direct positive, without a
negative. e photo booth creates a single image in a moment and, as su,
is unique. While we have pointed out the standardizing nature of the image
established as public identity, the fact that it is a unique image highlights the
interesting duality between the standardizing seriality of the image (in the
famous “age of tenological reproducibility” as stated by Benjamin (2003)),
manifested clearly in the photo booth, and the uniqueness of the image it
produces compared to the mass of reproducible and interangeable images.
e image of the photo booth recovers the auratic force of the image, being a
manifestation of and the only link to a past moment and its memory. is,
among other aspects, explains the fascination with photo booth images. e
photo booth image becomes a fetish, arged with symbolic and testimonial
force, iconic, both for people reconstructing their personal memory and for
the growing number of collectors who bid in Internet auctions on images
whose value lies, in many cases, more in the capacity to satisfy the nostalgic
desire for possession than in the aesthetic value of the photographic image.
e largest collections currently belong to Miel Folco and Joaim Smid.
eir work is nourished on found photographs where, in a surrealist way,
the ance of encountering them reveals an urban subtext. e collectors
inscribe data on the images whi generate a discourse and, again, a pseudo
identity: place, date, time found. In some cases the fetishized image is
carefully framed.
In 1957 Esquire magazine invited photographer Riard Avedon to
photograph some of the celebrities of the time using a photo booth. e title
of the work, 25 c. a Celebrity, provides enlightenment on the symbolic
transfer value of the photo booth image as a fetish. Avedon believed that
photographic talent was not restricted to the tenical limitations of the
camera.
us, the allenge was to exhort the automatism of the photo booth until
the fragile concept of authorship was restored in it. Avedon’s images serve
as fetishes, the fascination with whi has lile to do with the authenticity
of a subjective gaze; on the contrary, it is through automatism that the
image of the “celebrity” is given more presence and supposed authenticity. It
is a procedure by whi to generate that plus de réel of the image that
possesses a somewhat magical element, associated with the aforementioned
fantastical qualities that are atavistic to the photo booth.
Aware of the recreational araction of the device, Italian artist Franco
Vaccari proposed placing a photo booth in a different fairground
environment, the Venice Biennale 1972, where he conducted a social register.
e work, Exhibition in Real Time, documents the public’s passage through
the installation, where they were invited to take pictures of themselves in a
photo booth. Vaccari carried out a work of appropriation. e images were
juxtaposed on the wall of the installation, the people fixed their own photo
booth strips to it, and the sequences were manipulated and they interacted
with ea other. What they clearly show is that the photo booth inexorably
activates the pose of the photographed person owing to a constant
awareness and positioning: a split between see and be seen. In this way, the
exercise of showing oneself results in an impossible neutrality that manifests
the tension between private and public. Vaccari declared himself opposed to
the ange that was institutionalized that same year: in 1972 the Venice
Biennale was centered around the concept of behavior and, a few months
later, the Documenta V exhibition in Kassel proposed a return to the
“mythologies of the artist” as one of its themes. It is a nostalgic return to the
concept of author, whi is now derived from the work itself, based on
enquiries into identity. e link that modernity had tried to break, that of
artwork with any form of exteriority, including the exteriority of its
authorship, was re-established as the refuge of the authentic.

Self-representation and Identity

Although the photo booth questions the concept of authorship owing to its
automatism and formal constrictions, it also allows a use whereby
performative and narrative identity construction are enhanced. e term
“identity” is derived from the Latin identitas and refers to that whi is
identical. As explained by historian Estrella de Diego (2009: 24), there was a
ange in the typical formulas of the eighteenth-century portrait in terms of
identity understood as the identical (the more significant group
aracteristics that an individual shares with others) whi evolve towards
identity as the “quintessence of the uniqueness that separates one person
from another.” e photographic self-portrait became an alternative to the
mirror (whi had historically been where one would look at oneself,
together with the pictorial self-portrait, to whi not many people had
access) and an ideal tool for exploring individuality and the concept of
identity. e camera helps to create alternative representations of oneself,
one’s gender, class or race, gradually becoming the main meanism for
creating, modelling, questioning and advertising one’s identity, both as an
amateur and as a professional.
e photo booth also collaborated in the positioning of the photographic
camera as a key tool for representing oneself. Its specificity is constituted by
a series of elements that go beyond the strictly photographic frame of the
image it produces. In this respect, it can be considered an artistic genre in
itself, as Raynal Pellicer sought to demonstrate in Photo Booth: The Art of
the Automatic Portrait (2011). e photo booth is first and foremost a place,
with its own peculiarities, designed for generating a kind of image inevitably
linked to the specific nature of this space. e booth is a space of symbolic
representation. Clément Chéroux (2012) uses the metaphor of the
confessional to explain what the photo booth permits: a public place that
invites intimate confession. As with any intermediate place, as we have
seen, it is susceptible to hybridization and play. ere, the private and the
public, the internal and the external, are intertwined and respond to ea
other. In 2013 the artist Tracey Emin—following in the footsteps of many
artists who make the private public, a key artistic trend of the second half of
the twentieth century—created the work entitled My Photo Album, a visual
autobiography compiled from albums that she had kept since ildhood. e
images show her family trips, her student days, her exhibition openings and
self-portraits with famous people. e book devotes several pages to
photographs taken in a photo booth, and even includes her university
student card and passport. Emin, starting from the aesthetic of the family
album, embarked upon an introspective journey looking at different stages
of her life and observing the evolution of the self. In a similar way, the artist
Brenda Moreno in her work B to B (2016) used a collection of workbooks
that included photographs and collages, and seared for her past through
her identity (see Color Plate 15). For this purpose she ose her own family
photographs and photographs of other people and horses that had in some
way formed her past. One of the collages consists of ID card photographs
that show her during different periods in life, thus demonstrating the
exercise of memory that marks the work. In Self-portrait in Time, Esther
Ferrer photographed herself every year from 1981 to 2014 using photo ID
format. She creates dozens of portraits assembling self-portraits from
different dates and showing the concern about the passage of time that
dominates her artistic corpus.
It is important to point out that it was precisely at the end of the
nineteenth century, shortly before the birth of the photo booth, that new
forms of understanding identity and the self emerged. e notion of self-
portrait evolved towards a conception in whi it was understood to
represent the artist’s state of mind and his existential or social conditions.
Among other reasons, this was due to the influence of the psyoanalytic
theories promoted by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung at the beginning of the
twentieth century, whi led to the self-portrait being understood as the
production of a new self and not as the reproduction of an already existing
self, thereby demonstrating its multiplicity. e self-portrait evolved towards
a more psyological profile, leaving aside physical appearance and social
position. e artists of this time, moving away from naturalistic
representation, explored their creativity by producing more subjective
interpretations, as occurred with Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism.
e importance of the photographic camera in the evolution of the self-
portrait is also linked to the device itself, since, as we have seen, it is a
device that “guarantees” greater reference than other artistic disciplines; a
feature that is even more pronounced owing to the absence of a
photographer in the photo booth. e easy access to this new device is
reminiscent of the new escalation of democratization of the photographic
medium that is occurring these days with mobile phone cameras, giving rise
to the “selfies” pandemic. Paradoxically, however, despite its formal freedom
the selfie has become, as an epitome of the hyper-exposure of individuality,
just the opposite of the self-portrait, as it is used for gregarious identification
and almost always falls into a clié, i.e., into normative standardization.
Although the use of the photo booth may have participated in an imposed
normative, both in the official area and the recreational, the creative
discourses generated allow the gaze to be broadened with respect to one’s
own identity. is trend started at the end of the 1960s: the increase, at that
time, in psyoanalytic and new post-modern theories that revisited the
notion of subject partly explains why the self-portrait became a frequently
used vehicle for artists who wanted to express themselves in
autobiographical or identifying terms. e photo booth became a perfect ally
for this type of resear since the intimate space of the booth multiplies self-
awareness and aention on oneself. Manifested in this space is the concept
of extimité (extimacy), coined by Lacan (1990) in the 1958 seminar “e
ethics of psyoanalysis,” by adding the prefix “ex” to the Fren word
intimité (intimacy). is term explains the opposition between inside and
outside, represented in the artistic corpus of authors su as Francesca
Woodman and Antoine D’Agata. e most intimate would be forced to
recognize itself outside—the unconscious being an intersubjective structure—
and thus the inside/outside opposition would no longer make sense, by
revealing the inside, the intimate, in the outside, in public.
e photo booth is an intimate space with no witnesses, similar to the
private space of the home. is space is conducive to developing all the
issues that revolve around self-representation as the multiplicity of the self
or the consequent recognition and rejection produced by the image of
oneself. As with any self-portrait, the photo booth image always involves a
doubling of the self. In Sabine Delafon’s work I’m Looking for Myself (2005),
the sosías (one’s double) is manifested as absolute otherness through a
collection of self-portraits made in the photo booth. Another artist who
works with these narratives of identity with the photo booth is Miel
Salsmann. e formal constriction and the supposed neutrality of the
environment seek, as we mentioned above in relation to police identification
processes, a standardization of the image. Salsmann, in MS. 6594 (1965–
1994), uses this formal similarity to reconstruct a temporal arc that
documents the anges in his face, immobile over time within the frame of
the photo booth image. is procedure allowed him to document the
variants, but he was particularly interested in finding the features that do
not ange. Using a scanner, the artist manipulated and superimposed the
photo booth images to generate synthesis images in whi a blurred face
appears, whi questions the clarity of identity while simultaneously
pursuing the desire to find that unanging essence, capable of
substantiating the self. It is again a critical exercise that is not without
nostalgia for a lost psyological and metaphysical strength, where the
metamorphic and the anging refer to an aempt, a hint, of ultimate origin.
At the same time as the introspective analysis of this medium, from the
1960s and 1970s onwards, with the rise of social movements—especially the
feminist movement—and gender studies, many artists used the self-portrait
for socio-political demands. rough art, they started to give a voice to
issues that did not traditionally form part of the great narratives. Artists
begin to express identity not so mu in the first person but in terms of
ethnicity, gender and sexuality, issues that had been overlooked in a
predominantly Western, white, male art circuit.
e case of Cindy Sherman is key to understanding this type of work
since she took self-portraits of herself for over 40 years, although her work
cannot be considered autobiographical (Respini 2012: 12). Sherman
conducted a study on the construction of identity in our society by using a
broad visual imagery, including cinema, advertising and the Internet,
compiling an album of portraits that reflected Western society.

In 1975, the artist photographed herself in a photo booth, producing a work

composed of 23 photographs (Untitled #479) in whi she transformed her
appearance by anging her hairstyle and clothes and applying make-up
even to the extreme, thus exaggerating the artificiality of the pose. is early
work, carried out when she was still a student, already shows how she uses
her body and face as a blank canvas on whi to project multiple identities.
e series also reveals the artist’s admiration for the work of Andy Warhol
who, in the 1960s, had placed a photo booth in the Factory, and portrayed
the people who visited. e artist made the impersonal photographs his own
through his famous serigraphs, marked by the idea of seriality and repetition
that also exists in photo booth images but whi are considered a brief
sequence.
In a similar way to Sherman, where the discourse is about collective
identity, the artist Lorna Simpson has been exploring issues of race and
gender since the 1980s, from her position as an African American woman. In
2008 she created Photo Booth, an installation composed of 50 photo booth
images from the United States in the 1940s, accompanied by drawings of
abstract bla forms that represent the elusive nature of identity that lies
behind the social code. Most of the portraits are of bla men and ildren,
highlighting the inequality of gender within a system that is also racist.
e three thematic blos presented here are related to the aesthetics of
the photo booth—proof, appropriation and identity—and can also overlap,
i.e. many works deal with several issues. For example, Lorna Simpson’s
work, produced from found images, is related to the issue of appropriation
and authorship as well as to collective identity. Similarly, the work of
Hansjürg Bumeier could also fall under the identity issue, as well as
illustrating the subject of official and proof photography. e numerous
artworks based on the photo booth illustrate key issues about the history of
photography, particularly about its evolution and recognition as an artistic
discipline. e first two—proof and appropriation—are intrinsic to the
medium owing to their nature and tenical aracteristics. e third—
identity—forms part of one of the strands of photography in the second half
of the twentieth century, becoming a fundamental instrument for
autobiographical purposes. In this process, the photo booth brought a new
style, and thus a new viewpoint of photography in particular and visual arts
in general.

Note
I would like to thank professor and researer Moisés Vicent for his help and
advice in the resear process of this contribution.

References

About, I. (2012) “Le Photomaton et l’encartement des individus” in Chéroux,

C., Derrière le rideau. L’esthétique Photomaton, Lausanne: Musée de
l’Élysée/Éditions Photosynthèses, pp. 263–272.
Barthes, R. (1980) La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, Paris: Seuil.
Barthes, R. (2009) “La muerte del autor” (1967) in El susurro del lenguaje.
Mas allá de la palabra y la escritura, Madrid: Paidós, pp. 75–84.
Benjamin, W . (2003) La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad
técnica, Mexico: Ítaca.
Benjamin, W . (2004) Sobre la fotografía, V alencia: Pre-textos.
Chéroux, C. (2012) “Introduction: Le degré zéro du portrait. Pourquoi le
Photomaton fascine” in Derrière le rideau. L’esthétique Photomaton,
Lausanne: Musée de l’Élysée/Éditions Photosynthèses, pp. 27–262.
De Diego, E. (2009) No soy yo. Autobiografías, performance y los nuevos
espectadores, Madrid: Siruela.
Foucault, M. (1969) “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”, Bulletin de la société
française de philosophie, 3, July–Sept, in Dits et Écrits I (1994), Paris:
Gallimard.
Lacan, J. (1990) “La ética del psicoanálisis” (1958) in El seminario. Libro 7:
Ética del psicoanálisis (1959–1960), Buenos Aires: Paidos Ibérica.
Pellicer, R. (2011) Photobooth: The art of the automatic portrait, New York:
Abrams.
Respini, E. (2012) “¿Puede la verdadera Cindy Sherman ponerse en pie, por
favor?” in Cindy Sherman, Madrid: La Fábrica, MOMA, pp. 12–53.
Walker, I. (2010) “Di Jewell’s Found Photos,” Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No
4. pp. 20–34.

3.6 Art and Activism

Swaantje Güntzel and Chris Jordan in Conversation with

Moritz Neumüller
MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: Swaantje Güntzel and Chris Jordan—two artists who use photography,
film, performance and other media to speak about environmental issues, among other things, and
who are occasionally labeled as activists. How useful is this term for you, and in case it is not, how
would you describe the focus of your work?

SWAANTJE GÜNTZEL: I eed Chris’s Wikipedia entries in different languages, and while the
English entry calls you an artist, the German one describes you as filmmaker, photographer, social
and eco-activist, and in Fren, they call you artiste engagé. I believe that in countries like
Germany, unfortunately, we are very keen on categories, and as we are very fond of
environmental activists, it is easy to put you into that box. I mean in the end it’s more about our
own conception, isn’t it?
CHRIS JORDAN: Well, I think it’s a funny thing that there is even a category of activist,
especially environmental activist. If an environmental activist is somebody who loves the world,
then we should all be in this box, we should all be activists!

SG: I think that many people still expect artists, in general, to detect weak points in the system; we
are supposed to ange the world, or at least point out the problems. With the environmental
topics, in particular, I have the feeling that people are relieved to see that I am dealing with them,
so they don’t have to do it themselves. It seems that the label “environmental activist” helps a lot
with that because you can separate the activists from your own world and can pass the
responsibility over to them. Especially when it comes to the subjects that Chris and I work on
since at the end our work reveals that we are all responsible for problems su as plastic pollution.
Interestingly enough, artists whose work deals with political issues like the refugee crisis or wars,
for example, are not being labeled as “human rights activist.”

MN: There is a category called Social Activism . . .

SG: Yes, but I think the environmental activist category is different because, as Chris said, we
should all feel involved, because our mere existence on the planet causes this problem.

CJ: It sort of goes without saying that every artist who is seriously engaging with the world is an
activist in some way or another. ey are all trying to shi something, but at least in the US, the
term activist or the whole world of activism is deeply infused with hypocritical judgment and
telling people how they are supposed to behave . . . it’s divisive! And being hypocritical is not
effective. is is why I feel so strongly that the arts have a transformational potential because art
is not about telling people how to behave. e great power of art is its ability to hold an issue, to
hold the complexity, to hold the irony, to hold the hypocrisy and hold our sadness, and our rage,
and our anger.

SG: Absolutely. It is like holding a mirror to reflect what people are doing, but without judging,
and not as if we were on a crusade or on a mission. Honestly, it’s not my first goal to ange
people’s behavior. I want to make them look into the mirror and look at themselves. And either
they ange something, or not. e activist fights a neverending war though, to make people
ange. Before studying art, I studied anthropology and for me, the whole idea of being an
anthropologist is that you observe people’s behavior and then you try to understand and
categorize it. e freedom I have now as an artist is that I can interpret it and draw different
conclusions. As an anthropologist you have to sti to certain semes; you have to pretend to be
very objective. As an artist I do have the freedom to take it a step further—I can have a subjective
opinion. But that still doesn’t mean that I want to pressure people.

CJ: You know there’s another aspect to the world of activism that has grown in the last ten years,
and it is the annoying Call to Action mentality. Every time I give a talk, someone during the Q&A
asks “OK, so what should I do?” and it’s the weirdest thing because people expect that nowadays.
Lists are very popular, and every single time it’s a list of these pathetic tiny gestures that do not
ange anything. At the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presents this massive catastrophe,
and then he suggests that you pump up your tires to full pressure next time you go on a road trip
so you get the best gas mileage. My favorite “solution” to a plastic waste problem is that when you
order a martini at a bar, make sure to ask for no straw! To me those kinds of calls to action are
disempowering and have the exact opposite effect than they should have because, first of all, what
they’re saying to the viewer is: “Now that you know this gigantic problem, the only thing that I
have faith in you to do is something completely pathetic,” and even if everybody in the world did
it, it wouldn’t make any difference.

SG: Yes, it’s depressing because, I mean, isn’t my work obvious enough to tell you what you
should or shouldn’t be doing? Instead of asking, people should just look and think and then come
to a conclusion by themselves.

CJ: I think what’s actually happening is that this person feels uncomfortable and that’s the exact
intention of our work: To give them some kind of piece of information that breaks their heart, or
maybe breaks their heart open, and tweaks their mind, their whole worldview in some way. And
now they are feeling that they raise their hand and ask what should I do so that that feeling goes
away, at the end of a talk, or a documentary film or when seeing your work in an exhibition. If we
tell them what to do, it diffuses the entire effect of our work. If we say for example all you have to
do is go to a website and pay five dollars then that person will feel relieved, even if they never go
to that website. So the answer should be: “Feel whatever you are feeling! I am just the artist, I will
not tell you what to do.”

SG: is might have to do with the perception of contemporary art in general because many
people think that they need instructions for viewing an artwork. I have had so many discussions
with friends, especially with people who are not into art, who were begging me to give them a
code or to tell them how to read art. I think that even with unseling art, the best way to deal
with it is to just open up and allow yourself to have an innocent immediate interaction. When it
comes to work like ours, the immediate impact might be very strong and you have to allow
yourself to go through this experience. [See Color Plate 16.]

MN: Both of you work in the photographic medium, but also explore other media such as film,
installations, and even performance. What is special about photography, and how does it serve you
in the context of your work?

SG: As far as I can judge, we both work very conceptually. It is one thing to take a picture but it is
another to create a concept behind a series . . .

CJ: e thing I love so mu about photography is the way it portrays the real world. In the New
York Fine Art world, the whole conversation has been all about how photography isn’t real and
that there is no real world, but still, when compared to all other artistic media, be it sculpture,
painting, dance, music, and so on, photography is still quite a representational art form.

SG: True. Yet, the reality is always the reality of the photographer. You can make a lot of oices,
starting with what kind of camera you use and what kind of frame, how you will compose the
image, how you will retou, and so forth. ere is always a reality behind the photograph, whi
is not the reality on the photograph . . .

MN: And still, and despite all we know about the reality behind photography, if we look at the
image of a dead bird, with its belly filled with plastic parts, and we realize that this is not a
painting, but a photograph, it is like looking down an abyss. We are captivated by the possibility
that this actually could be “real,” and that we are witnesses of some terrible crime. Lens-based
images tend to touch us in a different way than those which are not . . . don’t you agree?

CJ: I totally agree that we work from our own perspective, and sometimes we don’t even know
that we are bringing our own agenda when showing the world in a particular way. However,
people trust that when they look at a photograph they are actually looking at something real, and
of course, many photographers have riffed on that, by tweaking the edges of the medium and
pushing its limits. I call myself a documentary photographer because I do not construct a
composition—I just put my subject right in the middle of the picture. I don’t want people to look at
my photographs and think of me as a great photographer. I want to put people in my shoes and
allow them to see what I saw. When people look at my photographs of the dead birds they don’t
think about me—they think “Oh my god, look at that bird’s body filled with plastic”—and that’s
why I love photography because, despite its limitations, it is the furthest you can go to depicting
the real world.

SG: It is interesting to see that we both work on the same themes and maybe even cooperate with
the same marine biologists, but our way of working is very different. I do not go to Midway;
instead, I get boxes full of marine debris shipped from Hawaii to me. I sit in front of the plastic
objects spread out on my table and start to think how I can work with them. en I set out a trap
by combining the debris with materials that have a positive connotation, like embroidery or
vending maines for gum balls [see Color Plate 17], for example, something that everyone in my
generation grew up with. e moment you see these things you always think about something
nice, warm and funny, but then I put the disturbing content inside and it’s like a time bomb: First
you swallow it, but it might explode at any moment. Working with these subjects also helps me to
cope with them. I am a typical ild of an era that in German we call the era of “ecopessimism”:
the term describes the late 1970s and 1980s, when the whole society was convinced that the planet
would explode and that ildren wouldn’t have a future, that the trees were dying, the rivers were
polluted and on top of everything else there was Chernobyl. We were brought up by teaers who
were part of the 1968 Revolution, who had the idea of creating a new society, where citizens
would be responsible for preventing another world war and environmental disasters. So what
happened at the end was that they put a lot of responsibility on our shoulders by telling us that
they had messed it up but now us kids would have to solve it. As a ild, it was literally too mu
to think that it was on me to prevent the next war and to save the planet. is was so stressful that
I spent nights crying, siing in my bed thinking how I could solve this problem by myself. And
even though I am an adult now, it still haunts me, since at the end of the day the problems are still
there, so I guess my art at least allows me to find a way how to cope with it because otherwise, it
would destroy me.

CJ: e world of activism just tells us how fued up the world is, and the energy of despair
doesn’t motivate anyone to do anything. We still have to look into the darkness but we also have
to look to the other side, to see the incredible beauty and mystery and miracle of our world. We
have to understand that every single one of us won the loery tiet of the universe to be here and
to be alive, and to me, this side outweighs all of the bad news by many magnitudes . . .
SG: If you look at the media coverage from the 1980s, it seems that the main aim was to sho
people, to frighten them and to freak them out, in order to ange their behavior. But if you
traumatize a whole generation, the only thing they will want is to protect their own small nie
where they can live their life. Ba then I believed that my biggest fault is that I was born because
I am the one causing the problem and at that age, you don’t have the intellectual capacity to
respond to the problem or put it into proportion. In my work, I try to provoke positive feelings and
mix them with the negative content, so you have more options, not just this terrifying image.

CJ: What drives our society today is the fear of pain, we look at all the bad news, and we feel so
mu pain that we fall into depression and hopelessness and paralysis. When we push aside our
pain we are also pushing aside the deepest part of ourselves, whi is our innate natural love for
the miracle of life and for ea other. What I am trying to hand over as a lived experience in my
Midway film is that grief is not the same thing as pain or despair. Grief is the same as love, a felt
experience for something we are losing or have lost and when we feel grief we reconnect with this
deep part of ourselves. As an artist, my wish is that my work helps people to reconnect with the
deepest part of themselves and then allows them to act, instead of staying paralyzed.

MN: Maybe this feeling is already present in your series on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in
2005. It was a “documentary” work in the sense that you went to the same places as the
photojournalists who were covering the story for the news industry, but you used another
methodology—a large-format camera—and the pictures you took there are very different from
theirs. The news pictures after the hurricane mainly showed people carrying their last belongings,
or their life in the shelters, whereas you show what is left behind, the destroyed houses that have
something sculptural, maybe even poetic. In your series Running the Numbers, however, digital
manipulation becomes a dominant factor, something that would not fit the classic definition of
documentary photography. I am thinking of your interpretation of Hokusai’s Great Wave, which is
composed entirely of small plastic objects. [See Color Plates 18–20, and the title page of this book.]
These are the same kind of objects that you find in the bellies of the albatrosses on Midway Island
[see Color Plate 21] and, of course, the same objects that Swaantje uses in her works, such as the
bubble gum machines . . .

CJ: Well, my Running the Numbers series is really an aempt to comprehend the enormity of
these issues and I believe it is just a skill we all need to acquire, to be able to understand what is
happening on a global level. e problem is that the only information we have about these global
phenomena is numbers: the number of plastic boles we consume, for example, in the United
States, is 210 billion plastic boles, last year, and in the same amount of time, we emied 36
gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere, whi means 72 trillion pounds of carbon. We read these
numbers, we see data and graphs and pie arts and we think we comprehend it but there are all
of these studies that show that the human mind cannot comprehend numbers on a scale of more
than a few hundred or maybe a few thousand. In fact, there is a radical difference between the
way we comprehend the number one and the number two. ere is a study where they showed a
picture of one starving ild to a test group and they asked how mu money would you give to
save this one starving ild and the average amount was around 50 dollars. When they showed a
picture of two starving ildren the amount goes down to 5 dollars, and if you go above the
number seven, the amount goes down to 0.
Every day we are bombarded with news of billions and trillions and we can’t comprehend them,
thus my wish with the Running the Numbers series was to provide some comprehension of the
issues at stake. To use Swaantje’s terminology, I am making these time bombs, in form of a
journey: From a distance, you look at my pieces and it’s always something beautiful or at least
non-threatening, su as a painting or a forest or a whale, or the Japanese wood print you
mentioned. So hopefully the person comes up close and sees that it is not a forest, but lots of paper
bags or huge quantities of plastic, and when they go up and read the label on the wall, the time
bomb explodes! My intention is to lay a trap and to feed someone information that they otherwise
wouldn’t digest and help them comprehend and connect with these issues on a global level.

SG: It seems that we use the same meanisms to aract people through positive, aesthetic
experiences and then make them aware of the sad truth behind it . . .

CJ: e Tibetan Buddhist practice called Tong Len, meaning giving and taking, consists of
breathing in all the horror of our world and passing it through your heart, and as it goes through
your heart, you transform it into love and beauty, and as you exhale, you exhale love and beauty
into the world . . . I like that idea and try to do something similar in my artistic practice. I don’t
want to just hand the horror to the viewer. I really love the experience of when horror and beauty
are combined so seamlessly that you can’t even tell the boundary when it is so horrible that you
can’t even look at it but so beautiful that you can’t turn away . . .

MN: Is this something you can relate to, Swaantje?

SG: Beauty and horror . . . well, this spring I did several interventions and performances that were
dealing with plastic pollution in the public space. One intervention was staged in the Greek city of
essaloniki. ere are a lot of areological sites in the city, and they fill up with the trash from
passing pedestrians. So we collected that garbage and brought it to the bea promenade. e
people of essaloniki are very proud of this promenade; it is the place to hang out, it is clean and
nice. We rented a bike for two people that sit next to ea other and drove down the promenade. I
wore a very obvious retro vintage dress and high heels, so I could not be confused with a normal
tourist, and my partner looked a bit like a sailor. In a very performative gesture, I started to throw
the garbage on the promenade while we were driving the bike and people got so mad that they
started spiing at us, they hit us and yelled at us, they tried to stop us, it was amazing. [See Color
Plate 22.] I still have no real explanation but it seems we really hit a nerve there. It takes me
months to recover from su strong experiences, as I am not looking for the aention. I just think
it is the next logical step within the logic of my work but it is not that I am looking for a reaction
in the first place but I want to take my concept to the next level and as part of my job I have to
live with the consequences.

MN: We have spoken about the message, of how you transform it, exhale beauty and build traps,
but what I am still missing is the “final product”: how it is packaged; how it reaches the spectator,
the museum or the art gallery; how attractive is it for a collector to buy such a piece? Is the market
a necessary part of your working cycle, how much importance do you give to that and, if I may
ask, how do you pay your rent?
CJ: I have a general dislike for the art world and the more I learn about it, the more I dislike it, so I
try to avoid as mu as I can. When I am creating a piece, I think about it as my duty, I never
think about the market or the audience, but instead I think about the subject. If it needs to be 20
feet wide then I make it 20 feet wide, and if it needs to be some strange thing that no one will buy,
like birds filled with plastic, so be it. In fact, no one is buying my birds filled with plastic, even if
they are priced very low, but I don’t really care about that, although in a way I am damaging my
own ability to put my work out there without having a fixed stream of income, so it is a difficult
situation, really. I am just now sort of waking up to the realization that I need to be accepted in
the art world and I need to play the game a lile bit because I want my work to be in galleries and
in museums.

SG: Really? I mean . . . everybody knows your work, everybody. I talk to so many gallery owners
and whenever I say I work with marine debris swallowed by albatrosses they always mention
your work as a reference, and at least here in Europe everyone believes you are a big star in
America.

CJ: I would love to show my work more in Europe, but you know it is hard because I’ve sort of
shot myself in the foot by making works that are so big . . . to print them is very expensive, and
shipping can cost up to 5000 dollars, so when I get invited to exhibitions, I have this bad practice
of sending my image files to the venue and they make a print and at the end of the exhibition they
destroy it. I leave a trail of destruction behind me everywhere I have an exhibition and I always
wished that somebody would buy it there and it would go into a museum and sometimes I just
donate it to museums aer the show. I wish I had smaller pieces, and this is something I love
about the Midway film: it is going to fit on a thumb drive that I can put in my poet.

SG: It is just now that for the first time I am negotiating with a gallery who wants to sign me. For
many years, gallery owners openly told me that my work is too hard to deal with and they didn’t
want to take any risks, so I had to sell to people who either know me personally or have been
following my career for a longer time. As my work is not in the high-end segment of the art
market yet, collectors don’t trust my market value, but just look at the work in terms of “Would I
want to have this in my living room?”—and they don’t. Galleries who work with topics related to
social responsibility are very rare so now I’m happy that this gallery found me and is giving me
the opportunity, because before I was very mu on my own.

MN: So do you think there will be a change in the art world that gives more space to positions like
yours?

SG: Well, in the case of plastic pollution it is something I’ve been observing for a long time now.
When I started to do my first work on marine debris in 2009—aer reading stories about birds
swallowing plastic and aer seeing Chris’s and David Liiswager’s work—no one knew about
the Great Pacific Garbage Pat at that time. In California, Captain Charles Moore began to talk
about garbage floating in the Pacific and began to deal with the topic, but it took many years until
people started to talk about it, at least here in Europe. Now, many years later, it is everywhere, in
the news, in museums, in popular culture, so this might help me as an artist to find a nie but still
it might take a while before I can really pay my rent from making this kind of work.
 CJ: Even if I’m completely broke at the moment and my wife and I are in the process of declaring
bankruptcy, I don’t want my work to be a commercial product. I wish I could create my work and
donate it for free to museums and that is what I want to do with my film, I want it to be a public
artwork so I’m trying to figure out ways to distribute it in the absence of any money. Hopefully,
there are enough people who want to wat my film in the first place.

The interview took place via Skype on August 22, 2016.

Plate 1 Sara Castrejón, Portrait of Amparo Salgado, 1911. Courtesy of the Consuelo Castrejón Family.
Plate 2 Alexey Goga, Untitled, from the series Evolution of Museification, 1998, C-print aer light
projection on human body, work with camera obscura. Courtesy of the artist, Moscow.

Plate 3 Boris Mikhailov, from the series By the Ground, 1991, Silver print, toned. Courtesy of the artist,
Berlin.
Plate 4 Valery Shekoldin, reportage from Mad Hospital in Uliyanovsk region, Russia. 1994. C-print.
Courtesy of the artist, Moscow.

Plate 5 Kurdish members of the PKK risk their lives to smuggle photojournalist Rita Leistner into Iraq.
Aer a day of hiking through treaerous terrain under threat of being shot by Turkish border guards,
they sele down for the night in a hidden cave along the Tigris River. Taurus Mountains, somewhere
between Turkey and Iraq, April 12, 2003. Credit: Rita Leistner from the book Unembedded: Four
Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.
Plate 6 Iraqi civilians are le injured and dying aer U.S. helicopters opened fire on a crowd who had
gathered to see a burning American tank. Haifa Street, Baghdad, Iraq, September 12, 2004. Credit:
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad from the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in
Iraq.

Plate 7 Members of the Mahdi Army camouflage a remote-controlled explosive with a covering of
asphalt in an intersection. e Mahdi Army buried the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to defend
against American incursions into Sadr City during a period of large-scale Shiite rebellion against the
American occupation. Sadr City, Baghdad, August 7, 2004. Credit: Thorne Anderson from the book
Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

Plate 8 An Iraqi man shows his hand to snipers as he carries his terrified ild across the front lines
between U.S. forces and the Mahdi Army at the wreed outskirts of the old city. Najaf, Iraq, August
21, 2004. Credit: Kael Alford from the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the
War in Iraq.
Plate 9 A view from the Musa Qala military base under American control. e base had over the
decades been held by the British, the Taliban, the Americans, and since August 2015 has been ba
under the control of the Taliban. Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, January 29, 2011. Credit:
Rita Leistner/Basetrack, courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.

Plate 10 24 Hrs in Photos, Installation shot, CCB Barcelona, June 2014. Credit: Marc Neumüller
Esparbé.

Plate 11 Screenshot from www.kesselskramer.com website: “Treat Me like a Lady” campaign for
Women Inc. Credit: www.kesselskramer.com.
Plate 12 e wedding of Alasdair Foster and Kirsty Jenkins, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland, August
21 1976. Courtesy of Alasdair and Kirsty Foster.

Plate 13 Juan de la Cruz Megías, Santomera, Spain, 1997. Courtesy of Juan de la Cruz Megías.
Plate 14 Juan de la Cruz Megías, Senda de Granada, Spain, 1998. Courtesy of Juan de la Cruz Megías.
Plate 15 B to B. Credit: Brenda Moreno.

Plate 16 Swaantje Giintzel, MICROPLASTICS III/Discofish, balit print, lightbox, 50 x 80 cm. Plaice
(pleuronectes platessa) covered with glier particles extracted from beauty products. Credit: Henriette
Pogoda.

Plate 17 Swaantje Güntzel, Stomach Contents XXL, 2014, height 145cm, metal, plastics: Vending
maine filled with toys swallowed by Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) in the Pacific
Ocean.
Plate 18 Chris Jordan, Gyre, 2009, from the series Running the Numbers II: Portraits of Global Mass
Culture.

Plate 19 Chris Jordan, Gyre, 2009, from the series Running the Numbers II: Portraits of Global Mass
Culture [detail 1].
Plate 20 Chris Jordan, Gyre, 2009, from the series Running the Numbers II: Portraits of Global Mass
Culture [detail 2].

Plate 21 Chris Jordan, CF000668, 2009, from the series Midway: Message from the Gyre.
Plate 22 Seibe & Güntzel, PLASTISPHERE, essaloniki Promenade, 2016. Plastic garbage collected
in the “Galerius Palace” areological site in the center of essaloniki, Greece was relocated in the
course of an intervention at the promenade of essaloniki. Credit: Giorgos Kogias.
Plate 23 Title: N 34.60576 W 114.36141 CAPTION: Friday, 18 July 1986. Janet Maryann Sloma (43), her
daughter Janine Carroll Sloma (15), Janet Sloma’s sister Carol Dimmi (39), and Carol’s daughter
Tracy Zmarilinski (19) were in a vehicle traveling southbound on State Road 95, ten miles north of
Lake Havasu City, in Arizona. Dimmi and Zmarilinski had come to Lake Havasu City from Illinois
July 14 as a surprise for Janine Sloma’s birthday, whi was in two days. e four women had le for
California on ursday to sightsee, and were returning home when a northbound car crossed the
centerline. e vehicle with the four women tried to avoid it, but the other vehicle hit the right front
of their car, killing all four of them. e driver of the northbound vehicle, who had a history of
drunken driving, was also killed and his passenger was severely injured but survived the accident.
Janet’s husband was an emergency dispater for Lake Havasu City, and his son was a police officer
who worked the crash. Image courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.
Plate 24 Title: N 47.35064 W 119.54148 CAPTION: Tuesday, 13 April 1999. Rosio Curiel was driving
with her two sons, her friend Maria Chavez and Chavez’s three sons. While approaing a bridge that
crosses an irrigation canal just north of Ephrata, Washington, Curiel aempted to turn the car around
when she lost control of her car. e car then slipped into the canal and sank. Curiel and Chavez
escaped from the car, but the extremely swi current and mossy banks of the canal prevented them
from saving their ildren – all five of whom died. e boys were pulled from the canal by rescue
workers two hours aer the accident occurred. e deceased ildren were Victor Eduardo Chavez
(11), Jose Guadalupe Chavez (3), Martin Chavez (2), Jose Curiel Jr. (4), and Alexis Curiel (2). Image
courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.
Plate 25 Title: N 38.20663 W 117.99872 CAPTION: Tuesday, 27 May 1997, 6:48 a.m. On US Highway 95,
15 miles south of Mina, Arizona a Blazer dried off the right edge of the expressway, overcorrected
and went off the le edge of the roadway. e SUV flipped over several times and came to rest on its
roof aer ejecting three of the four occupants. Britany Kay Brooks (11 months) and her ild safety
seat were thrown from the vehicle, killing her instantly. Also thrown from the vehicle and killed was
William (26), whose last name was withheld from the local media. Britany Kay’s mother and five-
year-old sister were injured, but survived. Image courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.
Plate 26 Fox Run Apartments. Image courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.
Plate 27 Debra Estes (15). Image courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.

Plate 28 Eric Chur (22). Image courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.

Plate 29 Four Photographs from Everyday. Credit: Noah Kalina.

Plate 30 Passenger projection. Credit: Jutta Strohmaier, Bildrecht Wien.

Plate 31 Passenger videostills. Credit: Jutta Strohmaier, Bildrecht Wien.
Plate 32 Life, July 12, 1937, p. 19. Credit: Photograph © Robert Capa, courtesy International Center of
Photography.
Plate 33 Anatomical eatre, Surgery Sool, Pistoia, from the series The Modern Spirit is Vivisective,
2012. Credit: Francesca Catastini.
Plate 34 Tactile Photography Prototype De Krijtberg, Amsterdam a, b, c, 2013. Credit: Andreas
Reichinger, VRVis.

Plate 35 Bir Barouta, Kairouan, Tunisia, 2015. Credit: Moritz Neumüller.

Plate 36 Exhibition of Tactile Photography Prototypes at the Regional Union of the Blind, Kairouan,
Tunisia, 2015. Credit: Moritz Neumüller.
Plate 37 Exhibition of Tactile Photography Prototypes at the Regional Union of the Blind, Kairouan,
Tunisia, 2015. Credit: Moritz Neumüller.

Plate 38 Exhibition of Tactile Photography Prototypes at the

Regional Union of the Blind, Kairouan, Tunisia, 2015. Credit: Moritz
Neumüller.
Plate 38 Exhibition of Tactile Photography Prototypes at the Regional Union of the Blind, Kairouan,
Tunisia, 2015. Credit: Moritz Neumüller.

Plate 39 Tactile Photography Prototype of the Bir Barouta,

Kairouan, Tunisia, based on a photograph by Moritz Neumüller,
designed by Andreas Reiinger, printed by Florian Rist.
Plate 39 Tactile Photography Prototype of the Bir Barouta, Kairouan, Tunisia, based on a photograph
by Moritz Neumüller, designed by Andreas Reiinger, printed by Florian Rist.

Plate 40 Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodenko, Будь готов!,

1934. Photocollage (paper, photograph, pencil, gouae), 29.1×20.6cm.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel Khoroshilov.
Plate 40 Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodenko, Будь готов!, 1934. Photocollage (paper,
photograph, pencil, gouae), 29.1×20.6cm. Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel
Khoroshilov.
 Plate 41 Cover of the first issue of Camera Mainii. Credit:
Susumu Shimonishi.
Plate 41 Cover of the first issue of Camera Mainichi. Credit: Susumu Shimonishi.

Plate 42 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

Plate 42 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

Plate 43 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

Plate 43 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

Plate 44 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

Plate 44 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

Plate 45 Sarah Meister, film still from Seeing through Photographs,

Coursera, 2016. Credit: e Museum of Modern Art.
Plate 45 Sarah Meister, film still from Seeing through Photographs, Coursera, 2016. Credit: The
Museum of Modern Art.

Plate 46 Vik Muniz, film still from Seeing through Photographs,

Coursera, 2016. Credit: e Museum of Modern Art.
Plate 46 Vik Muniz, film still from Seeing through Photographs, Coursera, 2016. Credit: The Museum of
Modern Art.

Plate 47 Gorsad Kiev, Piercing. Courtesy of Gorsad Kiev

/Romaniuk Mariia.
Plate 47 Gorsad Kiev, Piercing. Courtesy of Gorsad Kiev /Romaniuk Mariia.

Plate 48 Tony Futura, Lemons, 2015.

Plate 48 Tony Futura, Lemons, 2015.
 Plate 49 Philipp Baumgarten, Goldene Zitrone, 2016.
Plate 49 Philipp Baumgarten, Goldene Zitrone, 2016.

Plate 50 Screenshot: LensCulture Portrait Awards Call for Entries,

2016. Credit: www. lensculture.com.
Plate 50 Screenshot: LensCulture Portrait Awards Call for Entries, 2016. Credit: www. lensculture.com.

Plate 51 Screenshot: LensCulture website, 2016. Credit:

www.lensculture.com.
Plate 51 Screenshot: LensCulture website, 2016. Credit: www.lensculture.com.

Plate 52 Maat Mons is displayed in this computer-generated three-

dimensional perspective of the surface of Venus. e viewpoint is
located 634km (393 miles) north of Maat Mons at an elevation of
3km (2 miles) above the terrain. August 1, 1996. Credit: NASA/JPL.
Plate 52 Maat Mons is displayed in this computer-generated three-dimensional perspective of the
surface of Venus. e viewpoint is located 634km (393 miles) north of Maat Mons at an elevation of
3km (2 miles) above the terrain. August 1, 1996. Credit: NASA/JPL.

Plate 53 Screenshot of the Photocaptionist website, 2017. Credit:

photocaptionist.com.
Plate 53 Screenshot of the Photocaptionist website, 2017. Credit: photocaptionist.com.
 4
Redefining the Photographic Medium
 4.0 Chapter Introduction

Moritz Neumüller

Since the invention of the photographic medium, the relationship between

photography and art has been problematic in many ways, and it continues to
be. Although the distinctions between such categories have become
increasingly blurred in recent years, it would be more precise to speak of a
cross-fertilizing relation than a competing one. The most vital difference is
that “Art” is no longer defined by its materials, appearance or content;
instead it is defined by the context. Some contemporary photography suits
the artistic context very well. In many cases it is created exclusively within
this context, and engages directly with it. Other contexts, as mentioned
inChapter 3, include advertising, medicine, journalism, political activism,
the family album, scientific investigation, as much as the representation of
architecture, portraits, weddings, and so on. As all of these other contexts
illustrate, photography is an incredibly versatile medium that cannot be
confined exclusively to the artistic context. Or, as Aaron Schuman has put
it: “Yes, photography can be ‘Art’, but it is also much more than ‘Art.’” Of
course, the reverse is also true: in countless ways, art stretches far beyond
the limits of photography, and serves many roles that photography never
will (Schuman, 2010). For him, the most interesting development occurring
today is that photography has reached a level of maturity whereby it is no
longer simply a medium that exists within or is applied to other contexts,
but has begun to establish a context of its own: “‘Photography’ (with a
capital P).” Today, the medium seems to have gained enough confidence,
prominence, momentum and status—and has gathered enough of a cohesive
community around itself—that it no longer needs to hang onto the coat-tails
of “Art” in order to be recognized or respected; instead, it’s beginning to
redefine itself, exist and flourish as “Photography” (Schuman, 2010).
 It is within this context that I have invited a number of scholars and
practitioners to explore the borders of the medium, such as moving versus
still images, documentary versus staged photography, the single image and
the series, as well as sculptural and tactile dimensions, research-driven
methodology and psychological borderlines.
Most of these aspects are as old as the medium itself but have undergone
considerable variations with the arrival of the digital age. The convergence
of media has a great impact on the differentiation of static and moving
images. For a photograph not only reflects a decision on the part of the
photographer, his sense that a certain moment in time—let’s call it a
decisive moment—is worthy of being recorded; the true strength of a
photograph resides in the time it contains. This freezing of time— Bazin
speaks of a mummification of the moment in photography—is of course
related to Barthes’ punctum (Bazin, 2009). What happens in film is a
mummification of events as they take place, since the time span of events
here corresponds directly to that of reproduction. In the case of the
electronic visual media, TV and video, viewers can synchronously witness
this mummification on the screen. This simultaneity of recording and
reproduction, the visual feedbacks and interferences it creates, were central
to the earliest experiments with the medium of video, first and foremost in
the work of Nam June Paik. Digitalization has now rendered photography
equally capable of producing absolutely instant images. Moreover, multiple
image formats are commingled in the recording device itself: digital
cameras have long learnt to record video as well (some of them even
producing ready-for-YouTube files), and video cameras store photographs.
Mobile phones do both, producing imagery they forward directly to other
terminals or to the Internet. That is not to say, of course, that forms mixing
still and moving images are something new. They are present, too, in the
medium of film itself, which, in contrast with video, consists of individual
images, or frames. But digitalization engenders a new relationship with
technology: photographers and media artists are no longer tinkerers; they no
longer need to (nor in fact can) fully understand the technology they are
employing. The computer is a black box that we do not have to open; we
merely need to know how to use it. Learning consists in locating and
filtering information, not in making knowledge our own (as will be argued
in the next chapter, also). What counts is access to the necessary know-how,
not a firm grasp of it. This adaptation to fast-paced technology has
profoundly shaped the new generation of artists who have never known the
pre-digital world, and cannot imagine creating without menu-driven image
editing, and the “Undo” function (Manovich, 2017). Depending on the
desired end result, they blow up their pictures into large-format works,
project or stick them on the wall, publish them on their own blog, or
convert them, at a click of the mouse, into a photography book. They record
their videos now in cinema-quality HD, with their mobile phones. Their
fame and influence depends in a large part on how networked they are
within their “community” and on how the latter evaluates their work.
In his essay, Stephen Chalmers talks about his photographic projects and
the research-based methods he shares with other photographers such as Joel
Sternfeld, Taryn Simon, and Chloe Dewe Mathews. I met Stephen at the
Pingyao Festival in China some years ago, where he had curated an
exhibition that included Chris Jordan’s work. Soon, I also learned about
Stephen’s own practice, and his teaching. When he decided to publish his
long-term project Unmarked, he asked me for some advice in the editing
and design process, and the result was a small but very interesting book.
The work is based on long trips by car back and forth across the country,
that Stephen had made for different reasons and several life changes.
During these trips, he had passed numerous roadside memorials with
weathered stuffed animals, bits of lace or flowers tied to the post of a road
sign, denoting that “something bad happened at these locations at some
point in the past.” In all of his projects, Chalmers draws on the limitations
of the media of photography to represent these events, to prove anything, to
document or reveal the hidden yet charged histories of places.
Alexander Streitberger’s article reflects on images that are neither
photography nor film: As “images generated by images” (and not taken
from reality) they are photofilmic images situated on the threshold between
stillness and movement: freeze frames, flip books, chronophotography,
photodynamism, slide shows and immersive 3D experiences are some of
the examples he analyzes. Many of these techniques allow the film to reveal
its basic principle as a moving image composed of photographic stills, a
kind of self-reflexivity of the medium. Digital technology has unleashed a
revival of serial and sequential editing of photographs to time-lapse videos
and enabled new effects and experiences in the no-man’s-land between the
still and the moving image. I was first introduced to Alexander Streitberger
by our common friend Lars Blunck, the author of the next article in this
collection, and we have since organized many seminars and workshops for
the students of both our universities, in Leuven and Madrid. Together with
Hilde Van Gelder, Streitberger directs the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre
for Photography, Art and Visual Culture which has become a true research
hub for the medium in the last years. They are also the co-editors of the
Lieven Gevaert Series, a major series of substantial and innovative books
on photography launched in 2004.
Lars Blunck was my fellow intern at the Museum of Modern Art in the
late 1990s, but we lost contact for several years, until his book Die
fotografische Wirklichkeit (The Photographic Reality) fell into my hands,
and I contacted him via the publisher. He has also been one of the docents
for the European Master of Contemporary Photography in Madrid, and
recently invited me to hold a workshop for his students at the Nurnberg
Academy of Fine Arts. Beside his expertise on Duchamp’s optical devices
and readymades, Blunck has published extensively on the connection
between truth and fiction in photography. His article focuses on staged
photography, an umbrella term that gathers concepts as disparate as
Arranged, Constructed, Creative, Directorial, Fabricated, Manipulated or
Tableau Photography, and how it relates to traditional photographic
requirements such as correctness, authenticity, and truth. From suspended
World Press Photo winner Giovanni Troilo to Hippolyte Bayard, via Robert
Capa and Ralph Bartholomew Jr., Blunck shows us the role of narration and
fiction in supposedly “unstaged” photographs.
The territory shared by text and image is the playground of Federica
Chiocchetti’s conversation with Nina Strand. Chiocchetti, whom I met at a
colloquium at the Birmingham Library, organized by Pete James and Nicola
Shipley, has a background in comparative literature, and developed her
interest in photography through literature. Overwhelmed by photography
theory, she felt the need for a more playful and experimental way to engage
with her research and set up the photo-literary platform Photocaptionist to
promote the “concubinage” between photography and literature, images and
words. Her conversation with Nina Strand, the co-editor of the
Scandinavian magazine Objektiv, touches not only on image–text and
photo–text intersections after the pictorial turn, but also on very
contemporary matters, such as filter bubbles in the social networks, “the
irritating intrusion of algorithms,” and the current political turmoil in the
US, which, according to Strand, could easily be described as “a triumph of
pure image over other kinds of information.”
My own contribution on “Tactile Photography” is co-authored with
Andreas Reichinger, a computer graphics and computer vision researcher at
VRVis, the Viennese Zentrum für Virtual Reality and Visualisierung
Forschungs GmbH. We first introduced the concept of tactile photography
at a conference on Materiality and Immateriality in Photography in Vienna
in 2012, the proceedings of which were published in the magazine
PhotoResearcher. Since then, we have continued our research into 3D-
Printing in the field of cultural heritage, and presented it at international
conferences, in publications, and at curatorial meetings. This proposal
begins with a short introduction on the rise of multisensorial art practices
and projects in the field of tactile interpretation. Thereafter, we focus on our
main field of research, the use of stereoscopy to create 3D-printed reliefs:
its premises, technical description, its cultural and artistic impact, and
finally, its potentials in the field of education, of inclusivity and in
exhibition design.
Roger Ballen is one of the few collaborators in this publication I have
never met personally. A huge fan of his work, I have seen many exhibitions,
books and videos made by and with him, and finally got to know him via
email and phone, to coordinate his participation in the Daegu Photo
Biennial in Korea, which I co-curated in 2014. I vividly remember framing
and hanging some of the images that now illustrate his text, together with
the chief curator of the Biennal, Alejandro Castellote. To create the
composition that was to be hung on the wall, we put all the pictures on the
floor, then one of us stood on a ladder, and instructed the other to move the
frames from left to right and back again, until we had a convincing result
that we could hand over to the mounting team. Roger Ballen’s photographs
include drawings, calligraphies, masks and many mythological allusions
that call on “ancient shamanistic visions, sacred symbols inherited and
embedded through time,” as he put it himself. I am very thankful that he has
contributed his text and all the images in a timely manner and without
asking any second questions. Other photographers who have supplied their
works for this chapter are Stephen Chalmers (for his own text, Chapter 4.1),
Noah Kalina and Jutta Strohmaier for Chapter 4.2, and Francesca Catastini
for the conversation between Chiocchetti and Strand (Chapter 4.4). The
illustrations for the Tactile Photography piece (Chapter 4.5) have been
provided by Andreas Reichinger, our collaborator Florian Riest, and myself.
Finally, I want to thank Cynthia Young for her help in our being able to
publish the famous photograph of the Falling Soldier by Robert Capa from
Life magazine (July 12, 1937, p. 19), courtesy of the International Center of
Photography, in New York.

References

Bazin, A. (2009). What is Cinema? Montréal: Caboose.

Manovich, L. (2017). Post-media Aesthetics. [online] Available at:
http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/post-media-aesthetics [Accessed
1 March 2017].
Schuman, A. (2010). Photography and Art. Unpublished interview with
Moritz Neumüller, August 2010.
 4.1 Resear-Based Documentary Projects

Stephen Chalmers

When I was still in school, I watched the nine-and-a-half-hour epic film

Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann in one sitting. Early in the film, a 47-
year-old man, Szymon Srebrnik, is introduced to the viewers. In the Łódź
Ghetto, when Srebrnik was 13 years old, he witnessed his father killed.
Srebrnik and his mother were relocated 120 miles (193km) north to the
Nazi extermination camp in Chełmno, where between 150,000 and 340,000
individuals (primarily Polish Jews) were killed – including Srebrnik’s own
mother.
Two years into his forced labor and two days before the Soviet troops
arrived, all of the remaining prisoners were killed with a bullet in the head.
Despite being shot in the head, Srebrnik survived and was able to crawl to a
stable, where he was rescued by a Polish farmer and then treated by an
army doctor. Srebrnik was one of roughly ten prisoners who survived or
escaped from the camp by the time the camp was liberated on 20 January
1945.
In the film, Srebrnik returns to the site of the Chełmno camp from his
home in Jerusalem more than three decades after the war. Srebrnik is shown
walking away from the camera. The symmetrical composition of what
appears to be a crane shot shows a field and the outline of a concrete
foundation in an otherwise lush verdant setting. Birds and the sounds of
nature are heard.
It’s hard to recognize, but it was here. They burned people here. A lot of people were burned
here. Yes, this is the place. No one ever left here again. The gas vans came in here . . . There were
two huge ovens, and afterward the bodies were thrown into these ovens, and the flames reached
to the sky.
Yes. It was terrible. No one can describe it . . . no one can understand it. Even I, here, now . . . I
can’t believe I’m here. No, I just can’t believe it. It was always this peaceful here. Always. When
they burned two thousand people – Jews – every day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted.
Everyone went about his work. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now.
(Lanzmann and De Beauvoir 1995: 3)
 While watching the film, I was struck by the tension between Srebrnik’s
words describing a place of unimaginable violence as being quiet and
serene, and reconciling his descriptions of the Holocaust with the pastoral
scenery of Polish countryside captured in Lanzmann’s images.
Lanzmann was not the first to explore the tension between the
psychologically charged past and the present, but Shoah was the first work
that resonated with me in profound ways. Since this film, I have also been
interested in a number of photographers who use research-based methods
and historiographical information to define and create their photographic
projects, and who are similarly drawn to the history of a place in which no
trace of that history remains when photographed. Since the inception of the
media, many other photographers and cinematographers have worked in a
similar fashion – for example, consider selected photographs of Civil War
battlefields after the fighting had ended (with or without bodies) by
Alexander Gardner, George N. Barnard, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, John
Reekie, Andrew J. Russell and others. When viewed in conjunction with
historical accounts, including wild dogs picking flesh from bones and rivers
red with blood, these images from these photographers become similarly
resonant as those of Lanzmann.
This essay surveys the work of three photographers – Joel Sternfeld,
Taryn Simon, and Chloe Dewe Mathews – who incorporate research in their
formulation, and to exactly define the subject photographed. Once
uncovered, that knowledge changes the viewer’s perception of a peaceful
landscape, an otherwise ordinary room, or an average portrait subject.
These three artists were chosen for the sake of brevity; others might include
Trevor Paglen, Antonio Zazueta Olmos, Richard Mosse, and Rachel
Sussman.
Documentation of sites has a long history in landscape photography, but
the shift of emphasis away from pure aesthetics towards the incorporation
of contextual embedded histories really took off in the late 1970s and early
1980s. The often-discussed William Jenkins New Topographics exhibition
at the George Eastman House in 1975–76 is frequently viewed as a pivotal
moment for research-based documentary projects. However, there was a
cultural change in Western countries earlier, beginning in perhaps the
1960s, where interest in personal and societal history increased.
Joel Sternfeld’s now classic On this Site: Landscapes in Memoriam
(1996) documents 50 sites across the United States from between 1993 and
1996 in which a wide variety of historically charged events occurred. Some
of these events were nationally known, while others were smaller, local
items; some were violent, others peaceful. As an example, “The Masjid-Al-
Rasul, 11211, Central Avenue, Watts, Los Angeles, California, July 1993”
shows an orange-red carpeted room with two couches and an overstuffed
chair shoved against the back wall, next to a heater. The furniture and the
carpet seem to be two decades out of date by the time when the photograph
was made. The text that accompanies the photograph explains that: “In the
mosque, members of the Bloods and the Crips, rival Los Angeles gangs,
negotiated and signed a truce on April 26, 1992.”
Or another Sternfeld photograph, “Mount Rushmore National
Monument, Black Hills National Forest, South Dakota, August 1994”
shows the compositionally diminutive heads of Presidents Washington,
Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln carved into the granite face of Mount
Rushmore, as seen from behind a bank of 27 high-powered spotlights that
fill more than half of the frame. The text that accompanies the photograph
explains that
In 1868 the Federal Government deeded millions of acres in the Black Hills of South Dakota to
the Great Sioux Nation. Nine years later, when gold was discovered in the area, Congress broke
the treaty and took the land back.
In the 1920s the State of South Dakota, eager to attract tourists, commissioned a sculptor to
carve colossal monuments into Mount Rushmore. The Sioux still considered the Black Hills to be
their sacred land.
In 1980, the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux $17 million plus interest accrued since 1877 as
compensation. The award is now valued at nearly $300 million, but the Sioux continue to both
refuse the money and seek title to the land.

