TY - JOUR
AU1 - Doucet,, Emily
AB - Arguments against a linear or unified history of photography have become ubiquitous in photo-historical scholarship. Indexing the interdisciplinary characteristic of knowledge production, historians of photography have, in the last decades, productively expanded their inquiries beyond the reaches of the history of art and visual culture to the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and media studies, among other fields. It is within this historiographical trajectory that two recent contributions continue the work of interrogating the discursive construction of photography’s history. Patricia Di Bello’s Sculptural Photographs: From the Calotype to Digital Technologies examines the relationship between photography and sculpture, exploring the ways in which the discourse around new reproductive technologies used in the creation of sculpture set the scene for photography’s emergence as a properly ‘reproductive’ medium. Decentering photography’s conceptual and historiographical stranglehold on the concept of reproduction, Di Bello employs six case studies to highlight the ways in which ‘sculpture as subject matter has affected, expanded and endowed the reception and understanding of photography’, ranging from some of the earliest photographic techniques such as calotypes to digital rendering in 3D printing processes (p. 5). Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Nicoletta Leonardi and Simone Natale, brings together essays on photography’s many intermedial entanglements. As the editors state in their introduction to the volume, ‘any medium is not one thing but many’ (p. 1). Both studies are a welcome addition to what is surely a historiographical ‘turn’, following on the heels of, or as both Di Bello and Natale and Leonardi note, as part of the ‘material turn’ in photographic history and the humanities more broadly. While Leonardi and Natale distinctly place their volume under the slippery sign of media archaeology, Di Bello does not explicitly align herself as such. However, both books implicitly suggest, following Erkki Huhtamo’s opening essay in the Leonardi and Natale volume, that ‘an archaeology of photography, were it to be developed, should be a media archaeology’ (p. 29). Film historian Thomas Elsaesser has elsewhere interrogated recent interest in the field or approach of media archaeology in cinema studies, suggesting that interest in media archaeology is a ‘symptom’ of the transition of the analogue to the digital and the increasing homogeneity of mass visual culture (pp. 80–86).1 As Elsaesser outlines with regard to early film history, periods of media transition, such as that of photography’s emergence or the introduction of photography’s digital forms, render visible the tensions between cultural reception, industrial application, and artistic interpretation of new media.2 To counter deterministic narratives focused on the development of particular media characteristics, Elsaesser proposes a media archaeological approach, attempting to ‘identify the condition of possibility of cinema (when is cinema?) alongside its ontology (what is cinema?)’.3 Both volumes considered here explore this tension between ontology and historical epistemology and offer meditations on the co-constitutive relationships of media often considered distinct. Di Bello’s case studies put pressure on the meeting points between sculpture and photography. Chapter one discusses photographs of Hiram Power’s sculpture Greek Slave, made between 1847 and 1852, examining the problems of authorship presented by both photographic and sculptural ‘copies’. As Di Bello convincingly argues, previous scholarship on the relationship between photography and sculpture has assumed that photography initiated the age of mechanical reproduction. Examining the reproduction of this particular sculpture allows Di Bello to counter that it was instead the mechanically reproduced statuette that became the most important means by which to distribute sculptural ‘reproductions’ in this period. Chapter two furthers this argument by examining stereoscopic photographs made of Raffaelle Monti’s sculpture The Bride for the 1862 London International Exhibition. Di Bello artfully unpacks the ‘sculptural’ processes of making stereoscopic images of sculpture, ‘using sculpting machines, molds, and casts; and then lenses, negative plates and positive prints’, noting that in this multimedia process, stereoscopic photographs could be considered ‘legally and aesthetically’ as just one further copy of the many forms of the sculpture (pp. 38–46). The following chapter takes a new perspective on Edward Steichen’s photographs of Auguste Rodin’s Le Penseur, examining the parallel processes used to create Rodin’s textured sculptural surfaces and the surfaces of Pictorial photography. While the novel techniques utilised by Steichen and other Pictorialist photographers are often described as ‘painterly’, referencing the fine art aspirations of the photographers, Di Bello