GLOBAL

PHOTOGRAPHY

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 GLOBAL
PHOTOGRAPHY
A Critical History

ERINA DUGANNE
HEATHER DIACK
TERRI WEISSMAN

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 First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 Erina Duganne, Heather Diack, Terri Weissman

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Cover photograph © Yto Barrada, courtesy Pace Gallery; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, Beirut; and
Galerie Polaris, Paris

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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
List of Illustrations x

Introduction 1
Heather Diack, Erina Duganne, Terri Weissman

PART ONE REALISMS 9

Erina Duganne

1 Description and abstraction 11

Nature 11
The body 15
Process 20
Focus Box 1 The Helsinki School 26
Timothy Persons

2 Truth and fction 33

Focus Box 2 DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA 34

Barry Stone
Staging 39
Painting 44
Constructions 48

PART TWO EVIDENCE 57

Terri Weissman

3 Measuring the body 59

(Radical) Ethnography 60
Self and body 66

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 vi CONTENTS

Focus Box 3 Photography of the Minamata disaster 70

Namiko Kunimoto
Labor 74

4 Mapping the land 83

Borders 84
Ecology 90
Focus Box 4 Ecocritical voices 92
Subhankar Banerjee
T. J. Demos and Charlotte Cotton
History 104

PART THREE ETHICS 111

Heather Diack

5 Politics of representation 113

Visual signs 114

Absence 117
Identifcation and dislocation 120
Focus Box 5 Documents and documentary 122
Martha Rosler

6 Pictures of war 135

The politics of proximity 137

Afterimages 141
Bearing witness 146
Focus Box 6 Images of war or war of images? 151
Khaled Barakeh

PART FOUR ART 159

Heather Diack

7 Form 161

The shape of vision 162

The unexpected in the ordinary 168
Hybridity and objecthood 172

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 CONTENTS vii

Focus Box 7 Abstract labor 176

Drew Sawyer

8 Appropriation 183

Iconic images 184

Altered histories 188
Ownership, authorship, and originality 194
Focus Box 8 Advertisement extraction: an interview with
Juan David Laserna Montoya 198
Juan David Laserna Montoya, Gina McDaniel Tarver, and Erina Duganne

PART FIVE COLLECTIONS 207

Erina Duganne

9 Museums 209

The judgment seat 209

African agency 215
Focus Box 9 Correspondence and annotation: an interview
with Raqs Media Collective 219
Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Amy L. Powell
Everyday pictures 224

10 Archives 233

Collections 234
Focus Box 10 The surface of things: a history of photography
from the Swahili coast 240
Prita Meier
Memory 244
Time 248

PART SIX EXPANDED FIELD 257

Terri Weissman

11 Celebrity style, the publicity shot, and the maverick language

of fashion 259
Celebrity 261
Design and the editorial layout 265

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 viii CONTENTS

Focus Box 11 Owning beauty 266

Stephanie Baptist
The politics and power of dress 274

12 Photography and the cinematic 281

An uncertain perception: stilled movement and staged stillness 283

Focus Box 12 Moving stills 289
Marta Zarzycka
Extended time in still and moving images 292
Projection 296

Key Terms 303

Notes on Contributors 309
Index 313

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Davida Forbes at Bloomsbury Publishing for commissioning this project and to Louise
Baird-Smith and Alexander Highfeld for seeing it through to publication. We could not have completed
this project without the tireless research and organizational assistance provided by Kirstin Gotway. Her
enthusiasm and relentless attention to detail were exceptional. We would like to also thank the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for the invaluable support that they provided to make this publication
possible. Lastly, we would like to thank the authors of the Focus Boxes for contributing their scholarship
as well as the many artists and institutions who granted us permission to reproduce their images within
this publication.

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter 1: Description and abstraction

1.1 Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Fotogramm/Würmer, 2013. 13
1.2 Anna Atkins, Ceylon/Fern, 1854. 15
1.3 Anne Ferran, Untitled (1998) from the series Longer than life, 1997–9. 17
1.4 Floris Neusüss, Untitled (Körperfotogramm, Berlin), 1962. 19
1.5 Man Ray, Untitled (Rayograph) (Gauze, Match Boxes, and Spiral), 1923. 20
1.6 Pierre Cordier, Chemigran 7/5/82 II «Pauli Kleei Ad Marginem», 1982. 22
1.7 László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled Photogram, c. 1923. 25
1.8 Niko Luoma, Self-titled adaptation of Fourteen Sunfowers (1888), 2016. 28

Chapter 2: Truth and fction

2.1 Barry Stone, DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA, 2016. 35
2.2 Gustave Le Gray, Mediterranean with Mount Agde, 1857. 37
2.3 Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, Tipo indígena, c. 1920. 42
2.4 Edward Curtis, plate 188 from The North American Indian, vol. 6, 1910. 43
2.5 Azadeh Akhlaghi, Evin Hills, Tehran—Bijan Jazani, leftist intellectual who was executed in
mysterious circumstances. 18 April 1975. 45
2.6 Yamini Nayar, Cascading Attica, 2011. 49
2.7 Lucia Koch, Oratorio, 2013. 50
2.8 Frederick Sommer, Moon Culmination, 1951. 52
2.9 Édouard Baldus, Arles. Cloister of Saint-Trophîme, c. 1851. 53

Chapter 3: The body

3.1 Eleanor Antin, CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture (detail), 1972. 59
3.2 John Lamprey, Chinese Male with very long plait against a
Lamprey grid—profle, c. 1870. 61
3.3 Yee I-Lann, Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II, 2009. 62
3.4 Rineke Dijkstra, Almerisa, Asylum Center, Leiden, The Netherlands,
March 14, 1994, 1994. 65

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi

3.5 Berenice Abbott, Janet Flanner, 1926. 68

3.6 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1861–7. 70
3.7 Alejandro Cartagena, Untitled Carpoolers No 29, 2011–12. 76
3.8 Marc Ferrez, Slaves at a coffee yard in a farm, Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo, 1882. 78

Chapter 4: Mapping the land

4.1 Santu Mofokeng, Dikgoro with Washing Line, from the series Chasing Shadows, 1996. 83
4.2 Emily Jacir, Where We Come From, detail (Zina), 2001–3. 86
4.3 Joseph Koudelka, Shu’fat Refugee Camp, overlooking Al ‘Isawiya, East Jerusalem, 2009. 87
4.4 Timothy O’Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico, 1873. 89
4.5 Subhankar Banerjee, Caribou Migration 1, 2002. 91
4.6 Zhang Kechun, People Fishing by the River, Shaanzi, China, from the series
The Yellow River, 2012. 102
4.7 George Shiras, “The frst wild animal to take its own picture,” 1891. 104
4.8 Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers (Wassertürme), 1980. 105
4.9 David Goldblatt, Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein, Johannesburg. November, 1964, 1964. 106

Chapter 5: Politics of representation

5.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled
Low Blowing Itself—Ha—Smack Into the Middle of Ellington’s Orchestra Billie
Heard It Too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears, from the series From Here I Saw
What Happened And I Cried, 1995–6. 112
5.2 Ahlam Shibli, Back from school (Unrecognised no. 5), ‘Arab al-Na’im, Palestine/Israel,
1999–2000. 114
5.3 Hrair Sarkissian, Execution Squares (detail), 2008. 117
5.4 Oscar Muñoz, Aliento, 1996–2002. 119
5.5 Wall Label by John Szarkowski, New Documents, Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1967. 124
5.6 Jin-me Yoon, A Group of Sixty-Seven (detail), 1996. 128
5.7 Wang Jinsong, Standard Family, 2006. 129

Chapter 6: Pictures of war

6.1 Robert Capa, Falling Soldier, 1936. 136
6.2 Martha Rosler, Balloons, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing
the War Home, c. 1967–72. 138
6.3 John Heartfeld, “Hurrah! The butter is fnished!” (Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!),
from AIZ 14, no. 51, December 19, 1935. 140
6.4 Gohar Dashti, Today’s Life and War, 2008. 141

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 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

6.5 An-My Lê. Small Wars (Sniper 1), 1999–2002. 142

6.6 Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled, from the series Memory of War, Toyokawa, Aichi, 1959 145
6.7 Jo Ractliffe, Roadside stall on the way to Viana, 2007. 146
6.8 Khaled Barakeh, Untitled Images, 2014. 149
6.9 Muhammed Muheisen, Islamabad, Pakistan, 2014. 151

Chapter 7: Form
7.1 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dive (Pryzhok v vodu), 1935. 163
7.2 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Lo Schiaffo, 1912. 164
7.3 Tina Modotti, Workers Parade, 1926. 165
7.4 Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Untitled from the series Tokyo, c. 1975. 167
7.5 Edson Chagas, Angola Pavilion ‘Luanda, Encyclopedic City’ 55, International
Art Exhibition organized by La Biennale di Venezia, 2013. 170
7.6 Florence Henri, Obst, 1929. 172
7.7 Hippolyte Bayard, Lace Glove, c. 1843–7. 173
7.8 Liz Deschenes, Tilt/Swing (360° feld of vision, version 1), 2009. 174

Chapter 8: Appropriation
8.1 Jan van Raay, Art Workers’ Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group members
protest in front of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, with the Q. And babies? poster, January 8, 1970. 183
8.2 Pavel Maria Smejkal, Saigon (1968), from the series Fatescapes, 2009–10. 185
8.3 Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Capacity/Capacities, 1998. 187
8.4 Zhang Dali, Chairman Mao at the Xiyuan Airport in Beijing 1949, 1978. 189
8.5 Hannah Hoch, Dada-Review, 1919. 191
8.6 Gustav Klutcis, We Shall Pay Back Our Coal Debt to This Country, 1930. 193
8.7 Sherrie Levine, African Masks After Walker Evans: 1–24, 2014. 195
8.8 Daniella Zalcman, Signs of Your Identity, 2014. 197
8.9 Juan David Laserna Montoya, Untitled, from the series Extracción publicitaria, 2012–17. 200

Chapter 9: Museums
9.1 Installation view, Ocean of lmages: New Photography 2015,
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015. 210
9.2 Louise Lawler, Arrangements of Pictures, 1982. 212
9.3 Charles Thurston Thompson, Exhibition of the Photographic Society of London
and the Societe Francaise de Photographie at the South Kensington Museum, 1858. 214
9.4 Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1956–7. 217
9.5 Leon Levson, Basutoland National Council, 1947. 218

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

9.6 Raqs Media Collective, A History of Photography, 2014. 222

9.7 Installation view, The Family Camera, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2017. 226
9.8 Joe May, L’Allegro in The American Snapshot: An Exhibition of the Folk Art of the
Camera (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1944). 228
9.9 Installation view, Kodak exhibition interior, 1897. 229

Chapter 10: Archives

10.1 Akram Zaatari, Objects of Study/Hashem el Madami/Studio Practices/Scratched
portrait of Mrs. Baqari Saida (Lebanon) 1957, 2004. 235
10.2 Joachim Schmid, Archiv 28, 1988. 236
10.3 Albert Renger-Patzsch, Snake Head, 1927. 237
10.4 Unidentifed photographers, Portrait of Effuah Nicol, after 1961, based on
photograph c. 1890. 239
10.5 Dinh Q. Lê, Erasure, 2011. 244
10.6 Bryan Heseltine, Cape Town, c. 1949–52. 247
10.7 Craigie Horsfeld, Klub Pod Jaszczurami, Rynek Glowny, Krakow, February 1976,
1991. 249
10.8 James Bragge, Colonial Museum, c. 1880. 251
10.9 William Henry Fox Talbot, Nelson’s Column under Construction in Trafalgar
Square, London, April 1844. 252

Chapter 11: Celebrity style, the publicity shot,

and the maverick language of fashion
11.1 Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue cover, 1945. 260
11.2 Dan Winters, Jay-Z, 2003. 262
11.3 Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein, 1938. 263
11.4 J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, Onile Gogoro Or Akaba, 1975. 267
11.5 K8 Hardy, FashionFashion 4, 2006. 271
11.6 Steven Johnston, “Straight Up,” i-D magazine, 1980. 272
11.7 Kevin Serna, Hoda Ketabi, 2016. 275
11.8 Philip Kwame Apagya, Come on Board, 2000. 276

Chapter 12: Photography and the cinematic

12.1 Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 2009. 282
12.2 Mitra Tabrizian, Tehran 2006, 2006. 284
12.3 Wang Qingsong, Competition, 2004. 286
12.4 Tracey Moffatt, Useless, 1974, 1994. 287

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 xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

12.5 Felice Beato, Interior of Secundra Bagh After the Massacre, 1858. 289
12.6 James Rodriguez, A traditional Mayan Huipil, or hand-woven blouse, recovered
at a mass grave, dries under the sun at the headquarters of the Forensic
Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), 2015. 293
12.7 Fiona Tan, Island, 2008. 295
12.8 [Herbert?] Tomlinson, Opening Night at the Rex Theater Hannibal, MO, 1912. 297

Color plates
Plate 1 Farrah Karapetian, Riot Police, 2011.
Plate 2 Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer rechts, 2004.
Plate 3 Hasan and Husain Essop, Thornton Road, 2008.
Plate 4 Sammy Baloji, Untitled 13, from the series Mémoire, 2006.
Plate 5 María Magdalena Campos-Pons, When I am Not Here/Estoy Allá, 1994.
Plate 6 Ravi Agarwal, Have You Seen the Flowers on the River?, 2007–12.
Plate 7 Catherine Opie, Bush Smiling, Help Us, from the series Close to Home, 2005.
Plate 8 Gideon Mendel, João Pereira de Araújo, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil,
March 2015, 2015.
Plate 9 Obal Denis/Martina Bacigalupo, “Gulu Real Art Studio” (Uganda), 2013.
Plate 10 Richard Mosse, Rebel Rebel, 2011.
Plate 11 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, War Primer 2, 2011, Plate 62.
Plate 12 Elad Lassry, Circles and Squares (A Tasteful Organic Melons Arrangement), 2007.
Plate 13 Raghubir Singh, Pavement Shop, Howrah, West Bengal, from the series
The Grand Trunk Road, 1991.
Plate 14 Barbara Kasten, Construct NYC 11, 1982.
Plate 15 Alfredo Jaar, Life Magazine, April 19, 1968, 1995.
Plate 16 Installation view, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary
African Photography, the International Center of Photography, 2006, with
Tracey Rose’s Lucie’s Fur Version 1:1:1–I Annunciazione (After Fra Angelico),
c. 1434–2003.
Plate 17 Rosângela Rennó, Rio Montevideo, 2011–16.
Plate 18 Kimiko Yoshida, Painting (Monna Lisa) Self-Portrait, 2010.
Plate 19 Darren Almond, Fullmoon@Cerro Chaltén, 2013.
Plate 20 Saïdou Dicko, La Bouilloire (The Tea Kettle), 2014.

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 INTRODUCTION

There are many ways to learn about photography’s histories. One method is simply to look at images—
lots of them—in places like museums, galleries, books, or on social media platforms. Written histories of
the medium, such as this one, provide another. Yet as knowledge about the geographic scope of
photography’s past expands and as an increasing number of disciplines begin to incorporate aspects
of photography’s histories into their own methods of understanding the world, how such a written history
should look or be organized becomes a complex and political question. No single text can address all
aspects of photography’s rich history, but to us what feels essential is an investigative approach that is
at once capacious in scope, critical in its specifcity, and aware of its own limitiations. With this need in
mind, we have organized Global Photography: A Critical History around a set of analytical framings that
encompass a variety of historical contexts, a diversity of locations, and a plurality of producers. By
widening—geographically and conceptually—historical points of reference and contemporary points of
entry, our book takes a critical approach to the multivalent practices and discourses that compose
photography’s histories across time and space.
Teaching introductory surveys on the history of photography to undergraduate students can present
unique pedagogical challenges. If one elects to use a textbook, Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A
Cultural History (currently in its 4th edition) is a popular choice, and her chronologically structured survey
offers a broad overview of photography’s varied and complicated histories. However, when classes are
populated by photography, studio art, and design majors, all of whom tend to identify more readily with
contemporary uses of the medium, teleological models that place such examples at the end of the book
can alienate students who long for discussion organized around more current practices. Moreover, the
separation of the contemporary from the historical results in a relevance gap: chronological surveys too
easily lose sight of how historical antecedents inform and relate to contemporary questions, approaches,
and practices. Naomi Rosenblum’s A World History of Photography (in its 5th edition) presents many of
the same drawbacks as Marien’s text. Though admirably international in scope, and with a new section
devoted to photography at the start of the twenty-frst century, the book’s structure nonetheless remains
solidly linear and thus the pedagogical challenges posed by a chronological model remain as well.
Additionally, chronologically organized texts tend to emphasize completeness over criticality, and even
though we know comprehensiveness is impossible, the structure of a teleological survey with its discrete
and contained bits of information make the reader feel a sense of completeness.
Global Photography addresses the problems inherent to exhaustive chronological studies in a number
of ways. To begin with, rather than isolate international contemporary photographic practices from their
historical pasts, we consider the two in relation to each other so as to bring out important and often
overlooked interconnections and convergences. This approach aligns with a signifcant shift in teaching
survey courses more generally. Over the past twenty years, a re-evaluation of the traditional survey
course has been taking place in disciplines ranging from art history to American studies, and from design

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 2 GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY

history to the history of cinema.1 For many, the teleological chronology, upon which many of these
surveys is based, has become an outdated resource. One solution to this problem is to organize
the survey thematically. Such an approach, in fact, has become a new standard for teaching the
history of photography, with Liz Wells’s Photography: A Critical Introduction (also currently in its
4th edition) as a leading model. Yet, despite the relevance and importance of Wells’s edited survey, its
focus on primarily U.S. and Euro-centric examples marginalizes global perspectives, thereby situating
artists and projects from countries in the Global South (when mentioned at all) as ancillary to the
mainstream.
More recently, scholars have begun a more explicit questioning of Euro-centric preconceptions
surrounding photography’s history. Photographer and historian Boris Kossoy and Latin American scholar
Natalia Brizuela, for instance, have both sought to reframe photography’s frequently recited Euro-centric
origin story by turning to the groundbreaking photographic experiments that Hercule Florence conducted
in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1833, independent of those of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis-Jacques-Mandé
Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot in Europe.2 Likewise, American studies scholar Sissy Helff and
historian Stefanie Michel’s edited collection, Global Photographies: Memories—History—Archives
(2018), challenges conventional and normative narratives of the medium’s history, particularly through
their assertion that “Photography never belonged solely to the West nor was the idea of creating a
likeness of a thing or person an exclusively western or modern notion.”3 Global Photography adds to this
“global turn,” and seeks to expand on what this new history might look like. We hope the chapters that
follow here will continue to open the feld, offering a myriad of case studies, rather than an exhaustive
world history, that testify to the instability of, and unexpected possibilities within, the history of photography
more broadly.
Admittedly, we recognize certain fundamental limitations to our positions as scholars of art history
and visual studies writing from the perspective of the Global North. Scholarship on photography’s
global histories has grown in recent decades, yet as art historian Gael Newton points out, practical
issues, including funding for travel, means that many scholars must nonetheless “rely heavily on
biographies, collections and publications accessible in Euroamerica.”4 To contend with this constraint,
some argue that a geographical emphasis on specifc areas allows for greater cross-cultural understanding
of photography’s histories. The many geographically delineated histories of photography recently
published, especially by Reaktion Books, which focus on a continent or country, are prime examples of
this model.5
We understand the value of such studies, particularly after experiencing various geographic restrictions
in our own research and writing. For instance, while it was relatively easy to fnd contemporary global
examples to include in our chapters, we had more diffculty locating English language resources on
international historical fgures. Furthermore, our linguistic limitations threw into relief the inevitable concern
one encounters when taking a global approach to history writing: losing specifcity within the larger
whole, or not dealing with cultural difference in as much depth as it requires. Aware of these drawbacks,
we avoid claims to universalism and further believe, as Mark Miller Graham argued over twenty years ago
in relation to the future of the art history survey, that we art historians should “stop fetishizing
completeness.”6 For this reason, we adopt a thematic organization in which, through a series of critical
framings, we connect past and present within various global contexts. The chapters in our volume also
reference but do not claim the superiority of so-called canonical fgures and “important” artworks often
found in teleological surveys of photography’s history. We believe this innovative and inclusive approach
is more relevant and exciting to current students.

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 INTRODUCTION 3

At the same time, we recognize that a thematic model is not everyone’s preferred approach for
teaching the history of photography. To those who continue to employ—for any number of reasons—a
chronological approach, Global Photography still offers useful insights and ways for understanding how
that knowledge might be deployed or organized. Our chapters, and even sub-chapters, while integrated
into the larger framework of the book, can easily be taken apart and used as assigned readings in both
lower level and upper level classes in art history, studio art, art education, and design, among other
disciplines. The target audience for the book is undergraduate students, yet our emphasis on criticality
should likewise appeal to graduate students as well as scholars interested in thinking about the global
possibilities of photography’s diverse and complicated histories.
It is important to note that the feld we refer to as “global” photography is distinct from, though related
to, globalization. These terms are often taken as synonymous. Global Photography seeks to problematize
those assumptions. For instance, photography historian David Bate has convincingly argued that
globalization “offers a new paradigm for thinking about photography,”7 and he has offered a compelling
account of how the global circulation of photographs affects meaning. But the fow of pictures across
international borders forms only one facet of our inquiry into the global status of photography. Whereas
globalization refers primarily to the interconnectedness of the world’s economies, the “global” turn in art
emerged after many decades of postcolonial approaches to art history and visual culture. The “global”
method in art history, as for us, is preoccupied foremost with decolonizing or moving away from monolithic
timelines and narratives.8 It “requires,” as photography theorist Ariella Azoulay explains, “one to abandon
the imperial linear temporality and the way it separates tenses: past, present, and future,”9 and instead
fnd ways to remap and reimagine the wider feld of art.
This reorientation, however, does not mean that we disregard how photographs are made at specifc
times and places by practitioners who identify themselves in terms of particular nations and regions.
Martinique-born, postcolonial poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant’s conception of “globality,” and the
crucial need to recognize difference among cultures in spite of being drawn into ever closer relations,
provides a helpful model in this regard. For Glissant, globality marks a world that conceives of itself as
“multiple and single,” with responsibilities to “face the density (opacity) of the other.”10 This mode of
interrelationships or, as photography historian Tanya Sheehan signifcantly writes, “the challenges of
bringing into dialogue the global and local, the national and transnational, majorities and minorities,
cultural identity and cultural difference,”11 undergirds the project of Global Photography.
Our book is organized into six thematic units: Realisms, Evidence, Ethics, Art, Collections, and the
Expanded feld. The themes correspond to issues, genres, and approaches that we understand to have
global relevance both today and in the past.

Realisms
Photography’s presumed indexicality forms the framework for the chapters in the unit on Realisms.
Though scholars have long debated this characteristic of photography, what photography’s indexicality
in general implies is that the medium holds not only a similarity with or a resemblance to what it
depicts—its referent—but is also said to have been directly caused by this referent and thereby could not
exist without it. The chapters in this unit seek to destabilize and complicate this causal relationship
between a photograph and its referent through an exploration of the medium’s abstract and staged
qualities.

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 4 GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Evidence
This portion of the text builds on the insights of the Realism unit, in that it embraces the idea of
representational instability. Here, however, this instability is talked about in relation to how artists mobilize
photographic images (because of their indexical nature) to make arguments about the world around
them. Paradoxically, part of this process involves breaking down photographs to show how histories,
conficts, and ideologies can be embedded within seemingly neutral views of people and land. The
chapters in this unit thus address what artist and critic Hito Steyerl calls the “paradox of truth”12—that is,
the challenge to understand photographic images as pictures that simultaneously provide historical truth
and are manipulatable and opaque.

Ethics
The unit on ethics considers the ways that photographs propose a moral encounter with the viewer.
Specifcally, the chapters in this unit explore the politics of representation and confict photography
through questions concerning the subjective dimensions of objectivity and the diffculty of capturing a
“truthful” image. The role of photography in bearing witness and making visible is critically deliberated
here, especially within situations characterized by crisis and suffering. The chapters in this unit reject the
view of documentary photography as neutral and instead encourage ethical questions regarding how
(and for whom) particular subjects are framed and viewed.

Art
Of course, one of the key discourses of photography is art. As such, this unit looks at how aesthetic
practices and considerations distinguish themselves (or not) from other discourses such as science,
reportage, and documentary. By dealing with the theme and strategy of appropriation in art practices
that use photography, across several time periods and locations, as well as thinking deeply about form
as both the material and subject of photography, these chapters tackle how photography simultaneously
troubles and identifes as art.

Collections
Because of their reproducibility, photographs function not only as objects to be collected but also as a
means to collect objects in the world. The chapters in this unit therefore take up the subject of the
collections history of photographs and by extension their history as collected objects. To explore these
dual functions of photography, each chapter highlights two distinct institutional sites of photographic
collections and collecting: museums and archives. The chapters come together in their inclusion of
photographers, curators, and exhibitions, both contemporary and historical, which engage with and
raise questions around photography’s broader collections history.

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 INTRODUCTION 5

Expanded feld
The photographic image operates in multiples felds, including art, anthropology, science, medicine, law,
flm, and fashion, to name only a few. Such multiplicity has been a part of photography identity (even if
sometimes suppressed) since its “invention” in 1839 when Daguerre presented his daguerreotype
process to a joint session of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Art in Paris, France. This unit
investigates photography’s discursive promiscuity and inherent multiplicity by looking at two areas—
fashion and cinema—that intersect with discussions of art photography but are often left out of traditional
accounts. The chapters here, then, challenge photography’s accepted boundaries, in formal as well as
social terms. How, for instance, does the relationship between still and moving images disrupt
photography’s temporal ordering? Or, how does fashion photography push at the edges of acceptable
cultural expression?
Overlaps between subsections and themes recur usefully throughout the book. Photography’s
assumed realism, for instance, is a thread that runs across many of the chapters. And, though “art”
headlines just one thematic unit, the featured examples in the book are predominantly art photography.
Likewise, while there is no dedicated thematic unit on either photography’s temporality or materiality,
these characteristics of the medium are taken up in many of the chapters in the book, including
“Description and abstraction” and “Photography and the cinematic.” We see such overlap as a strength
in that such layering encourages readers to think more holistically about contemporary photographic
practices and their multifaceted relationships to the past.
Each of the twelve chapters examines a diverse group of photographers working at varying points in
their careers, including well-known historical and contemporary fgures and younger emerging artists.
This means that many of the photographers we include are canonical, artists whose work is widely
known and generally considered infuential. At the same time, we have employed other standards for
selecting artists, such as geographic location and critical engagement with the themes covered in the
book. We fnd such criteria to be as important as prominence or validation through the art market
because our book seeks to contribute to the construction of a more diverse and genuinely global history
of photography than currently exists. Perhaps most importantly, however, we engage fewer photographers
than most other introductory history of photography texts. We made this decision intentionally. Our
choice of work allows us to demonstrate, especially to student readers, the practice and importance of
looking critically, and the merits of placing their own art-making practices in historical and global terms.
Our examples, then, are not intended to be either all-inclusive or comprehensive. Instead, they are
designed to provide a fexible structure in which salient themes can be used in terms of the photographers
we consider or with others. In so doing, our book provides a much needed historical, methodological, as
well as practical model for readers.
The number of scholars and critics writing about photography has grown exponentially in the past
decade and a half. We have attempted to incorporate some of these newer thinkers into the chapter
narratives while also referencing more established historical and theoretical writings that remain relevant
to the feld. Still, there are many voices missing. In order to refect some of the diversity of these more
recent approaches, while maintaining a coherent overall narrative, each chapter of the book also includes
a boxed focus study designed to highlight a new area of research or form of practice around the globe.
These focus studies, which consist of short interviews, curatorial statements, and brief refections written
by prominent and emerging scholars and critics, but also photographers, serve to integrate the discussion
of photography’s history and critical voices of its practice in a manner unlike other textbooks. Additional

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 6 GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY

pedagogical features at the conclusion of each chapter further support our emphasis on critical looking.
These include chapter summaries that ensure the book’s contents and structure are accessible and
meaningful for introductory survey courses, suggested discussion points, as well as further case studies
and suggested further reading.
The feld of photography studies continues to shift and expand. But with this forward momentum,
there is always the risk of loss. Writing in 1940, shortly before his untimely death while escaping the
Nazis, literary theorist Walter Benjamin penned a text questioning the integral and immanent connection
between history and time. One well-known passage from this work, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” speaks directly to our project: “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as
one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”13 In this quotation and throughout the
essay, Benjamin understands time as radically fragmented and cautions that, without care, the past will
“fit by,” vanishing into the ether. The historian’s task, for him, is thus to establish a relation between
history’s fragments and to safeguard against its disappearance. Global Photography likewise grapples
with the threat of history’s irretrievable disappearance by looking for the past’s appearance in and
relevance to the present. Our hope is that the pointed thematic issues selected across these pages will
offer multiple viewpoints, provoke investigation, and spark reassessments of photography’s vast history,
as a means of propelling fresh-eyed and critically-engaged directions in current photography practice,
research, and criticism. Our approach, in other words, is to situate the past in the present by searching
for historical antecedents in today’s contemporary image world. This method serves as a guardrail
against forgetting: it is a way to keep historical knowledge forward-facing.

