Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Introduction, 4th ed, 2009

This book is included in the Essential Reading List for the Digital Photographic Practice course. I'm looking forward to exploring it.

The introductory paragraph is so tight that the best way to summarize is simply to quote.

This book introduces and offers an overview of conceptual issues relating to photography and to ways of thinking about photographs,  It considers the photograph as an artefact used in a range of different way and circumstances, and photography as a set of practices which take place in particular contexts.  Thus it is essentially about reading  photographic images rather than about their makings.  The principal purpose is to introduce key debates, and to indicate sources and resources so students (and other readers) can further develop lines of enquiry relevant to them.  The book primarily examines debates and developments in Britain, other parts of Europe and in North America.  The perspective is informed by the British base of the team of writers, particularly showing their influence of cultural studies within British academia in the 1990s when the book was first planned.  Our writing thus reflects a specific point of departure and context for debates.  There is no chronological history.  Rather we discuss past attitudes and understanding, technological limitations, and socio-political contexts through focus on issues pertinent to contemporary practices.  In other words, we consider how ideas about photography have developed in relation to the specific focus, or field of practice, which forms the theme of each chapter.  We cannot render theory easy, but we can contribute to clarifying key issues by pointing to ways in which debates have been framed.  (p.3)

Having now read through the first chapter, I can confirm and appreciate Wells’ work to clarify theory, or more accurately, to clarify the writing of those engaged in photographic theory. Here is an example of a quote included in Chapter One, followed by Derrick Price and Liz Wells’ commentary.  The following takes place in the discussion of postmodernism.

Within the aesthetic universe of differentiation - which is to say: "this is good, this is bad, this, in its absolute originality, is different from that" - within this universe photography raises the specter of nondifferentiation at the level of qualitative difference and introduces instead the condition of a merely quantitative array of differences, as in a series. The possibility of aesthetic difference is collapsed from within, and the originality that is dependent on this idea of difference collapses with it. (Krauss 1981: 22) 

Multiple, reproducible, repetitive images destabilised the very notion of ‘originality’ and blurred the difference between original and copy.  The ‘great masters’ approach to the analysis of images becomes increasingly irrelevant, for in the world of the simulacrum, what is called into question is the originality of authorship, the uniqueness of the art object and the nature of self-expression. (p23)

Here we go.