makes a case for their sculptural inspiration. As in the previous chapters, Di Bello locates a shared conceptual problem between the two mediums in order to demonstrate their mutual concerns. In the case of Rodin and Pictorialism, she suggests that ‘photography and sculpture, in their different ways, shared the problem of seeming too literal, fixed and defined, leaving insufficient scope to the imagination of the artist and the viewer’ (p. 64). Di Bello argues that both Rodin and Steichen sought to render visible the unique hand of the artist, self-consciously hedging against the critiques of the shared reproductive qualities of their respective mediums. Chapter four triangulates the reproductive technologies of sculpture and photography with that of the book, describing the production circumstances of a book of Picasso’s sculptures photographed by Brassai from 1949. Examining this book within the context of photographically illustrated books of sculpture from the 1930s and 1940s, Di Bello posits that photography was endowed with the capacity to restage the encounter between viewer and object in the gallery or museum. Brassai’s presentation of Picasso’s sculptures thus rearticulates the creative power of photography over its purely reproductive power. Recounting critical celebration of the musical quality (akin to conducting a score) of viewing a sculpture in the round, Di Bello suggests that photography was able to take up a ‘legitimate, even privileged role, beyond conveying the exact appearance of things’ (p. 87). Chapter five challenges yet another historiographical problem for photography – its status as documentation of performance and land art. Following Ana Mendieta’s use of photography in her Silueta series, Di Bello contends that Mendieta’s careful attention to the medium is indicative of the artist’s overarching attention to the reproduction of the silhouette. Di Bello reconstructs photography’s discursive evolution to encompass these formative encounters with sculptural reproduction. The final chapter or ‘digital conclusion’ examines perhaps the most material conjuncture between photography and sculpture as of yet. Acknowledging nineteenth-century attempts at ‘photosculpture’, such as François Willème’s process, Di Bello examines contemporary artist Barry X. Ball’s experimentation with the reproduction of eighteenth-century sculpture via 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CNC milling machines – processes evocatively figured as nineteenth-century dreams incarnate. Di Bello studiously avoids de-labouring or de-materialising digital reproductive processes, outlining the laborious procedures of crafting virtual 3D models and finishing milled sculpture by hand, actions that echo the finishing touches employed in the case of Rodin and Pictorialist photographers. Di Bello leans away from teleological conclusions, closing instead on the mutual imbrication of these two media in the discourse surrounding reproduction from the nineteenth century onwards. Similarly devoted to deconstructing these one-way chains of influence (which have historically often figured photography as the prime mover), Leonardi and Natale’s volume examines the relationship between photography and new media more broadly. Amounting to thirteen essays with an additional introduction by the editors and an afterword by Geoffrey Batchen and Lisa Gitelman, the book represents a significant intervention into the longstanding constitution of the history of photography as a media-specific discipline. Paralleling the themes of Di Bello’s book, the edited volume is divided into three sections: communication, reproduction, and dissemination. Erkki Huhtamo’s opening essay, ‘Elephans Photographicus: Media Archaeology and the History of Photography’, makes a case for the utility of media archaeology in the history of photography by way of an account of the photographer as public nuisance or intrusive onlooker. This account demonstrates an interesting bias observable in ‘media-oriented’ critiques of the historiography of photography, which sometimes assign Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s early twentieth-century monumental and modernist histories of photography undue influence in contemporary scholarship. That photography’s entire historiography must be held to account in each contribution to the scholarship is an approach that might hinder understanding of the deconstruction of the medium’s origins. The other essays in the volume begin in more historically situated moments in which photography’s evolution was entangled with other new media of the nineteenth century, thus allowing for a rhetorical form beyond the corrective. In ‘A Mirror with Wings: Photography and the New Era of Communications’, Simone Natale discusses the advent of photography as one of a series of new communication technologies, examining photography alongside modern spiritualism, telegraphy, the railway, and paper currency. Likewise examining the place of photography within other socio-technical