Both examples point to the charged history of the visually banal place
and deal with the theme of memory and forgotten or suppressed histories.
Other images in the series depict the sites where violence against people or
groups occurred, or violence against the environment. The emptiness of
many of his compositions reinforces the absence of people or at least their
disempowerment in the histories included.
After working in 2000 for the New York Times Magazine, photographing
individuals who were wrongly convicted and subsequently freed from death
row, Taryn Simon created one of her early projects, The Innocents, with the
assistance of the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to help free
individuals who are found to be wrongly convicted. In most Innocence
Project cases, inmates are wrongly convicted of crimes that also involve
rape, and then freed many years if not decades later – the preponderance of
cases involving rape are due to the incontrovertible evidence that the saved
body fluids from these assaults leave. Simon photographed the exonerated
individuals at sites that are charged with either the history of the crime or
the subject’s innocence – such as the scene of the arrest, the scene of the
crime, the scene where the subject was misidentified, or the scene of the
subject’s alibi.
For example, in one image, Frederick Daye can be seen sitting near the
corner of an otherwise empty and dark bar. Wood paneling adorns the walls.
There is what appears to be the chin of a painted portrait of Martin Luther
King on the top of the composition while Daye stares at the camera with a
similar head position to that of the painted portrait. Icicle Christmas lights
dimly illuminate the area above his head. The caption informs the viewer
that Daye is seen in the bar where he was when the crime occurred – and
that 13 people testified under oath that they saw him there.
Frederick Daye

Alibi location, American Legion Post 310, San Diego, California

Where 13 witnesses placed Daye at the time of the crime

Served 10 years of a life sentence for Kidnapping, Rape and Vehicle Theft, 2002

After viewing the photographs in the series, one is left with the heavy
impression of the ramifications that these images signify. With the current
351 exonerations claimed by just the Cardozo School of Law Innocence
Project, at the time of writing this, each of these individuals has served an
average of 13 years in prison for crimes that they did not commit – a
combined 4,500 years irrevocably lost from these individuals’ lives. In a
larger sense, one is left to wonder about the hundreds (if not thousands) of
others currently incarcerated for crimes they did not commit, but who have
not benefitted from the advocacy of groups like the Innocence Project or
that lacked DNA evidence.
Many of Taryn Simon’s other projects work in a similar data-driven
fashion. For example, in A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters,
I–XVIII (2008–2011) Simon photographed numerous people from 19
different individual bloodlines; in An American Index of the Hidden and
Unfamiliar (2007), a wide variety of items/places are shown that are out of
view of the general population within the borders of the United States; or in
Birds of the West Indies (2013–14), Simon photographed actresses who
played women in James Bond movies, as well as the original weaponry,
gadgets and vehicles used in the films. The title of Simon’s project comes
from author and ornithologist James Bond who wrote the exhaustive study
of Birds of the West Indies in 1936, and whose name became eponymous to
the Ian Fleming protagonist.
The third photographer I will highlight, Chloe Dewe Mathews, also uses
historical research to dictate the locations that she photographed, in her
most recent project, Shot at Dawn. In commemoration of the one-hundredth
anniversary of World War I, Mathews photographed 23 locations where
British, French, and Belgian soldiers were either held in detention or
executed for cowardice and desertion between 1914 and 1918. As most of
the executions took place at daybreak, she attempted to photograph the
locations at approximately the same time of day and approximately the
same time of year as the executions took place.
Like Sternfeld’s work, Mathews’ images are quiet and generally devoid
(for the most part) of evidence of human activity. The images in her small
series are uniformly dark and with a blue cast. In one image of a field
sloping down to the right side of a composition, a fence recedes into the
frame, while a fog hangs heavy in the air in the distance. Evidence of the
subtle tracks of a vehicle can be seen in the center of the frame. The caption
to the image indicates that six soldiers were killed on one day in September,
1914, at this site and another three were executed at the same site five days
later:
Vanémont, Vosges, Lorraine
time 06:30 /date 07.09.1914
Soldat Eugène Bouret
Soldat Ernest François Macken
Soldat Benoît Manillier
Soldat Francisque Pitiot
Soldat Claudius Urbain
Soldat Francisque Jean Aimé Ducarre
time 07:45 /date 12.09.1914
Soldat Jules Berger
Soldat Gilbert Gathier
Soldat Fernand Louis Inclair

Mathews’ other photographs in the series from sites in Belgium and

Northern France, gleaned from interviews with battlefield guides, military
historians and others, are similar in structure: the landscape photograph
stands in as a protagonist for the person who lost their life at the location.
In interviews, Mathews has stated that she only made 23 photographs of
the approximately 1,000 cases of executions from desertion and cowardice,
as the exact locations were difficult to ascertain from historical records
(Mathews et al. 2014).
In my own photographic projects, I use similar research-based methods
to Sternfeld, Simon, and Mathews. In what follows, I discuss the
background and the research behind two of my projects, In Memoriam and
Unmarked.
After I finished my undergraduate degrees in psychology and
photography in Kentucky, I moved to Oregon to work as a counselor to
emotionally disturbed children. After a few years, I left Oregon to attend
graduate school in Illinois, and after receiving an MFA in Cinema and
Photography, I took an academic position in the state of Washington.
For each of these life changes, I made the long trips by car back and forth
across the country. During these trips, I would pass numerous roadside
memorials with weathered stuffed animals, bits of lace or flowers tied to the
post of a road sign, or small crosses turned silver gray by the sun. Some had
names, dates of birth and death, faded notes, pinwheels, deflated balloons,
or other memorabilia.
In the evenings during one of the first trips across the country, I would
read from John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a travelogue
and meditation on leaving and returning home. In one section of this book
he describes a walk with a friend in the hills at night after they had a few
beers and their coming across a roughhewn wood cross along the path,
weakly illuminated by a kerosene lamp. His companion explained the
backstory of the cross by telling a story of a sick and weak fisherman who
attempted to crawl back to his house along the same path but collapsed and
died on that spot. “And his family put the little cross and the candle there to
mark the place. And eventually they would put up a stronger cross. It seems
good to mark and to remember for a little while the place where a man
died” (Steinbeck 1951/1995).
The practice of roadside memorials in the United States is believed to
have come from the Southwest via Mexico, where Steinbeck’s journey
around the tip of Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California Sur took him,
along the path originally established by colonists from Spain in the 1700s.
These colonists attached a spiritual significance to the place where the spirit
leaves the body, so they, like the family of the fisherman of Steinbeck’s era,
built crosses beside the trail to mark the exact spot where a death occurred.
Similar crosses are common in other Roman Catholic countries of Europe
and in Latin America, where they are called Descansos, or resting places.
These small makeshift shrines are constructed at the places where the
pallbearers rest while carrying the deceased to the graveyard.
Driving by the similar memorials on my cross-country trip it was difficult
to observe these markers without envisioning the incident or imagining the
lives of the survivors. What tragedy occurred? Who built the memorial?
Does the person who built it live in the area, drive by, and occasionally stop
to tend it?
The United States of America is a car culture, with drivers who
experience their lives through windshields. Because driving is such a large
part of American culture, remembering those who die as a result of
automobile accidents seems a culturally ingrained thing to do from behind
our steering wheels. The public grieving displayed by roadside memorials
stands in stark contrast to the way that other deaths are memorialized in the
United States. The accidents that precipitate the roadside memorials are also
decidedly public – with many onlookers and emergency personnel. The
memorials are placed in public view and become part of the daily landscape
for those who drive past them and in this way demand interaction, even if
only indirectly.
Some memorials are as simple as ribbons wrapped around a tree or
flowers tied to a telephone pole. Others are more elaborate, up to 20 feet
high and made of poured concrete or welded steel. Often there will be
mementos attached to the structure. Around the memorial, one might find
bits of crumbled glass, shards of red plastic from the brake lights, or other
evidence of the accident. These parts of the automobile are occasionally
incorporated into the design of the memorial, in effect, making the
instrument of death part of the grieving process (Color Plate 23).
Starting in about 1996, I began to stop at each of the memorials I would
see. At first I would just inspect the bits of plastic, stuffed animals, deflated
balloons, faded photographs damaged by the elements, and ephemera that
were left to commemorate those who died on these spots. I found these
memorials to be strangely poignant and haunting. I found them intriguing,
both as folk art and as spectacle. They spoke of loss and a life abruptly
ended. In a way, by standing on the spot where someone died and viewing
objects left by their families in remembrance, I felt empathetically a sense
of connection with them and their loved ones (Color Plate 24).
After a couple years of this ritual, I began to travel with camera and
lighting equipment to photograph these structures. Then returning home I
would attempt – through any signifier such as a date or a first name on the
memorial structure along with the LexisNexis search engines or the
websites of newspapers near to where the accident happened – to find out
what happened at these sites. The latitude and longitude of each site became
the title of the piece. If the newspaper searches didn’t provide useful
information, I would use the locational GPS information in order to find
nearby businesses to call, or if that was unsuccessful, to mail letters to
adjoining residential addresses (with pre-stamped return envelopes) to see if
the area residents knew of what happened on the sites. Occasionally, I
would reach out and call the families of the deceased to discuss the accident
and their loved ones (Color Plate 25).
In my interviews, I found that the bereaved built these structures for a
number of reasons: as a way to reach out from their private pain in order to
connect to the larger community; as a warning to others not to speed or
drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol; to let drivers know that
someone loved and important died there; as a way to process and bring
closure to grief; as a way to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the dead
through notes, inscriptions, personal items, and continuation of missed
holidays and celebrations; as a way to regain a sense of control through
ritualized patterns of tending to the memorials; or to have a symbolic
foundation and point of reference that provides a sense of stability to the
survivors and a place to pay tribute to the deceased. These memorials honor
the deceased and mark the accidents that killed them, thereby offering a
more personal way for the bereaved to connect with the people who are
now gone than traditional funerals or cemeteries can.
Unmarked is another project in which knowledge of the history of a site
altered my perception of the space. Around 2008, I went on a long,
challenging full-day hike with a girlfriend at Tiger Mountain in Issaquah,
Washington. It was a beautiful day and early in the relationship; the air
seemed filled with promise, excitement, and romance.
When we went back home and had dinner with friends, one of them told
us that the Tiger Mountain area was where the serial murderer, Ted Bundy,
disposed of the heads of his victims. This bit of new information, like the
scene of Srebrnik walking in the field of the former extermination camp in
the Lanzmann film, changed the tenor of my hike to something darker.
Shortly after this experience, I began to research serial murder in the
northwestern United States and began to file Freedom of Information Act
requests in order to review police records and prosecutor reports. In
addition to these, I read “True Crime” novels, which are typically based
closely on the criminal defense proceedings of the murderer and
contemporaneous newspaper accounts. In each of these, I would be paying
particular attention to the locations mentioned in these documents. For
example, from the Prosecutor’s Summary of Evidence (2003) in the case of
State of Washington versus Gary L. Ridgeway reads (emphasis mine):
B. DEBRA ESTES (COUNT VI)

On September 20, 1982, fifteen year old Debra Estes disappeared. At approximately 3:00 p.m.
that day, Debra was last seen near the Stevenson Motel on PHS. She was known to engage in
prostitution.
Nearly six years later, on May 30, 1988, construction workers, digging holes for a playground,
discovered Debra’s remains in a shallow grave in Federal Way. Buried with Estes were two items
of clothing: a brassiere and fragments of a black knit sweater/shirt with metallic threads. An
acquaintance of Debra’s confirmed that she was wearing this sweater/shirt on the afternoon she
disappeared.

Then, later, in the Statement on Plea of Guilty (2003) for the same case,
Ridgway states (emphasis mine):
Count VI (6):

In King County, Washington, sometime between September 20, 1982 through May 30, 1988, with
premeditated intent to cause her death, I strangled Debra Estes to death. I picked her up, planning
to kill her. After killing her, I buried her body near the Fox Run Apartments in Federal Way.

Using this information, I found the Fox Run Apartments in Federal Way,
and scanned the satellite image for the playground. After researching other
similar locations in the area, I drove across the state to visit the locations
and make photographs (Color Plate 26).
Debra Estes had just turned 15 years old when she vanished and her body
didn’t turn up until five and a half years later, when construction workers
were digging a hole in order to pour the concrete footings for a swing-set in
an apartment complex (Color Plate 27). Apparently her killer had dumped
her body in what was once a wooded area, and when the area was being re-
graded for construction, her body was accidentally buried in the process.
The construction workers called police, who unearthed a skull and pieces of
a knit top. The killer of Debra Estes was not charged with her death until
nearly 20 years later, in 2003. Advances in forensic science were finally
able to match microscopic specks of paint on the clothing to a specialized
industrial paint used by the murderer in his job.
In the creation of another photograph in the series, I read in the guilt
phase evidence of the Superior Court of Orange County (2000) report
proceedings (again, emphasis mine):
5. Murder of Eric Church

Around 11:00 a.m. on January 27, 1983, a California Department of Transportation worker
discovered the dead body of a young man, later identified as Eric Church, off the shoulder of the
on-ramp to the northbound 605 Freeway from 7th Street in Long Beach. The body was clothed
and wore burgundy colored socks but no shoes. It appeared to have skidded to the spot where it
was found.

Church was strangled and pushed out of a moving vehicle. His blood-
alcohol content was 0.08 percent and his body contained enough diazepam
that, in the absence of the strangulation, would have either been fatal or
would have put him into a mild to moderate coma. Knowing from other
information that the perpetrator, Randy Kraft, would push his victims out of
his moving vehicle, assisted by centrifugal force, I looked for an area of the
7th Street connector to I 405/605 in which the vehicle would be heading
around a left turn. Aided by a crime scene photograph that was part of the
prosecution case (exhibit 82) I headed to the location and photographed the
exact spot that the body of Eric Church was found (Figure 4.1; Color Plate
28). Victims like Eric Church, Debra Estes, and others haunt the images that
reveal their absence; in this series the photographs are titled with each
victim’s name.
The projects In Memoriam and Unmarked belong within my larger body
of work in which I use either personal interviews or public records to
research histories of communities and individuals in order to map the
pivotal locations in their stories. Unlike In Memoriam, where I first
photographed the roadside memorials and sought the personal information
about the accident victims afterwards, Climbing the Ladder with Gabriel,
which traces a woman’s journey through the introduction, addiction, and
recovery from methamphetamine, used personal interviews with the addict
to define which places I photographed.
The Freedom of Information Act requests that were at the core of
locating serial killers’ dumpsites in Unmarked were also useful in a recent
project Youngstown, OH, which addressed the urban downsizing and the
steady deterioration of a Rust Belt steel town after the collapse of the main
industry that sustained it until the late 1970s. Here, I filed a Freedom of
Information Act request to find the addresses of each house demolished by
the city, and I photographed all 4,000 of the now vacant lots. Exhibitions of
this work typically show 100–200 of these images, which are stylistically
identical with the curbs lined up from image to image; all that can be seen
in the empty lots is an occasional signifier of the land’s former use – a
concrete stairway leading nowhere, a driveway, a twisted and rusted
wrought iron fence all evocative of meditative feeling about the loss of a
resource of a shared memory – that which was embodied in the houses
destroyed.
Figure 4.1 Eric Church CRIME Scene. Image courtesy of Stephen Chalmers.

In a current project, Pearl Bryan (working title), there are no individuals

to interview or information that could be gleaned from government records
so I needed to adapt my methodology. For this project, I used research
conducted at regional historical societies, period newspapers, and period
folk-songs to tell the story of a late nineteenth-century murder which was
billed as the “crime of the century” at the time but is now largely forgotten.
In all of my projects, I draw on the limitations of the media of photography
in that there is absolutely nothing within the frame to denote that something
bad happened on these locations at some point in the past.
The research-based documentary projects surveyed here seek to reveal
the hidden yet charged histories of places. Joel Sternfeld explores
suppressed histories in ordinary sites; in The Innocents, Taryn Simon
photographed individuals who suffered from injustices from the legal
system in America; Chloe Dewe Mathews returns to execution sites of
fallen soldiers and deserters of World War I. The subjects of these works,
located in tame objects or landscapes, are deep and often problematic
traumatic memories and histories.
The attempt to reveal what had been lost, to conjure up ghosts, and
hopefully to come to terms with the past is also what first attracted me to
Lanzmann’s Shoah. Srebrnik, the Holocaust survivor in the film, returns to
the extermination camp site to find it oddly peaceful and devoid of the
trauma he suffered; yet, Lanzmann insists, Srebrnik’s subdued testimony
infuses the site of forested field with meaning that no viewer of his film can
ignore. It is the context and its revelation in the image that lends this genre
and body of photographic work incredible emotive power, as the
juxtaposition of the mundane and the psychologically charged holds the
potential to evoke the invisible, to inform, unbalance, and upset, and most
importantly, to commemorate loss and perhaps heal.

References

Lanzmann, C. and De Beauvoir, S. (1995) Shoah: The Complete Text of the

Acclaimed Holocaust Film. New Y ork: DaCapo.
Mathews, C.D., Dyer, G., Strachen, H. and McCartney, H.B. (2014) Shot at
Dawn. Madrid, Spain: Ivory Press.
Shoah (1985) [Film] New Yorker Films: Claude Lanzmann.
Simon, T., Neufeld, P. and Scheck, B. (2003) Taryn Simon: The Innocents.
New York, NY: Umbrage Editions.
Statement of Defendant on Plea of Guilty (2003) Associated Counsel for
the Accused. State of Washington (Plaintiff) Vs. Gary Leon Ridgway
(Defendant). Case No. 01-1-10270-9 Sea.
Steinbeck, J., Flanders Ricketts, E. and Steinbeck, J. (1951/1995) The Log
from the Sea of Cortez. New York: Penguin, pp. 58–59.
Sternfeld, J. (1996) On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam. San Francisco:
Chronicle.
Superior Court of Orange County (2000) The People (Plaintiff and
Respondent) versus Randy Steven Kraft (Defendant and Appellant).
Case S013187.
Superior Court of Washington for King County (2003) Prosecutor’s
Summary of the Evidence. State of Washington (Plaintiff) vs. Gary
Leon Ridgway (Defendant). Case No. 01-1-10270-9 Sea.

Further Reading

Chalmers, S. (2017). Stephen Chalmers. [online] Available at:

www.stephenchalmers.com, for further information about my projects.
Newman, C. (2016). Uncovering the Untold: An Interview with Chloe
Dewe Mathews. GUP – Guide to Unique Photography. [online]
Available at: www.gupmagazine.com/articles/uncovering-the-untold-an-
interview-with-chloe-dewe-mathews [Accessed 3 Dec, 2016].
The Innocence Project. [online]. Available at:
www.cardozo.yu.edu/innocenceproject [Accessed 3 Dec, 2016], was
originally a project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at
Yeshiva University (New York City) – now it is an independent non-
profit still closely aligned with the school. Their mission statement
indicates the feeling that these incarcerations are proof of systemic
failures within the criminal justice system.
United States Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration. Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS).
[online] Available at: www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx,
provides annual national statistics about all road-related fatalities.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Chełmno. Holocaust
Encyclopedia.” [online] Available at:
www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005194 [Accessed 3
Dec, 2016]. NOTE: An exact number of the Chełmno camp survivors is
difficult to determine due to differences in the names used in records.
Lanzmann’s Shoah mistakenly claims that there were only two
 survivors of the Chełmno camp. Recent research shows that at least 11
individuals escaped alive from the camp, including one man, Yakov or
Jacob Grojanowski, who was later recaptured and killed in the Bełżec
extermination camp.

4.2 e Still and the Moving Image

Alexander Streitberger

Though traditionally photography is supposed to be a still image while

movement is associated with film, in the last two decades a profound shift
can be observed in terms of the production, perception, and study of the
relationships of photographic and filmic images. The advent of digital
culture in the late twentieth century entailed an increasing convergence of
the categories of stillness and motion, both technologically, in drawing on
the same software and hardware engineering, and perceptually, in leaving
the spectator in doubt of the photographic or filmic nature of the image.
Imovie, Photosynth, and AutoStitch, for example, are computer software
programs that generate animated images on the basis of photographs. In
cinema, techniques such as morphing and bullet-time are used to depict
spectacular transformations from one state to another, or to travel within
temporarily immobilized situations.
As a result of recent developments in computer technology, social
networking, and devices such as the camera phone, photography became a
hybrid and mobile medium that shares its technological nature as well as its
ways of production and distribution with other media, most notably film. In
the 2013 edition of The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Martin
Lister observes rightly that “the distinction between the still and the moving
image became hard to secure” in a world where “attention has shifted from
the digitally encoded image to the dispersed life of images online” (Lister
2013: 1–4). This new hybrid and mobile status of the digital image
triggered an increasing interest in the relation of photography and film
within various fields of study such as film theory, photography theory,
cultural studies, and art history. Book titles such as Stillness and Time:
Photography and the Moving Image (Green and Lowry 2006), Still Moving:
Between Cinema and Photography (Beckman and Ma 2008), Mutations II
(Achleitner and Ecker 2008) and The Still/Moving Image: Cinema and the
Arts (Rossaak 2010) all suggest that the primary feature of the convergence
of photography and film in the digital era lies in “the multiple temporalities
that arise at the intersection of still and moving image technologies”
(Beckman and Ma 2008: 10).
Yet, the interaction of still and moving images has its history, both in
photography and in film. In the late nineteenth century, techniques such as
Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, the flipbook, and Damoizeau’s cyclographe
were already being used to transform still photographs into moving images,
while the Lumière Brothers’ first movie screenings began with a still image
suddenly put in motion in order to provoke a surprise effect for the audience
(Gunning 1989). Within the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s
techniques of montage and seriality were used in order to explore the
relationship between (still) photography and (moving) film.
Peter Wollen, in his essay “Fire and Ice,” hints at this dialectical
correlation when he writes:
Film is all light and shadow, incessant motion, transience, flicker, a source of Bachelardian
reverie like the flames in the grate. Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic
power to preserve objects through time without decay. Fire will melt ice, but then the melted ice
will put out the fire.
(Wollen 2007: 111)

Although ‘frozen’ photography and ‘transient’ film are still described as

ontologically separated media, Wollen suggests that they interact and
compete with each other, constantly imposing their own qualities on one
another. It is then most important to reconsider the distinction between the
photograph as still and the film as moving image in a historical perspective.
 From Serial Photography to Time-Lapse

While the purpose of a single photograph has often been defined as that of
capturing or freezing a moment in time, it is a main feature of serial
photography to represent or to simulate temporal succession and motion by
a continuous arrangement of images. In the 1870s Eadweard Muybridge
started his work on animal locomotion for which he employed multiple
cameras in order to record systematically the successive phases of motion.
Invented by Muybridge and developed by Etienne-Jules Marey, Albert
Londe and others, chronophotography’s aim was to measure and to study
“the physical body navigating this modern space of calculation” (Gunning
2003: 225). In opposition to this rationalized form of motion study, artists
such as futurist photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia used time exposure in
order to render the trajectory of human action in time and space. In
accordance with Henri Bergson’s disapproval for chronophotography as a
method to break down motion into isolated attitudes, Bragaglia’s
photodynamism aimed to represent “the intermovemental stages of a
movement in a fluid, unique gesture” (Bragaglia 1989: 290). In his book
Fotografische Gestaltung, published in 1937, photographer Andreas
Feininger finally declared serial photography as a privileged means of
representing events (in contrast to situations) and compared it with film for
its narrative qualities and its capacity to reproduce life.
Montage is another means that avant-garde photography and film share
to convey a dynamic vision of modern life. The kaleidoscopic and
fragmentary experience of the modern city’s uninterrupted flow of
potentialities and significations, as described by Siegfried Kracauer in his
Theory of Film (1960), has its visual equivalent in the photomontages
realized by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Moï Ver, Alexander Rodchenko and
others during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1942 Moholy-Nagy writes on
photomontage:
The cutting and assemblage of the parts is applied here on a static plane. The effect is that of a
real scene, a synopsis of actions, produced by originally unrelated space and time elements
juxtaposed and fused into a unity.
 (Moholy-Nagy 1970: 63)

For Moholy-Nagy, the “power of assemblage, the quick fluidity of the

action structure,” which photomontage and film have in common, permits
the creation of a coherent space–time reality that offers an exact
reproduction of modern life. Moï Ver’s photobook Paris, published in 1931,
demonstrates how techniques such as montage, sequence, multiple
exposure, and superimposition are used to simulate the dynamism and the
fleeting impressions encountered in the modern city. During the 1940s
hybrid genres such as the photonovel (a book consisting of photographs and
text arranged as in comic books) or the cine-novel (a photonovel adapting a
film or television episode by using film stills) became popular for their
qualities to mimic motion and narration by montage and sequencing, while
reaching a larger public than cinema, which was confined to the movie
theatre.
Since the early twentieth century, photographs have been organized in
illustrated books and magazines for temporal, narrative, or performative
concerns. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger situate the photobook between the
novel and film, arguing that the sequential montage of photographs,
supposed to evoke specific events, follows “a clear narrative imperative”
(Parr and Badger 2004: 10). Organized as a “stream-of-consciousness,” the
almost aggressive impromptu photographs of William Klein’s New York
(1956) express the dynamism and the anxiety in the United States during
the period of the Cold War (2004: 232–234). Other photobooks from the
same period result from road trips across the country (Robert Frank’s Les
Américains, 1958) or even simulate a car ride like Ed Ruscha’s Every
Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a montage of photographs presenting
the famous Boulevard seen through the window of a moving automobile. A
particular type of photobook is the flipbook, also named the “kineograph”
in the first patent introduced by John Barnes Linnett in 1868. At the end of
the nineteenth century, Maximilian Sklandanowsky produced small
booklets called “living photographs,” containing a succession of
photographs. These flipbooks animate a series of images in order to
demonstrate how photography becomes film. Based on still photographs
while mimicking cinema, the intermedia nature of the flipbook made it very
attractive for artists from the 1960s onwards as a means to counter
traditional esthetic distinctions between the arts of space (sculpture,
painting, photography) and the arts of time (theatre, literature, cinema).
Artists such as Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Gilbert & George, and Peter
Downsbrough used the flipbook to situate their work at the intersection of
movement and stillness, thus emphasizing the performative character of art.
For similar reasons, conceptual artist Dan Graham promoted the
photographic series, with reference to Muybridge’s motion studies, for its
capacity “to fixate the real mobile to be reproduced as an illusion by means
of the immobile” (Graham 2001: 104). Unlike Renaissance perspective,
Graham continues, “[t]here is no single, fixed point of view. The changes
are positional and only involve the motion of the reader’s eye” (106). As
part of a series, the photograph not only becomes an appropriate means to
analyze motion, but further activates the reader–spectator whose eye
movements or activity of flipping pages integrate the photographs in a story
or a mobile sequence.
Becoming popular in middle-class American homes during the 1950s,
slide shows are another means to animate still photographs and to transform
them into parts of a narration or an event. Since the 1960s many artists used
slide projections because of their capacity to produce movement by means
of transient and immaterial images. Based on 31 projected color slides and
audio recording, Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969–72) constitutes a
kind of travelogue that describes the various states of the building’s decay.
From the early 1970s James Coleman began utilizing the successive
projection of still photographs to explore subjective experience in a world
of shifting realities. In more recent years, the advent of digital technology
has unleashed a revival of serial and sequential editing of photographs to
time-lapse videos. Noah Kalina’s Everyday, for example, consists of a
quick, sequential montage of thousands of daily taken self-portraits,
contracting the slow process of aging in a couple of seconds (Color Plate
29). Time-lapse Mining is a software, developed by Google and the
University of Washington, which searches and selects photographs from the
Internet taken over years of the same subject with the aim to visualize
global changes.
Artists and photographers use similar stop motion and time-lapse
techniques rather in a critical and reflexive manner. Drawing upon Jan
Dibbet’s and John Hilliard’s conceptual photo-series from the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Jutta Strohmaier’s video Passenger (2004) shows a room
with two windows giving a view of the façade of the opposite building
(Color Plates 30 and 31). The compression of a large number of
photographs captured each minute over the course of a day into a video
lasting barely 15 minutes invites the spectator into a passage from the
domestic interior, visible at daylight, to the foreign life in the opposite
building that can be observed at night. The accelerated projection of still
images opens up on a dialectical interrelation between visibility and
invisibility, inclusion and exclusion. The complex relationship between
stillness and motion is also addressed in Zachary Formwalt’s Unsupported
Transit (2011). Confronting the construction of the new Shenzhen Stock
Exchange with chronophotography and Marxist reflections on capitalism,
the video employs time-lapse in order to deal with the processes of
acceleration and deceleration within contemporary society.

From Freeze Frame to Bullet Time

While serial photography tends to narration, movement and temporal

experience, the purpose of photographs, when used in film and cinema, is to
seem to arrest time, reminding us that, technologically, film is based on the
succession of 24 (still) frames a second. As Laura Mulvey puts it, analog
film is “a series of static, inanimate, images, which, once projected, then
become animated to blur the distinctions between the oppositions” (2006:
52). It has often been argued that the sudden arrest of time and motion in
film, caused by a freeze frame or the appearance of a photographic image,
allows the film to reveal its basic principle as a moving image composed of
photographic stills. Garrett Stewart addresses this kind of self-reflexivity
when he writes: “The film has become, so to speak, transparent to itself, but
only in the moment, and at the price, of its cancelled succession, its
negation as a moving picture” (Stewart 1987: 19). For Raymond Bellour,
the unexpected immobilization of the filmic flow permits the spectator to
distance themselves from the narrative in order to reflect on the film and its
larger apparatus. According to him, the viewer becomes thus a “pensive
spectator” (Bellour 2007).
In films of the 1920s and 1930s photographic images already appeared to
expose the production conditions of both photography and film. In Dziga
Vertov’s Man with a Camera (1929), for example, freeze-frame shots are
used to represent the transition from the shooting operations to the editing
process in the cutting room. Edgar G. Ulmer and Robert Siodmak’s
Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930) includes a sequence in
which a photographer takes souvenir photos in a park. When the faces of
people, posing in front of the camera, are suddenly frozen, this sudden
arrest marks the passage from film to photography and further illustrates
what Roland Barthes considers as the specific momentum of photographic
portrayal, the experience of “a subject who feels he is becoming an object”
(Barthes 1981: 14). If Barthes calls this transformation process a “micro-
version of death,” Stewart adapts this idea to the phenomenon of the freeze
frame “as a trope for death’s violent arrest of time” (Stewart 1987: 13). For
this reason, Stewart argues, the irruption of photographic stillness in film
became an appropriate and highly efficient means to image death scenes in
cinema. A particular example is Chris Marker’s seminal La Jetée from
1962. Composed almost entirely of stills, the film tells the story of a man
who, after traveling through past, present, and future, realizes at the end that
the image he saw as a child was the image of his own death. Beside the fact
that the photographic image is closely related to the moment of death, La
Jetée also demonstrates, as Wollen suggests, “that movement is not a
necessary feature of film; in fact, the impression of movement can be
created by the jump-cutting of still images” (Wollen 2007: 112).
 Following Bellour, the massive appearance of freeze-frame and
photographic images in cinema since the 1960s coincides with the new
possibilities of electronic image technologies. Stoppable and repeatable,
video appears as the ideal medium for creating transitions between moving
and static images, between analog technologies and the digital (Bellour
2002). It is thus not amazing that a huge number of experimental films and
video art of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Hollis Framton’s Nostalgia (1971)
and Peter Campus’ Three Transitions (1973), include photographic material
in order to reflect on the production and perception of technical images.
In more recent years, innovative digital visual effects have transformed
the relationship between moving and still images in cinema in a decisive
way. Best-known from Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s blockbuster Matrix
(1999), the bullet-time effect is based on a large number of photographs
taken simultaneously and then assembled in such a way that the camera
seems to orbit around a scene arrested in time. Eivind Rossaak rightly
situates this effect in the two distinct but related traditions of Muybridge’s
scientific photo-series and early cinema’s “aesthetics of astonishment”
(Rossaak 2010: 54). Mingling stasis and movement by means of a circular
panning around a frozen scene, bullet-time creates a reality effect that
allows both analytic observation and immersive seduction. Numerous artists
such as Victor Burgin, Michiel Van Bakel, John Gerrard and David
Claerbout employ this or similar effects in their videos in order to explore
aspects of representation and temporality within contemporary media
society. David Claerbout’s video Oil workers (from the Shell company of
Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013)
consists of a semicircular pan around African oil workers waiting under a
bridge for the rain to stop. Originating from a photograph found on the
Internet, of which the subjects have been remodeled as 3D portraits based
on a method similar to the bullet-time effect, the final video merges such
incompatible elements as water and oil, and movement and stillness, thus
confronting the rationalized time of industrialization with the unproductive
duration of waiting.
 From Panoramic Photography to Immersive 3D Experiences

Describing a 360-degree movement around an immobilized object or scene,

these films and video works based on the bullet-time effect inscribe
themselves in the history of the panorama. Turning the panoramic all-over
view inside-out, they are, in fact, inverted panoramas. In his cultural history
of virtual art, Oliver Grau actually presents the panorama as a forerunner of
digitally produced, 360-degree immersive imagery (Grau 2003). Introduced
in the late nineteenth century by Irish painter Robert Barker, the panorama,
a monumental 360-degree painting fixed on the inner walls of a circular
building, offers a static, cylindrical image that immerses the spectator in a
city, battle, or landscape which he is only able to apprehend when moving
around on the platform situated in the center of the rotunda. Consequently,
the panorama can be described as a fixed, immobile image navigated by a
body in motion. “Even cityscapes and landscape panoramas,” Victor Burgin
observes, “inevitably entail the time of viewing, as it is not possible to take
in the entire image at a glance” (Burgin 2009: 303). With the invention of
Friedrich von Martens’ Megaskop, obtaining 150-degree views by means of
a rotating lens, the panoramic movement of the body was also performed by
the photographic apparatus. The camera developed by Damoizeau in the
end of the nineteenth century finally was able to take 360-degree views
while turning around its own axis. Joachim Bonnemaison describes this
dynamic way to produce images of a time–space continuum as “a body
gesture which . . . is transmitted into an instantaneous visual memory. What
may seem like a technological invention is in fact an extension of the body
– motion, and a way of rendering motion” (Bonnemaison 1989: 34). In fact,
Damoizeau’s camera mimics the movement of the spectator located on the
platform of the panorama rotunda.
The idea of an active spectator immerged in an environment of images is
fully achieved in the gigantic photomontage frieze El Lissitzky designed for
the Soviet pavilion at the Pressa exhibition in Cologne, 1928. Some years
later, in 1942, Alfred Steichen organized the exhibition Road to Victory,
which, as the subtitle suggests, was conceived of as A Procession of
Photographs that promoted the American entry into World War II. Relating
the dynamic structure of the display – designed by Herbert Bayer – to film,
Steichen described the exhibition as a “moving picture . . . where you do the
moving and the pictures stand still” (Lugon 2010: 135).
More recently, software applications and technologies, such as
QuickTime VR, Pano2VR, Photosynth and Google Street View, substitute
the physical action of bodies and cameras by a completely virtual
experience of the world. The armchair traveler navigates a space composed
of still photographic imagery, giving him the illusion of immediate access
and flexibility. As a reaction to this return of the panorama as virtual
environment, many video artists create photographic 360-degree views in
order to explore the new phantasmagoria of total control over reality and its
representations, epitomized in panoramic vision. Produced by a rotating
camera and measuring 28 × 298 inches, Sam Taylor-Wood’s Five
Revolutionary Seconds X (1997) invites the spectator to stride up and down
in front of the nearly 360-degree view of a loft in which heterogeneous
events are suspended in time and space. In John Gerrard’s video Dust Storm
(Dalhart, Texas, 2007) a virtual panorama, based on thousands of
photographs and satellite data, confronts the spectator with an apocalyptical
desert landscape with no escape from the circular loop repeating always the
same monotonous view. Since the late 1990s, Victor Burgin combines in his
videos photographic panoramas with film and text elements in order to
explore the fragmentary, circular, and repetitive nature of “our everyday
encounter with the media” (Burgin 2006: 14). All of these examples have in
common that they are neither photography nor film. As images generated
by images (and not taken from reality), they are photofilmic images situated
on the threshold between stillness and movement.

References

Achleitner, G. and Ecker, B. (eds) (2008) Mutations II: Moving Stills, exh.
cat., Maison européenne de la photo Paris (et al.).
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980),
New York: Hill and Wang.
Beckman K. and Ma, J. (eds) (2008) Still Moving: Between Cinema and
Photography, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Bellour, R. (2002) L’Entre-Images: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo, Paris: La
Différence.
Bellour, R. (2007) “The Pensive Spectator (1984),” in D. Campany (ed.),
The Cinematic, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 119–123.
Bonnemaison, J. (1989) Panoramas. Photographies 1850–1950. Collection
Bonnemaison, exh. cat., Arles: Espace Van Gogh.
Bragaglia, A. G. (1989) “Futurist Photodynamism (1911),” in C. Phillips
(ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and
Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, pp. 287–292.
Burgin, V. (2006) “The Noise of the Marketplace,” in V. Burgin, The
Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books, pp. 7–28.
Burgin, V. (2009) “The Time of the Panorama (2005),” in A. Streitberger
(ed.), Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin,
Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 293–312.
Feininger, A. (1937) Fotografische Gestaltung, Harzburg: Heering.
Graham, D. (2001) “Photographs of Motion (1967/69),” in B. Pelzer, M.
Francis, and B. Colomina (eds), Dan Graham, London: Phaidon, pp.
104–107.
Grau, O. (2003) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Green, D. and Lowry, J. (eds) (2006) Stillness and Time: Photography and
the Moving Image, Brighton: Photoworks/Photoforum.
Gunning, T. (1989) “An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the
Incredulous Spectator,” Art & T ext, 34, pp. 31–45.
Gunning, T. (2003) “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in
Multiplicity,” in P. Prodger (ed.), Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the
Instantaneous Photography Movement, New York: Oxford University
Press, pp. 223–228.
Kracauer, S. (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Lister, M. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture,
Abingdon, Oxon /New York: Routledge.
Lugon, O. (2010) “Dynamic Paths of Thought: Exhibition Design,
Photography and Circulation in the Work of Herbert Beyer,” in F.
Albera and M. Tortajada (eds), Media Epistemology in the Modern Era,
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 117–144.
Moholy-Nagy, L. (1970) “Space–Time and the Photographer (1942),” in R.
Kostelanetz (ed.), Moholy-Nagy: Documentary Monographs in Modern
Art, New York /Washington: Praeger Publishers, pp. 57–66.
Mulvey, L. (2006) Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image,
London: Reaktion Books.
Parr, M. and Badger, G. (eds) (2004) The Photobook: A History, vol. 1,
London /New York: Phaidon.
Rossaak, E. (2010) The Still/Moving Image, Saarbrücken: Lambert
Academic Publishing.
Stewart, G. (1987) “Photo-gravure: Death, Photography and Film
Narrative,” Wide Angle 9, 6, pp. 11–40.
Wollen, P. (2007) “Fire and Ice (1984),” in D. Campany (ed.), The
Cinematic, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 108–113.

Further Reading

Alexander, D. (ed.), Slide Show: Projected Images in Contemporary Art

(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005)
provides a good introduction to the history and the artistic use of the
medium.
Campany, D. (ed.), The Cinematic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) is an
anthology of influential texts on the relationships between the moving
and the still image.
Campany, D. Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)
retraces the history of the encounters between photography and cinema
from the late nineteenth century.
Cohen, B. and Streitberger, A. (eds), The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in
Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven: Leuven University
Press, 2016) explores the border-crossing movement between
photographic and filmic images within contemporary art and visual
culture.
Diekmann, S. and Gerling, W. (ed.), Freeze Frames: Zum Verhältnis von
Fotografie und Film (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010) gives a great survey
of the uses of freeze frames in cinema.
Rossaak, E. (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography,
Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) is a
collection of essays that analyze stillness and motion as part of a larger
ecology of images and media.

4.3 Staged Photography

Lars Blunck

In 2014/15 the World Press Photo Award, one of the most esteemed awards
in photojournalism, became a touchstone of the organizer’s definition of
press photography. After the fact that, due to image manipulation, 20
percent of the competition submissions had already been rejected in
advance, and after the winner Mads Nissen—already the winner of the
previous competition—had been suspected of having arranged his
photograph of a gay couple in St. Petersburg, soon fraud allegations were
raised against the winner of the category “Contemporary Issues Story”:
Italian photographer Giovanni Troilo was accused of having staged pictures
—actually an affront to every decent photo journalist—in his series of
photographs about the Belgian town of Charleroi, among them a
photograph of lovers copulating in a car. As a consequence of public
pressure, in March 2015, the World Press Photo Foundation felt compelled
to deprive Troilo of the prize. In the corresponding press release it was
sheepishly said that the photographer had offended the competition rules
with incorrect captions; the organizers conceded that Troilo’s photographs
had raised controversy “about the definitions of press photography,
photojournalism and documentary photography” (World Press Photo
Foundation 2015). This controversy, however, is by no means new.
Incidents of manipulation and staging have accompanied documentary
photography since its early days. Legendary, for instance, are those
photographs in which persons who were absent have been pasted in through
retouching, or persons who were in fact present have been cut out. The
ancestral line ranges from Mathew Brady’s retouched group portrait of
union generals (1865) to picture propaganda in Stalinism up to montages of
title pages in the yellow press nowadays. For instance, photo historians felt
confident they could prove that British photographer Roger Fenton had
arranged some of his photographs taken in 1855 during the Crimean War:
Presumably, he had scattered cannonballs for his famous photograph The
Valley of the Shadow of Death over a road purely for dramaturgical reasons.
A similar accusation befell Alexander Gardner, who in regard to his picture
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, taken in 1863 in Gettysburg, claimed in
1866 in his Photographic Sketchbook: “The artist . . . found in a lonely
place the covert of a rebel sharpshooter, and photographed the scene
presented here” (Gardner 1866). A century later, Gardner was
posthumously accused to have come across the corpse at a completely
different place and—“for the purpose of a more effective scene” (Frassanito
1975: 187)—to have placed it in a rock niche, moreover to have fitted it
with a gun as props, in order to photograph the dead sniper in the first place.
Fenton and Gardner, goes the accusation, have staged their picture motifs.
Very similar imputations have been levied against other photographers, for
instance against Arthur Rothstein and his photo of a steer’s skull on parched
soil (1936), against Robert Doisneau with his The Kiss on the Sidewalk
(1950), and also against the Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal
with his famous picture Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken in 1945: a
staging which is, says the oft-repeated accusation, “nothing more than a
publicity stunt staged for the War department” (Ruby 1995: 194). Yet
Rosenthal had only accompanied a squad of soldiers who pulled down a
flag, recently raised under fire, and who then replaced it with another one;
in other words, Rosenthal photographed this event without having
intervened significantly in the scene, as far as we know today. One could
almost say: Actually, reality has staged itself in front of his camera.
Anyway, technically speaking, Rosenthal’s photograph is not staged at all,
at least no more then his subsequent group photo of the cheering soldiers in
front of the hoisted fluttering flag. Nevertheless, the picture of the erection
of the flagpole has been called “staged” for different reasons. And once a
photograph is incriminated as staged and thus discredited in the field of so-
called documentary photography, it is, as is well known, almost impossible
to rehabilitate; the suspicion of fraud (whether justified or not) burns itself
into what is commonly called the collective memory.

Fabricated and Manipulated

But what do we mean in the first place, when we speak of staged

photography? Nowadays, staged photography serves as an umbrella term
that gathers concepts as disparate as Arranged, Constructed, Creative,
Directorial, Fabricated, Manipulated or Tableau Photography. Especially
since the end of the 1970s such concepts have been established in the photo
historical discourse to distinguish Picture-making from Picture-taking. In so
doing, some authors have tried to reserve Staged Photography—written
with a capital ‘S’—for the Fine Arts (in capital letters for the same reason).
According to this, the generic term would mean: “scenes are staged
deliberately for the camera” and “exclusively in front of the camera.”
Though, according to German curator Michael Köhler writing on the Art of
Staged Photography, “photographers also assume the role of directors, set
and costume designers and often of actors in their own scenes” (Köhler
1995: 7, 15). Although not focusing exclusively on the context of fine arts,
American scholar A.D. Coleman likewise has defined a main criterion of
staged photography:
Here the photographer consciously and intentionally creates events for the express purpose of
making images thereof. This may be achieved by intervening in ongoing “real” events or by
staging tableaux—in either case, by causing something to take place which would not have
occurred had the photographer not made it happen.
(Coleman 1976: 484)

Accordingly, we would always have to address a photo as staged, if its

production does not correspond to the famous maxim of the late Edward
Steichen: “Take things as they are” (Steichen 1923: 294). Thus, in staged
photography the photographic subject is “fabricated to be photographed”
(Coke 1979).
More recently, however, the concept of staged photography has been
expanded with the aspect of manipulation. Thus, the American curator Erin
C. Garcia states: “Staged photography has come to encompass a broad
range of things, from elaborate fabrications to the subtle manipulation of
images that appear to be purely reportorial” (Garcia 2010: 6). Though the
early Edward Steichen, already the doyen of pictorialist photography, noted
in 1903 that each photographic picture and each print is preceded by a
whole series of decisions and interventions, from the choice of the subject
and the picture detail to the time and length of exposure up to what we
today call post production: “In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to
finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically
impossible” (Steichen 1903: 48). Nevertheless, in the early days of
photography “manipulation” was not considered as inappropriate
intervening at all, but simply understood as technical handling (Lake Price
1863). Even more: Retouching, double exposure and combination printing
had been appreciated aesthetically, for instance, in the case of landscape
photography by Carleton E. Watkins or seascapes by Gustave Le Gray
made in the mid-nineteenth century; collaged staffage in portrait
photography, picturesque colorations of photo postcards and montages in
trick photography have hardly caused any offense; also today’s
manipulation via Photoshop rarely has any potential for public excitation, at
least beyond the political sphere.
This holds no less true for posing and staging. For example, in the early
days of photography adjusting, using headrests to steady the subject’s head
was not considered to be an intervention at all, nor were the features of the
mid-nineteenth century’s carte-de-visite photography “with draperies and
palm-trees, tapestries and easels,” that led Walter Benjamin to remark that
back then the portrait photo would have oscillated “between execution and
a representation” and the photo studio “between a torture chamber and a
throne-room” (Benjamin 1934: 18). And even today we hardly take offense
when someone poses while being photographed, when they, as French
semiologist Roland Barthes put it, transform themselves “in advance into an
image” (Barthes 1980: 10). Like “manipulations,” “stagings” also play a
certain role in each photograph, be it as staging in front of and for the
camera, be it as mise-en-scène with the camera or as installing the
subsequent prints.
Therefore, to a certain extent reality in every photograph is altered,
whether “through cutting and pasting, combining multiple negatives into a
single composite image, or some other technique” or “by staging scenes for
the camera” (Fineman 2012: 6f.). Thus, it is by no means crucial whether a
photo is manipulated or fabricated and therefore whether it is staged, but
what readings we subject it to and in which context we do so. These
readings always determine the agency of any image. Thus, in the
documentary context—and especially in the context of press photography—
any form of image manipulation, of arranging the subject, or of incorrect
labeling can prove fatal. Because more than almost any other sort of images
a press photograph—and with it every variety of image which claims to
maintain a special relationship to social reality—is under scrutiny as far as
our ethical expectations are concerned.

Correctness, Authenticity, and Truth

The credibility of some photos has been questioned again and again in
photo-historical literature, in the popular press and—in an especially rigid
form—on the Internet. Immediately, accusations of deception and fraud
come up. But deception can only exist where we expect something to be
“real”; the suspicion of fraud arises when we find our expectations for
authenticity deliberately disappointed. In his essay “On the Nature of
Photography,” Rudolf Arnheim articulates the opinion that—when it comes
to judging the “documentary qualities of a photograph”—we ask ourselves
three questions: “Is it authentic? Is it correct? Is it true?” (Arnheim 1974:
157). With these questions Arnheim directs our attention to three topoi,
which are very remarkable from a photo theoretical point of view: the
correctness, the authenticity, and the truth of photographs.
Explaining his three topoi further, Arnheim notes that, regarding the
notion of correctness, the term would be meant to address “the assurance
that the picture corresponds to what the camera took“ (Arnheim 1974: 157),
for instance regarding colors, proportions, etc. In fact, already at this point a
controversial debate could take place, concerning the question under what
circumstances we could actually claim that a photo is “correct.” And surely
such a colloquially used term should not be misunderstood, and should not
be stressed intellectually too much. Nonetheless, everyone speaking about
correctness has to consider its variability and relativity. Arnheim would
presumably have countered such reservations with the point that
photographic correctness would simply mean a correlation between the
photo and what it represents; one could almost speak of a kind of
faithfulness of depiction, and the similarity would be all the more obvious,
the greater the consistency between the most important qualities of the
photo and those of the photographed. However, again, the determination of
such a congruence always depends on a comparison in which actually we
define and interpret the relevant properties. A fuzzy passport photo, for
example, would probably be seen as an incorrect representation of the
person being portrayed. However, Robert Capa’s notorious 1936 photo of
the death (or supposed death) of a Spanish loyalist could be seen as a
pictorial equivalent of a very dynamic incident, and not be regarded as an
expression of inaccuracy (see Color Plate 32). The fuzziness in question
could even be interpreted as an indication of the authenticity of the
photograph, especially if the context of the publication stimulates our
documentarizing reading, for example by captions such as this one, where
Life ascribed to this photo an exact place and a clearly defined incident:
“Robert Capa’s camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped
by a bullet through the head in front of Cordoba” (Life 1937: 19). Captions
like these—but also image compilations, headlines, etc.—irrevocably
contribute to our readings of photographic images. And it is often these that
decide whether we should take a photo as correct and authentic or not.
Which brings us to Arnheim’s second notion.
The question of authenticity of the photographic image touches, as
Arnheim writes, the “relation of the image to the world depicted” (Arnheim
1978: 38). Arnheim notes:
Authenticity, vouched for by certain features and uses of the picture, requires that the scene has
not been tampered with. The masked burglar leaving the bank is not posed, the clouds are not
printed from another negative, the lion is not taken in front of a painted oasis.
(Arnheim 1974: 157)

In other words, for Arnheim authenticity means the non-falsity of what he

calls “the facts of reality” (Arnheim 1993: 56), and the accurateness of
photography in terms of this reality, as well as eventually the absence of
subsequent image manipulations and retouches.
Authenticity, understood in such sense, has become questionable in the
case of Capa since the allegations raised by the British journalist Phillip
Knightley against Capa and his photo in 1975 (Knightley 1975). The
picture is staged, goes the accusation. It would therefore be no longer
authentic in the sense of Arnheim; the soldier is staged like Arnheim’s lion
in front of the painted oasis. However, Capa biographer Richard Whelan
vehemently disagreed with this, and stepped up again and again for the
authenticity, that is to say, for the non-falsity, for the accurateness of the
photograph. In 2005 he made an attempt to prove “the photograph’s
authenticity” in trying to invalidate the “absurd suggestions” of his
opponents and in trying to document that the Spanish loyalist was the 24-
year-old worker Federico Borrell Garciá from Alcoy, who verifiably died
on September 5, 1936 in a battle near Cerro Muriano, where the photo was
supposed to have been taken. Whelan concludes his argument with a plea:
I believe that the evidence overwhelmingly proves The Falling Soldier to be a photograph of
Federico Borrell García at the moment of his death during the battle at Cerro Muriano on
September 5, 1936. . . . Such solid evidence as there is all supports the authenticity of Capa’s
great photograph. It is time to let both Capa and Borrell rest in peace, and to acclaim The Falling
Soldier once again as an unquestioned masterpiece of photojournalism and as perhaps the greatest
war photograph ever made.
(Whelan 2003)

Notwithstanding the dubious nature of such superlatives: Whelan’s

attribution of the photo as doubtlessly authentic could have become
obsolete again (but perhaps only temporarily) with a discovery published by
the Basque photo historian Jose Manuel Susperregui in his book Sombras
de la fotografía (2008). Susperregui tried to establish the observation that
the photos made of the Spanish militiamen and of the dying loyalists by
Capa in 1936 are not, as Whelan assumed, taken in Cerro Muriano but in
the distant village of Espejo (Susperregui 2008). This assumption, of
course, makes not only questionable the identification of the fallen solider
as Federico Borrell García but also the authenticity of the photograph,
because the very fact that García fell on September 5, 1936 in Cerro
Muriano was supposed to confirm, as Whelan noted, the “reliability” of the
photo “as an unstaged document” (Whelan 2003).
May the backs and forths, the pros and cons of the arguments henceforth
continue as they will (I myself no longer follow them), may this debate
about the “authenticity” of Capa’s photograph end as it will (if it finds an
ending at all), much more interesting than the question as to which of the
opponents is “right” is, in our context, the basic assumption on which both
arguments are founded. Because the advocators of authenticity as well as
their opponents assume something, that may be called photography’s
relation to reality or its reference—and this is exactly what every quarrel
about authenticity is all about. To put it bluntly: Whelan assumes that the
photograph actually recorded a reality that existed in front of the camera
(precisely, without any intervening); and Susperregui too assumes that the
image shows, as Arnheim says, “physical reality” (Arnheim 1993: 56), but
a staged reality, trimmed for being photographed. Photography—this is the
argumentative tertium comparationis of the two opponents—“reproduces”
reality, whether this reality is unmanipulated (Whelan) or staged
(Susperregui). Both are therefore not arguing about the representational
character of photography, but about the authenticity of what the photograph
is supposed to refer to. And both assume that this direct reference is
something irrevocably given in photography. But in fact, we are the ones
primarily establishing these references in the first place. Each photographic
image is contingent. Although we handle photographs—in our
documentarizing reading—as representations of reality, presuming that they
deliver a depiction of the world totally independent from our point of view.
But this is a misconception. What photography provides is a registration of
light, not a self-enrollment of reality. In gazing at the photograph we, so to
say, literally look the very reality into it, but we then—in at least
unconsciously knowing about the indexicality of Photography—consider
the photograph to be a perfect depiction of reality.
Not just for completeness, Arnheim’s third topos still needs to be
addressed: the topos of the truth of photography. The problem of
photographic truth, says Arnheim, has not necessarily to do with the
authenticity of a photograph. When asked about the truth of a photograph
we should rather ask “whether the picture is characteristic of what it
purports,” it is about the “facts the picture is supposed to convey” (Arnheim
1974: 157). But what is “characteristic” in each case? Hard to say,
especially since, as in Capa’s case, clarity may not even exist about “the
facts.” Are the facts a falling soldier or a man, miming a falling soldier? Or
does “truth” lie somewhere else? It is not only the skepticism of
postmodernism that teaches that truth is always relative, never absolute.
Truth is what we make it, also in photography. For those contemporaries
who see in Capa’s photo the death of a Spanish loyalist, the truth of the
photograph may owe itself to the instantaneity of the shot; it may be due, as
French photo historian Laure Beaumont-Maillet says, to the fraction of the
very second “in which the truth of things are shown free from any pathetic
ballast” (Beaumont-Maillet 2005: 33). One could then see in this
photograph a truth about dying: dying as the sudden moment between life
and death, a moment captured photographically (or even merely supposed
to be captured). Likewise, one could also see a very different truth—or no
truth at all. That’s the way it is with truth; truth always depends on our
imterpretation—and in this, truth is the big sister of authenticity.
Now, the fact that truth is dependent on our interpretations is related to a
dual problem, that is joined nowadays with the category or with the instance
of “truth”: on the one hand, a fundamental epistemological problem,
because for many of us “truth,” even the truth as a metaphysical entity, has
increasingly faded as a consequence of poststructuralist erosions; on the
other, a media-historical problem (and here we come back to the question of
authenticity), namely the fact that our demands on photographs to be
authentic have been disappointed more than once and thus too often. We
indeed believe that a photograph directly refers to “the literal reality”
(Barthes 1961: 196); we believe that a photo would refer without any
intermediation or interpretation on the very reality we recognize in the
photographic image. Yet, often we find ourselves deceived in our belief
because we do not realize that it is we who establish this reference,
depending on our assumptions and our expectation of resemblance. In our
everyday common notion that photos would represent reality—that they
would, as Arnheim says, reproduce “physical reality”—we are taken in by a
media-ontological phantasm. Although the assumption of a mimetic
relationship between photography and reality may have been spoiled from
time to time, it is still not off the table. On the contrary: Paradoxically, this
jolting is based on our strong belief in the mimetic capacity of photography.
The “effet de réel” (Barthes 1968) of photography is not a result of
mechanical reproduction but of human interpretation. And interpretations
can turn out to be quite different. Hence, identical or similar photos can
cause different effects, depending on their context and on our mode of
reading them, a mode that does not necessarily have to be documentarizing.
Which leads us to the issue of photo fiction.

Photographic Fictions

An elaborate scene in the style of an American diner overarched by a

complex lighting: One could imagine oneself being on a film set. Cables
curl on the floor, a tripod leg rises into the image area, actors embody the
staff and guests of the diner in the very moment of an armed showdown,
everything is entirely in the style of the film noir of the 1940s and 1950s.
No doubt: A film set, it seems, has been photographed during a shooting.
The photo, one might think—in a documentarizing reading mode—is not
staged, but shows a staging. But the first impression is misleading. The
photograph has been taken in 1954 by American advertising photographer
Ralph Bartholomew Jr. for a (probably never realized) advertising
campaign for Eastman Kodak. Bartholomew did not photograph the
production set of a detective movie, but took a picture of a film set, which
had been specially built for the purpose of being photographed by
Bartholomew.
However, the situation is a lot more complicated: In the catalog book
Retail Fictions: The Commercial Photography of Ralph Bartholomew Jr.
(Wride 1998: pl. 99), one finds this photograph cropped to a significantly
different picture size. Here, the moderate landscape format is transferred
into a nearly cinematic widescreen (whereupon it must remain uncertain
whether this format once was intended for the advertisement). Thus both
images are based on the same photograph—and yet each of the images
respectively shows a different reality: on the one hand a view on the
scenery of a film set, on the other a glance into a crime scene. In the
trimmed version we no longer see the set of a diner scene (not the mise-en-
scène), but a scene within a diner. The second image looks like a film still
from a gangster movie, while in the first one we adapted to see scenery
providing the subject for advertising, exactly in the sense of Marshall
McLuhan, who in 1964 lamented “that all ads in magazines and the press
had to look like scenes from a movie” (McLuhan 1964: 231). Rather than
the picture itself, it is our perspective that has changed. In this second image
we don’t assume we see a movie set anymore (as we did in the face of the
untrimmed picture); rather we see a photographic fiction. This example
clearly proves: What we see in a photograph follows our glance.
While Susan Sontag noted, in her well-known collection of essays On
Photography, that “photographs depict realities that already exist” (Sontag
1977: 122), in the face of Bartholomew’s photos one has to add that
photographs have not only the capacity to “depict realities,” but also may be
used to shape realities: photographic fictions. Photographers since the mid-
nineteenth century have taken advantage of this potential of fiction in
photography, starting with Gustave Rejlander’s monumental combination
print The Two Ways of Life (1857) and Henry Peach Robinson’s famous
death scene Fading Away (1858), both still in the tradition of an allegorical
history and genre painting; to the photographic image inventions of
surrealism (for instance, by Angus McBean or George Platt Lynes, who for
their part found a late echo in Duane Michals’ melancholic image
sequences, in Jerry N. Uelsmann’s hallucinatory illusions, and in Joel Peter
Witkin’s bizarre and gruesome black-and-white tableaux); up to the
elaborate sets and highly suggestive scenes of Jeff Wall and Gregory
Crewdson, amongst others. For instance, in Philippe Halsman’s Dalí
Atomicus (1948) as well as in Anna and Bernhard Johannes Blume’s photo
sequence Küchenkoller (1985) it appears as if things have gone mad; it is as
if the laws of gravity are invalidated in front of the camera—in the face of
these images we even—for a moment—would doubt the physics of
Newton. We subject these photos to a fictionalizing glance; by taking this
glance we observe less a staged than a fictional reality. Unlike deceptions,
fictions owe a great deal of their existence to our (to some extent
benevolent) awareness of the fictivity of the perceived reality. Otherwise
they would not be taken as fictions but as facts; they would not be
perceived as fictional realities, but as, so to say, factual (or feigned)
realities. For instance, in Bartholomew’s diner scene an incident is to be
seen (an armed showdown), which is generally not perceived as a factual
reality (a shooting at a diner), although the photo—due to the fact that it
still partakes in the effet de réel of photography— seems to depict the very
reality we actually see in it. The fictionality of the photo follows our
fictionalizing reading (as opposed to a documentarizing reading, for
instance, of a press photograph). Therefore, it is our taking a specific mode
of perception that leads us to see the imaginary in photography.

