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Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art aims to contribute to the understanding of the multifaceted and complex character of the photographic medium by dealing with various case studies selected from photographic practices in contemporary art, discussed in the context of views.
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Not only are such strategies a new everyday norm, but the family album is also no longer a discrete, material object reserved for private use. And even more significantly, these platforms are enabled by and serve commercial interests and, potentially, those of the state.

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This integration of state, commercial, and personal spheres has profoundly transformed some of the most significant feminist questions of the s, with the vernacular image as a newly central element. For example, the expansion of working life into private spaces, the experience of love and the socialization and psychical development of children are all now mediated in much more visible ways.

For second-wave feminists the political significance of personal images lay in the sustained interrogation of the institution of the family as an important site for gendered subjectivization. The s in China were a period of profound political, social, and cultural changes, though in a completely different historical context from that in Britain. The death of the great leader Mao Zedong in marked the end of three decades of central planning, but also of a Party-oriented and politically engaged mass culture. For Chinese photographic practitioners in the reform era, a critical engagement with photography first and foremost meant marking a conceptual and pictorial distinction from Maoist socialist realism.

On the other hand, officially recognized photographic organizations saw the humanist rhetoric of American documentary as something they could appropriate as a means to restore the credibility and vitality of socialist realist principles. Despite their contradictory perspectives, the shared desire of these two initiatives to reconnect with the outside world has shaped a new photographic culture in contemporary China that is dominated by Eurocentric conceptions of practice and critical theory, yet has entirely overlooked ideas of the politics of photographic representation in s Britain.

Li Xiaobin, Petitioner , , contemporary color print. An effective open network requires us not merely to participate and appreciate, but also to cultivate new historical viewpoints, broaden and complicate avenues of inquiry, and contribute historical insights and inventive ideas to the field. This will depend, above all, on a conscious engagement with the politics of depoliticization that saturates our everyday working lives and our living environment.


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While I recognize the history and its political problematic plotted out by John Tagg, in many ways these questions, assumptions, and practices have been premised on very specific ideas of what photography is, what it does, and under what conditions. A whole body of Theory has been built on these foundations, characterized by anxieties about status, the power and ethics of representation, about claims to realism, the workings of the sign, and the nature of the index.

This resolutely realist ontology and its cultural applications demand a language and theoretical disposition that acknowledges the power relations of the image, but at the same time accounts for the photographic desires, expectations, and uses of photographs in that majority world—an ontology that is allowed to exist in a world in a critical, certainly, but not hostile interpretative environment. This demands not only that assumed categories of analysis are refigured, but also that we engage with different ways of talking about photographs embedding conceptualizations that may make photographs something else entirely.

Figure 5. Haddon, Family traces: Torres Strait , , photograph. A wider definitional base for the medium premised on what photographs do in the world might be part of this. One could pile up very numerous ethnographic examples, but the point is that anthropologists are good at disturbing categories and good at thinking within photographic spaces. Photography needs to be, indeed must be, understood as a network of processes and relations, and in relationship with other complex local beliefs.

Victor Burgin, Possession , , photograph. One image from its news portfolio is representative of the iconographic impoverishment of contemporary mass media fig. Figure 7. The representational infrastructure of mimed outrage stands at the ready, these evangelists of blankness greeting their unseen antagonist. The photograph, and its markers in the database, anticipate perfectly the search strings of besieged editors, avaricious marketers, and demagogues alike. Figure 8.

The corporate consolidation of visual representation under Getty Images has been breathtaking. The firm now controls the intellectual property of some eighty million photographs, including fifteen million from British press archives dating back to the nineteenth century.

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A more complete absorption of visual communication to the prerogatives of the neoliberal arrangements forged under Thatcher and Reagan would be difficult to imagine. Before politics becomes entirely resistant to the visual, it is imperative to visualize resistance differently. Absent new means of doing so, and the terrain of dissent is left to the nihilistic, prefab protestors of the contemporary image economy.

This is because current photography theory is no longer motivated by the interventionist impulse that triggered so much of the work done in the s, where scholars formulated their ideas in response to what they perceived as major economic and political transformations in the operations of post-war welfare states. This development can be also be linked to the fact that current scholarship is focused on vernacular photographic practices, rather than on the mass-produced advertising imagery that stood at the centre of scholarly analysis and artistic practice in the s—for example in strategies of appropriation.