systems, David Henkin’s essay, ‘The Traveling Daguerreotype: Early Photography and the U.S. Postal System’, describes the convergence of the emergence of cheap postage rates (no longer dependent on weight) with the institution of daguerreotype portraiture in nineteenth-century USA. Henkin eloquently articulates the ways in which these technologies – the growing postal network and the one-of-a-kind affective power of the daguerreotype portrait – helped to establish long-distance relationships between family members and loved ones separated by historical circumstances, such as the gold rush and the American civil war. Henkin affirms that these technologies allowed Americans to begin to expect provision of the networks necessary to maintain these long-distance affective relationships, positioning long-distance communication as a feature of state-oriented technologies of nationalism and expansionism. In his essay, ‘The Telegraph of the Past: Nadar and the Time of Photography’, Richard Taws examines another medium of communication: the optical (or Chappe) telegraph system. Taws reminds us of the oft-forgotten visual dimensions of telegraphic metaphors, arguing that telegraphy, as much as photography, offered people in the nineteenth century a mediatic symbol through which to think about historical experience. Nicoletta Leonardi, in her essay ‘With Eyes of Flesh and Glass Eyes: Railroad Image-Objects and Fantasies of Human-Machine Hybridizations in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States’, considers not simply the common comparison of the railway and photography as novel technologies which altered temporal and spatial experience, but also the crucial ways in which both railway and photography provided a new model by which to conceptualise artistic creation through what Leonardi describes as a ‘fantasy of hybridizations of the human and the machine’ (p. 73). Lynn Berger’s essay ‘Peer Production in the Age of Collodion: The Bromide Patent and the Photographic Press, 1854–1868’, examines the emergence of a kind of photographic ‘imagined community’ via the exchange of technical expertise in the photographic press. Berger offers a compelling analysis of emergent and competing ideologies in the photographic market (themselves variant theories of technological innovation) – namely, was innovation the result of knowledge exchange or of private enterprise? Following Berger’s discursive analysis, Jan von Brevern asks a different series of questions than is normally asked of the relationship between photography and the fine arts, examining the ways in which photography’s ability to ‘transform […] the represented object’ defined its value to painters such as Eugène Delacroix (p. 105). This emphasis on the medium’s perceived ability to ‘translate’ or render visible the structural details of painting foregrounds a more collaborative relationship between the two mediums, one not predicated exclusively on photography’s mimetic capacity. In similar terms, Steffen Siegel charts the discourse surrounding the fine arts into which photography emerged – a subject that Stephen Bann has explored elsewhere.4 Examining an early effort to reproduce photographs as engravings in Nöel-Marie Lerebours’ Excursions Daguerriennes, Siegel ultimately frames such experiments as media hybridisations, defined as they were by the ‘essential uniqueness’ of the daguerreotype and the reproductive capacity of engraving (p. 129). Parsing yet another intermedial translation, Geoffrey Belknap looks at questions of temporality in the translation of photographs into Victorian science periodicals and popular science books, such as Gaston Tissandier’s Les merveilles de la photographie, outlining the epistemological work assigned to the medium via its reproduction in print. This ontological slipperiness of the ‘photographic’ is affirmed through the Latourian ‘chain of translation’ that Belknap describes, underscoring the epistemic concerns of photographic circulation that a number of the essays in this volume address. Peppino Ortoleva discusses the parallel emergence of the daguerreotype and serialised fiction, arguing that both new mediums sought to describe or perhaps even ‘invent’ new representations of nineteenth-century society. As in von Brevern’s essay, this is an important distinction, suggesting that Honoré de Balzac, in his famous efforts to ‘daguerreotype’ society, did not necessarily imply a mimetic copy of the society in question but rather a product of a ‘mythopoetic medium’ (p. 153). This articulation of photography’s ‘visionary’ as well as ‘realistic’ qualities serves as an important riposte to those who would too easily align photography’s history in a realist camp, banishing its romantic and quasi-mystical reception. Continuing the deconstruction of photography’s received characteristics, Anthony Enns examines conceptual parallels between photography as a ‘self-recording instrument’ and nineteenth-century attempts to index other similarly fleeting phenomena, such as sound. Rather