Cross-references

Already one of the pioneers of photography, Hippolyte Bayard had

experimented in 1840 with the imaginary in photography, when he staged
himself as a drowned man in front of his camera. Bayard was aggrieved by
the very fact that the French government did not provide him with similar
royalties to his competitor Jacques Louis Mandé Daguerre. Bayard’s
Autoportrait en noyé (Self Portrait as a Drowned Man) was a protest
against this inequity. Thus, on the back of the picture, Bayard’s “obituary,”
it says that Bayard’s procedure for photography on paper would have
yielded him some admiration, but not a penny: “The Government which has
been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for
Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh, the
vagaries of human life!” Bayard’s self-portrait as a drowned man serves as
a kind of blueprint for all subsequent tableau vivant stagings in
photography that often oscillate between fact and fiction. Examples range
from the solipsistic role play of the Countess de Castiglione, from Margaret
Cameron’s sentimental Pre-Raphaelite “living images” and Fred Holland
Day’s highly aestheticized sacred re-enactments—“extraordinary
aberrations of taste” (Gernsheim 1962: 134)—to Guido Rey’s and Tom
Hunter’s photographic allusions on Dutch genre painting, up to Tina
Barney’s restaged photographs of factual private moments and Cindy
Sherman’s postmodernist strategy of photographic and discursive meta-
referentiality. In these pictures there is always—at least—more than one
reference. Looking at these images unfolds a network of possible
references, which in turn leads to a significant expansion of semantic
dimensions, for it is almost impossible to determine what the image means,
because the reference is not clear—a characteristic of staged photography in
postmodernism.
Something similar applies to photographic fakes and hoaxes these days
as well as to photographic novelties and amusements since the mid-
nineteenth century. Victorian trick photography, with its double and
multiple portraits, disembodied heads, men in bottles and portraits in front
of scenic views, was designed to astonish its beholders: “The appeal of such
images for turn-of-the-century viewers arose from the collision of
photography’s literal language of facts with the sheer impossibility of the
scenes or events depicted” (Fineman 2012: 124). This mechanism takes
effect even today—although too often in dubious and inappropriate
photographic images. Thus, a photo nowadays appears always as a hoax, if
the depicted scene tilts over into the implausible, and yet it may still—with
a wink—be claimed that everything happened just the way that the
photograph pretends to represent it. A well-known example is the so-called
Tourist Guy, who—as a forerunner of today’s mimes—seems to appear at
many different places, at first on the roof of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2011, while one of the airplanes approaches in the
background. As distasteful as we may consider this image to be, we still
don’t feel betrayed by it, because it presents itself transparently as a fake.
Whoever is taken in by it—goes the logic of the hoax—is a victim of their
own good faith, not to say of their faith in the representational character of a
photographic image. Eventually, photography, and thus staged photography
as well, has less to do with representational qualities than with the practices
of photographic image production, with the contextualization of
photographs and not least with our readings of photographic images.

References
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vol. 1, no. 1 (September, 1974), pp. 149–161.
Arnheim, R. (1978) “Die Fotografie – Sein und Aussage [1978],” in R.
Arnheim, Die Seele der Silberschicht. Medientheoretische Texte.
Photographie – Film – Rundfunk, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004, pp. 38–
35.
Arnheim, R. (1993) “The Two Authenticities of the Photographic Media
[1993],” in Leonardo, vol. 30, no. 1 (August/September, 1997), pp. 53–
55.
Barthes, R. (1961) “The Photographic Message [French 1961],” in S.
Sontag (ed.), A Barthes Reader, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, pp.
11–27.
Barthes, R. (1968) “Le Effet de Réel,” in Communications, vol. 11, no. 1,
pp. 84–89.
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [French
1980], London: Vintage Books, 2000.
Beaumont-Maillet, L. (2001) “Robert Capa, ein Leben voller Leidenschaft”
in Dies (ed.), Robert Capa Retrospektive [2001]. 2. Aufl. Berlin:
Nicolai, 2005, pp. 13–37.
Benjamin, W. (1934) “A Short History of Photography,” in Screen, vol. 13,
no. 1 (1972), pp. 5–26.
Coke, V .D . (1979) Fabricated to be Photographed, exh. cat., San
Francisco: Museum.
Coleman, A.D. (1976) “The Directorial Mode: Notes toward a Definition”
[1976], in V. Goldberg (ed.), Photography in Print: Writings from 1816
to the Present, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, pp. 480–491.
Fineman, M. (2012) Faking it: Manipulated Photography Before
Photoshop, exh. cat., New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Frassanito, W .A. (1975) Gettysburg: A Journey in Time, New York:
Scribner.
Garcia, E.C. (2010) Photography as Fiction, Los Angeles: The J. Paul
Getty Museum.
Gardner, A. (1866) Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War,
Washington: Philp & Solomons (www.loc.gov/pictures/item/01021785/,
accessed September 1, 2016).
Gernsheim, H. (1962) Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends 1839–1960,
New York: Bonanza Books.
Knightley, P. (1975) The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero
and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq [1975], Reprint, Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp. 229–231.
Köhler, M. (1995) Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photography,
Zurich: Edition Stemmle.
Lake Price, W.F. (1863) A Manual of Photographic Manipulation, London:
John Churchill.
Life (1937) “Death in Spain,” in Life, vol. 3, no. 2 (July 12, 1937), p. 19.
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New
York: McGraw-Hill.
Ruby, J. (1995) Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography, London and
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Steichen, E. (1903) “Ye Fakers,” in Camera Work, vol. 1, no. 1 (January
1903), p. 48.
Steichen, E. (1923) “Raps Photography Today” [1923], in V. Goldberg
(ed.), Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1981, pp. 293f.
Susperregui, J.M. (2008) Sombras de la fotografía. Los Enigmas
Desvelados de Nicolasa Ugartemendia, Muerte de un Miliciano, la
Aldea Española, el Lute, Leioa: Universidad del Pais Vasco.
Whelan, R. (2003) “Proving that Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ is
authentic,”
(www.photographers.it/articoli/cd_capa/img/falling%20soldier.pdf,
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Wride, T .B. (1998) Retail Fiction: The Commercial Photography of Ralph
Bartholomew, Jr., Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Further Reading

Brugioni, D.A. Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic

Deception and Manipulation (Dulles: Brassey’s, 1999) is a compact
introduction to photographic fraud.
Edwards, K.A. (ed.), Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary
Photography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 2005)
focuses on staged art photography which features invented melodrama.
Goysdotter, M. Impure Vision: American Staged Photography of the 1970s
(Riga: Nordic Academic Press, 2013) is an in-depth study of Duane
Michals, Les Krims, Arthur Tress and Lucas Samaras, and argues that
the abandonment of the idea of visual purity in their work meant a
reformulation of the modernist concept of photographic vision.
Hoy, A. Fabrications: Staged, Altered, and Appropriated Photographs
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1987) is a richly illustrated overview of
staged art photography in the 1980s.

4.4 Image-Text Intersections

Federica Chiocchetti in Conversation with Nina Strand

NINA STRAND: In our 2016 issue of Objektiv, entitled “The Flexible Image,” we look at the
current state of the (photographic) image, as it seems to expand into two distinct yet related
manifestations: the image as text/sign versus the image as operation. Considering the image as a
readable sign, I am interested to know how you work with image and text both in terms of your
academic research and your platform the Photocaptionist?
FEDERICA CHIOCCHETTI: My background is in comparative literature, particularly Latin
American and Italian twentieth-century authors. I developed my interest in photography through
literature. Calvino and Cortázar played a major influence. I got fascinated with the way in which
the two arts can interact and I started my academic research on photography, fictions and texts.

I had the desire to go beyond the somewhat rigid academic approach that characterizes the field
of studies on the relationship between photography and literature, where the two arts are usually
obliged to reciprocally engage. Most of the books on the topic either examine literature that is
about photography, namely one of the main characters is a photographer or a particularly
evocative image plays a key role in the story, or explore those photographic series whose subject
is literary, namely a writer or elaborately staged scenes portraying a literary character, like, for
instance, William Lake Price’s ‘Don Quixote in his Study’. I wanted to explore and compare the
autonomous response of photography and literature to specific themes such as the supernatural
through what I like to call the ‘photo-literary montage’ as a critical practice.

One of my initial attempts, entitled The Jolly Spirit, looks at the relationship between fin-de-
siècle spirit photography and ghost literature. Particularly it pairs a small 1860s albumen print of
painter Charles Sillem Lidderdale, who is flinching back, frightened by a presumed spirit, with an
excerpt of Henry James’s 1908 ‘The Jolly Corner’, where the protagonist Spencer Brydon has an
encounter with the ghost of his alter ego. The idea is to explore James’s controversial stance on
photography and illustration, which he discussed in his Preface to volume 23 of the New York
Edition of his texts, containing The Golden Bowl. James fears that a too-detailed image will
overwhelm the retina of the reader, killing his or her imagination, and disturbing James’s own
verbal images. That’s why when James collaborated with the then young Alvin Langdon Coburn
for the New York Edition, he acted almost as a somewhat strict art director, to make Coburn
produce the images James had in mind: ‘mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no
particular thing in the text’.

Academic research is fascinating but also challenging. I was spending most of my days at the
British Library overwhelmed by photography theory, and I felt the need for a more playful and
experimental way to engage with my research. That’s why I set up a photo-literary platform to
promote the practice of ‘concubinage’ between photography and literature, images and words,
through online editorial explorations (see the ‘Compositions’ and ‘Cornucopia’ sections of the
website), exhibitions, books and events. The Photocaptionist actually appeared in a dream I had a
couple of years back of a grumpy bloke whose job title was precisely Photocaptionist, and whose
task was to find or produce creative texts to accompany the photographs he was sent by various
institutions, artists and random individuals. From a photo-literary ‘itinerant column’ that inhabits
the pages of other magazines to a curatorial platform for exhibitions, where image–text
intersections and new commissions play an important role (for instance, Discipula Collective’s
video piece Mannequins & Mankind, commissioned for our Feminine Masculine show), we also
collaborate with contemporary artists, such as Francesca Catastini and Ignacio Acosta, who work
with photography, found imagery and text, to support them with the editing and sequencing of
their books.

NS: I am fascinated by the Photocaptionist column where you ask international photobook
experts to share an image–text photobook they find particularly interesting (regardless of its
publication date and where text is a fundamental element in the narrative, not a mere
introduction or essay on the photoworks). What makes a great image–text book in your opinion?

FC: Being obsessed with photo–text intersections, and hence completely biased, I couldn’t help
but noticing that within the incredibly prolific realm of photobooks a sub-genre was there waiting
to be spotted, analysed and embraced by the Photocaptionist. The column ‘Image–Text
Photobooks in a Nutshell’ on our website is just the beginning of a major project on the subject
[see Color Plate 53]. It is nice to notice that we are not alone in this obsession, if we consider the
recently introduced Photo– Text book award within Les Rencontres d’Arles, supported by the Jan
Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature.

To attempt an answer to your question, I would say that what makes it so difficult to reply, is
precisely the diverse and promiscuous nature of this sub-genre of photo-books. The author of the
photographs and of the texts can be the same person, like in the case of Larry Sultan’s Picture
from Home and Jason Fulford’s Hotel Oracle. Equally, the photographs can be anonymous – or
their authorship not so important or not credited – while a major poet has written the text, like in
the case of Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel (War Primer). And I could go on with many other
typologies of combinations. However, regardless of authorship, and in terms of my personal taste,
I quite admire books that have a good balance between what Anthony Wilden calls a ‘coding
disorder’ (in relation to Magritte’s painting where depicted objects have ‘wrong’ words attached)
and a subtle – at times subversive – cooperation between images and words. Political themes,
bittersweet sense of humour and ambiguity are also important ingredients for me. I think that
Francesca Catastini’s book on the mysteries and misunderstandings of Anatomy, The Modern
Spirit is Vivisective, which won the 2016 edition of the Vienna Photobook Festival award,
incorporates all these elements [see Color Plate 33].

NS: Inspired by Aperture’s issue on photography and literature, Lit., we want to investigate if the
image has taken over for the word, and if the gestures are taking over for the images. In a
conversation we had with Nicholas Muellner and Catherine Taylor from the Image Text Ithaca
Initiative, they point out that when image and text is used together, purposefully, it can force us to
stop and remember that the world is still unknowable, bridging the space between ‘the silence of
the image and the blindness of language’. How do you reflect over this sort of bridge between
image and text?

FC: When I came across the existence of the Image Text Ithaca Initiative I was overwhelmed with
happiness. It was perhaps one of the best professional moments of 2015, when I presented the
Photocaptionist in Ithaca. There I had the great opportunity to encounter a whole bunch of
people, artists, editors, publishers and lecturers completely devoted to the image–text cause. Their
presentations were highly performative and the somewhat intrusive presence of sound allowed
me to see where this ‘bridge’ that you mention can come to life. W.J.T. Mitchell, in his most
recent book Image Science, points out that the lack of sound in ‘imagetext’ interactions makes
them ‘slightly impoverished’ as it ‘confines words to the realm of writing and printing’,
neglecting the ‘sphere of orality and speech, not to mention gesture’. I see the absence of sound
allowing a space for creation. Images and words are intertwined to create a reality, a sort of third
object that only starts to exist, and then grows, in the constant back and forth movement of
looking at the images and reading the words.
Of course there are many ways in which words and images have been paired together over time
to serve different purposes. Walter Benjamin, in his fundamental essay ‘The Author as Producer’
(1934), stressed the importance of the caption to rescue the picture from ‘the ravages of
modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value’. Equally, Brecht published the War
Primer in 1955 – a unique work of art that introduced a new literary genre, the fotogramm
(photo-epigram) – to unmask the true nature of war in a capitalist society by combining poetry
and news photography. So, with them we can identify a more unilateral and political ‘bridge’, as
text played the important role of identifying and unveiling propaganda (the etymology of caption
refers to the idea of ‘seizure’). Later, postmodern and conceptual artists such as Barbara Kruger
and Victor Burgin healthily reminded us that, rather than simply seizing the meaning of an image,
text can also contribute to its ambiguity, without losing its political mission, as pointed out by
Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

Among the many ways in which image–text intersections have been described my favourite is the
one by Lessing who, as Mitchell reminds us in Image Science, considers them as ‘the frontier
between two countries, normally friendly and peaceful, but sometimes launching invasions into
their neighbours’ territory’.

Your question also made me think of Duane Michals’ photograph There Are Things Here Not
Seen in This Photograph and to an imaginary textual correspondent that could be entitled There
Are Things Here Not Written in This Text. I guess that behind the idea of the Photocaptionist and
its photo-literary montages there is the desire to go beyond the image–text hierarchical
conundrum, and create the aforementioned mysterious third object that develops and lives only in
the constant ‘ping-pong’ of the eyes when they move horizontally back and forth from image to
text. This third object is what I hope allows the reader/viewer to reflect on the pleasures and
limits of verbal and visual representation.

NS: One of our board members, Lucas Blalock, claimed that photography has become a stand-in
for language but also states that this is a fraught proposition. For example, he writes that we are
currently seeing the ascendency of Donald Trump in the US, which could easily be described as a
triumph of pure image over other kinds of information. But if photography is to some degree
displacing writing as our common cultural language, it has also (long ago) spawned a literature
and a poetics of its own. And this ‘literary’ position has been greatly enhanced by the fact that
photography has evolved into this extremely dominant form for expressing content in commercial
and social networks, which are themselves ever re-shaping our shared understanding of what a
photograph is. How is your view on the photograph in light of this?

FC: I have to admit I struggle to see how photography’s ‘literary position’ could be ‘greatly
enhanced’ by its dominant presence in commercial and social networks, but maybe it’s because I
normally relate the adjective ‘literary’ to art and, in this example, perhaps it would need some
further elaboration. If the question is to be read as whether the ubiquitous nature of digital images
and their overwhelming circulation in commercial and social networks has made fine art
photography stand out more easily, for its higher ‘literary’ nature or poetics, I think it is perhaps
still a bit too early days to give an answer.
‘On Literary Images’ – Olivier Richon wrote an illuminating text when he guest-edited the
journal Photographies in 2011. However, at the risk of misunderstanding your question and
drifting towards another issue, I would say that, in terms of photography displacing writing as our
common cultural language, possibly we are even one step further in letting ‘photography’ invade
our everyday life. Let’s say, for example, that we need to take a gas meter reading. The likelihood
that we take a snapshot of the meter with our phone, rather than write it down as a note, is quite
high nowadays. Equally there are artists working with mobile phones and Instagram imagery. But
then, after all, a novel and a shopping list are both made of words.

In his Aperture review of the ICP exhibition What Is a Photograph?, curated by Carol Squiers,
Jack King criticised the show for looking backwards ‘to produce a certain history which at once
marginalizes photography’s digital transformation and yet at the same time is a product of that
shift’. Sadly I didn’t see the exhibition, I only read the book, but, if I were to share my thoughts
on the current biggest challenge posed by the almost disturbingly ubiquitous invasion of
photography in our everyday life, I would say that it encourages, yet also challenges, the
reflection on the difference between art and non-art photography. A difference that is deeply
influenced by other factors too, such as the fame of the author and the market.

NS: Another board member, Ida Kierulf, co-curator of the exhibition Seeable/Sayable at
Kunstnernes Hus, writes that it is exactly this resonance and tension between word and image,
and between visual art and literature, they wish to explore in a number of contemporary works.
She says that the ideological battle between word and image will always go in cycles. She has
great faith in the resistance of the written word, in light of the iconoclasms of much cultural
theory during the last few years, and the general fear of images in society. How is your faith in
the written word?

FC: I totally agree about the cyclical nature of the image–word ideological battle. Intriguingly,
within photography theory this battle is linked with another one: the ideological battle between
photographic realism and anti-realism. In their book Rethinking Photography: Histories, Theories
and Education, Smith and Lefley explore photography ‘as “pre-linguistically” related to the
world that defines it’ and show how the realist position, which understands the photograph as
linked with a past reality that produced it, is a sign to photography’s resistance to ‘linguistic
assimilation’. For the realists language is perceived as an ‘intrusion’. Vice versa, anti-realist
positions, such as Victor Burgin’s, believe that ‘we rarely see a photograph in use which is not
accompanied by language’, as he writes in his chapter ‘Seeing Sense’ (The End of Art Theory).
As pointed out by W.J.T. Mitchell in his 1994 book Picture Theory, Burgin resolutely affirms the
domination of photography by language with his claim that ‘even the uncaptioned “art”
photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association,
snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other’. By
denying photography an independence from language, an authority of its own, theorists such as
Victor Burgin or John Tagg are also refusing to accept claims of ‘photographic truth’.

Sorry for the digression. To reply more directly to your question: my faith in the written word is
quite fundamental and visceral. I believe fear is always a waste of time. How many great novels,
movies, artworks are we missing out while we spend our time being ‘iconophobic’ or, conversely,
‘verbophobic’? Of course nowadays we need an eco-sustainable approach to our daily image-
consumption as much as we need to recycle, but I don’t think that a ‘binary oppositional’
approach to images and words is the solution. While I absolutely champion image–text and
photo–text intersections, as they simultaneously nurture my ‘verbo-visual’ curiosity, I think that
what is at the epicentre of my optimism lies in the observation that after all both the visual arts
and literature exist, or at least matter, only when they are experienced by viewers and readers.
Ultimately it’s the human being with their needs, tastes and habits that will decide whether she or
he feels more like reading a novel or going to an exhibition, or both. Visual arts and literature are
not enemies or competitors, they serve the same purpose of enriching the human spirit in a
different way. It might come across as a somewhat naïve optimism, but I would say that if I feel
the need to immerse myself in a sequential narrative where the only images I will encounter will
be my mental ones, provoked and inspired by the compelling words of a writer, then I will opt for
reading literature. However, the overwhelming pressure and omnipresence of images, screens and
social media addictions in our society have already invaded literature, if we think about authors
such as David Foster Wallace or Ben Lerner (particularly for his inclusion of instant messaging
language), or books such as The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, full of
Internet iconography. Do we want to find the computer's ghost haunting us also on the printed
pages of contemporary literature or, even worse, on some sort of Kindle-type device? Personally I
would rather not, so I'll stick with Calvino and read the Classics.

NS: Ida Kierulf also writes that images, as W.J.T. Mitchell claims in his publication What Do
Pictures Want?, crave a narrative and discursive framing in the multiple sense of wanting,
demanding, and lacking. Images need words. He calls for a closer reading of images, ‘to strike
them with enough force to make them resonate, but not as much as to smash them’. According to
Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as objects that convey meaning but as animated
beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. The idea that we live in a
culture dominated by images, by spectacle, surveillance, and visual display, has become such a
fundamental truth that its meaning is lost. Every day words disappear, and a million new images
appear. So, our last reflection for you (impossible to answer maybe), what comes after the
pictorial turn?

FC: Before I offer an inevitably failed attempt to reply to your question, I was noticing how the
phrase ‘the pictorial turn’ means different things. Mitchell in Image Science writes about pictorial
turns, explaining how it is not a unique phenomenon of our time. In his 1994 book Picture Theory
he refers to ‘the pictorial turn’ as a ‘shift’ of philosophical interest and speculation towards the
visual. He particularly places the ‘philosophical enactment of the pictorial turn in the thought of
Ludwig Wittgenstein’, focusing on the ‘apparent paradox’ of his philosophical career that began
with a ‘picture theory’ to end up with a sort of ‘iconophobia’, a ‘general anxiety of linguistic
philosophy about visual representation’. ‘This anxiety – he claims – this need to defend “our
speech” against “the visual” is a sure sign that a pictorial turn is taking place.’ Intriguingly ‘the
pictorial turn’, as David Bate writes in his recent book Art Photography, also refers to two
specific moments in the history of photography: its turns towards ‘pictorialism’ in the 1870s,
‘when the term was coined to refer to art photography’, with artists such as Henry Peach
Robinson, and in the late twentieth century, with artists such as Jeff Wall. If we think about an
image by H.P. Robinson or Jeff Wall we can see how they attempt to instil a lingered look, a kind
of contemplation, in the viewer, which is quite the opposite of what our image-consumption
 habits have become nowadays, if we consider instead ‘the pictorial turn’ à la Mitchell. Having
said that, if we stick with Mitchell he talks about an age of ‘biocybernetic reproduction’ (high-
speed computing, video, digital imaging, virtual reality, the Internet, and the industrialization of
genetic engineering) following ‘the pictorial turn’. Drawing a parallel between Benjamin’s
‘mechanical reproduction’ he argues, among many other things, that, while according to
Benjamin mechanical reproductions, such as photographic images, produced a ‘decay of the aura
– a loss of the unique presence, authority, and mystique of the original object’, with biocybernetic
reproductions we have a reversed relation of the copy to the original. The copy has, according to
him, ‘even more aura than the original’. I partly agree with that, but I also think that we should
consider the role of social media in terms of the impact of images’ viral circulation on their aura.
Through the ‘sharing’ function of Facebook, for example, how far does a photograph depart from
the photographic event that generated it? In our Anti-glossary of Photography and Visual Culture
that the Photocaptionist contributed to Krakow Photomonth’s 2016 publication edited by Lars
Willumeit, The (Un)becomings of Photography, we wrote for the entry aura: ‘How does an
image that has been shared 335 times, retweeted 104 times, regrammed 87 times, reblogged 41
times, and pinned 155 times contribute to what Benjamin referred to as the “shattering of
tradition”?’

Personally, I believe, and I think I am not the only one, that we are also witnessing what could be
described as ‘the algorithmic turn’. We live in a culture in which search engines are trying to
‘curate’ our research behaviour, telling us what we should read, watch, listen to, buy, etc. based
on algorithmic formulas, which are constructed as a result of companies such as Google spying
on our online habits. It’s what Eli Pariser calls the ‘filter bubble’. You buy a book on Amazon and
immediately Amazon tells you ‘people who bought this book also bought these other books’. The
accuracy of the recommendation, which is often presented as an image–text combination, is what
really scares me. And we don’t know where this is going to go. Even my deep faith in
independent research is starting to crumble. Perhaps in a not so remote future even the British
Library will implement an algorithmic system that tells you ‘readers who ordered this book also
ordered these other ones’. That is why I find more genuine initiatives such as Photoworks’
touring photography talks series ‘Desert Island Pics’, where Stephen Bull invites artists, writers
and curators to select which eight images they would take with them to a desert island. A truly
subjective selection, where art and life mingle in an unpredictable way and without the irritating
intrusion of algorithms. Of course as social media ‘victims’/users we still have our surrogate
subversive act at our disposal. We can decide not to share an image we find problematic, to avoid
participating in the superficial narrative that sharing means caring. We can even commit suicide
on Facebook. But these options don’t quite seem enough to me.

Further Reading

Cavino, I. The Adventure of a Photographer (Turin: Eiaudi, 1955) is the

short story where the key theories of photography emerge, more than in
any other official photography theory text.
Cortázar, J. Blow Up (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1959) became
popular thanks to Michelangelo Antonioni’s eponymous film even
though little of Cortázar’s story remains in the motion picture.
Brecht, B. War Primer (Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag, 1955) is a unique book
where Brecht introduces the new literary genre of the photo-epigram.

4.5 Tactile Photography

Moritz Neumüller and Andreas Reichinger1

Plastic, Visual and Multisensorial Arts

Traditional categories within the art field, such as literature, performing

arts, and music, are subject to constant changes in the artistic practice. They
have seen a blending of their borders, the emergence of umbrella-terms and
a general broadening of the categories. One particular case is the traditional
category of Plastic Arts, which has been largely substituted by the Visual
Arts. The reputable Encyclopedia Britannica reflects this adjustment in its
entry on Visual Art, stating that the term includes “two-dimensional visual
arts such as drawing and painting and also three-dimensional visual arts
such as sculpture and architecture.” Interestingly enough, the entry
continues by immediately restricting the purely visual character of these art
forms:
Some of these should doubtless be called visuo-tactual art: buildings are ordinarily touched as
well as seen, sculptures could be more fully appreciated if touched as well as seen, and even
paintings may sometimes have enough three-dimensionality to repay touch experience. At any
rate, all these arts appeal first and foremost, though not exclusively, to the sense of sight, and the
artifact is an object in the visual medium.
(Hospers 2016, emphasis in the original)

This careful attention to the tactile aspects of the medium, especially in

its reception, shows the difficulty of the term Visual Art, which came into
use in the 1940s during the modernist debate about the limits and unique
qualities of the different art forms. In his seminal article “Towards a Newer
Laocoön” of 1940, Clement Greenberg addresses the longstanding question
of the limits that serve to distinguish between the various artistic
disciplines. According to Greenberg’s argument, each art form has to define
itself in terms of the limitations of its proper medium. Greenberg argued
that each medium had to free itself from the influences of other art forms. In
the case of “avant-garde painting,” this meant paint on the flat surface of
the picture plane, without pretending either to tell a story (as this would be
literature’s domain), to construct perspective (architecture), or to imitate
three-dimensional figures, that is, sculpture (Greenberg 1940).
Greenberg’s ideal of the flat picture has indeed shaped painting for many
decades. Furthermore, the prominence of the purely visual qualities of an
artwork has entered art theory in the form of a doctrine, even though
Greenberg himself had very much insisted on the physical character of the
artwork:
For the visual arts the medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting and pure
sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically . . . Emphasize the medium and its
difficulties, and at once the purely plastic, the proper, values of visual art come to the fore.
(Greenberg 1940: 305)

Consequently, the term plastic arts, which used to include art forms such as
painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture, has been generally substituted
by the concept of visual arts. The decades of the 1980s were crucial in this
shift, coinciding, significantly, with the invention of Graphic User
Interfaces, the birth of MTV, and an unseen boom in the Contemporary Art
market.
The change of terminology is notable in other languages, too: In Spanish,
for example, we also see a dominance of the term artes visuales over artes
plásticas. In French, arts plastiques is still the prominent term, and in
German, Bildende Kunst continues to be widely used, yet the respective
“visual” terms are gaining territory.
 This general “visualism” (Classen and Howes 2003) in terminology goes
hand in hand with a “virtualization” of the arts, as the digital revolution has
profoundly changed the artistic practice (Paul 2003). Media Art forms in
the late twentieth century hardly involved any physical manipulation of a
plastic medium or physical support. This virtualization of the arts, strongly
paralleled with the vast changes in our “real world,” has radically driven
back all other sensory channels. Especially olfaction, thermoception,
balance and tactile input, once fundamental to understand a work of art,
have been eliminated or translated into visual information.
Since the turn of the century, however, Post-Medium (Krauss 1999) and
Post-Media Theory (Manovich 2001) have reflected the decline of the
Greenbergian concept of medium-specificity and recent approaches to art
theory (Grau 2007, Rath, Trempler and Wenderholm 2013) show a new
interest in tactility and the physical aspects of the artwork. Art Education
backs this “material turn” with its new practice of interactivity, sensorial
experiences and hands-on learning in the museum context. This practice
had been abandoned in the early nineteenth century, “an era of rising
visualism in many ways,” that gave birth to the Museum and its “Please Do
Not Touch” character: “In contrast to the multisensory modes of previous
centuries, in the 1800s sight was increasingly considered to be the only
appropriate sense for aesthetic appreciation for ‘civilized’ adults” (Classen
and Howes 2003: 207). These comprehensive forms of experiencing an
artwork have, of course, also made art more accessible for persons with
learning problems, for children and especially for blind or partially sighted
exhibition visitors.

Photography and Visual Impairment

The fruits of this new practice can be seen in many disciplines, including
theatre, music, performance art, sculpture, poetry, drawing, and
photography. The field of photography is especially interesting, as it is, by
definition, a purely visual experience. Existing approaches in this field
include, on the one hand, the conversion of photographs for a blind public,
and on the other, the artistic production of visually impaired photographers.
An example of the former is artist Lisa J. Murphy’s Tactile Mind Book, a
collection of erotic photographs as touchable reliefs using a thermoform
process (Murphy 2007). Perhaps the most well known initiative is Alain
Mikli and Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s joint exhibition Touch and See, where
several examples of Arthus-Bertrand’s famous aerial photographs were
converted in bas-relief largely based on brightness and then carved into
cellulose acetate (Costes et al. 2009). These tactile diagrams, which have
been mounted in public spaces and museums, are based on the findings of
Hoëlle Corvest from the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, who
has developed an image literacy program for blind people.
The photographic production of visually impaired artists has increased
considerably in the last years. According to Simon Hayhoe, this field of
artistic production follows two major trends (2015). The first one is
developed by blind and visually impaired collectives, such as the Seeing
with Photography collective in New York
(www.seeingwithphotography.com), or Ojos Que Sienten in Mexico
(www.sightofemotion. org). (Some of these groups are web-based, rather
than locally organized, as is the case with www.blind-photography.com, and
the flickr group www.flickr.com/groups/blind_photographers.)
The second form observed by Hayhoe is a more novice approach, mainly
with school-aged students. Each of these students is given a simple camera
without any adjustable parts and asked to take photographs of different
elements of their everyday lives. Prominent examples are Tony Deifell’s
organization Seeing Beyond Sight, founded in San Francisco in 2002
(www.seeingbeyondsight.org), and Partho Bhowmick’s Blind With Camera
in Mumbai, India (www.blindwithcamera.org). Both forms can be seen in
the context of Photography’s role as a medium for democratization and for
empowering socially weak groups by teaching them to use the camera.
Not mentioned by Hayhoe, but noteworthy, are the individual efforts of
blind photographers. The most prominent museum exhibition of the work of
photographers with visual impairments is Sight Unseen: International
Photography by Blind Artists, curated by Douglas McCulloh in 2009 for the
California Museum of Photography. It consists of “111 photographs and 8
tactile illustrations” by 12 artists, mainly from the US, but also from
Mexico and France. In all of these cases, though, the artwork remains
invisible for the visually impaired person, until converted, later on, by a
seeing interpretation artist (McCulloh 2009).
As arts and culture are opened to these “new” publics, and art lovers with
special needs become more confident, more unobjectionable questions
arise. At the conference In T ouch with Art at the V&A Museum in London
(2010), keynote speaker Cavin Karey asked for an anthropocentric
approach and inclusive, non-discriminating art. As most of the participants
were experts in accessibility and museum issues, his proposals received
plentiful approbation. However, when he demanded that it be obligatory
that all exhibitions produced with public funding be made accessible, and
only accessible works should be purchased with taxpayers’ money,
consensus was far from being reached.

Tactile Photography

In his article on some of the limits of materiality, James Elkins claims that
“seeing is embodied, and it should no longer be separated from touching,
feeling, and from the full range of somatic response” (2008). This interest
coincides with the promise of 3D printing to transform our contemporary
lives and foster “a new industrial revolution” (Pieri 2011). Apart from
industrial and commercial use, there is a fast-growing community of people
who use 3D printers to produce small series of impressions at home.
Inspired by this new interest in the physicality of the artwork, and our own
work with tactile materials for visually impaired exhibition visitors, we
propose the prolegomena for a new multisensory discipline, which we call
tactile photography. It is based on the principles of stereoscopy and the
computer-aided conversion of digital images into reliefs, which can be
produced as real objects – on 3D printers, for example. This new discipline
can be especially interesting for visually impaired artists, but is not limited
to “disability arts” (Sutherland 2005). Our aim is to show that tactile
photography connects with a long-lasting interest in enhancing photography
with the illusion of depth and physical space, which it shares with multi-
photography, Andrew Davidhazy’s peripheral photography (developed in
the 1960s), the Lumière Brothers’ photostereo synthesis, and with photo
sculpture (Schmidt 2009: 128, Beckmann 1991). Yet, only the latter
medium aims at translating photography into tactile sculptural forms.
Invented in 1859 by the French sculptor and photographer François
Willème, Photosculpture (written as one word in French) is the adaption of
photographic portraits to the construction of three-dimensional portrait-
sculptures. The sitter was positioned in a rotunda, surrounded by an array of
24 cameras at 15-degree intervals that took simultaneous photographs.
These profiles were then transferred by means of a pantograph to a pillar of
clay rotating on a turntable. The result was trimmed and touched up by the
artist, and then transferred into other materials. The entire process was
firmly based on the idea that the sum of all its profiles would yield the
volumetric whole (Sobieszek 1980). The new medium met with a euphoric
reception by some as it promised “l’immense avantage de la ressemblance
vraie” to the portrayed subject. Others were more reserved and saw it not as
a medium of its own value, but as an auxiliary medium for the artistic
process, or at best in a “place exceptionnelle” between the two (Gall 1997).
Photosculpture’s closeness to reality also meant a lack of hierarchy between
the more and the less important, an acceptance of nature as-is, without
artistic expression (Schmidt 2009: 120); an art mécanique of petrified
photography produced by body-copying-machines (Hermant 1864; Kümmel
2006). Despite technical improvements such as Antoine Claudet’s
Photoplastigraphie, Photosculpture was too expensive as a means for self-
representation and not accepted as an art medium in its own right (Dingler
1866). Clients preferred to acquire dozens of cartes de visite for the same
price as one bulky sculpture, and Willème’s enterprise lasted only about six
years. It was not until recently that photo sculpture celebrated a comeback,
thanks to enhanced body-scanning and 3D printing technologies.
 Our own approach is based on stereoscopy, a technique that has been said
to share an inquietante affinité (Frizot and Païni 1993: 9) with photo
sculpture and is currently celebrating a Renaissance in the entertainment
industry with 3D cinema. Stereoscopy has also entered the consumer
market, in the form of digital “3D cameras” for photography and video.
Stereoscopy is distinguished by its ability to capture not only color but
also encode the depth at every point, i.e., the plasticity, the surface.
Nowadays, computer algorithms can extract this depth and form the basis of
our approach. However, current algorithms are not perfect, as our
experiments have pointed out: The captured scene has to be sufficiently
textured; single-color objects, over-and under-exposure, reflections and
transparencies have to be avoided; and a high depth of field should be
maintained to get good results.
According to the taxonomy we have established for tactile media
(Reichinger et al. 2012), Tactile Photography would lie in the continuum
between two-dimensional and three-dimensional media. We use the term
2.5D, borrowed from visual computing, to denote a bas-relief that raises
every point above the planar photograph to its extracted height; this is
similar to terrain models. In contrast to full 3D, a 2.5D object only works
from a limited set of views. 3D features like undercuts or reverse sides are
not represented, as is the case in stereoscopy. From the technical point of
view, this technique has several advantages over full 3D photo sculptures in
data acquisition, storage, computation and production. The absence of
undercuts makes them easy to produce (e.g. with simple three-axis milling
machines, or 3D printers), and to reproduce (e.g. using the thermoform
process). Furthermore, this medium allows the photographer to point a
(twin-lens) camera at the world, using its photographic (and stereoscopic)
virtues, instead of having a virtual eye spin around an object to produce a
shadow-less scan (Schmidt 2009: 128). Photographers including Jacques
Henri Lartigue have used stereography on a large scale (there are about
5,000 glass stereo negatives in his archives, the vast majority taken between
1905 and 1928) to produce some of their most famous images, and cities
such as Paris have been photographed in 3D for the last 150 years (Reynaud
et al. 2000).
Tactile photography, as we envision it, should be conceived as an easy-
to-use and affordable technique based on the idea of a 3D capturing system
capable of recording depth information together with a conventional digital
photograph. It should be an open field of research and artistic practice,
rather than a paid service based on franchising, and accessible to everybody,
including blind and visually impaired photographers (see Color Plate 34).
This approach should help to include blind photographers in the editing
phase of their work and give them more control over the whole artistic
process. But it should also give seeing photographers the possibility to
experiment with a new medium, test its limits and “play against the
apparatus,” to use Vilém Flusser’s famous words (Flusser 1997: 72).

Implementation

The first implementation took place in the framework of the Rencontre

Euromaghrébine de Photographes in Tunisia in March 2015. Together with
the members of a local association for the visually impaired (Union
Régionale des Aveugles a Kairouan), a workshop concept was created that
contained an open and equal exchange on the subject of perception, reality
and photographic representation. The results should serve two purposes:
they were to be immediately and directly beneficial to the user group, and
they should form the basis for the works to be presented at the exhibition of
the Rencontre Euromaghrébine de Photographes, and the subsequent
catalog (published in November 2015).
In several meetings with the members of the Association, who served as
a participatory research group, interests and questions were discussed, and
then became the topic of the collaborative work. The seemingly simple
initial question was “What would you like to see?” and the spontaneous
answers were mainly related to the famous monuments of the city, such as
the great mosque, the market, and the old fort. The first object to be
produced was therefore a tactile plan of the old town in which these sights
could be traced. The materials were supplied by a local hardware store, on a
shoestring budget. The streets were drawn with a ballpoint-pen on a metal
board, and then traced with glue, to form a simple relief map.
For the next day, a visit to the Heritage Research Center was organized,
to explore a wooden model of the mosque which was kept there, but which
was not known to the local community of the blind and visually impaired.
The exploration group was able to touch and compare the haptic impact
with their constructed reality of the building.
In the second meeting, there were further requests: one participant
requested a tactile model of an airplane, another was interested in the local
soccer stadium, a third wanted an exterior view of the building that houses
the Bir Barouta fountain.
The production of the resulting models took place with the help of
another participant at the workshop, Professor Iosif Király from Bucharest,
and a local shoemakers’ workshop. We copied a front and a side view of a
passenger plane we found on the Internet to a piece of rubber, which is
normally used to make shoe soles for sandals. These rubber planes were
also mounted on a metal sheet. A photograph of the Bir Barouta fountain
(see Color Plate 35) served the shoemakers as a model for a layered model
of the building.
The next day we visited the soccer stadium, equipped with a tactile
model of the playing field and the grandstands. However, the participants
(on this day all male) were less interested in the architecture and its
representation, but wanted to touch the artificial lawn, explore the position
of the penalty point in relation to the goal and enter the changing rooms of
the players. This interest in the “real thing,” rather than its representation is
not unusual when working with communication differences (Rix and García
Carrizosa 2016) and made perfect sense in the case of the soccer stadium.
On the last day of the workshop, all tactile images (including a view of
the great mosque and a new version of the tactile city map) were handed
over to the Association and presented as an exhibition on their premises. As
part of a small vernissage, the participants exchanged experiences with the
visitors (see Color Plates 36, 37, 38) and discussed the possible extensions
of the project, such as the labeling of the tactile models in Braille.
The initial fears that blind people in an utterly inaccessible city and a
country with many barriers for people with communication and learning
differences could not be interested in the abstract and artistic nature of the
project did not prove true at all. Although the participatory exploration
group was small and composed of mostly visually impaired men, the
immediate results seemed to fit the necessities of the larger user group, the
members of the association of the blind and visually impaired of Kairouan.
The second goal of the project, to convert the stereoscopic images in tactile
works and exhibit them to a larger public took longer. The images taken in
Kairouan were converted into relief prints at VRVis,2 and printed as
“Tactile Photographs” on a 3D printer at the Vienna University of
Technology (see Color Plate 39). They were presented in the exhibition of
the Rencontre Euromaghrébine de Photographes in Tunis in November
2015 and published in the accompanying catalog. The results of this project
will also be incorporated into the ARCHES project, an initiative which aims
to create more inclusive cultural environments particularly for those with
differences and difficulties associated with perception, memory, cognition
and communication.3 This dual function of the Tactile Photography
approach, a double approach towards art practice and accessibility, seems
important as a long-term goal of the project, as it should help to ensure that
the arts become more inclusive, as well as help disabled artists achieve the
prominence they deserve within the arts community. In this sense, tactile
photography could also find its way into the field of disability arts, that is
art made by disabled people which reflects the experience of disability,
“made with some sort of aesthetic purpose, . . . not a hobby to keep the
cripples’ hands busy. And it is not therapy” (Sutherland 2005).

Notes
 1 This essay is based on our previously published papers Neumüller and Reichinger (2013), and
Neumüller et al. (2014).

2 VRVis is funded by BMVIT, BMWFW, Styria, SFG and Vienna Business Agency in the scope
of COMET – Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies (854174) – which is managed
by FFG.

3 The ARCHES project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 693229.

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4.6 Photography at the Borderline

Roger Ballen

To discuss a concept such as a borderline is to take into account a physical

and metaphorical, or symbolic journey. As Joseph Conrad acknowledges in
Heart of Darkness, “all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just
compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over
the threshold of the invisible.”
In the discipline of photography there are clear yardsticks for measuring
technical advancements. But where, in terms of meaning, is the borderline?
Can it be reached? Does such a line even exist? And, if so, is it a territory
or, in photographic terms, a time-frame?
By taking time into consideration one acknowledges that photography not
only captures a moment but it also captures, above all, the mores of a
particular period. Clearly, there has been a geographical shift in my work as
I moved from the United States to Africa. But the most important shift for
me came when I moved my camera from its position as an exterior device
to an interior one. It came naturally in my process.
Equally evolutionary, but posing the greatest challenge, has been the
impulse to move from the interior workings of the dwelling place to
capturing the interior workings of the mind.
There are important shifts in my personal evolution that have impacted
on my practice as a photographer and an artist. These have taken me to
certain borderlines where I have had to take some or other action based not
only on my creative ability but, more importantly, on my psychology.

At the Borderline of Society

Movement has always been intrinsic to me. There was movement towards
photography as a discipline since it was in my life from a young age. It also
encapsulates my subsequent movement away from the familiarity of home.
In the early 1960s my mother was a photo editor at Magnum. Her job
was to work with the various photographers, to assist them in organizing
their shoots and help them find the right people at the places where they
were working. So she quite frequently worked with people like Elliot Erwitt
and Bruce Davidson, and many of the other people who were there at the
time.
 In this context I was slowly introduced to documentary photography. I
see myself as a member of the last generation of photographers that was
brought up in an environment where black and white photography
dominated. I was born in 1950, so I was in my early teens at the time. I
became quite fascinated with photography, I think almost by a process of
osmosis, because photography books started to pile up, then photographs
were hung on the wall. My mother was quite passionate about photography
and her work with it.
At an early age I was captivated by the work of Paul Strand. He operated
as a photojournalist, but considered himself an artist. He was a street
photographer; yet he worked with his subjects in a very intimate way. Even
today his work seems timeless (and yet, in its idealism, it now strikes me as
belonging to a previous era). His deep respect for the inherent formal
qualities of a photograph, and his use of the square format, were to be
significant for me. He was my first role model.
I got to know André Kertész. He had left Europe for the USA during the
Second World War. Kertész had been influenced by the Surrealists: their
qualities of puzzlement and contradiction were intrinsic to his eye. My
mother was the first person to sell his work in the States, at a photographic
gallery that she had opened. Americans had considered his work unsaleable;
he in turn was appalled at the unsophisticated state of photography in the
USA. I took a photograph on Kertész’s verandah on Washington Square one
day, looking down on the park; to be in his place, so to speak, to see as he
did. It was a kind of tribute to him. I owe to Kertész the understanding of
enigma and formal complexity that underlies much of my work.
Figure 4.2 Dead Cat, 1970. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

Among other photographers who influenced me were Henri Cartier-

Bresson, Elliot Erwitt, Walker Evans and Diane Arbus.
I had bought cameras and taken pictures, but in my own mind and
perhaps in a subconscious way, I started to separate something that was
more aesthetic than an ordinary snapshot. So by the time I was 15 or 16, I
think I understood that one could translate that vision into something more
concrete in terms of a photograph. This went on for a long time. I never
studied photography. I don’t think I ever even took a class in photography
in my life, so I didn’t want to make a living at it. I was never interested in
anything in photography except perhaps self-expression, but I gradually got
more involved in it. When I graduated from high school, I got a Nikon
camera as a present and during summer breaks in college, I’d plan long
trips – I went to Europe, I went to Mexico – and I started to take pictures. I
began to find an identity in the photographs, and I guess that’s how the
artistic career started.

Figure 4.3 Froggy Boy, USA, 1977. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

My mother got sick with cancer and died in 1973, and during that period
and afterwards, I took up two things. One was that I began to roam the
world trying to take more artistic photographs, and the other thing is that I
started to paint. In the first half of 1973, I became obsessed with painting,
and at the same time, preoccupied with trying to find a more mature way of
taking photographs. I had graduated from Berkeley one year earlier, and in
the process made a film called Ill Wind. That work depicted a person that
was like a Beckett character, an outsider. So it wasn’t just when I came to
South Africa that I got associated with outsiders.
 And then in 1973, I sort of disappeared, taking an almost five-year trip
from Cairo to Cape Town that lasted until 1977. A trip that started out as a
two-month excursion wound up lasting almost half a decade. I hitchhiked
from Cairo to Cape Town, and from Istanbul to New Guinea. During that
period, I spent some time in South Africa and started to work in the mineral
business, which is what I’ve now worked in for 30 years, doing geology and
exploration work.
When I think of that journey, I see it as one of the most formative and
crucial periods in my artistic career, and it is during this period that most of
my first book, Boyhood, was photographed. There existed two forces
parallel to each other, but slightly different, with which I came into contact.
There was colonialism; and when I travelled on my five-year trip the old
order was petering out. Countries had obtained independence, yet there was
still a strong element of a colonial past in a lot of Africa and some parts of
Asia.
Regarding South Africa, the country in which I eventually settled, it was
really isolated. The society was deep in the throes of apartheid. That,
combined with its colonial past and enormous natural wealth, made for an
electrifying, uneasy dynamic. When I travelled through Africa I didn’t use a
phone for nine months. Somebody living in this environment today can’t
get away from a phone for nine seconds let alone nine months. This
disappearance is important in relation to the aesthetic I developed over the
years; a lot of it I attribute to the fact that I was functioning in an isolated
environment whether it was during my travels in the 1970s, or during the
apartheid period in South Africa.
As a geologist, my experience with the earth led me to consider that as an
artist my work needed to reflect the depth of reverence I felt when I
meditated on the state of rocks billions of years old. South Africa is the
richest mineralogical province in the world and this fact has shaped its
history in every way.
But while my profession provided me with a living, there are questions
about my existence that it did not begin to answer. I still needed to use the
camera to excavate layers of my inner life. Like my work, peering below
the earth’s surface for a hidden treasure. Like many other South African
artists I began to seek that element in the people and places I photographed,
trying to pierce their outer layer to reveal their elemental selves.
I didn’t really have that many people to talk to about what I was doing.
The culture in Southern Africa certainly didn’t appreciate what I was doing,
and I didn’t really have anybody to critique my photography, so it was
really a passion and a hobby. Bear in mind that I started doing this in the
1960s, and only started selling pictures in 2000, so for over 30 years I never
really sold a picture.
During these travels in the countryside, perhaps because I was an
outsider or because I felt a compatibility to isolated places, I was drawn to
the unique aesthetic of the small towns or dorps. On one occasion in 1982, I
was photographing in a town called Krugersdorp, and upon arriving at
home that afternoon I experienced a memorable moment as the word dorp
electrified my being. The word was odd and enigmatic, it bothered me. The
discovery that night impelled me to begin my first project in South Africa,
which culminated in the book Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa in 1986.
The people who inhabit these towns are almost completely physically
absent from the streets and buildings. Due to this, and the harsh light that
characterizes much of South Africa, it was very difficult to decide what to
photograph. I remember very clearly that in a dorp called Hopetown, in the
then Cape Province (where the famous Hope Diamond was found), I
knocked on a door as I decided that day I could no longer wait to find
people or wait for the softer light of the evening to appear.
Figure 4.4 Front Door Hopetown, 1983. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

I asked the man who answered my knocking if I could enter his house. At
that epitomizing moment, I went inside, literally and metaphorically. I
crossed a sort of borderline between the tangible world and the world of the
psychodrama. The only way I can describe it is by saying that it was as
short a distance as crossing from the United States into Mexico, but with
equally culturally and emotionally estranging implications. Beginning then,
I found the motifs that I would work with for the remainder of my career. I
began using a flash, and found the ‘character type’ that dominated my
imagery from then on until my more recent projects Outland (2000, revised
in 2015), Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House (2009), and Asylum of
the Birds (2014).
From the start I began to construct images that were frontal, as though
the frame was a proscenium, heightening the drama. The wall is paramount;
it is not a background, but an articulated surface, identified with the picture
plane. On the smudged surfaces could be found wires, photographs hung in
an uneven, incoherent way, children’s drawings, grease and dirt stains. Like
a painter, the ‘living wall’ became my canvas.
These early journeys were important, also, in the scope of my project
because it was at that time that I began to use the square-format camera.

Figure 4.5 Bedroom of Railway Worker, De Aar, 1984. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

At the Borderline of the Mind

For nearly 20 years I worked on my photography without showing it to

anyone in the art world. I believe that as a result of this isolation from the
mainstream art market I was able to develop a unique aesthetic. It is
impossible for me to hypothesize how my photography would have evolved
if I had lived elsewhere.
The urge to put one’s mark on a public surface is so much more of a
primal motivation than an inspiration to make art. It stretches back to the
earliest creative acts of humanity. The wall takes us beyond the canvas into
the realm of the present, like a stage before the actors enter. This would
defy the notion that all art is of a political nature. There is no particular
reason that my early work focused more on White South Africans than
Black ones. It was just a mistake of history. Until 1994, a White person had
to obtain a permit to enter certain areas where Blacks lived.

Figure 4.6 Show Off, 2000. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

Certainly it is easier from a technical point of view to photograph people

with pale skin as opposed to darker complexions. But this discussion is
hindered by the fact that my work has not been about identity. It has been
psychological in nature – not political, social, or economic – and therefore
the political changes in South Africa may have had a profound impact on us
all, yet they did not have a major influence on the evolution of my
photographic career.
I always say that a photograph began before I began making it, deep
down in some part of my mind. It formed before my consciousness about it
was formed. I see myself as an inheritor of many traditions including that of
ancient wall-marking and latter day outsider art. I believe that the ancient
cave-dwellers who described their everyday experiences in line drawings,
stencilling and staining, were doing what artists like me still do today. And
in the same milieu.
In 1997, I began to extend my definition of myself as a photographer.
When people visited South Africa they’d often enquire about my
profession. For a long time I’d just say “geologist.” Then I started to put
down “photographer.” But then, in that year, I began to define myself as an
“artist/photographer.” About that time, I started to deal with the question of
what art is. Until then it didn’t even occupy me. I never thought about it. As
I have noted, I created images in my own isolated way – my interaction
with other artists was minimal – I didn’t go to any shows. When I went
overseas for business, I went to some museums, but I wasn’t really engaged
with the question of what art is, whether the definition would help me
answer the question: “Am I an artist, or am I a photographer?”
I remember, during the period of Outland I started to think, “What am I
doing here? What is the purpose of these photographs? What am I trying to
say? What am I trying to define?” And I remember thinking to myself, “The
question I wish to answer is this: ‘Is chaos fundamental to the world around
us, or is order?’” It is vastly different to the issue people assumed I was
addressing in my earlier work – that of trying to define a certain group of
people in the South African countryside.
Playing instinctively with the notion of order versus chaos has meant that
composition comes about, not from engaging with a socio-political
discourse but from chance and the creative act of transforming the physical
world. Moving through borders, and graduating to new territories, has
meant the virtual abandonment of chance and passive looking.
In my early travels the places that presented themselves as interesting
possibilities gave clues as to new ways the work could evolve. In some of
those houses there were wires stretched across the walls. For whatever
reason, they caught my eye. The ever-present wires were found in a very
objective, documentary way, and I took photographs of the wires as they
appeared in the rooms. Initially I would document what was in front of me,
what other people had created. Later, though, the wires are used in a more
interactive way.
Think about the artist Miro. When somebody looks at something as wire-
ly as, say, a Miro painting, the issue of meaning is represented by abstract
line. In photography, since the basis is a capturing of reality, people always
want to know what the meaning of the wires is. In painting, you don’t ask
that question. It’s there. It’s part of the composition. So in photography, one
wants to place it in some objective format.
Figure 4.7 Head Below Wires, 1999. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

When one looks at the wire, one has to understand the dual mechanism
that’s behind the wire. One is “What is that wire? What does it mean? What
is the metaphor behind it?” That’s one question. The other part of the issue
is the formal qualities of the wire. “What does the wire do in the photograph
formally?” In many cases, the wire is used to almost stitch the photograph
together, to bind one part of the photograph to the other. So you have these
two qualities to the wire – one is the formal quality, and the other is based
on the metaphor of the content.
The meaning is visual – it’s not necessarily derived from verbal
conceptualizations. I’m not able to tell you what the wires mean. They
mean all sorts of different things, and they mean different things to different
people; some are strictly visual. One has to define for oneself the picture’s
significance.
 This, for me, applies to the use of photography generally: many artists
today create installations or conceptual photographs. But in retrospect one
remembers almost none of those photographs. They just sort of sit there and
you have to figure out the artist’s theory to get into the work. The moment
of recognition cannot merely be constructed. There has to be a moment of
truth or a moment of authenticity. If the artist’s hand is seen as too strong,
the pictures seem either dead or contrived. The mind doesn’t believe it. The
mind has to see that photograph as commenting on some aspect of truth,
whatever truth means.

Figure 4.8 Twirling Wires, 2001. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

At the Borderline of Reality

The most common questions I have been asked – and this is especially true
of the series Shadow Chamber produced in the years before 2005 – are
these: “Is this place real, did you make it, did you do this; did you do that?”
The basic tenet being that two forces, namely documentary and creativity,
exist as different pathways. To get beyond the dogma meant crossing yet
another psychological barrier fraught with deep philosophical issues. Yet
people persisted in asking: “Is this real or not real?”
The exploration of this fault line between fact and fiction is especially
prevalent in the series Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, and Asylum of
the Birds.

Figure 4.9 Head Inside Shirt, 2001. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

Everything you see in my photographs is me, because nobody else could

take those pictures, even if they went to the same place as I did. Viewing
the world photographically is a very complex way of seeing. Each picture
involves thousands and thousands of subconscious and conscious steps.
Because photography is such an easy medium to master technically,
especially with today’s cameras, people don’t realize that it’s not just a case
of being able to pick up a camera.
Photography is an art form that works with visual relationships.
Psychology is a field that involves words and verbal concepts. Even though
my photographs are predominantly psychological in nature, it does not
mean that I would be able to produce the most basic photograph if I did not
understand the science and art of photography.
The crucial thing, in the construction of the image, is to avoid being too
fictional. A lot of contemporary photography feels contrived, even if it
attempts to appear incidental. It’s very important that the mind believes
there’s something factual there. The strongest photography always has
something factual to it. The hard line is to make something factual and
fictional and also of high impact. If it goes too fictional, the mind doesn’t
believe it. It’s not like painting or writing; photography fundamentally is
about capturing what’s in front of you. I think there are some exceptions,
but that’s the line I’m always having to deal with.
Figure 4.10 Boarding House, 2008. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

All art in some way or another is concerned with refining reality into a
statement that expresses a truth. My function as an artist is to use the
camera to transform various aspects of physical reality into a photographic
reality that conveys a heightened meaning.
The content of my work approximates a point between surrealism and
Art Brut. Whilst these movements originated from painting, my images are
not paintings, they are photographs, and as a result I have to work within
the confines of this medium. I believe that my photographs are
predominantly psychological in meaning and ultimately emanate from my
psyche. I believe it might be appropriate to label my images as imaginary
realism.
In the period of Outland, people said, “Oh you must have been inspired
by Diane Arbus or Weegee.” My reply was that, although they were
indisputably great photographers, they didn’t really play much of a role in
the meaning of the pictures. What did play a role was the journey, not to a
physical place but to a place in the farthest reach of the psyche.

