Bate - Photography: The Key Concepts

Photography

THE KEY CONCEPTS SERIES

ISSN 1747-6550

The series aims to cover the core disciplines and the key cross-disciplinary ideas across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Each book isolates the key concepts to map out the theoretical terrain across a specific subject or idea.

Designed specifically for student readers, each book in the series includes boxed case material, summary chapter bullet points, annotated guides to further reading, and questions for essays and class discussion.

Design: The Key Concepts

Mark Westgarth and Eleanor Quince

Fashion: The Key Concepts

Jennifer Craik

Film: The Key Concepts

Nitzan Ben-Shaul

Food: The Key Concepts

Warren Belasco

Globalization: The Key Concepts (1st Edition)

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Globalization: The Key Concepts (2nd Edition)

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Technoculture: The Key Concepts

Debra Benita Shaw

The Body: The Key Concepts

Lisa Blackman

New Media: The Key Concepts

Nicholas Gane and David Beer

Photography: The Key Concepts (1st Edition)

David Bate

Photography: The
Key Concepts

Second Edition

DAVID BATE

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Figures

1 Photography Theory

2 Snapshots and Institutions

3 Documentary and Storytelling

4 Seeing Portraits

5 The Composition of Landscapes

6 The Object of Still-Life

7 Photography and Art

8 Global Photography

9 The Scopic Drive

10 History and Photography

Colour Plates

T hanks to Paula Gortzar for her picture research work and to Davida Forbes for her care, efficiency, and patience as editor at Bloomsbury.

T he first edition of this book was published in 2009. It has been translated into several different languages and adopted as a standard textbook: a reference for the study of photography at many different levels. So why make a new edition of the book? There are three main reasons. First, most obviously new is the greater number of visual images in this edition, the advantage of which is surely as obvious: as references for students of photography. The photographs included do not form any kind of canon, but are indicative of different ways of treating the topics and themes referred to in the text.

Secondly, the practical requirements of the series that the first edition was published in meant an inevitable squeezing of the topic. This new edition has two additional chapters, alongside minor revisions to the existing ones, where improvements could be made. One of the new chapters is on Snapshots and Institutions, including the public/private domains that are in transition, the other is on The Scopic Drive and the more general situation of looking and photography in our visual culture. These essays were written specifically for this edition and have in mind some of the issues indicated below.

The third reason is probably far more complex. In the interval between the first edition of this book, photography has undergone a vivid set of changes. Some may even say it is no longer photography, and that the technical revolution of computing and the massive range of new cultural uses of the Internet have changed it beyond all recognition. Some would thus say we should call our age post-photography or even be talking about post-digital photography. Yet the word photography and the range of practices it gives rise to seem curiously resistant to such nominal changes. Despite the many and often wild claims about the demise of indexical reference and endless philosophical critique of the ontological status of the photographic image, photography is nevertheless still here. So although many technological changes have provoked debates about photographic truth and the relation to what we still call reality, it has become ever more clear that the way people conceive of these new issues is often part of the problem, rather than any solution to the questions that are raised.

New media critics have been keen to throw out the photographic image with darkroom chemicals, which are substituted with data screen files, algorithms and bytes. Paper prints are replaced with data screen images, yet the transition to digital images has turned out to be not so much a revolution as a sliding evolution. As photography has entered into the more comfortable realms of art, the brave new world of digital photography turns out to be a remarkable reinvention of the wheel. The radical changes, it seems to me, are more in the modes and relations of distribution and dissemination of images than in the specific forms of photographic images themselves. While it is true that fantasy is more prevalent in the construction of images, it is the new relations between the Internet and existing social institutionswhose legal, ethical, judicial, and political status is still being worked throughthat the real transformations are beginning to occur.

In the democratic use of the Internet, different types of images that were formerly regarded as insignificant or minor practices (e.g., in war photography the private trophy pictures made by soldiers are more public, and the vast domains of amateur and professional photographic pornographythese have all existed since the early practical days of photography) have found a new social visibility, not yet repressed or restricted to personal use as they were in earlier periods. Out in the open on the Internet, these practices skew the old ways we see and value many public and private institutions, which shakes up the established relations of appearance between them and us. These changes are profound, they actually affect our whole perception of society. The once more clearly demarcated institutional fields of photographic discourse, like news, advertising, entertainment, and politics all appear, sometimes indiscernibly, mixed and juggled alongside each other on webpages in different, sometimes bizarre, and perhaps even in exciting new ways. Is the medical advice given on a webpage to be distinguished from the pharmaceutical advertisements that accompany it (advertorials)? How do we distinguish product advice from independent fact? Who is speaking there, it is often worthwhile to ask?

But what of the photographic image itself? Certainly in art, advertising, fashion, and news photography there are new and innovative practices, but how far these are all new because of their digital foundation, rather than because of what they enable in the wider appearance of human imagination remains to be seen. I say this, not because the old film-based negative seems now to have a certainty that the data file does not, nor because, data screen images are less permanent than paper prints, but because beneath the glossy appearance of all these new shiny images, the same critical questions about the photographic image still apply. Indeed, we should also note, for example, that after all, whether paper or LCD, these are still all just variant types of screen, which any visual image requires for its formation. Computerized and decentralized, the photographic image nevertheless retains a kind of social charm. The still photograph features as yet a highly central form across the nexus of social media and interactive life.

This new edition has given an opportunity to add material relating to these new issues, but in a way that does not simply dismiss the important debates and questions about practices, nor exchange them for some new myth of creativity as data art. The contemporary challenge is to find a way to talk about the new incarnations of photographic forms that often still exist inside the old ones, and which have not gone away. We should have learned by now that discontinuities and continuities are in fact typical of the whole history of photographic, if not all human, culture, and indeed all technology. About 330 bc Aristotle proposed in his The Art of Rhetoric three genres of speech. Today, perhaps, it seems we have many more genres of speech, alongside the domain of everyday chatter and talk. Perhaps we do now have to include photography and photographic images here, as fully entered into this domain too, as visual talk. These newold forms demand critical understanding and analysis of their operations. It is a goal that remains within the ambition of this book. That is, to outline genres of photographic speech that are fixed and mutable. The experience of this contradiction is felt nowhere more so than when browsing the internet. Finally, I must add that I hope all these new changes do not detract from the simple usefulness of the first edition.