Yet, I actually see a potential for engaged scholarship and innovative forms of political practice within these new fields of scholarship, with their emphasis on the tactile and embodied rather than the strictly spectatorial, within specific communities of producers and users. New scholarship points out that photographs have a certain social, political, and emotional efficacy—they are affective: they produce social effects and enable agency, while their concrete modes of production and circulation are embedded within specific social and cultural relations as part of actual lived environments.

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These projects highlight the roles of desire, emotion, and the imagination within processes of archiving. They are concerned with the practice and use of photography, the temporal contingency and instability of archives, and the multiple lives of images. The images in these archives show signs of damage, touch, and exchange.

They are addressed not simply as visual documents, but as material and tactile objects that were held, marked, and sometimes corrupted by their specific users. That is to say, their meanings derive from their re uses and not only from their modes of representation. Another major concern of recent scholarship is with visual activism, for example in the work of Ariella Azoulay and Thomas Keenan.

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Rather than reach to the East to find the redemptive power of photography pass into the hands of those photography has historically overlooked, objectified, and kept exterior to its constitutive discourses, let us understand these questions as an invitation for the decolonization of photography.

Yet, despite its omnipresence, the darker side of photography endures invisibly. Connecting new and old politically committed photographic practices and histories of the global South with the Anglo-American photography scene of the s is pertinent and productive. The connection highlights the political, class, and formalistic critique that arose during that decade in relation to shifts in national and local economies and politics that foregrounded issues of class, gender, and race in Britain and North America.

The association also calls to centre stage the politics of representation and makes visible the economy of the photograph, its production, dissemination, and discursive and disciplinary effects within a larger topography of class, race, gender, economy, politics, and empire. Yet the fate of the s movement provides us with a prescient lesson to avoid looking to the global South exclusively as a fount of salvation.

If nothing else, looking to the global in order to find the new loops us circuitously back into a containing pattern of looking to art as the latest native informant, the most recent co-conspirator, and the newest prophet. One manifestation of the latter is the EU referendum outcome in Britain.

One way of interpreting the Brexit vote is as a protest born of popular anger against economic neoliberalism and unregulated globalization, whose concrete, visible consequences are felt and seen across the UK: conspicuously increased income inequalities; depressed wages especially in unskilled occupations ; large-scale immigration; and a governmental commitment to shrinking the state by eroding all forms of social welfare.

Protest against neoliberalism sounds laudable, yet the most notorious image from the Brexit campaign conjures an uglier form of populist protest fig. Family design agency, Breaking point: the EU has failed us all , Brexit campaign poster, Figure The interest in the s, to which Tagg alludes, is not the preserve of academics and curators. The poster produced by the unofficial Leave. But now the wit and humour are gone; nor is there an address to the country as a whole or an invitation to subscribe to the programme of any particular party.

It is not a sufficient basis on which to found a critical practice adequate to the politics of our time. Better, perhaps, to return to Barbara H. British political culture has conventionally tolerated the first two and deplored the third.


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    • What the poster does is seek to change the rules regarding what emotions can be expressed and tolerated in the public sphere. This alerts us to the need for a mode of critique that takes seriously the politics of emotions but does not see affective communities as an unalloyed good. A good coincidence. It was also technically quite tricky to achieve, believe it or not.

    For his newer works Burgin spent around eighteen months teaching himself how to use industrial strength CGI programs. The technical, aesthetic, and formal differences are as stark as the continuities over four decades.

    Some things have changed for Victor Burgin and some have not. As Tagg notes, the most radical photographic gestures can be bought, resold, and bought again in the free market of contemporary art. The only thing the bourgeoisie cannot hang on its walls, wrote Terry Eagleton somewhere around , is its own political defeat.

    I came to that moment when I studied photography, film, and video at the end of the s. I soon realized that the positions that had been staked out, in writings and in images, in implicit or explicit opposition to everything—from the unconscious of patriarchy and the persistence of colonial attitudes, to neo-liberal economics and the hegemony of its art market—were positions that were going to remain pertinent for as long as those ills were around. Yes, on some level the works are dated and can be subsumed into art history and social history, but only the wilful are blind to their contemporary pertinence wilful blindness being no more or less common now than I imagine it was in the s when that work reached its first small but vital audience.

    It is a daily challenge, as a teacher, to help students to grasp the history of critical resistance, to feel a part of its various ruptures and the continuities. Final Price Rs. Apply Exchange.

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