Figure 4.11 Take Off, 2012. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

The borderline that this essay considers, then, is a line within us. This
place at which I have practiced my photography is an interior chamber, a
hidden territory where all emotion is permitted.

At the Borderline of Chaos

I have said that Beckett was the closest thing to having a parallel meaning
to what I was doing and saying in the Outland project. Beckettian
characters don’t pretend to be able to order their lives, so they are at the
mercy of the forces and they have total acceptance of that. They have no
motivation in a way.
Their motivation has been neutralised, and I have identified correlations
between Beckett and what I was doing. The first is that the sets were really
simple. The sets, and the writing, were very clear, simple and precise,
reduced. There exists comedy and tragedy at the same time. Ultimately,
meaning is found in the symbolism of the characters, because they
represented human absurdity in a different way – these people were
accepting, whereas most people you meet are resisting the concept of
absurdity. They feel they can ultimately create a meaning that goes beyond
the human condition. They don’t feel that they are at the mercy of a human
condition.
But in Beckett’s world the characters don’t have that attribute; they don’t
pretend to be anything other than what they are. And whatever they are is
clearly revealed in an absurd manner. In those theatre sets, the people
within are portrayed in a certain way, there can be a head coming out of a
hole, sitting on a road, looking into the horizon.
So much of my work has come from the same impulse that gave rise to
the Theatre of the Absurd. And I hope that viewers of my work will see that
a Roger Ballen photograph is equally a work of theatrical endeavour as it is
the documentation of a moment.
Since the parallels between the images and the absurd theatre have been
drawn, I have been asked what my definition of ‘absurdity’ is. I believe that
‘absurd’ is the concept that what you may think has meaning in relation to
what you are doing, is actually a farce. There is no meaning and life goes on
as a matter of habit.

At the Borderline Between Life and Death

The images that make up the photographs in my recent book The Theatre of
Apparitions (2016) are a combination of an inner and outer world. This
place, and the images that arise out of it, are old. In a kind of amniotic
darkness of the womb, the depictions recreate the perceptual realm of a
fragmented world of part-objects, fears of annihilation, and chaotic
perceptions merging reality and fantasy, self and other. They are flickering
archetypes from the collective unconscious of humankind itself. In these
silhouettes, there are evocations of the weathered rock of caves; depicting a
life long-gone in our Palaeolithic prehistory. Some of the recurring
relationships in this book – that of human and canine, bird and beast –
invoke familiar primordial bonds. They, and others, are a kind of
mythological ‘memory fossil’, and they call on ancient shamanistic visions,
sacred symbols inherited and embedded through time.
What these images have in common is their otherwise inaccessibility to
conscious awareness. They are all, in some way or another, pictographs
made into photographs: brought out from the unbearable, the unacceptable,
and even the unthinkable. At times, they may escape, visit us, as the
vestiges in introspection, projecting themselves onto the screen of our own
mind’s eye. We may ignore them, watch with intrigue, or dispel them as
nightmares entering as a curse from afar or signs of psychosis. But the
apparitions are answers to a calling of absence, a comforting gift from deep
within ourselves or from a more spiritual realm somewhere else. They act
out on the stage for the imaginative psyche. They are a kind of hallucination
making up for that which is lost; a contact with that which one desires but
which one does not have in physical presence.
I called the book The Theatre of Apparitions because I wished to evoke
the theatrical mechanics in this introspective experience: the way in which
the forms of mental life – the pictures of dreams, imagination, memory or
meditation – project themselves
Figure 4.12 Waif, 2012. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.
Figure 4.13 Divided Self, 2007. Courtesy of Roger Ballen.

onto the screen of our ‘mind’s eye’; figments that play themselves out on
the ‘stage’ of conscious experience. Often, especially when we allow our
mind to bubble up and ‘dance’ in its free-flowing stream, we find ourselves
‘watching’ these ‘performances’. It is as if our psyche is no longer felt to be
‘our own’, and at these times we become spectators, audience members
sitting in on the wondrous entertainment provided by the diverse
expressions of our internal world.
In this set of stills, I have excavated scenes acted out by characters that
live in the depths or peripheries of consciousness, where they have been
repressed, extruded or exiled. They are the phenomenological visions that
are mostly ignored, dispelled as entering nightmares or disowned as
humiliating animalistic impulses, pushed away, as a curse from afar or signs
of psychosis. The visions presented are glimpses of parts otherwise
invisible to the eye, the stuff of dreams made perceptible to us through the
power of the photographic lens. Embodied as living artworks, they are
reminiscent of cave-paintings, and, like the unconscious itself, timeless.
 5
Rights and Markets for Photography
 5.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

e desire to possess a thing in order to enjoy the exclusive pleasure of

having it is probably as old as mankind itself. A desire, whi, of course, also
applies to art objects under the term “collecting”. e most significant
anges to the art market arise in the second half of the nineteenth century,
when artists began to work as free entrepreneurs. e upswing of the
modern art market aer the Second World War, especially from the 1960s
onwards, is rooted in the developments of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, but is essentially aracterized by two new components.
In addition to the greater liquidity of modern capital, it is the new way of
looking at the work of art as a fungible and profitable investment whi
made the boom of the art market possible in the 1980s. While the motif of
prestige and the motif of decoration—for the spontaneous art lover as well as
the systematic collector—continues to exist in the area of private art buying,
a number of specific goals, su as corporate image, customer care or
employee motivation, have become motivations for the establishment of
Corporate Collecting. ere have been efforts to “measure” the performance
of art as investment, and comparative studies between the art and sto
market since the 1970s, yet it has only been in recent years that Art Market
Studies have become an important part of cultural studies.
e market for image rights, that is, not the object itself but the right to
use it, has a history of its own, and is currently facing a critical moment.
Traditional picture agencies and collectives, whi take care of the
commercialization of their members’ images, are disappearing or being
bought by bigger players on the market. Authored and commissioned
images are being substituted by eap sto photography (and now also
video) available online.
 Collaborative efforts in the world of photography seem to respond to
times of ange. Magnum Photos, the classic example of a photographic co-
operative, was founded in 1947. e artist-run agency Ostkreuz was formed
in East Berlin just one year aer the fall of the Wall; around the same time
the collective Tendance Floue was founded through “a generous and
ecstatically wild friendship”. e main purpose of these agencies and co-
operatives was, and to a certain extent still is, to protect its members’
(copy-)rights and to promote them in the publishing market, whi is now in
decline. While many prestigious agencies have closed, we are seeing a true
renaissance of Photography Collectives. e vast majority of these
collectives have popped up in the last 15 years, su as Supay Fotos,
NOPHOTO or Sputnik Photos. Some festivals and centers have already
responded to this new trend by inviting collectives to meet, debate and show
their work. For example, E.CO 2010, organized by Claudi Carreras, invited
20 photographic collectives from Europe and Latin America to Spain. e
rise of the P2P philosophy field of art and image rights alike corresponds to
emerging possibilities around collaboration, sharing and exange.
Collective models of production, consumption, and ownership have grown
in our networked societies, whi allow user-generated content, crowd-
funding and collaborative consumption. ese anges have begun with the
rise of the Internet, survived the dot-com crisis and keep spreading,
regardless of economic development. On the other hand, the global financial
crisis has certainly accelerated the renaissance of traditional practices su
as lending and bartering, since complex trading instruments have fallen into
disrepute. Platforms based on participatory and commons-oriented
paradigms seem to invade more and more social, economic and cultural
fields.
is apter consists of three interviews and one essay around
contemporary issues in the commercialization of images, collecting
photography, and reproduction rights. e first interview features art market
expert Alexander Roer, former director of the contemporary art
department of Sotheby’s New York, and now in a similar position at
Christie’s. I met Alex when we both studied Art History in Vienna, many
years ago. As he is not a person who gives interviews on a regular basis, and
only agreed to have the conversation for our old friendship’s sake, I am
deeply grateful for his trust, and his frankness when speaking about the
open secrets of the business. Another thank you goes to Katelend Rosaen
who has helped with the transcription and editing of this interview.
Simone Klein, who I met in Berlin some 15 years ago, also worked in the
auction business before joining the prestigious agency Magnum to take care
of the Print Sales. She is thus able to speak about the market for
photography from many angles—a market that is divided into three sectors:
nineteenth-century photography, classic vintage photographs, and
contemporary photography. She explains that limited editions are something
that came up in the 1970s/1980s due to a growing market for photography, as
it was necessary to make people understand that what they buy is limited
and rare. As Simone explains, the practice of limiting editions of
photographs, albeit typical for tenologically reproducible works of art, is
borrowed from printmaking, and a purely commercial practice, whi “has
been applied onto photography to make it fit for the market”.
With Pavel V. Khoroshilov and his daughter Anastasia we look at the
other side of the coin, the collector’s point of view. I met them via Irina
Chmyreva (the author of Chapter 2.4) and we decided to have a
conversation that would orbit around the motivations of a collector of
photography, taking into account the special circumstances of the Russian
art market and Pavel’s personal history. As in the case of the two other
interviews in this apter, it was a rare opportunity to find out more about
the operating mode of the art market, whi can now be shared with a wider
public. I wish to thank Anastasia and Pavel for their time and their kindness,
and Julia Gelezova for her help with the translations.
e last text in this apter is by Wolfgang Ullri, a cultural scientist and
freelance author from Germany whose work I have followed for many
years. When I asked him to contribute to this compendium, he proposed to
write on reproduction rights of photographic images for scientific texts. is
is clearly an issue that moves him personally, as it becomes more and more
difficult to illustrate solarly essays and books, due to restrictions from
certain artists, their galleries or their heirs. Interestingly enough, permission
to publish an image is also oen refused in order to prevent the artist in
question from appearing in connection with certain other artists. In
particular, foundations devoted to the works of a deceased artist impose
strict conditions as to the context in whi a work may or may not be
reproduced. By determining the context in whi reproductions appear,
these right holders understand the reception of art as something that can be
influenced by them, as “Copyright becomes a postproduction tool”.
I would like to thank the Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel
V. Khoroshilov for giving us the right to publish some of their gems, su as
Gustave Le Gray, Nikolay Kuleshov, Varvara Stepanova and Alexander
Rodenko, in this apter and remind the readers that although they do not
have a website, their collection is “always open” for proposals.

5.1 e Contemporary Art Market

Alexander Rotter in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: When talking about Photography and the Market, we refer, of course,
only to a small segment of the commercialization of photographic images: The one that is
embedded in the art market, where physical works are bought by collectors, from the artist, the
gallery, or the auction house. You have been involved for many years in the auctioning of
contemporary art, including photography, and have witnessed many ups and downs of what we
call the secondary art market. According to your experiences, how well does photography fit into
the world of modern and contemporary art, how is it embedded in this system?

ALEXANDER ROTTER: First of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk to you. ere
are a couple of questions here, so maybe to preempt the answers I will talk first about my
baground. I worked my entire professional career at an auction house, in the contemporary art
department, and so a lot of high-end contemporary photography has passed through my hands—
so to speak. e segment of contemporary art in the auction market (but also in the secondary
gallery market) is not specific to the medium. Nowadays, a gallerist, auctioneer or advisor in the
field of contemporary art will not differentiate between a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, or
an installation. It’s important to point this out because it has not always been like this. It was in
the 1990s that the contemporary art market started to boom and where photography started to be
really elevated to a heightened level within the market.

Of course, there are specific galleries that are focused on modern and contemporary photography
and do not sell art in any other medium. And there are departments at the bigger auction houses
that are called Photography Departments. ese departments strictly deal with early nineteenth-
century photography up to the same artists that you would see being sold in a contemporary art
sale. is makes sales a lile murky because you have artists su as Cindy Sherman, Riard
Prince, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia, Andreas Gursky, and so on, whi are being offered specifically to
photography collectors, but they also fall into the category of contemporary art. As contemporary
artists, they are aractive to collectors that don’t specifically care that it is photography because
the medium is less important to them than it is to the classic photography collector.

MN: So the same work could actually be sold through two different departments, and the range of
potential buyers, as well as the price range, would be different. Maybe we could take a step back
and talk about the very basic functioning of the art market. In other words: how does a work get
from the artist’s studio to the collector’s wall?

AR: Well, the first step is obviously that the artist makes the work, and then presents it to a
gallery. We are still at a time where the gallery is the most important commercial representative of
an artist. Maybe this will ange one day, maybe the artists will hire managers that deal with their
work, or they could become their own managers, and galleries are no longer needed; however, as
of today, galleries are still the traditional pathway. From there it goes to the collector, either they
are specifically interested in photography or just in great art. When a piece is sold on the primary
market, the artist will share the revenue with the gallerist. e commission of the gallery can be 50
percent, sometimes more, sometimes less. Photography is more expensive the majority of time in
regards to production versus a traditional oil painting. is is especially the case if you are dealing
with larger scale because here size does maer. A big-sized print, as you know, can be extremely
expensive to print multiple times. us the photographers decide either by themselves or with the
gallerist if they are going to make an edition of 3, 5, 6, 10, 20, 25, 100 prints, whatever, it depends.
Obviously, the more prints you do of one subject maer, the eaper it becomes to the end user.
An image printed 100 times will be valued less than the same image printed three times by the
same artist and so galleries usually get involved with these questions regarding the production.
Imagine you being an artist and staging a show with a gallery. For that show, you make one print
of ea image you show, and if this one print sells, and sells well, then you reprint it. In any case,
the gallerist helps you with the production costs, whi is really important for you as an artist.

is is the primary market. But it does not stop here, because works may ange hands, whi
means that collector decides to resell the piece. ey can go through a dealer, or an auction house
—for example, one of the big ones, whi are Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips—in order to sell it.
is is where I get involved. We have to decide on parameters su as whi department sells the
work (photography or contemporary), price ranges and so on. Obviously, I try to give advice
whi will get the seller the most money. ink of a great work from the history of photography, a
photograph that we could call a solarly photograph, by whi I mean something that needs
connoisseurship in order to really understand and appreciate it. In this case, you might be beer
off in a more traditional photography sale, because you have specific collectors that look for this
Moholy-Nagy photograph, or that look for that Man Ray photograph, or a Bernice Abbo that
they haven’t seen, or a certain subject by Walker Evans that is not oen on the market. ese
buyers are very specific in what they want; if it is an artist from the next generation, su as
Cindy Sherman or Riard Prince, it depends on the image, how difficult it may be, but generally
speaking you have more ances of selling it beer in a contemporary sale.

MN: You mentioned that in the 1990s, there was a big change in the market for contemporary art.
What happened and how did it influence how photography was perceived and traded?

AR: In the later 1990s, so just about the time when I started at Sotheby’s, there was a shi, as
photography got elevated to the high-end of the contemporary art market. What do I mean by
that? Traditionally, up to the 1980s, the modern art market had dominated the art world and
everyone was paying aention to the Monets, Renoirs, or Picassos. In the early 1990s, the
contemporary art market became very strong. People were looking at post-1950 artists and the rise
of Pop Art became evident to the art market. Andy Warhol and the other stars of Pop really
anged the segmentation of the market, and in my opinion, that was a major factor for the
ange. For many years, it seemed that photography for Warhol was only a side product, but now
we know that his polaroids were really relevant, more than just a sket—he really cared about
them just as mu as the paintings at some point. However, at that time, what got legitimized by
the art market was “the finished product”, the paintings and prints in big formats.

Photography was always legitimate in art history but it took some 150 years before it became
seriously traded on the art market. If we look at the history of art and the market, we can see that
the market always follows the artists that are ahead of their time. In the 1980s you had a very
strong German sool that had already been established in the 1970s by Bernd and Hilla Beer,
who then passed this on to the next generation, with names su as Gursky, Struth, and Ruff.
ose artists, in my opinion, used the tenological advancement and put it into photography to
create their own language, and thus created a new stimulation for the art buyer. I state this
because if you were used to looking at 20 by 16 ines, bla and white photographs, and suddenly
you see a 10-foot digitally enhanced color reproduction of the Rhine, or a hotel lobby, or
something like that, it gives you the illusion that you are looking at a painting, a feeling that is
different from the one you have when looking at small bla and white vintage prints. In the late
1990s these artists broke into the classic field of contemporary sales. You saw a Jeff Koons next to a
Gursky next to a Sherman next to a Pollo and so on and so forth. Everything was possible and
that is when the big collecting started.

In America, you had artists that worked in different media and had a very big take on Pop Art.
ink of Riard Prince who started with photographing in the 1970s by re-photographing images
and blowing them up, or Cindy Sherman who worked with her body, and herself as the main
subject maer, or in the 1990s Mahew Barney, all of them artists that focused on self-reflection
rather than on the landscape. ese artists then made the cross-over, and this happened at the end
of the 1990s where suddenly you had prices that were close to a million dollars for a photograph.

I think it was one of the Gurskys that was one of the first photographs to break a million dollars in
a contemporary sale and it was a very big deal. en people started to see photography as a
collectible art form, and this was the beauty of it. If I may make this personal for a second,
contemporary photography is su a beautiful way to become a collector, because in general, it is
still an affordable medium.

Very few people have the opportunity to become high-end art collectors, and photography is an
opportunity here because it is on one hand very deep and on the other hand very accessible. So if
you are a novice to the art world, photography is an easy access point, first because it is an
edition, and second because the prices are mu lower than a unique painting.

MN: Let’s talk a bit about collectors, and collecting. You are normally in touch with very high-end
collectors, and your job is to convince them to sell and to sell with you. Do you think there is a
typical contemporary art collector, and/or a typical photography collector? You said that a
photography collector knows more about the medium and is more specific about the images that he
or she wants. How can we imagine a contemporary art collector, as opposed to somebody who buys
books, or silver, or Old Masters, or Impressionists? Are these they same people or are they different
breeds?

AR: at’s a good question. My gut answer is that the traditional contemporary collector can be a
30-year-old man or woman, or even a whole family that just fell in love with a piece and started
buying. Maybe in the beginning for the collector, it was more for having something on their wall.
at is a legitimate reason to buy, they would be the decorator collector; this is not to be negative,
they just experience art differently and sometimes people are just as happy to be stimulated by art
visually, without knowing a lot, just following an emotion. Of course, there is no age limit, and
there is, in fact, no “typical” contemporary art collector. ere are specific collectors; for example,
you have a certain type of people coming into the market and buying up the highest ends. ere
you can be a lile bit more stereotypical and say, for instance: when photography really started to
get really big prices in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the time of the dot-commers. So there
was a lot of those guys, about 30-or 40-years-old, that came into a lot of money with startups and
felt stimulated by this genre. I think people related to it easier than to other media, and maybe
they felt it was “their” medium since photography had made this big jump into the market, just
the way they had.

Between 2005 and the crisis, you had a lot of Russians coming into the market and buying up
high-end art. Interestingly enough, there were also certain people that focused heavily on
photography. ere is a very famous collector in the Ukraine whi we can mention, as he has his
own museum in Kiev, Victor Pinuk. He is someone that came into the art market and
specifically focused on certain artists, and one of the artists that he focused on was Andreas
Gursky. So he really elevated photography into a new braet, as he bought pieces for four or five
million dollars, whi were obviously huge numbers at that time. Aer the collapse, the Middle
East came into the equation. e museums of the Gulf region started to buy photography, yet with
a different approa. ey purased classic photography, because they said: “We want to build a
museum and we want to build the greatest museum in the world; we are not just going to start
randomly, we are going to start with traditional photography.” So suddenly, you saw the
traditional photography, the Walker Evans, Bernice Abbo, the starting generation of popular
photography if you want to call it, aieving big prices, or the Cindy Sherman film stills whi
were her first and most famous series became suddenly more relevant than the big colorful clown
images. So you go through cycles whi bring different kinds of collectors with them. e one
thing that I could say is that there is actually a classic photography collector who has more of a
studioso approa to collecting. So there is a very specific target list, there is a deep knowledge of
the tenical details of the works—is it a first print run, a vintage print, who printed it, whi
edition number is it, etc. ey pay mu more aention to the specifics of the photographs, the
tenicalities; they look at quality, print quality, mu more than the “younger” collector—not
necessarily in age but in experience—who gets more stimulated by the image rather than by the
historical value of things.

MN: In the late 1990s, the online auctions started, not only the flea market-like sales on eBay, but
also the professionally organized (and vetted) auctions at artnet.com, sothebys.com, and other
platforms. I remember speaking to you at that time and you mentioned that you expected
photography to be the most fitting medium to be sold this way. It is true that it would seem that it
is easier to judge a photograph on a screen than a sculpture or a painting. The photograph as an
object is important (I have spoken about this with Alison Nordström, in another chapter of this
book), but it seems that this medium is more adaptable to an online market than other art forms . .
.

AR: I think this is very true because it all comes down to the question of how you look at art, and
then also, how do you buy art? is has anged radically in the last years. In the mid-twentieth
century, collectors still bought from the wall of the gallery or the artist’s studio. Lile by lile,
photography, the reproduction of art, became a relevant factor in the decision process for the
buyer. It didn’t go from one day to the next and I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we’re
mu closer to a market where buyers decide to buy a work of art because they see an image of it,
not the real thing. When I started in the art market it was still the transparency that you sent to
the collectors to stimulate because what the transparency did was just a pure reproduction; and
this goes with what you said: Painting a sculpture, you want to feel the surface, you want to feel
the three-dimensionality, you want to see certain aspects that cannot be reproduced on a flat sheet
of paper. So the transparency that you held against the light had a lile bit more of a volume to it;
so the art market decided this is the best way to show it and to show art if you can’t show it in
person, you show it through that – but the next step happened, and this happened with me
literally being there and going through these anges, with the digital revolution.

e acceptance of digital markets grew as we got beer in looking at a screen. I mean, not just the
quality of the screens got beer, in terms of clarity and color, but also we evolved into people that
can judge a screen image if it’s a cartoon or work of art, beer. I think the next generation is used
to seeing everything on a screen—maybe their eyes and brain connect beer—but ba to your
question, I still believe what I told you then: that photography is probably the best medium for the
internet, because by seeing it we are stimulated enough to take a decision; we do not need to see
these pieces in person before we purase them. ere’s a sad part to it, but that’s just the way it
goes. is is the development, and I do think that what you said about the role of the dot-commers
in the shi of the market towards the photography might be true. It’s not surprising if you think
about it; these people were used to looking at screens mu more than the doctor from Park
Avenue. So they were mu more open to it, and this was the first generation where it became
part of their daily lives to take decisions from what you see on a screen only. It takes a while to
translate a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space, and then for your brain to accept
it as su. I still make mistakes in judging things from a screen, and when I stand in front of the
real piece, I might have a different reaction to it, sometimes more positive, but also very negative.

MN: So when you have to stick a price tag to a work of art, you make a first estimation with the
digital image, but reserve the right to change your mind once you see it in person?

AR: I have a certain expertise and other colleagues have a certain expertise and so sometimes we
feel comfortable enough judging an image from a screen and puing a value on it. e value is a
combination of many factors. Obviously, you work a lot with databases, in your head, and on the
computer, like Artnet, whi is a great database for pricing. Let’s say you have an Andy Warhol
portrait of Jaie; you list the prices in your head or on the screen, and you say: “is one has sold
for this, this one has sold for that.” So that’s how you establish the prices; Warhol is the easiest to
price because he repeated his images. If there is not enough comparable information, we rely on a
more subjective pricing: we sit together in a group and say: “is piece is beer than the one that
sold there; this piece has more scale, more depth.” I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, but I oen
ange my judgement when I stand in front of the work of art because at the end of the day, the
impact that you have in person—and I’m a firm believer in this, although I said all of this about
the internet and the digital images.—only comes out when you stand in front of the artwork.
at’s what I, as an art market expert, not an art history expert, have to judge: how people will
react to it. In other words: Are people more willing to spend this kind of money? You look at
various factors: you look at how many pieces from this period are in museums, or important
collections; if the piece is exceptional in any way, and so on. What makes it easier in the
secondary market, is that I can act in response to the demand in the primary market. You know, I
don’t go to an artist’s studio, take a work of art, and put it up for auction. I respond to what
galleries have sold to collectors, and then I go to the collectors and say “I know there’s a lot of
people who would like this piece in their collection, would you be willing to sell it?”, and in order
for you to sell it, I have to know what he or she paid for the work five years ago, ten years ago, 20
years ago. en you try to tempt them.

So you judge the quality, the rarity, judge the size, the price history, and the demand. It is very
interesting if you go ba in history, even in the last ten years, to see sudden shis from
abstraction to figuration and ba, and it doesn’t make sense. People have tried to explain it,
saying that in times where people feel insecure they want figurative paintings, in lush times they
want more abstract paintings. It’s a nice theory but nobody has proved to me that it really works.
It is true that trends happen because many people not only buy with their eyes but also with their
ears, they read about someone famous who has bought an artist and then they want it too, they
react to fashion. e art market is not as sophisticated, and not as brutal as art history in all
fairness. So you get away with things that just happened by hearsay . . .

MN: Sorry to interrupt, but what do you mean by art history being brutal?

AR: I’m a firm believer that the art market is actually mu soer than art history in terms of
judging the artists, and making them important or dropping them so they will be forgoen. If you
look ba at the last 500 years, the number of artists that art history lets past as great artists is
mu fewer than what the art market allows. You can get away with a mu lesser quality in the
art market for a while than you can in art history, and that’s my true belief, that’s what I meant
when I said that art history, whi looks so refined and nice, is actually a very brutal science.

MN: Interesting. Now let’s get back to what you said about convincing people to buy, and not less
intriguing, how to convince them to sell a work of art.

AR: Well, look. e money side is definitely a big asset. For many people there is temptation in the
monetary value: if you bought a piece for 10,000 dollars and in only a couple of years it’s worth
500,000 dollars, I have never met a collector that doesn’t like to hear that, also because it makes
them say “Well I was right, in the end!”, so it’s a win. Even if you decide not to sell, it definitely
gives you confidence. Especially when you are a new collector, you like this confidence because
we’re living in times where you can’t get away with buying a great young artist called Picasso or
Warhol for 300 dollars. You have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the work of artists
who are maybe just in their twenties and you don’t know if they are going to be “the next
Picasso”. Chances are probably not. So you get excited that a piece that you like, that you bought,
is now worth mu more. So there’s definitely the monetary temptation, I can’t put it in
percentage points, but it’s a big temptation.

Most collectors have the works of art in their house, their apartment, their second home, their
third home or their yat or airplane, wherever they want to put it, and they live with it. So
oentimes, you speak to collectors and hear, “Well, maybe I’m geing bored aer five years of
looking at that, I saw another painting by this artist that I like beer”, and this is where I can tell
them, “Hey, why don’t I get you that one and in return I sell this one for you?”

Other motivations are anges of emotional states, and ange of taste in general. As a collector
(and I experience this myself) you go through phases and what stimulated you in your early years
does not anymore. So you respond to that. ere are different kinds of situations, and you adjust
to them, and it doesn’t always work!

MN: Maybe we could briefly talk about the future of the art market. You mentioned the online
market, you mentioned the Russian buyers, the museums from the Middle East, yet New York,
London, and Paris are still the centers for the big sales. How do you envision the art market,
especially the photography market, in 20 or 50 years?

AR: e internet online base sales have dramatically increased in the last 15 years, and they still
do, and there are new platforms popping up. ere is a price braet preference online, meaning
that, if it goes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, people still want to see it in person. One
ange might be that the sub 20,000 dollar level of art, and there’s a lot of that out there, will fully
migrate online, and photography will be very mu part of this ange. I see more photography
sales happening, I see people really turning to this medium, and I also see a shi in people to
accept tenological anges in the presentation of artworks. Maybe in the future, you buy a
photography pass and you can enjoy your works on your super-flat wall-hanging TV because the
artist created it specifically to be viewed on the screen. I think that very soon we’ll see artists
looking for new opportunities. Artists have always been good in responding to tenological
aievements. Take Jeff Koons as an example. People might think what they want of him, but his
use of tenology, su as metalworking mainery, is amazing.
e understanding and the recognition of art and the emotional response to art is growing,
therefore the community of people that want art at home is growing. It keeps growing; every year
there are more people. I see art becoming even more relevant and I don’t need to be Nostradamus
to predict this. Art was only for a small segment of the population for many centuries. Now it’s
for everyone and it’s becoming more and more of an expression that “I can have, and you can
have”; you don’t need to be a solar, you can be more sophisticated, less sophisticated. You can be
a dentist or a bicycle rider, and you still can appreciate it, and the internet has a lot to do with this
notion. It’s all about the emotion at the end of the day, as an end user, a looker, an owner, you
want to be stimulated by something and the more you see the more you want.

MN: Is there anything that we forgot to talk about or is there any self-critique or critique to the
field you work in? Is there anything about the image of the art market that you wanted to
comment on?

AR: I hope that the art market develops in a way that stimulates more people and I truly believe
(that’s why I am in this field although I am on the commercial side of it) that art can really
influence your daily life. Looking at a painting, a sculpture, a photograph can provoke emotions in
you that other things might not be able to stimulate. I do think that the prices got a lile bit out of
hand but maybe you need to overshoot the message to get the people halfway there. In a funny
way, as if it was reverse psyology, it’s a good thing that you have those crazy prices for some
works of art because that is what the press writes about, and what the internet responds to, what
bloggers respond to, and at the end of the day it helps bring the art further because more people
will look for it; even if they look for the price for the wrong reason, they might get stimulated by
something else that’s mu more aievable. So I think this theater that I am a part of, it’s my life,
I embrace it as su, and even if there’s some critique there, the big sales help the small ones, if
you think a lile further. It’s like the blobusters that create more opportunities for other movies,
so to speak.

5.2 e Market For Photography

Simone Klein in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: You have worked in different positions within the market for
photography, namely in the German auction house Lempertz, then at Sotheby’s and as head of
print sales at Magnum. Could you give us an introduction to this market, as it came to be and how
it is today?

SIMONE KLEIN: I could talk for hours about this but I will try to be short. e photography
market, as we know it today, has existed in the US since the 1930s—mainly in New York—and in
Europe since the 1970s. at is when the first photography auctions were organized in London, at
Sotheby’s and when specialized galleries for photography came up all over Europe, in France,
Italy, and Germany. One of the oldest galleries is the Photographers’ Gallery in London and then
you have Wilde and Liropfen galleries in Germany. e market for photography really came
up and what was being sold was nineteenth-century photography and photographica, that is
cameras and stereoscopic devices, but also contemporary photography. Photographers at that time
still were working essentially in bla and white, and rather small formats. e market anged
totally in the 1990s, when large-format color photography came out with the Beer Sool in
Düsseldorf and some American photographers. From that time on we have a separation of
classical photography (meaning nineteenth century along with classic bla and white analog
photography from the twentieth century) from contemporary photography meant to be put on the
wall. Another important moment for the photography market was the introduction of digital in
the mid-1990s, whi allowed new esthetics and introduced new very stable printing teniques
especially for color photography.

Today the market for photography is divided into three sectors: nineteenth-century photography,
classic vintage material, and then contemporary photography. Fairs like Paris Photo with their
highly specialized galleries and international auction catalogs reflect exactly this situation.

Price-wise, generally speaking, prices for photography are not as high as prices for contemporary
or modern art. At auction, prices for over a million dollars, euros or pounds have been aieved
for photographs quite regularly since around 2000. For me, there is still a lot of potential for
classical and nineteenth-century photography because of its rarity and artistic importance. We say
that a vintage print doesn’t typically exist in more than five prints. Vintage prints are rare in
themselves, but furthermore, every print is somehow unique and different from the others. If you
have a print from the 1920s by a photographer like Man Ray or André Kertész, it will have his size,
paper, his sort of signature or stamp; and another print from the same period of the same image
would look totally different. A vintage print by a known, established photographer, an iconic
image in the best possible condition and with a good provenance fulfills the criteria to aieve a
high or even record price on the market.

I have been working, and still work, with photographs as objects, that is, prints or collectable
pieces of art. I do not myself deal with copyrights, even if I work at an agency now. W e had a
stand at Paris Photo, as we have every year that Paris Photo has existed, because Magnum has
been selling prints since the 1980s, from their arive, and from the current Magnum
photographers.

MN: It is interesting to hear about the uniqueness of the vintage print, as compared to the edition
print, where you could have as many as the artist, or the gallery decides . . .

SK: e nature of photography is that it can be reproduced as many times as you like. From the
nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, when no market existed really, most
photographs were either produced for a purpose or were purely personal. Someone like André
Kertész, who lived on the profits of his photographic activities, produced images that were
commissioned by companies or printed in magazines. Not many prints were made, some of them
for personal use maybe, but never for the purpose of being sold to collectors.

MN: They didn’t think about editions and sizes . . .

SK: Why should they? Man Ray had a photographic studio, he made a living from his portraits
and from commissions, su as the acclaimed work Électricité, whi was a commission for a
power company that desired to promote the domestic consumption of electricity. His surrealist
experimentations and the rayograms were his private artistic work.

But ba to your question about limited editions, whi is something fairly new, something that
came up in the 1970s/1980s only, because there was a necessity, due to a growing market for
photography. ere was a necessity to make collectors understand that what they buy is limited
and rare. Historically, prints, etings and lithographs were sold in limited and numbered editions.
Limited editions are applications from these domains onto photography to make it fit for the
market. Today, editions are being held smaller because the idea of rarity is very important for the
collector. If a photograph is available in a small edition of say five prints, that helps, as a rare piece
is more desirable and usually more expensive that a mass product. High editions of 100 or 50 don’t
make sense; it doesn’t add value to the piece. ere are different types of editions: the small
edition for the gallery vs the higher editions whi are oen available online, for example. In other
words, the mass production vs the luxury market for artistic photography.

MN: Magnum is an agency where artistic and commercial purposes are intertwined, or run
parallel, in some way. Your colleagues sell images to inform people about an event or maybe even
for commercial purposes (advertising, fashion, or whatever) and you sell maybe some of the same
images as objects of art to collectors. Do you see any conflict of interests here, conceptually as well
as practically speaking?

SK: Magnum has an immense and steadily growing pool of images, from the 1940s until today, as
there are 56 active photographers at the moment, and they are around the world and take pictures.
Many of them are being used for editorial purposes, for ads, for commissions; most of them can be
found in the image pool on the Magnum website. What we sell as “art” pieces, are two categories:
One is the vintage material, meaning the prints from roughly the 1940s to the 1990s; these are sold
to museums, institutions, and collectors. e second category is the contemporary work done by
Magnum members, that is, the private artistic work of photographers who we represent, as if we
were a regular gallery. We define series or single images with the photographer whi we then sell
in limited editions. Many purely journalistic pictures cannot be sold to a collector. No one would
put them on the wall—they are too violent—thus we don’t offer them for sale as limited editions.
We do a selection from all the images for the gallery. We work with the photographers directly
and that’s actually quite nice because there are so many different brilliant photographers, with
their different styles and aracters. So we sit with them, we discuss with them; it is very
important to understand how they function and how they work and what we can create out of it:
an exhibition, a book, whi pictures can be sold.

MN: And this has been a part of the Magnum business for many years. However, it seems to be a
different segment now where Magnum wants to grow, because the magazine market has gone
down quite a bit, so education and print sales are probably the new cash cows, in order to maintain
the collective.

SK: Yes, exactly. We are now working on a global strategy to grow this department, through sales
of grouped vintage material and individual prints. Also we do gallery exhibitions in Paris and
London, we do booths at fairs su as Paris Photo, Photo London, Photo San Francisco, Photo
Shanghai, so we are quite active in fairs too. We have a team of sales persons in our offices in
Paris, London and New York. ere is also a department that organizes and tours exhibitions with
Magnum photographers, and this is something that we also combine with print sales. So it’s a
allenge, this job didn’t really exist before, as we didn’t coordinate all this on an international
level.

MN: Education seems to be important, too.

SK: Activity-wise, education is important because many of the Magnum photographers frequently
do workshops. Budget-wise it has not su a big impact. e biggest department is the Corporate
department; they are actually the biggest piece of the cake, as they do commissions for companies
and projects with institutions. For example, next year there will be Magnum photographs in the
metro stations all over Paris.

MN: How important are online sales for Magnum?

SK: Very. Online sales get more and more important. You can buy many photographs through our
webshop. Magnum’s Digital department deals with that. And there is also the “square prints sale”,
a highly profitable activity. For a limited time, you can buy a number of prints online, for 100
dollars, and the edition is unlimited, but it is limited by the time. Aer five days the sale stops and
the works are produced, in the exact number of prints that were sold. Aer that, it’s gone, and you
cannot buy these images anymore. It’s a very smart marketing idea, but it’s important to
understand that the square prints don’t have the same quality and value as a collector’s print. is
double strategy is quite common in today’s market for photography. On the one hand, small
editions for collectors and on the other, large editions for the wider public. However, I would
advise individual contemporary photographers to keep their fine prints editions small.

MN: So how do you find the vintage prints or images you want to release as a limited edition in
the vast amount of pictures taken by Magnum photographers since the 1940s? I was once in the
storage area of the London office, and there were boxes all over the place, full of negatives and
prints. Is your job to go through this material and try to convince them to let you sell them, or do
you work directly with the photographers?

SK: Both. And it’s fun, actually. We go through the boxes, but we also resear in the digital image
arive. Sometimes I come across things that I think are interesting, and I approa the
photographer and ask him: “What about these prints, do you have them?” I like to see myself as
something in between an areologist and a truffle pig, because my job is to dig and find
something interesting. So, if I am luy the photographer says, “Oh yeah, I still have them, they
are at home, in my arives somewhere, I’d forgoen about them . . .” and then we go to find
them, that is really the fun part of it.

ere have also been many books published since the 1950s and if I see an image that I find
interesting, I go from there and try to find out where the vintage print is. Of course, I have to
convince the photographer to give it to us for sale.
At this moment we have an exhibition up in our Paris gallery, with vintage prints by Miguel Rio
Branco. ese prints are from the early 1970s, and they are absolutely special. He made these
pictures from 1970 to 1972 when he was in New York. He was a trained painter who came from
cinematography, and this was the first time he was using a photographic camera, so his images are
very special. His studio burned down in 1980 and most of his negatives got lost, as well as many of
his original prints. ese prints are unique, the negatives don’t exist anymore, and it is an early
bla and white series, whi was never shown before, there is no publication. e photographer
had stored them somewhere remote in a drawer because he didn’t think about this material
anymore, and I discovered them by ance and asked him if he would exhibit them. He said yes,
okay, okay, and now here they are on the wall, and the exhibition has been very well received. e
prices are 10,000–16,000 euros, and it is fantastic material no one has seen before. is is a great
story, because it illustrates that sometimes you are able to dig out a real treasure.

When I worked at the auction house the part of the job I really liked the most was to visit
collectors, discover their treasures and convince them to allow us to sell. Now I am conceiving
groups of photographs for collectors or a museum or an exhibition, so this is a mu more
conceptual work than before. In the auction world there is a lot of excitement, it is dynamic, but
also exhausting and fun. Now I get to combine these two worlds, and I like it. e secondary
market is interesting when you find amazing objects by ance, and then you negotiate about
prices or conditions of sales.

MN: So, you are in a really privileged position because you are in between the two worlds.

SK: Absolutely. It is very interesting and I am learning every day.

MN: The artists you are working with are already established, but what would you tell the younger
artists in order to make their pass towards the market? Because that is something that they do not
tell you in art school or photography school.

SK: What I tell everyone is: “Limit yourself in every way.” It doesn’t make sense to put everything
out for sale in high editions. Keep it low, keep it simple. ere are so many photographs around, so
make a selection, do smaller editions, and find really good people to advise you.

MN: I will pass your advice on to my own students, if I may. Last question: The future of the
market. How do you see the market of photography in 20 years?

SK: I think in 20 years we will have the “old big masters,” and their masterworks will be mu
more expensive than they are now. I think there will be a wider range of teniques. At the
moment, old teniques su as Daguerreotypes, tintypes, wet collodion, and so on, are being
reintroduced by contemporary photographers, whi is really interesting. And the online sales
market will grow. It seems like a contradiction, but both trends are happening at the same time: a
return to the analogue teniques that show a longing for working with all senses and the
photograph as an object, on the one side, and a further virtualization of the market, converting the
sales transaction into a purely digital experience, on the other.
 5.3 Collecting Photography

Pavel V. Khoroshilov and Anastasia Khoroshilova in

Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: Please tell us about the history of your collection. How did you start, and
why are you specifically interested in photography?

PAVEL V. KHOROSHILOV: It is interesting to discuss the various historical details and anecdotes
of the photographic medium photography, but these are not the questions at stake. What drives
me is the “desire of photography”: A photograph has to be held in your hands and looked at
thoroughly. Otherwise, a photograph will always be simply a “picture.”

In terms of collecting, I would not consider myself the type of person who is overwhelmed with a
passion towards acquiring and accumulating objects. e inner satisfaction about the process is
more important than the materialistic sufficiency, as the substantial basis of my lifestyle.
Everything I became surrounded by over time, was connected to professional interests, to my
work, to education. Essential books that guided me in this process come from classical literature
and the history of art, but also contemporary authors and writings on artistic practices. e
passion for collecting usually ignites during youth, like an interest for poetry or sport, like
alternative ways of communication with peers, but then it quietly fades away. e same happened
to me, eventually. It is hard to tell what the push was. Regardless of my professional education,
whi I received from the Lomonosov Moscow State University—I specialized in the history of
Russian medieval art—I did not collect icons; my activities in contemporary art did not prompt me
to buy the works of current artists. However odd, maybe the main, fully unconscious motive,
could have been the events whi—right in front of my eyes—have turned the USSR into Russia.
at atmospheric sensation of the historicity of every moment of your life, a natural visualization
of a global turning point generated a certain relationship of “the second of being” and its
imperishable value. e “photographicness” of the occurrences became the standard measure of
their authenticity, a confirmation of the events. Maybe as a counter-reaction, I became interested
in the structure of the photographic image, in the reconstruction of historical space and time, the
reanimation of a frozen emotion within
Figure 5.1 Gustave Le Gray, Brig on the Water. Albumen print, mounted 31.3×40.2cm, 1856.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

a photograph. In this quest, I did not distinguish between documentary, portrait, or art
photography.

e second reason for my growing interest in photography was, however paradoxical it may
sound, the first solo show of Helmut Newton in Russia. It took place in Moscow in the early 1990s,
and I was involved first-hand in the organization of the event. I felt that my observations could
also be extended to contemporary photography, and became a key to its analysis, not only for
judging the aesthetic value of an image, but also as an instrument for reading its implicit
“meanings.”

And, of course, the fact that in Russia it was already expensive to collect “high art,” while
photography, at the time, cost nearly nothing. erefore, the euphoria for collecting has never
become a substantial financial burden for my family.

ANASTASIA KHOROSHILOVA: Let’s not forget that in this time period—the end of the 1980s,
beginning of the 1990s—in Russia there were only two or three collectors of photography. Now, in
2016, it is a completely different game: A different understanding and perception of photography
accompanies us every day and the medium is firmly woven into our lives, with many theories
wrien on its use, and its omnipresence in the mass media. In essence, it becomes “unnoticed”
again, but an integral part of our everyday life, and, subsequently, of our awareness. Just think of
how the younger generation uses photography in the social media.
In this context, it is interesting to analyze, with the aid of collecting, the modern state of society,
the environment, to conduct analogies. I think Moritz’s question is related to the principle under
whi you initially originated your collection. Was it initially a logical selection, connected with
your education and the environment of your work, or were they intuitive, aesthetic decisions?

PK: Of course there was an inner readiness to undertake this journey. e foundation was laid
during my university time where I had the privilege to study with brilliant art critics and
historians su as Viktor Nikiti Lazarev, Mikhail Andreevi Ilyin, Viktor Nikolaevi
Grashenkov, and Mikhail Mikhailovi Allenov, to name just a few. ey taught us how to look at
and how to understand works of art (it is irrelevant that the word “photography” was never
mentioned), they educated and honed the “eye,” and I will be forever grateful to them for this
experience.

Professional education, of course, pushed me towards following the Crème de la Crème principle,
and “the eye” was ready for this. Of course, my eyes still needed some more training, so for many
years, I had to wallow around in all varieties of photographic material. is training was enough
to get engaged in the study of photography and its history. Mainly in European photography, as
not mu was said about Russian photography at the time. I started collecting materials that
corresponded to my artistically aesthetic notions, whi of course, were drawn from my
knowledge of art history.

Photography may be the most “democratic” of all collectable art forms, even if it is considered
“high” art today. In a country where nobody was properly involved in this pursuit, it was
fascinating to be one of the pioneers in this movement.

e market for photography in Russia up to this day has no recognized and established qualities
and values, and Western standards do not work here. e anaric
Figure 5.2 Nikolay Kuleshov, 44.3×59.5cm. Vintage silver print 1935–1936.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

aracter of the demand side allows dealers to make considerable margins, but it also means that
collectors in Russia still have a ance to find something new and interesting, sometimes even an
overlooked masterpiece. Just recently, the collectable agiotage around the Russian avant-garde
flushed the market with Soviet photography of the 1920s–1930s [see Color Plate 40 for an
example]. Russian photography of the nineteenth century is still seen as a “dark spot” on the
professional market, with the exception, maybe, of early pictorialist work (thanks to the collector
Mikhail Golosovskiy).

e nineteenth century was the time when many Russian explorers “discovered” Europe, thus the
photographic evidence of our touristic expansions should be conserved. ese were some of my
pragmatic reasons for defining the first group of “motives” for my collection.

MN: . . . and then?

PK: I was fortunate enough to be acquainted with many Western collectors, gallerists and dealers,
who not only possessed professional knowledge in the area of photography, but also had first-class
material at their disposal. e connoisseurs may recognize the name of Hans P. Kraus, owner of a
New York gallery and a brilliant expert, who at that time collected for one of the most significant
photographic collections, that of Manfred Heiting, whi was later sold to the Museum of Fine Art
in Houston. Believe me, a two-to-three-hour conversation with Hans, where he is presenting
masterpiece aer masterpiece, belonging to the best photographers of the
Figure 5.3 Atelier Serer-Nabholz, formerly A. Bergner in Moscow, View of Okskij Bridge during its
trial on the 19th of February 1865. Albumen print, mounted. 24×33.9 (28.6×38.3) cm, 1865.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

nineteenth century and “the eye” immediately “stands into position”! Connoisseurship remains the
key to the most cunning mysteries, associated with the aribution of photography. ere were
also meetings and long conversations with Professor Klaus Honnef, then a curator in the
Rheinises LandesMuseum Bonn, Gerd Sander, Nathan Fedorovskij in his gallery Avantgarde on
Leibnizstrasse in Berlin, and many many other friends, who gave me my first, most fundamental
lessons.

“A trained eye,” the knowledge of photographic literature, and the skill to differentiate and
appreciate photographic images were acquired at that time. I am proud of this knowledge, but of
course you can also collect without all that, for example by basing selection purely on what you
see in the pictures—as long as the pictures “work.”

MN: So your eye was trained in the West, but then you have to develop a specific strategy, a set of
criteria and a focus for the Russian market, right?

PK: e Western collector’s aim is mainly the possession of a purase. He is used to dealing with
selected, systematic material. If there is money, the process can be speeded up: you just do a
selection of textbook names, and the more money, the beer known the names you can afford,
from Daguerre to Warhol, and so on. e Russian context is totally different, it is more like a sea
of accessible material, but no generally recognized masters, and it is mu more interesting to
sear (and find) the “right” works.

Russian photography, compared to the trends and the dynamic of Western development, is behind
by some 10 to 15 years. is is evident, if you look through
Figure 5.4 Georgy Zimin, Photogramme. Vintage gelatine silver print 22.5×16.5cm, until 1931.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

publications su as Masterpieces of Photography from Private Collections: Russian Photography

1849–1918, edited and published by Moscow collectors with the publishing house Punktum
(Пунктум).

In Russia, the dispute over affinity of the newborn photography with the “high arts” was
especially critical. And, of course, let’s not forget that the main instrument of learning about the
world was Russian literature. It took a long time to adapt. For example, Nikolai I, before his death
in 1855, never stood in front of the “photographic apparatus.” And in St. Petersburg there were
already many ateliers and studios, both by Russian and foreign photographers, from the 1840s,
because the St. Petersburg society had completely surrendered to the new “amusement.” Possibly,
this is linked to a certain extent to the inner restrictions of the deeply religious Emperor.
Something similar, of whi Walter Benjamin reminded us in A Short History of Photography, was
observed in Germany. Now, Nikolai’s son, Alexander II, is a whole different story . . .

MN: What is your collection made of? Which periods and photographers play a big role, and which
directions do you follow?

PK: I have always considered my collection a field for intellectual exercise that consisted of
“Crème de la Crème” positions, yet this “crème” was mixed in my own kiten, meaning that my
personal perception was the only reference point. ere were no exceptions made, not for textbook
works, not for anonymous photographs. I also used my “hunter’s instinct,” not relying on names or
popularity, but solely on specific photographs. is was an expedition in sear of rudimentary
intellect, universal meanings in the visual universe. It was my personal oice, by means and
responsibility of my “trained eye.”

Let’s say that I have been constructing strategies in an intellectual game, by means of visual
expression. I was trying to create tactical methods with the help of graphics, painting, literature,
journals and memoirs, even politics: basically everything that the photographic image was capable
of coding and translating to the viewer, regardless of their historical time and the reality these
objects represented.

My collection includes a considerably large array of photographs from Italy, France, Germany, and
Turkey. ese were important to me, first and foremost, because the appearance of these works in
Russia (they were all acquired here) was the first manifestation of a wider common interest
towards photography, from the point of view of the formation of aesthetic taste, and from the
point of view of that influence, whi European photography has had on Russian photography. In
this context, we could add that I had the opportunity to organize an exhibition program dedicated
to the travels of Russian people abroad, called Grand Tour: Russian Version (shown at the
Multimedia Art Museum, MAMM, Moscow, in 2015/2016).

Japanese photography became part of the collection in a nearly accidental way, and there is also a
not very “prestigious,” but “intellectually weighty” section of Russian photography of the 1920s
and 1930s: Constructivism, pictorial photography, su as Anatoly Trapani, Yury Eremin, and
other trends in Russian photography, whi haven’t fully found continuity because of the 1917
Revolution . . .

AK: It is interesting to compare the catalogue of the exhibition Nude for Stalin, whi is dedicated
to the censored theme of nudity in the USSR, and the absolutely different facet, coming from a
“box” from our collection, and published in the book Masterpieces of Photography from Private
Collections: Russian Photography 1849–1918. To me it seems that this is a good example of how our
collection “works,” and more precisely, how a collector “arranges,” “plays,” and selects the
intellectual keys to the material.

PK: Fear of the photographic image and the constraint of a person in front of a camera have
accompanied the medium from the very beginning. When personal fear is transformed into
 disapproval by the authoritative structures of administration we can speak of Censorship—the evil
and kind genius of photography. Since we are speaking of intellectual games, the exhibition Nude
for Stalin became a game “of the reverse.” It showed side by side what was accepted in society
(meaning “Stalin’s taste”) and what could land you in a labor camp (whi is what happened to
the photographer Alexander Greenberg). e positive and negative Kammerton [concert pit] of
this oice was the socialist “pseudo moral,” whi crippled human fates not just in photographic
and cultural environments.

AK: Another important aspect of our collection is the view of photographers from the West on
Russia . . .

PK: I try to find “reference points” in the Russian tradition, some of whi became landmarks in
the formation of global photographic art. e very essential moments were when European
photographers first visited Russia: Roger Fenton in 1852 and

Figure 5.5 William Carri, Untitled, 1862. Albumen print, mounted, 9.9×14 (10.6×16.5) cm.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

again during the time of the Crimean war in 1855–56. Pierre Ambroise Riebourg in 1858–59,
who was shooting St. Petersburg for the publication of a series of albums of Pierre Jules éophile
Gautier—Artistic Treasures of Ancient and New Russia (1859). Some of them came to stay, su as
the Italian photographer Giovanni Biani, who seled in the Russian capital as early as 1851.

AK: at's a very interesting detail—a Western viewpoint of Russia …

PK: is influence is not new: Russian art from the mid eighteenth to, approximately, the end of
the first third of the nineteenth century was essentially rossica (россикa), that is work made by or
inspired by foreign masters, who were invited by the royal court. Similarly, early Russian
photography is easier to understand when taking into account the Western European
photographers who worked in Russia. A separate question are the masters of photography whose
whole artistic career is wholly tied with Russia, for example “Russianized” Scots, Germans, Swiss,
Italians whose families had lived in Russia for several generations and who had studied in the
Imperial Academy of Arts. In their photographs, we find a surprising combination of rudimentary
European mentality and Russian sentimentality; they comprehend the basics of the Russian life.
Aer having studied their lives, I consider them an integral part of the Russian arts environment.

For me it was essential to seek out Western photography in Russia. I never acquired photography
in Europe or America, with the exception of works from Russian photographers. Besides
everything else, collecting meant to reflect the photographic segment of the visual environment
whi existed during the nineteenth century within the borders of the Russian Empire. is is why
my collection contains classic examples su as the seascape of Gustave le Gray (Figure 5.1), a
fragment of the Egyptian adventures of Felix Teynard, a few works from the series of Johann
Franz Miiels dedicated to the Cologne cathedral, etc. Or, for example, to me it was obviously
important to find four daguerreotype engravings, done in Moscow between 1830 and 1840 from
Excursions daguerriennes: vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe by Noël Marie
Paymal Lerebours. ese four pieces had been ordered by a Moscow bookseller, directly from the
publisher before the book even saw light.

I am interested in those images that go beyond the established practices—“beyond the

photographic”—and show historical, social, political or economical themes that influenced society.
We can speak of some universal themes, whi were unarguably the catalysts in the development
of Russian photography. First of all, the formation of a multi-national, colonial Empire. In the
beginning, photography took the role of the visual confirmation of the expansion of geography in
Russia. Colonial expeditions were endlessly far from the capitals—St. Petersburg and Moscow. is
is a special variety of “Reisefotografie”: Mid-Asian campaigns—Murenko, Nehoroshev, Krivtsov,
Priorov, the many-tomed photographic Turkestan Album. In the Caucasus, a special photographic
department of the headquarters of the army was led by the brothers Rudnev. is list of
photographers could be continued, yet, unfortunately, their works even today have not received
appropriate recognition, nor have they been comprehended as a part of photographic history.
Towards the middle of the 1860s, there is a turn towards ethnographic resear in central Russia.
e abolition of serfdom (“Russian slavery”) in 1861, the celebration of the Russian Millennium in
1862 and the All-Russian ethnographic exhibition in 1867 . . . this was a very important moment,
also from an aesthetic point of view. Artists and photographers wanted to show a particular
Russian way of life: William Carri in provinces on the Volga, Jozef Kordysz in Ukraine, Ermakov
and Barkanov in the Caucasus. e result was the famous album by J. X. Raoult, Collection de
Types des Peuples de Russie, Roumanie et Bulgarie, whi included more than 200 photographs.

AK: e defeat of Russia in the Crimean War was a bafire in this process, a humiliating apter
of history for a country that wanted to be proud of its new political reality, and the modernization
of its image in Europe. Photography, as a method for the creation of a renewed “shop front” for
the country, started to play a primary role for this new, “other” Russia. European newspapers and
magazines filled up with images by Russian photographers. e Emperor and great princes invited
photographers and they produced albums that are presented to their European “vis-à-vis.” Let’s
remember this fact: the album of Gabriel de Rumine consists of photographs made in Greece,
Sicily, Naples and in Jerusalem during the Mediterranean sailing of the general-admiral of the
Russian navy, the great prince Konstantin Nikolaevi, in 1858–1859.

PK: And photo studios cropped up within governmental structures su as the armies and the
navy, even in Orthodox monasteries. For example, Lewis Carroll wrote about his impressions of
the photography studio in the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in 1867. is caught the aention of
Pierre Jules éophile Gautier, at the time of his travels in Russia, so he bought a photograph of
the monastery, and he noted that in the monks’ studio, Nadar would perfectly feel at home. I
managed to find out the name of the monk-photographer in arge of this studio, eophan
Osipov, and to find a representative photograph of his work. But enough of my fish stories!

MN: Do you collect contemporary photography?

PK: I love photography. Contemporary photography forms part of my life because I exist at the
same time as contemporary art, including photography. Everything that current photography has
to offer—including its aempts to dissect human relationships, question social structures, reflect
the global political picture—for me, as a person from this phase of my life, is close to my heart.
Probably, I could be even more active in this segment, but, as always, it is a question of time and
money.

MN: What about your library? Are there any books that have influenced you and the creation of
your collection?

PK: What influences me is the object, the item I am holding in my hands. e path to it could of
course lie within a book, or through a dictionary, encyclopedia or catalogue. A library is very
important. Aribution, the construct of a ronological order, biographical details: all keys to a
wholesome description of collecting, and the preparation of material for catalogues. Finally, the
alignment of a sear strategy, the structure of collectionism . . . Without literature, this is
impossible: Constant companions on my table are Kracauer, Barthes, Sontag . . . and many more.
Figure 5.6 Alexey Sidorov, Untitled, 1926–27. Vintage gelatine silver print, 22.8×16.4cm.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

AK: We could also add Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. You actually illustrated, with photographs from the collection, the latest Russian
edition of A Short History of Photography, whi included this text.

PK: Yes, indeed, it was hard work, like an exam: I had to maneuver between straight-on
photographic quotes and photographic metaphors, whi were specially selected for Benjamin’s
texts.
MN: What does it mean to be a collector?

AK: To me, it seems that in our case you can draw analogies and compare the creation of a
collection (in recent years) with a “visual selection” of commentaries about this or that period of
time. is is the position of a historian and researer. I would call it visual publicism. It is about
the happiness of finding, and being able to interpret an image. Oen you draw analogies, and
parallels, with forthcoming or current, events. Or is that a “puzzle” for you, whi you are trying
to solve, through the history of individual photographs?

