The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory

Mark Durden, Jane Tormey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317541585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory's direction, relevance, and purpose.

This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to 'see' an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means.

Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

Part I

Aesthetics

1

Feeling in photography, the affective turn, and the history of emotions

Thy Phu,Elspeth H. Brown, and Andrea Noble

What does it mean to feel photography? Since photography’s inception in 1839, critics and spectators have intuited our manifold ways of feeling photography. However, until recently, the impact of feeling on the study of photography has received less serious attention. Consider, for example, the category of ‘desire’. Although desire is a key term in photography studies, the field chiefly acknowledges rather than interrogates the appeal of the camera and the images that it produces. Notably, Geoffrey Batchen’s influential work counters conventional histories, which credit Louis Daguerre with the invention of photography, by demonstrating that the desire for photography was so pervasive that no one inventor can be credited with this technological invention (Batchen 1997). Well after its invention, the desire for photography persists. When it comes to the black diaspora in the US, desire lies at the core of Frederick Douglass’s faith in “pictures and progress” (Wallis and Smith 2012). That pictures were a record of progress into the ranks of humanity for those who had been brutally dehumanized made photography valuable—and desirable—as a political resource for emancipated slaves. In the twentieth century, desire erupts most forcefully and eloquently in the work of Roland Barthes, for whom the concept anchors a personal, subjective, and highly emotional approach to photography (Barthes 1981). Desire, then, has been a crucial way for scholars to grapple with the powerful connection that individuals and communities have with photography. Curiously, these conversations have unfolded without full recognition of desire as an affective category, even though the work of psychoanalytic theorists, from Sigmund Freud on, has decisively shaped desire in this way. Instead, the tenor of most discussions about what it means to feel photography accords with what cultural historian Barbara Rosenwein describes as “unfocused” emotions talk (Rosenwein 2006). In short, feeling tends to arise in a loosely thematic and largely descriptive way, rather than as a mode of analysis. However, this “emotions talk” has acquired increasing focus, particularly with Feeling Photography and continuing with numerous publications (Brown and Phu 2014; Phu and Brown 2018). Taken together, these recent works have grappled with the implications of a shift—described as the “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007)—for criticism in photography studies, by drawing on a number of disciplines for insights into what affect, emotions, and feelings might mean for the analysis of images. Our own research contributes to this affective turn by considering how theories of affect, feeling, and emotions might enrich our understanding of photographs.

This chapter offers a review of recent work that brings together photography and affect, emotion, and feeling. After a brief discussion of how photography scholars have taken up these terms, we identify fruitful new directions concerning photography, emotion, and the sonic; affect’s role in constituting the optical unconscious; and the idea of ‘presence’ as a site of abundance that indexes affective histories within the photograph. A second section takes up the role of emotion as an analytic within historical studies, while demonstrating the possibilities for photography studies. What would an image-based approach to the history of emotions look like? We sketch a ‘messy’ answer to this question in our third section, which provides a brief, comparative history of tears and their photographic significance.

Focusing emotions talk

There is no scholarly consensus concerning the meaning of the theoretical terms affect, feeling and emotion; rather, preference for one term over another reveals disciplinary allegiances more than anything else. Still, it is helpful to consider, briefly, the ways these terms have been taken up by photography scholars. In humanities discourse influenced by work in the life sciences, affects are pre-cognitive, corporeal states of being that are eventually manifested in the body as emotions and in the mind as feelings. Freud, for example, considered ‘affect’ as a generalized concept for all those embodied processes—including desires—that, when they reach the conscious mind, can be understood on the one hand as feelings or, on the other hand, as physiologically charged emotions (Tompkins 1962–1963). Brian Massumi’s work on affect, influenced by Gilles Deleuze, emphasizes intensity, a somatic and non-cognitive event that resists narrative or structured mapping. In this approach, ‘affect’ exists apart from feeling or even the “unclaimed experience” of trauma (Caruth 1996), both of which can be understood as social and cultural discourses that emerge in relationship to personal or collective history. Whereas most affect theory focuses on the individual, some sociologists (Hardt 1999; Ahmed 2004b) understand affect as emotions in circulation as a form of currency that moves between individuals. This understanding of affect as central to how modern capitalism builds economic value has been influential in work that examines the relationship between photography and political economy (Brown 2009, 2019). As discussed below, however, historians of emotion (Leys 2011) and others dispute the transhistorical assumptions undergirding this work, which often describes a set of basic affects independent of history and culture. Feelings, as a keyword, has emerged in photography studies through the influence of queer and feminist scholarship (Sedgwick 2003), work on public feelings (Cvetkovich 2007), and critics who have helped politicize negative affects (Munoz 1999; Dolan 2005; Berlant 2007; Stewart 2007).

Feeling Photography drew from these insights to focus ‘emotions talk’ in two key ways: first, by drawing attention to an incipient theory of feeling in the history of photography and, second, by developing feeling as an analytic for engaging with photography. When it comes to the history of photography, we can see the incipience of feeling across a broad range of photographic genres. In emotions studies, scientific photographs recorded facial expressions—and, as it turns out, produced these very expressions by both stimulating and simulating the emotions that they sought to objectively record. Lavishly illustrated studies by Guillaume Duchenne (1990), Jean-Martin Charcot, and Charles Darwin (1979), among others, not only profoundly influenced how we perceive and comprehend feelings, but also became foundational to affect theory generally. Documentary photographers from the nineteenth century to the present day often seek to elicit sympathy through the production of images, which they circulated for the purpose of producing sympathetic communities who they hoped would be moved to act. This faith persists to the present day, and is renewed in work by Sharon Sliwinski (2011) and Wendy Kozol (2014), among others, that calls for a community of sympathetic spectators who would be inspired to act ethically. Yet, this process of producing feeling communities surprisingly overlaps with that of commercial photographs, especially when it comes to print advertising and the fashion industry, in which the circulation of images fuels a desirous marketplace (Wissinger 2007; Brown 2009). In the digital age, the exchange of photographs over social media offers an instantaneous and simultaneous shorthand for expressing a spectrum of emotions, from grief to joy, and everything in between.

For their part, critics have evinced strong feelings about the significance of photography. As noted above, the emergence of photography was a desirous event, as evident in the widespread fervor that anticipated and greeted the invention of the camera. For a generation of modernists, starting with John Szarkowski in the 1960s, the project of legitimizing photography as a field of study entailed, variously, a passionate embrace of some images, namely those that were formalist (and emotionally restrained), and dismissal of others, such as pictorialism, for its decorative, and seemingly excessive emotional style. Similarly, the field of photography studies developed under the sway of a Marxist commitment to ideology critique along straight and austere lines. In particular, the task of “thinking photography” (Burgin 1982) sought, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to eschew feeling altogether. That these critics felt strongly about photography could hardly be doubted. Strangely, what was even stronger was their unvoiced yet palpable distrust of feeling as excessive and therefore antithetical to photography criticism. Even Susan Sontag (1977), who was fascinated by photography, was ambivalent about images because the feelings they evoked were, as she put it, “messy” and not conducive to the ethical action that she advocated when it came to redressing violence. The muchness of feeling in response to photography seemed to be a problem stemming from photography’s inherently abundant quality (Edwards 2012). It was not until Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida that feeling would be unequivocally embraced. So impassioned is Barthes’ approach to images that this landmark book is now—though it wasn’t always—seen as offering the first sustained, if incomplete, attempt to think, feelingly, about photography.

Feeling, then, is more than just a theme in photography studies or a description of responses to images. Feeling is an analytic tool for thinking and interpreting photography in new ways. This approach enables us to grasp more fully the role of images in constructing emotions, in a process that illuminates the importance of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects in establishing normalized expressions. Emotions studies, such as the one conducted by Guillaume Duchenne, drew their subjects from among the destitute and mad, who were vulnerable and socially powerless groups. As noted above, state surveillance refined methods for identification, in response to the anxiety that racialized bodies especially occasioned, for their ostensible interchangeability and capacity to evade detection (Cho 2009). A focus on feeling in photography helps elucidate the process by which visual conventions are established and entrenched, and the political purposes that this process serves. Abject bodies have been the vehicles through which we have been taught how, when, and for whom to feel (Sheehan 2014).

Given the political importance of attending to context, in Feeling Photography we privileged feeling instead of affect as a way of avoiding the problematic ahistorical assumptions of affect theory. The term ‘feeling’ also has the advantage of underscoring tactility, to draw attention to a broader range of sensory experiences of photography, which encompass not just the optic but also the haptic. However, a focus on feeling in photography is challenging precisely because the ephemeral nature of feelings makes them difficult to archive. At the same time that scientists seek to register the nuances of emotional expression in controversial projects such as Paul Ekman’s facial action coding system, critics are pondering, as we explain more fully below, what it might mean that some feelings, particularly traumatic ones, are unphotographable and unarchivable.

Alongside the publication of Feeling Photography in 2014, new work has emerged that continues to shape the relationship between photography and affect. The remarkable book Image Matters (Campt 2012), for example, builds on Fred Moten’s (2002) earlier work on photography’s sonic and affective dimensions in understanding the impact of Jet magazine’s publication of a 1955 photograph of African American teenager Emmett Till’s destroyed face, on view in an open casket. Tina Campt takes up Moten’s emphasis on the photograph’s sonic potentiality to consider the role of sound in the affective work of family photographs among Europe’s black diaspora, drawn from the Dyche Photography Studio, a commercial studio that photographed black and Asian communities in Birmingham, England, for much of the twentieth century. In this shift from Moten’s singular image to the serial of the Dyche archive, Campt offers both an intervention into archival theory and a new way of reading photography and feeling, as encompassing a broad range of sensory experiences that includes haptic, optic, and sonic dimensions.

Another new direction within photography and affect concerns what disappears from the visual field through the work of affect. What can and cannot be seen within the photographic field, and how are sites of what Walter Benjamin called the optical unconscious enabled through feeling? A fascinating study has explored what lies at the “edge of sight” in a volume exploring US photography (Smith 2013). Ariella Azoulay’s work even goes so far as to insist on “the event of photography,” as a temporally unfixed series of encounters that unfold despite the absence or irrevocable loss of an image (2012). This concept of the event of photography not only radically transforms how we understand photography—that which does not require an image—but also lays bare the importance of desire as the impetus that drives this event. In The Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, Zahid R. Chaudhary (2012) pursues this question in relation to affect, aesthetic form, and colonial photography. Aesthetic form, he argues, is the process through which we make sense of the world, including the feelings that emerge in response to external stimuli, and filters what can be seen, touched, or felt, and as such it is where politics enters the scene of sense-making. Chaudhary pursues this argument in relationship to several eyewitness accounts of famine in nineteenth-century India, showing how Christian sympathy emerges as a ‘civilizational affect’. That is, Christian sympathy, when it came to the famine’s visual record, operates as a complex affective shuttle, shifting between feeling and not-feeling, between emotional response and anesthesia. Famine photographs engendered a capacity for suffering within the Christian viewer, while at the same time enabling the persistent deferral of any action to alleviate that suffering.

In making his argument about the political work of aesthetic forms in filtering information about the world, Chaudhary works with Benjamin’s notion of the ‘optical unconscious’ in order to explain how photography shows more than we could possibly see as well as something beyond the horizon of sight. Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious and photography is taken up most extensively in the work of Smith and Sliwinski (2017). As an example of what a focus on affect and seeing/not seeing in photography can offer, consider Laura Wexler’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Aesthetics
• PART II: Politics
• PART III: Theories
• Index