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.