With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose.
This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means.
Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.
Author(s): Mark Durden and Jane Tormey
Series: Routledge Art History and Visual Studies Companions
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of plates
List of contributors
Introduction
Digital expansions
Temporal expansions
Documentary expansions
Political expansions
Aesthetic expansions
References
PART I: Aesthetics
1. Feeling in photography, the affective turn, and the history of emotions
Focusing emotions talk
Historicizing the emotions in photography
Weeping and its visual histories
Acknowledgments
Note
References
2. Jacques Rancière: aesthetics and photography
Aesthetics and philosophy
The discursive field of photography
The three regimes
Aesthetic regime
Aisthesis
Notes
References
3. Ambiguity, accident, audience: Minor White’s photographic theory
Previsualization and its enemies
Ambiguity
Accident
Approaching the punctum: White at the limits of communication
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
4. Testing humanism: the transactions of contemporary documentary photography
Note
References
5. Jeff Wall speaks with David Campany
Introduction, Mark Durden
Jeff Wall speaks with David Campany
Note
6. Deleuze and the simulacrum: simulation and semblance in Public Order
Photography and the simulacrum
“Plato and the simulacrum”
The simulacrum in photography: Sarah Pickering’s Public Order
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
7. Five versions of the photographic act: archival logic in the work of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
Trigger
System
The field of acts
Pre-photographic acts
Note
References
8. Jean Baudrillard’s photography—a vision of his own strange world
Introduction
Photographing an enigmatic world
Barthes, the punctum, and Baudrillard’s photography
Conclusion
Note
References
9. Visual episodic memory and the neurophenomenology of digital photography
Introduction
Linking photography and memory
More is more
Reconstruction
Perspectives
Amnesia
Embodied experience
Time and place
Feels like memory
Future orientation
References
PART II: Politics
10. Seeing the public image anew: photography exhibitions and civic spectatorship
Rethinking photography
Developing the public image
Photography’s public world
The museum on the street
Staging a
common world
Activestills
The Philly Block Project
Everyday Africa
Conclusion
Notes
References
11. Still images on the move: theoretical challenges and future possibilities
Different ways photographs migrate
Image migration: reuse or rebirth?
Mobility and materiality
Photographic (im)mobility as social awareness
Gender and postcolonial issues in photography studies
Conclusion
References
12. Interview with Ariella Azoulay
Introduction, Justin Carville
Interview with Ariella Azoulay
Note
References
13. Human rights practice and visual violations
Introduction
Physicians for Human Rights
The violation of confidentiality
Ex-pose
Photography, absence, rights
Notes
References
14. Love the bomb: picturing nuclear explosion
The photobomb
A
still image/still an image
The art bomb
The home bomb
Notes
References
15. Twice captured: the work of atrocity photography
Notes
References
16. Presenting the unrepresentable: confrontation and circumvention
Unrepresentably complex
Unrepresentable atrocity
Representing the unrepresentable
Presenting the unrepresentable
Notes
References
17. The eco-anarchist potential of environmental photography: Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America
Introducing Petrochemical America
Richard Misrach’s environmental photography
Eco-anarchism as community resistance
Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas
The eco-anarchist potential of Petrochemical America
Note
References
18. Counter-forensics and photography
From the instrumental to the operational image
From evidentiary promise to counter-forensics
Notes
References
PART III: Theories
19. Derrida and photography theory
Introduction
Derrida on time
Time, Barthes, punctum, studium
Photography and technê
Technê and aura
Photographic archive and memory
The photographic image and mourning
Derrida’s work is all photography theory
References
20. Image, affect, and autobiography: Roland Barthes’ photographic theory in light of his posthumous publications
Michelet’s gaze: the photographic portrait and biography
Camera Lucida through the lens of mourning
Aseminar on Proust and an “Autobiography in Images”
Note
References
21. Ideation and photography: a critique of François Laruelle’s concept of abstraction
Abstraction, mimesis, and photography
Photography, totality, and anti-decisionism
Nature, contingency, and the object
Contingency and sufficient reason
Philosophy as science?
The temptations of scientism
Flattening of the real
The giving and asking for reasons
Abstraction and world-building
Notes
References
22. Fractal photography and the politics of invisibility
Preface
From self to selfie
Colonizing representation
Iconic images and algorithms
Fractal theory of photography
Erasure and repetition
Conclusion: the practice of fractal photography
Note
References
23. Photographic apparatus in the era of tagshot culture
Dispersion of ‘the photographic’
From semantic anchoring to intersemiotic encounter
Language and apparatus
Layers of metadata
Struction
Experiential tagging
Struction and scription
Notes
References
24. Artistic representation and politics: an exchange between Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder
Introduction, Hilde Van Gelder
Exchange between Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder (HVG)
Notes
References
25. Decentering the photographer: authorship and digital photography
The automation of the labor of representation
Pictorialism 2.0
Conceptual artists, deskilling and the networked condition
Coda: the selfie and authorship in photography
Notes
References
26. Out of language: photographing as translating
References
27. Habitual photography: time, rhythm, and temporalization in contemporary personal photography
Introduction
The time and temporalization of photography
Temporal mediatization
Practices, rhythms, and routines
Digital traces, imaging time
Conclusion
References
Index