PK: Within the frame of our collection, I want to discover a projection of my own viewpoint, my
own relationship and understanding of what is usually called “the history of photography.” I am
forced to independently control my “collecting” actions. I abruptly stop myself, if I feel I am going
beyond the lines of what I define as the “aesthetic of collecting.” For example, I give equal
aention to an anonymous photograph as I do to a photograph belonging to a famous artist. But I
am scrupulous when it comes to aribution, provenance or establishing the exact date of a piece.
It maers to me from whose hands a photograph makes its way into my collection. In collecting,
ethics is always the sister of aesthetics. Yes, in some cases, collecting gives me substantially felt
shoves towards understanding history, including the modern-day. “Visual lessons,” acting in the
emotional field of human subconscious, oen open those depths of historical processes, whi we
are not able to open with arival documents, theoretical works or memoirs and memories of
peers. Photography oen performs as a propaganda instrument, but behind this image oen
glimmers an inevitable trust in time and reality of events and fates. It is exactly this that forces me
to look around with different eyes. “Visual publicism”? Most likely, yes.

MN: Some people describe collecting as an attempt to arrange the world, to put order into a chaos.
You see it more as a game, a way of communication and self-reflection—can we say it this way?

PK: Aer spending some time, you start to understand that collecting is an intellectual game. It is
different to the other methods of your inner communication. A conversation with yourself
becomes less interesting, once you have had the opportunity to really listen to the indistinct
murmurings of a bun of photographs. en you realize that, in this game, there are many more
players. ey are the actual photographers, and their famous and not famous models, the dark
areas of history of your country, the fate of people. Sometimes a landscape, in a photograph, turns
out to be more verbal than a portrait. Look at lile Vasya Stalin (Stalin’s son), on whose shoulder
dominantly rests the hand of a KGB agent (Figure 5.7).
Figure 5.7 Evgenij Iavno, Vassili Stalin with a beret, 1929. Moscow. Vintage silver print, 8.5×11cm.
Credit: Collection of Anastasia Khoroshilova and Pavel V. Khoroshilov.

MN: Anastasia, what is your first memory of your father as a collector?

AK: My first memory of “a sear for an object for the collection” is when I am 11 or 12 years old
and you took me to a tiny, second-hand book store, by the “Park Kultury” metro station. I am
surrounded by “treasures,” whi are extraordinarily aractive to me today. But at the time I just
remember long hours of waiting and my father over piles of photographs. is goes on forever.
My only wish is to quily leave.

My second memory is mu later, you are showing me photographs from the end of the 1840s—
portraits of St. Petersburg’s nobility, the works of Carl Dauthendey. You are telling me about ea
of these noblemen. en you are recommending that I read the memoirs of prince Dolgorukov
who, instead of arriving for his interrogation at the sadly infamous ird Section, le for Paris and
sent the gendarmes his business card with a request to punish it and send it to Siberia, for penal
servitude. Gradually and imperceptibly, it was from these situations and conversations that my
professional interests formed. So here I am—an artist working with photography.

MN: How do curators find out about the items in the collection? Can they take works for
exhibitions? Is there an opportunity to visit your collection with an educational aim (for example,
the writing of a dissertation)?

PK: My collection is always open, there are no fundamental restrictions. Of course I wish to know
in whi exhibition structure the photographs from the collection will be placed, in what context,
and whi role they will play. We do not have a website; we have publications, books. I never do
 special PR. e number of collectors in Russia is not so big, so I accept proposals with pleasure, to
show the photographs from my collection within the frame of other exhibition ideas.

AK: Like-minded people have to support ea other. We try to establish a path of communication
between other collectors. e participation of works from our collection in exhibitions helps the
advancement and recognizability of our collection beyond Russia, and also the popularization of
early Russian photography overall.

MN: But now, please allow me to pose a last question: What is the meaning of collecting for you?

PK: e meaning of collecting? For me, it has the same meaning as living life.

5.4 Copyright and the Art Market

Strategies of Control and Shortage1

Wolfgang Ullri

A new apter has been added in recent years to the long history of bans on
images. is time, images are not being banned because they are
blasphemous or pornographic. Nor in order to protect rights of privacy or
because the images contain political symbols punishable under criminal law.
is time images are being banned because their creators or their successors
in title – usually from the area of art and aritecture – do not wish them to
be displayed. To be precise: e creators or their successors in title do not
wish to permit photographic reproductions of works or at least wish to
control precisely and determine where and for what purpose a work may be
reproduced.
I would first like to mention a few typical cases.2 ere are growing
complaints from publishers of text books and introductory works on certain
areas of art history that reproduction permission is being denied on the
grounds that the nature of the publications is too eap. e fact that the
books are published by renowned publishing companies in large editions
and above all create a fixed canon is evidently less important to authors and
their successors in title than the fact that a work could possibly be
reproduced in bla-and-white only or in a relatively small format.
In the meantime, photographers specializing in aritecture report that in
many cases they are not permied to publish photographs of buildings that
were not shot on behalf of the aritects. ey are oen not permied to
shoot any photographs at all inside the building. Only images corresponding
to the aritects’ viewpoint are published; these are oen retoued images.
Art forgers – e.g. Wolfgang Beltraci – are also entitled to invoke
copyright law and prevent reproductions of their forgeries. e fact that
details of the works thus cannot be analyzed and rendered visible – e.g. on
the basis of comparing images – makes it difficult to discover forgeries that
are still in circulation (Öcal 2013).
In some cases artists aempt to prevent images that do not even show one
of their own works, but, rather, constitute a persiflage, caricature or
imitation of their works in a different medium – without aspiring to be an
original work of art. Similarly to an enterprise where designs are concerned,
these artists then argue that they are the creators of an image concept or of a
unique image, variations on whi are subject to their consent.
Yet even academics writing about artists whose rights are represented by
a rights management society occasionally face bans on reproduction. Several
artists – including Andreas Gursky – require their works to be reproduced
in color, for example (Ullri 2016). However, owing to the higher printing
costs that are not financially sustainable, this impedes the authors of
doctoral theses, academic collections of works and independent books in
particular; in an extreme case it prevents the publication of texts whi
possibly constitute a critical analysis of the iconography of the artist’s
subjects and whi therefore depend on images as the basis for and
verification of their arguments.
Other artists again suddenly exclude individual works or entire phases of
works from the oeuvre so that they are no longer available to the rights
management societies; authors wishing to reproduce the relevant works
have to ask the author directly, who, however, will most likely refuse to
grant permission for a reproduction. is enables artists – for example Neo
Rau (Zöllner 2013) – to prevent works from whi they subsequently
distance themselves from being reproduced at all; these works vanish
completely from the public sphere and public debate.
In the meantime it has become almost obligatory for authors seeking a
reproduction permit to submit their texts to artists and aritects who are
not represented by a rights management society. A permit is only granted if
the text is in line with the artist’s or aritect’s views. However, a ban on the
publication of images by authors is imposed not only in case of a critical
analysis and interpretation of the work; in some cases artists – e.g. Doug
Aitken – demand the deletion of facts whi are not consistent with the
image that the artist conveys of him-or herself or his or her works, for
example quotes from interviews published elsewhere (294 2016, No. 3).
Permission to publish an image is also oen refused in order to prevent the
artist or aritect from appearing in connection with certain other artists. In
particular, foundations devoted to the works of a deceased artist sometimes
impose very strict conditions as to the context in whi a work may or may
not be reproduced.
Admiedly, a quotation right does apply to academic publications so that
to a certain extent works can be reproduced without permission having to
be sought; however, the quotation right is not broad enough to be of
assistance in many of the cases mentioned. For example, the quotation right
only permits rather small images, so that it is difficult to recognize anything
at all where aritectural plans or large-scale paintings are reproduced.
Where numerous works by one artist are to be reproduced at once, this is no
longer covered by the quotation right so that the publication of monographs
can actually be prevented if the artist concerned or his/her successors in title
refuse to grant permission to reproduce. In the meantime publishing
companies oen refrain from invoking the quotation right in case of doubt
since they worry that – especially successful – artists will not only sue them,
but also are in a beer position to assert their arguments in court with the
aid of good and expensive lawyers. A lost court case can even have
existential consequences for a small academic publisher, for whi reason
the decision is oen made not to embark at all on what might be a
problematic publication.
As different as the assessment may be as to whi prevention strategies
one considers plausible and whi scandalous, there is general agreement
that rights-holders are using copyright in order to influence the
interpretation and image-building of works of art and aritecture. Although
copyrights and exploitation rights were originally intended to enable
authors to glean pecuniary gains from their works, thus regulating the terms
under whi third parties may reproduce those works and possibly pursue
their own intention to make a profit, those same rights are increasingly
employed today in order to determine how the substance and meaning of
the works is documented in future. By determining the contexts in and
connotations with whi reproductions of their works appear, rights-holders
understand the reception of art and aritecture not as a process subsequent
to and independent of production, but, rather, as something that can still be
part of the process of creating both the work and the added value. Copyright
becomes a post-production tool.
Post-production played a role in earlier times as well. For example, artists
placed their works in the limelight by using a frame, a title, a plinth; certain
styles and programs were promoted, labeled and classified into art history
genealogies by critics and art writers at the request of artists; anecdotes
about artists were put into circulation and image strategies were otherwise
pursued just as passionately. Owing to the growing significance of the
media, it also became possible for artists to rea a broader audience for
their works, for example through interviews or home stories. One could
presumably establish through corresponding resear that many of the most
famous and most successful artists in particular always aempted to control
the reception of their oeuvre insofar and for as long as possible. eir
creative urge did not end the minute their signature was placed under a
work or the minute the work was sold, but, rather, extended to all situations
in whi the work, as an original or subject, appeared in the media.
Hence, deploying copyright in order to determine the history of reception
merely expands the repertoire of practices in artistic post-production that
have long since become customary. However, one difference should not be
overlooked. Whereas the previous forms of influencing reception were
aimed at the beer presentation of works, at lending them additional or new
nuances of meaning, or at enhancing their accentuation aer the fact,
copyright is now being used to prohibit certain forms of work reception, i.e.
to impede or even forbid others to participate in the reception of works.
When an aritect prohibits a photographer from shooting images of a
building from an independent perspective, he simultaneously prevents a new
work from being created in the photographs. When an academic is
prevented from publishing resear about an artist because the arguments
presented would be toothless or implausible without illustrative material,
the invoking of copyright by the artist is equivalent to the impairment or
even destruction of an aievement whi, if permied to exist, would on its
part be eligible for copyright on its own merits.
Hence the copyright of one person leads to a restriction on the freedom of
others so that the practices described constitute a unique and aggressive
form of artistic post-production. Since the majority of copyright provisions
have existed fundamentally unaltered for several generations, and since
forms of reception have been steered and prohibited using copyright
provisions only since the early twenty-first century, the question arises as to
the possible reasons for this relatively recent practice. For many years it was
the topos of the artist’s widow who as the dutiful executor of the estate
prohibited more than she permied and whose conduct was not difficult to
explain psyologically, but in the meantime a reception strategy aimed at
refusal has spread to entire sectors of artists and aritects whose conduct is
testimony less to strong emotions and more to a ange – and the
increasingly professional way – in how they view themselves and their
works.
In the meantime, therefore, a painter su as Markus Lüpertz seems old-
fashioned when he declares that a work of art “cannot be owned because it
is a balefield” and as su is “outside the law and unprotected,” and that
“no balefield is owned by any person.” Rather, everybody can do what he
wants there: “e artist wates unmoved because he wishes to neither force
nor influence maers” (Lüpertz 2005: 128; I would like to thank Isabel
Hufsmidt for drawing my aention to this quote). is is based on the
romantic idea that art is a public good since it expresses something that in
principle is relevant to all people. e balefield metaphor specifies the work
of art as being a place where various societal powers focus their oen
irreconcilable energies. e artist as a seismograph feels these powers to a
greater extent than others, and lends them expression. Since the artist is
oen unaware what is happening to him or her, the work created cannot be
considered his or her private property; as a genius (in his or her own
understanding) the artist is merely a medium of what is manifested in the
work. e work stands for itself, it is autonomous. e more outstanding the
work, the less it can be impaired by an unfamiliar context or a critical
interpretation, hence it does not require specific protection. Ideally it will
remain a balefield even as the object of reception.
e fact that an artist like Markus Lüpertz considers it unnecessary and
dishonorable to monitor and limit the reception of his works thus arises
from a strong understanding of the concept of a work. Many younger artists
no longer share this understanding. ey doubt that a work of art can really
be autonomous; rather, based on their experience and belief, the meaning of
a work is altered by ea individual context and association.
Correspondingly, an artist who takes his or her work seriously has to
develop context sensitivity in order to become aware in good time when the
perception of his or her work veers in a direction that contradicts his or her
intentions.
In addition to the concept of a work, the concept of art – and the artist –
has also become weaker. Many artists no longer understand themselves as
being geniuses, but, rather, as highly specialized developers of ideas, whose
professional image comes closer to that of aritects, designers, film
directors and fashion designers, at least as regards success in the market.
Based on their performance in creating works and designs, the artists
consider themselves to be the proprietors of their works and do not lose
interest in exercising a positive influence on their reputation and relevance
even aer the works have been sold. As the proprietors, they naturally avail
themselves of copyrights, and, especially because they no longer consider art
to be a public good, see no moral conflict when they prohibit reproductions
and prevent the broadest and most varied possible dissemination of their
works.
Furthermore, the consequence of proprietary claims is that questions
concerning the market value become more prominent. More than ever post-
production therefore pursues the aim of generating added value. e aim is
to place a work in the limelight so that it somehow appears superlative or
spectacular, in order to spark the interest of collectors who are thus able to
enhance their status in society. Hence a work is preferably reproduced in
exhibition or auction catalogues where critical, distanced texts are excluded
from the outset and where the creator of the work can oen exercise a direct
influence on the selection and substantive focus of the authors.
In fact, in the meantime the formation of public opinion on works of fine
art – contrary to works of literature and music – takes place almost
exclusively through publications aimed unilaterally at image optimization
and essentially constituting advertising. is might explain the restrictive
behavior of many artists, possibly even their understanding of copyright as a
right to control, if they are simply no longer used to independent articles
being wrien about themselves and their narrower artistic environment.
Perhaps they are not even particularly sensitive regarding criticism, but find
the idea of permiing the unconstrained reception of their works irritating
and somewhat disconcerting. In this their conduct is no different from that
of enterprises and the manufacturers of trademarked goods who for a long
time have assumed that the names, logos and corporate design elements
forming their own image shall only be put into the public sphere by
themselves, whereas ea and every other use, even without any commercial
baground, is strictly prohibited.
Furthermore, irrespective of substantive and contextual considerations, it
can be in the interest of creators not to publish reproductions of their works
too oen and particularly not too indiscriminately. e artist will then
remain rare and exclusive. Well-acquainted with market logics, artists have
acquired the “déformation professionelle” of considering scarcity as su to
be a value. For this reason they merely perpetuate what they have learned
when dealing with originals in the area of the photographic reproduction of
works.
In this respect it is not even necessary to prohibit a reproduction expressly
in order to prevent it – at least where the artist is not represented by a rights
management society. It is sufficient simply not to respond to requests made
– and this practice is becoming increasingly widespread. ere is a further
indication that creators wish to keep the number of reproductions of their
work small (instead of earning money with them). For example, at times
even professional photo editors find it difficult to locate the address of an
author or rights-holder. Instead of ensuring transparency and making it as
uncomplicated as possible to establish contact, it appears that artists would
rather play hide-and-seek, whilst art galleries oen refer to one another,
ea denying that they are competent in the maer. is causes some
queries and requests to fail; time and possibly money (for photo-editing
services) are lost. Authors are gradually learning from this and are geing
used to doing without images – whi is ultimately a success for creators
seeking to ensure scarcity.
Since artists and their works are becoming closer to other sectors su as
design and fashion not only in their understanding of themselves but also in
the consequences, whilst on the other hand art is still perceived as being
something special, strategies of scarcity are becoming increasingly popular.
e reason is that it is only where unique works or very small editions are
involved that the desired difference between works of fine art and designer
furniture or haute couture can be upheld, where in the laer case the size of
an edition is not usually determined in advance, but, rather, the industry
reacts flexibly to demand, unless it models itself on the arts industry.
However, this means that what is recognized as art depends more on
business models than on form and substance, thus allowing the market to
play a pivotal role. Whereas the previous mantra was that an object was
expensive because it was art (thus having unique qualities), nowadays the
reverse is oen true because something is deemed to be art because it is
expensive (only distinguished from other objects by a particularly high
price).
As an example, photography demonstrates what it means when a
business model originating from the art sector is adopted. It is common
knowledge that during the nineteenth century many photographers claimed
to produce works of art in their sector. ey therefore adjusted the
production and appearance of their images towards established art forms,
giving rise to the genre of pictorialism. However, since the 1970s, when
photography actually began to be recognized as an art form, adjustments
were preferably made towards art as regards product marketing. Although
there is no reason to limit the editions of photographs, no maer whether
analogue or digital, since infinite numbers of prints can be made tenically,
many photographers have succumbed to the philosophy of scarcity. All at
once photographs are produced in editions as small as those for bronze
statues, possibly even smaller than those for prints. A large number of
today’s most famous photographs only exist in editions of between three
and seven original prints (Mil 2016).
Ansel Adams is a contemporary witness of this ange, and his
autobiography contains critical remarks on su limitations. Admiedly, he
once succumbed and destroyed negatives aer having developed a pre-
determined number of 100 prints, yet he later regreed this (“I know now
that I was wrong”) and took the view that “the destruction of the negative I
believe to be an affectation, true to traditions of commerce, but not true to
the medium itself.” He also remarked: “I cannot accept the value of
artificially produced scarcity as more important than the value of creative
production” (Adams 1985: 305–306).
Adams considered the destruction of negatives to be particularly
disastrous because he believed they require interpretation, i.e. can be
transposed into positives very differently. In this respect he seemed
convinced that not only the photographer him-or herself but likewise other
people possibly equipped with beer tenology in future, would discover
ever new qualities in a negative and be able to produce a more impressive
translation: “If I could return in twenty years or so I would hope to see
astounding interpretations of my most expressive images” (p. 305). Yet the
isolated limitation of the edition prevents the potential of an image from
ever being realized. is means that the short-term commercial
consideration – the wish to increase profits through scarcity – ultimately
results in a permanent waiver of additional artistic options.
Adams’ argument can be set forth and transposed from the limitation of
originals to a restrictive policy when dealing with reproductions. e more
these are limited in quantity or even prohibited completely in certain
contexts, the less it is possible to discover whi qualities, meanings and
possibilities for interpretation there are in a work. Even where an author
compiles a critical analysis of a work, it may reveal strong points that
otherwise remain concealed; in addition, criticism could provoke objection,
leading to a debate that focuses solely on the relevant work, thus enhancing
its relevance. Vice versa, a perception threatens to become sterile and one-
sided where depictions of works are only permied at places aimed at
increasing the market value and image of an oeuvre; monotony rapidly
turns into tedium, whi ultimately harms the relevant work.
Indeed, it seems that a number of rights-holders are beginning to have
reservations as to whether a restrictive policy regarding reproduction
requests, i.e. the refusal to permit reproductions or the demand for
shoingly high fees for reproductions, could in the long term lead to
diminishing aention and hence to a drop in value. It was for this reason
that in February 2016 the Robert Rausenberg Foundation decided as the
first foundation of its kind to release Rausenberg’s works for science and
education, and for use on social media. In future – fully in line with the
original concept of copyright law – a reproduction permit is required and a
fee payable solely by a person wishing to use the works for commercial or
advertising purposes. e express intention of the foundation’s new strategy
is to aieve a broader dissemination of Rausenberg’s works (“it wants the
images to flow freely”) and for the artist to aieve an improved status in the
further art debate (Kennedy 2016).
It is also most likely that the decision was provoked by the fact that
through digitization and the emergence of social media in particular, novel
and virulent forms of handling images – and ultimately reproductions of
works – have arisen. Images are not only posted like postcards on platforms
su as Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook in order to communicate using
them, they are oen classified by different users according to diverse and
very surprising themes or formal qualities, placed into ever new
constellations, embellished with anging hashtags and hence meanings, are
oen modified digitally and used as the basis for memes, pictorial humor
and professions. Since this all takes place as a maer of course and
completely innocently, without anyone sparing a thought for copyright,
millions of copyright infringements are commied daily. e infringements
are so numerous that it is difficult to punish them consistently, as a result of
whi those who receive a formal warning notice consider it arbitrary and
unjustified to have to pay in order to use an image constituting a
copyrighted work.
Although it is hardly conceivable that the dynamic use of images in social
media will slow down even where formal warning notices are issued in
higher quantities than is presently the case, this does bring a profound
ange to the formalities on whi the development of the contents of a
collective memory and of a canon is based. Instead of an exclusive circle of
art collectors and art institutions, from now on a mu larger group of users
will determine whi works are visible, receive prominent aention, will be
appropriated in different ways, or even aieve the status of icons. Right
holders who aempt to stem the flow of images or regulate it hermetically
in order to uphold traditional practices of building-up an image or an
interpretation, therefore run the risk of falling behind competitors whose
actions are less restrictive, and in the worst case could even become
marginalized. As mu as the art market may pursue a policy of scarcity,
this policy is incompatible with the spirit of social media. Hence the art
business is currently confronted for the first time by a counterpart that
needs to be taken seriously, that in the mid-term could render all existing
business models obsolete.
However, it appears that this is not necessarily the case. Perhaps artists
and rights-holders will grasp the free flow of images on social media as a
ance to emphasize the exclusive nature of art. Specifically where images
are everywhere, scarcity can become a significant luxury. e discussion of
art can become something close to the practices of a sect; works that are to
be particularly significant will not be reproduced at all in future, possibly
not even displayed in public.
e present fees policies of the majority of rights management societies
could permit the conclusion that arcane practices are to control the art
sector. For example, the use of a work reproduced on a website is usually
considerably more expensive than reproduction in a print publication. e
difference arises essentially from the fact that a non-recurrent fee is payable
for print products, whereas monthly invoices are generally issued for
Internet publications, or a new licence is required aer one year.3 As a result
the fees accumulate quily into substantial – in some cases absurdly high,
unpayable – amounts. is practice is devoid of any logical foundation; aer
all, books are far more permanent products than websites, and are still in
circulation aer years or even decades. One might call the practices of the
rights management societies prohibitive; they evidently perceive the Internet
as a dirty, dubious place and wish to protect the authors and works they
represent against it. ey react to the wilderness of social media by
aempting to set up strictly exclusive reservations.
Have things come so far that art can only safeguard its special status by
increasingly deploying strategies for scarcity where both originals and
reproductions are concerned? And will the gigantic price hikes and turnover
thus aieved on the art market possibly be viewed with hindsight as a
manifestation of angst? As a hectic aempt to preserve traditional business
models whilst images in general and art in particular have become public
goods in the digital online world to an extent that is likely to have surprised
even the most ardent romantics?
It might soon become normal for authors who keep their works artificially
exclusive through unnecessarily limited editions and, in particular,
restrictions on reproductions, to meet with skepticism. eir conduct will
serve as an indication that the wish to succeed on the art market is stronger
than the wish to rea as many other people as possible, the wish to
encourage people to adopt a new perspective or to generate strong emotions,
and to ange society as a whole. Hence, prohibitions on images, whi are
not based on the fear of images and their effects, will be interpreted as proof
of the creators’ la of sense of artistic mission. e fact that the creators are
not interested in discussion and debate will be considered a weakness.
Finally, it will no longer be possible to dispel the suspicion that the works
rendered so exclusive and protected could be weak.

Notes

1 Translated into English by Catriona omas, MA MCIL, Karlsruhe, Germany.

2 e following article concerns cases brought to my aention since February 2016 through a
query I posed to colleagues via the arts network arthist.net. See:
hp://arthist.net/arive/12261.

3 Cf. e.g.
www.bildkunst.de/fileadmin/User_upload/downloads/pdf_tarife_2016/Internet_Tarif2016.pdf;
www.dacs.org.uk/licensing-works/price-lists/digital-publications-and-apps/other-digital-
uses.aspx#duration; www.arsny.com/read-me.

References

Adams, A. (1985) An Autobiography, New York: Lile, Brown & Company.

Kennedy, R. (2016) “Rausenberg Foundation Eases Copyright Restrictions
on Art”, New York Times, 28 February 2016, available at:
www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/arts/design/rausenberg-foundation-
eases-copyright-restrictions-on-art.html?_r=0 (Accessed: 9 November
2016).
Lüpertz, M. (2005) Der Kunst die Regeln geben: Ein Gespräch mit Heinrich
Heil, Züri: Ammann Verlag.
Mil, F.M. (2016) Die limitierte Auflage: Rechtsfragen zeitgenössischer
Fotokunst, Heidelberg University Press. Available at: hp://heiup.uni-
 heidelberg.de/catalog/book/102 (Accessed: 9 November 2016).
Öcal, T. (2013) “‘Imagines ad aemulationem excitant’ –Kunst-und
sozialtheoretise Überlegungen zu den Fälsungen Wolfgang
Beltracis im Fokus frühneuzeitlier Überbietungsdynamiken”, in:
Imago: Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Ästhetik 2, pp.
181–193.
Ullri, W. (2016) “Stellungnahme des Autors zu den Abbildungsverboten in
‘Siegerkunst. Neuer Adel, teure Lust’”. Available at:
hps://ideenfreiheit.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/siegerkunst-
stellungnahme1.pdf (Accessed: 2 November 2016).
Zöllner, F. (2013) “De-authentification and Authentification in and by the
Contemporary Art Market: e Case of Neo Rau”, in: Großmann, U.
and Krutis, P. (Eds.) The Challenge of the Object/Die Herausforderung
des Objekts. CIHA Congress Proceedings, Nuremberg, Vol. 2, pp. 735–737.
 6
Dissemination and Education
 6.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

e following apter is dedicated to the distribution of photography

through the classic annels—that is, exhibitions, books, and magazines, as
well as teaing. Needless to say, these days they are complemented (and
partly substituted) by the Internet, in the form of electronic books, websites
and online learning platforms. As social media and the future of
photography will be analyzed in depth in the next apter, the essays in this
part of the book will concentrate on the history of exhibitions, the revised
history of the photobook, a case study on a Japanese photography magazine,
one on a Spanish publishing project, and a historical perspective on
photography education, before looking at the future of photography
education, through Visual Literacy programs and MOOCs.
Alessandra Mauro’s book Photoshow (2014) provided us with a long-
awaited history of the photographic exhibition. It provides the answers to
questions su as “When was the first photography exhibition held?”, whi
actually cannot be answered in a simple way, as several events qualify in
different ways. More importantly, though, Mauro analyzes the raison d’être
of the photographic exhibition, as a montage of attractions, a term she
borrows from Sergei Eisenstein. While the first presentations of the medium
in libraries, auctions and showrooms, later at industrial fairs and World
exhibitions, and then in salon-style shows at Camera Clubs laed a
“curatorial” approa, the exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz’s Lile Galleries of
the Photo-Secession, active from 1905 until 1917, opened a new era for
photographic exhibitions. Other selected milestones in this history are
Edward Steien’s monumental Family of Man (1955), the project here is
new york (2011), The European Dream by Alessandro Penso (an itinerant
exhibition about migration that was set up in the inside of a tru, whi
drove from Greece to Brussels in 2013), or the installation Wall on Wall by
Kai Wiedenhöfer (2014). In comparison to traditional museum exhibitions of
painting, sculpture, drawings, and other original art works, a typical photo
show at a festival or art space is made up mainly of “exhibition prints.”
ese prints can be adapted to the space in terms of size, paper quality, and
mounting, and therefore can be quite unique pieces. However, it has become
common for them to be destroyed aer deinstallation of the show (Read
2008).
It has also become common practice to show photographic books
mounted on tables or in glass cases, along with the prints on the wall, or
even to concentrate an event on the book form alone. is is the case with
the photobook festivals that have popped up around the globe in the last few
years, from Melbourne to Moscow, from Kassel to Istanbul. ese festivals,
together with the fairs and book markets (su as the UNSEEN photobook
market, Cosmos, and Offprint), are vibrant and lively meeting points for the
photobook community, and showcases for the latest publications.
In addition, there is a growing interest in reinterpreting the history of
photography through the role of publications and printed photographs. A
particularly influential reinterpretation, whi has been crucial for the
renaissance of the medium and the formation of a true Photobook
Phenomenon, has been put forward by the photographer and collector
Martin Parr and the critic Gerry Badger, published in three volumes (2004,
2006 and 2014). We can speak of a neophyte field of what is currently
designated as “photobook” studies at least since Horacio Fernández’s
exhibition Fotografía pública: Photography in Print 1919–1939, in the Reina
Sofia Museum in Madrid in 1998. At a time when photography was
struggling to prove its status as Art and to enter the museum in the form of
ever-larger prints in massive frames, here was a show of loose pamphlets,
well-thumbed magazines and yellowed photography books: a true
“paradigm ange” that placed special emphasis on the “specific intrinsic
value of photobooks according to primarily aesthetic criteria” (Saden 2008:
439). Jose Luis Neves’ forthcoming dissertation will be the first resear
project to question and re-evaluate the hegemony of the terminological,
historical and ontological proposals developed by the general historicization
process of the “photographic book” initiated in the early 2000s. Neves
highlights the most significant historiographical and critical studies
dedicated to the study of photographic publications in book form, while
highlighting their contribution towards the construction of the identity of
that book production.
e interview with Martin Parr and Gerry Badger took place in Arles,
France, in 2016, during the Rencontres festival, and in the framework of
working together on the exhibition Photobook Phenomenon, whi opened
its doors in Barcelona, in Mar 2017. is exhibition, according to one
reviewer, “invites the audience to interact with its displays through digital
tenology,” and “doesn’t glorify print or imply that it’s of higher moral
standing than the web, but rather it reveals the curatorial value of the
photobook as distinct but just as worthy of discussion as exhibition design”
(Morley 2017). When Parr and Badger speak of a “revisionist” history of
photography through the photobook, they follow up on Horacio Fernández’s
argument that photobooks have been responsible for a good part of shis of
style and content maer in the history of photography, especially between
the 1950s and 1970s, the “golden age” of the photobook. It seems reasonable
to state that photographic books have significantly aided the acceptance of
photography as an art form and the establishment of many photographic
careers (Fernández 2017). But can we really speak of “two histories of
photography,” as Fernández claims, one composed of a “canon of
masterworks” and the other “in the form of books with nearly unlimited
(re-)editions, whi can be found in libraries, rather than museums”? e
major concern of solars su as Neves seems not so mu whether we can
write this alternative history of photography, but who is writing it, and how.
Photobooks also have a shared history with magazines. In Japan, for
example, photo-books were oen assembled from bodies of work that had
first appeared in magazines. Actually, from the 1950s to the 1990s this
practice was an outstanding aracteristic of Japanese photo publishing. A
prominent example is Shomei Tomatsu’s Nippon, released in 1967, whi
brought Tomatsu’s main serialisations from the end of 1950s to the mid-
1960s together in book form. Ea of these series is an independent body of
work and, at the time of their original publication, there was no plan to
compile them into one volume. It was not until years later that they were
organized into a single book with a very broad theme (Kaneko 2017).
Susumu Shimonishi presents a Case Study on Shoji Yamagishi, the
legendary editor of the Japanese photography magazine Camera Mainichi,
and co-curator of the exhibit New Japanese Photography, held at MoMA in
1974, with the participation of 15 Japanese photographers su as Eiko
Hosoe, Masahisa Fukase, and Daido Moriyama. Shimonishi’s article gives an
insight into the role of photography magazines in post-war Japan, with the
tragic anecdote of Robert Capa’s visit to Japan, shortly before he died. When
I first met Susumu, he did not speak a word of English, and our
conversations could only take place with the help of a translator, and a lot of
imagination. Now he is not only a fluent speaker of English, but also a
recognized solar and an admired artist. His resear of Yamagishi’s
arives is exemplary for a new interest of solars around the world in the
history of the printed image.
Today, more photobooks than ever before are produced, read, traded, and
collected. Independent publishing and self-publishing of books—as well as
fanzines—has become a phenomenon that has had a considerable impact on
contemporary culture (Neves 2015). ere is an evident return to the printed
page and the tangible object, even though we are at the height of the digital
era—or at least at the beginning. Today, many of the sales happen over the
Internet; marketing campaigns are done through social networks; and
financing oen uses crowd-funding. Consequently, bookstores that
specialized in the medium, su as Kowasa in Barcelona and Saden in
Cologne, had to close their doors, while more and more online distributors
are popping up. e strongest markets are still the US, Japan, Germany, the
Netherlands, France and the UK; however, in recent years Spain has become
one of the key players, at least in terms of production. Jesús Micó’s Kursala
Edition is an important part of that success story. In 2012, we were invited
together to talk at the Photobook Weekend in Bristol, and I asked him for
the transcription of his lecture, to make it accessible to a wider audience.
Apart from being a curator, Jesús is also a teaer of photography, whi
builds the bridge to the last three contributions to this apter.
Joan Fontcuberta once told me in an interview that for him, formal
education has always suffered from logocentrism, maybe due to historical
reasons. He claimed that “today, the politicians who run the administration
of education should realize that more and more of our experience of the
world is visual and consequently there should be an emphasis on the
education of visual content” (Fontcuberta 2012). Today, basic photographic
teniques can be easily learned from tutorials on the Internet, some
workshops and practice. What students of photography still need are people
who support them and give them input, advice, and courage—in fact, this is
maybe the single most important thing a teaer can do. Of course, it makes
a difference if we speak of photography as practice or as part of the
curriculum of humanities, art history and visual studies.
Peter Smith’s and Mielle Bogre’s pieces are complementary. When I
asked Mielle to contribute to this book, she proposed that Pete should
write on the historic context and she would dra a more manifesto-like text,
making the case for Visual Literacy as a means of making people fit for
understanding our world of images. Smith states that traditional sism
between theory and practice is now quite rare in universities where
photography education “is aracterized by responsiveness in ambitious
practice to critical theorization.” He highlights major anges in the
intellectual scope of photography education at university level from the late
1970s to the present day and underlines how key debates in the humanities
and social sciences entered the field of study. Finally, he anowledges the
alignment of identity politics with postmodernist photography, and
recognizes the role of New Photography eory.
Mielle Bogre’s text, on the other hand, deals with the idea that
photographic education is in crisis, and discusses the allenges it faces. She
starts by stating that photography education has been questioned and
criticized almost as long as it has been a field of study, and that, if there is a
problem in photo education, it is self-inflicted: “We cannot agree on the
definition of photography, so we can’t decide what we are teaing.” Her
main conclusion, similar to Fontcuberta’s, is that Photography is the
language of the twenty-first century, as we “now punctuate our texts with
images, not grammatical marks.” For Bogre, understanding how to read a
photograph is the new literacy, and only visually literate photography
students will be adaptable to whatever tenological or communication
anges the future holds (Bogre 2014).
One of the major anges in education is the use of Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs). While distance learning goes ba to the nineteenth
century (in fact, nearly the same year that photography was “invented”),
large-scale interactive participation and open access through the Web or
other network tenologies, are rather recent developments. e last piece in
this apter is Sara Bodinson and Sarah Meister’s description of MoMA’s
learning program Seeing through Photographs, whi was produced for the
Coursera platform and uses works from the Museum Collection as a point of
departure to encourage participants to look critically at photographs through
the some of the diverse ideas, approaes, and tenologies that inform their
making. I know both authors from when I was working at MoMA in the late
1990s, and they were kind enough to accept my invitation to contribute with
this case study that gives an insight into new learning strategies in a
museum context.
Finally, I am grateful to the ICP for the permission to print Robert Capa’s
lile known A Cook and a Woman in Atami, as well as to Tres Tipos
Gráficos for their images from the Kursala Edition, and Sara Bodinson for
the screenshots of the videos from MoMA’s Seeing through Photographs
program.

References

Bogre, M. (2014). Photography 4.0. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.

Fernández, H. (2017). e Library is the Museum. In: M. Neumüller, ed.,
Photobook Phenomenon. Barcelona: RM V erlag.
Fontcuberta, J. (2012). If ere is a Future for Photography, the Young
Talents that are Currently Going through the Sools are e Ones Who
are Going to Bring it to Us. In: M. Neumüller, ed., European Master of
Fine Art Photography. Madrid: IED Madrid.
Kaneko, R. (2017). Five Aspects of Japanese Photobooks. In: M. Neumüller,
ed., Photobook Phenomenon, Barcelona: RM Verlag.
Mauro, A. (2014). Photoshow. Turin: Contrasto.
Morley, M. (2017). Barcelona’s Photobook Phenomenon May Have the
Answer to Exhibiting Books. In: AIGA Eye on Design, June 29. Available
at: hps://eyeondesign.aiga.org/hasbarcelonas-photobook-phenomenon-
exhibition-got-the-answer-of-how-to-exhibitbooks/ (accessed November
4, 2017).
Neves, J. (2015). Photobook as Medium. Lecture at Photobook Week Aarhus,
October 2015, Aarhus, Denmark.
Read, S. (2008). Exhibiting Photography. Amsterdam: Focal Press.
Parr, M. and Badger, G. (2004, 2006, 2014). The Photobook: A History, vol. I, II
& III. London: Phaidon.
Saden, C. (2008). e Photobook: Comments on a Medium that Has Been
Largely Ignored by Photo-Historical Resear. In A. Auer and U. Sögl
(eds.), Jubilee: 30 Years ESHPh, Congress Minutes, Fotohof, Salzburg.

6.1 e Photographic Display

A Short History

Alessandra Mauro

e focus of my investigation is seeking in the history of photographic

exhibitions a potential, valid keystone to understand the history of
photography, its styles and its development. On this, I have published
Photoshow (Mauro 2014), a book that is organized as eleven case-histories in
the history of photographic exhibitions, ea marking a ange in style, in
overall perception, and in the way photography was used.
More than in books, it is perhaps in exhibitions that photography’s
principal raison d’être lies, its most definitively public moment; it comes out
in the open, musters its strength, puts itself on show – to demonstrate what
it is, what it can do, what it wants and is able to relate.
Edouard Manet apparently said that “to exhibit is to find friends and allies
for the struggle” (Pirani 2010: 7). In this sense, photography’s bales have
been particularly intense and have been fought to assert an identity above
all of a linguistic nature, and to reiterate a presence and a vital, at times
central, role in the representation of reality. Alfred Stieglitz was then to take
this further, considering photography exhibitions as a series of
“demonstrations”: of an idea, a particular vision, of a way osen to depict
the world or simply a story.
Nowadays, “considerations of exhibition are the focus of a current
reconfiguration of art history and curatorship” (Bruno 2007: 5). I therefore
propose to submit photography to the test of curatorial studies to verify – by
examining the objects in relation to their context, as omas McEvilley so
fiingly summarized it with regard to the ideology of the exhibition space
(1986: 7) – how the photographic language might react and to discover,
perhaps, that this very analysis might succeed in bringing to the surface,
almost revealing, part of its profound nature.

e First Years1

Photography has an official date of birth, confirmed by the Chamber of

Deputies of France, whi, on August 19 1839, purased the patent for the
reproduction of images. e principal actor of this deal was Louis Mandé
Daguerre, painter, set designer, and creator of the Diorama. However, there
were other participants in the race that took place in the first half of 1839,
with the objective of securing the rights for similar resear aimed at the
fixture of the latent photographic image. On the other side of the English
Channel, Henry Fox Talbot made great progress with his method while, in
Paris, Hippolyte Bayard was the Daguerre’s main competitor, proposing a
more innovative procedure to print on paper.
On January 25 1839, Henry Fox Talbot organized a first presentation of his
method at the Royal Institution of London. Talbot took advantage of the
Friday course, held by Miael Faraday, to announce his invention in front
of an audience of more than 300 people and asked Faraday’s permission to
organize an exhibition in the Library. is small show is considered the
foundational act, the first public demonstration of “writing with light”: a
strategy forged as a reaction to the voices from France that declared
Daguerre’s invention the basis of what would later be called photography.
In the meantime, in Paris, Hippolyte Bayard encountered difficulties in
promoting his tenique, as Arago and the Deputy Chamber supported
Daguerre’s approa. What was at stake in the summer of 1839 was not the
artistic status of the new tenique but its reception by the audience. On
June 24, Bayard presented 30 of his images at a Parisian arity sale to
collect funds for the victims of an earthquake on the island of Martinique,
an overseas region of France in the Caribbean. e showroom was full of
artwork su as engravings, sculptures and paintings. A few days later, July
7, Daguerre also organized a public exhibition: his “Daguerreotypes” were
shown in a strategic venue, adjacent to the Senate.
ese three episodes, whi take place over just seven months, between
London and Paris, on the one hand testify to the need to publicly show the
new discovery and its applications, on the other hand reveal three different
outcomes for photography and its destiny in terms of a social language: as a
scientific discovery, as a language of representation, and as a political
affirmation tool.
Yet, by the summer of 1839, the situation anged dramatically, and the
history of photography became that of the appearance of the images in the
urban space. In a short period of time, the new language appeared to lose its
exceptional aracter and joined the universe of mundane things, of
everyday life: Photography would be effectively used as a scientific tool and
the portraitists began to put the new invention at the service of politics.
 e art world stayed a photographic terra incognita for mu longer, and
the exhibition space became a allenge, from the moment the stakeholders
of photography decided to make it a means of legitimizing the artistic
potential of the photographic image despite its industrial context.
In 1851, the first Universal Exhibition took place at the Crystal Palace in
London and displayed no fewer than 700 photographs, made with different
teniques, and mainly from England, France and the US, where
photography and the daguerreotype in particular, were celebrating an
outstanding success. And when in 1855 the Universal Exhibition arrived in
Paris, there was a section dedicated to photography, curated by the new-
born Société Française de Photographie. Yet, again, there was no
autonomous status for this new language, and photography was considered
primarily a tenical curiosity, a scientific resource – the section is in fact
included among the “Produits de l’Industrie.”
World exhibitions emphasize on the one hand the power of the
photographic language, impossible to ignore, but on the other hand, the la
of awareness about what this new language was about and how to consider
it: art, science or both?
Only a year later, in 1856, also in Paris, a series of photographic
reproductions appeared in a side section of the Salon des Beaux-Arts. ey
were no longer Industrial Products, but a series of aievements to be
admired as artworks. Of course, it was only accessible through a side
entrance and with an extra tiet, but it was a partial takeover of awareness
that aroused critical acclaim among many visitors, including aracters su
as Baudelaire who could not comprehend the claim of a tenical process to
become art. e photograph, he said, is to painting what shorthand is to
writing: a tenique to go faster.
It took several years before the art world decided to see a specific
expression in photography. In 1858, the South Kensington Museum of
London – the current Victoria and Albert – opened the first photography
exhibition in a museum. e status quo was, and would remain for a long
time, to regard photography as somewhere in between street photography
and photographical resear.
 A New Awakening

It seems that the path to awareness has to go through the assimilation of

photography as an artistic expression. And if painters create reality using
brushes, palee and canvas, with their instruments photographers should be
able to not only reproduce but to transfigure reality, manipulating the results
of their accomplishments in the darkroom, or even on the positive print, as
well as proposing photomontages, as a testimony of personal creation more
than meanical reproduction.
From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the pictorial photography
exhibitions followed ea other and overlapped on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sools, circles, photography clubs and secessionist groups arose as a sign of
continuous resear for a specific identity of the photographic language. e
first international exhibition of pictorial photography took place in Vienna,
at the Camera Club in 1891: Photography now had general recognition and
could, in fact, even organize an international exhibition in the name of its
method and its tenique – in one word, its identity.
us, when the medium succeeded in affirming the autonomy of its own
language, it found its real awareness and, in this sense, the need to “prove”
its own creations, to organize them into a project that is useful for a larger
public, whi helps the photographic language to find its autonomous
dimension and its definite raison d’être.

e Photographic Exhibition as an Intimate and Passionate

Experience

In his article in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (Rand and Kouris 2007),
András Szántó declares that every exhibition tells a story. e device that
the curator must implement is thus of a narrative nature, capable of
convincing, of arousing pain or joy, of touing consciences, of transmiing
emotions. e talented curator should be aware of when the public needs to
be guided, when a pause is required, when it is necessary to prepare a
surprise. In short, the curator must prove himself to be an able storyteller.
Using the components at his disposal (the fixed images, the light that
illuminates them, the gallery space that contains them, and the movement of
the spectator within the space), the curator oen finds himself creating a
device that allows a sort of passionate perceptive involvement. e curator
realizes, so to speak, a sort of montage of attractions (to borrow the term
coined for Sergei Ėjzenštejn and his need to create a montage of innovative
and effective shots), capable of holding the aention of the public and
keeping it constantly alert through emotional shos, indispensable to
ensuring the narrative thread is not lost and that emotion remains intense.
e curator of photography exhibitions furthermore has to master the
fragmentation of images and skillfully work on proximity and distance, in
accordance with the construction of an itinerary (again, the reference is to
Ėjzenštejn and his parallel between cinematographic montage and
aritecture), in whi it is possible to assemble in sequential order a series
of phenomena that might resonate in the psye and in the memory of the
spectator, in order to define the exhibition narrative as an intimate personal
experience.
e photography exhibition as a personal experience, both powerful and
intimate, and its construction as a veritable montage of attractions was an
aievement of the twentieth century. e experiences of Alfred Stieglitz’s
Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, active from 1905 until 1917 (and
whi, for the sake of brevity, was soon to be known by all as 291, the street
number on Fih Avenue where it was located (Mauro 2014: 101–127,
Whelan 1997, Wilson 2009)) and of Edward Steien and his great thematic
exhibitions created and realized for the Museum of Modern Art in New York
– Road to Victory (1942) and The Family of Man (1955) – were to be
fundamental:
We are searing for the ultimate truth, for the human being who is simple in every way that he
can look at things objectively, with a purely analytical point of view. . . . And we believe the
camera is one of the most effective means of teaing people to distinguish between what is
beautiful and what is not.
 (Mauro 2014: 105–109)

It was thus, in an interview that appeared in 1908 in the New York

Morning Sun, that Alfred Stieglitz summed up the philosophy behind his
gallery 291 and its exhibition program. Everything in its rooms was to reflect
this declaration of intent. e exhibitions were designed and displayed to
allow the visitor to experience a sense of communion, through the works,
with the ultimate truth for the human being.
Innovating the tradition of thematic photography exhibitions, su as the
major collectives of the late nineteenth-century Pictorialists, Stieglitz ose
not to follow the traditional method of hanging, with its obvious
accumulative effect. At 291 the works were displayed only on the upper part
of the walls, in a single horizontal line and only rarely with one work placed
above another. Aer all, it was only at the turn of the century that, in
galleries, the relationship between the spectator and the photographic print
was totally transformed. No longer an industrial miracle, no longer the
collective endeavor of a group of amateurs, photography started to become
an object of artistic and economic value, capable of arousing emotion and
generating income or a collectable item. Just as with paintings, it was now a
maer of celebrating within a public space – or, in the case of 291, in a space
that aspired to become one – “the dual individuality of the author and of the
spectator, removed from any standardisation associated with quantity,” as
Olivier Lugon has commented (2012: 82). For Stieglitz, the exhibition was a
mystical and spiritually upliing experience; the exhibition space needed to
be austere, solemn, like a temple of whi he was the only high priest.
For Edward Steien, on the contrary, an exhibition was an experience
that could be enhanced by various stimuli, mental associations, poetic
syntheses. In the name of emotion, colors, objects, the arrangement of the
works could therefore be considered in an open-minded way. In his work as
a curator at MoMA, Steien was to point the way and to carve out for
himself – and in a certain sense, for the figure of the curator of photography
in general – the specific role of a narrator of grandiose stories in images,
stories with ethical meaning that taught, guided, entertained, amused and
moved. e lessons of the European avant-garde, and of Film und Foto above
all, were to be assimilated and reworked, American style.
In 1942, a year aer his appointment as director of the Department of
Photography at MoMA, the museum’s rooms were to host Road to Victory.
e idea was to create an exhibition that was not simply a piece of war
propaganda but, with the aid of photographs, one that would strengthen the
sense of nation and identity. Citizens were to feel themselves proudly part of
the national effort and, to provoke a strong emotional reaction, Steien
brought into play documentary photography. In addition, to help design the
installation, he also called upon Herbert Bayer, the Austrian-born graphic
designer and artist who had studied at the Bauhaus prior to emigrating to
the United States in 1938. According to this concept, the installation should
constitute a veritable experience for spectators, exposing them to multiple
perspectives capable of bringing into question their traditional view.
It was clearly necessary to evaluate carefully the way in whi the
visitors moved through the space and to restrict the spectator to a
predetermined path of circulation. During the installation, photography not
only permied the space and the tempo to be worked on, but also the
surface of the images and their distance from the spectator. e format of
the images could be altered: they could be enlarged, reduced, assault the
visitor or arm him.
Spatial dimensions, the scale of the images, juxtapositions: all of the
elements that several years later Edward Steien would draw upon for his
most important creation, The Family of Man. Inaugurated on 26 January
1955, the exhibition represented a conciliatory aempt to rediscover a
universal communion in the wake of the disasters and divisions of the
Second World War and thus to reaffirm an intrinsic and profound unity in
the world we inhabit. In other words, it was conceived as a highly emotional
whole, designed to arouse, in the sequence of images, a univocal and
universal memory of the present. e images varied in size and were
exhibited without frames, and oen mounted on Masonite panels cut flush
and painted bla around the edges. e installation was aracterized by
the use of transparent materials, light supporting structures and dramatic
lighting. e photos were aaed to beams or mounted on panels of
transparent plastic, hung directly from the ceiling or laid horizontally on the
floor. In some cases, enlargements were hung from above on ains that
could be moved or swung by the visitor. e texts were a further element
contributing greatly, and in an evocative way, to the emotional experience of
visiting the exhibition.
e visitor’s kinetic itinerary was thus strongly orientated: the telling of a
story capable of captivating and overwhelming. Many compared the visit to
The Family of Man (“the show you see with your heart,” as it was advertised
in the newspapers) to wating a film. Perhaps, in reality, it would be more
accurate to affirm the extent to whi this exhibition was a sort of visual
statement by the curator (Sandeen 2009: 471–486).
Steien himself was well aware of the limitations but also of the
resources he had at his disposal:
In the cinema and television, the image is revealed at a pace set by the director. In the exhibition
gallery, the visitor sets his own pace. He can go forward and then retreat, or hurry along,
according to his own impulse and mood as these are stimulated by the exhibition. In the creation
of su an exhibition, resources are brought into play that are not available elsewhere. . . . all these
permit the spectator an active participation that no other form of visual communication can give.
(Steichen 2009: 460)

Even now, we are the heirs of this same experience. e photography

curator invents, consciously or not, stories that are emotionally intense,
reversing or complicating an experience akin to one that is cinematographic,
seeking to transmit an intention into the space.

e Photographic Exhibition in the Digital Era

e arrival of digital tenology represents a major revolution in the way in

whi photography can be appreciated and above all shared. Today
photography no longer looks like a beautiful window on the world, with its
well-defined edges, but a way to document every single moment of our
lives.
 In recent years the power of photography has exploded, dispersing itself
into a thousand fragments, as many as the images from the Internet whi
compose our daily lives. At this point it is not a maer of qualifying a
language but to take it, use it, ew it, perhaps to create installations that
explore the new possibilities of communication in whi we live.
For example: who can tell the deep truth from a tragedy su as 9/11, who
is accredited in order to give a precise, solid narrative regarding su an
aa? According to the curators of the project here is new york, no one in
particular but everyone at the same level. ose who have “seen it,” who
have recorded a certain aspect of the tragedy with their cameras, and kept
that memory, who have filed it as an evidence of their own experience, were
thus capable of becoming reliable eyewitnesses, regarding those facts of that
day and the next ones, too. And all the visual testimony of that incident can
merge equally into a collective exhibition.
e opening of here is new york was held in New York City on September
25, 2011. A democracy of photographs in an exhibition, that witnessed the
tragedy of those days and, together, the possibility of a new form of
community that can rise from the ashes of that tragedy.
Everything started with an empty store in the SoHo neighborhood, near
the studio of Miael Shulan, an artist and art critic. Right aer the aa,
and with the help of three of his friends, he decided to summon all those
who, in those days, had taken photographs in the shoed City, and filled the
shop space with these images.
ey put together around 5000 photographs taken by 3000 people, both
professionals and amateurs. All images are digitally scanned or captured,
printed in the same format and hung on a cable without any frame or passe-
partout, against the windows and inside the store. e pictures were
available for sale with a unitary cost of $25, and the full amount went to the
Children’s Aid Society. e exhibition remained open for months with
incredible aendance by the public; a website was also created that collected
the photographs of the exhibition and a series of interventions and video
testimonials.
 e growing redefinition of the photographic media is based on the visual
experience of a drama that links public and private, on its democratic
construction, the use of digital, and the convergence of significant and
redundant images. Now that the possibility of sharing images has become
part of our lives, a series of installations ooses the flow of images, the
photographic source of the Internet, to tell our daily experiences. If the
accumulation of images on the Internet redefines the meaning of the visual
story, it redefines also the meaning of its organization in the exhibition
space.
e installation 24 Hrs in Photos, presented by Erik Kessels in 2011 at the
Foam Museum in Amsterdam and subsequently in various other venues,
works as an example of the new relation between the Internet and the
museum space, a discourse that needs to be renewed, and between the
production of images and the place designated for their enjoyment: Instead
of remaining in their social network, the images now invade the space, they
occupy the space physically, like waves of a rising tide. e visitors can
move between pictures, oose their favorites and try to guide themselves
through a visual flow that now is real, even walkable. ey have to build
their own path, whi might be difficult at times. In the exhibition hall, the
photographs become objects, items asking for new ways of interaction.

e Explosion of Photography

Photography has oen tried to define itself in a representative identity

comparable to art, to the point of demanding museums and exhibition
spaces for itself. But there is another story; the story of the photography that
consciously ooses non-canonical places and areas to show itself and even
to explode – literally – in the streets, squares and contaminate the life of the
cities. Photography is ductile, it can grow, shrink, adapt to communication
projects, propaganda, commercial spaces, like huge advertising, or public art.
In the nineteenth century, the cities covered with big posters were called
“open air museums” and today, in a similar way, photographic projects
explore this dimension and try different tools to share and dialogue, working
on the content and the container in a new way.
In this sense we can find a series of interventions where the context plays
a significant role in connecting deeply with the image content, to the point
of becoming, in a way, part of it. e project Rushes (1986–1987) by Alfredo
Jaar seems emblematic of this practice: Aer visiting the mine of Serra
Pelada in the Amazon, and having spoken with the miners regarding their
work conditions as well as photographing them, Jaar rented a whole subway
station in New York – on the line that runs through Wall Street – and
covered it with images of miners and posters showing the price of gold in
various markets around the world.
e intention is to “weld” the work of the miners to the reality of people
who work on Wall Street with links between stations and images. Where
there was a waste bin, for example, there he put a picture of waste. As the
station is very long, the “story” is broken into several fragments to allow
transit passengers to have an idea of the project. Not only does Jaar use an
unconventional space for photographic intervention but he also creates an
effective and essential relationship between the image and the context.
Here is another tra to be followed in the dissemination of photography:
the projects that – by oosing a different field of use – try to create a
particularly virtuous and above all necessary relationship between the
exhibition space and the photographic intervention. More recently, The
European Dream by Alessandro Penso (an itinerant exhibition – presented
in 2014 – about migration that was set up in the inside of a tru, whi
drove from Greece to Brussels) or the installation Wall on Wall by the
German photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer (who here covered some of the
remains of the Berlin Wall with pictures of other walls, su as the one in
Israel, and other atrocities of our time, su as the war in Syria) are just two
examples of authors following the same tra.
An exhibition, in summary, is the result of a directed device to provoke an
emotional experience in the visitors, an experience that is anneled by the
curator, as well as the author of the images. e intention is not only to
merely show the images, but to build a visual path for a personal experience.
e “passenger” of an exhibition, as Giuliana Bruno defines the visitor in her
Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007), is always directed
into a visual and thematic journey. us, the personal experience remains
the fly-wheel of an exhibition: since I have an experience, I redefine my
cultural territory as a visitor, the visual exploration to discover new
territories, and then, I share it. In our case, the experience is renewed in the
different relationship between images and context. I believe that this is a
path to travel, for those who want to create new photographic projects to
share and for those who want to study them. is, in essence, is the true
allenge for every curator.

Note

1 See Mauro (2014), in particular apters 1 and 3, by Pierre-Louis Roubert.

References

Bruno, G. (2007), Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lugon, O. (2012), “Entre l’affie et le monument. Le photomural dans les
années 1930”, in Exposition et Media: Photographie, Cinéma, Télévision,
Lausanne/Paris: L’Age d’Homme.
Mauro, A. (ed) (2014), Photoshow: Landmark Exhibitions that Defined the
History of Photography. London: ames & Hudson.
McEvilley, T. (1986), “Introduction to Brian O’Doherty”, in Inside the White
Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francisco: e Lapis Press.
Pirani, F. (2010), Che cos’è una mostra d’arte, Rome: Carocci.
Rand, S. and Kouris, H. (eds) (2007), Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating.
With essays by Sara Arrhenius, David Carrier, Kate Fowle, Boris Groys,
Dave Hiey, Geeta Kapur, Young Chul Lee, David Levi Strauss, Jean-
Hubert Martin, András Szántó. New York: apexart.
Sandeen, E. (2009), “‘e show you see with your heart’: The Family of Man
on tour in the Cold War world”, in Public Photographic Spaces:
Exhibition of Propaganda, from Pressa to e Family of Man, 1928–1955,
ed. Jorge Ribalta, Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Steien, E. (2009), “e Museum of Modern Art and The Family of Man”, in
Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibition of Propaganda, from Pressa to
e Family of Man, 1928–1955, ed. Jorge Ribalta, Barcelona: Museu d’Art
Contemporani de Barcelona.
Whelan, R. (1997), Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography, New York/Boston: Lile,
Brown & Company.
Wilson, K. (2009), The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the
Exhibition, 1925–1934, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University
Press.

6.2 e Revised History of the Photobook

Gerry Badger and Martin Parr in Conversation with Moritz

Neumuller
MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: Books seem to be a proven model of efficiency for presenting,
communicating and reading photographs. In the last fifteen years, they have also become widely
recognized as the best medium for presenting photographic sequences, by scholars as well as by the
photographers themselves. You have been very much involved in writing the history of what is now
commonly called the photobook. How important are photographic publications really for the
history of the medium?

GERRY BADGER: We always said that the Photobook is the natural home for photography. I
think Lewis Baltz once said that photography was a very narrow but deep area, somewhere
between the film and the novel, and I think the photobook exemplifies that. One always thinks of
photographs in series and I think the main practitioners from the 1930s onwards thought of
photography in that kind of sense, as a serial thing. You cannot really say mu with one
photograph but as soon as you put them together, they are like words; if you combine in a certain
way, you start to construct a narrative.
MARTIN PARR: Photography is the most democratic art in the world. We are all photographers
and therefore people are mu more into photography, because people are puing there images on
Instagram, on Flir, on Snapat, tweeting them, whatever. Although this is very satisfactory as a
general trend and a great way both for communicating and for finding a new audience,
disseminating your work to a specialized audience works very differently. When you want to
make a statement about your practice, it is mu beer to do it physically, to actually see the
images in a printed form. at has always been an integral part of the history of photography, and
people have understood and appreciated photography this way ever since. anks to tenology,
we can all make statements about the world, our relationship to it and add our own voice into this
continuing story.

GB: at’s the problem today: there is too mu photography around at the moment that is not
solid enough.

MP: You need a lot of bad books to understand a good one.

GB: A lot of young people would say that you are an old fogey . . .

MP: Of course! Anyone who does anything is accused of being an old fogey, of having become the
establishment! Look at all the kings of punk who are now the overseers. All right, the usual
suspect circuit! And we want more usual suspects to join us. Like Cristina de Middel, who came
from nowhere and has become a usual suspect, in a space of three or four years. I have never seen
anyone go from the unknown to an establishment figure so fast, don’t you think?

MN: The success of her photobook e Afronauts may have been the key to this steep career, and
the fact that you have supported her has certainly opened many doors.

MP: Sure. Actually, she just brought out the second edition of The Afronauts when she always
said she wouldn’t. In fact, she had signed my copy promising that there would never be a second
edition. But then, I also ange my mind from time to time . . .

MN: So, it seems reasonable to state that photographic books have significantly aided the
acceptance of photography as an art form and the establishment of many photographic careers.
Yet, you also claim that the photobook, more than any other physical or conceptual format of
photographic expression, has been responsible for a good part of the shifts of style and content
matter in the history of photography, especially between the 1950s and 1970s, the “golden age” of
the photobook. Can we really speak of “two histories of photography,” one composed of a “canon of
masterworks” and the other in the form of books which can be found in libraries, rather than
museums? For many, the History of the Photobook claims to be another history of photography . . .

MP: It is a revisionist history.

GB: It includes photographers su as Paolo Gasparini, who did great books, but not the kind of
work that would interest the Museum of Modern Art . . .

MP: is only shows the laziness of the people that run the museums of Europe and America, they
have a very closed view of what we all know and understand as the subjective history. You have
to allenge the ultimate laziness. One of the great mysteries of the photography book within the
context of the postwar period is that here you have this amazing thing happening in Japan in the
1960s and 1970s, where the books were completely revitalized. e vibrant, fantastic books were
being produced by brilliant designers and great photographers, and until thirty years aer, no one
in Europe or America bothered to understand how extraordinary that movement was. I look ba
at that and wonder how could that happen, how come we did not realize that there was a
revolution going on there, in terms of photographic publishing. We were arrogantly ignoring it!
Don’t you agree, Gerry?

GB: Szarkowski did a show and he misunderstood it!

MP: He did a show and he used some very good photographers, but he did not present and
ampion the book in that show . . .

GB: It did not fit into his idea of what photography was.

MP: We all know he was a great curator, but he had this blindspot, and ultimately his big
blindspot was, when he was one of the few people who actually understood that there was
something happening in Japan, when he presented it to MoMA, he ignored the photobook, whi
is its greatest aievement.

MN: However, in the last fifteen or twenty years, the appreciation for photographic books has risen
enormously, and your research, collecting and promoting of this medium have been essential for
this new understanding of the photobook.

MP: e appreciation and the status, the value of how we think about books has anged a lot. If
you have an exhibition or retrospective show of a photographer nowadays it is unthinkable not to
have a vitrine with all the books or publications of this author. Twenty or thirty years ago people
didn’t really do that, so automatically that is one thing that the museum world have taken on
board and they have appreciated how important that contribution is to a photographer’s career, or
to formulate a statement. at’s the kind of thing where you can see the manifestation of the
revival and renaissance of photography and publishing that wasn’t there twenty years ago.
Another thing that happened is that tenology has anged so now you make a print-on-demand
book whi then can become a trade book. It is surprising that—in the decade that has been
dominated by the Internet—the physical book has never been stronger and more appreciated.
Paradoxically, people oen learn about these books through the Internet.

GB: I keep hoping someone will eventually do an e-book that will break through the same way
that Klein’s New York did, but it has not been done yet.

MP: And if you go to photobook events like offprint in London at the Tate–and it is significant
that the Tate encourages this event–most of the audience are under 30. All these people were
brought up entirely in the digital age. And yet, they too seek out and collect physical books.

GB: A new awakening.

MP: It is quite interesting. And the “old fogey argument” will be soon disproved in terms of what
this new audience is. To see the vitality and the number of people, it’s quite incredible. Besides the
most sophisticated bookmarket whi is Europe, there is still Japan out there. Tokyo, in terms of
bookmaking and photography books, is remarkable.

MN: You are considered two of the main prophets of this new religion, would you agree?

MP: Well, clearly it has been one of the many positive contributions, but as you know we are not
the only people, there is Horacio Fernández, Andy Roth, as well as a lot of other researers and
collectors. I guess the thing about our three volumes is the fact that it gives the whole subject
some authority, because it has a solid structure and is well wrien, whi is of course the merit of
my dear friend Gerry Badger. It is a subjective view point, but objectivity has been given by our
collective experience, by studying the subject for many years, and by talking to many people.

GB: It was an intent to write the history of photography through the photobook, but not a history
of photobooks. A very important distinction.

MN: Horacio Fernández’s seminal exhibition Fotografía Pública: Photography in Print 1919–1939,
at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, also had an impact that has been widely recognized as a
paradigm shift, a catalyst and an inspiration for further research on the subject. You went to see
this show in Madrid, didn’t you?

MP: I went to see Horacio’s show in Madrid and it immediately piqued my interest. And then I
came across Andrew Roth, who basically came from the world of first editions of literature,
novels, etc. He saw an opening—photography books hadn’t really had the same aention as the
first editions of novels, so it was a huge market in America. us, he started to collect them to
promote them on the high end, so he made a book whi is almost like a blown-up sales catalog.
He might have seen Horacio’s book as it was about the same time he was producing that. When
Phaidon invited me to do a book about photobooks, I proposed Gerry as the writer and
coproducer. We inmediately realized that to do it properly we needed two volumes, and they
agreed to that, and so we worked on the first volume first, and the second volume second.

MN: And later you even made a third one.

MP: e third, you know, it took another eight years, before that really sort of came to be, but
clearly in that interim period so many good books were published that we had to react to that. If it
was meant to be a collection with some authority it would be irresponsible not to respond to the
new books as well as to the old books that we had rediscovered and also themes that we had not
pied up, protest being a prime example.

GB: Yes, protest books is one of the not so well-known areas of photography book production. In
the 1960s and 1970s, when there were a lot of protest movements in the world, many were
documented by photographers and they produced photobooks . . . sometimes to make money for
the cause, sometimes as a visual record. In the 1980s and 1990s, they slightly diminished, but quite
recently there has been a revival in protest book making, many of them self-published on a
shoestring budget, yet with a lot of imagination.
MN: So, protest books were born in times where the people went on the street to fight for their
rights, but they have lived a revival in the time of crowdfunding on the internet, so it is still a very
contemporary cultural product.

GB: Exactly. Occupy Wall Street and other movements of that kind are using this medium, as well
as the Arab Spring, and civil rights movements all around the world.

MN: Did the success of the first two volumes give you the liberty to pick up on themes that were
not in your focus at the beginning?

MP: Well, clearly the fact that the first two sold very well helped give faith that the third volume
would be a good idea. I think it surprised everybody how successful the books were. It is a strong
message that the books are still selling well because as more and more younger people come into
this market they want to go ba to an authority of voice, and that’s our contribution because it’s
a very inclusive but also revisionist history.

MN: It is very different from the books on books that concentrate only on one country or continent
. . . even if you have been involved in some of these projects, too, such as the Chinese and the Latin
American one.

MP: We really tried to cover the big picture and feature authors that have been overlooked; of
course we have excluded or forgoen many, but it’s a step in the right direction.

MN: You have willingly excluded your own books, haven’t you?

MP: Well, yes, there is a big argument about that. I think that if you are editing or curating a
project it’s just inconceivable that you can include yourself—it’s just arrogance beyond despair. I
said this is non-negotiable.

GB: ere are some books that we would have wanted to include, but then, you have to draw a
line somewhere, nothing could ever be totally comprehensive but the thing I would say about
volume 3 is that it was quite difficult to find the structure.

MP: Oh, yeah, there’s plenty we’ve missed. at’s the trouble as we are geing to be old men—
we’ve actually agreed on many books that were going to be in volume 3, but then we just forgot to
put them in . . .

GB: Not many, but you know, one or two.

MP: at could be volume 4 . . .

GB: Volume 4, the ones we forgot about! [Laughs]

MN: As mentioned before, one of the regional photobook histories you were involved in is the Latin
American Photobook, made by a team of Latin American and international curators, artists and
researchers. Their investigation was also a kind of treasure hunt, driven by the passion to discover
rare works, mixed with the passion of the academic scholar for the new and unknown.
Unfortunately, the fact that some books (and many others not) get “rescued” and recognized as
 masterworks, does not mean that they become more accessible to the general public. Then there is
the Chinese photobook, and now I think you are investigating countries such as Iran, and India.
How many white spots are there still on the map?

GB: Maybe there are still great undiscovered masterpieces out there, but Martin has now been
looking for twenty years to find these things.

MP: Forty years, darling.

GB: So there you are, there will be undiscovered books out there, but not so many. I think we now
are beginning to get a broad picture of the photobook as, not just even a European, American and
Japanese phenomenon, but a worldwide phenomenon. I think it is a good time to take a look at
what we’ve got.

MP: I would say this is the absolutely right time to do it because we had this renaissance for the
last twenty years. So in order to sort of continue this great story and this exciting movement we
need a time to look ba, to appreciate how it all happened, to see some of the great aievements
and for people to understand that this movement can carry on and that the new photography is
emerging from all over the world. e photobook really is the best way to get your message out, it
is not only the Internet but actually to have the physical book, because we can share this, it has a
smell and it’s almost like an antidote to our digital age. e younger people have really taken to
exploring and celebrating the physical book and passing it on to their friends, to their colleagues,
and it’s been an integral part of understanding our relationship to the world through photography.

6.3 Case Study on Shoji Yamagishi, Editor of the

Japanese Photography Magazine Camera Mainii
Susumu Shimonishi

Introduction

Camera magazines have shaped Japanese society in many ways – in

particular, Camera Mainichi, not only because it trained many
photographers, but also because it educated people as intellectual readers. In
Japan, camera magazines are for amateur photographers and people who
like taking photos for fun. It is easy for us to find a camera magazine that
has lile distinction from an art magazine. is is because they share similar
article types, i.e. photogravure, monthly photo contests, new camera ads,
and how to get the most out of your camera with different teniques.
However, we tend to call Camera Mainichi a photo magazine, instead of a
camera magazine.
During the 1960s and 1970s contemporary photography in Japan started to
develop. is era produced many photographers who are internationally
known today. At this time the photo director of Camera Mainichi was Shoji
Yamagishi (1928–1979), who acted as editor and editor-in-ief of the
magazine during that era.

e Spread of Cameras and the Beginning of Camera Magazines

in Japan

In early modern times Japan was one of the first modernized countries in
Asia and, due to that, some commercial photography studios were opened as
early as the 1860s. As a result of this modernization, the economic market in
Japan started growing and photography became more and more popular.
e first camera magazines published for the regular person were published
in the 1920s; however, they were forced to cease publishing in the early
1940s due to World War II.
Aer the war some camera magazines started to publish again. Many of
the military tenologies and facilities were being anged into peaceful
industries. Some of these were optical manufacturers – and many of them
started producing cameras. In the early 1960s, the Japanese optical industry
aieved rapid growth and some optical companies rose to pre-eminence in
the international camera market. us, in addition to the economic reasons
of post-war reconstruction, the Japanese optical industry is also considered
as a leading cause of the popularity of the camera magazine.
In April of 1954, two years aer the Treaty of San Francisco, Camera
Mainichi was launed (see Color Plate 41). Almost simultaneously, Sankei
Camera (1954–1959) was launed. us the beginning of a Japanese
economic miracle became apparent.
 Camera Mainichi invited the international photographer Robert Capa to
contribute to the first issue, and featured Capa and other Magnum
photographers on the first through the twelh issues. Capa’s street snaps in
Japan appeared in the second issue of Camera Mainichi. It was the first time
he had visited Japan. He arrived in Tokyo on April 13 and stayed for 20
days. However, this visit to Japan indirectly caused him the worst
misfortune.
Instead of supporting Capa’s wish to stay in Japan for two months, Life
magazine sent him on an assignment in Southeast Asia, to cover the Fren
advances in the First Indoina War. It was here that he stepped on a
landmine and died. erefore, in an odd way, Camera Mainichi was a
contributory factor in Capa’s death.

Shoji Yamagishi and Camera Mainii

In 1958, four years aer the first issue of Camera Mainichi, Shoji Yamagishi
(who would later become the ief editor) was assigned to be on the
editorial staff. He edited his pages of Camera Mainichi with a strong
personal tou and supported photographers who would later be known
internationally.
In fact, Yamagishi had begun his career at the Mainii Newspaper
Corporation as a cameraman. He obtained this position because he found
himself to be a good landscape photographer aer being in the
mountaineering club when he was in sool. However, due to the anging
times, he started working in the editorial staff.
Figure 6.1 A Cook and a Woman in Atami, Robert Capa. Credit: Susumu Shimonishi.

Figure 6.2 Camera Mainichi, June 1974 issue, page 39. Credit: Susumu Shimonishi.

With Yamagishi on the editorial staff, the pages of Camera Mainichi

slowly began to ange. He began to include stylish logos and cover images.
It was he who constructed the first pages and who made Camera Mainichi
into an inspiration for the readers. It contained texts from many critics and
writers, introduced new photographers, and showcased the work of
international artists, establishing a connection between novice and famous
photographers. He discovered many capable photographers, su as Daido
Moriyama. Moriyama showed Yamagishi his first works, Yokosuka.
Yamagishi told Moriyama, “Bring your photos whenever you take them; I
will publish them in Camera Mainichi,” and it was possibly due to this
support that Moriyama continued taking photos and became an established
photographer.
ere are many great stories about Yamagishi, and to give you a beer
sense of the man I shall share some with you. e first is about Camera
Mainishi’s April 1965 issue. Yamagishi was working on the presentation of
Yoshihiro Tatsuki’s Shitadashi Tenshi (Angels with Tongues Sticking Out).
Tatsuki’s work was to be on top of 65 pages of the issue as a special
appendix. It was a really special moment since nearly a fourth of the issue
would be dedicated to a single novice photographer’s work. Yamagishi did
the editing with only a few other coworkers from the editorial staff and the
printing factory – without leing his boss know at all. He prepared himself
to be fired or to leave the company for this oice, and kept a copy of his
resignation leer in his poet at all times. However, it was a success and
Tatsuki became a wildly popular photographer in Japan aer that crucial
issue.
e second story is about Yamagishi’s behavior: Apparently, he had a sort
of bossy aitude towards young photographers. As a result of his position
and experience, he had a good ability to judge photography. us, many
young photographers showed him their works, and he tore them up and
threw them away. In many cases it might have been because he just did not
understand them. However, some artists became terrified of him and called
him “e Emperor” behind his ba.
ere are many more comments one could make on him. However,
Yamagishi made the oices for the works contained in Camera Mainichi,
and edited the pages to contain his ideology of the best photographic options
for ea issue. Some respected him, some feared him, and rival camera
magazines aempted to follow the ideology he portrayed. Due to his
oices, photography had finally been livened up in Japan.
 Development of Contemporary Photography in Japan

Realism and commercial images showing female nudes were used in

abundance in the middle of the 1950s by Camera Mainichi. However, at this
point the photographic cooperative VIVO was formed, and things started to
ange. (Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, Akira
Tanno, and Shomei Tomatsu were active members of VIV O from 1959 to
1961.) Where unique expressions were represented, commercial photography
became refined and the pages were brilliantly renewed by the time the 1960s
came around.
Aer the 1960s, photographers su as Masahisa Fukase and Nobuyoshi
Araki who expressed imagery in the style of Shi shousetsu (I–Novel)
appeared. Fukase published multiple experimental pieces in Camera
Mainichi on a regular basis. Also, Araki oen sent invitations for his
exhibitions shown at alternative spaces and his self-published photobooks to
Camera Mainichi’s editorial staff.
Daido Moriyama’s first works appeared in Camera Mainichi in 1965, and
Provoke started their activities in 1968. Lee Friedlander, Duane Miael and
other major international photographers’ works were being introduced on
the pages of Camera Mainichi at this time. It started to become apparent
that photography was going to become a globally influenced art form.
In the 1970s, Yamagishi held exhibitions for Diane Arbus, Riard Avedon
and Peter Beard. is generated a large reaction within Japan. Besides
introducing international photographers, Yamagishi also helped to publish
books by Japanese photographers. One of especial note is Shomei Tomatsu’s
The Pencil of the Sun, one of the most important photobooks in Japanese art
history. e title is borrowed from Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature; Tomatsu
published his works in order every month in Camera Mainichi for two
years.
In addition, the Eizo–no–Gendai (Contemporary Images) series was also
edited by Yamagishi, whi was very important for Japanese art history.
is series contained ten photobooks by different artists (Ikko Narahara,
Shoji Ueda, Masahisa Fukase, Shomei Tomatsu, Akira Sato, Yoshihiro
Tatsuki, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Norio Yokosuka, Haruo Tomiyama, Daido
Moriyama); ea book contained one photographer’s work. Although they
did not initially sell very well, they soon became expensive items of art
within the US and European markets because of their fairly high degree of
“perfection,” and Japanese Photography became more and more important in
the international context.
During in the 1970s, Yamagishi’s interest in the United States also
developed and he sought to aieve advanced photographic expressionism
and exange of ideas through contact with American artists. erefore he
traveled oen to the US and created a relationship with John Szarkowski,
the curator of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art.
With Szarkowski, Yamagishi was able to develop and direct New Japanese
Photography, an exhibit held at MoMA in 1974, with the participation of 15
Japanese photographers including Eiko Hosoe, Masahisa Fukase, and Daido
Moriyama. Aer the success of this exhibition, Yamagishi curated Japan: A
Self-Portrait, held in 1979 at the International Center of Photography, whi
established a solid international reputation for Japanese photography.
Aer working for Camera Mainichi for almost 20 years, Yamagishi took
on the position of editor-in-ief in 1976. He had already become known as
a popularizer of new photographers and an international activist, before
taking this position. However, in 1978 he suddenly quit, aer only two years
in the position. It seems that he had been suffering from depression and had
a lot of stress due to his new position. Aer quiing he became a freelancer,
and started writing essays on an almost-monthly basis for Asahi Camera,
the rival magazine of the one at whi he had been working for 20 years.
His essay section was called “New Flankness”; it was sharp-wied and
strongly opinionated.
It was truly sad for the art world when Yamagishi hanged himself in July
of 1979, just a few days short of his fiy-first birthday. Yamagishi had
contributed major developments in terms of Japanese photography and news
of his death spread all over the world. Many friends, artists and curators
with whom he had developed relationships – among them Lee Friedlander
and John Szarkowski – wrote memorial pieces filled with sorrow for his
passing.
Aer Yamagishi was gone, Camera Mainichi anged their concept and
the popularity of the magazine halved. Kazuo Nishii, a junior colleague,
became editor-in-ief. He tried to revitalize and rebuild its popularity, but
the magazine continued to decline until it ceased publication in 1985.
It is unfortunate that there is no one who can seem to look into the art
world and act for Japanese photography as Yamagishi once did. To explain
the scale of the terrible loss, photography critic Kotaro Iizawa said that
Japan had fallen ten years behind in the photographic movement, aer the
death of Shoji Yamagishi.

Conclusion

By the time that Yamagishi died it had become common for the masses to
use instant cameras. Many started to buy single-use cameras in the 1980s
due to their easy availability. Digital cameras became hugely popular in the
mid-1990s. Creating photographs was just a push of a buon away for
anyone, and no one needed special skills to produce an image.
Currently, everyone takes photos with mobile phones, with no worries
about film cost or development. We are able to upload these photos to the
web and show everyone whatever we want. e entire concept of
photography has anged and the purpose of a photograph now is to appear
on a screen without printing, as photos are data instead of physical objects.
No one in Yamagishi’s time could have predicted the current situation of
the photographic industry. Ba then people put effort and strategy in every
image, whereas today, we just shoot and upload on a great scale. Looking
ba on Camera Mainichi during the 1960s and 1970s helps us to define the
history of the image and appreciate what Yamagishi did to help establish the
photographic medium as a contemporary art form.
 Further Reading

Asahi Camera, April 1978–September 1979, Tokyo: e Asahi Newspaper

Corporation. Original Japanese Title: 『アサヒカメラ』（1978年4月
号～1979年9月号）
Camera Mainichi, June 1954-April 1985, Tokyo: e Mainii Newspaper
Corporation. Original Japanese Title: 『カメラ毎日』(全巻1954年6月
号～1985年4月号)
Iizawa, K. 2009. Photologue, My Navi News. Available at:
hp://news.mynavi.jp/column/photologue/032/ (accessed October 25,
2017). Original Japanese Title: 飯沢耕太郎 『ウェブコラム：フォト
ローグ』マイナビニュース、 2009年
Nagano, S., Iizawa, K., and Kinoshita, N. (eds.) 1999. An Outline of the
History of Japanese Photography, Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten. Original
Japanese Title: 長野重一、飯沢耕太郎、 木下直之編『日本写真史
概説』（日本の写真家 全40巻別巻）岩波書店、1999年
Nishii, K. 2001. Homage to Shoji Yamagishi, Tokyo: Mado-sha. Original
Japanese Title: 西井一夫 『写真編集者 山岸章二へのオマージュ』
窓社、2001年
Noriko Tsutatani (ed.) 2003. Daido Moriyama: Hunter of Light, 1965–2003,
Shimane: Shimane Art Museum. Original Japanese Title:『光の狩人 森
山大道 1965–2003』 島根県立美術館、2003年
Szarkowski, J. and Yamagishi, S. (eds.) 1974. New Japanese Photography,
New York: e Museum of Modern Art.
e Photographic Society of Japan (eds.) 1971. The History of Japanese
Contemporary Photography, 1945–1995, Tokyo: Heibon-sha. Original
Japanese Title: 日本写真協会編『日本写真史 1840-1945』平凡社、
1971年
e Photographic Society of Japan (eds.) 2000. The History of Japanese
Contemporary Photography, 1945–1995, Tokyo: Heibon-sha. Original
Japanese Title: 日本写真協会編『日本現代写真史 1945-1995』平凡
社、2000年
 6.4 Case Study: Cuadernos De La Kursala
Jesús Micó

Transcription of a lecture given by Jesús Micó, for the Round Table session
on IBERICAN PHOTOBOOK, in the framework of PHOTOBOOK BRISTOL
festival, Friday, June 6, 2014.

Good aernoon. My talk will focus on a very specific and relevant maer, a
story that has to do with the situation of the photobook in Spain. What I
want to talk about is my strategy as a curator in a modest photo showroom
in a small provincial town in southern Spain named Cadiz. Don’t be
surprised: this work strategy, as you will find out in a few moments, is
heavily and intimately related to the question of the photobook, whi is
why I have been invited to this roundtable. I would like to point out that our
center, despite its modesty, has become a major benmark for emerging and
contemporary photography in Spain, as shown by many indicators that I
will not get into at the moment. It should suffice to mention the national and
international awards that some of our photobooks are receiving from centers
su as the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and PHotoEspaña festival, who
have invited us to be part of its official program, even though we are more
than 500 kilometers away from the location of the festival.
Our photography showroom is quite small and limited, so don’t imagine
it as a gallery or a museum. Its name is Kursala and it belongs to the
University of Cadiz (UCA). Cadiz is a provincial capital in the south of
Spain, the southernmost one near Morocco. It has just over one hundred
thousand inhabitants. e University is quite young and public. It doesn’t
offer degrees in Fine Arts or Art History. It has no official curriculum about
anything relating to art or photography. It just has a cultural department
that takes care of an extracurricular program in performing arts, music,
literature, film and studio art (including photography). e Kursala opened
in October 2007 and from the beginning, I realized that the main problem I
had with it was that it was located far away from the centers of the
contemporary Spanish art world. I was not looking for local success; that
didn’t interest me at all. Whi is why, from the beginning, I thought of a
special strategy (one very closely related to the photobook, whi, at this
time in Spain, was still nowhere near the phenomenon it is now). In October
2007, I already knew that recognition for the Kursala would have to come
from a photobook strategy and would require approximately five years to
rea a national level. Fortunately, it seems I was right. is is why I am
here today, whi fills me with pride and satisfaction (along with a huge
sense of gratitude).
As I mentioned, the big allenge for the UCA photography showroom is
not only that it is in the geographical periphery, but that it is also in the
cultural periphery of contemporary photography and art. We are not in
Madrid or Barcelona, not even in Seville or Granada, and therefore we are
far from major centers of development and cultural management. We are
nowhere near the great contemporary museums, galleries, large fairs and
festivals, that is, the institutions that promote and disseminate photography
in a serious way; even far from academic institutions, both private and
public that take this subject seriously. And, to make things worse, we do not
have a big budget because the UCA is a new public university that has to
address many areas of cultural extension and is not focused exclusively on
photography. As you can imagine with those two handicaps, the allenge of
trying to create an important work from within this cultural periphery was
considerable. It had to be solved with the application of three basic and
unavoidable resources. First, it had to be a very interesting, promising, and
experimental program, with new and emerging artists, rather than
established ones. Second, it had to be economically feasible without losing
quality (again, calling for emerging artists). And, third, to enter the Spanish
contemporary photography world, without forgeing that the primary
function of the showroom is to nurture, raise and feed the local art scene of
the city of Cadiz.
Before going into details, I should probably point out the fact that my
work in the Kursala is very peculiar, because I work 1000 kilometers away—
in Barcelona, at the opposite end of the country! us, I can only take care of
the curatorial and programming tasks (oosing artists and projects,
monitoring the work and the completion of the photobook, writing reviews
for the press, updating the contact list for the book mailing, etc.), and the
UCA does everything else. So it is really thanks to a small—but great—team
that things are moving forward. ey take care of payments, installing and
uninstalling, insurances and all the rest.
Having explained the structure, let me now concentrate on the strategy I
developed for the Kursala, the fundamental principles I established in direct
contact with the authors. First, creative and operational liberties for the
artist, but always in an intensive dialogue with me. at means that I
respect their freedom, but must give approval for everything, as it is me who
is ultimately responsible for the event. ere are artists who have to be more
supervised and guided than others, and some who work very autonomously
and do not have to be bothered at all.
Second, absolute respect for the emerging artist, in the sense of economic
and professional conditions. Everyone receives exactly the same, and there is
no distinction made between the creators. Production and catalogue is paid
for. So is insurance, transport, and installation. Invoices are paid
immediately, without any delay, despite being a public entity in a context of
slow administration. Allow me to state that I strongly believe that you have
to pay emerging artists before anyone else.
ird, as for the issue of photobooks, I am very mu interested in
supporting only small independent publishers, su as Bside books
(Barcelona and Madrid), Siete de un Golpe (Madrid), Fabulatorio (A
Coruña), Fiesta ediciones and PHREE (Madrid), Ca l’ Isidret and Standard
Books (Barcelona), and, of course, self-publishing (Cristina de Middel, Marta
Soul, etc.). I had to convince the UCA that the best way to place ourselves
on the radar of Spanish photography was to pay the author or publisher in
advance for catalogue production and let the books be produced in other
Spanish cities, rather than the official publication service of the university in
Cádiz. I also convinced them gradually that ea catalogue had to be a
different photobook. (e UCA initially preferred a one-size-fits-all type of
catalogue, just the opposite of what I wanted.) I knew my approa would
involve the production of small gems, for obvious reasons, but it required
prompt payments and that the UCA fully trusted the osen artists and me.
For the university, everything would have been easier and safer if they had
controlled the process and the printing directly. Yet, with only one
exception, the invited authors do not come from nor live in Cadiz, and it
was clear to me that ea photobook should be formalized and controlled
directly by the artist (from conception to physical production). It was clear
that ea photobook should be an independent product with a different
aesthetic and conceptual formalization adapted to the work of ea author.
Rather than a homogeneous collection of catalogues (I mean “catalogues” in
the sense of books that are a simple retransmission of the exposed work on
the walls), I wanted a heterogeneous collection of independent photobooks
(although ea of them is related to their respective exhibition at the
University, of course). Ea photobook must have a life of its own. e UCA
accepted in the end, and I think it was a success (the truth is I do not have
the slightest complaint about the UCA; on the contrary, they have given me
the opportunity to coordinate the Kursala project the way I wanted to from
the beginning).
With the photobook, the author is free to do what they see fit as long as
they meet with me—even just electronically—and we study the idea
together, discuss it, talk about it. Only then, aer the dialogue, do I give my
approval to the previous stages and of course, the final version. I gladly
accept and even encourage all kinds of risks provided we have agreed on
them previously. Risks regarding concept, graphic design, content,
production, etc. Only by taking risks will you get results su as the
Cuadernos de la Kursala (Kursala’s Notebooks), whi are obtaining not
only national but also international awards. e Cuadernos de la Kursala
collection keeps on receiving anowledgments. Many of these volumes
have been selected for the Best Photobook Award, organized annually by
PHotoEspaña. Some of the osen works are Afronauts, by Cristina Middel;
Noray, by Juan Valbuena; Furtivos, by Vicente Paredes; and Idilios, by Marta
Soul. e truth is that virtually all the books we have published lately have
been selected. In that contest we competed with the big photobook
publishers. Because of this, being selected is already a great success. In
previous years we already had some runners with the works of Ricardo
Cases (The Hunt of the Frozen Wolf), Federico Clavarino (Ukrainian
Passport) and Camino Laguillo (Inward). e Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid
has made an exhibition (lasting until September 2014) of the best Spanish
photobooks and ose 11 of our volumes. e Fotocolectania Foundation in
Barcelona is currently presenting nine of our authors (of the 21 selected). In
addition, catalogues su as Cristina de Middel’s have already won other
awards. Afronauts was the most voted work on Photo Eye as Best Book of
2012. As you know, it is the most complete list of experts’ favorite books.
is same work was also a finalist (along with Chris Killip, Mishka Henner
and Broomberg & Chanarin) for the Deutse Börse Prize. And it was
honored at the International Center of Photography of New York (Infinity
Award for Best Publication of the Year 2012). Afronauts, whi is now being
sold for thousands of dollars on the Internet, was also included in the last
volume of Martin Parr’s A Photo Book History. Ostalgia by Simona Rota has
also been osen by the ICP in New York as one of the top ten best books of
2013 and has been awarded the D&AD Awards in London (Design and Art
Direction Awards) in the Entire Books category.
So, as I was saying, I proposed this freedom with photobooks to the UCA
for obvious reasons: this symbiosis (given that everyone wins) would allow,
on one hand, the Kursala to benefit from more interesting, polished and
personal publications, treated with the care that the author gives to their
own product and, on the other, the young artist to, if desired, add funding
(personal or through sponsors: we accept crowdfunding) to create a more
elaborate book. For a lile more money than the UCA offers for the
catalogue, a young photographer may have his first book on the street. e
catalogues are an integrated part of a collection, Los Cuadernos de la
Kursala, numbered ronologically. e UCA sends them free of arge to
an important personal mailing list that I manage, extend and constantly
update. I stress this point because it is the basis for the success that the
Kursala has come to garner. I think that one of the most important tasks of
my work in the Kursala is to make its policy known in the main sectors of
photography of the Spanish State. I’m talking about that third point of the
fundamental work strategy that I mentioned before, the fundamental and
most important strategy: the Kursala’s extra-peripheral projection, its
departure from the local, the provincial, the regional, even the autonomic
(federal), to rea what I call the core of contemporary Spanish photography.
And I succeeded thanks to that mailing’s performance. I mean that the
catalogue is sent (repeat: free) to a large number of journalists, curators,
critics, gallery owners, gallery directors and photography teaers,
researers, publishers, theorists, collectors, artists and other recipients
connected with photography in any way. I am aware that this is the only
way to put the Kursala in the map of contemporary Spanish photography. If
we consider that, as I said, the budget is quite limited and the showroom is
in a city in the periphery, it is very difficult to get media coverage beyond
the local news. at is why I explained that the UCA wanted to direct the
programming of the room if we produced enough photobooks to meet the
needs of this specialized mailing throughout Spain. Without these
specialized recipients having news of what was exhibited in Cadiz, I could
not get what I wanted for the Kursala: the key for me was the allenge of
making a “minor” and peripheral showroom become a well-known
showroom with a clearly identifiable line, in this case contemporary
photography by emerging authors. at allenge was stimulating to me.
Without it, the project would not have sparked my interest. e specialized
mailing work is also essential to give the artist another good consideration
for the fact of exhibiting their work in a peripheral showroom without mu
budget—although, paradoxically, I oen find that we treat the authors with
far more dignity that many other consecrated showrooms.
e photographs are not for sale (we are not a gallery and we do not have
those functions or capacities) but we do put prospective buyers directly in
contact with our artists. We do not sell the photobooks either, but we do
encourage and are delighted if the artist sells their publications and extends
the print run. Regarding the programming (and here I re-emphasize the first
two points of the triple action strategy that I mentioned above), as the initial
conditions are already outlined stating that we are a peripheral showroom
without an excessive budget, I ose to use these modest resources in a
specific direction, that of programming young artists who rarely

Figure 6.3 Kursala Editions, L, 2016. Credit: Tres Tipos Gráficos.

have access to a solo exhibition at a decent showroom and to the publication

of a book (a book whi also comes with that advantage of its specialized
diffusion). Authors who, on the other hand, have works that do not envy
those of any consecrated artist. Furthermore, it is very nice to work with
these artists, as they are generally very receptive to the project room and
always find solutions to the inevitable problems that any exhibition carries. I
always end up seeing the scope of a young artist not only in the work that I
request for the show, but also in their mood at the production and
installation stages, their ways in the backstage. On the other hand, to work
on a young line of programming involves a higher risk since you do not
have the support you can get in all fields when with the presence of
consecrated authors.
Anyway, I do not want to dwell more nor bore you with this issue about
the strategic bases of operation and conception of the Kursala. I prefer to
finish showing some of the photobooks and works presented in the
showroom. I remind you that you can—legally—download all catalogues of
the Cuadernos de la Kursala collection in a PDF with more images and
critical texts about the authors, as well as their biographies. We do not have
a website or any other web presence since there is no money for its
production nor for its permanent update. So if you want the catalogues, I
urge you to just use a sear engine on the web and find them. ank you
all very mu for your aention.

Editor’s note: Despite the fact that it was published in 2016, two years aer
this spee was delivered, we have decided to include images from the
fiieth catalog of the Cuadernos de la Kursala collection, as Color Plates 42–
44 and Figure 6.3.

6.5 Photogaphy eories and Photography

Education: In Historical Perspective
Peter Smith

Introduction
is apter presents a critical reassessment of the anging role of
photography theory in Higher Education. While writing from a British
perspective, it takes into account American and European traditions and
tendencies as well. In the first part of the apter I discuss the rise of theory
and new methods of teaing in the late twentieth century. I want to show
how far photography education was anged by political engagement with
the ideological functions of the medium across a range of institutional
practices including art, commerce, journalism, and the academic field itself.
In the second part of the apter I discuss the perception that in some of its
most hegemonic forms, photography theory vitiated the medium’s social
basis by undermining its realist properties.

New Photography eory

e solarly side of photography has an uneven history. Photographers

oen think that students should sti to “doing” rather than “thinking”. e
traditional sism between theory and practice, however, is now quite rare
in universities where photography education, at the highest level, is
aracterized by responsiveness in ambitious practice to critical theorization.
On the practice side tenology is always a resource issue since photography
teaing struggles to keep up with anging skills requirements and the
revolution in mobile telecommunications. Photography education since the
mid-twentieth century is not, however, as we are oen told, a purely
tenological excursus. e new tenological environment raises many
issues and yet photography can still be mapped onto a longer history of the
medium (Lister 2013: 3). Mu current debate has focused on the outmoded
status of photography and yet at the very point when computerized
dispersal of the image, and digital manipulation, became a threat to the
identity of the medium, it aieved a new lease of life: “Photography . . . is
booming like never before, both in terms of quantity produced and the
multiplicity of new tenologies and practices” (Elo 2013: 91). e
acceleration of tenological ange has, moreover, stirred up new interest
in photography as a key site for academic and artistic resear. As images
(including photographs) are involved in the thinking process, in mu
disputed ways, we note a turn to self-reflection and philosophical enquiry as
constituent parts of photography education. Ideally, we may say students are
encouraged to broaden their knowledge so that cultural reference is built
into practice as a basic requirement in photographic higher education. I
therefore argue the main anges in photography education have resulted
from raised levels of intellectual debate and greater awareness of the social
potential of the medium in a anging world.
e compounding of theory and practice in and around conceptual art in
the late 1960s and 1970s had important implications for art and photography
education. Dissolving old lines of opposition between “doers” and “thinkers”
stimulated art market interest in the prospects of a photography-centered
avant-garde and raised the medium’s intellectual profile as well. e
“theoretical turn” that followed the emergence of conceptualism was a
allenge to the traditional theory–practice dualism. e taste for ordinary
communication media, incorporating the use of words, linked conceptualism
with a collective world of spee, social action and everyday life. e
political content and aesthetic strategies in the work of the historical avant-
garde had a specific relevance in the 1960s for student activists. More
specifically pre-war modernism, with its belief in the tenological prowess
of the camera, contributed to the idea of photography as an important
element in art education in later decades. László Moholy-Nagy had already
established the New Bauhaus in exile at Chicago in 1937, where
photography was taught in the Photo and Film Workshop established at the
Institute of Design in 1944. Versions of Bauhaus teaing methodologies
with an emphasis on cra skill and experimentation were to be found in the
most progressive sools of art and design in Britain, some parts of Europe
and in the United States in the post-war period. e political vision that
accompanied photography as an instrument of social and political
transformation between the two World Wars, however, was displaced or
consciously elided in the period of post-war social and ideological
reconstruction. Photographic teniques of close-up, oblique-angled shots,
unconventional viewpoints and photomontage associated with the emergent
forms of militant modernism in the 1920s and 1930s were assimilated into
the mainstream lexicon of styles in advertising photography and more
widely in commercial design and propaganda (Smith and Lefley 2016: 304–
308).
Key anges in photography education since the middle years of the last
century have been driven by the perceived need to bridge the gap between
solarly and intuitive modes of knowledge. Alan Tratenberg’s remarks on
a discipline laing “critical intelligence regarding the medium” (1980: viii),
is a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of photography and marks the
beginning of a sea ange in photography education. Tratenberg was
possibly exaggerating to make a point. His anthology, nevertheless, was
timely and effective since mu of what passed for photography theory at
this time was uncritical and intellectually limiting.
Photography has never been without theorists. Histories of the medium
are dominated by speculation on what it is and how it relates to the wider
world. Changes occurring in the 1970s were inspired by recently translated
writings of European critics including Roland Barthes, Miel Foucault, and
Walter Benjamin. ese writers provided synthesis of aesthetic theory and
leist cultural politics, a critical analysis of words in relation to photographs
(Barthes), ways of making photographs aieve a revolutionary use value
(Benjamin), and recognition of the institutional control of photographic
meaning (Foucault). Key anges in photography education in this period
were aributable to the way in whi photographers allenged institutional
boundaries and demanded a new seriousness in the level of discussion. e
names associated with this ange include Victor Burgin, Jo Spence, John
Tagg, Simon Watney, Peter Wollen and others in Britain, as well as Martha
Rosler and Allan Sekula and others in the United States. ese artists,
photographers and critics broadened the field of study, elevated the status of
the discipline within the academy and redefined the curriculum at key
institutions. e compact between critical theory and photography was also
contemporaneously explored in the writing of Douglas Crimp, ierry de
Duve, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owen and others in the pioneering journal
October, in the United States from the late 1970s. Alignment between theory
and social radicalism in the arts was a common theme amongst the new
critics in this period. For convenience we have called this international
cohort the New Photography eorists (Smith and Lefley 2016: 221–22).
e “theoretical turn” of the 1980s had many consequences. One in
particular was the re-orientation of photography (as art and as documentary
practice) towards a more systematic engagement with interpretive
frameworks and social relationships of power. New critics and practitioners
saw culture as the site of contestation and struggle between socially
divergent interests. Photography in this perspective is a constituent part of a
wider culture – a network of disciplinary institutions – in whi inequalities
of social class, gender, race and other identity formations have an ideological
effect on its operation. e New Photography eorist would no longer
accept, at face value, the truth claims of the photograph, nor any claims for
the special nature of the medium. He or she would seek its true meaning in
the discourses that surround it and the institutions that circulate it. e
historical and ontological complexity of the medium would demand
investigation of its “common sense” artistic and documentary functions.
Su ideas must have seemed light-years away from established conceptions
of photography as an unmediated or expressive process.
Photography, as a stand-alone subject, was taught in very few academic
institutions in Britain and wherever the subject had a presence within
American sools at this time it was oen a supplementary pathway within
other programs. Post-war expansion in photography education was
influenced by the burgeoning culture industries. e upgrading of
photography from a trade to a profession paralleled its shi from journalism
to fine art programs at leading institutions in the United States (Stuart 2006:
34). e specific issue of the quality and content of photographic textbooks
in the post-war period is beyond the scope of this apter but suffice to say
the intellectual range of available literature was limited. ere was an
abundance of photo-tenical literature and case study textbooks on generic
subjects su as the nude, landscape, portraiture, ildren and group
compositions. ese “look and learn” manuals showed lile if any interest in
the semiotic value of their materials or the disciplinary framing of their
image content. As su they reveal the intellectual paucity of academic
provision in photography education in the post-war period. e great
exception to what appeared to be an intellectual dead-end were English-
language translations of key Bauhaus texts focused on the theoretical and
social aspects of art, design and photography. Reissued and original books
from the 1930s and 1940s by didactic figures su as Moholy-Nagy and
György Kepes had an important influence on art sool curricula in this
period, albeit in de-fanged, politically neutralized readings. As one critic has
observed, “America aer the Second World War was hardly a hospitable
environment in whi to transplant even the bien pensant Leism of the
Dessau Bauhaus” (Solomon-Godeau 1997: 74). e Bauhaus legacy le an
indelible mark on visual arts education in Britain and the United States but
its wider social aims were largely ignored in the cold-war push for industrial
regeneration and anti-communist political containment.
e provision of photography education in the 1950s and 1960s was linked
to the exponential growth of advertising, fashion and journalism. A wide
range of programs in art and photography were validated at newly
designated polytenics in Britain in the 1960s. It was specifically these new
courses that were later aaed as “unthinking” and intellectually limiting.
For a new generation influenced by the revolutionary politics of the late
1960s su courses had lile to offer beyond “narrowly tenicist” (Burgin
1982: 4) approaes and haneyed notions of camera vision. In this context
“theory” was oen lile more than poed histories of photo-pioneers with
lile interest in the mediating influence of economic factors or the
relativities of aesthetic judgment. Studio training, according to one observer,
was untroubled by intellectual interests:
Su studio training is unlikely to offer mu in the way of say, “News” photography, or Page
ree pin-ups, or Fine Art Practices. For behind all the discussions of style, lighting, and so on, the
student’s work will ultimately be judged in relation to client satisfaction and sales returns in
markets whose values and practices remain unquestioned.
(Watney 1986: 55)
 New Photography eorists asked what seemed to be new kinds of
questions: How does photography produce meaning? What are its psyic
and social functions? How far is photography inscribed in the ideological
apparatus that regulates its circulation and defines it, or in what measure,
and by what means, does photography construct subject positions as defined
by ideology? In what measure is human subjectivity gratified or repressed
by linguistic or other representational systems through whi it is
constituted?
is approa, also known as subject-position theory, allenges the idea
that photographs are somehow “neutral and above ideology” (Bolton 1989:
xv). Its investigatory methods are focused on institutional sites and practices
including museums, sools, advertising, fashion, news networks and more
broadly agencies of state power and social regulation. e emergence of
Cultural Studies in the 1980s, a more accessible and “applied” version of
subject-position theory, steered the humanities away from the favored sites
of high culture towards a study of the mass media and consumerism. e
shi to critical analysis of popular culture reflected intellectualist mistrust of
images that intensified in this period. e identification of the medium with
the most visible forms of ideological petitioning su as advertising and
journalism confirmed this perspective. John Tagg underlined his views on
the duplicity of the photo-document: “documentary came to denote a
discursive formation . . . whi appropriated photographic tenology to a
central and privileged place within its rhetoric of immediacy and truth”
(Tagg 1988: 8, my emphasis).
To say that photographs are rhetorical forms and their truth-telling claims
can be allenged is an obvious caution; critical analysis of manipulation
and artifice are necessary. e manipulative tropes of the medium are,
nevertheless, atypical and serve only to confirm its evidential power when
and if they act against it. e critic Susie Linfield’s argument that
“photography is a great democratic medium” (Linfield 2012: 13) makes a
sharp contrast with subject-position theory laboring the point that cultural
production is subsumed under dominant power relations. e monolithic
idea of photography’s repressive power became increasingly problematic in
teaing practice in the period when the ideas of the New Photography
eorists held sway. Anxiety about photography as a recuperated project
with an identity crisis provoked “returns” to pictorial styles in art
photography (Wall 1995) and politicized defense of documentary
photography (Levi Strauss 2003).
A skeptical aitude to the truth-telling properties of photography and the
distrust of documentary form were generated by legendary claims to
legitimacy on the basis of visual evidence alone – that is without recourse to
language or other contextualizing factors. It was thus argued that
photographs are constructed objects that may comply with or reinforce
established ways of seeing the world. is was of course highly contentious
for defenders of a value-free notion of photographic education and the
uncritical believers in photographic truth. e art historian Ian Jeffrey was
amongst the few to question what he viewed as an unsympathetic
assessment of photography by the new theorists. In particular he questioned
the skeptical aitude to the evidential force of the photograph that, he felt,
had been undermined by critics su as Burgin (Britain 1999).
Tagg and Burgin’s provocations were, nevertheless, brilliantly pited
against the academic establishment. Laing even the barest intellectual
credentials many photographers were unable to defend themselves. ree
kinds of practice were targeted by the new critics: firstly, art photography
destined for the salerooms of high culture; secondly, photography complicit
with advertising and commercial cultures; and thirdly, photojournalism.
eir approa was informed by a sear for critical methods that would
displace what Burgin dismissively called “assertions of opinions and
assumptions paraded as if their authority were unquestionable” (Burgin
1982: 3). Photography criticism and history, he claimed, was plagued by
“private rather than social realities” (ibid.: 40) conjured up by the unique
vision of the artist. New Photography eorists opposed this with a program
of demystification and a demand for the submission of photography (in all
its forms) to the suspicious eyes and the critical mind-set of the theorist.
ere is, of course, more to it than that. It is one thing to distrust images
in the manner of Burgin; it is another to elide or weaken their causal
connection with things in the world and the meanings they have for their
users. We may, for example, wish to step ba from a position of doubt and
accept that photographs have a certain resistance (1) to theoretical
translation and (2) to structures of meaning including surrounding texts and
language more generally. As a critical and reflexive response to New
Photography eory we offer the provocation that photographs have a life
outside verbal discourse. is is the great strength of the medium and in
recognizing this we are saying that the anti-realist thrust of New
Photography eory always tended to underrate the distinctiveness of the
photographic image. We accept that photographs are constructions but they
have other qualities determined by their contact with the world. In this view
the potential for recognizing the “non-conventional” element in a
photograph (what the photograph is of) and the way it can create a sho of
proximity in the viewer is what defines it. A consequence of this view is
evident in the way that memory, history and autobiography are themes
whi generate new photographic practices and critical discourse in the
current period (Prosser 2005).
We know photographs may function in undifferentiated ways as images
(like drawings and illustrations). ey are, nevertheless, special types of
images with unique capacities. A photograph is a record of a past reality and
its status is that of an unmediated imprint. Its primordial effect therefore is
reference and its emphasis must therefore be: “is happened!” rather than,
“is image/text means”. Emotional response may not be registered when
run-of-the-mill pictures pass us by and yet we are vulnerable to the sho
potential of photographs. e author Clive Sco expressed this point thus:
“However conventionally (symbolically) readable a photograph may be, it
cannot fully suppress a certain lack of mediation” (1999: 24, my emphasis).
In this formulation the photograph has a pre-linguistic, language-denying
status that commands aention as it points towards the admiedly difficult
idea of photographic realism.
Looking at old photographs of family or friends we may read the image in
an emotional way, determined not so mu by photographic staging as su
but rather by the fact that he or she (possibly an ancestor) was there in front
of the camera, and now appears to us as a manifestation of that person
rather than as a mere picture. Transparency allows an uncanny sense of
being in the presence of the photographic subject. In other words the
photograph may allow some scope for recognition of what Barthes called a
superimposition of “reality and the past”, a reference to “that thing that has
been there” (Barthes 1981: 76–77).
is Barthian reading of the photograph incensed Tagg, who denounced it
as traumatic appeal for a “pre-linguistic certainty . . . a nostalgic and
regressive phantasy” (1988: 4). Tagg notes, “We have no oice but to work
with the reality we have: the reality of the paper print,” but equally (and
imperatively), he claims: “What is real is not just the material item but the
discursive system of whi the image it bears is part” (1988: 4). Discursive
meaning is ever-present and yet for Tagg the gap between the photograph as
a sign and the photograph as visibility is fraught with uncertainty as if the
referent is an artificial thing without weight or substance (Tagg 2009: xxix–
xxx). In a discussion of later work by Tagg the critic Jae Emerling (2012: 38)
addresses the “threshold” between photograph-as-statement and
photograph-as-visibility, that is between what he (Emerling) calls the
“visible and the articulatable”. In describing how far discursivity and
signification dominate Tagg’s reading of an image (a photograph by Walker
Evans), Emerling notes the critic’s reluctance to “traverse it by opening it to
transformations that dismantle its regime of signs” (ibid.: 38). is suggests a
limitation in the semiotic value of a photograph (a certain la of mediation)
that allows contact with something that is strangely outside it, yet present
within it as well. e phenomenologist Hubert Damis says a photograph
“retains something of the reality from whi it was somehow released
through its physioemical makeup” (2003: 88). Emerling expresses a similar
point in the following way: “e analysis of the photographic image as a
(semiotic) statement or code leaves one with a desire for the visible” (2012:
38). In their different ways Damis and Emerling present ways of thinking
about Tagg’s holding ba, as if framing and contextual meaning are a
barrier to the experience of contact with a photograph’s causal object.
 Tagg’s reading of the image is a contextual reading that negates the
existential link with a pre-theoretical layer of human experience and
knowledge. It is a skeptical view premised on a reading of mass media
communication. Photographs seen at a glance have lile resonance for the
viewer and yet arresting images, of atrocity for example, elicit audience
response underscored by a sense of the primal encounter of the
photographer-witness. Su images are badly served by the recuperative and
deadening language of theory. ey may be seen as “projections” or
“discursive formations”, but these words fail to do justice to, or to explain,
the enormity of what is seen. e photograph, we might say, is beyond
analysis when its meaning lies in the realm of emotion and psyological
affect (Wel and Long 2009: 13). In viewing certain kinds of photographic
imagery we become implicated in something that happened. As Nancy K.
Miller has observed: “Looking at photographs of atrocity forces an ethical
crisis” (2012: 148).
e impact of New Photography eory was widely felt and its legacy
has been widely anowledged, and yet at the same time, and perhaps rather
more in this century, it is a movement that has been decried as philistine
and pessimistic. Linfield targets Burgin, Tagg and other critics as people who
“don’t really like photographs, or the act of looking at them, at all” (Linfield
2012: 5). In a similar vein the artist Jorge Ribalta speaks of the “melanolic
defeatism” of John Tagg (2012: 2). Recently critics have contested the
negative judgment on documentary photography. Ariella Azoulay, Mielle
Bogre, David Levi Strauss, Linfield, Ribalta, John Roberts and others have
defended photojournalism as a necessary response to political violence, and
as rearguard action against “theoretical nihilism” in the field of study
(Roberts 2014: 6).

Return of Real

New Photography eory acted as a bulwark against the anti-intellectual

and laissez-faire habits of photography educationalists in the 1970s and
1980s. In this part of the apter I summarize elements of New Photography
theory. is is followed by a discussion of the reportorial and socio-cultural
functions of photography. Firstly, I note key anges in the intellectual scope
of photography education at university level from the late 1970s to the
present day. In particular I have underlined how far solarly and intuitive
modes of knowledge were critically revaluated, their historical antinomies
allenged, and the two competing models of knowledge integrated or
juxtaposed as sites of critical evaluation and praxis. Secondly, I underline
how key debates in the humanities and social sciences entered the field of
study. irdly, I anowledge the alignment of identity politics with
postmodernist photography, and fourthly, recognize that New Photography
eorists enabled a wider understanding that photographs are discursive
products with instrumental social outcomes.
I also recognize that New Photography eory closed down options as
well as opening them up. e critique of popular culture, for example, was
sweeping. It reflected avant-gardist contempt for popular culture and
asserted a monolithic view of audiences as passive consumers of mass media
products and dominant culture. e critic Jessica Evans noted how
“mainstream cinema and popular ‘realist’ culture were wrien off as
retrograde” (1994: 205). Equally, the rejection of photographic documentary
practices was dogmatic and unfairly dismissed socially progressive
movements exploring innovative methods of public circulation and address.
New Photography eory’s conflation of photography with the philosophies
of positivism ignored the way photographers allenge the structural
determinations of the medium, negotiate the ideological condition in whi
they work and, as noted, oose new ways of disseminating their work
(Memou 2013). Positivism is perhaps easily linked with an audience’s
uncritical reading of photographic transparency or a photographer’s blind
faith in the neutrality of observation. Exponents of realist methodologies,
however, accept that aesthetic and cognitive determinants of photographic
meaning are, inescapably, socially structured. Roberts argued: “To defend
realism is not to defend an unmediated notion of photographic truth” (1998:
145). A pragmatic view of photographic meaning accepts that photography
has a capacity to “reconnect discursive production with social struggles”
(Ribalta 2012: 4). In a related argument Azoulay states the following:
Critical discussions seeking to allenge the truth of photography, or argue that “photography
lies,” remain anecdotal and marginal to the institutional practices of exhibiting and publishing
photographs. Only a glance at newspaper kiosk is needed to realize the enduring power of the
news photo. Photography’s critics tend to forget that despite the fact that photography speaks
falsely, it also speaks the truth. A Photograph does in fact aest to what “was there”.
(2008: 126–27)

Claims made for the semantic equivalence of words and images (Burgin
1982: 83; Burgin 1987: 70) confirm a widening of the trend towards
photographic hybridization and the anti-realist bias in the work of Cindy
Sherman and others who rose to fame in the 1980s. Simulation-ism and
staging and other forms of ironic picture-making were celebrated as
authorship critique and playful subversion. ese trends seemed mainly to
reflect a deepening of the skeptical aitude to the truth claims of the
photograph. Linfield noted the abandonment of documentary tradition in
favor of a highly staged “critique of art” as the default position of
postmodern art photography. Sherman’s metapictures – “pictures that
contain another picture of the same kind” (Grønstad and Vågnes 2006) –
double up on themselves as they turn away from the world.
For critics su as Linfield, postmodernist art photography represented an
aa on the authenticity once aributed to photography, “as if the question
of photography’s truth value has been tossed without regret into the dustbin
of history” (2012: 11–12). e work of Riard Prince, Sherrie Levine, or
Barbara Kruger was always in danger of losing its connection with “external
‘societal’ logic” (Evans 1994: 208). In other words the postmodernist account
leaves something out of the picture – something important at the level of
denotation that never really goes away in even the most dogmatic anti-
realist theory. It is a something with many names: the perceptible, the
referent, visibility and significantly in the case of political violence and
atrocity, imagery: “e troubling referentiality of photography” (Roberts
1998: 119). Linfield calls it a “viscerally emotional connection to the world”
(2012: 22) aroused by images of suffering or loss. Barthes remarked on the
possibility of pure denotation, “a this-side-of-language”, existing “at the level
of absolutely traumatic images” (Barthes 1977: 30).

Conclusion

e intervention of New Photography eory provided new ways of

thinking about photographic meaning. Recognition that photographs are
always abstract in some measure and that they rely on a frame of reference
to do their work is indispensable to current thinking about the medium. is
point is understood but dogmatic interpretation of these insights led to the
abandonment of documentary practice to “the dustbin of history”. Its rescue
is I think important but perhaps we should also say: this is perhaps only a
way of taking sides in a one-sided bale in whi postmodern doubt and
antipathy dominated photography theory. at moment may have passed.
Important conclusions for the educational curriculum include recognition
of photography as an important cultural and philosophical category. Recent
writers have also highlighted renewed prospects for documentary
photography. Ribalta notes that “the documentary social function continues
to exist and operate publicly and hegemonically in spite of declarations from
academia that it is obsolete” (2012: 2). It is a bogus intellectualism that treats
the photograph as something that can never be trusted. Let us hope for a
more positive and renewed faith in the social potential of photography as a
democratic medium continuing its work in a public role.

References
Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, Cambridge MA: Zone
Books.
Barthes, R. (1977) “e Photographic Message,” in Image Music Text, ed. and
trans. S. Heath, London: Fontana, pp. 15–31.
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R.
Howard, New York: Hill and Wang.
Bolton, R. (ed.) (1989) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of
Photography, Cambridge MA and London: e MIT Press.
Britain, D. (1999) Thirty Years of Creative Camera, Manester and New
York: Manester University Press.
Burgin, V. (ed.) (1982) Thinking Photography, Houndsmills and London:
Macmillan.
Burgin, V . (1987) The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity,
Houndsmills and London: Macmillan.
Damis, H. (2003) “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of e Photographic
Image,” in L. Wells (ed.) The Photography Reader, London and New York:
Routledge, pp. 87–89.
Elo, M. (2013) “e New Tenological Environment of Photography and
Shiing Conditions of Embodiment,” in D. Rubinstein, J. Golding and A.
Fisher (ed.) On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond
Representation, Birmingham UK: ARTicle Press.
Emerling, J. (2012) Photography History and Theory, London and New York:
Routledge.
Evans, J. (1994) “Victor Burgin’s Polysemic Dreamcoat,” in J. Roberts (ed.)
Art Has No History: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art, London
and New York: Verso, pp. 200–29.
Grønstad A. and Vågnes, O. (2006) “An Interview with W.J.T. Mitell,” in
Image [&] Narrative, Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, 15,
“Bales around Images: Iconoclasm and Beyond.” Available at:
www.imageandnarrative.be/inarive/iconoclasm/gronstad_vagnes.htm
(accessed 11 July 2016).
Levi Strauss, D. (2003) Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics,
New York: Aperture.
Linfield, S. (2012) The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence,
Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.
Lister, M. (ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2nd
edition, London and New York: Routledge.
Memou, A. (2013) Photography and Social Movements: From Globalization of
The Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalization (2001),
Manester and New York: Manester University Press.
Miller, N. K. (2012) “e Girl in the Photograph: the Visual Legacies of War,”
in G. Baten et al. (eds) Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis,
London: Reaktion Books, pp. 147–66.
Prosser, J. (2005) Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss,
Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Ribalta, J. (2012) “Towards a New Documentalism,” Variant, Spring (43), pp.
1–4. Available at: www.variant.org.uk/43texts/JorgeRibalta43.html
(accessed 5 October 2016).
Roberts, J. (1998) The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the
Everyday, Manester and New York: Manester University Press.
Roberts, J. (2014) Photography and Its Violations, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Sco, C. (1999) The Spoken Image: Photography and Language, London:
Reaktion Books.
Smith P. and Lefley, C. (2016) Rethinking Photography: Histories, Theories
and Education, London and New York: Routledge.
Solomon-Godeau, A. (1997) Photography at the Dock: Essays and
Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, Minneapolis MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Stuart, N.M. (2006) “e History of Photography Education in Roester,
New York: 1960-1980,” Exposure, 39 (1), pp. 33–41.
Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories, Houndsmills and London: Macmillan.
Tagg, J. (2009) The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture
of Meaning, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tratenberg, A. (ed.) (1980) Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven CT:
Leete’s Island Books.
Wall, J. (1995) “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as,
Conceptual Art,” in A. Goldstein and A. Rorimer, Reconsidering The
 Object of Art, 1965–1975, Exh. Cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, Cambridge MA and London: e MIT Press, pp. 247–67.
Watney, S. (1986) “Photography – Education – eory,” in S. Bezencenet and
P. Corrigan (eds) Photographic Practices: Towards a Different Image,
London: Comedia, pp. 53–59.
Wel E. and Long, J.J. (2009) “Introduction: A Small History of Photography
Studies,” in J.J. Long, A. Noble and E. Wel (eds), Photography:
Theoretical Snapshots, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–15.

Further Reading

Azoulay, A. (2012) Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography,

trans. L. Bethlehem, London and New York: Verso.
Bogre, M. (2012) Photography as Activism: Images for Social Change,
Amsterdam: Focal Press.
Bogre, M. (2015) Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century,
New York and London: Focal Press.

6.6 Photographic Education

e Case for Visual Literacy in the Twenty-First Century

Mielle Bogre

Originally this piece of writing was to be an essay on the State of the Art of
Photographic Education; however, su a synronic cut would be obsolete
almost at the time of writing. In any case, this essay will deal with the idea
that photographic education is in crisis, and discuss the allenges it faces in
the twenty-first century.
 Mu has been wrien about the crisis of photography in general, and
more particularly photographic education, with some commentators
claiming that it faces “unprecedented tenological, social and educational
ange” and even that it is at an “unprecedented historical threshold” (Bogre
2014). Are photography and photographic education really facing su
historical ange?
e only thing certain about photography is that it is anging, but it has
always been anging. Photography, when it was invented, was as
earthshaering to society as when writing was developed some 5,000 years
earlier. As a “meanical” art, photography has always been limited by
tenology or advanced because of tenological innovations. Are the
anges imposed by digital tenology really more unprecedented to the
medium than when the images of the camera obscura could finally be fixed
by emical processes? Or when film on flexible substrates replaced
cumbersome glass plates, or when the development of small cameras
allowed photographers to hit the street and shoot from any angle they liked?
Critics contend that the malleability of the image in a digital world has
“profoundly” anged the “truth” of a photograph. But as Picasso noted: Art
is a lie that reveals the truth (Zayas 1923: 315). So is photography.
Photography has always lied as it has told the truth.
e anges we think are so unique today, when analyzed 50 years hence,
will not appear more earthshaering than the moment when we figured out
how to fix an image. It only seems to be unprecedented because we are
living through the new epo and thus we have limited perspective.
e question of how mu ange must be asked of photographic
education is linked to the same issue: It is being transformed for sure, but
more by the anges in education than anges in photography. In the
United States, that transformation is being driven by the costs of burgeoning
top-heavy administration; demands for “outcomes” and “rubrics,” more
suited for STEM disciplines than art; the increase in underpaid part-time
faculty; the demands that full-time faculty engage in “resear,” valued more
than teaing; and maybe the most serious of all: the high cost of education
resulting in excessive debt loads that American students, and to a lesser
degree British students, acquire but cannot sustain.
So beyond the allenges that all higher education faces, is there a specific
crisis in photo education? First, I would note that the current concerns about
photography education are criticism redux; it has been questioned and
criticized almost as long as it has been a field of study. As early as 1971
articles appeared in important magazines questioning whether photography
should be taught as a vocation or an art. Other debates swirled around
whether a photo program should add color or only tea bla and white
because photography should be an “art.” Photographic educators are having
similar deliberations today.
If there is a problem in photo education, it is self-inflicted. Photographic
educators are plagued by indecision. We cannot agree on the definition of
photography, so we can’t decide what we are teaing – art or photography.
As photographers, we struggle to justify our discipline as one and we yearn
to shed our cra roots so we will be invited to sit at the adult art table. is
very debate devalues the uniqueness of photography. We argue where
photography should reside in an institution, preferring it more when it is
housed in the art department. Where it resides fundamentally impacts how
we will tea photography. As an art, we layer on concept and theory
without mu emphasis on tenique, and conversely when we tea it as a
professional practice we may place too mu emphasis on tenique at the
expense of theory. is internal conflict has been exacerbated by the trend in
the United States to only hire faculty with an MFA, all steeped in three years
of very similar theory-based study. With less pedagogical diversity among
our faculty, our departments and programs evidence a sameness that
imposes theory at the expense of image making and where students produce
similar conceptually driven work. We create modalities of resear-led
practice, not practice-led resear. Too mu resear and theory can silence
the creative voice on the undergraduate level. e problem with our
indecision is that these two approaes deliver two very different
photographic educations.
 It seems always to be an either/or with photography and photographic
educators. We talk about how photography has become something
“profoundly different” in the digital age, and we refer to traditional genres
and methods – su as beautiful prints – as anaronistic, rather than
embracing the discipline’s whole messy and eclectic history. We discard the
past in anticipation of the future, narrowing our options, not enlarging
them. Maybe the debates are really about how expansive the definition of
photography should be.
To fully address the needs of students in the twenty-first century, and to
become relevant, photography educators should shed restrictive ideas and
language and be expansive in their definition of photography. We must stop
valuing a fine art photography program more than a practice-based one and
embrace the strengths of both. We should stop describing new media in
terms of old media, as Marshall McLuhan suggests. We need to think about
the idea of the image as being active. Our main allenge is to redefine the
medium (without discarding the past) and understand that we are going
through the second paradigm shi for photography as the image breaks
away from the artifact. (e first paradigm shi occurred when photography
broke away from painting.) If our students don’t understand the significance
of this paradigm shi, they will not be equipped to participate in the
contemporary photography world.
e allenge for photographic education will be to toss off the shales
imposed by the “art” world. Photography is an art form, no doubt, but to
tea it only as that is restrictive. It is reductive to justify photography only
to the extent it is validated as fine art. Or as Jean-Claude Chamboredon
wrote, “e wish to cultivate photography as an art means condemning
oneself to a practice that is uncertain of its legitimacy, preoccupied and
insecure, perpetually in sear of justifications”(1996: 129).We need an open
and innovative educational approa to photography, to be more expansive
in our definition, to embrace our past and our future.
Ba to the questions of whether photography education is in crisis and
why a student should study photography in University. Photography
education is not at a crisis point if we shi its goal from being the means to
the end, to being the beginning. English departments don’t rate their success
on how many of their students become novelists or poets. We should not
worry about how many of our students become photographers because we
are teaing literacy. e photographic profession has anged for sure, but
to fear the demise of photography is unfounded since ea year we make
more images than were made in the history of photography. In 2015, more
than 80 million photos were uploaded to Instagram daily and more than 40
billion have been shared. Facebook users have uploaded more than 240
billion images and continue uploading 300 million daily while Snapat’s
200 million users share 8,796 ephemeral photos per second.
However, with the increase in the number of photographs produced,
comes a reactive decrease in understanding what a great photograph looks
like. Photography is the language of the twenty-first century. We now
punctuate our texts with images, not grammatical marks. Understanding
how to read a photograph is the new literacy. Visually literate photography
students are prepared to fully engage in the present and be adaptable to
whatever tenological or communication anges the future holds. e
photographic image has phenomenal power in our culture and more so now
than ever.
We should also defend a photographic education by explaining that, in
spite of how tenically easy it is to take a photograph, it is really hard to
take a good one. Photography is far more complex than it seems and
students (and the public at large) confuse the skill set that comes with
knowing how to operate a good DSLR with being visually literate. Becoming
proficient in our discipline requires the same level of intensive study as any
other discipline. ere is a profound difference between taking and making a
photograph and an even greater difference between making a good or a
great photograph.
Almost none of the hundreds of billions of photographs on Facebook
really maer to anyone other than the Facebook users who posted them and
maybe their Facebook “friends.” ey are not lasting images, or artifacts that
invite the viewer to engage with the world. ey do not contribute anything
meaningful to cultural knowledge. ey do not impact our consciousness or
have a profound impact on us as a society. Great photographs do that. Of
course, studying photography doesn’t guarantee that a student will ever
make a photograph that maers, but if we do our jobs well, it improves the
odds.
If we can remain open to the fluidity of ideas about photography and
images, the twenty-first century will be an exciting time for photographic
education. If we succeed in becoming post-photography programs and
departments, perhaps we can work to integrate photography into every
discipline. en the question of the future will not be what is the purpose of
a photographic education, but what is the value of an education without
photography?

Note: is essay has been adapted from the Introduction in Photography 4:
A Teaching Guide to the 21st Century, published by Focal Press.

References

Bogre, M. (2014) Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide to the 21st Century,

New York: Focal Press.
Chamboredon, J.C. (1996) “Meanical Art, Natural Art: Photographic
Artists,” in Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, Stanford:
Stanford Press, pp. 129–149.
Zayas, M.D. (1923) “Picasso Speaks,” The Arts, May, pp. 315–26.

6.7 Case Study in Online Learning

Learning to Look Critically with e Museum of Modern Art’s

Seeing through Photographs

Sara Bodinson and Sarah Meister

e Museum of Modern Art has been at the forefront of experimenting with
art-based digital learning initiatives, developing online courses in art history
and studio art since 2010. Over 6,000 learners have participated in instructor-
led or self-guided versions of these courses—far more than could ever be
accommodated in the Museum’s classrooms. e audience for these courses
is both broader than that of MoMA’s on-site courses—including many
learners with disabilities and stay-at-home parents who cited accessibility as
a key benefit—and largely parallel in that most participants are women over
age 50.
Coursera is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform with a
mission “to provide universal access to the world’s best education.” In 2013
Coursera invited the Museum to become a Teaer Professional
Development partner. Seizing the opportunity to experiment with offering
free online courses to an even larger audience, MoMA produced three
MOOCs—Art & Inquiry, Art & Activity, and Modern Art & Ideas—that
explore pedagogical strategies for K–12 teaers. us far, 200,000 learners
have participated in these MOOCs, 40 percent of whom did not, in fact, self-
identify as teaers. e audience for these MOOCs, while still
predominantly female, is mu younger and more geographically diverse
than MoMA’s fee-based online courses. But perhaps more surprising, for 98
percent of learners surveyed, this was their first encounter with MoMA. A
recent Pew Resear Center report on Lifelong Learning and Tenology
indicated that while 73 percent of American adults consider themselves
lifelong learners, 80 percent said they do not have mu awareness of
MOOCs.1 ese statistics suggest that MOOCs offer museums a tremendous
opportunity to engage new audiences with their collections and resources.
Based on the success of the first three MOOCs, in 2015 Coursera invited
MoMA to become a full partner, thereby encouraging the Museum to
develop courses for general audiences. Several factors informed the oice of
subject of the Museum’s next MOOC, including MoMA’s own audience
resear that identified photography as a high demand topic. Coursera’s
resear also identified interest in this subject, as well as relatively few
existing courses. Beyond this broad agreement on photography as a topic,
the content and approa were le entirely to educators and curators at the
Museum. We are acutely aware that while taking, viewing, and sharing
photographs is second nature to most, it is not synonymous with visual
literacy, and we wanted the course to encourage awareness around this
distinction. Rather than tracing a formal ronological history of
photography, the resulting course—titled Seeing through Photographs—uses
works from the Museum’s collection as a point of departure to encourage
participants to look critically at photographs through some of the diverse
ideas, approaes, and tenologies that inform their making. MoMA’s
departments of Education, Photography and Digital Media worked
collaboratively to develop goals for learning outcomes and a content
strategy for the course that would not only foster deeper engagement with
photography’s past and present, but examine how various factors including
editorial control and modes of circulation influence our reception of
photographic images. e course was designed to encourage learners to
explore the gap between seeing photographs and truly understanding them,
and to expand approaes to the medium through close looking at
photographs.
At the heart of the course content are newly produced vérité films and
audio slideshows, whi introduce learners to the perspectives of twenty
artists and solars about photography and the many ways in whi it has
been used throughout history and into the present day: as a means of
personal artistic expression; a tool for science and exploration; a method for
documenting people, places, and events; a way of telling stories and
recording histories; and as a mode of communication and critique in our
increasingly visual culture. From a pedagogical perspective, we felt it was
important to introduce learners firsthand to the widely varied ideas and
processes of artists working with photography today to model different
approaes to contemporary images (see Color Plates 45 and 46).
Seeing through Photographs begins with a conversation between curator
Sarah Meister, who serves as the course instructor, and writer Marvin
Heiferman, who argues that “the power of photography is way more
complicated than people admit to.” e course is structured around six
modules, one of whi, called “One Subject, Many Perspectives,” examines
photographs of the moon taken throughout the medium’s history. Looking
at a single motif not only helps introduce learners to key anges in
photographic tenologies, but also to the ways in whi vernacular,
scientific and artistic portrayals have played a role in shaping our
understanding of this universal subject. In another module, we enlisted
artists to discuss their approaes to photographing people—for Niolas
Nixon, teasing apart the differences between photographing digitally as
opposed to using an 8×10 in view camera; for Susan Meiselas, the
complexities of capturing self-presentation in her photographs of women
who perform as carnival strippers; and for Katy Grannan, fostering in
viewers a feeling of recognition and empathy that she has for strangers
whom she meets and photographs on the street.
Seeing through Photographs also explores works by artists who reuse
existing photographs to critique widely accepted narratives about history
and culture—for Mike Mandel, exploring nuances of photographs used as
evidence; for Martha Rosler, combining photographs of conflict with images
from home magazines to create powerful agitprop; and for Akram Zaatari,
re-presenting studio portraits from southern Lebanon to capture trends in
self-presentation over his country’s tumultuous recent history. In his
interview with Meister, Hank Willis omas said, “I feel it’s important that
we take responsibility in actually mining and looking at the images that our
society is creating so we can really get a broader perspective of our time.” He
provides insight into how his process of ‘unbranding’ advertisements reveals
the underlying messages and biases they convey.
In the digital era it is critically important to recognize the difference
between a photograph (a physical object) and a photographic image (one
that can assume new aracteristics specific to the device on whi it is seen,
but whi has no material presence). In an effort to tease out these
differences, the course’s final module includes interviews with artists
featured in MoMA’s exhibition Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015.
Oen combining analogue and digital imagery and teniques, these artists
explore contemporary photo-based culture, specifically focusing on
connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and
communication models. To trace the propagation of images online, David
Horvitz uploaded a photograph of himself onto the Wikipedia entry for
mood disorder, making it freely available to be shared and used for any
purpose. e image, whi shows Horvitz with his head cradled in his
hands, spread quily and was featured in countless news articles, blogs, and
other online forums, whi the artist aggregated and presented in a book.
e course’s artist interviews are supplemented with text-and-image
slideshows featuring other works from MoMA’s collection to provide further
context for the key ideas explored in ea module. Learners are also assigned
readings, many drawn from historic and recent MoMA publications on
photography—from texts by John Szarkowski and Beaumont Newhall, to
monographs and essays on Frances Benjamin Johnston, Walker Evans,
Cindy Sherman, Robert Heineen and Walid Raad, as well as several essays
from the Photography at MoMA book series.
While they do not share a physical classroom, at any given time
thousands of learners from around the globe are engaged in lively exanges
and debates in the course’s discussion forums. While some discussion
questions are posed by the course instructor, the vast majority are initiated
by learners and address a range of topics—from the ethics of documentary
photography, to whether or not it is important to make categorical
distinctions between fine art and vernacular photographs. ough course
materials are available free of arge to anyone who enrolls, learners who
opt to pay for a verified certificate of completion must write two essays
applying themes explored in the course to photographs of their selection,
whi are then peer-reviewed. is is consistent with many of MoMA’s
other education programs, whi aim to foster peer-to-peer learning rather
than top-down knowledge sharing, anowledging the value of the diverse
perspectives and experiences our participants bring to bear.
Because Seeing through Photographs is offered on demand and learners
can register for the course at any time, the Museum will continue to activate
the course in different ways—participating in course discussion threads,
broadcasting videos of talks or exhibition walkthroughs via social media—all
of whi can be arived in the course to further enhance its content. For
example, Meister hosted a ora Session in whi she answered questions
submied by the Coursera and ora audiences that oen paralleled topics
explored in the Seeing through Photographs. e session received more than
1.2 million views in just one week.2 Additionally, given the popularity of the
MoMA’s previous MOOCs with Chinese learners as well as the demand for
the Museum’s recent photography publications by a Chinese market, a
Mandarin version of Seeing through Photographs launed in fall 2016.
In its first year aer laun, over 170,000 learners enrolled in Seeing
through Photographs, with those from Italy (17 percent) and the United
States (13 percent) making up the highest portion of learners, but with
representation from over 160 countries and territories, providing access not
only to learners who may never have the opportunity to visit MoMA, but
also to some for whom access to a local art museum is equally difficult. In its
first three months post-laun, Seeing through Photographs had the highest
enrollment of any individual course on the platform. Coursera has aributed
the success of the course to how the topic is resonating with learners, the
quality of the content, and MoMA’s promotional strategy, whi included a
press release, takeovers of MoMA’s Instagram account by several artists
featured in the course, and publishing a selection of artist interviews on
YouTube.
Part of the appeal of an online course is that aspects of its content can be
adapted in response to learner feedba. Coursera’s administrative
dashboard provides the Museum with access not only to statistical
information about its audience (how many people visit and actively
participate in the course, and their countries of origin), but also how many
times ea piece of content is accessed, and how highly it is rated by
learners, detailed analysis of performance on assessments, as well as learner
retention rates. Two months aer laun, Coursera provided a
comprehensive Action Plan identifying ways for MoMA to improve the
course, with the significant recommendations for making anges to the
assessments. Having this information in tandem with feedba from
individual learners has been instrumental in targeting improvements.
 Overall, learner reviews of the course have been very positive, with
learners ranking the course 4.8 out of 5 stars and leaving glowing,
inspirational comments. A highlight of the dashboard is the Learner Stories.
Hundreds of learners have shared a bit about themselves and how the course
had an impact on their looking and thinking: “More than once, I ended my
assignments for the week, but still thinking about the artists and their ways
of working and ways of expressing themselves and telling other people what
I learned and how amazing was this journey!” Another commented, “It was
a real pleasure to explore the world of photography through all the
documents made available to us in su an easy way. I couldn’t believe
everything was there, within one cli. It has made me swit my brain on
about so many questions with regards to how and why we take pictures and
the meaning of ea one of the images that we take and see.”
MoMA was founded in 1929, artered as an educational institution with
a mission “to help people enjoy, understand and use the visual arts of our
time” as a “primary function, whi is educational in the broadest, least
academic sense.”3 is approa remains at the core of the institution today,
embodied by our goal to be the most engaging museum of modern and
contemporary art—for everyone. To aieve this, MoMA must continue to
engage with communities not only on-and off-site, but also in the digital
space. We appreciate that meaningful teaing and learning through art
begins with a deep understanding of both art and audience. Seeing through
Photographs has been a particularly successful model, drawing from our
distinct skills and perspectives, and applying them towards this shared goal.

Notes

1 www.pewinternet.org/2016/03/22/lifelong-learning-and-tenology/-

2 www.quora.com/session/Sarah-Meister/1

3 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “e Museum Collections: A Brief Report,” January 15, 1944.
 7
Outlook
 7.0 Chapter Introduction
Moritz Neumüller

In Summer 2011, the visitors of the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival,

in Arles, France, had a lot to discuss. Clément Chéroux, Joan Fontcuberta,
Erik Kessels, Martin Parr, and Joaim Smid presented a ground-breaking
exhibition called From Here On, with a Joint Manifesto that began:
NOW, WE’RE A SPECIES OF EDITORS. WE ALL RECYCLE, CLIP AND CUT, REMIX AND
UPLOAD. WE CAN MAKE IMAGES DO ANYTHING. ALL WE NEED IS AN EYE, A BRAIN, A
CAMERA, A PHONE, A LAPTOP, A SCANNER, A POINT OF VIEW.
(Gergel 2012 [capitalized in the original])

e exhibit included the work of 36 international artists whose work

consists mainly of appropriated popular imagery from the Internet, using
vernacular sources from social media, sear engines, arives, surveillance
tenologies, Google Street View, cameras operated by animals, webcams,
and haed laptop cameras. I gave these laer categories the name
Unmanned Photography (Neumüller 2013).
We have become accustomed to the camera eyes in the sky, above all, in
the shape of spy satellites rotating around our planet in their thousands
since the 1960s. Long before that, however, the pioneers of roet
photography, like Amédée Denisse, Alfred Nobel and an engineer from
Dresden called Alfred Maul, recognized the potential of the photographs
taken “from a great height.” e roet device with built-in plate cameras
and paraute could provide images from a height of up to 600 meters.
Another curiosity dating from that era is pigeon photography, developed by
the apothecary and amateur photographer Julius Neubronner, and making it
possible to take up to twelve photographs per flight. What is more, the
winged photographers were quiet and inconspicuous, and thus perfect spies,
especially in war-time.
 Other kinds of animals were also used for image-making—be that hunting
dogs with special camera jaets, or house cats, like Nancy Bean, whose
works were on show in From Here On. e transfer of the photographic act
from man to animal goes hand in hand (or rather, paw in paw) with a high
degree of authenticity, for action taken by an animal, crude, accidental and
clumsy, does not falsify anything. When it comes to the issue of the
documentary value of the photograph, therefore, unmanned photography is
a special case, and a very multifarious one at that.
Eliminating humans from the image-making process is done not
necessarily for their protection, but rather for the sake of efficiency. e
physical need to sleep, eat and excrete waste, and also the fact of aging on
long flights into space, are annoying obstacles to the success of a mission.
e very act of photographing functions beer without people: today’s fully
automatic cameras can produce perfect images, if only they are allowed to.
To produce really bad, or unusual, photographs, you would really have to pit
your wits against the maine.
For his No.4 Vienna MMIX, during the Vienna Opera Ball, Jules Spinats
used a programmed camera system to capture a certain area in columns
from le to right, following a precise grid over the entire duration of the
event. e single images are then assembled in ronological order into one
large panorama. e resulting images are a contradicting liaison of control
and failure. Two competing agendas—the sedule of the event versus the
programming of the camera—construct a new narrative and trigger
speculation about time, image and the real, as the image plane is split into
unintended time fragments. Just as in Jorge Luis Borges’ story of the
cartographers, this maine-managed and objectified reality is so close to
reality that it becomes useless. e best example for this might be
Heisenbergs Offside, whi was created during the World Championship
alification game of Switzerland against France. Spinats produced 3003
still shots from an interactive network camera over the course of the whole
game, but not a single one shows the ball (Spinats 2017).
Light-field cameras promise the next tenological revolution in the field
of photography. ey allow anging the focal distance and depth of field
aer a photo is taken. is is possible because they record the direction that
the light rays are traveling in space, in addition to light intensity. e idea to
take “integral photographs” is more than a hundred years old, but it has only
been in the last few years that we have seen the first working prototypes
and some commercial products. is way, any part of the image, be it in the
foreground or at the ba, can be made sharp in the post-production process,
without having to take a binding decision in the “decisive moment” of
taking the picture.
e advance of surveillance tenology for domestic use is a growing
source of worry for the secret service people, particularly in those countries
that use drones extensively, that is to say, Great Britain, the United States
and Israel. But even if they were to succeed in banning mini-or micro-
drones in the air, the next threats are lurking on the high seas (mini-
submarines), on land (telepresence robots) and above all in space (swarm-
financed microsatellites). e opening up of space for the average consumer
could soon become a security risk; aer all, official satellite images are still
subject to strict censorship. NATO military bases are pixelated (as artfully
shown in Mishka Henner’s Dutch Landscapes book), and when Google Earth
was first up and running, the White House was blurred (today it is shown in
supposedly “outdated images”). Organizations like the American National
Reconnaissance Office (moo: Vigilance from Above) will certainly not be
short of work in the years to come.
Another strategy is the infiltration of the private sphere with cameras, like
Delivery for Mr. Assange: A Live Mail Art Piece, by the media group Bitnik,
who—modeled on Tim Knowles’ Spy Box—sent a cyclopic paage to the
WikiLeaks founder. Surprisingly, it was actually delivered to the addressee,
who recognized it as a transmission medium with artistic intent, and even
used it performatively. One cannot help but think of media artists like Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer or Ricardo Iglesias, who have been working for years with
electronically controlled and partially autonomous surveillance devices. But
surely the most perfidious form of photographic intrusion was found by
Kurt Caviezel: for his The Users project, he haed his way into the
webcams of harmless Internauts so as to make portraits of them.
 In most cases, these images are fished from the infinite stream of data, are
particles in a constant process of photographing by millions of camera eyes.
In this maine-managed and objectified reality there are rarely any
breaes or disruptions that might grant us some surprising moments. It is
this apparent contradiction that makes unmanned photography so
interesting for the theorists of post-photography. For highlights su as the
2013 Chelyabinsk meteor photographs taken by Russian dashboard cameras
cannot conceal the fact that surveillance camera images are usually
dreadfully boring.
e first essay of this apter is by Annekathrin Kohout and describes a
now-common phenomenon on the Internet, a kind of ludic visual
conversation triggered by what she calls Ki-off Images and then eoed
ba from all ends of the Network. In her wiy and yet serious analysis,
#foodporn meets Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan stares at a pierced pair of
lemons. For her, a ki-off image is a picture that acts as an initiation for
new variants or reblogs, similar to how jokes are told and retold in real life.
A surprising/absurd constellation of motives in the image, and the
environment of social media form the breeding ground for this
phenomenon. e images must be removed from their original contexts, and
freed from the authorship, so they can be shared, adapted and re-
contextualized without inhibitions.
Robert Cook’s essay is just as analytical and clever, but wrien from a
personal point of view and with his tongue in his eek. I asked Robert to
reflect on the disappearance of the decisive moment, and gave him full
freedom to develop a style that he has described as “lyrical, explorative and
personally-conceptual” in one of our email conversations. is free-style
way of writing may feel a bit strange in this rather solarly context, yet it
enables him to make brilliant points about our anging relation to cameras,
as fetishized tools and amplifiers of self-representation on the social
networks.
e last Case Study in the book is on a prominent online platform for
photography, LensCulture, in the form of an interview with its founder Jim
Casper. I have known Jim for many years and respect his great work for the
photographic community, but also wanted to raise some critical questions
about its commercial exploitation. e result is an honest and passionate
conversation with somebody who believes in what he is doing, and who
wants to be part of the future of the medium: “I’m eagerly looking forward
to whole new ways of using photography—maybe it will be like a new form
of literature or global activism or immersive cinema or jazz.”
Joan Fontcuberta has been mentioned and quoted several times already,
and for many reasons. An educator, critic, curator, and conceptual artist
using photography, he has shaped the understanding of the medium in
many forms. His widely acclaimed book Pandora’s Camera consists of
various essays on the state of the art, and the future of photography. Homo
Photographicus, the small piece we publish here, had first appeared in the
Matador magazine, vol. S, in December of 2016, and is a compressed form of
his thinking about a future where hyper-visibility becomes consolidated,
and where post-photography prepares us for a world of mental pictures,
ubiquitous images with neither body nor support.
While the term post-photography is becoming widely used in the
photographic community, some solars have come up with another
terminology: post-post-photography. According to Friedri Tietjen, co-
organizer of the annual After Post-Photography conferences, the basic
questions of post-post-photographic resear orbit around three aspects
concerning the history, the definition and the pragmatics of photography. In
other words, it comes ba to the truth of photographic images
(indexicality), ontological questions of the medium (what is a photograph?),
and finally, how it can or should be used (praxeology).
Aer all, it seems that we finish where we started. Photography is still
haunted by the same ghosts as at the moment of its inception, networked
hyper-ghosts caught in small bla coffin-shaped boxes we hold in our
hands, with shiny mirror-like displays that remind us of the first
daguerreotypes. e homo photographicus still lives in Plato’s cave, even if
he is now connected with other cavemen all around the globe. He has
constructed camera-eyes to explore the outside world and send ba images
whi can only be read aer maine decodification, but what interests him
—and her—most, is still how they are seen by their cavemen-friends. While
photography is no more an index of truth, the images themselves now do
leave traces. ey are filtered, screened and interpreted by the same entities
that have put the cavemen in ains, in order to prevent them from finding
out the truth. In fact, it seems that we are further away from ever leaving
our caves than ever before.
My most honest thank you to Gorsad Kiev, Tony Futura, and Philipp
Baumgarten for leing us use their images to illustrate their kick-off effect;
Jim Casper for the screenshots from LensCulture; and NASA for the
“photograph” of Venus.

References

Gergel, J. (2012). From Here On: Neo Appropriation Strategies in

Contemporary Photography. [online] Interventionsjournal.net. Available
at: hps://interventionsjournal.net/2012/01/26/from-here-on-neo-
appropriation-strategies-in-contemporary-photography/ [Accessed 29
Jun. 2017].
Neumüller, M. (2013). Unmanned Photography. European Photography,
34(93), pp. 3–13.
Spinats, J. (2017). Temporary Discomfort and Surveillance Panorama
Projects. Interview with the author, July 7, 2017, via Skype.

7.1 Ki-Off Images

Annekathrin Kohout

Still life of everyday objects. Pierced produce. Bodies pasted with stiers.
Faces hidden behind plants. Sliced fruit, held in front of female sexual
organs. Glier on skin. Fried eggs. Rainbows. Pizza.
 All of these are popular photo motifs in social networks, where they are
shared and re-interpreted over and over again. Motifs that captivate through
a certain simplicity and are perceived as inspiring by many. e fact that
there are more and more of these images and that they are increasingly
popular is the result of a boundlessness as it can be experienced exclusively
online, on the Internet. Direct access to the old and the new, the absurd and
the trivial, to images of art and of everyday culture enables connections and
references of hitherto unimaginable extent. us, all kinds of constellations
are generated, usually playful, experimental, and without the claim of
creating a work of art.
is effect is particularly evident on social networks, where pictures are
liked, shared and visually interpreted. What do these images look like, how
do they work and what does it mean when they are favored?

e Imagery of Social Media

More images than ever emerge in the conditions of social networks, whi
are a continuation of verbal and personal communication and a public space
at the same time. And these images are of a different kind – especially in the
realm of photography. Nowadays, almost every social network app has an
integrated camera function, whi enables users to take pictures in the
moment and publish them immediately. Publishing usually includes a
license for use, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial. us, private and
professional photographs enter the digital space, where they occasionally go
viral or produce smaller popularity waves. An economy of recognition,
expressed in likes and reblogs, drives the production of images by teaing
producers whi motifs and whi particular aesthetic is potentially
successful at a certain time. In the world of prosumers, images must be
relatable and applicable to many different contexts.
In order to aieve this, there were and are various strategies that are
more or less distinct on the respective platforms. In order to connect to
others, social media users employ networking tools su as hashtags, whi
also serve to standardize and establish image motifs. In addition to Flir,
whi was clearly perceived in the tradition of private and amateur
photography at first (the name “Flir” refers to the act of flipping through
an album of photos), Instagram and Tumblr are currently important
platforms where new image conventions and trends are established.
One of these conventions is the selfie. e photographic pretense of
capturing a selfie becomes more evident when questioning the motivation:
to shoot a selfie also means to be found with the hashtag #selfie, and thus, to
be able to network. Another conventional motif can be found behind the
hashtag #foodporn. Both #selfie and #foodporn have developed very specific
representations. e laer category usually features images, whi show
plates and cups viewed from above in order to minimize shadows as mu
as possible. Standards like these arise because they make it very easy for
users to participate in this distinct imagery.
However, every social network has its own rules and thus creates its own
users and norms. Elspeth Reeve (2016) has ironically classed the different
aracters of the respective networks in her longread The Secret Lives of
Tumblr Teens:

ose blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly
wealthy post to Instagram. e most arismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine.
On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity. Tumblr is
the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool.

While there are, of course, exceptions to this rule, tenical and functional
peculiarities clearly lead to specific forms of interaction. If Instagram is
aracterized both formally and in terms of content by the greatest possible
standardization and comparability – especially through the predefined
square format – and the censorship of content, Tumblr holds its literal
promise: it upsets norms.

Tumblr
But what are the prerequisites for su an accomplishment and how exactly
does it look? Tumblr is both microblog and social network. Sharing content
is a central act when compiling a Tumblr blog. In addition to the like-buon,
there is a reblog-buon under ea picture. When activated, the
corresponding entry is shared on the user’s own page. e simplicity of the
appropriation of the works of others and the possibility of combining these
arbitrarily and intuitively both with pictures, texts, and audios created by
the user or by others leads to an eclectic consumption of pictures. On the
one hand, users act as viewers, as they participate in real time when other
Tumblr users upload their pictures and are able to share them immediately
on their own pages. On the other hand, users themselves provide personal
and external content for the followers of their blog. Unlike other social
networks, there is no censorship on Tumblr, whi leads to unrestricted
access to images that have hitherto been hidden from certain milieus or age
groups: images of violent, pornographic or fetishistic nature.
Tumblr enables a wide range of applications. It can be a diary, a notice
board, an artistic tool, a portfolio, a network, or a news page. Although
Tumblr is a social network like Instagram, Facebook or Twier, it differs
from neighboring platforms not only in terms of censorship, but also in its
understanding of authorship. It seems as if most Tumblr users do without a
detailed personal profile and in the ensuing anonymity, questions about
motivation usually no longer arise. In addition, for mu of the content, the
sources are unclear. is seems to allow unrestricted reblogging – where
there is no author, there is no person whose copyright can be violated.
In these conditions, the use of found footage can be described as
lighthearted and intuitive. Additionally, in contrast to Instagram, the
anonymity on Tumblr leads to images that defy standards and contradict
habits. Images whi do not express everyday life and normality, but whi
signal creativity. is is aieved, for example, by combining things that are
not normally associated with ea other: su as a piercing and a lemon.
Oen, these images come from a professional context, from photography,
design, fashion or art. Only aer they have been published, isolated images,
whi previously might have been part of a photographic series, enter new
contexts. On Tumblr, the images mostly dissolve from their authors. Even if
they are still referenced, they are negligible to the reception, that is, to the
sharing and re-imagining of content. If the Western image reception of the
last century was dominated by textual and theoretical discussions, social
networks offer a visual and practical approa. In this way, images receive
their acclaim less and less from the history of their authors or from their
theoretical conceptions, but require entirely new and above all image-
inherent qualities.
What does this new type of image and its author-independent quality
look like? e aforementioned photo of a pierced lemon may be regarded as
a prime example of this new image type. It was shot by the Ukrainian
photographer trio “Gorsad Kiev” (see Color Plate 47) and was then not only
shared countlessly on Tumblr but also stimulated new interpretations of the
motif, for example by the German graphic designer Tony Futura (see Color
Plate 48).
is photograph by Gorsad Kiev is a good example of what will
subsequently be called a ki-off image. A ki-off image is a picture that
acts as a launing point – as an act of initiation – for new variants or
reblogs. Similar to how jokes are told and retold, pictures are re-imagined,
recreated and shared in social networks like Tumblr, if they contain a certain
point and are memorable.
But a surprising and/or absurd constellation of motives in the image is not
enough for aieving “ki-off quality.” Pictures need the environment of
social media in order to develop their inspiring effect. ey must be removed
from their original contexts, like a photo series or the museum space, in
order to be freed from the author and the associated claim to authenticity
and thus be shared, adapted and re-contextualized without inhibitions.

Image Scores

ere are songs that are so caty that every time someone begins singing
them, one immediately feels the urge to sing along. Naming the
prerequisites of this effect is easy: simplicity and repetition. e simpler the
text and composition, the easier they are to imitate and sing along to. e
song itself requires repetition – first, in the orus, and second, in the media.
Aer all, what is played oen is remembered.
Until now, only the laer concept was valid for images: the more
frequently a picture is reproduced and disseminated, the beer it is
remembered. New media have always been used to improve reproductions –
their quality and distribution. Above all, photography has revolutionized the
possibilities for spreading images.
e situation is different, however, concerning imitation and singing. It is
true that aer a glance into the history of art, the aemulatio can be named –
aer all, over-trumping is always preceded by a certain imitation – but that
is a contest only among the artists themselves. Outside of art class, laymen
do not usually dare to imitate works of art, as they still respect the skill of
the cra or the complexity of the concept. Images from the field of art emit
aloofness, be it due to their pre-modern crasmanship or to their modern
elitism. Too high is the pretense of originality of those artists who are still
striving for the new, too strong the associated faith in the work on the part
of the recipients.
But even within the imagery of folk and popular culture, no cultural
practice comparable to imitation and singing has developed. is is mainly
due to the fact that the production of pictures requires relatively high effort
and crasmanship. Producing images means using external tools. is was
the reason why images were not suitable as media of spontaneous imitation
and could not be perceived as scores that are easy to interpret. e demands
on the professionalism of production were too high, so that any ambitious
interpretation would have been perceived as arrogance.
But the aforementioned hurdles are geing smaller and smaller. While for
a long time, no one was inclined to agree with Marshall McLuhan when he
defined tenical devices as prostheses (1962), it is hard to deny that external
tools have become permanent extensions of specific abilities. It is in this
sense that social media can be regarded as an extension of oral and
immediate communication. Especially since they tend towards real-time
communication. In order to speed up communication the integrated photo
and video cameras are used, among other devices. It is mu faster to take a
picture of a place and send it than to describe it comprehensively. And if you
do not want to use your camera, you have access to a comprehensive
collection of pictures – be it on your computer or phone, or on the Internet.
In the past, the spoken word or songs have always been associated with
immediacy and spontaneous moments, that is to say, orality, and images, on
the other hand, as something with a longer duration. e new conditions of
social media have enabled spontaneity and immediacy for images too. us,
in its situativity and its participation, reblogging is quite comparable to the
practice of singing along.
e German artist Fritz Swegler already developed the idea of a visual
score in his so-called “Effes scores” in the 1960s. ese consist of a series of
drawings, whi are linked with instructions for independent interpretation.
Mostly, these are photographic or cinematic productions. If Swegler’s
work still required instructions, the image itself is sufficient in the context of
social networks. While Swegler had to programmatically discard his
pretense to originality by the invitation to imitate, this happens, as has been
shown, quite naturally in social networks. But the rule is: the simpler the
motif, the faster and more uninhibited it can either be adapted or simply be
shared. erefore, unsurprisingly, everyday objects like a lemon usually
stimulate the interpretation of a score.
As far as the motifs are concerned, Swegler’s work shares similar
constellations with ki-off images. ey are usually a constellation of
objects, whi are semantically strong; objects whi are assumed to have a
symbolic meaning. us both a staircase and a flower, both a lemon and a
piercing, can be symbolically interpreted. e respective combinations lead
to a mystery of meaning, whi allows for a certain arbitrariness, but also
for playful ease in the compilation of su objects. Ki-off images are, as
already indicated, particularly successful if they do not have a clear and
distinct meaning.
 A Short History of Images and eir Meaning

ere is an old truism that emphasizes the advantage of images over

language: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Following this line of
reasoning, complex relationships and ambiguous emotional situations can be
represented only in pictures. To this extent, the language of images has
always been vehemently distinguished from wrien language and perceived
as more subversive and, above all, more subjective. A portrait is supposedly
able to make the soul of a person visible – something that cannot be grasped
in words. At the same time, those seeking legitimization for the existence of
images used this capability as a central argument.
e relationship between images and what they represent has been re-
evaluated again and again in the past. For a long time, possibilities and
functions of images were perceived as dangerous. “ou shalt not make a
likeness, nor any likeness, neither of what is above in heaven, nor of that
whi is on the earth, or of that whi is in the water under the earth,” it is
wrien in the second book of Moses (Exodus 20: 4). e risk, according to
the religious explanation, consists in idolatry, an unreflected adoration, and
was explained by ignorance of the medium: possibly one could confuse what
is depicted with what it depicts; possibly, one could believe what one sees.
e prohibition of images was a way of protection against the
instrumentation of the images.
Up until the late sixteenth century, states Miel Foucault in his 1966
monograph The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences, this
“thinking in similarities” prevailed. He describes the relationship between
the picture and the pictured as magical. For thinking in similarities is not
constituted by an understanding of the media, is not a conscious part of the
functioning of signs: “e universe was folded in upon itself: the earth
eoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants
holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man” (Foucault
2002: 19). For example, the so-called memory theater, whi was supposed to
store the knowledge of the world through mnemonic pictures, was based on
the understanding that man is a microscopic image of the world and that
theater is an emulation of life: “e relation of emulation enables things to
imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without
connection or proximity” (Foucault 2002: 22). Image and meaning came
together.
Like Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, in his influential 1962 work The
Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, also emphasized the
printing press as a decisive turning point in the conception of how images
relate to what is depicted, how signs relate to what is signified. e printing
tenology enabled broad access to knowledge about script and image, and
established the general ability to reflect about media:
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable
commodity. . . . Typography is not only a tenology but is in itself a natural resource or staple,
like coon or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
paerns of communal interdependence.
(McLuhan 1962: 161–163)

In this time, Foucault continues, images and signs acquire meanings that
lie beyond what they represent. In the so-called “age of representation,” he
locates the domination of symbols, metaphors, and allegories. And he thus
marks another relationship that pictures can have to their meaning: they are
independent of one another. Su a relationship is, for example, the case
when a dove is no longer simply a white bird but is interpreted as a sign of
peace. For the reception, this meant that the contemplation of images had to
be followed by a deciphering of their hidden meaning.
However, the interaction with images has anged significantly, especially
in social networks. e sheer quantity of pictures makes the reflection on the
individual image impossible. is leads to the fact that the resonance with
complex image types, in particular, is decreasing, while simple motifs are
favored. Simplification, on the one hand, is the result of the communicative
function of images, whi is why they must be understandable; on the other
hand, it serves the capacity to withstand as many intercultural and media
contexts as possible. ese are the images that are usually found in groups
on social networks.
 Ki-off images are not treated reverently like pictures in a white cube,
nor are they interpreted. Even if they were produced by a successful artistic
duo: the artist Maurizio Caelan and the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari
have been working on photographs that can be classed as ki-off images for
their self-published Toilet Paper Magazine. ey combine motifs whi are
not related to one another and produce evidence in this way. at is to say,
they mean exactly what they represent: a bare foot with four lighters stu
between the toes. However, the effect of the picture anges in the moment,
it contains no direct statement. As in the age before the “Gutenberg Galaxy,”
one no longer asks for a meaning beyond the pictorial space when one looks
at the toes with lighters. And yet, at the same time, the image reception
evokes immediate associations, whether pedicures or a special foot fetishism.
Although the image in social networks is no longer necessarily a reason
for asking questions, this does not mean that pictures are no longer given
meaning: on the contrary. Images inspire us because we have knowledge
about what effects they unfold and how valuable they can be. Ki-off
images promise opportunities, possibilities of personal image production, but
also reception. e more ambivalent the message, the more diverse effects
and interpretations the image can unfold in different contexts.
While in the age of “thinking in similarities,” images were regarded as that
whi they represented, and in the age of representation images were linked
to fixed meanings independent of the depicted; ki-off images in social
networks are still in a relation to meaning, but these are increasingly loosely
linked. ey have a third relation: ideally, images and meanings can be
freely constellated.

Ki-off Images

Let us return to the example of the image of the pierced lemon in order to
illustrate the freedom of meaning described above. At first, the motif is very
simple: two lemons with piercings lie side by side, in a space that cannot be
determined. e slightly slanting horizontal line creates the feeling that the
photo was created spontaneously, in the moment. Since the lemons were
placed in the right half of the picture, the motif acquires a casualness, whi
creates the appearance that the symbolism of the motif had happened by
ance.
Its ki-off quality lies first of all in its simplicity: both the lemon and the
piercing are easily accessible, so it can be reconstructed quily and easily.
Tony Futura, for example, has only slightly varied the motif by shooting it
from a different angle and piercing only one lemon (see Color Plate 48).
Another photographer, Philipp Baumgarten, collages the lemons into the
universe (see Color Plate 49).
Comparing these variations shows that freedom from fixed meanings is a
prerequisite for the ki-off quality. While Gorsad Kiev’s original image only
permits relatively vague associations in different directions, Futura’s, whi
shows the lemons in top view, already emphasizes the reference to two
breasts. Baumgarten finally shows not only the motif of the pierced lemons
as nipples, but also interprets it with the image of the universe, that could be
associated with feelings like infinity, femininity and ecstasy.
In this respect, Gorsad Kiev’s photo has the strongest ki-off quality,
whi becomes especially clear when analyzing on whi Tumblr blogs the
picture was shared. It is true that the association with breasts is also close
here, for example on a reblog by “gretanavy.” However, it is equally found
on BDSM blogs, where this image suddenly appears between images of
women in tight latex underwear. In other blogs, in the context of images
with a punk aesthetic, it suddenly unfolds rebellious features and, for
example, evokes young women who secretly get pierced without the consent
of their parents. e pierced lemons can thus be interpreted in a variety of
ways, be it as a sign for punk, BDSM, veganism or just breasts.
e aempt to produce images whi can be used again and again in as
many contexts as possible is not new. e advertising industry already uses
them: sto photographs. Sto photos are also created in su a way that
they are compatible in different areas. And this contextual openness is
already part of their production process, states Wolfgang Ullri in his
exploration of the commercialization meanisms of images (2006): A
personal style is undesirable, and effects su as overexposure and blurring
are used as “blank” or “variable” for meanings.
Perhaps sto photos are the “purest” pictures that can be imagined. Because they give evidence of
a fact that is oen not believed: Images as themselves do not tell anything by themselves. . . . ey
need a framework, an institutional integration, in order to become meaningful.
(Ullrich 2006: 99. Translated by the author)

Although ki-off pictures do not express anything concrete and are – as

shown – free from fixed meanings and thus usable in various contexts, they
are by no means dependent on them. While sto photos do not say
anything and need a context, ki-off images are highly versatile and enri
the contexts in whi they are adapted. Although the author is irrelevant to
the reception of the pictures in both cases, the laer needs an assertiveness,
whi can be interpreted as artistic. is artistic assertiveness, whi is also
due to its actual origin in the fields of art and design, must, however, express
itself less in the photographic style than in the nature of the motif. To be
versatile is to use motifs, whi – in their simplicity – have a metaphorical
effect and create an atmosphere of meaning in their interaction, without
actually signifying anything. Only in this way, they become inspiring and
offer various possibilities for adaptation and interpretation.
In this respect, the ki-off image is based on ambiguity: on the one hand,
symbolism is required to radiate an atmosphere of meaning. On the other
hand, it should not allow too strong references in order to allow diverse and,
above all, temporary associations. e ki-off quality can be differently
weighted; some motive constellations are more clear, like fruits and the
female sex, some almost too open for meanings, su as toes and lighters.
But what does the favoring of ki-off effects in the social networks mean
for the general understanding of images? For a long time, transcoding the
meaning this rapidly of certain pictorial motifs would have been a political
issue. Images were perceived as a tangible and accessible object of human
knowledge or of scientific observation. People believed in their inherent
meaning, and image reception had as the primary goal the deciphering of
meaning. However, ki-off images do not hide the fact that meanings are
fundamentally something that is brought to images. But unlike in the case of
sto photography, this does not mean that images without context are weak
and nondescript.

References

Foucault, M. (2002) The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human

Sciences, London/New York: Routledge Classics, first published 1966 as
Les mots et les choses.
McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man, Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.
Reeve, E. (2016) The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens. Available at:
hps://newrepublic.com/article/129002/secret-lives-tumblr-teens
(Accessed: 10 November 2016).
Ullri, W . (2006) Bilder auf Weltreise, Berlin: Wagenba Verlag.

7.2 Shopping for God (and the Indecisive Moment)

Robert Cook

Me/Not Me/Me

As extensions of ourselves that make varieties of work possible and

imaginable, “tools” and “tenology” are intrinsically subjective things.
inking through su ideas in the work of Martin Heidegger, Miael E.
Zimmerman states:
Instead of conceiving of humans as worldless intellects making abstract assertions about external
objects, Heidegger defined humans as being always already involved in myriad practices that
utilize many different things. ese things do not manifest themselves abstractly as “objects”, but
 instead as tools involved in a context of relationships that constitute the ‘world’ of human
existence.
(Zimmerman 1993: 246)

So, not only do they aid us to shape and manipulate the world, they in turn
shape and manipulate us. And yet, as mu as they come from us, they are
“other”. at is, a tool is always a thing imagined even when it is in use; it is
a moment in fantasy, always bigger (and maybe smaller) than its physical
form and its tenical capacities. When we speak of tools like “cameras”,
practices like “photography”, therefore, we are speaking about particular
relationships to ourselves as they stret us out to nudge a point just beyond
ourselves, a point, a thing, a position, that maybe both evades us and reflects
us ba.
My hun is that thinking about these assumptions might reveal
something of the bond between our claims at selood and the cultural and
tenological fields we shuffle through. In this spirit, this essay is an
intuitive, subjective reflection on certain emotional undercurrents at play in
recent (mostly amateur, mostly filtered through street photography) streams
of engagement with the camera. Within this area, it circles around the
notion of decisiveness, one of the most important ideas and mythologies in
the field of photography. Indeed, and perhaps obviously, decisiveness is
structurally embedded in the field as a promise, a provocation and a
pressure, and it’s this that defines and haunts the tenological-dreamings
that continue to propel it and us into our various fractured, never quite
avant-garde futures.
I come at this not as a curator (the quasi-labour that comprises my day
job) but as a consumer filled with half-understood forum
opinion/knowledge, a fumbling amateur with loaded (and problematic)
expectations about what a camera might do for me. My naivety is sincere
and is a quality that provides its own pathways into culture, mu like, I
presume, it is for so many of us despite our efforts to hide our various
failings in a realm that seems to require seamless mastery above all else.
 Stepping into the World

It sounds like a clié, but my experience with cameras started with a

dream. I recall words only: “When I come to photography everything will be
okay”. e dream “came to me” on holiday in the summer of 1990/1991 at
the end of my first year of art sool (painting major) when I was struggling
to decide what to dedicate myself to: would I be a realist, a romantic, a cute
illustrator, or, less likely, an abstractionist. Feeling like time was outpacing
me, with other students flamboyantly thriving, I figured I needed to commit
to a course of action – fast.
e promise of photography was not just associated with image making
with a camera. If I were asked at the time what photographic imagery meant
it would have been sepia shots of mid-distance barns, Converse One-Stars
hanging over powerlines – album cover art of the period, basically. Even as a
20-year-old that felt too theatrical. Instead, I think I was drawn to the
radical o/Otherness of photography as it played on the premise of decision
and indecision; somehow I was hooked into the dominant (romantic-
humanist) takes on the medium’s histories, the ones that define it as a
sequence of still moments that compose a disciplined narrative about the
inextricability of photo-heroes and their micro-but-nonetheless-meta-
moments. And, what was key to me wasn’t so mu the idea of producing
photographic images but something about the way those stills were a
decisive record of what happens when the shuer goes down and there’s
just no going ba, no time to second guess, to ange one’s mind.

Shopping for God

I made a partial step out in 1995 when I pied up a Pentax Z-70 SLR as a
support tool for my graduate study. I used it about ten times and it mostly
remained in its Lowepro bag like an over-complicated programmable VCR,
always beyond me, always four functions in excess of what I could cope
with. If it was anything, it was a tool of deferral. My actual moment of
readiness was around early 2012. At this time, I was focused on what
photography was and might be on a range of levels. I’d curated a bun of
photography shows and through them my feeling for it was as a provocative
social and interpersonal instrument; I also had a couple of close friends who
were professionals in the medium in different ways and being interested in
cameras was a way of being in the world with them socially and culturally.
And so, with my dream-memory very mu still in mind I thought maybe I
could make sociable culture too; though I wasn’t sure what the tool would
produce by way of images exactly, my dream hun was there to tell me it
just might make everything okay.
I took the final leap, however, because of aesthetics. I saw a Pentax Q in
the window of a city camera shop and loved it straight away. It was how a
camera should look, but super-small, and therefore (supposedly) manageable
and without huge expectations of amazing outcomes. Aer seeing it I did
what we all do now: researed it online. My dream started unravelling. e
sensor was tiny. Lenses were not readily available. I bought it despite these
flaws; I didn’t know whether those things maered to me, and, well, the
look of it made me put rational assessments aside.
Naturally, once the thrill of purase had dulled, the very fact it had su
obvious flaws – to others not to me: I never once printed anything from it,
or even posted anything on the web from it – made me unhappy. So began
the struggle between form and “function-as-imaginary/imaginary-as-
function”. e seeds of the struggle about what I could accept from it as
output came not from myself but from how others (who were not around,
who would not be interested) would consider my non-output output. Like so
many of our First World acquisitions everything operated at the level of
fantasy and projection. While I was dealing with a physical object, a tool, I
had entered into, or brought with me, a decidedly psyo-cultural space, and
my decisiveness crumpled with post-purase indecision.
is makes sense, not only in terms of post-purase doubt but because
my purase and resear (both part of the same continuum) was embedded
in the unstable ideas and imaginaries associated with the burgeoning Micro
4/3 and compact digital camera scene. ese were entirely held in place by,
and annelled, a potent thrum of promise. As is well known, mirror-less
Micro 4/3 cameras offered a supposedly high quality smaller-than-DSLR
camera that harked ba to the “serious” 35mm film cameras of previous
decades. ey offered portability, lens swit-outs and beer styling
compared to full frame digitals. It was a rapidly evolving field. Ea new
camera seemed to make the preceding ones redundant; ea year – and with
a fervour akin to Apple fans – camera buffs would wait and see what the big
brand launes would offer. Following ea release, anges were always
intricately evaluated: were “notoriously slow” focal problems fixed, had high
ISO issues sorted themselves out, was baery life extended?
Behind this was a will towards a future where su devices would be as
good as their bigger counterparts. e DSLR was always the benmark and
the lile guys always came up short; the push of this tenology was to
transcend itself, to exist beyond its tantalising state of not-quite-thereness.
As su, maybe these cameras were never actually themselves. is was
proved in test aer test where zooms were tried out, where the dreaded pixel
obstinately remained, where low light continued to be a problem. ose of
us learning about images being made through cameras at this time
(something very different to making photographs) might have found it hard
to fathom the difference between the relative noise in images, but with
persistence a language developed, one in whi I could spot the “issues” and
name them as su. e way they laed, the way they were never what
they should be, was what they were, and was what the discourse was. It was
one of la, and therefore one of desire, to be more than they were, to be
other than themselves.
So the field I bought into was not just one where information and analysis
was at work, but one that constituted a rigorous, implicit testing and
demarcation of discursive boundaries, about the probability and
permissibility of certain images. is was being played out against the
fulfilment of the promise of the camera per se (not just the DSLR that in
some ways was a mere stand-in for the ur-camera). e baground
assumption in operation was that a proper image would be devoid of pixels,
with no blurriness at any level of light, possess perfect fades (the mu-
sought Bokeh), true to life colour, and be able to be blown up as large as
possible with no degradation.
In short, this type of camera discourse images God. It expects a perfect,
generalised image of the world that everyone can agree on. It is the world
doubled, the world that replicates our view of it but “impartially” with
precision and with a sense of truth that we might appeal to as a form that
might not stabilise ourselves but will finally satisfy ourselves. e visual
asm that is born from the voyeuristic desire to “see more” will then be
quened, and desire as su eradicated, cured. In this way, “progress”
moves to an act of subjective erasure, of annihilation. Ea at forum
critique is a suicide note, a coded plea for death. at this is the exact end
point is never actually spelt out, but it is, I think, always implied. And there
is another downside to noiseless visuality: we need noise to live, noise to
make meaning that underpins this living as conscious beings. To see we
need to see the seeing. Our modernity (and its “posts”) is predicated on this.

Your Noise is My Grain

roughout, and maybe (latently) because of this, the discourse was also
balancing itself in certain ways. One response was to posit that one became
an “artist” by working with the medium, while you remained an “amateur”
by obsessing over ea and every flaw of the camera itself, and you became
a “professional” by being some pragmatic place in between. Su ideas were
voiced in many ways, anonymously on forums and on various blogs. e
one I was most aracted to was Eric Kim’s who, via his website and blog
eriimphotography.com, spoke against the era’s prevalent Gear Acquisition
Syndrome (known in forums as GAS), this being the idea that the right
camera, or simply just one more camera, will fix things (Kim, undated). He
spoke, I believe, with sincerity and humility of a need to become an artist by
not expecting the camera to create the art. is was sage advice and he got
at it via an initial love of the Ricoh GRII (tweaking the Moriyama model
into the digital age, a version of the camera I purased eventually too)
(Kim, 2016). With a fixed lens and small sensor it was a basic beast. Yet, it
looked amazing and gave enough resistance to the culture of pure visuality
so as to amplify its teness, its status as a function of the realm of picture-
language. Within the industry at the same time were the great videos from
the Hong Kong site Digitalrev that also featured nice instances of pros using
crappy cameras, and there was the release of cameras with limitations like
the more recent Leica M bla-and-white-only digital camera, the Leica M
2012. Always, the thing was to show that at the same time as the progress
fetish was being played out it was just that, a fetish, a construct, a product of
culture in the guise of science and religion in the form of tenology.
Intimately connected to this correction was the embrace of film – Eric
Kim took this on too (2012). Inspired by the antics of Terry Riardson
(jwd606, 2007) and others, film cameras (including the endearingly
unpredictable Lomo variants) allowed an embrace of flaws and limits. Once
again it was about tools that resisted, that embraced, even amplified, the
very flaws that the Micro 4/3 scene was trying to transcend. Cameras could
again be devices in the decisive moment of their use, not teleological
devices. Accordingly, nostalgia was a pressure valve that brought us ba to
a space of cultural traction. In this mode the camera moved against science
and into the humanities in a very clear and maybe necessary way; to
embrace the camera as camera, as the tool it is, is to ensure its fantasies
don’t swallow us up.
As necessary as this might be, there was and possibly remains something
limiting about the way this was played out. Camera grain and resistance
seemed only all right when filtered through some cameras. Noise from a
Lumix DMC-LX 2 would be just that, but from a Ricoh, Yashica or Contax it
would be read as an aesthetic or even an ideological position. Like so mu
else of this recent past there were unwrien rules everywhere. Rules for
grain and noise differentials were entirely romantically conceived around
ideas of authenticity that were, whilst not actually arbitrary, entirely
artificially constructed and not without their own aesthetic power relations.
 Suffering in the Streets

And so the decisiveness of making an image from “this place”, from “this
maine”, was never ideology-free nor neutrally rational. To take a photo
with a camera says a bun of things about how you want to be seen, but
also in this forms a wilful blindspot that says, on all levels, “is is where I
am shooting from; these are the limitations I am concerned with or the
limits I am trying to transcend or ignore”. It is a sense of strong-weakness, to
allow oneself to be pinned down by a version of the Lacanian Gaze (Lacan
1994), of te critics, forum junkies not to mention anyone with an eye for
the potential art of what you’re about.
I see, therefore, a fragility at play in the field at this level, and to me it’s
also why there is su a soly romantic tone to the work of leading “street
photographers”, this genre being the one where the camera dynamics are
most overtly being played out (possibly because of the visibility of the
device as a signifier in the hand on the streets). As I see it, this genre is a
delicate, humanistic, urban-formalism of “social concern”, but not really full
of heat and fire, and not remotely close to the cuing edge of contemporary
art photography practice. is is a judgment, but is not intended
judgmentally. So, instead of finding this activity derivative we should see it
as a stance, as one of several available positions, in relation to the camera
and the decisive moment now. It is of course not without issues, like the
implicit sense that the person with the camera has more agency than those
they shoot, or that they possess an artistic subjectivity while those they
shoot are mere props for the romance of “his” being there, props for
projected cinematic emotion, props even for “his” gear fetish. ese issues,
while serious, are also housing vulnerabilities. ey are related to gender, to
the lingering mode of a type of gear junkie masculinity that whilst oen
trying to be top dog (in life, on forums) is actually suffering, insecure and
tentative, playing out the overcoming of a shyness and a concern for la of
relevance.
So, when I see a guy (and again it is mostly men, but not always) stalking
the city with a Leica around his ne I see all this struggle in him, and feel
more than anything a sense that this is one way of living in a kind of
cultural pain, fighting against something, of being the product and subject of
a particular bind. It is the difficulty of taking a claim on social and cultural
space. at this is played out in the domain of the street is a way of ensuring
that there are some stakes at play in the public field even if this is rarely
noted and dealt with: one walks with all the forum critics in your head and
in your body. e camera is a tiet into a dilemma that is surely way more
about the self than about image production. Yes, mu of the work is about
decisive moments, precise times of engagement with the mainations of the
street (its own entity worth thinking more about), but it is also about the
decisive moment of oosing a workflow (that begins with the loaded oice
of camera), a moment that is far from actually decisive and is a kind of
unconscious to the field as su.

Embedded In/Decision

It is interesting (but hardly surprising) that this unconscious is coming to the

surface in the form of the symptom of recent shis in carry-around-te,
most especially with the promise of video working in su a way, and at
su a capacity, as to allow fully fledged stills to be made from its output.
Now it is at least theoretically possible to run footage, sit at your maine
and come up with something. e world as it rushes by is now raw material,
and we make pictures at home with the stereo on. Once again, these, in the
same ways noted above, seem to come from a field hell-bent on becoming
God. As I’ve floated, this is mu as it has always been of course, but with
the shi being that this image (not a “shot” now) can never be the one where
the world has landed in the right place (according to a sense of form and
ance, 4K video, the balance of the miraculous always a construct, and how
it pivots on a notion of doubt that it will be there, that it will have occurred).
Still, logically driving the idea of the image making in this process is a sense,
of course, of there being a perfect moment, and it thereby presents all the
te, the sequences of workflow, as defensive catments for this moment.
ere is an anxiety at play here, a fear of missing out, of not producing the
goods, of failing to enter the heroic-moment discourse. is fear, its
existence even, comes from a cultural space where the idea of the image is
preconceived, expected, whi in turn means that one loses the otherness of
a moment itself, of it not being planned, of there being an un-made quality
to it. It pivots on the idea of there having to be a moment, of there needing
to be a point of necessary, transcendental coherence; of there being an
organising moment from whi meaning can be made in terms of a story to
and from that point. Without it, we are lost in pure semblance as the world
rolls on by doubled, paralleled in and through the device.
While there might be practical reasons for this tenology being in use,
su as a promo still from video in an easy hand-held format and the like,
what we see in this nascent space is the further amplification of oice in the
medium. Once again, what is interesting conceptually and subjectively
though is that this new shi seems to more clearly foreground the dilemma
of oice as almost structurally connected to the nature of the medium itself,
its push to pure Otherness, pure worldness, and the struggles we have with
not quite ever being in that place. So this is not necessarily a development as
su but more a digging-in of the medium into itself, or an example of the
medium’s Id-ness continually refusing repression. I have never been tempted
to use the new capacities, and have spoken to a few professionals who say
that neither have they, but it seems to me like something happening almost
of its own accord, simply following out another logic. ough no doubt
that’s being paranoid. What is maybe more realistic to note is that
photography as an act that requires you to actively lur into the rolling
perfect world, at the same time as reflecting it flawlessly, remains at the core
of the medium . . . and will possibly always be the crux of our struggle with
the medium (a struggle that replicates my own initial wish to be in the
medium, oddly . . . or what I looked to it to save me from).

Sociology for One, for Many

Okay, all of this is intuition, a reflection on photography from my position,
as someone both in the field but also on the sidelines trying to find a way in.
As I did, and as I noted, what I found was a very different set of decisive
moments in play, ones far from heroic, more about anxiety, fear of looking
stupid, old tropes and arguably modes of, and outlets for, various types of
tentative, insecure masculinities. I found this because in many ways that
was my subject position too. So I found not just cameras and images but the
subjective issues with them. But what of me? I still think photography will
save me. And, to a degree it has. I am not using a camera anymore, or even
thinking of them mu; instead, I’m using a rubber-covered hand-me-down
iPhone 5. I use it to take notes, shoot art in storage, document installs in
progress, and the odd piece of clothing when I’m on a spending spree. Its
main use, however, has been Instagram. I (or my girlfriend) take headless
shots of me in whatever brand combo I’m wearing as a claim on the reality
of my being in discourse. I am, again, like a million other amateurs looking
for validation through ultra low-res imagery. Strangely, it’s a kind,
encouraging space quite different to camera space. It is not transcendent, but
it is part and parcel of the male amateur life and the ways we struggle
behind our lenses and behind our typewriters with who we might be as it
blurs against who we are. If everything is okay, it is at this level, of
understanding it as a tool for self-making through limits and for finally
lodging myself, decisively, in a mediated social space.

References

jwd606 [youtube]. (2007) “Terry Riardson Yashica T4,”

www.youtube.com/wat?v=k8i3VETLflk, accessed 26/11/2016.
Kim, E. (2012) “Why Digital is Dead for Me in Street Photography,”
hp://eriimphotography.com/blog/2012/04/22/why-digital-is-dead-for-
me-in-street-photography/, accessed 26/11/2016.
Kim, E. (2016) “My Favorite Camera for Street Photography,”
hp://eriimphotography.com/blog/equipment/, accessed 26/11/2016.
Kim, E. (undated) “30 Tips to Conquer G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome),”
hp://eriimphotography.com/blog/equipment/, accessed 26/11/2016.
Lacan, J. (1994) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, London:
Penguin Books.
Zimmerman, M. (1993) “Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology,” in C.
Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 246.

7.3 Case Study: Lensculture

Jim Casper in Conversation with Moritz Neumüller

MORITZ NEUMÜLLER: If I am correctly informed, LensCulture started some 13 years ago as a
project driven by a personal interest, and has since developed into a large community of
photography lovers, but also into a company, which sustains employees, manages user accounts
and has entered a new phase due to a partnership with investors that see a business opportunity in
it. Please tell me about this journey, the story of LensCulture . . .

JIM CASPER: I started LensCulture in 2004 because I wanted to explore the increasingly
important roles that photography plays in many different aspects of society today—media,
advertising, art, politics, propaganda, journalism, surveillance, personal interactions. At the time I
was airman and CEO of a branding and design strategy business, and I knew that photography
was very important in the communications we created for our clients. So I wanted to understand
in a more profound way how photography works in other disciplines.

I was eager and impatient—I did not want to go to sool to learn all this—I wanted to learn
directly from the people who were experts in the language of photography, the photographers
themselves, as well as curators, photo editors, art directors, historians, gallery owners and others. I
created LensCulture as a vehicle to approa some of my heroes, and ask them to help me
understand what photography is about and how they were using it.

Almost as a side effect I realized that lots of other people (our new and growing audience) seemed
interested in learning from these people, too, and hearing in their voices what photography was
about. From 2004, LensCulture started to become a ri resource of articles about photography and
photographers, curators, editors, critics, as well as trends in photography in all genres. And now,
at the end of 2016, LensCulture reaes more than 2 million people every month in 145 countries.
e photographers we discover are featured in exhibitions, books and about 50 international photo
festivals ea year. We sponsor four international awards every year, making our outrea in 12
different languages, so we can really discover what is going on with photography in cultures all
around the world, not only in the English speaking countries.

MN: So when did LensCulture become a full-time job for you?

JC: In 2005, I sold my business in America and moved to Paris, to focus fully on photography and
LensCulture. In 2013 I was luy to connect with two business partners who have a lot of
experience in tenology and in growing businesses and designing for the internet. So with these
partners, we were able to rebuild the whole platform from the ground up, while keeping all the
content from 2004 up until now. We made the experience mu rier and enabled our readers to
sear all the information that is there. It also works beer on smartphones and tablets now, and
the image quality has improved a lot, so you can even project it onto a 4k resolution screen, and
the photos look amazing.

We also built in a lot of best-practices on the platform to help photographers move forward in
their careers and to improve creatively. We do this by giving talented photographers access to
their own free profile pages on LensCulture, where they can present lots of information about
themselves to our audience of over 2 million photography lovers. ese invited photographers can
upload an unlimited number of their images and projects, captions, statements, links to books that
they have published, links to their galleries, agencies, and their own professional websites . . . So
what we are trying to do is provide connections throughout the global community, and make it
easier for people to discover excellence in photography and to connect with those artists who use
photography in interesting ways. We want to make it easy for people to discover great talent and
to interact directly with ea other.

MN: This means that, on the one hand, you concentrate on excellence, and on the other, you have
teamed up with people who are very much interested in the growth of the platform. Is this a
contradiction or will you be able to fulfill the two goals?

JC: Yes. It’s growing in many directions. Since we publish our calls for entries in 12 languages, we
are discovering photographers in cultures all around the world whom we would not have
discovered otherwise. You and I know that when you go to portfolio review events (whi I still
do, several times ea year), you meet a bun of really interesting photographers. However, this
is still a very limited number, compared to the number of people you can rea online. Now we
receive projects from photographers in far-flung countries, large and small, on every continent.
With the power of the internet, we are able to connect with people we would not have come
across any other way. So the number of artists on LensCulture has grown to many thousands.

e other interesting thing we have done is that we invited experts in photography, curators,
gallery owners, critics, authors, and other photographers to become LensCulture Insiders—and to
nominate talented photographers to get visibility on our platform. ese are all people who are
working very hard to discover new talents, and we ask them to tell us about interesting
photographers they have discovered in their practices. So ea of the Insiders—we have almost
1,000 now, around the world—can nominate photographers to get a free profile page on
LensCulture. It’s like having a thousand talent scouts around the globe, keeping us up to the
minute. is has really enried our base, because it enables all our readers to discover these great
photographers and new talents, just by digging in and browsing through LensCulture.

MN: Wow, 1,000 Insiders, and I believe I am one of them . . .

JC: Yes, you are!

MN: I was not aware that we are so many. How active are they?

JC: Well, not all of the Insiders actively recommend artists to be featured on LensCulture, but they
have other possibilities to interact with the photographers they find on LensCulture. We have a
special dashboard for the Insiders. For example, when we sponsor an award, there might be six top
prize winners and 25 finalists, but there might be some 150 other highly rated submissions that
were trying to win those awards, so we display all of those highly rated photographers for the
Insiders, so they can discover them for their festivals, exhibitions, publications, and more. It has
become a very interesting database of photographers who are creating great work today, including
many who have not been recognized internationally yet.

MN: Is this the future, the new way to work globally in photography? The photographic object is
getting less and less important and it is all about the image?

JC: Well, I think word of mouth has always been an important way for any creative workers to
expand their networks. You meet other curators and share your discoveries. If you’re excited about
someone who has a new approa to the visual language of photography, you probably share your
enthusiasm with your colleagues, right? So you spread the word across the community about
people who will be interesting to wat. We simply tapped into tenology and the power of the
internet to amplify this effect and allow people to make these recommendations in an easier way
and in a forum that affects a larger number of people. So you can say, as if it was in a private
conversation, “Hey, here is someone who has found a new way of visual storytelling.” And your
excitement and enthusiasm can now rea a very big international group of influential experts
who are passionate about photography. It can have a profound impact on the success of
somebody’s career.

e question of whether photography is best experienced as a physical object or on a screen is a

bigger question.

MN: What I am heading at is probably the fact that, when I am invited to judge work for online
contests, and have to make a selection of my favorite projects from a screen, I tend to apply a
different set of criteria than when I see the works physically on a table or on the wall. I do not have
any proof of this hypothesis; it is based on a feeling more than on tangible data. However, I feel
that I fall more for flashy and easy-going, impressive images on the screen, whereas in “real life,” I
appreciate research-based, multi-layered projects . . .

JC: Well, it ultimately depends on the context, right? If you want to show something in a physical
exhibition, you really need to see the prints before you decide if a project is good enough for your
purpose. Or if you want to publish a book, it helps to see a book dummy. But if you are talking
about a visual story that is going to appear in the New York Times online or in a slideshow or
some kind of hybrid multimedia presentation, then a computer screen is fine. Whether we like it
or not, I think this is how most people are consuming and reading images these days, anyway.

MN: True. And in the future, this will be more and more so. Joan Fontcuberta speaks of the Homo
Photographicus . . .

JC: I believe that photography is the most universal language on the planet today. We share
photos from our smartphones practically every day. Photography transcends any verbal language;
it transcends any economic status, any level of education or cultural baground. It seems that
everybody knows what a photograph is and everybody seems to be able to “read” photographs to
one degree or another.

e allenge we face in this language is fluency. Who is really using the visual language of
photography as an innovative art form or as a new persuasive communication tool? And that’s
where things get interesting, when people use the medium not to show a frothy cup of cappuccino
on Instagram, but to tell a multi-layered and complex story. at’s what I am interested in—who is
using this language in new, interesting ways? And then I want to share those discoveries with as
many people as I can, to inspire people.

Also, I think there is a sincere desire for people to understand beer how photography works and
how to become beer photographers and beer visual storytellers themselves. With that thought
in mind, LensCulture started to offer personalized, wrien critical feedba to photographers to
help them improve. For example, with our Call for Entries (Color Plate 50), when someone
submits five or more images with captions, they are entitled to get a critique of what they
submied. So, it’s not a typical photo contest where you get maybe a thousand entries but only
ten people can win. In this case, everyone wins, because thoughtful, qualified experts look at every
submission, and they respond with an honest, helpful critique. It’s short, it’s wrien, but it’s also
visual and it can maybe suggest a different sequence for the images, or show alternative ideas for
an edit. With that we really want to elevate the awareness of how photography can convey
nuances and meaning in a powerful way. So we are trying to educate people who are interested in
photography, from professionals and students to enthusiastic amateurs. We want to raise the level
of visual fluency, that is, not only to read, but also to write with the photographic image.

MN: This personalized feedback is sure worth its money, and thus it must seem only fair that the
participants have to pay for taking part. And still, there have been accusations and people seem to
be skeptical about what has now become very normal, that you have to pay a fee to participate in
any call for entries, be it for festivals, portfolio reviews, contests, etc. Why is this so?

JC: I think in the past, many of the so-called photo contests had been money-making businesses.
And this is one of the reasons why we anged the model, so everybody who participates gets
something ba. It’s impossible to offer everything for free unless you have a ri and generous
sponsor. It’s the same in many fields. For example, galleries incur a lot of expenses when they
show photographs at an art fair—the cost of prints, framing, lighting, advertising, shipping,
insurance, and the fees to be part of the fair. And if you want to go to a museum, or to see a
performance, or to enjoy a music festival, you typically pay a fee to participate.
MN: And then there are those people who do not want to pay a five-dollar entry fee for a museum,
but have a latte macchiato for six dollars next door . . .

JC: Right, and post a picture of it on Instagram! [laughs] At LensCulture we do not have sponsors
or paid advertising. We made a conscious decision that we do not want to cluer the screen with
visual advertising. Our platform is purely devoted to photography, to create a really pleasant
photographic experience. We try to keep it image-ri, cluer-free [see Color Plate 51].

MN: When did you realize that you had achieved something special?

JC: It has come in waves, but even as early as 2004, when I did my first audio interview with the
Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko, I realized that there was a big international audience that
was interested in photography. Alexey didn’t speak English at the time, and I didn’t speak Russian,
so we had to use a translator, but we kept the tape running the whole time. Without planning for
it, we reaed a big Russian-speaking audience! How did this happen? Apparently, somebody
must have put a link on a Ukrainian bulletin board: “Listen to this Russian photographer talk
about his cool photos.” is was an “Aha” moment for me.

From that humble start, our audience continued to grow, and as I said earlier, we now rea more
than 2 million people every month, and the audience continues to grow—that is very gratifying.

MN: I understand that LensCulture is encouraging photographers not only to concentrate on

producing great pictures, but to create a series or a body of work that is about something. The
narrative power of a carefully composed image sequence can help to bring across much more
complex themes than just one great picture. In other words, you are trying to help them to engage
with what is now known as visual storytelling . . .

JC: Exactly. As you know, making a single good photograph is hard in itself, but making a series
of photographs to tell a complex story in a compelling way is really allenging. You have to work
hard at it, and be very deliberate in the final presentation. You have to think about the sequence,
the edit and the flow. You have to think about how captions are related to those photographs, and
how they inform the photographs, and how they pull the reader through the story. I think that’s
where education and talking with your peers, and geing feedba, allows people to become
beer storytellers. Having a compelling image at the start, and writing a concise opening
statement allows the reader to approa that idea with clarity, and that’s something that you can
learn how to do with practice. Once people learn how to edit and sequence images and text in a
way that grabs people’s aention and keeps it, they become mu more effective.

I encourage photographers to collaborate with writers, researers, film-makers, musicians,

philosophers, poets, anyone who can help to add an extra layer of interest to a project. It’s really
fun and useful to collaborate with exhibition designers, book designers and graphic designers. I
think it’s nearly impossible to do everything well by yourself, so it’s important to collaborate with
other talented people to make the work as strong as it can be. In my experience, people in the
creative industries, and especially photography, are very generous and have a strong sense of
empathy—collaboration can be very enlightening and personally rewarding.

MN: How do you see the future? In ten years, where do you want it to be?
 JC: I am actually quite happy with where things are right now—photography is alive and thriving.
At LensCulture, I feel that we are involved with an active and engaged community of people who
really care about photography, and the exange of information happens on a prey interesting
intellectual level. I’d still like to discover people who use photography in new ways, who will blow
our minds with the next way to use this visual language. And I think that’s going to happen really
soon! Photography is more and more popular, and everyone is a photographer, so I’m sure that
there is going to be another breakthrough of some kind, and that’s going to be really exciting to
wat and experience. I’m eagerly looking forward to whole new ways of using photography—
maybe it will be like a new form of literature or global activism or immersive cinema or jazz.

MN: And this is probably going to happen on Instagram or Snapchat or some other platform,
probably one we do not even know about. How do you connect to these networks? Is there a direct
dialogue between LensCulture and these user groups, or do you find them in the hidden depths of
the social networks and bring them to the surface?

JC: ere is so mu photography out there these days, in so many places. It really helps to get
recommendations from people you trust. So, I might look to see who my friends are following on
Instagram, and when I find someone who is consistently posting cool work, I’ll follow that person,
and see who they follow . . . But things can get random prey quily on the internet, so I oen
rely on the recommendations of curators and editors who take the time to highlight good work
from around the world. And that is the same mission we have at LensCulture—to discover
interesting new work every day, and then to share those discoveries with other people who are as
passionate about photography as we are.

This interview took place in Amsterdam on December 15, 2016.

7.4 Homo Photographicus

Joan Fontcuberta

I don’t know what future awaits for photography over the next few decades
although I am quite certain that the bridge whi will allow us to rea this
distant future is post-photography. Science fiction holds out a world of
either physical or intangible screens whi we will access through a mental
interface and whi will provide us with holographic images from multiple
perspectives. Ba in 1982 Ridley Sco planted the Esper camera in our
imaginations when—in a popular sequence from Blade Runner—the
replicant-hunter Ri Deard visually navigates within a photograph to be
able to observe details whi were hidden from the initial point of view. is
action sequence whi is set in cinema fiction is very close to us in 2019.
Today there are thermal cameras whi “see” through walls as well as
cameras whi record information in bulk and later decide the context and
the moments of recording whi are of interest. An advance whi has
become popular with the public is the Lytro Light Field camera whi allows
for focusing on a certain plane after taking the photograph, rather than
previously as is customary. Su navigation through the spatial dimension
leads us to conjecture about the viability of navigating through the temporal
dimension: we focus on a spot and calibrate the moment in whi we want
to see it on a ronological scale. Certain journeys (visual ones) in time thus
appear possible at least within limits. Just give it time. e optic systems
developed for military purposes and for espionage have been slowly
integrated into civilian life: for monitoring the road system, the Spanish
Road Transport Authority (Dirección General de Tráfico) boasts of its
Pegasus helicopters whi are fied with cameras able to read the
registration number of a speeding vehicle at night from a kilometer away.
On the other hand, micro-surgery allows ocular implants whi can make
vision as potent as that of Superman. Another field rivalling science fiction
is the resear in advanced computational neurosurgery laboratories aimed
at reconstructing human cerebral activity through visual images, the
objective being to be able to film directly through the eyes and record
dreams so that they can be shown on a screen as soon as the subject
awakens, coding emotions so that they can be transformed into images
whi can be seen or perceived by another person. Although for the moment
it is still only possible to externalize simple graphic forms as figures or
pictograms, the tenique portrays a scenario whi is as poetic as it is
terrifying: we could take delight in the projection of our fantasies but also
the most intimate of our thoughts will be exposed to the manipulation of
intelligence or criminal agencies. As this future of hyper-visibility becomes
consolidated, post-photography prepares us for a world of mental images,
ubiquitous images with neither body nor support. is new breed of
photographs comes to life in the hands of adolescents, while monitoring
their practices helps us to make out their potential evolution. It is clear that
photography is no longer only a case of “writing using light” exercised by a
few select scribes but rather becomes a universal language whi we all use
instinctively in the twists and turns whi life takes. is is what I propose
be referred to as the coming of homo photographicus. is universality and
its use on a mass scale whi is brought with it demands a toll from what
has been the ideological scaffolding supporting photography: we are now
entering into genuinely new models of truth and memory. e uncertainty
surrounding the documentary value of post-photographic images has been
done to death. at for memory not so mu. Photo-emical photography
was associated with the memory of an elephant; post-photography in
contrast is associated with the memory-span of a goldfish whi supposedly
lasts only for a maer of seconds. e epitome of this is Snapat, an
application whi caused a furor among young people and where the
messages, photographs and videos received are deleted aer ten seconds.
is is the ecstasy of the present to the detriment of the past: a present
whi is in suspension, made eternal, the no-man’s-land between the
horizon of experience and that of expectations. Post-photography replaces
the memory of the past with nostalgia for the present. At the time of
draing these lines, 800 million photographs are uploaded daily onto
Snapat; 350 million on Facebook; 80 million on Instagram. If only a second
were spent on ea of these images and leaving aside the content on the
many other platforms, it would take 39 years to look at them all. e
paradox is that we no longer take photographs so that we can look at them;
there are now other values associated with the act of taking photographs
su as connectivity and communication. Post-photography thus announces
a society whi loses memory but gains interaction. We should get ready for
it.

7.5 Post-Post-Photography
 Friedri Tietjen

In May 1989 NASA sent the robotic space probe Magellan to Venus with the
task of orbiting the planet and arting its territory. As Venus is completely
covered with a dense layer of carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid,
optical cameras would have been useless. Instead, Magellan was equipped
with a microwave radar that could penetrate the opaque atmosphere.
Mapping 98 percent of the planet took two years, and for some regions, data
stereo imagery was also collected. Transmied ba to the Earth, the
measured radar data were rendered into images. Most of these images
resemble aerial photographs taken vertically from above. e images
produced from the stereoscopic data, however, have a vanishing point, a
horizon and depth and overlapping of landscape formations, and despite
their false colors they appear as if they were taken from a camera close to
the surface of the planet – a camera that of course never had been there
(Color Plate 52).
Images like the ones from Venus triggered discussions in theory of
photography from the late 1980s onwards, whi became even more intense
with the widespread introduction of digital tenologies from the 1990s.
With their help, it became possible to generate and record images that would
no longer comply with the tenical frameworks of analog, emical
photography. Images were produced that appeared to be ordinary
photographs and yet had no reference to known or visible reality, and that
were not taken by a photographer and with no camera at all. Under these
conditions, what were thought to be the fundamentals of photography
seemed to erode, and with them, its cornerstone: the indexicality of the
photographic image, i.e. the assumption that there is a physical connection
between the image and the reality it depicts, mediated by the rays of light
reflected or emanated from the laer leaving traces in the photographic
emulsion. is connection was seen as essential for the veracity of
photographic images. Due to its malleability it appeared dubious whether
digital photography could provide indexical photographs at all. As a
consequence, writers claimed that photography, in fact, was dead and that
an age of post-photography had begun.
Yet – had it? at is the basic question of post-post-photographic theory
and resear. ere are three aspects to this question concerning the history,
the definition and the pragmatics of photography.
Historically, indexicality and, with it, the veracity of pre-digital
photography is far from being a given, and not because as a semiotic
concept indexicality came into being only in the second half of the
nineteenth century. e truth claim of photography, however, can be traced
ba to the 1830s, when contemporaries marveled at how the new pictures
would reproduce even the tiniest details, for instance, of a cityscape. is
precision was selective at best. Fine cras in the masonry might be
recorded, but the streets appear eerily deserted – the long exposure time
would cat only static objects while a bustling crowd would dissolve into a
thin mist. Moreover, until the 1880s photographic emulsions were sensitive
mainly to white and blue light: In the portrait of a sier with blue irises, the
eyeballs would appear entirely white, except for the lile bla dot of the
pupil. Retouing would be the only remedy – and it would also take care of
unwanted details su as moles, dimples, and wrinkles. us, from early on
the assumed veracity of photography not only came into conflict with the
tenical conditions of its production but was also met with measures to
provide images of a reality that clients wished for. At the same time resear
into the nature of seeing made it clear that the human eye was prone to
errors and deceptions, making it difficult to decide in relation to whi
understanding of (visual) reality the veracity of photographic images should
be proven. In other words: e bond between reality and photography
became contested not only by digital photography but from early on.
ese questions of truth in photographic images are also connected to the
second aspect – what exactly do we talk about when we talk about
photography? Textbook definitions focus mostly on tenical aspects;
photography then is understood as a process where the action of light and
other electromagnetic radiation on surfaces sensitive to them leaves traces
that eventually make images. Yet, not all of the images called photographs
are made this way – the illustrations in this book, for instance, are not
tipped-in prints pulled from negatives but were printed offset with ink on
paper; according to the definition, this would make them reproductions of
photographs, not photographs in their own right. And even if these images
were to be included on the ground that at their origin there once was a
photograph, other problematic cases remain. On the one hand, we have
images that look like photographs but would not fit into the definition, su
as the renderings made from Magellan’s data and photorealistic graphics in
video games and advertisements. On the other hand, there are zincotypes,
photolithographically printed circuits and spectroscopic recordings where
photographic processes are applied but whi would not be perceived as
photographs. It seems to be vain to find a definition for photography based
on its tenical properties that would clearly sort these cases. Maybe none is
needed?
Or maybe a more pragmatic one would be more helpful. With digital
photography, new processes were certainly introduced to produce images.
But these images are mostly treated the same as if they were produced with
pre-digital means: A snapshot in a social media profile is aributed no less
veracity than one in a family album; newspaper pictures are mostly made
from photographs taken with digital cameras, but the captions make us take
them to be as real as ever; and computer tomography data are made into
images with X-ray with the aesthetic to first and foremost make them
readable. Indexicality, it seems, is not a quality intrinsic to analog images
and absent from digital ones; the physical connection between the image
and reality appears rather as something that comes only with the specific
use of the images. ese practices have anged more radically than
photographic aesthetics. Professional studio photography dominated the
nineteenth century; in the twentieth century, photography became a pastime
for pey-bourgeois and white-collar workers in the West and East; when the
twenty-first century brought the introduction of cell phone cameras,
photography spread like wildfire. In the course of these anges, the time
lapse between taking a photograph and seeing it became increasingly
shorter until it virtually vanished. e photographers and their family and
friends would compare the realities they knew with the images they took;
the veracity of photography as su was proven by recurring exposure to
photographs and photographing as parts of life. Recognizing an image in a
newspaper as a photograph, however, does not depend on knowing the
reality in question firsthand; it is a result of being familiar by experience
with how photographs, in general, look like.
With this, indexicality reverses its direction. e connection between the
photograph and reality is not that the laer projects itself physically into the
image; it is rather that looking at the image is a projection of what has been
real once. Moreover it turns out that photographic indexicality is not per se,
but depends on the iconicity of photographic images in a double way: On
the one hand recognizing the semblance of a known reality and the resulting
image is fundamental to looking at the photographs taken by oneself. And
on the other hand, photographs of unknown realities aesthetically resemble
those that can be compared with known ones: ere is not mu difference
between a group-portrait of a politicians’ summit and that of a wedding, and
so it is easy enough to aribute the same veracity to both.
Veracity and truth in photography are not quite the same. In fact, the
post-post-photographic shi of the focus from the images to the practices
and from the indexicality of photography to its iconicity makes us aware
that photography is as mu about generating realities as it is about
recording them. e images oen show situations that became reality only
through photography – family and online albums filled with snapshots of
trips, parties, and Christmas make life appear as if it was an eternal Sunday
with no daily grind; the spotless beauties of advertisements promise that
dreams become reality when using the right product; the politicians’ group
portraits are arranged to show not the actual meetings but their allegory;
cropping its gilded frame makes a reproduced painting shed its existence as
a material object bound to a certain time and space. e history of
photography can be read as a history of aempts to truthfully record reality;
nevertheless, it is run through with a powerful undercurrent of dreamt
realities becoming true only in images: Photography is the phantasmagoria
of a non-phantasmagoric medium.
Note: This essay would not have been possible without Maria Gourieva (St.
Petersburg State Institute for Culture) with whom I am organizing the
annual Aer Post-Photography conferences and who has been most helpful
in preparing this essay. I would have preferred to write it together; other
obligations, however, made this impossible for her.
 Index
24 Hrs in Photos 154, 165, 315–16
3D printers 248
9/11 aas 25, 315
Abdul-Ahad, G. 143–4
absurdity 130, 265–6
academia see education
activism 199–206 see also politics
actor–network theory 10–11
Adams, A. 301
Adrian, B. 176
advertising 37–40, 361; aritectural photography 179–80, 183; ethics 155; gender 157–8; irony 155–7;
KesselsKramer 153–8; Kodak 51–2; photo fiction 235
Afghanistan War 147–51
Afronauts 318, 330–1
Alford, K. 143–4
algorithms 244
alternative fashion 110–11
alternative processes 17
ambrotype 94
Anderson, T. 143–4
animals 351–2
anthropology 163–4, 168–76
Araki, N. 325
aritectural photography 177, 186; advertising 179–80, 183; digital teniques 185–6; image right
issues 296; modernism 177–80, 183–4; monumentalism 180–2; politics 179–80, 183–4; post-war
period 182–3; postmodernism 184–5 see also documentary aritecture
Arive of Modern Conflict (AMC) 101–4, 107
arives 101–7
Arnheim, R. 231–4
arranged photography see staged photography
art 18–19, 204–7, 260, 344–5; and activism 199–206; contemporary 21–6; copyright 299–301, 303; family
album 164–5; history xxii, 11–12, 277; plastic/visual/multisensorial 245–6
art market 269–70, 300–1, 303; photography market 279–83 see also contemporary art market
Arthus-Bertrand, Y. 247
Asia-Pacific 88–95
Atget, E. 179
aura 244
authenticity 232–4, 262
authorship 193–5, 240, 356–7
automation 192–5
Azoulay, A. 340–1
Baan, I. 186
Badger, G. 223, 306, 317–22
Baldus, E. D. 177–8
Ballen, R. 252–68
Bark, J. 194
Barker, R. 226
Barthes, R. 6–7, 84, 163, 193, 225, 231, 335, 339
Bartholomew Jr., R. 235–6
Basetra 147–8, 150
Baten, G. 163
Bate, D. 243
Baudrillard, J. 121
Bauhaus 334, 336
Bayard, H. 236, 310
Baym, N. K. 45
Beato, F. 87, 94
Beaumont-Maillet, L. 234
Beer, B. 184
Beer, H. 184
Bee, S. 265–6
before and aer photography 74–82
Bellour, R. 225
Benjamin, W. 70, 72, 192–3, 231, 240–1, 244, 294, 335
Berezinsky, S. 117
Berezner, E. 116
Bezukladnikov, A. 110, 117
biocybernetic reproduction 244
blindness and visual impairment 246–7, 249–1
Blume, A. 235–6
Blume, B. J. 235–6
Blun, L. 228–37
Bodinson, S. 346–50
Bogre, M. 343–6
Bolivar, S. 103
Boltanski, C. 164
borderlines 252–3; absurdity 265–6; apparitions 266–8; mind 259–62; reality 262–5; society 253–8
Bordo, S. 39
Borisov, S. 110
Bourdieu, P. 163
Bourne, M. 32
Brady, M. 229
Bragaglia, A. G. 222
Bret, B. 241
Bredekamp, H. 4–5
Brodsky, M. 101–7
Brokeback Mountain 33–4
Bruheimer, J. 142
Bruno, G. 317
Bumeier, H. 191, 198
Bull, S. 244
bullet-time 225–6
Burgess, J. 46
Burgin, V. 226–7, 242, 337–8
Cadiz 328–31
Cambodia 91, 138–9
camera magazines 322–7
Camera Mainichi 323–7
cameras 363–9; Mexican Revolution 100–1; networked camera 44–5; war photography 147–51
Camerik, S. W. 93
Campbell, C. 133
Capa, R. 141–2, 232–3, 323
captions 232, 240–1
Casasola, A. V. 97, 101
Case Study House 182
Casper, J. 369–74
Castrejón, S. 99–100
Catastini, F. 240
Céphas, C. K. 93
Chalfen, R. 161
Chalmers, S. 211–20
Chen Xiaoyi 128–9
Cheng Xinhao 127
Cherkashin, N. 110
Cherkashin, V. 110
Chernysheva, O. 109, 113–14
Chéroux, C. 193, 195
Chevrier, J.-F. 56
Chezhin, A. 114
Chilikov, S. 114–15
China 93, 121, 126–30
CHINESCAPE 120–1
Chinese Aesthetics movement 122–5
Chinese landscape photography 120–1, 131; Chinese Aesthetics 122–5; conceptualism 121–2; cultural
roots 127–9; New Topographics influence 125–7, 130; perspectives 121–7; spectacle photography
130
Chiocei, F. 238–44
Chit, F. 93
Chmyreva, I. 107–17
Claerbout, D. 226
Clark, J. 89
class see social class
Clinton, H. 31
co-operatives 269–70
Coleman, A. D. 230
Coleman, J. 224
collectives 269–70
collectors/collecting 15, 274–5, 283; contemporary photography 292; Khoroshilov, P. 289–92, 294–6;
literature 292–4; meaning 294, 296; Russia 284–92
Colombia 101–3
colonialism 83–4, 86–7, 90, 256, 291–2
conceptualism 113–15, 121–2, 334
conflict photography see Mexican Revolution; war photography
Connell, K. 41
connoisseurship 287
Consten, E. 127
constructed photography see staged photography
contemporary art 21–6
contemporary art market 271–9; 1990s 273–4; collectors/collecting 274–5; future 277–8, 283; online
auctions 275–6; photography market 279–83; primary market 272; secondary market 272–3;
valuation 276–7
copyright 107, 296–303; academia 297–8; dissemination 302; no-ownership 106–7; as post-production
298–300; scarcity 300–1, 303; social media 302–3
correctness 231–2
Corvest, H. 247
Coon, C. 21–6
Coursera 346–7, 349
creative photography see staged photography
Crimean War (1853–6) 139, 292
cross-references 236
Cruz, E. G. 167
Cuadernos de la Kursala 328–33
Cultural Studies 337
D’Agata, A. 197
Daguerre, L. M. 310
Damis, H. 339
Damoizeau 226
data 105–6
Dayal, R. D. 87
de Middel, C. 318, 330–1
Debord, G. 121
decisive moment 352–3, 367–8
decisiveness 363, 366
Delafon, S. 197
Deleporte, A. 191
Dephot photo agency 142
Depression era America see Migrant Mother
Dewey, K. 30
digital images 14, 221, 224–6, 241–2, 371–2 see also social media
digital learning 346–50
digitisation 208, 246, 343–5; exhibitions 314–16; online auctions 275–6
directorial photography see staged photography
discourse standardization 6–9
Dissemination and Education 305–8
Dobrynkin, A. 117
documentary photography 253, 337; documentary aritecture 71–4, 76, 126;
staged photography 231–4 see also resear based projects
dorps 256–7
Dresden 75–6
Düben, C. 93
Duganne, E. 64
Dykhoviny, I. 116
E, B. 35
education 23–6, 334–6, 338, 340–5; online learning 346–50; visual literacy 345–6
Edwards, E. 163–4
Elahi, H. 165
Elkins, J. xix–xxii, 248
embedding 142
Emerling, J. 339
Emin, T. 196
Entenza, J. 182
environmental activists 199–200
equipment see cameras
Ertuǧ, A. 184
Es, H. G. 186
Estalayo, O. 153–8
Eurocentrism 86–7
executions 100
exhibitions 305–6, 309–10, 316–17; digital era 314–16; first years 310–11; as intimate experience 312–
14; pictorialism 311–12; unconventional interventions 316
fabrication see staged photography
Facebook 134, 150, 244, 346 see also social media
fakes 236–7
The Family of Man 314
family photography 159–61, 166–7; art as analytic tool 164–5; contemporary interest 161–2;
methodology 162–4; social media 160, 165–7; wedding photography 168–76
Faraday, M. 310
Farm Security Administration (FSA) 59–68
fashion photography 43, 110–11
Fegitz, E. 40
Feininger, A. 222
Feldmann, H.-P. 164
feminism: balash 29–31; FSA photography 64; male gaze 28–9; self-portrait 197–8; selfie 52 see also

gender
Fent, M. 191
Fenton, R. 139
Fernández, H. 306–7, 320
festival movement 115–16
fiction see photo fiction
film 221–7
financial crisis 24–6
fine art print 113
Fleishauer, C. 66
Flir 162, 165, 318, 355
flipbook 223–4
Flusser, V. xx, xxv, 249
Folco, M. 194
Fontcuberta, J. 307–8, 374–6
Formwalt, Z. 224
FotoFest 116
Foucault, M. 8, 10, 186, 193–4, 335, 359–60
France 76–7
fraud see staged photography
freeze frame 224–5
Friedman, E. 142
From Here On 351–52
Fukase, M. 325
funding 24–5
Futagawa, Y. 184
galleries 117, 205, 272
Gamergate 30
Gardner, A. 229
gay male gaze 32–6, 38–9
gaze see male gaze
Gellhorn, M. 147
gender 367; advertising 157–8; Mexican Revolution 100; selfie 50–2; trans 43–4 see also feminism; male
gaze
Germany: art market 273; before and aer photography 74–82; documentary aritecture 71–4; war
photography 140–1, 182 see also Nazi Germany
Gerrard, J. 227
Ghostbusters 30–1
glasnost 108–9 see also Russia
Gordon, L. 64
Görlitz 69–72
Gormsen, N. 74–5
Goyarrola, E. 189–98
grain 366
Grau, O. 226
Greenberg, C. 245–6
Griffiths, P. J. 139–40
Gropius, W. 179
Güntzel, S. 199–206
Hall, S. 6
Halsman, P. 235–6
Hambourg, M. M. 76–7
Hamengkubuwono VI 93
Hariman, R. 60
hashtags 355–6
Haussman, G.-E. 76–7
Hayhoe, S. 247
Hebron Bang Bang Club 145–6
Hege, W. 181
Heidegger, M. 362
Heidersberger, H. 182–3
Heiferman, M. 348
Heliodoro J. Gutiérrez Agency 97
here is new york 315
Herr, M. 146, 150
history of photography see exhibitions; other world histories
Hitco, R. 179
hoaxes 236–7
Hoest 182–3
homo photographicus 375–6
Howard, A. 31
Howe, P. 145
Hu, Y. 45
identity 17–18, 190–2, 195–8, 366–7
ideology 8 see also theory
Image Act eory 4–5, 9–10
image manipulation see staged photography
image meaning 359–61
image performativity 4–6
image rights see copyright
image scores 357–8
image–text intersections 238–44
Images, Photographs and Visual Culture 1–4
imperialism see colonialism
In Memoriam 215–17
indexicality 376–8
India 87, 89, 92–5
Innocence Project 213–14
Instagram 160; selfie 53–6 see also social media
institutions 7, 16, 337 see also arives; education; museums
internet: online culture 28–31; online learning 346–50; online sales 275–6, 282–3 see also social media
InterPhoto 115–16
interventions 316
introduction xxiii–xxv; Dissemination and Education 305–8; Images, Photographs and Visual Culture

1–4; Outlook 351–4; Redefining the Photographic Medium 207–10; Rights and Markets for

Photography 269–71; Territories 83–6; Useful Photography 133–7

Itier, J. 90
Jaar, A. 316
James, H. 239
Janin, J. 177
Japan 87–8, 93–5, 307, 319, 323, 325–7
Jeffrey, I. 337
Jens, C. 185
Jewell, D. 194
Johns, M. 40
Johnson, P. 179
Jones, E. 161
Jordan, C. 199–206
Jorgensen, C. 42
judicial photography 190
Kabakov, I. 164
Kalina, N. 224
Kamber, M. 145
Kambhampati, S. 45
Karey, C. 247
Kasyanov, S. 117
Kertész, A. 253–4
Kessels, E. 135, 153–8, 165, 315
KesselsKramer 153–8
Khoroshilov, A. 283–96
Khoroshilov, P. 283–96
ki-off image 357–8, 360–2
Kiev, G. 357, 361
Kim, E. 365–6
King, J. 242
kissing to be clever 39
Kitaev, A. 113
Kiyan, D. 117
Klein, S. 279–83
Klein, W. 223
Klevak, S. 110–11
Knightley, P. 142, 232
Kodak Girl 51–2
Köhler, M. 230
Kohout, A. 355–62
Koppelkamm, S. 72, 81
Kosore, K. W. 26–44
Kracauer, S. 222–3
Kraus, H. P. 286–7
Kühne, A. 74–5
Kupriyanov, V. 109–10
Kursala 328–33
Kuwayama, T. 147–8, 150
Lacan, J. 197
landscape photography 212–13 see also Chinese landscape photography; Western landscape
Lange, D. 59–64, 67
Langford, M. 163
language xx–xxi
Lanzmann, C. 211–12, 220
Larsen, J. 167
Latin America 101–4, 322
Latour, B. 10–11
Le Corbusier 179–81
legacy see reception
Lehmuskallio, A. 167
Leipzig 74–5
Leistner, R. 138–51
LensCulture 369–74
Leonhard, W. 77–8
lesbian ic 40–1
Letinsky, L. 41
Lévi-Strauss, C. 133
LGBT identities 26–7, 51; gay male gaze 32–6, 38–9; lesbian ic 40–1; trans 41–4; unqueer 33, 38
Lien, S. 161
light-field cameras 352, 375
limited editions 280, 301
Lin Shu 128
Linfield, S. 337, 339, 341
Linke, A. 186
Lissitzky, E. 226
Lister, M. 221
literacy 345–6
literature 238–44, 292–4
Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan 147–51
Losh, E. 51
Lost and Found Project 166
Lozada Jr, E. P. 176
Lucaites, J. L. 60
Lugon, O. 313
Lüpertz, M. 299
McEvilley, T. 309–10
MacGregor, M. 116
McLuhan, M. 147–51, 235, 358–9
magazines 117, 307, 322–7
Magellan 376–7
Magnum 280–2
male body 34–5, 37–40
male gaze 26–8; advertising 37–40; feminism and online culture 28–31; lesbian ic 40–1; trans 43–4;
visual culture 32–6
Manet, E. 309
Manikonda, L. 45
manipulation see staged photography
Mapplethorpe, R. 34–6, 41
Marker, C. 225
markets see art market; contemporary art market
Martin, D. N. 26–44
Marville, C. 76–7
Marx, K. 161
Mary, B. 159–60
massive open online course (MOOC) 346–50
materiality 13–21, 246, 371–2
Mathews, C. D. 214–15
Matrix 225–6
Mauro, A. 305, 309–17
meaning see image meaning
medium 207–10
Megias, J. 176
Meglinskaya, I. 117
Meister, S. 346–50
memorials 215–17
memory 375–6
Mendelsohn, E. 179
metadata 46
Mexican mother in California 61, 63, 67–8
Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) 96–101, 139
Mials, D. 241
Micó, J. 328–33
Middle East 275
Mies, L. 179
Migrant Mother 60–3; existing literature 64–5; historical baground 65–8
Mikli, A. 247
Mitell, W. J. T. 4, 240–4
Moholy-Nagy, L. 223
Mokhorev, E. 113
montage 222–3
monumentalism 180–2
Moreno, B. 196
Moriyama, D. 325–6
Mraz, J. 96–101, 139
Mukhin, I. 110
multisensorial art 246 see also tactile photography
Mulvey, L. 26–8, 224
Murphy, L. J. 247
Museum of Modern Art 346–50
museums 15–17, 115, 162, 205, 319
Muybridge, E. 222
Natwey, J. 138
Napalm Girl 134–5
Natanson, N. 65
Nazi Germany 69, 138, 140–1, 161, 164, 179–82, 211
networked camera 44–5
Neubronner, J. 351
Neumüller, M. xxiii–xxv, 245–51; with Alexander Roer 271–9; with Alison Nordström 13–21; with
Anastasia and Pavel V. Khoroshilov 283–96; with Charloe Coon 21–6; Dissemination and

Education 305–8; with Gerry Badger and Martin Parr 317–22; Images, Photographs and Visual

Culture 1–4; with Jim Casper 369–74; Outlook 351–4; Redefining the Photographic Medium 207–10;
Rights and Markets for Photography 269–71; with Simone Klein 279–83; with Swaantje Güntzel
and Chris Jordan 199–206; Territories 83–6; with Timothy Prus and Marcelo Brodsky 101–7; Useful
Photography 133–7
Neves, J. L. 306
New Photography eorists 335, 337–41
New Topographics 125–7, 130
Newton, G. 86–95
Nielsberg, R. 138
nineteenth-century photography 279
Nissen, M. 228
no-ownership 106–7
No.4 Vienna MMIX 352
noise 366
Nordström, A. 13–21
normativity 190–2
Nude for Stalin 290
objecthood 13–21, 246, 371–2
objectivity 189–90, 193, 232–4
online culture 28–31
online learning 346–50
online sales 275–6, 282–3
ontology 11
Open Frame 120
Opie, C. 41
orientalism 89
other world histories 86–7; observations 90–5; projections 87–9
Outland 265
Outlook 351–4
ownership see copyright
Page, T. 147
panoramic photography 226–7
Paris 76–7
Parr, M. 223, 306, 317–22
patriary see feminism; male gaze
Paul, G. 4–5
payment 329–30
pedagogy see education
Pejic, A. 43
Pellicer, R. 195
Penso, A. 316
perestroika see Russia
performativity 4–6; advertising 156; selfie 53, 56–7
Pernot, M. 192
photo booth 189; automation and authorship 192–5; identity 190–2, 195–8; uniqueness 194
photo fiction 235–6
photo sculpture 248
photobook 19–20, 223, 239–40, 306–7; exhibitions 306; history 317–22; Japan 319–20, 326; Spain 328–32
Photocaptionist 239–41, 244
The Photograph as Contemporary Art 21–3
photographic realism see realism
Photography is Magic 22–4
photography market 279–83 see also art market; contemporary art market
photojournalism see documentary photography; war photography
photomontage see montage
Phuc, P.T. 134–5
pictorialism 243–4, 311
picture agencies 106
picture postcards 178–9
Piganov, I. 110, 117
Pinuk, V. 274
Pink, S. 165
Pinney, C. 89
plastic arts 245–6
politics xxi, 104–5, 241, 334; activism 199–206; aritectural photography 179–80, 183–4; protests of
1968 104–5, 184, 321; war photography 139–40
Pop Art 273
populism 105
portrait photography see self-representation; selfie; wedding photography
positivism 83, 340 see also realism
post-photography 354, 374–6
post-post-photography 376–8
post-production 298–300
postmodernism 185, 236, 341
praxeological theory 9–12
Prince, R. 273
privilege 25
protests of 1968 104–5, 184, 321
Protsky, S. 89
Prus, T. 101–7, 161
psyoanalysis 196–7
psyology 253, 259–62, 264–8, 339
queer see LGBT identities
quotation rights 297
race: FSA photography 61–2, 64–5, 67–8; photo booth 198
Rausenberg, R. 302
realism 201–2, 232–4, 242, 262–5, 338–41, 377–8
reception 298–300
Redefining the Photographic Medium 207–10
Reeve, E.356
Reiinger, A. 245–51
Rejlander, G. 235
Rencontre Euromaghrébine de Photographes 249–51
representation 233–4, 359–60
reproductions 296–303
resear based projects 211–12, 219–20; Chloe Dewe Mathews 214–15; In Memoriam 215–17; Joel
Sternfeld 212–13; Taryn Simon 213–14; Unmarked 217–18; Youngstown, OH 218–19
revolutionary photographers 97–101
Ribalta, J. 341–2
Riardson, H. H. 178
Riardson, T. 366
Riman, L. 59–68
Rion, O. 241
rights see copyright
Rights6 and Markets for Photography 269–71
Road to Victory 226–7, 313
roadside memorials 215–17
Roberts, C. 120
Roberts, J. 340
Robinson, H. P. 235, 244
Rooff, A. 139
Rogov, A. 117
Rosenblum, N. 87
Rosenthal, J. 229
Rossaak, E. 225–6
Roth, A. 320
Roer, A. 271–9
royal photography 92–3
Rubinstein, D. 45–6
Ruff, T. 190–1
Rumsfeld, D. 142, 150
Russia 107–8, 116–17, 274; 150 Years of Photography 112; alternative fashion 110–11;
collectors/collecting 284–92; conceptualism 113–15; exhibitions 112–13, 116; festival movement
115–16; fine art print 113; first galleries 117; glasnost 108–9; installations 109–10; magazines 117;
museums 115; photographer as profession 109; Western photography 291
Sase, R. 177–87
Said, E. 89
Sainz, I. 28–30
Salsmann, M. 197
Sandbye, M. 159–76
Sassatelli, R. 27
Savenko, I. 164
Say Cheese! New Soviet Photography 112–13
scale 18, 20, 314
scarcity 300–1, 303; limited editions 280, 301
Saber, S. 141
Saarsu, K. 75–6
Smid, J. 164, 194
Sumaer, F. 178
Swegler, F. 358
Sco, C. 338
Seeing through Photographs 347–50
Sekula, A. 8–9
self-representation 45–7, 195–8
selfie 355; case study 47–50; gender inequality 50–2; Instagram 53–6; networked camera 44–5;
performativity 53, 56–7; self-portrait comparison 45–7; smile score 52–3
Selfiecity/Selfiecity London 47–53
Semenkov, S. 117
Sen, T. M. 45
sensory experience see tactile photography
Serebriakova, M. 109
serial photography 222
sexism see feminism; male gaze
sexuality see LGBT identities; male gaze
Seymour, D. 141
Shadow Chamber 262
shanshui 127–9, 131
Sherman, C. 197–8, 273
Shimonishi, S. 307, 322–7
Shoah 211–12, 220
Shulan, M. 315
Shulman, J. 182
Simon, T. 213–14
Siodmak, R. 225
size see scale
skeuomorphism 15
Sklandanowsky, M. 223
slide shows 224
Sluis, K. 45–6
smartphone: networked camera 44–5; war photography 147–51 see also selfie; social media
Smelov, B. 113
Smith, P. 333–42
Smithson, R. 224
Snider, C. 33
social class 98–9
social media 29–31, 241–2, 244, 345–6; copyright 302–3; Facebook 134, 150, 244, 346; family
photography 160, 165–7; image consumption 154–5, 355–6; image scores 357–8; ki-off images
360–2; surveillance 105–6; Tumblr 356–7; Twier 29–31; war photography 147–51 see also selfie
Sontag, S. 83, 139–40, 167, 235
South Africa 256–7, 259–60
Southeast Asia 91, 93, 95
Soviet Union see Russia
Spain 328–32
spectacle photography 130
Spee Act eory 4–5, 9–10
Spinats, J. 352
sport media 28–9
staged photography 228–31, 236–7; authenticity 232–4; correctness 231–2; cross-references 236;
fabrication 230; manipulation 230–1; photo fiction 235–6; truth 234
Steien, E. 226–7, 230, 312, 314
Stein, S. 61–2
Stenger, E. 177
stereoscopy 248–9
Sternfeld, J. 212–13
Stevens, P. 116
Stewart, G. 225
Stiegler, B. 4–13
Stieglitz, A. 309, 313
Stillfried, R. von 87, 94
sto photos 361
Strand, N. 238–44
Strand, P. 253
Strassler, K. 89
Streitberger, A. 221–7
Strohmaier, J. 224
structuralism 6, 163 see also Barthes, R.
Stryker, R. 59–60, 66–7
studio portrait see wedding photography
subject-position theory 337
subjectivity 133–4
Sullivan, M. 128
Sultan, L. 164
Sumovsky, V. 117
Surrealists 192–3
surveillance 165, 351–3
Susperregui, J. M. 233
Sviblova, O. 116
Swan Lake (Mahew Bourne 1996) 32–3
Szántó, A. 312
Szarkowski, J. 326
Szucs, S. 26–44
tableau photography see staged photography
Taca Sui 122–5
tactile photography 248–9; implementation 249–51; visual impairment 246–7
Tagg, J. 6–7, 66, 242, 337–40
Talbot, H. F. 310
Taro, G. 142
T atsuki, Y. 325
tenology see camera
Templeton, E. 164
Territories 83–6
terrorism 25, 315
text 238–44
ailand 93
Theatre of Apparitions 266–8
theory 333–5, 337; discourse standardization 6–9; image performativity 4–6; praxeological theory 9–12
omson, J. 91–2
Tietjen, F. 354, 376–8
Tifentale, A. 44–57
time-lapse 224
Titarenko, A. 113
Tomatsu, S. 307
Tratenberg, A. 335
trans 41–4
travel photography 91–2
Troilo, G. 228–9
truth 234, 337, 344, 377–8
Tugwell, R. 65–6
Tumblr 356–7
Tung Hing 120
Twier 29–31 see also social media
Ullri, W. 296–303
Ulmer, E. G. 225
unconscious 266–8, 367–8
Unembedded 143–4
University of Cadiz (UCA) 328–31
unmanned photography 351–3
Unmarked 217–18
unqueer 33, 38
USA see Migrant Mother
Useful Photography 133–7
uses see praxeological theory
USSR see Russia
Vaccari, F. 194–5
valuation 276–7
Van House, N. 166
Vasiliev, S. 111
veracity 376–8
Verne, J. 91–2
Vertov, D. 225
vintage market 279–80, 282
virtual reality 227
visual history 5
visual impairment 246–7, 250–1
visual literacy 345–6, 372–3
Vivienne, S. 46
Waowski, L. 225–6
Walker, I. 191
Wall, J. 244
Walther, T. 162
war photography 138–9, 146–7, 214–15, 313; embedded/unembedded 142–3; fixers and translators 145;
Hebron Bang Bang Club 145–6; history 140–2; logistics 144–5; Looking for Marshall McLuhan in

Afghanistan 147–51; politics 139–40; Unembedded 143–4

Warhol, A. 198, 273
Watson, P. 145
wedding photography 168–76
Weimar Germany 140–1
Weizman, I. 69–81
West, N. M. 51–2
Western landscape 125, 127, 129
Whelan, R. 232–3
Whitman, B. 142
Wiedenhöfer, K. 316
Wilden, A. 240
Willème, F. 248
wires 260–2
Wigenstein, L. 9
Wollen, P. 222, 225
Wood, M. J. 38–9
Woodman, F. 197
Yamagashi, S. 323–7
Yan Wang Preston 127
Y ang Y ongliang 121–2
Yao Lu 121–2
Yazdani, M. 50
Yeon-Soo, K. 161
Yining He 120–31
Youngstown, OH 218–19
Zeng Han 126
Zhan Bin 130–1
Zhang Jin 122–5
Zhang Keun 126–7
Zhang Xiao 126–7
Zimmerman, M. E. 362