than enabling the reproduction of sound as later inventions such as Edison’s phonograph would do, devices such as Édouard-Léon Scott’s phonautograph sought to visualise auditory signals, creating a graphic language of sound. While sound recording was soon to follow, Enns argues that such methods for visualising sounds were wrapped up in the photographic language of preservation and translation, allowing researchers to render sound an object of positivist science, legible in a quantifiable, graphic form. Further scrutinising these discursive origins, Kim Timby examines the development of cinema as another effect of efforts to technically satisfy photography’s kinship to ‘perceptual realism’. Considering the early trajectory of cinema as ‘animated photography’, Timby exercises the kind of ‘synchronic’ media history called for by media historian Gitelman (an argument paraphrased in the afterword to this volume). Such a methodology is also taken up by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion in the final essay in the volume, entitled ‘The Double Birth Model Tested Against Photography’. They outline the theory of a ‘double-birth model for cinema’, arguing that the technical invention of a medium and the institution of it as a ‘social, cultural, and economic system’ are not necessarily temporally contingent (p. 192). While offering a kind of methodological conclusion to the volume as a whole, this essay might well have figured closer to the beginning, framing as it does the theoretical approach of the entire project. The book’s afterword brings together in conversation two influential scholars in the history of photography (Batchen) and media (Gitelman). Batchen opens their discussion with a nod to the accepted history of media specificity, upheld by the positioning of photographic history in departments of art history and the consolidation of photographic departments in art museums. Batchen claims that we must still pay attention to photography’s specificity, suggesting that ‘such a history has a complex task: to imbed photography in a broader media context even while acknowledging its exceptionalism’ (p. 207). The question left to the field is whether such photographic ‘exceptionalism’ is synonymous with media specificity. As the essays in this volume, alongside Di Bello’s contribution, would indicate, photography emerged into a complex media ecosystem by which it was shaped and which it in turn influenced. This approach is consonant with a larger trend in media studies – a current that Eva Horn has characterised in a 2007 introduction to a special issue of Grey Room on new German media theory as ‘not so much analyzing a given, observable object as engaging with processes, transformations and events’.6 This emphasis on process or circulation rather than ontology also presses us to consider anew Gitelman’s ever-important reminder to consider the ‘newness of old media’ (p. 210). Such an interest in, or indeed even surprise at, long media trajectories and ‘old newness’ is at play in current popular interest in online articles or ‘listicles’ with amusing titles such as the ‘surprising history of the selfie’ or ‘11 ridiculous future predictions from the 1900’s world fair’.7 This distrust of teleological media narratives and interest in past futures has increasing political and scholarly purchase in our contemporary moment, where tech solutionism and capitalist future thinking appear to have overreached both human and planetary capacity. The two volumes surveyed here remind us that the way in which societies conceptualise the development of media is itself a philosophy of history, with particular political connotations. That contemporary media technologies have complex and historical entanglements with other media is a lesson well served by these recent contributions. Footnotes 1 Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 80–86. 2 Lisa Gitelman argues similarly for media transition as a key site for reading media epistemology, see Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006). 3 Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 103. 4 See Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 6 Eva Horn, ‘Editor’s Introduction: There Are No Media’, Grey Room 29 (2007): 7. 7 Richard Jones, ‘The Surprising History of the Selfie’, 6 November 2017, https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/history-of-selfie-scott-of-antartica-sothebys-auction-a3677651.html. Accessed 14 January 2019. Thom Dunn, ‘11 ridiculous future predictions from the 1900 World’s Fair – and 3 that came true’, 10 August 2016, https://www.upworthy.com/11-ridiculous-future-predictions-from-the-1900-worlds-fair-and-3-that-came-true. Accessed 14 January 2019. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Other Media and Photography
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcy030
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/other-media-and-photography-hXp73AFMnH
SP - 121
VL - 42
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -