Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 3: 'Sweet it is to scan...' , 4th ed, 2009 CONTIUED

Photogenetic Draft No. 24, 1991 ©
Joachim Schmid

Kodak
The arrival at the turn of the century of the Kodak camera marked an important change in personal photography.  Cameras now became accessories of middle class life, tools for shaping the identity of the family. Holland quotes Don Slater on how the new consumer technology arrived denuded from its mechanical and conceptual processes.  By just clicking a button and returning the package to the lab, the operator was deprived of the means of understanding how images are created and from being able to use those skills and knowledge to create something more radical.  Holland notes, though, that a new skill was in fact introduced, that of framing and arranging the content of the image.

Outside of professionals, the full photographic process became the province of “amateur photography,” a mostly male pastime fascinated with technology and aesthetic control and which has “retained its long-lived aspiration to ... pictorialism...” p143

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 3: 'Sweet it is to scan...' , 4th ed, 2009

A personal photo from my own collection:
the church family

The chapter title comes from an 1899 poem printed in a book of advice for amateur photographers in which the author reflects on the joy of looking at the photographically immortalized faces of deceased family and other loved ones.  It has been used, presumably, because of the shift in meaning of scan, which can now mean to digitize an image.

As with academic treatments of other forms of photography thus far encountered, chapter author Patricia Holland cautions private photography is fraught with exception making generalization difficult.

Holland prefers private or personal to family photography, for though in its history it has been associated with the family, it often covers far more than family life.  That we have come to see it as “family” photography, though, may tell us something about how we conceive of image making and the purpose of family.  What is unique about photography as a family activity is that it produces objects that are loaded with meaning and subject to interpretation.  They are typically taken to portray the subject as he or she wishes to be seen.  They are also valued less for their quality than for their content and context in confirming identity.

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 2: Surveyors and Surveyed, 4th ed, 2009, CONTINUED

From the Bolton Worktown project, a part of Mass Observation.   http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

The Construction of Documentary

In this section Price examines documentary as first defined in the 1930s, quoting Stott from 1973 on the primacy of unassailable content, content “inaccessible to critical engagement.”  (p 93) Since the camera was believed to be able to capture and reproduce reality, photographs were irrefutable proof. Price also notes in the succeeding section of this chapter that documentary photographs did not function in and of itself, but most always in support of text, to confirm what was written. Photographs were published largely anonymously.

Price covers three projects in this section, beginning with Mass Observation, an anthropological survey of British life in the 1930s, for which a number of photographers gathered images on the typical behavior of English citizens.  Their brief was to remain aloof, impartial, unobserved, to gather data without interfering with their subjects.  As one photographer is quoted about his approach to this work, “I was somebody from another planet.”  The point was to make what seemed ordinary strange in order to be able to examine underlying assumptions and identify patterns.  Unfortunately, what became of this work and of its conclusions Price does not say.  He does, however, note that much documentary work of the 30’s recorded conditions with the assumption they could be ameliorated, but never challenged the political-economic structures that bred such conditions.

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 2: Surveyors and Surveyed, 4th ed, 2009

Political rage against Arthur Rothstein's staged image, 1936.  More:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-1/#more-11487

Documentary and Photojournalism: Issues and Definitions

Chapter author Derrick Price begins by noting that documentary has been described variously as a form, a genre, a tradition, a style, a movement and a practice.  To arrive at some understanding of something so intractable, he finds it necessary to examine the history of documentary practices, products, practitioners, and consumers.

The word documentary was first used in 1926 in relation to cinema and a particular kind of film in opposition to Hollywood fiction.  Solomon-Godeau (1991) has observed that almost all 19th century photography can be described as documentary.  While most academics concede that documentary has no defining style or technique, what sets it apart is its basis in investigation and “a goal beyond the production of a fine print.”  (Ohrn 1980)  In many cases, the photographer’s intention is not only to observe, but in doing so to bring attention that may change the conditions documented.

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 1: Thinking About Photography, 4th ed, 2009 CONTINUED

Newhall's 1937 (amazon.com)

Histories of Photography

Until post-WWII, the history of photography, according to Price & Wells, was largely the history of photographic technique, though they note Gasser’s history of histories, in which three types are identified:  the priority debate (who invented photography),  manuals and handbooks of techniques, and histories of the photograph as image. Gasser feels the preponderance of the second has led to the mistaken assumption that nothing else was ever published before WWII.  

Regarding the debate on priority, the antecedents to the camera are noted, included Aristotle's notes on fixing a reflection on a wall by concentrating light through a small hole, the first notes on the camera obscura from the 16th century, and the large number of people working in optics and chemistry in the 18th century whose discoveries contributed to the publications in science journals in 1839 of details on the creation of instruments and processes for capturing light and fixing images.  The authors refer to Mary Warner Marien on the need to examine historical claims carefully, on the need for further research, particularly political, scientific, and cultural contexts. 

Two early 20th century histories are introduced as seminal in redirecting academic discussions toward more art-historical concerns, and of putting photography at the center of it’s own theory (rather than as a branch art theory).

Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 1: Thinking About Photography, 4th ed, 2009

Photo found at http://yimvmd.blogspot.ae/2010/09/bodyworld.html

Aesthetics and Technology

This chapter places photography within the context of wider intellectual movements, beginning with the 19th century debate about the camera as an instrument of science or of art.  The photograph came to supplant the painting in producing facsimiles of reality and from a very early date there was mass acceptance of the idea that photographs are reproductions of reality, small snippets of truth.  Individual photographers, in their style and subject, became inheritors of the attributes of Great Masters.  With the arrival of late 20th century post-modernism, all defining narratives were said to have been lost in a world grown increasingly interwoven.  Authenticity, the unique vision of the master, was no longer possible nor sought after, as was the idea that reality was somehow reproducible.  But even in an age of widespread production and consumption of digital images, the idea that photos are somehow real remains common currency.

Price & Wells note the camera’s appearance in an age of criticism where discussion often centered on how to define photography and distinguish it from other forms and practices.  They note the lack of consensus, the absence of any definable uniform practice or product, and the character of discussion:  a tendency toward reductionism - attempting to define an essence - or detailed description - avoiding any type of theory.  Perhaps one of the  more interesting ideas raised in this chapter is the camera as the product of need, rather than agent of change.  They note that technical elements were already in place in the early 19th century, and that as early as the late 18th century there are notes in the literature of ideas for capturing and processing light.  What socio-economic forces led to the invention of the camera?  One driving force was the demand for portraits, which was soon met by the new technology, putting painters - like film processors at the dawn of digital - out of work.

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)