Summary
• An accessible thematic overview designed for introductory and upper-level undergraduate
photography majors but also suitable for other related majors, including art history, studio art,
art education, and design, among others.
• Structured as required or recommended reading for semester-long undergraduate courses, its
thematic organization also makes individual chapters and sub-chapters suitable for courses
dealing with the particular subject areas of those chapters.
• Covers a broad range of international historical and contemporary photographers, including
emerging practitioners, and positions contemporary photographic practices and issues in terms
of relevant historical antecedents.
• In addition to the main chapter narrative and focus box, each chapter includes the following
pedagogical features: chapter summary, discussion points, further case studies, and suggested
further reading.

Notes
1 See, for instance, Sarah A. Lichtman, “Reconsidering the History of Design Survey,” Journal of Design History
22, no. 4 (2009): 341–51; Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Towards a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,”
Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1358–70; Frank P. Tomasulo, “What Kind of Film History

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 INTRODUCTION 7

Do We Teach? The Introductory Survey Course as Pedagogical Opportunity,” Cinema Journal 41, no. 1 (Fall
2001); Bradford R. Collins, ed., “Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey: A Practical, Somewhat
Theoretical, and Inspirational Guide,” special issue, Art Journal 54, no. 3 (Fall 1995).
2 See Boris Kossoy, The Pioneering Photographic Work of Hercule Florence (London: Routledge, 2018); and
Natalia Brizuela, “Light Writing in the Tropics,” Aperture 215 (Summer 2014): 32–7.
3 Stephanie Michels, “Re-framing Photography – Some Thoughts,” in Sissy Helff and Stefanie Michels (eds),
Global Photographies: Memory—History—Archives (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018), 9.
4 Gael Newton, “Other World Histories of Photography: The First Century of Photography in Asia,” in Moritz
Neumüller (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2018), 87.
5 See, for instance, Karen Fraser, Photography and Japan (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); Justin Carville,
Photography and Ireland (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and
Germany (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
6 Mark Miller Graham, “The Future of Art History and the Undoing of the Survey,” Art Journal 54, no. 3 (Fall
1995): 33.
7 David Bate, Photography: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 189–90.
8 See, for example, Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza, eds., Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn
(Williamstown, MA, and New Haven, CT: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press,
2014).
9 Ariella Azoulay, “Unlearning Images of Destruction,” Foto Museum, September 17, 2018, https://www.
fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/155283_unlearning_images_of_destruction.
10 Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 24.
11 Tanya Sheehan, “Introduction: Questions of Difference,” in Photography, History, Difference (Hanover, NH:
Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 6.
12 Hito Steyerl, “Documentarism as Politics of Truth,” trans. Aileen Derieg, transversal (May 2003), http://eipcp.
net/transversal/1003/steyerl2/en. See also, Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” A Prior 15 (2007), http://
re-visiones.net/anteriores/spip.php%3Farticle37.html.
13 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.) and Harry Zohn (trans.),
Illuminations: Essays and Refections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255.

Selected further reading

Bate, David. Photography: The Key Concepts. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Hannah Arendt (ed.) and Harry Zohn (trans.),
Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Refections, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Cadava, Eduardo and Gabriela Nouzeilles, eds. The Itinerant Languages of Photography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Art Museum, 2013.
Carville, Justin, ed. “Globalization.” Special issue, photographies 2, no. 1 (March 2009).
Fontcuberta, Joan, ed. Photography: Crisis of History. Barcelona: Actar, 2002.
Glazer, Ya’ara Gil. “A New Kind of History? The Challenges of Contemporary Histories of Photography.” Journal of Art
Historiography 3 (December 2010), https://arthistoriography.fles.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_183179_en.pdf.
Helff, Sissy and Stefanie Michels, eds. Global Photographies: Memory—History—Archives. Bielefeld: transcript
Verlag, 2018.
Neumüller, Moritz, ed. The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Pinney, Christopher and Nicholas Peterson, eds. Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003.
Sheehan, Tanya, ed. Photography, History, Difference. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015.
Sheehan, Tanya and Andrés Mario Zervigón. Photography and It Origins. London: Routledge, 2015.

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 PART ONE

REALISMS
On March 31, 2003, nearly two weeks into the start of the Iraq War, staff photographer Brian Walski
(b. 1958) sent a photograph to his editor at the Los Angeles Times in which an armed British soldier
signals a group of Iraqi civilians to take cover. The following day, after the image circulated widely on the
front page of the Times as well as in numerous other newspapers, Walski, a staff photographer since
1998, was fred. The reason for Walski’s dismissal was the discovery of a duplication indicating that
he had used a computer to combine elements from two photographs, taken moments apart, in order
to improve his composition. Since Times policy forbids modifying the content of a news photograph,
Walski’s fring generated much discussion over the purported objectivity and truthfulness of
photojournalism. We turn to this example, however, not to weigh in on the ethics (a theme taken up in a
later unit) of Walski’s act of manipulation but rather to call attention to photography’s presumed indexicality.
Walski’s fring results in part from assumptions around photography’s so-called indexical relationship
to the real. Unlike handmade images, which are often considered to be created not found, many believe
photographs provide a record or trace of what was directly in front of the camera at a particular time and
place. This means that while a painter or illustrator may invent a composition from her or his imagination,
a photographer, as Francis Frith famously said in the mid-nineteenth century, “can only appreciate the
diffculty of getting a view satisfactorily into the camera: foregrounds are especially perverse; distance too
near or too far; the falling away of ground; the intervention of some brick wall or other commonplace
object, which an artist would simply omit.” 1 Photography, in other words, shares what some—borrowing
the terminology of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce—call an indexical relationship to the real. Though
scholars have long debated this characteristic and Pierce’s contribution to it, what photography’s
indexicality in general implies is that the medium holds not only a similarity with or a resemblance to what
it depicts—otherwise known as its referent—but is also said to have been directly caused by this
referent and thereby could not exist without it. The following two chapters seek to destabilize and
complicate this causal relationship between a photograph and its referent through an exploration of the
medium’s abstract and staged qualities.

Note
1 Francis Frith, “Introduction,” in Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described, vol. 1 (London: J.S. Virtue,
1858–9), n.p.

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 1
DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION

In his essay “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” written between 1893 and 1910, Charles Sanders
Peirce defnes an “index” as a sign that points to an actual thing in the way that a bullet-hole designates
the passing of a bullet. Pierce explains, “a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign for a shot; for
without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the
sense to attribute it to a shot or not.”1 This causal relationship between signs and their referents is
especially evident in photographs known as photograms. The photogram is a camera-less, negative-
less photographic process in which an object is often, though not always, placed directly onto light-
sensitive material and exposed to light. The image that results is thus an “index” of the objects placed in
contact with the light-sensitive material. Despite this indexicality, photograms, paradoxically, tend not to
hold the same level of resemblance to what they depict as other forms of photography, especially those
taken with a camera. This means that, though photograms are produced in direct contact with their
referents, they hold both a fdelity to and, more signifcantly, a distance from observed reality. One can
see this inconsistency in a photogram’s composition, which is made up of both white areas, where the
light-sensitive material is covered by the objects, and dark regions, which have been exposed to light.
Together these light and dark forms offer no surface details but only outlines and varying shades of grey
that fuctuate according to the transparency of the objects with which they came into contact. It is this
conficting nature of the photogram—its ability to be at once real and abstract, evidentiary and evocative,
literal and otherworldly—that is the subject of this chapter.

Nature
Many trace the origins of photograms and other camera-less photography to the experimentations
with light-sensitive materials that Thomas Wedgwood, Humphrey Davy, William Henry Fox Talbot, and
John Herschel, among others, conducted in the frst half of the nineteenth century. Though scholars now
date these photographic investigations much earlier, and not exclusively to Europe, one consequence of
these experimentations was the widespread use of the photogram in the nineteenth century for botanical
book illustration. Until this point, the recording of empirical data through drawing had played a key role
in scientifc discovery. But, as this form of rending “came to be seen,” as curator Catherine de Zegher
notes, “more and more as too personal, idealized, and inaccurate,” other forms of representation, “in
which nature seemed to draw itself,”2 began to be used. These included the photogram, or what Talbot
called “photogenic drawings.” In his book The Pencil of Nature, published in six installments between
1844 and 1846, Talbot promoted photogenic drawings as “impressed by Nature’s hand” and “executed
without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.”3 It was this emphasis on the photogram’s indexicality—
or ability to serve as a physical trace of the natural world—that rendered it a preferred medium within

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botanical illustration. Still, while the photogram was linked to empirical study during the nineteenth
century, its lack of detail, particularity, and exactitude—or immateriality—kept it equally bound to the
world of art and imagination. It is this paradoxical position that the photogram occupied between science
and art in the nineteenth century that continues to inform its use today in contemporary art practices.
Since 2011, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky (b. 1980) has collected leaves perforated by ravenous
caterpillars as part of her ongoing series Fotogramme. But, unlike nineteenth-century practitioners who
would rest their botanical specimens on top of a sensitized surface and then expose them to direct
sunlight, Kovacovsky places her leaves in the negative holder of an enlarger and then exposes them in
an analog color darkroom. To manipulate the formal outcomes of these images even further, Kovacovsky
also prints multiple exposures of the holed leaves, both enlarged and cropped, on the same piece of
paper and uses flters to either add or subtract color in between exposures. Through this printing process,
which takes place completely in the dark, Kovacovsky relies on chance and instinct to transform these
botanical specimens into fantastical shapes and patterns that are beautiful, whimsical, and, even,
hallucinogenic. In so doing, she both upholds photography’s indexical capacity and undermines
expectations about its visual outcome, which is dictated as much by her performative actions in the
darkroom as by the physicality of the leaves themselves. To further heighten such tensions within her
images, for the 2014 exhibition Midsummer Night, organized by artist Sara van der Heide, Kovacovsky
hung her photograms within a lush botanical garden that belongs to Vrije Universiteit in the Netherland’s
capital of Amsterdam (see Fig. 1.1). Through this act of staging her photograms outdoors amongst
actual vegetation, instead of on the customary white walls of a gallery or museum, Kovacovsky
encouraged viewers to contemplate the formal structures that make up the natural world in ways that are
associative, expansive, and unfamiliar.
The natural world, especially water, is also the subject of the camera-less photography of Susan
Derges (b. 1955). A number of scholars have discussed Derges’s photograms in relation to science.
They have noted, for instance, how her interest in ideas such as the visualization of sound waves and the
life cycle of frogs share parallels with scientifc investigation. But, while Derges has clearly adopted the
techniques of empirical study in her practice, her attention to the natural world is informed as much by
aesthetics and philosophy as by science. In the late 1990s, after producing works largely in a studio-
laboratory environment, Derges began to work directly in nature through her series the River Taw
(1997–8). For this series of photograms, Derges visited the River Taw, which runs through Dartmoor in
Devon, England, near where she has lived since 1992. After examining the river during different seasons
and weather conditions, Derges sought to document its ebb and fow. To accomplish this aim, she took
large sheets of colored photographic paper out at night in an aluminum tray, which protected it from light,
and then submerged the tray just below the water’s surface. Using a fashlight, she then exposed the
paper to light, capturing imprints upon the surface of the paper of the varied formal patterns of the
water’s movements—waves, ripples, and drops—which, at times, are overlain with more solid organic
shapes made up of foating leaves and branches overhanging the water.
The resultant images mesmerize in their evocative documentation of the unseen, macrocosmic forces
of water’s movement. To further engage viewers with these hidden energies, Derges prints her photograms
life-sized (roughly 5 x 2 feet), a format that recalls Japanese scroll painting, which Derges studied
alongside Zen philosophy when she lived in Japan from 1981 to 1986. While Japanese aesthetics and
philosophy have clearly infuenced the scroll-like design of Derges’s photograms, the severe verticality of
these images responds as well to Derges’s ongoing interest in natural theology. According to curator
Martin Barnes, Theodor Schwenk’s 1965 book, Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 13

Figure 1.1 Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Fotogramm/Würmer, 2013. From Midsummer Night by Sara van der Heide in
conjunction with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, VU Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam,
2014. © Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky. Courtesy of the artist.

Water and Air, has been critical to Derges’s thinking about water’s movement. In this book, Schwenk
connects the forms of water’s ebb and fow to the structures of such things as the bones of the human
body, the fight of birds, and the patterns of the weather to argue that there are fundamental, unseen
forces that unite all natural and living things. Derges uses her series of river photograms to make a similar
set of associations. Through these human-sized camera-less images, she seeks to dissolve the
boundaries between science and aesthetics as well as science and spirituality and thereby encourage
viewers to begin to understand how everything and everyone in nature is connected.
Like Derges, Kunié Sugiura (b. 1942) has also been infuenced by Japanese aesthetics and
philosophy. But for Sugiura, this inspiration is distinctly personal. Born in Nagoya, Japan, Sugiura moved
to the United States in 1963 to study photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
At SAIC as well as in New York City, where she moved after graduating, Sugiura took up an experimental
practice whose blurring of the distinctions between photography and painting as well as realism and
abstraction came about in part through her interest in Eastern aesthetics. “In Asian art,” Sugiura explains,
“there has always been a co-existence of the real and the abstract; for example, fowers and birds are
rendered realistically in a simplifed space, painted in one color. It is a partial realism, pointing out the
ephemerality of living.”4 This tension between the representational and the abstract, or a “partial realism,”

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is evident in some of the very frst images that she made. For these works, Sugiura brushed emulsion
onto raw canvas in the darkroom, and then used an enlarger to expose the canvas to her own photographs
depicting close-up patterns, mostly from nature, of tree bark, pebbles, leaves, and rocks. Printed large-
scale and sometimes embellished with acrylic and pencil, these formalist yet surreal images are hybrids
of drawing, painting, and photography.
In 1981, while attempting to make her practice more “dynamic,” Sugiura turned to the photogram
technique, which she continues to employ today. As in her previous photographs, she uses the photogram
process to create painterly works that are at once real and abstract as well as grounded in both Eastern
and Western aesthetics. In Compounds. A. Positive, from 1997, Sugiura “draws” a composition using
fowers and string onto light-sensitive paper. Next, she exposes the objects to light while, at the same
time, disrupting the paper’s uniform development by pouring hot water over randomly selected areas.
This action creates a tension between the relative clarity of the fowers and string and the immateriality of
the background. Suspended in a kind of nebulous ether, the stringed fowers, whose forms are both
opaque and translucent, appear to dissolve within the background at the same time they emanate from
it. Evoking notions of both the infnite and fnite, the limitless and the bound, Sugiura uses these
photograms of the natural world to suggest not competing but a single, unifed vision.
The interplay between realism and abstraction is also central to the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins
(1799–1871). Beginning in 1843, Atkins, an amateur botanist, sought to make precise renderings of
botanical specimens, including algae, seaweed, and ferns, among others. But though she was an
outstanding draftsperson who had previously made extensive hand-drawn studies of shells for an English
translation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s 1799 essays on conchology, she chose the cyanotype process.
Developed by John Herschel in 1842, the cyanotype is a printing process in which a solution of iron salts
is applied to light-sensitive material, which in turn is exposed to sunlight in contact with the plant
specimen. The resultant image is a contact print or photogram, in Parisian Blue, which is then fxed by
washing it in water (see Fig. 1.2). For Atkins, the cyanotype process was ideal “not only because it was
relatively easy and archivally permanent,” as art historian Carol Armstrong explains, but also because it
“emphasized over and over again the one-to-one, specimen-to-specimen relationship to the ‘real
thing.’”5 But while the indexicality of the photogram denoted its primary scientifc value, even Atkins
herself could not resist calling the cyanotype process “beautiful.” This observation was echoed by
Atkins’s contemporary, Robert Hunt, who called “the effect” of her algae photograms “exceeding
pleasing.”6 Amplifed by the blue background of the cyanotype process, Atkins’s photograms, much like
the images of Kovacovksky, Derges, and Sugiura, resonate at once as scientifc and aesthetic, naturalistic
and strange. And, though produced as part of a systematic study of botany, one might even go so far as
to call these phantasmagoria images abstract.
Within art history, the term abstract is generally used to denote artworks not intended to imitate
observed reality. Often these works are referred to as non-objective. In painting, moreover, abstraction
frequently refers to a reduction or a taking away of subject matter so as to fnd the essence of the
medium, like paint on canvas. Working in the United States in the 1960s, artist Ad Reinhardt attempted
to produce what he described as “a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless,
relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal,
transcendent, aware of no thing but art.”7 He called these works his “ultimate paintings,” since they
represented his effort to reduce his paintings down to their structural or material components. This effort
by Reinhardt to produce a “non-objective,” “disinterested” painting is not how abstraction functions in
the photograms discussed here. Instead, it is more useful to think about abstraction in these camera-

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 15

Figure 1.2 Anna Atkins, Ceylon/Fern, 1854. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

less images, as curator Lyle Rexer argues, as an opening up instead of as a reduction or taking away.
They are a form of abstraction, in other words, that builds upon and subverts photography’s realism—or
indexicality—and thereby offers a different way of seeing the world.

The body
Photography’s realism, or its ability to describe the world in a seemingly objective, accurate, and truthful
manner, has made it an especially popular medium for recording the exterior features of the human body
(a theme we will return to in Chapter 3). In fact, during the nineteenth century, one of the primary uses of
photography was portraiture. Yet, parallel with this attention to outward appearance, since its beginnings,
photography, and most especially camera-less photography, has also been used to represent the unseen.
Nineteenth-century spirit photography, in which so-called medium-photographers turned to camera-less
techniques to render what remains invisible to the naked eye, is but one example of these early practices.
This dual capacity of photography—its evidentiary and evocative abilities—continues to preoccupy artists
today. Many of the photograms of Farrah Karapetian (b. 1978) are based on actual political subjects:
undocumented immigrants, protestors, riot police, and U.S. army veterans, to name a few. But rather
than produce documentary images or even portraits of these subjects, Karapetian attempts to render

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something more nebulous: their lived experiences and memories. To recreate these living histories,
Karapetian turns to her friends, models, as well as, at times, the political subjects themselves, whom she
orchestrates in the darkroom, often wearing costumes and holding props that she has cast out of resin.
Through these performative life-size tableaux, which are at once traces and impressions, Karapetian
explores but also complicates photography’s, and especially news photography’s, presumed indexicality
and, by extension, its truthfulness, accuracy, and objectivity.
Riot Police, from 2011, is a product of Karapetian’s long-standing fascination with the global uprisings,
often referred to as the Arab Spring, which began in late 2010, frst in Tunisia, then spread across North
Africa and the Middle East (see Plate 1). For this fve-panel work, which is based on an iconic New York
Times photograph of police in Kyrgyzstan being stoned by protesters, Karapetian called on a group of
her art world friends. Garbed in military gear and holding translucent shields that she manufactured out
of resin, Karapetian instructed her subjects to recreate the gestures depicted in the news photograph.
Next, she exposed these poses numerous times in the dark against light-sensitive paper so that her
subjects’s silhouetted bodies function more in terms of allusion and suggestion than as fact or document.
In conjunction with this image, whose larger than life size (8 x 13 feet) renders this historical event in
markedly otherworldly terms, in 2011, Karapetian produced Flyer Photograph, an eight-part work based
on a pamphlet distributed in Egypt prior to the fall of Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak. This fyer, which was
initially distributed online as a PDF fle, gave instructions about the objects and practices necessary to
stage a successful protest. Karapetian learned about the document while interviewing Ahmed Maher, the
Nobel Prize-nominated civil engineer and co-founder of the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt. Maher is
featured in one of the eight dyads that make up this expansive, life-size work, where he performs the dual
role of protestor and riot policeman. To further act out the terms of the instructional guide, Karapetian
also photogrammed objects—sneakers, sweatshirts, and spray cans, among others—listed in the fyer.
To fabricate these objects, she cast them in resin so as to convey a sense of volume that would otherwise
be missing if the objects were solid and opaque. As photograms, these semi-translucent objects take on
the appearance of x-rays and thus further heighten the ethereal aspects of the work. Together these
multiple layers of representation—the photographic, the sculptural, the performative, and the pictorial—
destabilize long-standing assumptions about photography’s inherent ability to objectively represent
history and, by extension, civil unrest and, in so doing, encourage viewers to engage with these lived
experiences in ways that are time-consuming, unfamiliar, and deeply evocative.
Like Karapetian, Anne Ferran (b. 1949) also uses camera-less photography to restage history. In
1998, Ferran accepted an artist-in-residence position at the Rouse Hill estate in Sydney, Australia, which
had in its collection entire sets of undamaged nineteenth-century clothing that belonged to the successive
families who lived in the house beginning in 1813. As part of her residency, Ferran decided to meticulously
photogram all of the items in the house, beginning with the clothing. Daily, for a period of six months,
Ferran unwrapped each piece of clothing, placed it on a photo-sensitive sheet of paper, and then
exposed it to light. Printed as life-size and similar to the photogrammed objects in Karapetian’s Flyer
Photograph, these semi-translucent articles of clothing, which hover against the dark background of the
paper, appear mystical, even phantasmagorical. Devoid of people, yet full of life, Ferran’s photograms
tenderly evoke the subjects to whom these clothes once belonged yet are now no longer living.
Untitled is part of the series Longer than Life (1997–9) that Ferran produced during her residency at
the Rouse Hill estate (see Fig. 1.3). The subject of this image is a woman’s bodice, but because of the
translucency of the fabric, when Ferran photogrammed it, aspects of the garment, usually overlooked,
were brought forth. These include overlapping patches to the underarms that provide evidence of its

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 17

Figure 1.3 Anne Ferran, Untitled (1998) from the series Longer than life, 1997–9. Gelatin silver photogram, 75.9 x
103.6 cm (image and sheet). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon
for Contemporary Australian Photography, 1999 (1999.387). © Anne Ferran/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS
2019.

long-term use value and forgotten female labor (a theme we take up in Chapter 3). Yet, while this image
bears witness to the female bodies who wore as well as mended it, there is also something deeply
melancholy about the work. Part of this quality has to do with the strangeness, even shimmering nature
of this item of clothing, which is brought forth through the techniques of the photogram process and the
way that Ferran arranges the garment with the arms spread out. These techniques produce an
otherworldly quality that is further heighten by the fact that, though present through the photogram,
Ferran’s ethereal image of this nineteenth-century bodice conceals as much as it reveals. Photography
historian Geoffrey Batchen elaborates: “Turned to an apparition, history is brought back to life, not as the
truth of the past but as a ghostly presence that still haunts and entrances, today and forever.”8 Through
these photograms, then, Ferran concerns herself not with documenting the lived histories of the owners
of this clothing in any sort of factual or comprehensive manner. Instead, she uses the absence evoked
through her images to suggest a past that is at once distant and ephemeral yet to which viewers in the
present moment cannot help but long to recover.

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Both Ferran and Karapetian turn to clothing to conjure absent bodies in their images. And, even
though Karapetian’s photograms also feature actual subjects, their clothing and movement largely
obscure their genders. That is not the case for the Körperfotogramms (or whole-body photograms) of
Floris Neusüss (b. 1937). When Neusüss frst began to make these images in 1960, he had a nude
female model lie down on a piece of light-sensitive paper. He then exposed the model to light so that,
depending on the proximity of the body parts to the paper, the outlines of the fgure vary from clear to
blurry but nonetheless still register as female. Printed as life-sized, the female bodies in these images—
which appear either as white fgures on a black background, if standard paper was used, or as black
fgures on a white background, if auto-reversal paper was used—seem suspended or foating in a
weightless ether, which has caused most to read them as detached not only from gravity but also from
the reality of the world itself. But to what extent does the specifcity of their gender complicate such
readings? Can we read these traces of Neusüss’s nude female bodies without also feeling voyeuristic or
slightly unsettled? Are they somehow different than Yves Klein’s contemporaneous Anthropométries
(1960–1) for which he covered nude female models in blue paint and pulled them across the surface of
the canvas?
Part of the answer to these questions hinges on photography’s indexicality. The level to which the
female models in these photograms can be detached from the social construction of gender depends
in part on whether they read as real or not. Certainly, Neusüss has attempted to downplay their realness
through his use of the dematerializing effects of the photogram process. His Untitled (Körperfotogramm,
Berlin), from 1962, for instance, literally offers itself as a trace of Neusüss’s female model. At the same
time, there is nothing in the picture that individualizes or personalizes her (see Fig. 1.4). Suspended within
a white ground, the fgure, rendered in black with her legs raised in what appears to be a fetal position,
foats in space as if she has been born into a world unmoored from anything and everything that is known
or knowable. Because of this perplexing sense of the enigmatic that haunts Neusüss’s camera-less
photographs, some have read them not as “photographic traces . . . but rather as the realization of
visions.”9 This metaphysical reading builds on the interplay between the evidentiary and evocative in
Neusüss’s photograms. Though these images are indices of the female body, their visualization of the
human form is neither obvious nor clear but rather seems to be a product of the human imagination or,
as has also been suggested, the human psyche.
The association between Neusüss’s camera-less photographs and the unconscious fnds visual
support in the surrealist images of Man Ray (1890–1976), which Neusüss has cited as important
infuences. Although photograms fourished in the 1840s and 1850s, they were largely forgotten until the
early years of the twentieth century when European avant-garde artists such as Christian Schad, László
Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray began to experiment with their visual possibilities. For Man Ray, much like
his contemporaries Schade and Moholy-Nagy, what was most appealing about the photogram was its
automatic nature. It did not require a lens or camera and thereby represented a certain freedom from
more traditional art-making practices of the past. For Man Ray, this spontaneity, even instinctual potential,
of the photogram also aligned it with Surrealist thought and practice.
In his “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” written and published in 1924, poet André Breton defned
Surrealism as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express . . . the actual
functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic
or moral concern.” 10 For Breton, the aim of Surrealism was to help people gain complete access to their
unconscious thoughts and thereby encourage them to discover a larger reality, or “surreality,” that existed
beyond narrowly defned, rational notions of the world. One of the frst artists that Breton claimed as part

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 19

Figure 1.4 Floris Neusüss, Untitled (Körperfotogramm, Berlin), 1962. © Floris Neusüss. Courtesy of Von Lintel
Gallery, Los Angeles.

of this movement was Man Ray, who had emigrated to Paris from New York in 1921. It was in Paris that
Man Ray supposedly “discovered” the photogram process, when he accidently exposed objects sitting
on photographic paper in his darkroom to light. Likening the process to a kind of automatic drawing with
light—akin to the “automatic writing” of his Surrealist colleagues—Man Ray called these images
rayographs, after his assumed name.
For Man Ray, what was most signifcant about the rayograph, his name for the photogram, was the
manner in which it rendered ordinary objects, including the human body, ambiguous. In his Untitled
(Rayograph), from 1923, Man Ray transforms everyday objects—in this case, gauze, matchboxes, and
a spiral—by placing them on light-sensitive paper in the darkroom, exposing them to light, and then
repeating this process with additional objects and exposures (see Fig. 1.5). Through this technique, Man
Ray emphasizes the enigmatic interplay of light, shadow, and form rather than the exact physical

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Figure 1.5 Man Ray, Untitled (Rayograph) (Gauze, Match Boxes, and Spiral), 1923. Gelatin silver print, 29.5 ×
23.8 cm (115∕8 × 93∕8 in.). © Man Ray TRUST/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2019. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.

characteristics of the objects in his composition. As a result, viewers are encouraged to read these
otherwise banal items, which seem to hover detached in space and time—not unlike the fgures in
Neusüss’s Körperfotogramms—in new, even uncanny, ways. For Man Ray, like the other artists discussed
here, the photogram’s importance depended on its ability to document the world at the same time it
rendered it unfamiliar. Or, one could also say, returning again to Lyle Rexer, their interest in the photogram
hinged on its ability to visualize “the paradox of unseen seeing.”11

Process
In the camera-less photographs discussed so far, an object has been necessary for their production,
regardless of whether, in the case of photograms, that object is placed directly in contact with a light-

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 21

sensitive material or, for so-called luminograms, it is placed in between the light and photographic
paper. It is also possible, however, to make camera-less photographs without an object per se by
chemically treating the surface of the light-sensitive material or through the use of different light sources.
In the late 1990s, Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) produced two series of camera-less photographs using
both of these processes. For his ongoing series Silver, begun in 1998, Tillmans passed photographic
paper, at times unexposed and, at other times, exposed to various sources of colored light, through a
photo-developing machine, which he either left dirty or cleaned to a certain point. Due to the remnants
of water and leftover chemicals in the machine, when the paper passed through it, dirt and other chemical
particles, particularly silver nitrate, settled on the paper’s surface, where they produced streaks, scratches,
dents, and deposits as well as altered the image’s overall color. Because the accidental effects of the
photographic paper passing through the photo-developing machine determined their visual appearances,
the images are technically called chemigrams, or chemograms, as Tillmans likens them.
The chemigram—a form of camera-less, or more specifcally lens-less, photography that combines
the physics of painting (varnish, wax, oil) with the chemistry of photography (light-sensitive emulsion,
developer, fxer)—is said to have been “discovered” by Pierre Cordier (b. 1933) in 1956 when he sent
a handwritten note to a young German girl named Erika using nail polish on light-sensitive paper. Though
this was not the frst instance in which various chemicals—photo emulsion, fxer, and developer—had
been painted onto photographic paper, Cordier was the frst to actively develop and publicize its use; he
is also credited with its naming. Cordier initially exhibited his chemigrams in 1958 as part of Otto Steinert’s
Subjektive Fotografe, a series of European exhibitions that sought to explore how photography might
use techniques such as the close-up, blurring, solarization, and time exposure, among others, to refect
the inner psyche and personal emotions rather than document the reality of the exterior world. Cordier’s
chemigrams, in which he used physical and chemical actions and reactions taking place on the surface
of his paper to draw viewers into imagined labyrinths of cosmic splendor, ft well within the aesthetic
parameters of Steinert’s Subjektive Fotografe (subjective photography) movement on view in his
exhibitions.
Cordier produced chemigrams using several different methods that he has perfected through
experimentation over time. The most basic includes applying—either pouring or brushing—photographic
developer and fxer to gelatin-silver photographic paper, much like effects of watercolor. These images
rely largely on the interplay between chance and control as the developer and fxer, the frst of which
creates dark areas, while the second produces lighter areas of spectral tones, interact with each other.
In other works, he introduces additional materials such as varnish, wax, glue, oil, egg, and honey, what
he calls “localizing materials,” which he applies to the photographic emulsion as a kind of protective
surface onto which he then makes incisions and lines that react chemically or physically when dipped
into the developer or fxer. In both cases, Cordier uses these physico-chemical techniques to produce
hybrid works that function somewhere in between painting and photography.
Painting has served not only as an important infuence on Cordier but also as the subject of his
chemigrams. Chemigram 7/5/82 II «Pauli Kleei Ad Marginem», from 1982, is inspired by Paul Klee’s 1930
painting Ad Marginem (see Fig. 1.6). Cordier’s chemigram transforms Klee’s painting, in which a dark,
sun-like form glowing in the center of the composition seems to attract various animal and botanical
forms inhabiting the edges of the frame, in several ways. First, he renders the sun into a series of
triangular shapes. Second, he morphs the creatures and foliage at the edge of Klee’s composition into a
series of curvilinear shapes that appear to grow out the framing edge, even as they disintegrate into the
black void of the background. Despite these changes, however, Cordier’s chemigram maintains the

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 22 GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Figure 1.6 Pierre Cordier, Chemigran 7/5/82 II «Pauli Kleei Ad Marginem», 1982. © Pierre Cordier. Courtesy
of the artist.

overall structure of Klee’s work, thus suggesting their shared interest in exploring ideas around creation
and destruction, death and rebirth. Moreover, though Cordier’s chemigrams may lack the referent to
which the other works in this chapter depend, like the other artists discussed here, his use of this
physico-chemical process pushes the boundaries of the real in substantial and innovative ways.
While Cordier positions himself and the chemigram process at the intersection of painting and
photography, Wolfgang Tillmans is adamant that his abstract works, including his series Silver, which
many have noted shares a visual resemblance to mid-twentieth-century abstract painting, are
photographic. One of the reasons that Tillmans wants to maintain this separation is to ensure that
viewers are invested in their indexicality, or “the assumption,” as Tillmans explains, “that [they] must be
of something.”12 The same holds true for Tillman’s series Blushes, Freischwimmer, Mental Pictures, and
Super Colliders, which are abstract pictures that he began in the late 1990s alongside his Silver series.
For the images in these series, rather than turn to the accidental effects produced by the photo-
developing machine, Tillmans used different light sources—fashlights, lasers, and so forth—which he
manipulated over light-sensitive paper in the darkroom and then processed through a conventional

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 23

means. Though produced differently, the resulting images also share a remarkable visual affnity with
color-feld paintings of the 1950s and 1960s not only in appearance—in his Freischwimmer series, for
instance, strands of color fow over the paper’s textured, unglossed surface much like the bands of color
that U.S.-based color-feld painter Morris Louis poured onto his unprimed canvases—but also in size—
Tillmans prints many of these images as large ink jet prints, generally over 12 x 8 feet in size.
Beyond this formal affnity with mid-twentieth-century color-feld painting, Tillmans’s statement that
his turn to abstraction relates to his ongoing interest in medium-specifcity further aligns it with the
intentions of these color-feld painters. But while “Tillmans’s abstractions . . . do indeed illuminate
properties specifc to their medium,” as critic and scholar Lane Relyea points out, they do so “in ways
that can only be considered expansive rather than reductive.”13 In making this distinction, Relyea
addresses an aspect of Tillmans’s practice that separates him not only from the mid-twentieth-century
American modernists, to which the color-feld painters belonged, but also from the more recent turn in
contemporary art photography to abstraction. Whereas many of these more recent artists have turned
to abstraction to investigate the formal properties of photography, including its materiality and objecthood
(subjects we address in Chapter 7), for Tillmans, it is not enough to take up questions around the
physical characteristics of the medium as ends in themselves. Instead, it is necessary for him to also
situate this exploration within the lived experiences of the social world.
Two monumental works (each 19 x 6 feet) from Tillmans’s Freischwimmer series speak to this
distinction. In 2004, Tillmans produced Ostgut Freischwimmer rechts and Ostgut Freischwimmer links
for Berghain, a nightclub in Berlin, where, for fve years, they hung over the dance foor in a space known
as the Panorama Bar (see Plate 2). Berghain is a reincarnation of an earlier Berlin nightclub, Ostgut
(1998–2003), which was located in an empty railway shipping warehouse near the Ostbahnhof S-Bahn
railway station in former East Berlin. Ostgut, after which Tillmans’s titles his photographs, reopened as
Berghain in 2004 in an East German-era electrical plant on the other side of Ostbahnhof’s railway tracks,
and soon became infamous in the Berlin dance-club scene as a place of excess, experimentation, and
sexual freedom. Tillmans has participated in as well as photographed this scene extensively since
the 1980s. Yet, what renders Berghain critical for understanding Tillmans’s abstractions is not the
artist’s intimate knowledge of this place and others like it, but rather the kinds of association that these
abstract compositions, as photographs, take on in terms of the lived experiences of the people who
look at and interact with them within this space. It is this connection to yet disassociation from the real
that Tillmans’s camera-less photography both depends on and seeks to complicate.
Like Tillmans, James Welling (b. 1951) has also used camera-less photography to explore questions
around photography’s referentiality, or the idea that photographs must fundamentally refer to or be an
index of observed reality. Welling’s interest in the idea that “content is not the only way a photograph has
meaning”14 extends back to the early 1980s when he began two series using aluminum foil and drapery.
Though Welling is often categorized with a group of loosely-knit artists working in the U.S. at this time
commonly referred to as the Pictures Generation (a group we discuss in more detail in Chapter 8), his
interest in ideas around representation and meaning making did not always align with the group’s more
explicit focus on using photography to interrogate art’s originality and authenticity. In both of Welling’s
series, the objects—crumpled aluminum and folded cloth, sprinkled with phyllo dough crumps, which
the artist photographed close-up—cause uncertainty in viewers since, as art historian Rosalind Krauss
notes, they “[hold] the referent at bay, creating as much delay as possible between seeing the image and
understanding what it was of.”15 Welling extended this investigation into the instability of the photographic
referent in his Degradés series that he began in 1986 and continued to produce until 2006. To make this

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body of camera-less photography, Welling worked in total darkness where he exposed one half of a
piece of chromogenic paper to a specifc color fltration and then turned the paper and exposed it to a
different color fltration. At the same time the paper was being exposed, Welling gradually shaded it using
a piece of cardboard or foam core so as to produce a soft line through the middle. Named after the
shaded color backgrounds used in advertising photography in the mid-1980s, the images in his Degradés
series do not index an object per se; rather, like many of the other images discussed in this chapter, they
record and are the product of indiscernible transitions of light produced in the total darkness of the
studio.
Many have noted the visual resemblances between Welling’s Degradés series and the color-feld
paintings that Mark Rothko produced in the late 1940s through 1960s. Welling does not deny such
associations. Nor has he refuted the formal affnity that some critics have also identifed between his
subsequent camera-less, black-and-white photography series, New Abstractions (1998–2001), and the
large black-and-white gestural canvases that Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline made in the
1940s and 1950s. However, it would be amiss to discuss his work solely in terms of their commonality
with these mid-twentieth-century U.S. modernist artists, especially since, at the same time that the
images in his Degradés series reference these paintings, they also engage with, as curator Carol Squires
points out, “postmodern issues of commercial aesthetics”16 and, as critic Rosalyn Deutsche beautifully
argues, the “vulnerability of abstraction that underlies representation and subjectivity.”17 In the end, it is
more productive to read Welling’s abstract, verging on sensual color studies in terms of all of these things
and none of them. They are both legible and incomprehensible and fulfll desire as much as they defer it.
Though at times diverging from each other, what brings the artists in this section together is their
preoccupation with, as László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) writes in his seminal Painting, Photography,
Film (1925), the “basic elements of the photographic process.”18 For Moholy-Nagy, who serves as a
central interlocutor for the artists in this section, the primary property of the “photographic process” was
light, and the photogram—which he named in response to the directness and quickness of the telegram—
was the perfect medium to explore photography’s connection to light. Moholy-Nagy believed that as a
camera-less form of photography, the photogram could reorient a viewer’s perception of space away
from the traditional one-point perspective that lens-based photography seemed to reinforce. Because of
this realignment, the medium could then move beyond reproducing the appearance of observed reality
and begin to construct something new. Moholy-Nagy elaborates: “The photogram opens up perspectives
of a hitherto wholly unknown morphosis governed by optical laws peculiar to itself. It is the most
completely dematerialized medium which the new vision demands.”19 For Moholy-Nagy, in other words,
the revolutionary potential of photogram is its ability to formulate a “New Vision.”
Moholy-Nagy coined the term New Vision in the mid-1920s while working at the Bauhaus, an early
twentieth-century German art school that combined aesthetics, design, and technology. There, in
collaboration with his wife, Lucia Moholy, who taught her husband darkroom and technical skills—since
Moholy-Nagy, in fact, taught the preliminary course and a metal workshop—he began to experiment with
how to use photography, alongside other media, not to depict the “objective meaning” of an object or
what it was assumed to look like but, rather, to “productively” refect a “direct optical experience without
any objective meaning.”20 With the photogram’s unique ability to both see and record the effects of light
and shadow, Moholy-Nagy believed photography was uniquely positioned to refect this New Vision and
thereby expand the boundaries of human perception in ways that were unfamiliar and revolutionary.
Moholy-Nagy used the photogram foremost as a vehicle of dematerialization. This meant that
though various objects may be identifable (or not) in his compositions, recognizing them as such is

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 25

Figure 1.7 László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled Photogram, c. 1923. © 2015 Estate of László Moholy-Nagy. Courtesy of
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

completely beside the point (see Fig. 1.7). Instead, as he writes for the caption of his Untitled Photogram
(c. 1923), “The organization of light and shadow effects produce [sic] a new enrichment of visions.”21
What Moholy-Nagy sought in his photograms was for viewers to no longer see the represented objects
in terms of what they already knew about the world but rather to visualize them in terms of the new
relationships of light, color, and form brought forth through the photogram process. In so doing, the
photogram process transforms objects into abstract representations of light and form or a New Vision
that he believed could revolutionize the way people see and, more pertinently, how they understood and
form knowledge about the world. For Moholy-Nagy and the other artists in this chapter, this characteristic
was precisely what made camera-less photography so pivotal: its ability to not only reorient the real but
to register it anew.

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FOCUS BOX 1
The Helsinki School
Timothy Persons

The Helsinki School grew out of an experimental educational platform initiated in the
early 1990s at the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University) for
selected MA students in the photography department. It was a turbulent moment in
Finnish history, as the whole country was mired in the worst economic recession since
the 1920s. Unemployment was rampant, galleries were few, and those who did manage
to survive were focused primarily on a regional market. The only real hope for
developing a stable professional artistic career was to build one outside of the country.
Yet to do so required another approach. I decided to develop a professional studies
program so as to explore new ways to take students outside of the classroom and into
the international arena. It was a dire time, but it also set in motion opportunities that
would not have otherwise existed in Finland.
The Nordic region, and Finland in particular, needed to measure itself by a different
standard. In this sense, Aalto University created a program whose primary purpose was
to introduce selected students to galleries, curators, publishers, and museums, the
majority of which were based outside the region. Gallery Taik came into existence as
part of this shift. This gallery, which eventually expanded into a physical base of
operations in Berlin a few years later, began actively working as the vehicle by which
these international introductions would be made possible. Content was the key,
cooperation the engine, and learning through shared experiences was the bridge that
sustained this unique program for over twenty-fve years. Pop-up exhibitions,
combined with direct participation in selected international art fairs, became the means
to teach curatorial as well as presentational skills. Commercial fairs were utilized not
only for selling of works but as platforms to reference and for self-evaluation.
The name “Helsinki School” came from a 2003 article by Boris Hoymeyer entitled
“Aufbruch im hohen Norden” (Emerging in the Far North), which was published in the
journal Art Das Kunstmagazin. This was the frst time this title was deployed to
describe a specifc group of artists, all of whom originated out of the photography
department at Aalto University. The Helsinki School thus became a brand name
identifying fve generations of artists who used photography as a medium and who
have either taught or graduated from the university over this extended period of time.
More importantly, it also referred to a certain professionalism and standard of
excellence. An ongoing challenge remains how to teach such an attitude, which is
based on managing recognition rather than coping with failure.
The success of any program is measured to a certain degree by how it deals with
criticism directed towards it. For some, the Helsinki School represented the

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 27

commercialization of Finnish photography. Specifcally, it was thought that the selling of

a work would interfere with the quality of the original idea. This outdated and narrow
attitude about the commercial value of photography grew from remnants of the late
1960s and 1970s and still plagues certain artistic quarters active in Finland today. A
mid-2000s research project, “The Making of Polar Stars: Internationalization of Finnish
Photography and Video Art,” funded by the Academy of Finland, attempted to justify
this line of thinking based on secondary sources. With no primary sources cited, it was
ultimately proved to be an academic embarrassment. As for the question of why the
criticism, I believe it can be summed up by the common misconception that the
success of a few will draw away attention from others. The Helsinki School represents
an educational platform based upon an adaptable program that has evolved to meet
the challenges each generation has had to face. With over 140 publications accredited
to various artists evolving from its beginnings, and a strong institutional presence
combined with the museums and various biennales selections, it stands today as a
reference point and as one of the leading educational platforms for photography
anywhere in the world.
Aalto University supports an approach to teaching photography using the
photographic process as a tool for conceptual thinking. It was never about promoting a
national but a common identity, as 20 percent of MA students come from other
countries. The focus instead is on creating a sustainable system built around an open
environment for collaborative dialogue between students and teachers based on
constructive criticism. By utilizing the international art market in all its various formats,
in particular the fairs that have become integral to it, as a teaching instrument, a new
avenue is opened for experimentation. The emphasis is not only on the originality of an
idea but on how it is realized and then presented. The concept is simple. Create
real-life situations where selected students can use art fairs and the international art
market more generally as a platform for experiencing a broader spectrum of the art
world.
While conceptual art is one of the cornerstones upon which the Helsinki School was
built, there is no specifc approach that bonds these artists together, other than their
openness to challenge the parameters of their own art-making. However, there has
been a tendency towards abstraction (see Fig. 1.8). Some of the best examples include
the works of Jorma Puranen, Niko Luoma, Mikko Sinervo, Pertti Kekarainen, Timo
Kelaranta, and Jaana Maijala. These artists helped to expand the semantics of abstract
thought, inspiring different ways to use light and refections as measures of how we
process the passage of time. These artists make up a relatively new history of abstract
photography in Finland, which dates back to the mid-1980s with the early
experimentations of Timo Kelaranta. At this time, abstraction became more of a norm
than an exception, especially with the introduction of large color photographs from the
1990s. The trend is still on the rise today, with nearly 25 percent of Helsinki School

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 28 GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY

students exploring different ways of how to expand ideas around abstraction in their
works.

Figure 1.8 Niko Luoma, Self-titled adaptation of Fourteen Sunfowers (1888), 2016, from the series
Adaptations. Analogue photograph, 196 x 156 cm. © Niko Luoma. Courtesy Gallery Taik Persons, Berlin.

Still, while abstraction remains central to the work of many students, the longevity of
the Helsinki School as a whole is directly linked to the cooperative interaction between
disciplines that range from documentary to performance art. Photography in all its
forms is the media by which this century will defne how it looks as well as how it
thinks. The goal at Aalto University is not only to sustain the conversation but to be a
leader in how the medium may be used as a means of discovering one’s own voice as
an artist.

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 DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTION 29

Summary
• Though produced in direct contact with their referents, photograms hold both a fdelity to
and, more signifcantly, a distance from observed reality.
• In their depiction of the natural world, photograms have been valued for both their realist and
abstract potential.
• Photograms have been used to depict the human body in ways that are both evidentiary and
evocative.
• The photogram has been used to explore photography’s medium specifcity in ways that are
expansive rather than reductive.

Discussion points
• What is photography’s so-called indexical relationship to the real?
• What is a photogram and why is its relationship to observed reality paradoxical?
• In what ways are photograms both real and abstract?
• How have photograms been used to suggest the otherworldly or uncanny?
• How have photograms been used to explore photography’s medium specifcity?

Additional case studies

Emilio Amero (1901–76)
Anita Douthat (b. 1950)
Jaromír Funke (1896–1945)
Shi Guorui (b. 1964)
György Kepes (1906–2001)
Len Lye (1901–80)
Garry Fabian Miller (b. 1957)
Abelardo Morell (b. 1948)
Arthur Siegel (1913–78)
Ewa Stackelberg (b. 1966)

Notes
1 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Justus Buchler (ed.), Philosophical
Writings of Pierce (New York: Dover, 1955), 104.
2 Catherine de Zegher, “Ocean Flowers and Their Drawings: Introduction,” in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from
Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 70.
3 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844–6), n.p.

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4 Kunié Sugiura, “A Conversation with Kunié Sugiura,” in Kunié Sugiura: Photographic Works form the 1970s and
Now (New York: Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 2012), n.p.
5 Carol Armstrong, “Cameraless: From Natural Illustrations and Nature Prints to Manual and Photogenic
Drawings and Other Botanographs,” in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 104.
6 Quoted in Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins (New York: Aperture, 1985), 31.
7 Ad Reinhardt, “The Black-Square Paintings,” in Barbara Rose, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad
Reinhardt (New York: University of California Press, 1953), 83.
8 Geoffrey Batchen, “History Remains: The Photographs of Anne Ferran,” Art on Paper 4, no. 3 (January–
February 2000): 50.
9 Martin Barnes, Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography (London: Merrell Publishers in association with
the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2010), 27.
10 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1969), 26.
11 Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (New York: Aperture, 2009), 69.
12 Wolfgang Tillmans, “What They Are: A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” by Nathan Kernan, Art on Paper
5, no. 5 (May–June 2001): 63.
13 Lane Relyea, “Photography’s Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction,” in Julie Ault et al. (eds.), Wolfgang
Tillmans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 99.
14 James Welling, quoted in Noam M. Elcott, “The Shadow of the World: James Welling’s Cameraless and
Abstract Photography,” Aperture 190 (Spring 2008): 30.
15 Rosalind Krauss, “Photography and Abstraction,” in A Debate on Abstraction: Photography and Abstraction
(New York: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, 1989), 66.
16 Carol Squiers, “What Is a Photograph?” in What is a Photograph? (New York: International Center of
Photography and Del Monico Books, 2013), 21.
17 Rosalyn Deutsche, “‘Darkness: The Emergence of James Welling’,” in James Welling: Abstract (Brussels and
Toronto: Palais des Beaux-Arts and Art Gallery of York University, 2002), 12.
18 László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 28.
19 László Moholy-Nagy, “A New Instrument of Vision,” 1932; quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Moholy-Nagy:
An Anthology (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 50.
20 László Moholy-Nagy, “Photography is Creation with Light,” in Krisztina Passuth (ed.), Moholy-Nagy (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1985), 302.
21 Virginia Heckert, Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015),
10–11.

Selected further reading

Barnes, Martin. Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography. London: Merrell Publishers in association with the
Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010.
Beck, John and David Cunningham, eds. “Photography and Abstraction.” Special issue, photographies 9, no. 2
(June 2016).
Cotton, Charlotte and Alex Klein, eds. Words Without Pictures. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
2009.
Cunningham, David. “The Spectres of Abstraction and the Place of Photography.” Philosophy of Photography 3 no.
1 (2012): 195–210.

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Laruelle, François. The Concept of Non-Photography. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011.
Rexer, Lyle. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. New York: Aperture, 2009.
Roberts, John. Photography and its Violations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Rubinstein, Daniel, Johnny Golding, and Andres Fisher. On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond
Representation. Birmingham, UK: ARTicle Press, 2013.
Squiers, Carol. What is a Photograph? New York: International Center of Photography and DelMonico Books,
2013.
White, Minor, ed. “The Sense of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.” Aperture 8, no. 2 (1960).

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 2
TRUTH AND FICTION

In 2002, Kelli Connell (b. 1974) began a series of photographs called Double Life in which she explored
dualities of the self—male/female, irrational/rational, exterior/interior, and motivated/resigned, among
others—that are frequently experienced in relation to decisions about intimate relationships, family, belief
systems, and lifestyle options. To create these photographs, Connell scanned and manipulated multiple
images of the same model in different poses and clothes in Adobe Photoshop to create a “believable”
situation that Connell had herself witnessed, often in public spaces or in the mass media. This meant
that, while the scenes depicted in her photographs “looked” real, in fact they had never actually occurred.
For critic Veronica Dye, the fctive nature of these images was deeply unsettling. As Dye remarked, “One
disappointing revelation is that, as pointed out by the artist in her statement, these photographed scenes
never occurred.”1 In making this criticism about the apparent lack of truthfulness in Connell’s digitally
manipulated photographs, Dye evokes anxieties around digital photography frst formulated in the late
1980s and early 1990s.
As developments in digital technology increased in the 1980s and into the 1990s, so did fears about
how these advances would impact traditional analog photography’s truth-value. Part of this anxiety
centered on how digital photographs are made. Both analog and digital photographs produce the
“same” picture of a scene, as it might be printed on photographic paper. But, whereas traditional analog
photographs consist of “marks” physically made by light to the chemical emulsion on the paper, digital
images are instead produced by translating light into “information” or numerical codes that can be
infnitely altered through the aid of computer software, often without leaving any evidence of the
modifcation. Because of this inherent manipulability, many at this time feared that digitization abandoned
analog photography’s assumed indexicality, or the belief, as discussed in Chapter 1, that a photograph
is an “index” of the objects placed in contact with the light-sensitive material. This new digital technology,
then, seemed to cast a doubt on analog photography’s long-standing truth-value and was capable,
some went so far as to argue, of bringing about its so-called death.
Over time, these fears about how digital photography would ruin the integrity of analog photography
have mostly proven unfounded. The digital camera-phone photographs taken in the Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq, in 2004 (which we return to in Chapter 12), as well as those taken of the terrorist attack on
London, in 2005, for instance, were both received as “true.” These and other examples attest that digital
photography has not brought about the death of photography. In fact, if anything, digitalization has
expanded photography’s cultural value, especially in terms of how the medium is electronically
disseminated and consumed as part of a larger and more complex global communications network. Still,
when staging or manipulation is discussed in relation to contemporary art photography, there remains a
tendency to situate these images in terms of changes to the medium brought about through the advent
of digital photography in the late 1980s to early 1990s. This chapter signifcantly enlarges this scope by
situating current interests around the constructed or staged photograph in terms of a more expansive as

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well as diverse history. It also seeks to undo the binary between “truth” and “fction” often evoked in
discussions of digital photography and thereby suggest how technology, including digitalization and
computers, did not alone introduce fction into the photographic image.

FOCUS BOX 2
DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA
Barry Stone

I.
I make photographs with a digital camera, which is an instrument for coding light. If you
open the fle generated by a digital camera in a text-editing program, you will see
pages and pages of numbers and characters. This is the code of the image. A digital
camera’s sensor is comprised of an array of light cavities, wells, or “photosites” that
collect photons and store them as electronic signals when light enters the lens after the
shutter has been released. The code of a photograph is generated by the camera’s
software when it assigns values (according to the varying wavelengths and intensities)
to the light it has captured. Each photosite on a camera’s sensor (often referred to as a
pixel), at full resolution, corresponds to a tiny single square (also called a pixel) among
millions that make up a digital image. A digital photograph maps a translation of visual
experience into a still image; it is a memory harnessed from incarcerated photons
converted into text and ultimately expressed as light from a screen and then translated
once again into ink on a page.
My book, DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA, is an album of digital photographs that I took on
a small sweep of the New England coastline (see Fig. 2.1). I have visited this shoreline
every summer with my family over the past ten years. The code of each photograph I
take forms a kind of picture, one that is literally a text. I sometimes choose to purposely
rearrange and precisely disorder these texts to create a generative glitch in the image.
These tiny shifts or glitches in the arrangement of the code give life to whole new views
of this sliver of the Maine coastline. The new syntax of symbols morphs into aberrant
pixels that alter the color of fog and the contours of the sea to take the shape of
mirages only made possible in the information age.
My title, an anagram of “BAILEY ISLAND, MAINE,” is derived in the same way that I
make the glitches in my photographs: by a changing and rearranging of the symbols of
the code contained in the image fle. Just as chemicals might form stains on analog flm
or glass plates, digital disorder or glitches likewise create gestural aberrations endemic
to the image’s constituent material. In my book, I pair straight and altered photographs
with the symbols from the computer code that I cull from the correspondent digital

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 TRUTH AND FICTION 35

Figure 2.1 Barry Stone, DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

image fles. I also place glitched photographs next to unaltered images, which in turn
are placed adjacent to blocks of code that I have molded into paragraphs shaped like
pictures. I make many iterations of the same seascape and place them next to each
other in sequences throughout the book. This structure mirrors my experience on the
island, where, due to the shifting climate and the cycles of the tides, one awakens each
day to what feels like an entirely new and yet enduring landscape.

II.
Photography is as closely associated with time as it is with chance. I fnd that luck
breathes life into photographs of observed circumstances, in which the world is
allowed to talk back to the camera. In a digital photograph, by rearranging the code,
there is an extended opportunity for the “material” of the digital image to inject a
welcome alteration of the controlled vision so often associated with contemporary
digital photography. Artist Jeff Wall famously claimed that there is a “dry” and “wet”
side to the photographic medium. Wall co-opts these terms from those used to
describe the common practice of segregating the physical work areas in a traditional
darkroom to prevent fnished “dry” prints from getting stained by unruly “wet”

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chemicals spilled from open trays and beakers during developing and printing. For
Wall, the “wet” side conveys photography’s “liquid intelligence,” which creates a
“memory trace” of the medium’s chemical past. Its “dry” side, conversely, speaks to
the technical/optical precision of the medium’s impassive lenses. When combined,
these processes create the perfect conditions to depict the fragile and ephemeral state
of natural forms. Wall laments that, with the shift from (wet) flm to digital (dry) based
photography, “there will be a new displacement of water in photography,”1 thus tipping
the balance towards dryness and a new kind of sterility. I see creating glitches as a way
to put the water back into dry digitization, a view elaborated on and echoed by Anne
Pasek in her essay “The Pencil of Error: Glitch aesthetics and Post-liquid Intelligence.”2
An aberration in a digital photograph is created by gesture to form a fuid pictorial
movement of chance operation.
Cameras and books are technologies. Photographers have always played with the
tools of their time in an attempt to create new kinds of pictures that transcend
expectations. In the mid-nineteenth century, in order to circumvent the technical
limitations of contemporary cameras, French photographer Gustave Le Gray combined
different exposures of clouds and the sea to create a seamless, single seascape. This
photographic process required that the chemicals applied to his glass pane remain wet
when exposed. Citing these constraints and other conceits, Le Gray wrote about a
“theory of sacrifces.” In it, he warned would-be photographers to be prepared to
lose overall sharpness in favor of a more desired “artistic” effect. If we look closely at
Le Gray’s photograph Mediterranean with Mount Agde, we can perceive the details of
a halted ocean and clouds (see Fig. 2.2). We can also faintly discern other “sacrifces”
made: undulations possibly created by the wet emulsion gliding down the glass plate
upon which it was applied. This cataract of collodion and silver nitrate creates a kind of
meta photograph, forming itself from its own material, which in turn intermingles with
the image of the sea and clouds, also, of course, made from water.

III.
The concept of what nature is and its role in our lives is constantly evolving. In the
world in which Le Gray grew up, nature was the measure of all things. In fact, William
Henry Fox Talbot wrote in The Pencil of Nature (published in London between 1844 and

1
Jeff Wall, “Photographie et intelligence liquid/Photography and Liquid Intelligence” in Jean-Francois Chevrier and James
Lingwood, Une Autre Objectivité/ Another Objectivity (Milan: Idea Books for Centre Nationale des Arts Plastiques; Paris and Prato:
Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi-Pecci, 1989), 231.
2
See Anne Pasek, “The Pencil of Error: Glitch Aesthetics and Post-Liquid Intelligence,” Photography and Culture 10, no. 1 (March
2017): 37–52.

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 TRUTH AND FICTION 37

Figure 2.2 Gustave Le Gray, Mediterranean with Mount Agde, 1857. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1996.

1846) that photographs were uniquely “impressed by nature.”3 Talbot’s initial thoughts
about photography came of age in the time of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species.
Darwin’s pioneering work provided a theory of natural selection that allows for life’s
evolution to be considered as a cascade of infnitesimal and incremental mutations,
which over yawning spans of geologic time allow for a universe to be born and keep
developing. Romantic artists such as Le Gray attempted to portray the world as if
cloaked in the eerie fog of the sublime, where the force of nature is a source of
inspiration, fear, and reverence in equal measure. Rebecca Solnit, writing about the
time of Le Gray, Talbot, and Darwin, argues that the industrial age brought about an
“annihilation of time and space,”4 as cities became linked by the speed of light through

3
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844–6; facsimile, Boston: Da
Capo Press, 1969), n.p.
4
Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin Books, 2010),
chapter 1.

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telegraph wire, rather than the postman’s trot, and the locomotive easily outpaced the
fastest racehorse. Writing in the 1980s, Fredric Jameson theorized that as part of the
twentieth-century’s postmodern condition, nature, as the subject of landscape imagery,
had been supplanted by technology to forge a new “hysterical sublime.”5
We see the world through the translations facilitated by our contemporary
conditions. In today’s post-digital society, information is the currency of the times. My
book looks at nature through the twin lenses of the history of photography and the
optics of this digital sublime. As an industrial object, printed with inks on paper from
digitally created plates, the book forms a link between the industrial and digital age, in
which the code of fog looks both like a grid of grammatical notations signifying gray
blankness and the symbols of concrete poetry denoting air heavy with moisture.
Through this intuitive intervention and play, I create a depiction of the world at its edge,
where the full weight of the caprices of nature, the fragility of time, and the complexity
of our understanding of our contemporary world are precipitously laid bare.
The shore at Bailey Island is a universe of impossible rocks. Rather than sand, the
beach is blanketed with assorted stones polished by the tides over unfathomable
spans of time. The smaller rocks are smoothed into handheld perfect ovals washed in
myriad shades of gray and laced with the threadlike white veins of other rocks in
amalgams seemingly too perfect to be the result of mere chance. The larger boulders
form roughly hewn cliffs in miniature and masquerade as landlocked craggy leviathans
that appear and recede with the tides. Rachel Carson, writing in a similar New England
setting, elegantly described the coastline in The Edge of the Sea as “an elusive and
indefnable boundary,” where “[t]oday a little more land may belong to the sea,
tomorrow a little less.”6 The view of “our” coastline is completely transformed by the
changeable interactions among the fog, sun, and tides. When the tide goes out, a rocky
feld of seaweed is revealed. To walk across it is to traverse the ocean foor in the open
air. Against this capricious summer backdrop, I have made thousands of pictures of my
daughters growing up among the circadian iterations of the coast where the illusion of
an endless horizon is formed from the curvature of the Earth. The landscape looks to
be obdurately fxed, but in images, my daughters appear to abruptly grow from year to
year in staccato bursts when they are pictured immobilized in this landscape
haphazardly shaped by a long wander of a billion days.

5
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 34.
6
Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (London: Staples Press Limited, 1955), 1–2.

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 TRUTH AND FICTION 39

Staging
Because of its assumed indexicality, photography is often valued for its ability to truthfully and objectively
document observed reality. Yet, since the medium’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, photographers
have engaged in staging both through the construction and performance of events in front of the camera.
This interest in fabrication remains a constant today. But whereas in the nineteenth century staging was
used primarily to establish photography’s status as art as well as to overcome limitations imposed by the
time period’s often bulky camera equipment and lengthy exposure times, today it has become a widely
accepted visual strategy most frequently evoked in discussions around the role of narrative in
contemporary art photography. Storytelling, however, is not the only means through which contemporary
artists have engaged with staging. Twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop (b. 1985), for instance,
have turned to this visual strategy to investigate the historical complexities of their identities as Muslims,
as South Africans, and as global citizens of the world.
Having grown up in a devout Muslim home with no pictures or family portraits on the walls, the Essop
brothers are intimately familiar with the limitation within Islamic art of representing human fgures. Yet,
rather than passively follow this rule, the artists have sidestepped this restriction by only including
themselves in their images, believing that, as Husain explains, “God will judge us for our actions, and
hopefully see the positive in us.”2 To construct these photographs, the brothers enact different personas,
often through pose and dress, that are part of multifaceted staged events based on actual memories,
environments, or situations that they have personally experienced. They document these events using a
camera mounted on a rotating tripod that shoots thirty-six frames per sequence. In Photoshop, they then
digitally “stitch” these hundreds of images together to create the fnal 360-degree or “spherical” work in
which everything is at once in focus and the fgures in perspective. Yet, while the images that result
appear “truthful,” their works are not meant to faithfully replicate what was in front of the camera at a
specifc moment in time. Rather, through their use of performance, alongside the digital technology of the
panoptic sweep, the artists use their constructions or “fctions” to consider the contradictions and
ambiguities of growing up as devout Muslim men in largely secular and cosmopolitan post-apartheid
South Africa.
Born and raised in Cape Town, the Essop brothers are Muslims, a minority population who trace
their lineage to the frst wave of dissenters and slaves brought to the Cape from the Indian Ocean islands
by the Dutch East India Company around 1652. Much of their work interrogates the complexities of this
heritage. This interest is especially evident in photographs such as Thornton Road, from 2008, in which
the artists both assume and challenge stereotypical Muslim personas through both costume and pose
(see Plate 3). To construct Thornton Road, the brothers enacted multiple roles. In the foreground of
the composition, they drink bottles of coke donned in both traditional Muslim prayer clothes,
sometimes wearing scarves with Palestinian fags, as well as military fatigues. This incongruous
juxtaposition of symbols from popular culture and religion is further heightened in the middle and
background of the composition where the brothers, almost like zombies, pray to the iconic red and
white Coca-Cola logo that hovers just out of reach behind a colossal red brick wall in the background
of the composition that visually resembles the “Separation Barrier,” or “Apartheid Wall,” in the
West Bank. Through these digital amalgamations of themselves and popular culture, the brothers
not only explore stereotypes of the East and the West but, more signifcantly, the diffculties, even
challenges, of navigating the religious, moral, and cultural expectations embedded within them.
Husain explains:

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We all suffer an inner struggle. You have this split personality within yourself because of the different
lifestyles we’re exposed to. We were raised by traditional parents, but the moment one leaves the
home you step into a world full of peer pressure. You grow up with this inner tension. You have your
Islamic garb when you’re going to pray. But when you take that off, you have your Diesel top
underneath, which you feel more comfortable with.”3

While the artists use Thornton Road to explore competing notions of Muslim identity in contemporary
South Africa, they also situate this struggle within the larger history of racial confict that makes up the
country’s apartheid past. To evoke this past, the brothers turn to place: Thornton Road. Located in a
suburb of Cape Town with a large present-day Muslim population, this street is prominently identifed in
the photograph by a sign that one of the brothers attempts to climb in his effort to get closer to the
omnipresent Coca-Cola logo. In addition to this contemporary connection, this street also holds historical
relevance. In the mid-1980s, Thornton Road was the site of an apartheid-era atrocity known as the
Trojan Horse Massacre. On October 15, 1985, armed police concealed themselves behind wooden
crates in a South African Railways truck. The truck was then driven down Thornton Road to where an
anti-apartheid student protest was being held. When a rock was supposedly thrown at the vehicle, the
armed offcers, hidden behind the crates, sprang up and opened fre on the unarmed protestors, killing
three young people—Jonathan Claasen, age twenty-one; Shaun Magmoed, age ffteen; and Michael
Miranda, age eleven—and injuring several others. In deliberately staging their digital “panoptic” or “all
seeing” photograph (that is signifcantly made through time) at this historical location, the Essop brothers
align contemporary struggles—including religious discrimination—among South Africa’s Muslim
community within the country’s larger history of racial strife. In so doing, they ask viewers to consider
what parts of South Africa’s apartheid-era history of discrimination continue today and how these current
struggles, which have largely been overlooked, especially in the news media, might be made more
visible. Yet, they do not pose these questions in any sort of dogmatic or prescriptive way. Instead, by
positioning these historical references within what otherwise appears as a playful commentary about the
intersection between religion and consumerism, the brothers use their “fctional” digital reconstruction to
further visualize the historical complexity of the “realities” of their experiences as Muslims in South Africa.
Like the Essop brothers, Laurie Simmons (b. 1949) has also used staging to refect on the nature
and infuence of media representations, most especially those found in the United States in such post-
World War II era magazines as Life and Look as well as in that period’s advertising campaigns and
television programs. But whereas the Essop brothers use their digital reconstructions in part to situate
the media’s overly simplistic representation of Muslims within a larger historical context, Simmons is
more interested in how these postwar media representations, which she grew up looking at and watching,
are remembered over time. And although, like the Essop brothers, Simmons also uses staging in her
work to explore shifting boundaries between “truth” and “fction,” in contrast to them, she mostly
constructs her photographs in the studio without the aid of digital technology.
Though Simmons owned a brownie camera as a child, it was not until she moved to New York City in
1973 that she began to realize, after encountering the “more casual and unselfconscious” 4 photo-based
works made by such 1960s U.S. artists as Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, and Barry Le Va, that the
medium could function differently than the one institutionalized at this time by the Museum of Modern
Art’s (MoMA) Director of Photography, John Szarkowski (who we return to in Chapter 9). In contrast to
the 1960s documentary and street photography of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand,
which Szarkowski championed for expanding the medium-specifc vocabulary of photographic

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description, Simmons sought a different approach. In 1976, she began to set up small vignettes in her
studio that consisted of female dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props, and postcards, which she
placed in the rooms and in front of the facades of disassembled dollhouses. Through these miniature
worlds that she assembled and photographed, Simmons referenced both general stereotypes of women
in interior spaces and, more signifcantly, her own personal memories from her childhood about these
domestic settings. In creating these tiny vignettes, Simmons has said that she sought to create “a
moment that wasn’t quite real, but was quite perfect.”5 Here Simmons suggests that while it was
important that her arrangements looked “real,” the observed reality that she attempted to represent in
them was not about the accurate portrayal of either the dollhouses themselves or how these domestic
settings appeared in media representations from the postwar period. Instead, the “real” in her photographs
is one that is remembered, even misremembered, over time, or as she puts it, “the way your memory
white-washes the image when you think about something from the past—making it far more perfect.”6
Simmons’s interest in how the real is transposed through memory is substantially different from the
general approach to cultural memory used by other artists of the Pictures Generation—Cindy Sherman,
Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, and Sarah Charlesworth, among others—with whom Simmons is most
frequently associated (and to whom we will return in Chapter 8). Whereas, many of these U.S. artists
from the 1980s appropriated images from mass culture to consider the ways in which these representations
were constructed as real, Simmons’s work, as art historian Michael Lobel notes, is far “more personal
and intimate, even autobiographical.”7 But that does not mean that her dollhouse recreations, which she
shot between 1976 and 1978, are devoid of cultural resonances. Quite the contrary: the tensions
between the “real” and the “artifcial” in these images—or the uncanny ability of these photographs to
read as both truth and fction—also “point out,” as Simmons explains, “the darker subtext lurking beneath
the whitewashed presentation of this time period.” In other words, in her effort to explore how her
personal memories of her childhood have been transposed over time, Simmons also alludes to the ways
in which these recollections are intertwined within the larger cultural history of the U.S. postwar period,
an era that “represented itself as fresh and young, a country reborn and replenished with economic
opportunities and the promise of ‘the good life.’”8 Yet, as her photographs of these miniature domestic
interiors so pointedly suggest, these well-rehearsed postwar images were as much the product of
fantasy and desire as her own memories of them.
Staging was also central to the art-making practice of Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar (1878–1951).
Yet, unlike Simmons who used the staging of miniatures to address how postwar U.S. media
representations are remembered over time, much of Figueroa’s work, produced in Peru during the frst
decades of the twentieth century as part of Cuzco School of Photography, responded to representations
of that country’s indigenous population. Figueroa moved to Cuzco in 1904, where he worked frst as a
portrait photographer in a studio set up by a British missionary society. This studio, like many European-
run portrait studios in Peru at this time, largely used photography, in the form of captioned carte de
visite, to create images of Peru’s Indian “types” for the European and North American tourist market.
Though Figueroa learned his art in part from this studio, his theatrically staged photographs of Indian
“types” varied signifcantly from the more anthropological and scientifc images of Indian subjects featured
on many of these cartes de visite, which consisted of small portrait photographs mounted on pieces of
card around 2½ x 4 inches in size.
Part of this difference may be traced to a strain of indigenismo in Cuzco known as the New
Indianist movement. Infuenced by the writings of José Uriel García, Cuzco’s New Indianists understood
“cultural identity, or ‘ethnicity,’” as anthropologist Deborah Poole explains, “not [as] a natural or historical

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Figure 2.3 Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, Tipo indígena, c. 1920. Courtesy of Archivo Figueroa Yabar, Peter Yenne,
and the Photographic Archive Project, Cusco.

identity waiting to be empirically discovered and described.” Instead, it was the product of social
construction. Figueroa’s photographs of Indian “types,” which he carefully staged though costumes,
props, and pose, including noticeably positioned backdrops painted by Figueroa himself, visualize these
New Indianist ideas (see Fig. 2.3). For Figueroa, then, photography was not a tool to record or even to
transform reality. More signifcantly, it provided a means through which he could use performance and
staging to visualize the artifce and malleability of indigenous cultural identity in Peru and, in so doing,
begin to point out the conventions and codes—or visual constructions—through which the very idea of
an “authentic” Indian type was visually evoked in the frst place.
Around the same time that Figueroa was using staging in Peru to emphasize the constructedness of
Andean cultural identity, in the United States, Edward Curtis (1868–1952) was avidly staging Native
American subjects in his photographs. Curtis has been widely criticized for these manipulations. A
number of scholars have responded to these criticisms by arguing that the soft focus and romanticized
approach of his photographs belongs more to the art movement of Pictorialism than to the felds of
science or ethnography. Photography historian Alan Trachtenberg, for instance, writes that in the
introduction to the frst of the twenty-volume set of his The North American Indian, Curtis himself claimed,
“the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and

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luminous picture.” In using the terms “broad” and “luminous” to defne his practice, Trachtenberg
maintains that Curtis situates his work in terms of the lighting techniques of Pictorialism, an early
twentieth-century international art movement whose practitioners emphasized photography’s capacity
to create expressive pictures rather than to record objectively (which we take up again in Chapter 9),
thereby “distancing,” as Trachtenberg further contends, “the viewer from the ‘mere accuracy’ of the lives
depicted.”9
But in spite of the important context that Pictorialism provides for understanding the aesthetic function
of staging in Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans, his pictures, as Native American writer and critic
Gerald Vizenor aptly points out, were rarely included in the salons and societies in New York City that
promoted this style of photography and, in most histories of this movement, his photographs are seldom
cited. In short, though Pictorialism serves to situate Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans as pictorial
representations, this context is not suffcient to offset the ethnographic purpose that his photographs
likewise served, especially as published within The North American Indian and backed by the ideological
perspectives of his patrons: Theodore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, and Frederick Hodge. Vizenor elaborates
upon this contradiction in Curtis’s practice through the photograph In a Piegan Lodge. In the
photogravure—a favored artistic medium of the Pictorialists—that Curtis made of this image and which
was published in volume six of The North American Indian, Curtis upholds the romantic and picturesque
Pictorialist vision of a pre-modern or pre-industrialized world through his focus on the so-called traditional
Native American subject (see Fig. 2.4). To achieve this effect, Curtis, like many Pictorialists, not only

Figure 2.4 Edward Curtis, plate 188 from The North American Indian, vol. 6, 1910. Courtesy of Charles Deering
McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.

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staged his subject but also altered his negative through the removal of a small box with a (modern) clock
that was initially positioned between the two seated indigenous subjects. According to Vizenor, this
erasure cannot be explained merely in terms of the aesthetic strategies of Pictorialism. On the contrary,
in removing the clock, or the evidence of the modernity of his indigenous subjects, Vizenor contends that
Curtis, in spite of his creative Pictorialist intentions, not only perpetuates visual stereotypes about Native
Americans but also upholds mainstream political ideologies about their savagery and the inevitability
of their extinction. Here we see a very different use of staging to that employed by Figueroa in Peru.
Whereas Figueroa used his constructions to problematize the idea of an “authentic” Andean cultural
identity, Curtis’s fctional constructions, like the empirically-driven photographs of science and
anthropology, served not only to fx Native American people and culture, but also, more detrimentally, to
wield power over them.

Painting
Within contemporary art photography, staging has become widespread, even commonplace. Yet,
historically, this visual strategy was much derided, in part because it seemed to go against what made
photography unique, namely its potential for realistic depiction. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century,
poet and critic Charles Baudelaire famously declared that photography’s “true duty . . . is that of handmaid
of the arts and sciences.” In making this statement, Baudelaire sought to distinguish what made
photographs different from other works of art. For Baudelaire, as would be the case for later advocates
of “straight photography”—those images with high contrast and sharp focus produced in the early to
mid-twentieth century by such photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston,
and Ansel Adams (a subject we also take up in Chapter 9)—photography’s “absolute material accuracy,”10
as Baudelaire called it, or its ability to describe something truthfully and realistically, is what distinguished
it from other media, most especially painting.
At the same time that critics such as Baudelaire attempted to defne what makes the medium of
photography unique and thereby different from painting, many nineteenth-century photographers looked
to painting, especially Renaissance painting, as both a model and source material for their own art-
making practices. The relevance of painting to photography continues today in Azadeh Akhlaghi’s (b.
1978) series By An Eyewitness. Akhlaghi began this series in 2009 in the wake of the death of Neda Agha
Soltan, a young Iranian bystander who was killed by a gunshot near protests organized by supporters of
presidential opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Like many people around the world, Akhlaghi
witnessed the killing and subsequent transformation of Soltan into a symbol of the Iranian anti-government
movement via a cellphone video that went viral over the internet. After watching this video, as well as
others like it from the Arab Spring, Akhlaghi began to wonder about similar fgures in Iran’s history, whose
deaths had likewise served as “crucial turning points” since, as Akhlaghi continues, “if any of them hadn’t
died in that particular moment, our history would have been different.” 11 The seventeen photographs that
make up By An Eyewitness are Akhlaghi’s attempt to render visible such forgotten fgures from Iran’s
history.
To construct these images, Akhlaghi frst spent around three years researching Iranian freedom
fghters—political activists, intellectuals, poets, writers, journalists, and athletes—most of whom had
died between the Constitutional Revolution in 1906 and the Islamic Revolution in 1979 but also during
the Iran and Iraq war of 1980 to 1988. She became most interested in fgures from these periods whose

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deaths had not only been suppressed within Iranian history but, more signifcantly, lacked any sort of
visual documentation. To reconstruct the terms of these deaths, Akhlaghi turned to historical sources,
including written words, confdential documents, witness reports, newspaper articles, and radio reports;
she also interviewed key eye witnesses. Despite the extensiveness of her research, she quickly “realized
that historical precision is just impossible” and so instead sought to “captur[e] the spirit of the moment.”12
To reconstruct this more nebulous impression within her photographs, Akhlaghi turned to cinema and
literature as well as Renaissance nineteenth-century painting for inspiration. For Akhlaghi, these sources
not only provided narrative techniques but also compositional models. Her photograph of Bijan Jazani,
the leftist intellectual who was executed in mysterious circumstances in 1975, is a case in point (see
Fig. 2.5). In positioning Jazani, arms raised in submission, in front of a line of men with their guns aimed
at him, Akhlaghi’s composition recalls Francisco José de Goya’s iconic 1808 painting The Third of May,
in which a group of French soldiers likewise aim their guns at a Spanish man who raises his arms in
submission. It is this compositional affnity as well as the orchestrated manner in which she constructs
her images that most closely aligns her series with the genre of tableau photography.
Tableau photography takes its name from the French term “tableau vivant,” or “living picture,” in
which actors or models, mostly in the nineteenth century, would be hired to act out a scene from a work
of art or a literary source. In photography, this term has been used to refer to images that have both been
self-consciously choreographed, often with the assistance of a cast and crew (akin to flmmaking), and

Figure 2.5 Azadeh Akhlaghi, Evin Hills, Tehran—Bijan Jazani, leftist intellectual who was executed in mysterious
circumstances. 18 April 1975. Courtesy of the artist and Mohsen Gallery, Tehran.

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which knowingly reference or make use of compositional devices from historical paintings. Besides
referencing Renaissance and nineteenth-century European paintings, Akhlaghi orchestrated the
production of her series much like a flm director (a job she knows intimately from having served as the
assistant director to Iranian flmmaker Abbas Kiarostami). She hired a director and a professional crew,
with whom she worked for about one month in pre-production and then for about twenty days actually
shooting her friends and extras posing as the characters in the series’s seventeen photographs. But it is
not just that Akhlaghi’s photographs explicitly allude to historical paintings and are approached through
the strategies of flmmaking that render them examples of tableau photography. What is also key are the
ways in which the photographs in her series make use of the tableau’s temporal dimension.
According to literary scholar Jay Caplan, “the characteristic tense of the tableau,” at least as it was
used in the eighteenth century, “is future perfect,” which he goes on to explain as “a perspective that
simultaneously recognizes the mobility (or inherent ‘pastness’) of the present and claims to bring it all
together from a fxed (transcendent), future perspective.” The idea that the tableau establishes a
relationship between “the past and the future”13 is critical to understanding the temporal dimension of
Akhlaghi’s series By An Eyewitness and, most especially, her decision to include herself as one of the
characters in each of her photographs. Donned in a black dress and wearing a red scarf, Akhlaghi
appears in all of her compositions as a kind of “time traveller,” or someone who, as she explains, interferes
“with chronological time.” By inserting herself as an eyewitness from the present into the historical past
depicted in her reconstructions, Akhlaghi interferes with the linear progression of time. In so doing, her
photographs not only call attention to the cyclical nature of the forgotten histories that she uncovers, but
also, more signifcantly, render this past fundamental to the lives of Iranians today.
Because of her use of a tableau-style approach, the images in Akhlaghi’s series By An Eyewitness are
often compared with those of Jeff Wall (b. 1946). But, despite certain visual affnities, including their
large size (most of Akhlaghi’s photographs average 6 x 3 feet), their approaches to the tableau as a
pictorial strategy differ signifcantly. Whereas Akhlaghi has turned to the tableau to bring history into the
present day, when Wall frst turned to this approach in the late 1970s, he used the tableau largely to
address issues fundamental to the pictorial problem of picture-making.
Wall’s interest in the visual strategies of the tableau developed primarily out of his frustrations with
1960s U.S. conceptual art in which ideas of art-making supersede its material form. Although Wall had
been infuenced by conceptualism and especially its interest—as exemplifed by such artists as Dan
Graham and Robert Smithson—in both using and subverting photography’s documentary potential, he
soon rejected the explicit criticality of this approach, which he found to be overly antagonistic toward the
pictorial potential, even visual pleasure, of photography. In its place, Wall turned toward a different
tradition, the staged tableau photograph, whose pictorial and illusionistic qualities he attempted to infuse
with the criticality of conceptualism. Part of what appealed to Wall most about the tableau was its
potential presence on the gallery wall. Until this time, art photography had been largely confned to suites
of small fne prints intended to be viewed within the pages of a book and not as self-suffcient, singular
images on the gallery wall. With his tableau photographs, Wall altered that tradition by thinking about
how photographs might command a presence not unlike paintings on the wall. To accomplish this
objective, yet without giving up photography’s reproducibility, in the late 1970s, Wall began to display his
photographs as enormous transparencies lit from behind by fuorescent bulbs such as were used in
advertising. Because of their spatial and luminescent qualities, these large-scale back-lit light boxes
gave his images a physicality and authority that was unexpected in the viewing of art photography at
this time.

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In addition to making gallery-specifc images, Wall’s turn to the tableau also positioned his photography,
in a manner akin to his contemporary Laurie Simmons, squarely within the studio as opposed to the
outside world that had been lionized through the traditions of documentary and street photography
sanctioned by MoMA’s John Szarkowski in the 1960s. But rather than use the studio as a space in which
to simply stage his tableaux, as is the case with the work of Simmons, Wall made the studio’s artifciality
an integral component of the content of his works. Wall’s 1978 The Destroyed Room clarifes this
aim. To create this photograph, Wall staged a woman’s decimated bedroom within his studio. Yet he
undermined the illusionism of this domestic space by including elements that call attention to its
fabrication as a staged set. As Wall explained, “Through the door you can see that it’s only a set held up
by supports, that this is not a real space, this is no-one’s house.”14 Wall further heightened the artifciality
of The Destroyed Room by also basing its composition on Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting The Death
of Sardanapalus, which depicts the ancient Assyrian king, in his last act of defance, destroying all of his
favorite possessions—his wives, pages, and even his horses and dogs—before his palace is besieged
by enemies and he takes his own life. Wall’s photograph recalls Delacroix’s nineteenth-century
composition not only through the room’s red-painted walls but also through the violent central diagonal
that begins at the pilfered dresser drawers in the upper-left corner, extends through to the slashed
mattress in the center of the composition, and continues on to the overturned table and decimated chair
in the lower-right corner. At the same time, devoid of any fgures, Wall’s photograph is not meant to
simply imitate the composition of Delacroix’s painting. Instead, he uses this reference, much like the self-
conscious artifciality of the staged set, to undermine photography’s assumed transparency or realism.
But unlike many conceptualist artists who sought to make a similar critical statement in their works,
Wall does so in a manner that upholds photography’s pictorial authority and singularity as a form of
picture-making.
While tableau photography is widely accepted today within contemporary art photography, when
Wall frst began to produce these back-lit staged photographs, this approach was greatly undervalued,
even scorned. Photography critic David Campany explains, “Throughout photography’s high modernist
decades (the 1920s to the 1950s), the staged tableau remained a repressed idea, derided from all
sides.” In the 1970s, U.S. artists like Les Krims, Duane Michals, and Lucas Samaras, among others,
sought to revitalize this visual strategy. But their frequently comic and at times upsetting staged
compositions remained largely misunderstood, and some would say, despised. “Indeed,” as Campany
continues, “by then [tableau photography] had just about the lowest reputation of any type of
photography.”15 Despite its marginalization during the twentieth century, in the nineteenth century,
Victorian photographers like Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–75) gained notoriety for their use of the
tableau, most especially for how they turned to this visual strategy to legitimize photography as art.
After studying painting and sculpture in Rome, in 1853, Rejlander moved to England where he took
up photography. While in Rome, he had made a living by copying Old Master paintings, or those made
by so-called great European painters prior to 1800. It was through this work that he became acquainted
with Raphael’s famous sixteenth-century fresco, School of Athens, whose composition, with its theme of
allegorical opposing points of view, would eventually become the basis for Rejlander’s large tableau
photograph from 1857: The Two Ways of Life. In the center of Raphael’s fresco, Plato points towards the
heavens, the philosophical realm of the ideal, while Aristotle points to the Earth, the philosophical source
of material knowledge. Rejlander uses this juxtaposition as the basis of his photograph of a bearded
sage who introduces two youths to two moral choices in life. On the left is a life of debauchery or
idleness, while on the right is the moral life of honest industry or work.

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Rejlander produced the photograph, which is unusually large (16 x 30 inches) for the nineteenth
century, over a period of six weeks. During this time, he completed preparatory sketches, hired and
posed sixteen professional models, and made thirty separate negatives, which he then masked, printed
on two pieces of paper, and connected using the technique of combination printing. In using this process,
Rejlander argued that the labor involved, combined with the image’s inspiration from Renaissance source
material with a morally uplifting theme, distanced the work from contemporary understandings of
photography as an imitative technology and instead aligned it with the imaginative practice of painting,
thereby justifying it as art. While Jeff Wall would revitalize this approach in the late 1970s, the difference
is that while Rejlander turned to the tableau to establish photography’s artistic value through its parallels
with painting, Wall’s concern, at least in his early tableau photographs, was not with whether or not
photography is art, but rather with how the pictorial terms through which art photography is produced
and understood might be re-envisioned.

Constructions
Most discussions of staged and tableau photography address images whose compositions, though
fctional, nonetheless have an illusionistic appearance. But as the images of Yamini Nayar (b. 1975)
attest, contemporary staged photography need not necessarily “look” real. It can also include images
that appear abstract as well as non-representational. Nayar’s staged architectural photographs are often
said to recall the work of German photographer Thomas Demand, whom she has also cited as an
infuence. This comparison derives in part from their art-making process. Like Demand, Nayar frst
creates three-dimensional models. Next, she photographs these assemblages with a large format
camera and then discards the model after her documentation is done. Similar to Demand, Nayar also
frequently bases these models on found images. But the two differ in what their models actually depict.
Whereas Demand’s life-sized, three-dimensional paper models meticulously attempt to replicate the
source material upon which they are based, Nayar’s smaller, tabletop-sized models refer to imaginary not
actual spaces. To that end, many of her photographs depict the model, which she constructs from found
objects, including scrap materials, photographs, magazine clippings, and other detritus, not in a “fnished”
state but at various stages and from different angles in the process of its construction. Because of this
choice, the large-scale images that result (generally 4 x 5 feet), as critic Emily Hall notes, “conjure a
feeling of push and pull: an invitation into spaces that are impossible to enter, both imaginatively and
literally.”16
Though Nayar’s constructions at once beguile and mystify, certain architectural forms can be identifed
nonetheless. In works such as Cleo and Between the Lines, both from 2009, walls, doors, and
foorboards, among other architectural elements, are identifable. However, their relationships to each
other remain uncertain thus making what they signify diffcult, if not impossible, to determine. Critic
Sharmistha Ray explains that “Nayar shuts down meaning. The objects cease to be even signifers. The
possibility for meaning is erased, and the viewer is left with just the boundaries of the room to
contemplate.”17 Some have read this disjunction and incoherence in Nayar’s photographs as a product
of her personal history. Though Nayar was born and raised in the U.S., her parents kept strong family ties
to India, where she spent much of her formative years visiting relatives in Delhi, Calcutta, and Kerala.
These experiences in India made a lasting impression on Nayar, especially in terms of her often-ambivalent
feelings about the complexities of her hybrid identity as an Indian-American. Nayar recalls, “Some of my

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earliest memories are in Chittaranjan Park, New Delhi, which was initially called ‘Displaced Colony’ for the
Bengali refugees who settled there post Partition. These in-between spaces are fertile ground.”18 Nayar’s
staged architectural tableaux function in a similar in-between space. At once photography, sculpture,
painting, and performance, her constructions offer spaces that, much like her own fragmented diasporic
identity, are as much about belonging as they are about non-belonging or the impossibility of belonging.
More recently, Nayar’s architectural compositions have become increasingly ruptured and confusing.
The images in her 2011 exhibition Head Space, for instance, are sourced from mid-century modernist
buildings, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Administration building. But
these architectural structures would be completely indecipherable were it not for the source material that
hangs next to her photographs on the gallery wall. The inclusion of these references, however, is not
intended to limit what Nayar’s photographs actually depict. Instead, they represent yet another element
in her ongoing effort to visualize how the historical architectural forms that she quotes within her
compositions serve not only as vehicles for remembering her own past but can function as the act of
remembrance itself. “My concerns,” explains Nayar, “lean towards subjectivity and memory—and thus
my photographs are less tied to being read as ‘real.’ I’m much more interested in process, and how we
shape memory and how it shapes us.”19 That concern for visualizing the intricacies of memory is most
apparent in images such as Cascading Attica from 2011, whose title, like the beguiling nature of the
composition itself, is impossible to pin down (see Fig. 2.6). Referring at once to the classical Greek region

Figure 2.6 Yamini Nayar, Cascading Attica, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

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projecting into the Aegean Sea, the 1971 prison riot in upstate New York, and a waterfall in Wyoming,
the photograph exemplifes Nayar’s deep-seated interest in using her staged photography to explore
issues around fuctuation and change as well as fuidity and variability.
Like Nayar, Lucia Koch (b. 1966) has also created architectural interventions that trouble the assumed
illusionism of staged photography. Yet in contrast to Nayar whose process-oriented approach addresses
questions of identity, memory, and time, Koch is more interested in using her fabricated constructions to
consider the complexities of seeing. Many of Koch’s staged photographs depict the interior spaces of
small cardboard boxes or other ordinary food items such as empty paper popcorn bags, coffee packages,
and spaghetti boxes. Koch photographs the insides of these items up-close, often illuminated by both
natural and artifcial light, and then prints the resultant images large-scale (up to 10 x 20 feet) so that they
have the appearance of actual architectural spaces. Through the optical illusions that she creates, Koch
invites viewers to enter the immersive, fctive spaces of her photographs as if they were real places. Yet
when images such as Riso Arborio, from 2006, are examined more closely, that perception dissipates as
the viewer begins to notice its deception. What is depicted is not the interior of an actual room but the
inside of an empty box of rice.
Koch further troubles the relationship between the real and the illusionistic in her photographs through
the placement of her images within the architectural space of the gallery itself. Her 2013 Oratorio, for
instance, depicts the receding interior of a trapezoidal concrete enclosure (see Fig. 2.7). But rather than
hang this photograph on the gallery wall, she places it in the corner, on the foor, so that the image
appears to be a physical extension of the gallery’s grey concrete foor. In so doing, Koch blurs the

Figure 2.7 Lucia Koch, Oratorio, 2013. Pigment print on cotton paper, UV matte laminate, 59¼ x 91½ inches; 150.5
x 232.5 cm (framed) 56½ x 91½ inches; 143.5 x 232.5 cm (installation). Edition of 6 with 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist
and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica.

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distinction between what is real and imaginary and thus forces viewers to try to make sense of what they
do and do not see and the ways in which “the deceptions we accept,” as critic Leah Ollman explains,
are “part of the basic perceptual processing of visual, especially photographic information.”20
Koch’s interest in the complexities of seeing shares commonalities with the staged photography of
James Casebere, who, like the other Pictures Generation artists with whom he is associated, has sought,
since the mid-1970s, to challenge the documentary model of photography espoused by John Szarkowski
at MoMA during the 1960s. But whereas Casebere turned to staged architectural models, mostly
constructed out of Styrofoam, paper, and plaster, to disrupt and unsettle the disciplinary nature of such
institutional spaces as prisons, hospitals, schools, and asylums, Koch is more interested in using her
architectural interventions to explore spatial boundaries around seeing. That concern is especially evident
in a series of photographs that she produced in response to the regional architecture of el Cono Norte,
the northern district of Lima, Peru. For these images from 2011, Koch again photographed the insides
of empty boxes but in this instance, all of the boxes have cut openings that expose different views of the
outside. These views to the outside, which are at best vague and restricted, contrast sharply with the
expansiveness of the interior spaces and thus create a tension between what lies inside and out. In so
doing, they not only address the spatial limitations of seeing, but also, more critically, provide visual
metaphors for the region’s own recent struggles with massive migrations to urban centers caused largely
by poverty and a lack of resources in the rural parts of Peru.
Devoid of human fgures, the staged photographs of Yamini Nayar and Lucia Koch employ architectural
forms, both real and imagined, to engage with viewers in distinctly spatial terms. Produced mostly
between 1946 and 1955, the staged constructions of Frederick Sommer (1905–99) are also unpeopled.
Yet, unlike the large-scale, immersive works of Nayar and Koch, these constructed images, much smaller
in size (around 7 x 9 inches), are markedly anthropomorphic. Likewise, rather than challenge viewers to
explore their own relationships to the depicted spaces in his photographs, Sommer instead uses the
visual associations that he sets up within his compositions to consider how the inanimate objects
represented in his photographs might be experienced as living entities.
Beginning in 1946, Sommer became less interested in photographing the world around him and
instead began to search out discarded objects that he would in turn assemble and photograph in his
studio. At a time when the modernist tradition of “straight photography,” which advocated objective
depictions of the reality of the world as they were encountered, was favored in the United States,
Sommer’s decision to make or construct his images was largely rejected as “unphotographic.” Yet for
Sommer there was no difference between making and fnding photographs since, as he explains, “You
have to make it to fnd it. You have to fnd it to make it. You only fnd things that you already have in your
mind.” 21 This emphasis on the role of the imagination is critical to understanding Sommer’s art-making
process. To create these tableaux, Sommer was most interested in bringing together discarded objects—
broken toys, old engravings, encrusted paint can lids, torn and weathered pieces of wood or wallpaper,
among other items—that, despite their incongruities, might “still have a mathematical chance to meet
and work together.”22 To that end, in constructing his assemblages, he sought out combinations of
objects that shared some sort of visual affnity. He would then position these objects on a found
background in a manner that would encourage new visual associations to emerge. His Moon Culmination,
1951 consists of three separate objects that Sommer seamlessly brings together into a unifed whole
(see Fig. 2.8). The background is made up of a discarded and discolored piece of wallpaper. On top of
that object he placed part of a palette covered with dried, encrusted paint, which he in turn juxtaposed
with a torn illustration of a couple dancing. Sommer aligns each of these objects within the fattened

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Figure 2.8 Frederick Sommer, Moon Culmination, 1951. Gelatin silver print, 24.3 x 19.1 cm. © Frederick and
Frances Sommer Foundation. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

space of his photograph so that the three representational forms appear to merge and thereby animate
the otherwise lifeless dancing couple. While Sommer’s use of chance in this and his other found tableaux
owes much to the approaches and sensibilities of Surrealism, Sommer—who had met Surrealist artists
Max Ernst and Man Ray in 1941 and would later develop a close friendship with Ernst—never subscribed
to the movement’s aims of using techniques like free association or automatism to access the
unconscious. Instead, for Sommer these staged constructions were more about the possibility of
transformation and regeneration, or the idea that photography might be used to create new realities
based within the imagination. As curator Keith F. Davis observes, “With their original utility gone, they
become ours in an important way—to be used for new ends or simply as spurs to the imagination.”23
Through his emphasis on making as opposed to fnding, Sommer’s practice aligns with what
photography critic A. D. Coleman in 1976 famously called the “directorial mode.” Coleman used this
term to make a distinction between those photographers who believed that the medium should be
understood as “an accurate, reliable transcription” of the world and those who sought “to free [it] from
the imperative of realism” either through “intervening in ongoing ‘real’ events or by staging tableaux.” It
was the latter group of photographers, who “consciously and intentionally create[d] events for the
express purpose of making images”24 that Coleman not only identifed as directorial, but, more signifcantly,
argued had been active since the nineteenth century. Despite the groundbreaking nature of Coleman’s

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historical positioning of the “directorial mode,” as curator Marta Weiss importantly points out, his
conclusions though “useful” are “insuffcient for a broader consideration of the practice.” This is because
they largely rely on twentieth-century assumptions about the need “to segregate photographs of real and
imaginary subject matter.” For Weiss, this understanding is problematic, because “it was not as natural
an assumption in the nineteenth century as it is today that a photograph that documents an existing
aspect of the world is incompatible with one that records a deliberately set up scene.”25
The architectural photographs of Édouard Baldus (1813–89) address this important distinction. In
1851, France’s Historic Monuments Commission organized the Missions Héliographiques, a
government-sponsored photography project whose aim was, in accordance with the renovation efforts
of Napoleon III, to document the country’s important architectural sites and monuments. The commission
identifed two kinds of structures to be photographed: those signifcant to French history and those that
had been singled out by architect Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc as in need of repair. Baldus was one
of fve photographers hired by the commission for this project. Among the buildings that he was tasked
with photographing was the church of Saint-Trophîme in Arles in the south of France (see Fig. 2.9). For
Baldus, however, photographing this building posed certain problems. The barrel-vaulted cloister at
Saint-Trophîme, for instance, contained ornate bas-relief sculptures and full-length sculpted fgures. Yet
because of the limitations of nineteenth-century photographic technology, Baldus’s camera lens could

Figure 2.9 Édouard Baldus, Arles. Cloister of Saint-Trophîme, c. 1851. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open
Content Program.

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only accommodate a small portion of the total space of the cloister and his negative could only register
a limited amount of tonal ranges. To overcome these physical constraints, Baldus shot about ten
negatives of the site, each focused and properly exposed, which he then joined together along the
contours of cornices and columns so as to minimize the evidence of his handiwork. He then further
retouched these seams as well as other areas of the negatives themselves, clarifying details and painting
in sections of stonework with brush and ink. The resultant print is at once painstakingly real in its depiction
of an actual place and entirely fabricated from the artist’s imagination, thus suggesting that truth and
fction could not only coexist harmoniously within a single nineteenth-century print, but also, more
signifcantly, that their paradoxical relationship has been a preoccupation of artists long before the advent
of digital technologies in the 1980s and 1990s.

Summary
• Digital technologies did not alone introduce fction into the photographic image.
• Storytelling is not the only means through which photographers have engaged with staging in
their works either today or historically.
• Photographers have looked to painting, especially Renaissance painting, as both a model and
source material when staging their tableaux images.
• The construction of models, both real and imaginary, is another means through which
photography’s assumed realism has been challenged.

Discussion points
• What made digital photography so troubling initially?
• What are some other ways besides storytelling that artists have turned to staging in their
photographs?
• What is tableau photography and what role has painting played within this genre?
• How have artists used constructions, both real and imaginary, to engage with the paradoxical
relationship between truth and fction in photography?

Additional case studies

Herbert Bayer (1900–85)
F. Holland Day (1864–1933)
Joan Fontcuberta (b. 1955)
Anthony Goicolea (b. 1971)
Marcos López (b. 1958)
Angus McBean (1904–99)
Camille Silvy (1835–69)

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 TRUTH AND FICTION 55

Wang Qing Song (b. 1966)

Maurice Tabard (1897–1984)
Newsha Tavakolian (b. 1981)

Notes
1 Veronica Dye, “Kelli Connell: Photographs,” Art Lies 39 (Summer 2003): 61.
2 Husain Essop, quoted in Sean O’Toole, “Doing it Ourselves,” Enjin Magazine 48 (March–April 2010): 40.
3 Husain Essop, quoted in “Essops’ travails,” Mail & Guardian, June 22, 2008, http://mg.co.za/article/2008-06-
22-essops-travails.
4 Laurie Simmons, “The camera lies; or why I always wanted to make a flm—a conversation via email with Laurie
Simmons, August 2006,” interview by Jan Seewald, in Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek (eds.),
Imagination Becomes Reality, Part V: Fantasy and Fiction (Munich: Sammlung Goetz, 2006), 150.
5 Laurie Simmons, “Laurie Simmons: Photography, Perfection, and Reality,” ART21, October 28, 2007, http://
www.art21.org/texts/laurie-simmons/interview-laurie-simmons-photography-perfection-and-reality.
6 Laurie Simmons, quoted in Carolina Nitsch Project Room, Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House, May
17–June 28, 2008, http://www.carolinanitsch.com/past-exhibition/laurie-simmons-in-and-around-the-house/.
7 Michael Lobel, “Scale Models,” Artforum 49, no. 2 (October 2010): 257.
8 Simmons, “The camera lies,” 150.
9 Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2004), 206.
10 Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” 1862; reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg, Classic
Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 88.
11 Azadeh Akhlaghi, “Seventeen Deaths: Q&A with Azadeh Akhlaghi,” by Pauline Eiferman, http://
roadsandkingdoms.com/2014/seventeen-deaths-qa-with-azadeh-akhlaghi/.
12 Akhlaghi, “Seventeen Deaths.”
13 Jeff Caplan, Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986), 89–90.
14 Jeff Wall, quoted in Tate Modern, Jeff Wall Room Guide, Room 1, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-
modern/exhibition/jeff-wall/room-guide/jeff-wall-room-1.
15 David Campany, Jeff Wall: Pictures for Women (London: Afterall, 2011), 40.
16 Emily Hall, “Yamini Nayar,” Artforum 50, no. 5 (January 2012): 223.
17 Sharmistha Ray, “Yamini Nayar—Intimate Theater: A Soliloquy of Dislocations,” ArtPulse 1 (April 2009), http://
artpulsemagazine.com/yamini-nayar-intimate-theater-a-soliloquy-of-dislocations.
18 Yamini Nayar, interview by Sheida Soleimani, Huffngton Post, March 31, 2015, http://www.huffngtonpost.com/
sheida-soleimani/yamini-nayar-interview_b_6977060.html.
19 Yamini Nayar, quoted in Meenakshi Thirukode, “Yamini Nayar: Head Space,” Whitewall 9 (January 2012), http://
www.whitewallmag.com/.
20 Leah Ollman, “Lucia Koch,” Art in America, September 5, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/
reviews/lucia-koch/.
21 Frederick Sommer, quoted in Lanier Graham, “The Art of Frederick Sommer: Part II: Master of the Combinatory
Arts, A Retrospective View,” Image 33, no. 3–4 (Winter 1990–1): 48.
22 Frederick Sommer, “General Aesthetics, Part III,” 1979; reprinted in Frederick Sommer, Sommer. Words
(Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative Photography, 1984), 27.

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23 Keith F. Davis, “Living Art: The Sources of Frederick Sommer’s Work,” in The Art of Frederick Sommer:
Photography, Drawing, Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 19.
24 A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Defnition,” Artforum 15, no. 1 (September 1976): 55–6.
25 Marta Weiss, “Staged Photography in the Victorian Album,” in Lori Pauli (ed.), Acting the Part: Photography as
Theater (London: Merrell in association with the National Gallery of Canada, 2006), 82.

Selected further reading

Bear, Jordan. Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2015.
Coleman, A. D. “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Defnition.” Artforum 15, no. 1 (September 1976): 55–61.
Diack, Heather. Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2020.
Edwards, Kathleen A. Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2005.
Fineman, Mia, ed. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012.
Garcia, Erin. Photography as Fiction. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010.
Goysdotter, Moa. Impure Vision: American Staged Photography of the 1970s. Lund: Nordic Academic Press,
2013.
Kohler, Michael. Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photography. Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1995.
Pauli, Lori. Acting the Part: Photography as Theater. London: Merrell in association with the National Gallery of
Canada, 2006.
Shore, Robert. Post-photography: The Artist with a Camera. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014.

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 PART TWO

EVIDENCE
Delilah Montaya’s (b. 1955) series Sed: Trail of Thirst (2004–9) depicts the perilous migration route that
extends from Mexico across the Arizona Sonora desert and into the United States. Few people populate
the photographs in this series, though the viewer can see the tracks and footprints made by individuals
as they move through the desert hoping to cross the border. Visible as well are a number of water tanks
and bottles strategically placed by humanitarian workers seeking to prevent migrant deaths from
dehydration. The presence of just these few signs and objects—the scarred land that marks the terrain
where people have walked and the empty water bottles that signal life—reveals the photographed
scenes to be complex sites that store the hidden stories of those who have lived on and travelled across
the land. As the politics and violence that haunt the represented borderland spaces slowly emerge, the
images appear less as landscape views and more as assemblages of power that contain complicated
and contradictory histories of pain, confict, and hope.
The following two chapters, “Measuring the body” and “Mapping the land,” consider how histories,
conficts, and ideologies are embedded in seemingly neutral views of people and places, a point
Montaya’s series makes clear. We have chosen the words “measuring” and “mapping” to emphasize this
point, as such terms generally refer to “objective” processes. Similarly, the title of this section, “Evidence,”
is meant as a provocation. What types of evidence can or do photographs provide? Can such evidence
ever be neutral? Are the water bottles left in the desert landscape a kind of mapping technique that
provides evidence of someone else’s pain? Of social policy gone wrong? This section challenges readers
to question both how photography has been used as evidence in arguments and as examples of
historical “truth.”

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 3
MEASURING THE BODY

In 1972, between July 15 and August 21, Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) photographed herself naked each
morning in four different positions: straight on; from behind; standing in profle looking to the right; and
standing in profle looking to the left. CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture (see Fig. 3.1), the work to emerge
from this daily practice, consists of a total of 148 photographs, and documents the artist’s severe diet
and resulting ten-pound weight loss over the thirty-six-day period in question. Each day’s photographs
are arranged in a vertical column with a small text panel placed beneath indicating the date and time the
images were taken and her current weight. Most often, this piece is discussed as a landmark work in the
history of conceptual art, as a project in which Antin literally carves her own body as one would carve
a sculpture. Morever, by highlighting a process that chips away and removes one’s own body fat, Carving
criticizes conventional standards of beauty and the pressure to lose weight, effectively joining conceptual
and feminist art practices.
But Carving also provides insight into photography’s long history of recording, measuring, and
assessing the body. Although a performance-based conceptual work, much of the piece’s success

Figure 3.1 Eleanor Antin, CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture (detail), 1972. © Eleanor Antin. Courtesy of the artist
and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York.

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stems from the particular way Antin made herself the object of the camera’s penetrating lens. Arranged
in a giant grid, each photograph features Antin standing, somewhat awkwardly, against the same white
door in approximately the same place. The repetition of that door—and doorframe, lock, handle, and so
on—provides a constant against which the viewer can measure and evaluate Antin’s changing body. The
consistency of the framing and purposeful “administrative” as opposed to artsy look of the images (think,
for instance, of how the photographs are simply tacked to the wall, or how they resemble medical
documentation) further connects Antin’s photographic approach to systems of measurement and
control, as well as to pseudo-scientifc studies of the body, such as those used in nineteenth-century
ethnographic imagery, which were explicitly designed to control, dominate, and rule populations.
In 1986, about ffteen years after Antin produced CARVING, artist and writer Allan Sekula (1951–
2013) wrote an essay entitled “The Body and the Archive,” in which he describes the way photography,
since its inception, has been used as just such an agent of control and tool for social categorization. In
the text, Sekula argues that photographs of human subjects—even the most intimate of personal or
family portraits—are always haunted by disciplinary archives, systems of surveillance, and a generalizing
equivalence of the commodity.1 “Every proper portrait,” writes Sekula, “has its lurking objectifying inverse
in the fles of the police.”2 He illustrates the essay with examples of the Bertillon identifcation card: a
document used by police in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that detailed a criminal
suspect’s facial and bodily characteristics and featured standardized frontal and profle photographs of
that suspect’s head and shoulders. When Sekula takes his own portraits, usually as part of larger projects
such as Waiting for Tear Gas (1999) or Shipwreck and Workers (2005–7), he does so as if to escape
exactly the surveillance aspect of the police fle archive. Sekula’s subjects, often partially obscured or
shown while performing labor, are fgured not as fxed and stable objects available to the viewer’s gaze,
but as individuals who are connected to others in an ongoing process of political and social becoming.
In this, his portraits also seek to avoid, as art historian Benjamin Young has pointed out, a kind of
photographic humanism (the belief that photography has a special status enabling the communication
of “universal” humanistic values) that erases specifc histories of social struggle and injustice, and that
naturalizes historical meaning.3
The three sections of this chapter, “(Radical) Ethnography,” “Self and body,” and “Labor,” examine
moments when photographic representations of the body either seek to control and surveil—as with the
Bertillon identifcation card, or conversely when they challenge such purposes—as with Antin’s CARVING:
A Traditional Sculpture or Sekula’s portraits.

(Radical) Ethnography
In the nineteenth century, ethnographic photographs of colonized people functioned as tools of
surveillance, classifcation, and control. Made by photographers such as John Lamprey (active 1870s),
and encouraged by scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley, these types of images were designed by
and for Europeans to observe and compare human bodies of people from different ethnicities and racial
backgrounds. The goal was to create, as curator and scholar Brian Wallis has pointed out, “a photographic
archive of human specimens, or types”—a fact Lamprey’s own text from 1869, “On a Method of
Measuring the Human Form,” makes crystal clear.4 In this text, Lamprey proposed that the scientifc
study of race should be based on visual observations of the nude human body, which would reveal
differences in skin color, hair texture, hair style, physique, and so on. Photography, he went on to argue,

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was essential to this process because the photographic image would be able to highlight features that
“no verbal description can convey.”5 To this end, Lamprey introduced a background grid in his pictures,
explaining that such a structure allowed for “the study of all those peculiarities of contour which are so
distinctly observable in each group.”6
But in functioning as a tool by which to measure and observe humans, the grid created an absolute
divide between the photographer and photographed subject, itself becoming a marker of difference and
authority. In one image produced by Lamprey, simply labeled “Chinese Male” (c. 1870) (see Fig. 3.2), a
naked Chinese man stands on a small platform against a gridded background—his left hand lays across
his chest while his right rests by his side, holding the end of his pigtail, which for Lamprey was an
important indicator of race. Shown in profle, the fgure gazes to the right, impassively. Artist-scholars
Deborah Willis and Carla Williams have argued that the profle shot, as opposed to a straight-on view,
directs the spectator’s gaze to the shape of the subject’s skull, thereby suppressing any contemplation
of character or a person’s internal life.7 The grid, as it measures and delineates, is crucial to this
interpretation. It turns the fgure into a specimen: looking at Lamprey’s photograph, it is easy to imagine
the square marks of the grid as transferred onto the man’s body, fragmenting his form and dehumanizing
his being.
In her diptych, Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II (2009) (see Fig. 3.3), contemporary Malaysian
artist Yee I-Lann (b. 1971) challenges Lamprey’s ethnographic project by appropriating, rephotographing,

Figure 3.2 John Lamprey, Chinese Male with very long plait against a Lamprey grid—profle, c. 1870. © RAI.
Courtesy Royal Anthropological Institute, London (400_001187).

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Figure 3.3 Yee I-Lann, Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II, 2009. © Yee I-Lann. Courtesy of the artist and Tyler
Rollins Fine Art, New York.

and editing one of his images in order to make visible the traces left by European colonialism in the
Southeast Asian archipelago, and the photograph’s unequal distribution of power. I-Lann, who was born
in Malaysia and currently resides in Kuala Lumpur, explains that she frst came across Lamprey’s Malayan
Male in Mary Warner Marien’s photography textbook, and “wanted to see if this image from a colonized
past which spoke of the gaze, of power and the ‘other’ could change its meaning in a post-colonial
world.”8 I-Lann’s piece consists of two panels, each containing two images. The left panel includes an
unaltered reproduction of Lamprey’s photograph of a stripped male next to a digitally adjusted version of
the same photograph that shows the fgure slightly repositioned into a more confdent stance. The man’s
legs have been straightened so he stands taller, the angle of his head has been adjusted such that he
confronts the camera’s gaze, and the spear—a frequent marker of “savage” otherness—has been
removed altogether. As if responding to Willis and Williams, I-Lann’s gestures remove the Malayan male,
at least in part, from the realm of measurement and the spectacle of display. But a bigger change to
Lamprey’s photograph comes in the second panel. In the frst of the two images in this panel, I-Lann
whited-out the Malayan man’s body, leaving visible only a silhouette of his form; in the second, she
erased his body entirely. All that remains of Lamprey’s original photograph here is the grid. Moreover,
standing in front of this empty frame is an image of I-Lann herself, hands on hips, examining the Lamprey
image as well as her own manipulations of his original print.
The contrast of I-Lann’s clothed body juxtaposed against the Malayan man’s white silhouette is
particularly effective in revealing a European fascination with colonial nakedness that associates various
states of undress with savagery. To be without clothes, or only partially clothed, was, as historian Philippa
Levine has argued, “to be in a state of nature, unschooled, unselfconscious, lacking in shame and
propriety.”9 Yet I-Lann’s insertion of herself into Lamprey’s staged photographic scene does more than
highlight the racism upon which Western imperialism depends. The combination of her manipulation of
Lamprey’s photograph, and her gaze back at his gridded structure, turns Lamprey’s project (rather than
the pictured “Malayan male”) into the object of study. By decomposing Lamprey’s supposedly scientifc
gaze into its constituent elements—the grid, the pose, the spear, and so on—I-Lann, standing sure-
footed, becomes the one who examines, measures, observes, and makes judgments. This action, it
could further be said, inverts colonialism’s claim that only Western looking is neutral and objective, and

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that “primitives” or native subjects lack the ability to see clearly, do not possess aesthetic judgment, and
cannot understand representational art.10
Contemporary artist Sammy Baloji (b. 1978) makes work that, like Yee I-Lann, confronts the joint
legacy of colonialism and Western ethnographic imagery. Born and raised in Katanga province, a mineral
rich region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Baloji examines how the ethnographic body,
as confgured and disciplined by a photographer like John Lamprey, fts into a history of resource
extraction, colonial greed, and postcolonial disillusionment.11 Particularly important to this history is the
Gécamines mining company, which, founded in 1906 by Belgian colonizers and taken over by Mobutu
Sese Seko’s government in 1966, has dominated and controlled much of the DRC’s economic life
throughout the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. Since the 1990s, however, due to failing equipment,
aging infrastructure, and ethnic violence, the company’s fnances have suffered, leaving thousands of
workers without job security. Since 2010, in an effort to reestablish their prior dominance, Gécamines
has sought to modernize and partner with international frms, though this has led to a whole new set of
problems related to foreign investment. Further complicating this history is the fact that prior to
independence, when Gécamines was known as the UMHK (Union Minière du Haut Katanga) and run by
the Belgian government, the company afforded its workers medical care, education, housing, food, and
running water. Though capitalist and paternalistic, the UMHK was thus able to provide the kinds of social
services that Gécamines, in its decline, has been unable to do. Baloji, deeply aware of this diffcult and
layered history, has said that although the Congolese “know Gécamines will never be the same ‘goose
that lays golden eggs,’ it has fed, clothed, and educated not only themselves but also their parents, their
grandparents and even great great grandparents.”12
The sobering after-effects of the insatiable desire to exploit resources on the part of the DRC’s Belgian
colonizers, Mobutu’s famously corrupt and violent government, and companies like Gécamines, is the
subject of Baloji’s series of photomontages from 2006 titled Mémoire. In these works, Baloji juxtaposes
archival images of Congolese laborers from the early twentieth century with more recent pictures of
imperial debris from the DRC’s postcolonial industrial landscape. Untitled 13, Mémoire (2006) (see Plate
4), for example, depicts a black-and-white archival image of a man wearing the striped clothes of a
prisoner, disciplined with a chain around his neck. He stares out at the viewer, but as with most
ethnographic imagery, the man’s expression tells us little to nothing of his interior life. Behind him are
three color photographs, taken by Baloji, of contemporary Katanga. What looks like an abandoned
warehouse flls the right edge of the image, while empty train tracks—and other signs of an aging
infrastructure and deindustrialization—fll the left. The viewer is thus confronted with an unsettling paradox
between past abuse seen in black and white and present devastation shown in color.
To this point, art historian Sandrine Colard argues that Baloji dislocates subjects from the petrifcation
of colonial circumstance and resituates them in the contemporary landscape, thereby creating a bridge
between the colonial era and our own time. As a result, she argues that Baloji’s work should be seen not
as an attempt to recover the distorted identities of the pictured fgures, but rather as a process of their
(and others’) retrieval from oblivion, a return to history.13 The colonial past, in other words, is placed in its
political present; it looks at us—to us—for an explanation or resolution. Baloji’s images are powerful,
then, not only for how they refer to the past, but also for how they speak to the ongoing predatory
practices of global capitalism in the present. They stand as a warning to the future. In this, Baloji’s images
might also be thought of in terms of radical ethnography, that is, as an approach to representing
fgures from history such that they ethically engage today’s viewers by challenging assumptions about
the dispossession and destruction of others.

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In the nineteenth century, ethnographic and anthropometric photography was part of the Western
colonial project; it provided a way for Europeans to observe, measure, and assert control over bodies
they perceived as different from and inferior to their own. Sammy Baloji and Yee I-Lann, as well as others
such as Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou from Benin or Boushra Almutawakel from Yemen, present a rebuttal
to this use of photography as a tool of domination. Yet engagement with photography as an ethnographic
practice is not confned to contemporary artists of color who address the legacy of colonialism. As art
historian Julian Stallabrass notes, Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) makes work that recalls in form
(if not content) the deadpan expression, minimal background, and standardized format of ethnographic
pictures.14 For example, Dijkstra’s series of adolescent bathers standing, mostly alone, on beaches in
various locations around the globe capture subjects in remarkably similar and controlled situations. Her
Almerisa series (1994–2008) provides another example. In this series, she records the transformation of
Almerisa from a six-year-old girl, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1994 as a Bosnian refugee, into adulthood.
Using a large format camera and tripod, Dijkstra made eleven photographs of Almerisa over a period
of nearly ffteen years. Each image is similarly structured, with Almerisa centered in the frame, sitting on
a chair in an interior space, directly engaging the camera. However, the photographs’ insistent formality,
along with their unnerving stillness, lush color, and high resolution work against, or at least complicate,
this otherwise formulaic presentation. Stallabrass notes, for instance, that while the images’s standardized
format references ethnographic imagery, the lush color and overall affect refers more to commercial
fashion photography (a subject we turn to in more detail in Chapter 11).
The frst picture in the series, Almerisa, Asylum Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, March 14, 1994
(1994) (see Fig. 3.4), was taken in Amsterdam in an asylum center, and shows Almerisa in a red chair—
her feet dangling in the air, unable to reach the ground. The chair is signifcant in that it disciplines
Almerisa’s body by dictating an expectation: she must sit here in this chair and face that camera over
there. But over the course of years, as Dijkstra photographed Almerisa in various positions—slouching,
leaning, sitting cross-legged, posing comfortably, and eventually holding her own child—the chair begins
to feel less disciplinary and more connected to Almerisa’s own self-presentation. In this way, the change
in her gestures and shift in her bodily movements come to mark Almerisa’s cultural assimilation from an
Eastern European subject to a Western European one, from a socialist citizen to a capitalist one. Or as
Stallabrass more critically describes, the viewer witnesses Almerisa’s “socialization into the commercialized
image world,” putting her at risk of becoming a mere image.15
Another artist who engages with ethnographic form, though earlier in the twentieth century, is
German photographer August Sander (1876–1964). In the 1920s, Sander began work on a project
conceptualized as a visual accounting of all the different people that made up Germany’s democratic
society. He started the project, titled Citizens of the Twentieth Century, during the years of the Weimar
Republic, and continued to work on it, despite enormous obstacles, until his death in 1964. Weimar was
established in 1919 to replace the German Empire, and ended fourteen years later in 1933 with the rise
of Nationalist Socialism. On the one hand, this brief democratic moment between World Wars I and II has
become known as a period of German cultural renaissance. Berlin especially thrived during this time,
hosting a vibrant cabaret scene, as well as signifcant literature, cinema, theater, and art communities.
On the other hand, economic turmoil, hyper-infation, and political extremism plagued the republic,
creating the chaotic conditions that culminated in Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. This cultural and political
context is critical for understanding Sander’s work in part because his aspiration was to create a
photographic typology of Weimar society in particular, and in part because Weimar’s ultimate failure,
which also contributed to the failure of Sander’s project, imbues the work with additional meaning.

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Figure 3.4 Rineke Dijkstra, Almerisa, Asylum Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, March 14, 1994, 1994. © Rineke
Dijkstra. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Sander’s plan for Citizen was to create a series of books that contained portraits of hundreds of
German citizens. He planned to organize the images by profession and social class, establishing
categories such as peasants and farm laborers, skilled laborers, bankers and merchants, aristocrats,
women, and intellectuals. The project was also designed to include marginalized populations in categories
such as the insane and beggars. Like other ethnographic projects, the images share a remarkably similar
mode of presentation: most photographs feature a single fgure in a work setting or living situation
centered in the frame, and displayed in a full-length or three-quarters view. The expression on the man
in Pastry Chef, from 1928, straightforward and serious, is typical of Sander’s approach: the camera
confronts the subject directly, and the subject rarely, if ever, smiles back. On its own, Pastry Chef would
be a compelling portrait—extraordinarily crisp, as is typical of Sander’s work, the chef’s white jacket and
his silver mixing bowl, a tool of the trade, glows against the kitchen’s darker grays—but situated in
Sander’s larger archive of Weimar “types” (comprised at one point of tens of thousands of images), this
image comes to represent one part of a social collective as much as it does any specifc individual.

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In the summer of 1934, the Nazi Ministry of Culture ordered the seizure of Sander’s work; they ruined
copies of his book The Face of Our Time, which was conceived as a prelude to Citizens, as well as his
printing plates and thousands of negatives.16 Anathema to Nazi totalitarianism, Sander’s project rejected
the idea of the singular bourgeois portrait that often worked to glorify wealthy individuals. By contrast, his
work, at least in part, sought to create a new kind of portraiture based on collectivity and class identity.
As the Nazis rose to power, Sander’s project thus came to function as an unwelcome visual reminder of
a past German democratic society, a memory Nazis thought best eradicated by destroying its visual
remains. Though Sander’s own politics were not as left-leaning as this description might suggest, and in
fact the specimen quality of those he pictured, along with the ethnographic roots of his work, still served
as a measuring and cataloguing strategy (as we detail in Chapter 10), Sander’s historical placement and
the tragedy that befell his projects transform that measuring and cataloguing from a strategy of control
into one of dissent.

Self and body

In the early to mid-1860s, six decades before Sander’s project, American abolitionist and great nineteenth-
century thinker Frederick Douglass argued that photography should be used after the Civil War to affect
a new vision of the United States as a nation.17 Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and other forms of early
photographic technology, he believed, could break the optics of racism and picture instead a nation
based on the ideals of equality. In his 1861 speech “Pictures and Progress,” he asserted that “the moral
and social infuence of pictures” might shape national culture more than “the making of its laws.”18 Unlike
paintings and illustrations, which Douglass believed were always distorted by the visual stereotypes held
in the minds of artists (resulting in features such as exaggerated lips and low and depressed foreheads
that fed into popular myths regarding black ignorance), photography created opportunities for self-
presentation. Moreover, like many early commentators on photography, Douglass saw in the new
technology the potential to break down class divisions, exclaiming, “What was once the special and
exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl . . . may now
possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and court royalty . . . could purchase ffty
years ago.”19 And, as if to demonstrate how one might assert control over their own presentation and
public image, Douglass was a frequent and compelling model for early portraitists. In fact, he became
one of the most photographed men of the nineteenth century.
Yet Douglass’s dream for representational justice, which he believed the camera’s unwavering and
objective eye would bring, did not occur the way he might have imagined. Consider just the fact that for
many decades in the twentieth century, color flm was optimized for white skin color. Researcher Lorna
Roth explains the effect this has had on subjects of color, particularly in a North American setting. She
writes, “Problems for the African-American community . . . have included reproduction of facial images
without details, lighting challenges, and ashen-looking facial skin colours contrasted strikingly with the
whites of eyes and teeth.”20 This imposed bias notwithstanding, Douglass was not entirely wrong about
photography’s ability to help individuals self-fashion. From Douglass’s time until today, the camera has,
without doubt, served as an important tool for constructing identities, both of self and other.
In the more recent past, a number of artists, including Moroccan-born Lalla Essaydi (b. 1956) and
Cuban-American María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959), have combined performance with
photographic practice in order to describe the experience of living in brown and black skin. For example,

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Essaydi’s series Les Femmes du Maroc stages re-enactments of Orientalist paintings from the
nineteenth century, such as those made by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres or Jean-Léon Gérôme, in
order to confront past portrayals of Arab women as sexual objects for men’s fantasy. In these performance-
photographs, Essaydi arranges her models in positions inspired by nineteenth-century European
paintings, but then drapes their bodies in garments that are covered in calligraphy and writes on their
exposed skin with henna. The effect is stunning. It also gives voice to the depicted subjects, and exposes
the stereotypes upon which earlier representations—like those produced by Ingres and Gérôme—rested.
About her practice, Essaydi states, “In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses—as artist,
as Moroccan, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes.”21
Campos-Pons’s work is similarly informed by a structural condition of multiplicity and double-ness.
Campos-Pons’s great-grandfather was sent from Nigeria to Cuba in the middle of the nineteenth century,
during the fnal wave of the transatlantic slave trade, to work on La Vega sugar plantation. Campos-Pons
herself grew up in Matanzas province in a landscape populated by sugar plantations and though she
later moved to Havana, she was still surrounded by the creolized cultural legacy of Africa. In 1988
Campos-Pons left Cuba to study in the United States as an exchange student, and became a U.S.
permanent resident in 1991. Initially, she believed travel back and forth from the United States to Cuba
would be possible, but the U.S. embargo against Cuba, a policy that defned the two countries’
relationship in the late 1980s and 1990s, restricted her movement. This unforeseen complication
reinforced and deepened Campos-Pons’s diasporic identity, and her work often presents a clear and
thoughtful articulation of double displacement: black Africans’ forcible removal from Africa, and then
Compos-Pons’s own exile from Cuba, the nation of her birth.
In the series When I am Not Here/Estoy Allá (1994) (see Plate 5), Campos-Pons photographs herself
as she performs rituals connected to Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion derived from traditional Yoruba
beliefs. One diptych in this series references the river goddess Oshun, who is also associated with fertility
and motherhood. In the work’s left panel, Campos-Pons holds out a carved wooden boat as an offering
to Oshun; on the right, the image is similar, except that here Campos-Pons holds her hands above the
carved boat as honey—one of Oshun’s signs—drips from her fngers. Throughout When I am Not Here/
Estoy Allá Campos-Pons uses her body as a canvas, and in this diptych she transforms her naked torso
into an image of the sea by painting it with yellow dash marks over a blue feld. As her skin mutates from
biological matter to a painted surface, her body appears suspended in a state between stasis and
narrativity, between sculpture and painting; or, in the context of her work’s exilic thematics, between the
historical and the contemporary. The honey’s viscous consistency allegorizes this state of suspension,
while the wooden boats refer not only to Oshun and the Middle Passage, but also to the complex history
of the migration of Cubans to the United States since Castro’s revolution.
Earlier in the twentieth century, many photographers, especially women, including artists such as
Claude Cahun (1894–1954), Lotte Jacobi (1896–1990), and Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), had already
experimented with how performance before the camera’s lens might be used to challenge gender roles
and the normative frameworks of compulsory heterosexuality. Abbott, who was born in the United
States, in Cleveland, Ohio, moved to New York as a young woman in 1918 to study journalism at
Columbia University. Scornful of Columbia’s factory-style education and contemptuous of her classmates’
obsequious behavior, she soon dropped out of school, believing that her real education lay not in the
academy, but in the experiences of life in the city. Initially inspired by New York’s urban environment and
politicized arts scene, Abbott soon felt frustrated—as did many of her generation—by the city’s lack of
support for the arts and more generally by America’s increasingly commercial culture. In 1921, when an

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artist friend described Europe’s more artist-friendly environment, Abbott decided, without any real goal
in mind, to move to Paris. There she found a job working as a darkroom assistant to photographer Man
Ray. Eventually she opened her own studio, which became one of the most fashionable places in Paris
to have your likeness taken. Abbott’s ability to make the genre of portraiture socially relevant helped
distinguish her practice from others working around the same time. “There’s one thing I think about
photography,” Abbott said in 1978, refecting back on her practice, “it’s the most contemporaneous
medium there is, it’s what going on at the time that counts, the only thing you can photograph is now . . .
[and in the 1920s], people were very important . . .”22
Part of the “now-ness” of Abbott’s portraits involved showing gender play as lived experience, and her
photographs of fgures such as Jane Heap, the Princess Murat, Sylvia Beach, Isamu Noguchi, Foujita,
and James Joyce all reveal ongoing negotiations between feminine and masculine gender identifcations,
as well as the fuidity and contingency of individual identity generally. In Abbott’s portrait of Janet Flanner,
from 1926 (see Fig. 3.5), Flanner sits on the foor, with her legs loosely crossed and her left arm resting
naturally on her leg. Her back, which is slightly hunched, adds a palpable physical presence. The
informality of this gesture also speaks to the easy and frank relationship Abbott developed with many of
her sitters. Not shy or demure, Flanner’s gaze meets the viewer straight on with a self-assurance that
seems to declare, “I am here looking at you on my own terms.” Even the props—the top hat and
attached masks—seem to emphasize Flanner’s authentic presence as the masks’ two hollow sets of
eyes accentuate the intensity’s of Flanner’s own gaze.

Figure 3.5 Berenice Abbott, Janet Flanner, 1926. © Getty Images.

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Abbott never dressed or posed her subjects—the clothes they wore into her studio or themselves
brought there were the clothes in which Abbott photographed them. And the gestures or poses they
assume in conversation with Abbott are the gestures or poses presented in their portraits. This was
important not only to Abbott, but also to her sitters, as evidenced by the inscription Flanner wrote on the
back of a small proof from the top hat series. “Photo by Berenice Abbott . . . it is NOT,” Flanner declared,
“an Uncle Sam take off. . .it was Nancy Cunard’s father’s ascot topper which I ornamented with a cerise
and a black mask for fancy dress in public . . . dressed as a concierge . . . No disguise at all . . .”23
Rejecting the idea that her outft is a “disguise,” Flanner makes clear that she is not dressed up, not
mugging for the camera—but playing on, and with, the photograph’s projective surface in the same way
that she would play with and in the city’s streets.
When Abbott photographed people, her images situated subjects as beings who must negotiate
between one’s own sense of self and an outside world, and who, in this negotiated relationship, can
never fnd completion. This means, in a sense, that the subjects of Abbott’s portraits are always in
process or incomplete in that their identities depend on dialogue and exchange with others. In the
nineteenth century, images of the Countess de Castiglione (1837–99), made in collaboration with the
photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822–1913), reveal how photography has long been used to
similar ends, though in the case of the countess, this self-presentation is not explicitly subversive. Born
to an aristocratic Italian family, Virginia Oldoini entered into an arranged marriage at age seventeen to
Count Francesco Verasis da Castiglione. Sent to Paris in 1856 to strengthen Napoleon III’s interest in the
cause of Italian unifcation, she gained notoriety as Napoleon’s mistress, though was also associated
with wealthy bankers, politicians, and other prominent men of the day. Soon after arriving in Paris, the
countess visited the photographic studio of Mayer & Pierson, a visit that began her long collaboration
with Pierre-Louis Pierson and resulted in the production of over 400 portraits taken between 1856 and
1895. In the images made with Pierson, the countess’s displayed and eroticized body emerges as the
locus of her identity. Yet within this structure she also plays with expectations of self-presentation,
pictures herself as a woman of mystery, can be seen wearing extravagant gowns, and sometimes
assumes roles drawn from literature or her own imagination. Moreover, as photography historian Shawn
Michelle Smith notes, the 400-plus photographs of the countess “disrupt, in their very multiplicity, the
process whereby a singular self is constructed around a defnitive sign . . . Instead of attempting to
identify herself as a unique being in an archive of others, the Countess de Castiglione generated an
archive of multiple identities from her ‘singular’ self.”24
The result of this multiplicity is that Pierson’s images of the countess exist as a symbiosis of truth and
fctionality, a system full of contradictions and the ability to hide, mask, and transform their subject. In one
photograph taken between 1861 and 1867 (see Fig. 3.6), the countess stands centered in a room
elegantly dressed in white, gazing at herself in the mirror as she touches, and perhaps adjusts, her hair.
The photograph stages the countess as a subject interrupted, looking at herself, suspended between a
state of complete and incomplete self-presentation. The space of the photograph becomes a space of
splitting: the countess standing before the mirror and the countess’s image in the mirror form two
brackets demarcating a gap between selves, a gap that remains open. There is no experience of fnitude,
no ultimate person who the viewer gains access to because the subject emerges only through her
exposure to others. One might say that the danger in this loss of self to seemingly endless plurality and
relationality is a state of perpetual exile. Art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau references this danger
when she describes the countess as a “tabula rasa on whom is refected a predetermined and delimited
range of representations” that speak to the forces of patriarchy and capitalism that defned the era and

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Figure 3.6 Pierre-Louis Pierson, Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione, 1861–7. Gilman Collection, Gift of
The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

the countess’s social context.25 But where Solomon-Godeau understands the countess’s images as
obedient to a patriarchal gaze, Smith sees the countess’s performance before the camera and the
hundreds of resulting images as a disruptive strategy, an act of self-construction that—like Abbott’s
subjects—acknowledges the self’s basis in relationality and performativity even while holding on to some
idea of a unitary selfhood.26

FOCUS BOX 3
Photography of the Minamata disaster
Namiko Kunimoto

In postwar Japan, photography played an infuential political role in stirring local and
global concern about the “Minamata disaster.” The scandal in this case involved the
local Chisso Corporation, which had routinely and covertly pumped industrial waste
into the port of Minamata City in the 1950s. Photographs in local newspapers, in

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medical studies, and in books by photographers, such as Kuwabara Shisei (b. 1936)
and W. Eugene Smith (1918–78), raised public awareness of industrial pollution (and,
more specifcally, mercury poisoning) through haunting images of ravaged bodies. They
also fueled demands that the state and Japanese corporations be held responsible for
their actions.
The story of the Minamata disaster (I call it such here, for to call it simply Minamata
disease—the direct translation of Minamatabyō—casts the issue in narrow medical
terms and obscures the event’s direct ties to consequential choices made by the
government and Chisso) was fltered through a gendered frame.1 Minamata sickness
affected more men than women, since many fshermen worked directly with (and
subsisted on) contaminated fsh. It was young girls, however, who triggered community
attention. The frst photographs to appear in the local news were those of young girls
stricken by the disease. As early as 1957, a Kumamoto prefectural newspaper
published a photo of a naked two-year-old girl, under the headline “Minamata strange
disease: is manganese the cause?” The photograph is disquieting: the girl’s bare legs
are folded in a fetal-like position, and her eyes are blocked out in a strange attempt to
hide her identity. As these images circulated in national newspapers, the issue took
hold with activists and photojournalists.
Kuwabara Shisei (a photographer who had lost one eye as a child and was dedicated
to social justice issues) learned of the disease from a photograph and article in the
Weekly Asahi newspaper in 1960. His most powerful photographs were those that
captured the devastating effects of mercury poisoning on the body, and his work
became evidence of congenital defects before they had been medically recognized.
Kuwabara gained access to the Minamata Municipal Hospital and captured critical
photographs of patients that most newspapers were unable and unwilling to publish—
he even went so far as to discretely photograph documents that also became legal
evidence of Chisso’s culpability. His 1962 exhibition in Tokyo, Minamata: factory effuent
and coastal fsherman, marked a turning point of public awareness of the disease.
Kuwabara’s portrait of Matsunaga Kimiko, a girl who contracted the disease at age
six, is a haunting and beautiful portrait of victimhood. A wall-sized enlargement of the
image greets visitors to the Minamata Disease Memorial Museum, setting the tragic
tone for the permanent exhibition space. The grainy quality of the image suggests the
visual language of photojournalism, while the intense close-up on the face and body
exceeds the usual vantage point of typical photojournalism. Matsunaga’s hands are
deformed, clawlike, and unable to touch others in a normal manner. Her head is turned
to one side, her uneven gaze focused outward beyond the frame. The photograph is
titled A Living Doll, directly citing a foreboding headline about Matsunaga that

See Namiko Kunimoto, “Introduction,” in The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (Minneapolis:
1

University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

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appeared in the newspaper Asahi Shin- bun in 1960: “Girl is a living doll: unconscious
for four years.” Both the photograph and the news headline emphasize her liminal state
between life and death.
Yet unlike the newspaper image of the young girl, Kuwabara’s oeuvre as a whole
avoids the prurient gaze. His lens trains on the landscape of the fshing village, the shy
smiles of resilient victims passing fyers to young women celebrating Girl’s Day in their
luxurious kimonos and elegant hairstyles, and the grim unity of protestors fghting for
compensation into the 1970s. At times, he links the bodies of the fsh with those of the
fsherman; for example, in an untitled image from 1970, we view scores of sardines laid
out to dry, neatly organized on wooden pallets, their shiny scales alluring. Between the
numerous pallets and the sea, a fsherman with his back to us gazes pensively into the
waters. His boat is anchored, as though his day’s work was done, and a thirteen-year-
old boy named Hamada Ryōji (a congenital victim of the disease) stands nearby. The
cycle of predator and prey here implicates corporations and laborers, and the long-
term effects of environmental disaster are brought to the fore.
Kuwabara’s images made an impact on U.S. photographer W. Eugene Smith and his
wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, and they traveled to Minamata to photo-document the
disaster in the early 1970s. Their book, Minamata: Life, Sacred and Profane, is a
photo-narrative that captures the devastating effects of mercury poisoning on men,
women, and children. The book also operates as a position paper on photojournalism.
Smith opens with the following statement: “This is not an objective book. The frst word
I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.”2 Smith uses the
prologue to situate himself against an editor at Life magazine and argues that his
responsibilities lay only with his subjects and his readers. His photographs powerfully
convey his commitment to social responsibility in aesthetic terms.
Smith’s The Chisso Corporation: Waste-water, #1 is a striking photograph that
places Chisso (and the responsibility it bears) front and center. A large pipe is central to
the image, acting as a synecdoche for the company, and encouraging the viewer to
consider the origins of the disaster. In the book, the photograph of the pipe is placed
adjacent to an image of an anonymous victim, his or her head tilted back, raising a
disfgured hand that seems to point a crooked fnger towards the pipe on the next
page. The cause and effects of the Minamata disaster could not be clearer. Speckled
with rust, the corroded pipe itself seems to have fallen victim to the hazardous
pollutants it carries. Smith’s bold contrasts of black and white in the photograph are
ominous, as we observe the vast outfow of the pipe and are left to imagine its
destructive path. In the distance, Smith includes the calm waters, mountain range, and
a small boat, perhaps suggesting the larger stakes involved in the disaster.

2
W. Eugene Smith, Minamata (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Watson, 1975), prologue.

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Despite the persuasive political power of this photograph, it garnered little attention
in comparison to Smith’s Tomoko in the Bath, which author Jim Hughes has described
as Smith’s masterpiece and “the defning image in a lifetime of important photographic
images.”3 Tomoko in the Bath was taken in 1971, while the Smiths were living in
Minamata in a home close to the Kamimura family and were actively engaged in the
struggle for justice for Minamata Disease victims.4 The Kamimura family had agreed to
the photograph, which depicts Tomoko naked in the bathing chamber, being held
tenderly by her mother, Kamimura Ryoko, who gazes down into her eyes. The
vulnerable, deformed body of the then ffteen-year-old girl is brought into relief by soft
light from above, and the intimate positioning of the mother and child is reminiscent of
a pietà scene. The photograph was published in Life magazine in June 1972 as a
centerpiece in Smith’s photo essay on the Minamata disaster. Not long afterwards, the
ongoing local movement against Chisso and the Japanese state gained international
attention.
Not only did Tomoko’s image represent the disaster, but her living body did as well.
During the court case that stemmed from the disaster, for example, Tomoko was taken
to the Central Pollution Board to be witnessed. Activist patients demanded that the
board members “look, touch, hold this child, and remember the experience as they
evaluated human beings in dollars and cents.” Tomoko passed away in 1977 at age
twenty-one.
The media spotlight created tensions for Tomoko’s family, and in 1997 the family
requested that the image be removed from public circulation. Aileen Smith, who was
the copyright holder for the photograph following her husband’s death in 1978, met
with the family and agreed to their request. In response, several curators and photo-
historians wrote letters encouraging Aileen Smith to allow the image to circulate, while
others believed that since the photograph was taken inside the family home with their
permission, the family also had the right to withdraw that permission. Their change of
heart bespeaks their awareness of the easy slippage of such portraiture from a vehicle
for social change to an intimate family memorial to an objectifying image displayed
largely for shock value.
Other artists and photographers have added to the visual record of the Minamata
disaster, such as Tabe Mitsuko (b. 1933), one of the principal members of Kyūshū-ha
(the Kyūshū School), an avant-garde artist collective active in the nearby city of
Fukuoka from 1957 to 1970. Tabe’s 1957 mixed media work, Gyozoku no ikari (Anger of

3
Michael Sand, “Latent Image: Eugene Smith’s Controversial Minamata Photograph,” Aperture 160 (Summer 2000): 18.
4
For more on the decision to withhold copyright of Tomoko in the Bath, see Aileen Smith’s statement of July 5, 2001 in Aileen
Archive, http://archive.is/e84c. The family’s decision is also mentioned in Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby,
“Introduction,” in Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby (eds.), Image Ethics in the Digital Age (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003), xxiii. Note that Eugene and Aileen Smith read the family’s name as Uemura, but the family’s pronunciation
is Kamimura. Most descriptions of the photograph continue to refer to the family as Uemura.

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Fish Tribes), expresses rage at the treatment of the environment. The artist Jun
Nguyen-Hatsushiba (b. 1968) saw Smith’s photos as an art student in the United States,
and said it left a lingering impact. His Memorial Project Minamata: Neither Either nor
Neither, A Love Story is a four-channel video projection, created underwater at
Minamata Bay. Artists like Nguyen-Hatsushiba have demanded that the Minamata
disaster have a place in public memory.
From the time of its offcial recognition as a disease caused by pollution, the
Minamata disaster revealed the drive toward industrialization as ruthless and reckless,
with the poor and disenfranchised bearing the greatest risks. Photographers, in
partnership with activists and journalists, have sought to sound the environmental
alarm and prevent such tragedies from happening again. The photographic image has
been a vital tool in this mission.

Labor
Prior to photography’s invention, artists rarely represented workers, and when they did, those
representations tended to focus on laboring people as ethnographic evidence or social data.27 Seldom
were workers seen as individuals with personality and rich interior lives. To some extent, the camera’s
lens changed this. For example, Lewis Hine’s (1874–1940) stunning photographs from the frst decade
of the twentieth century of newsies in New York City, or of young children working in cotton mills in the
southern United States, or of worker injuries caused by unsafe industrial conditions in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, reveal how early practitioners aimed the camera at this previously underrepresented
population. Hine’s photographs were in fact so compelling that social reform campaigns frequently
mobilized his work to help pass legislation designed to improve the poor working conditions he exposed.
Early flm also focused its lens on the fgure of the worker, though with a different social agenda. In 1895,
shortly after the motion picture camera’s invention (a subject we return to in Chapter 12), French brothers
Louis and Auguste Lumière produced the forty-fve-second-long flm, Workers Leaving The Lumière
Factory in Lyon. The flm’s opening sequence—as the title suggests—features workers leaving the gates
of a factory presumably after a full day’s work, and then exiting the picture frame on both sides. This
theme of workers leaving together (indeed surging out of the workplace as one big group) makes it
appear as if they have something in common, that they are united. But as flmmaker Harun Farocki points
out, “The appearance of community does not last long. Immediately after the workers hurry past the
gate, they disperse to become individual people . . . their image as workers disintegrates.”28 Farocki also
calls attention to the fact that the cameras, aimed at the factory gates, serve as a precursor to today’s
surveillance cameras, which, designed to protect factories, warehouses, yards, fences, walls, and so on,
record in order to safeguard private property and monitor potentially “criminal” bodies, not to help build
worker solidarity.29 Thus, while early flmmakers and photographers periodically directed their cameras
toward the laboring subject, and while there are some positive pictures of and about work from the mid-
twentieth century, working-class solidarity and working-class labor has not emerged as a widespread or
popular theme.

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In recent years, however, as global economic policy has created greater wealth inequality, labor (both
productive and non-productive) has become an increasingly common subject among artists and
photographers. Allan Sekula’s Shipwreck and Workers, which portrays working-class people like
seafarers, metalworkers, and lumberjacks, provides one example. Jason Larkin’s Platinum (2014), which
pictures striking platinum miners in South Africa, provides another, as does Andreas Gursky’s large-scale
color pictures of factory interiors from the 1990s. Many scholars attribute the recent and dramatic
increase in wealth inequality to a late twentieth and early twenty-frst century neoliberal orientation.
Neoliberalism promotes deregulation, fnancial markets, and the privatization of the public sector.
Political theorist Wendy Brown provides one especially compelling critique of neoliberalism, arguing that
it fnancializes all aspects of one’s life. Neoliberalism, she contends, makes all conduct economic
conduct, and transforms all social practices and relationships into economic ones. In a neoliberal
economy, when individuals think about their education or retirement, or their health care, they are required
to do so in a way that demands participation in fnancial markets through mechanisms such as student
debt and bank loans, individual retirement savings plans, or insurance companies. The state no longer
delivers these types of services as part of a social contract; instead, individuals are on their own.
But neoliberal policies also affect everyday life in more granular ways. For instance, as governmental
responsibilities are transferred to the private sector, fnancial support for public transportation often
declines, leaving many individuals—especially in rural or poorer communities—isolated and without
access to effcient or reliable forms of transportation. Alejandro Cartagena (b. 1977), in his series Car
Poolers (2011–12) (see Fig. 3.7), examines some of the effects of these kinds of neoliberal policies on
working-class people. Cartagena was born in the Dominican Republic but lives and works in Monterrey,
Mexico. Monterrey, the capital of the northeastern state of Nuevo León and the third largest metropolitan
area in Mexico, is a huge industrial center, and often cited as the best city in Mexico for quality of life. Yet
the workers upon whom such growth rests do not always enjoy the benefts of the city’s economic
boom. Cartagena frst began to notice this discrepancy while on a commission from a research institute
about how people use the streets in Monterrey. “Construction workers,” he would later say, “were buying
houses an hour or more away from where they worked.” 30 With no available public transportation, this
observation led Cartagena to contemplate—and then photograph—how people depend on privately
owned cars and carpooling networks to get themselves to and from their jobs. His images thus capture
both the complexity of traveling to work in an overdeveloped city where the suburbs are expanding and
the strain such travel puts on the body.
What makes Cartagena’s pictures so visually striking, however, is that he chose to document this
travel from a bird’s eye view. Situated on an overpass above the highway taken by most construction
workers on their forty-fve to ninety-minute daily commute to work, Cartagena shot Car Poolers by
aiming his camera down at the traffc moving below him. As a result, his photographs capture fgures
(all men) laying low in the back of pick-up trucks, often asleep and huddled together, sometimes covered
in blankets, nestled in amongst the tools and other equipment needed for their jobs. Occasionally, a sole
fgure—such as the man dressed in a brown T-shirt positioned in the middle of Untitled Carpoolers
No 29—appears to look back at the camera with a disconcerting, maybe even aggressive, gaze. Despite
this particular look back, however, the power to look freely, and to assess and measure, remains with us,
the viewer. From this voyeuristic vantage point of above, Cartagena’s photographs not only expose the
bodies of workers, but also the unseen labor upon which Monterrey’s economy depends. His images
make literal the invisibility of the working class—men hidden in the fatbeds of pick-up trucks—in a
society that, Cartagena notes, increasingly values material wealth. The images in Car Poolers, which are

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Figure 3.7 Alejandro Cartagena, Untitled Carpoolers No 29, 2011–12. © Alejandro Cartagena. Courtesy of Kopeikin
Gallery, Los Angeles.

often displayed in a grid, do not tell a specifc story. Rather, each tightly framed photograph reveals just
a small bit of the complex scenario that plays out daily for the working class laboring under neoliberal
rationality.
If Car Poolers addresses productive labor in an era of neoliberal governance, then Nikki S. Lee’s
(b. 1970) performative mimicries of yuppie culture attend to the role played by non-productive labor,
that is, labor that adds value to objects not through construction or manufacturing, but from other types
of work such as advertising or branding. Typical yuppie jobs, like fnancial analyst or money manager,
might also be described as non-productive forms of labor. Born Lee Seung-Hee in South Korea, Lee
chose her American name—Nikki S. Lee—after moving to New York City in 1993. In New York, she
attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, assisted well-known photographer David LaChapelle (who
was working commercially at the time), and eventually earned her Master’s degree in photography at
New York University. In the late 1990s, when Lee began to pursue her own artwork, she quickly achieved
success with her Project Series (1997–2001), of which Yuppie Project (1998) is a part.31 In some ways,
the Project Series is like a sociological experiment. Before making any photographs, Lee would select a
subculture (such as yuppies), hang out with members of that group for roughly a month, adopt the
group’s codes of dress, assume their bodily gestures, learn their habits, and then “become them” by
mimicking their lives in her own. Her performances were recorded by a friend, who took informal
snapshots of Lee staging herself as a member of these various “other” communities.
In Yuppie Project (19) Lee sits dressed in a navy suit at a desk lined with computers and papers;
behind her we see two co-workers, and behind them rows of computers. Lee faces the camera while

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her colleagues appear to address some issue displayed on the computer screen in front of them. Other
Yuppie Project photographs show Lee similarly dressed shopping at upscale retail stores, lunching at the
World Financial Center, and drinking with other fnancial analysts. Generally, one of the amazing qualities
of the Project Series photographs is how seamlessly Lee integrates herself into the communities she
observes. In the Yuppie Project, however, including Yuppie Project (19), she appears slightly out of place
and uncomfortable in her own clothes. Her glance at the viewer in contrast to her co-workers’ glance at
the computer further separates Lee from her colleagues, as well as from the offce space behind her. One
consequence of this separation is that the suits and computers, the fancy lunches and brand names—
the yuppie lifestyle Lee exposes—comes to represent not so much mastery or upward mobility as it does
illusion and the pretense of being in control. The distance Lee creates between herself and the other
yuppies she depicts also, importantly, makes visible American whiteness and privilege as it exists in the
world of young Wall Street professionals, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. About the Yuppie Project,
art historian Maurice Berger writes, “Lee does not depict her white subjects as overtly bigoted or
malevolent, but the underlying racial tensions of her Wall Street experience slip into almost every frame
. . . she never quite fts into the yuppie milieu. Though she masquerades in the fashions, make-up, and
body language of white yuppies, her Asianness and her visceral discomfort read as distinctly as their
whiteness.”32
Lee’s Yuppie Project is notable in part, then, for how she makes whiteness visible in the workplace of
the privileged class. But even when whiteness is not so explicitly named, the difference or tension
between laboring bodies of color and white bodies is evident in a variety of photographic projects from
the nineteenth century to today. Tina Modotti’s Hands Resting on a Tool (1927) shows the dusty hands
of a peasant working in Mexico in the 1920s after the armed revolution. Berenice Abbott’s Dirt Farmer,
Hertzel, West Virginia (1935) depicts an African American man separated from the viewer (and Abbott,
the white photographer) by a fence that runs across the horizontal plane of the image. Or in the later
twentieth century, Alfredo Jaar’s Gold in the Morning (1985) or Sebastião Salgado’s project, Archeology
of the Industrial Age (1986–1992), both call attention to the arduous work performed by some of the
world’s poorest inhabitants, almost all of color, as well as to the spectacular and sometimes romantic
ways in which the global art market visualizes these bodies.
Another example are Marc Ferrez’s (1843–1923) photographs of enslaved individuals working on
coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley in Brazil in the nineteenth century. These images are instructive
for how they reveal, in an earlier moment, the way in which some photographs helped maintain an
established—and racist—social hierarchy. Ferrez was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, into a family of
artists who immigrated from France. After attending school in Paris, Ferrez returned to Rio de Janeiro in
1865 where he established a photography studio. First recognized for his images of Rio’s urban
landscape, in the early 1870s, Ferrez began to focus his lens on rural landscapes (often shot with a
panoramic camera) and on enslaved people working on coffee plantations, such as Slaves at a coffee
yard in a farm, Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo (1882) (see Fig. 3.8). This photograph is extraordinary in its
orderliness: the overseer on the left-hand side of the image points out toward the feld of workers, both
men and women, who, staged in a grid-like formation, all appear engaged in their work, whether that be
carrying baskets or raking the earth. One woman, in the center, nurses her child surrounded by other
workers. Ferrez thus represents the plantation as a modern space of production in which the confict
between a landowner’s fantasy of industrial rationality and the violence of the slaveholding reality is
completely repressed. As scholar Mariana de Aguiar Ferreira Muaze observes, the “pacifed slave”
depicted in many of Ferrez’s shots is protected from social confict, abolitionist ideas, and slave

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Figure 3.8 Marc Ferrez, Slaves at a coffee yard in a farm, Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo, 1882. Marc Ferrez/Gilberto
Ferrez Collection/Instituto Moreira Salles.

resistance.33 She further notes that also omitted from view is the evidence of violence—such as scars,
burns, broken limbs, branding marks, and health problems—that was common in newspaper
descriptions, announcements, and inventories of the bodies of enslaved individuals.34
Photographs such as Ferrez’s Slaves at a coffee yard downplay the brutal and inhumane conditions
wrought by slavery and focus instead on the institution’s economic viability. Yet viewers looking at this
image today, or others like it, can (and have a responsibility to) construct a different historical narrative
that accounts for the mix of brutality, racial injustice, and coercion and punishment that the slave–master
relationship entails. Just as artists like Yee I-Lann or Sammy Baloji return to nineteenth-century
ethnographic images in order to challenge Western imperialist ways of looking at and understanding the
world, contemporary spectators can see Ferrez’s visual constructions of an ordered slavery as evidence
of a system in peril. Photography played a role in maintaining the slave-owner’s visual discourse, but
enslaved individuals also glance back at the camera, and it is this returned look that allows us to see
these fgures too as active social agents.

Summary
• A number of contemporary artists appropriate the conventions established by nineteenth-
century ethnographic photographers in order to disrupt the racist assumptions and myth of
objectivity that such practice professed.

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• From the nineteenth century until today subjects have performed in front of the camera in
attempt to take control of their public image and self-presentation.
• Only occasionally did early photographers take pictures of workers or record the toll that
labor can take on the human body. As wealth inequality increases in the later twentieth and
early twenty-frst century, however, an increasing number of photographers have begun to
picture workers and working conditions in order to reveal the effects of that inequality on
the body.

Discussion points
• Can photography ever be used to measure and assess bodies in a manner that does not
depend on or reproduce stereotypes?
• How can photographic practice participate in the construction of one’s self-identity?
• How has photography been used to surveil workers?
• How has neoliberalism changed the way photographers depict workers?

Additional case studies

Diane Arbus (1923–71)
Dana Claxton (b. 1959)
Lala Deen Dayal (b. 1844, d. unknown)
Adolphe Duperly (1801–65)
Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904)
Delilah Montoya (b. 1955)
Daniela Rossell (b. 1975)
Lorna Simpson (b. 1960)
Ilona Szwarc (b. 1984)
Pinar Yolaçan (b. 1981)

Notes
1 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–69.
2 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 7.
3 Benjamin Young, “Arresting Figures,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 78–115.
4 Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerrotypes.” American Art 9, no. 2
(Summer 1995): 45.
5 John Lamprey, “On a Method of Measuring the Human Form, for the Use of Students in Ethnology,” Journal of
the Ethnological Society 1 (1869): 85. See also Philippa Levine, “States of Undress: Nakedness and the
Colonial Imagination,” Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 189–219.
6 Lamprey, “On a Method of Measuring the Human Form,” 85.

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7 Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2002), 11–12.
8 Yee I-Lann, “About the Series,” http://www.silverlensgalleries.com/artists/i-lann-yee/series/study-of-lampreys-
malayan-male.
9 Levine, “States of Undress,” 192.
10 Levine, “States of Undress,” 215–16.
11 See “Contested Terrains: Sammy Baloji,” Tate Modern, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/
exhibitionseries/project-space/project-space-contested-terrains/contested-2.
12 “Contested Terrains.”
13 Sandrine Colard, “New Perspectives in Photographic Portraiture from Africa,” lecture at Beyond the Frame:
Contemporary Photography from Africa, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, October 21,
2016, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wallach/exhibitions/Expanded%20Subject_Beyond%20The%20Frame.html.
14 Julian Stallabrass, “What’s in a Face: Blankness and Signifcance in Contemporary Art Photography,” October
122 (Fall 2017): 72.
15 Stallabrass, “What’s in a Face,” 84.
16 In 1944, Allied bombs destroyed more negatives.
17 See Sarah Lewis, “Vision and Justice: Guest Editor’s Note,” Aperture 223 (Summer 2016), https://aperture.org/
blog/vision-justice/. Douglass, “The Negro as Man,” probably written in the mid-1850s, “Pictures and
Progress,” mid-1860s.
18 Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in John W. Blassingame (ed.), The Frederick Douglass Papers,
series 1, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 456.
19 “Pictures and Progress,” Library of Congress, http://frederickdouglass.infoset.io/islandora/object/
islandora%3A2179#page/3/mode/1up.
20 Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies,” Canadian Journal of
Communication 34, no. 1 (2009): 117.
21 See “Lalla Essaydi,” http://lallaessaydi.com/1.html.
22 This is Abbott’s response to the question “Why did you take portraits?” Berenice Abbott, Learning From
Performers, 1978 Harvard Interview, Archives of American Art.
23 Photo in private collection; collector shared this information with me in November 2002.
24 Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 97.
25 See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 105, 69.
26 Smith, American Archives, 103.
27 Phillip Kennicott, “The American Worker: Exploited from the beginning,” Washington Post, November 20, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-american-worker-exploited-from-the-
beginning/2017/11/20/7ae8fe6a-c890-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.
ca985040016a.
28 Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Harun Farocki: Working on the
Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 239.
29 Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” 238.
30 Alejandro Cartagena quoted in David Rosenberg, “Spying on Mexico’s Carpoolers,” February 13, 2013, http://
www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/02/13/alejandro_cartagena_car_poolers_examines_the_intersection_
between_the_personal.html.
31 Examples of other subcultures performed by Lee in her Projects series include punk, hip hop, tourism, and
seniors, among others.

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32 Maurice Berger, “Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee Yuppie Project,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 54.
33 Mariana de Aguiar Ferreira Muaze, “Violence appeased: Slavery and coffee raising in the photography of Marc
Ferrez (1882–1885),” Revista Brasileira de História 37, no. 74 (January–April 2017): 33–62, http://dx.doi.
org/10.1590/1806-93472017v37n74-02.
34 Muaze, “Violence appeased,” 51.

Selected further reading

Braun, Marta. “The Expanded Present: Photographing Movement.” In Ann Thomas (ed.), Beauty of Another Order:
Photography in Science, 150–85. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press in association with
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997.
Corwin, Sharon, Jessica May, and Terri Weissman. American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott,
Evans, and Bourke-White. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Didi-Huberman, George. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1992.
Fusco, Coco and Brian Wallis, eds. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. New York: International
Center of Photography/Harry N. Abrams, 2003.
Kemp, Martin. “‘A Perfect and Faithful Record’: Mind and Body in Medical Photography before 1900.” In Ann
Thomas ed., Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, 120–49. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press in association with National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997.
King, J. C. H. and Henrietta Lidchi, eds. Imaging the Arctic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press,
2006.
Poole, Debora. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997.
Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds. The Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Reader. New York:
Routledge, 2004.
Smith, Marquard and Joanne Morra, eds. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural
Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

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 4
MAPPING THE LAND

In 1996, Santu Mofokeng (b. 1956) began work on a series of photographs titled Chasing Shadows.
One picture from this series, Dikgoro with Washing Line (see Fig. 4.1), depicts a shallow, rocky place that
Mofokeng tells us was sometimes used by local inhabitants as a prayer site. In this image, however, we
see no people, only a washing line of white shirts and other garments hovering in the air, occupying the
place like familial ghosts or spirits overseeing their home. This photograph, as well as others in his
Chasing Shadows series, was taken in South Africa near the border of Lesotho—a country whose
history is intertwined with the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. During the years of apartheid (1948–
1991), South Africa’s racially discriminatory government claimed, among other things, that black people
belonged in spaces geographically separate from whites, and it passed a series of laws zoning all towns
and cities as white-only areas. This practice effectively created debilitating systems of spatial oppression
and forced black South Africans to live in separate regions like Lesotho, or other economically deprived
areas deemed “homelands.”1 From these “other” places, men would travel as part of a migrant labor
force, often leaving families behind.

Figure 4.1 Santu Mofokeng, Dikgoro with Washing Line, from the series Chasing Shadows, 1996. © Santu
Mofokeng Foundation. Courtesy of Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg.

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Mofokeng’s photograph does not overtly reference this history, and none of the photographs from his
Chasing Shadows series show the degrading living conditions that were and still remain a part of
apartheid’s legacy. Instead, Mofokeng engages the history and legacy of apartheid by photographing
places affected by it as sites of memory and spiritual signifcance, a process he hopes will contribute to
a reclaiming of traumatic space. While the actual location represented in Dikgoro with Washing Line
might remind viewers of how apartheid-era laws erased and removed people from their homes and land,
and denied people of color full access to space, to law, and human rights, Mofokeng does not picture
this directly. Rather, he shows the border area between South Africa and Lesotho as a spiritual home.
Think again of how the garments foat above the space, flling it with a sense of history and the possibility
of salvation.
Chasing Shadows as well as other projects by Mofokeng, such as Train Churches (1986) or Nightfall
of the Spirit (2002), thus reveal the way in which landscape imagery is not only—or not necessarily—
about natural beauty. Photographs of the land are also about human history. This chapter takes up how
landscape imagery is inextricably bound to the world of human politics and culture, including struggles
over national borders, climate and ecological challenges, and history. As historian Finis Dunaway explains,
“nature is an important actor in human history.”2

Borders
Santu Mofokeng’s photograph Dikgoro with Washing Line provides one example of how histories of
struggle and confict are embedded within seemingly “natural” scenes. Similarly, national borders—the
lines that divide nations—can also appear “natural.” But borders are not “natural,” nor are they self-
evident or intrinsic to countries; human beings create borders through acts of negotiation, war, and
politics. It is through these processes, moreover, that borders create inequalities, obstacles to travel, and
(for better or worse) disruptions to or avenues for the easy fow of goods. As a number of contemporary
politicians around the globe have recently made clear, borders are also fundamental to arguments about
sovereignty—the power and authority of a governing body over itself—and can be used to promote
nationalist, often racist, discourse.
For more than a decade, Parisian-born, Moroccan-educated photographer Yto Barrada (b. 1971) has
focused on the border between Europe and Africa. Her project, A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project
(1998–2004), documents life in Tangier, a Moroccan port city at the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait of Gibraltar
is a small space—only 8.7 miles wide at its narrowest point—that separates Morocco and the African
continent from Spain and the rest of Europe. Because of its location and size, the Strait of Gibraltar has,
for hundreds of years, been used as a passageway between Africa and Europe both for trade and as a
site of diplomacy. In recent history, it has become a popular gateway for the migration of Africans into
Europe. However, while Europeans come to Morocco all the time as tourists, and ferries can cross the
Strait in as little as thirty-fve minutes, Moroccans and other Africans do not enjoy the same mobility or
freedom of movement. For this reason, the Strait of Gibraltar has also become known as a one-way street.
Playing with the concepts of border, travel, and a one-way street, Barrada’s photograph “Le Détroit”—
Avenue d’Espagne, Tangier, from 2000 (which appears on the cover of this volume), depicts an actual
street in Tangier: Avenue d’Espagne, from an oblique, bird’s eye angle. At the top of the picture, a number
of pedestrians stand in or walk across the street while a young boy holds a toy boat towards the bottom.
The image includes very little other contextual information; indeed, the street flls the majority of the frame.

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It does so, however, in such a way that the concrete ground starts to look itself like a body of water. In an
essay on Barrada, art historian T. J. Demos further notes how the toy boat in the corner of the image
consumes and obscures the boy who holds it, dislocating him from the frame of representation. The boy
is seen and not seen, neither his body nor his face are fully discernible. It is as if the dream of crossing the
Strait—not only for this photographed child, but also for all those who travel to Tangier for the purpose of
crossing—has blurred the boy’s identity and in so doing separated him from his community.3
Girl in Red, Tangier (1999), also from Life Full of Holes, similarly plays with this idea of hiding or purging
one’s identity in order to move from one geopolitical context, one landscape, to another. The image
shows a woman dressed in red facing a wall, the pattern of her dress merging with the tiled pattern on
the wall she faces. A complex design results: the woman’s contour begins to ficker back and forth from
positive to negative shape, from presence to absence. She is, like the child holding the boat, simultaneously
there and not there. In a 2006 interview, Barrada commented on how those who attempt to cross the
Strait frequently hide their identities, effectively articulating in words what her images do visually: “There’s
a whole new vocabulary that’s invented around [crossing the Strait],” she says, “‘to cross’ is called ‘to
burn’ because you burn your past, your identity, your papers, because if you’re caught on the other side
and you’re from Algeria you may get permission to stay, because of the political situation; if you’re from
Morocco you’re sent back right away.”4 The wall in Girl in Red or the street in Le Détroit thus function like
borders between countries. They are barriers, but also imaginary dream sites that represent spaces of
potential escape. This duality—escape and obstruction—governs the imaginary space of Barrada’s Life
Full of Holes series, and emphasizes the spatial insecurity that comes with refugee existence.5
Emily Jacir (b. 1972) is another artist whose work addresses the way political borders affect how
humans experience, use, and understand the land on which they live. Jacir, a Palestinian-American artist,
was born in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Occupied Territories refer to land
captured and occupied by Israel in the War of 1967, and consist of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and
the Gaza Strip. Because Israel imposes stringent travel restrictions on Palestinians in these spaces,
individuals holding Palestinian passports are frequently barred from entering Israel, moving between
countries, or even just crossing the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jacir, however, holds an American passport,
and so has the mobility and freedom to travel between places with an ease not granted those holding
Palestinian papers. Jacir’s project, Where We Come From (2001–3), investigates the discrepancy between
her ability to move across land and borders with others’ inability, as well as the impact such difference has
on one’s desires and experience of the world; it is, in essence, a project about the complexity of exile.
To make Where We Come From, Jacir asked more than thirty Palestinians, living within and outside
the Occupied Territories and Israel, this question: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine,
what would it be?” After gathering responses, Jacir carried out the requests, taking a color photograph—
often of herself—as she did so. A black-and-white text panel, written in English and Arabic (and
occasionally Hebrew), accompanies each image, explaining what wish Jacir fulflled and for whom. Some
requests are practical: “Go to the Israeli post offce in Jerusalem and pay my phone bill.” Others, more
affective: “Go to my mother’s grave in Jerusalem on her birthday and put fowers and pray.” But all, in
some way, express the pain of distance and forced absence from a land one considers home: “Go to
Bayt Lahia and bring me a photo of my family, especially my brother’s kids.” Or even more explicitly: “Go
to Jaffa and fnd my family home and take a picture. As a refugee, I am denied a visit to my country by
the Israelis, who control all borders . . .”
The task of carrying out these various requests led Jacir into a kind of protracted performance of wish
fulfllment by proxy.6 Over and over again, in Where We Come From Jacir comes to occupy, virtually, the

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position held by another who is the subject of some privation, either physical or emotional. Two requests,
from subjects identifed as Zina and Maha, ask Jacir to behold the Mediterranean Sea from atop a
mountain. “I always wanted to cherish the view of Palestine and the Mediterranean from the top of Mount
Carmel in Haifa,” Zina exclaims. Or Maha’s instructions to Jacir read, “Climb Mount Carmel in Haifa and
look at the Mediterranean from there. I have always dreamed of climbing Mount Carmel, but as a West
Banker I cannot enter the 1948 areas.” To look at the photograph Jacir took as she fulflled these
requests—and she uses the same image for both—is to understand the subjects’ yearning to witness
this view (see Fig. 4.2). Divided into four regions—the dark green land of the mountain; the white and
gray architecture of the port city; the deep expansive blue of the sea; and the cobalt blue sky—the
photograph speaks plainly of a site layered with history. But more signifcantly, the image displays a view
of the city of Haifa, which is located in a country known for its politicized and often deadly borders, here
without obstruction or violence. Moreover, because Jacir frames the shot such that the spectator
identifes with the camera’s viewpoint, it feels as though we have been incorporated into the scene, and,
in manner not so different than Mofokeng’s Dikgoro with Washing Line, as if we are foating above.
Everyone Jacir spoke to faced severe limitations on their movement, many of whom, living abroad,
had been denied access to their places of birth for years. In this, the question posed by Jacir—“What
can I do for you anywhere in Palestine?”—highlights postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s description of
exile as representing “the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place, between self and
its true home,” a rift that separates one from “the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.”7 The
land of one’s birth, the “where we come from” in Jacir’s piece, can only be a place of memory, imagined
and dreamt about, but not physically occupied, at least not by those responding to Jacir’s inquiry.
Like Jacir’s Where We Come From, the images in Joseph Koudelka’s (b. 1938) photobook Wall:
Israel and Palestinian Landscapes, published by Aperture in 2013, record how the Middle East’s fraught
political history registers itself on the natural landscape. Best known for his series of images of the Soviet
invasion of Prague in 1968 and as a member of the photojournalist organization Magnum, Koudelka
made Wall after traveling to East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and various other Israeli
settlements along the border between Israel and Palestine between 2008 and 2012. His focus was the

Figure 4.2 Emily Jacir, Where We Come From, detail (Zina), 2001–3. Thirty framed prints, thirty-two mounted
photos, one video. © Emily Jacir. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

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construction and effects of the border wall Israel began erecting in the early 2000s. The book begins with
a timeline detailing the controversial wall’s construction (Israel calls it a “security fence,” Palestinians call
it the “apartheid wall”) and is followed by a series of beautifully rendered panoramic black and white
images. Captions, which specify location and provide facts about the wall’s building and its effect on the
surrounding land and people, accompany the photographs.
In one of the earlier photographs in the book, Shu’fat Refugee Camp, overlooking Al ‘Isawiya, East
Jerusalem (2009) (see Fig. 4.3), the border wall swoops down from the background and divides the
foreground space almost exactly in half. On the right sit buildings of a refugee camp; on the left a dirt road
runs alongside the border fence leading toward a home in the distance. Throughout the book as a whole,
the separation barrier functions alternatively as fgure and ground, but here in this image, it appears as
fgure and edge—dividing, partitioning, and regulating space (even the space of the photograph, which
it splits in two). The caption reads, “If completed as planned, the Wall will be approximately seven
hundred kilometers long, more than twice the length of the 320-kilometer 1949 Armistice Line or ‘Green
Line’ between Israel and the West Bank.”8 The “Green Line” refers to a series of agreements signed in
1949 between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria that ended the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and
established Israel’s borders. Present only as text, this history feels absent from the photograph. Missing,
too, is any mention of the fact that the barrier wall caused serious problems for this particular village.
Because the wall’s route placed the refugee camp in the West Bank even though it is offcially part of the
Jerusalem municipality, a complication leading to serious issues concerning the availability of basic
human services such as water, garbage collection, and regular access to medical care.
The fact that the Shu’fat image is devoid of people or any signs of active life seems to push further
aside questions of contemporary politics. This absence, combined with the photograph’s formal beauty
and Koudelka’s choice to use black and white, makes the picture feel like it is speaking from the past—
formal and distant.9 Or as art historian Kristin Romberg has observed, “The temporality of Wall . . . is
more future perfect than present; the mood, more Greek tragedy than twenty-four-hour news cycle.
Devoid of heroes and martyrs, the human confict driving the wall’s construction already seems petty. The
wall goes up like a ruin in reverse.” Romberg goes on to argue, however, and this is signifcant, that the
“dramatic mood and epic timescale” of the images in Wall, when placed in tension with the book’s
impassive news-like captions, generate their own kind of political power.10 Thus, the very quality—the

Figure 4.3 Joseph Koudelka, Shu’fat Refugee Camp, overlooking Al ‘Isawiya, East Jerusalem, 2009. © Josef
Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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formal beauty—that can make it seem like history is missing from these images might also, ultimately, be
the source of their political address. That is, the formal tensions in Koudelka’s work open up a space for
contemplation on the same themes of territorial division and human privation that the work of someone
like Emily Jacir does, just on a different register. Whereas Jacir’s work incorporates the spectator into the
scene as if standing in the negative space of another’s life, Koudelka’s photographs lack emotional
immediacy and move the viewer back into a more meditative state.
Photography’s relationship to the formation and experience of national borders and territorial expansion
has a long history that predates any twentieth- or twenty-frst century concern. In the nineteenth century,
just decades after photography’s “invention,” the British and French deployed photographers to their
colonies and throughout the world as a way to mark space and claim ownership over lands and people.
Around the same time in the United States, cameras and photographs became key tools in the promotion
of Manifest Destiny—the claim that the westward expansion of the U.S. was not only justifed in social,
economic, and political terms, but also destined by God. William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan,
and Carleton Watkins are among the nineteenth-century photographers who, working for the U.S.
government as well as private developers, participated in geological surveys designed to navigate
western lands and help build (and reinforce) the legitimacy of the settler state. Photographers who
participated in these expeditions played various roles, but most frequently used their skills to document
specimens (e.g. rocks and natural formations too big to bring home), record possible land routes for
future travelers, and sometimes, employing an anthropological lens, take pictures of native people.
One of the most important tasks performed by these nineteenth-century survey photographers was
the imaging of wilderness itself—that is, the representation of vast geological wonders in an imagined
untouched and trackless land. On the one hand, such photographs were used to frame the U.S. as a
rugged, growth-oriented country distinct from Europe. Europe—this line of thinking implied—may have
cathedrals that are thousands of years old, but California has giant sequoia trees.11 On the other hand,
the very idea of wilderness—the idea that space exists without human settlement—suggested that there
is endless opportunity for expansion, a belief critical to the establishment of a settler colonial state,
which is a form of colonialism that functions on the sustained dispossession of indigenous people and
their land. Furthermore, when survey photographers did picture traces of indigenous life or Native pasts,
it was usually presented as the inherited property of settler society.12
Timothy O’Sullivan’s (c. 1840–82) image Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico (1873)
(see Fig. 4.4) possesses many of the qualities described above. O’Sullivan shot this image while working on
a survey led by Lieutenant George Wheeler of the Army Corps of Engineers, and in it, a patchy foreground
of rocks and shrubs gives way to a hugely expansive rock façade notable for the vertical striations on its
surface. In the middle of the image sits a dilapidated wall, ruins from an American Indian structure. Two tiny
fgures can be seen climbing the wall, their forms echoed by another pair of fgures standing on more ruins
below. Ropes, necessary for the climb, connect the two pairs of bodies, and in their diagonal pull, also
mirror the striations on the rocks above. Photography historian Robin Kelsey has argued that together, the
ropes and the rock’s striations fatten the image, making it appear more like a diagram than a traditional
western scene with recessional space and penetrating line of sight that pierces the landscape and leads the
viewer in.13 Thus, in at least two ways, the Ancient Ruins photograph reveals how expansionist images from
the nineteenth century were governed by the logics of possession and settler belonging. First, it charts, like
a diagram, European-American exploratory penetration of the West as nothing more than a vigorous climb
(think of the men ascending the ruins); and second, it links settler exploration to the inevitability and grandeur
of the geological process (think of how the climbing ropes mirror the striations on the rocks above).

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Figure 4.4 Timothy O’Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico, 1873. Digital image courtesy of
Getty’s Open Content Program.

Among the most precious resources recorded by photographers on survey explorations of the
American West, then, was that of the West itself. That is, the West as an open space, forever available
for exploration and conquest, regardless of any indigenous life or geologic obstacle. An image of the
ideal American male—the rugged individual/cowboy, capable of the kind of vigorous climb pictured in
O’Sullivan’s Ancient Ruins photograph—accompanies this notion of the West as a space of unfettered
exploration and becomes so ingrained in the American imaginary that the image persists well into the
twentieth century, past the time of any actual U.S. territorial expansion. This disjunct, between the fantasy
of endless expansion and wilderness and the reality of cowboy life, results in the later twentieth century
in a new kind of exploration imagery—one that expresses anxiety rather than confdence about the
future. The most famous example of this might be the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin flm of Bigfoot scampering
around the northern Californian woods.14 This short flm, which was staged by its authors, spawned a
near cottage industry of Bigfoot photographs, typically consisting of individuals pointing to empty sites in
wooded locations where they claim to have spotted the mysterious Sasquatch beast.15 Though there is
a certain bathos in such imagery of fgures pointing to nothing, perhaps the fnal blow to the romanticized
vision of the American cowboy comes in the 1980s with a series titled Cowboys produced by photographer
(and member of the Pictures Generation, discussed more extensively in Chapters 2 and 8), Richard

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Prince (b. 1949). To make his cowboy photographs, Prince rephotographed a number of Marlboro
cigarette advertisements that featured a cowboy, known as the Marlboro man, traversing mountainous
landscapes on horseback. Prince removed all the text and reframed the images as high art photographs,
and without text or product, the pictures appear more nostalgic than promotional. Their concentrated
color and grainy surface now seeming to advertise not the possibility of a rugged life in western lands,
but rather the fear of a vanishing frontier and the collapsed dream of endless expansion.16

Ecology
Just as human decision determines and regulates national borders, so too does it affect and change the
natural world. Though not always immediately apparent, “natural” landscapes—of mountains, sunsets,
oceans, and so on—are shaped as much by human life and human actions as they are by forces beyond
human control; neither the natural nor the human world exists without infuence from the other. To
account for the profound impact that humans have had on the planet, including rising ocean waters,
hotter weather, and stronger and more erratic storms, some scientists, as well as scholars from emerging
felds such as the environmental humanities, have designated our contemporary geological epoch as the
Anthropocene. The term refers to a new era, most often considered to have begun in the mid-twentieth
century, in which humanity’s impact on the planet is so profound that it determines the Earth’s natural
systems and geological conditions.17 It should be noted that a number of ecologically-minded thinkers
have challenged this term, arguing, among other things, that it universalizes responsibility for climate
change—placing it in the hands of all humans everywhere—when in fact developed and colonial nations,
as well as fossil fuel corporations, have contributed more to the problem than less developed and
indigenous nations. Similarly, some feel the term universalizes the impacts of climate change, as if
everyone will be equally affected, when in reality climate change carries differential impacts according to
geography, class, economic resources, and race.18
Subankar Banerjee (b. 1967), an Indian-born American photographer, writer, and activist makes
work that not only addresses the physical and social effects of climate change, but also recognizes
some of its differential impacts. Banerjee, who abandoned his career as a research scientist in 2000 in
order to photograph the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, focuses on the shifting patterns
of non-human life in the Arctic caused by climate change. Banerjee’s images are also remarkable for the
way in which he creates non-objectifed images of animals, representing both the meaningful relationships
that exist in non-human (animal) communities, and the relationships that such communities have with
humans. One strategy Banerjee uses to achieve this is to photograph the tracks and traces that non-
human species draw into the Earth while migrating. Thinking outside any idea of human exceptionalism,
these marks come to function in Banerjee’s work as a kind of speech—even a kind of articulation of the
animals’ rights to the land. For instance, Caribou Migration I, from 2002 (see Fig. 4.5), depicts, from an
aerial perspective, pregnant caribou migrating across the ANWR’s Colleen River Valley. The image wavers
between abstraction and realism, the white feld of snow and dark brown dots only revealing themselves
as land and a pack of traveling caribou upon close and sustained inspection. Notable too is the way in
which the caribou’s footprints draw lines across the surface of the image in a manner similar to the rope
and striations of O’Sullivan’s Ancient Ruins image. Here though what marks the ground, and claims its
right, is non-human life, thus disrupting the settler colonial grammar of place as it is articulated by
O’Sullivan’s photograph.

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Figure 4.5 Subhankar Banerjee, Caribou Migration 1, 2002. © Subhankar Banerjee. Courtesy of the artist.

Color also plays a role in how Banerjee seeks to reorient his viewer’s sense of place and picture Arctic
sites as decolonized spaces. For instance, he often organizes his work he often organizes his work by
color as a way to help viewers unlearn the misconception that the Arctic is a hostile, uninhabitable,
bleached-out wasteland. Banerjee explains:

In the popular conception around the world, the Arctic is primarily thought to be a space of “snow and
ice” and “ice and snow.” In the words of pro-oil-development USA politicians, the Arctic has been
variously described as “fat white nothingness,” “frozen wasteland of snow and ice” and “barren
wasteland”. . . I began to ask: Can I make a photograph with only brown; white and brown; only grey;
white, grey and brown; white, blue and brown; only green; green and blue? . . . Colour, I thought,
would be a wonderful visual language to help us unlearn some of these intolerances.”19

Such an approach situates the Arctic not as vast other-land, but as an “eco-cultural” space in which
animals and people—and some of Banerjee’s ANWR images also feature Native Inupiat and Gwich’in
people—cohabit the land and are interdependent.

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FOCUS BOX 4: Ecocritical voices

Peripatetic photography—crossing borders, building bridges
Subhankar Banerjee

Since 2001, I have been encouraging residents of the lower latitudes to consider
how the Arctic is connected to their own lives and places of residence and, in so
doing, slowly transform how we speak about the Arctic—no longer as the far north
but instead as a near north. Recently, after sixteen years of telling others why “they”
should care about the Arctic, I began to ask myself why “I” care about the Arctic so
much. This happened because, after working independently for sixteen years, in 2016 I
joined the University of New Mexico (UNM) faculty and had to think about the classes I
might like to teach and other activist and scholarly activities in which I might like to
engage.
In the spring of 2017, I taught my frst class at UNM: “Integrative Ecology and Social
Transformation.” The class was cross-listed with eleven different departments and
programs: American studies, arts, biology, communication and journalism, community
and regional planning, geography and environmental studies, Native American studies,
public administration, religion, sustainability, and the Honors College. Thirty-nine
students from ffteen departments registered. That semester I also convened a four-day
interdisciplinary public forum called “Decolonizing Nature: Resistance/Resilience/
Revitalization” (http://decolonizingnature.unm.edu), which brought to Albuquerque over
thirty speakers from diverse academic disciplines, including, art, architecture, science,
religion, and the humanities, as well as environmental conservation and indigenous
human rights activists. How does someone like me, who has no academic training in
arts or humanities, dare venture into such an interdisciplinary realm? The answer lies in
what I call “peripatetic photography.”1
Peripatetic photography is built on the foundation of “The Itinerant Languages of
Photography.” Established by Eduardo Cadava, Gabriela Nouzeilles, and their colleagues,
The Itinerant Languages of Photography was a three-year transcontinental
interdisciplinary project that examined for the frst time the movement of photographs
across space, time, media, and genres. The project hosted several symposia in Argentina,
Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, and culminated, in 2013, with an exhibition at
the Princeton University Art Museum. As Cadava and Nouzeilles explain in the exhibition
catalogue, “The phrase ‘itinerant languages’ refers to the various means whereby
photographs not only ‘speak’ but also move across historical periods, national borders,

1
In 2017, I introduced the term “peripatetic photography” in two separate lectures: frst, at the “Extraction Speaker Series”
organized by the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California-Santa Cruz in February, and then at the symposium
“Art of Environmental Justice in an Expanded Field” at Princeton University in April.

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and different mediums.” In its focus on how the photographs “redefne themselves and
take on different and expanding signifcances”2 as they migrate across time, space, and
media, the attention of The Itinerant Languages of Photography remained largely focused
on the photographs and not on the spaces to which the photographs migrate.
Peripatetic photography, on the other hand, draws attention to the spaces to which a
photograph migrates and encourages us to critically engage with those spaces. To
mark the distinction, I articulate peripatetic photography in this manner: A photograph
is not merely an object on a wall, or on a printed page, or online, that may induce
pleasure or spark intrigue and other human emotions, but more importantly, it is a
portal to activism and knowledge—collaborative social-environmental activism and the
interdisciplinary production of knowledge. The aim of peripatetic photography is to
apprehend the signifcance of cross-pollination of knowledge and practices across
various spaces into which photographs migrate across time.
The migrant lives of Caribou Migration I and its two variants, Caribou Migration II
and Caribou Migration III, are examples of peripatetic photography. Made in early May
2002, those images depict pregnant female caribou of the Porcupine herd migrating
across frozen river valleys or steep mountain slopes. Every spring the Porcupine
caribou herd embarks on the longest land migration of any mammal on earth,
journeying from their wintering grounds in northeast Alaska and the adjacent northwest
Canada to the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where they calve and
nurse their young. With their minimal color palette—white, brown, grey, and teal—and a
spare, near-abstract aesthetic, the photographs have been widely reproduced in
various creative, academic, activist, and public spaces in formats that range from small
postcards to large art objects. The following is a list of some of the print and online
venues to which the caribou photographs have so far migrated:

Books and anthologies

The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Animal Eye (book of poems; caribou migration appears in a literary form in the poem
“Arctic Scale”)
Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point
Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques
Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics
Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology
A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History

2
Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles, “Introduction,” in Eduardo Cadava and Gabriela Nouzeilles (eds.), The Itinerant
Languages of Photography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), 17.

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Exhibition catalogues
Photographers and Research: The Role of Research in Contemporary Photographic
Practice all our relations (18th Biennale of Sydney exhibition)
(Re-)Cycles of Paradise: An Exhibition at the Intersection of Art, Gender, and Climate
Change
True North: Contemporary Art of the Circumpolar North

Journal articles
“Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology” (special issue of the Third Text)
“Gender on Ice” (a special issue of The Scholar & Feminist; online)

Miscellaneous
“Big Oil is Willing to Pay You a Penny to Let Them Destroy the Arctic Refuge” (ad in the
New York Times)
“GWANDAII K’EERAHAANTYAA GOO’ALL (TAKE CARE OF ALL LIFE) 25 YEARS OF
PROTECTING GWICH’IN WAY OF LIFE” (Gwich’in Steering Committee poster)
A Moral Choice for the United States: The Human Rights Implications for the Gwich’in
of Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (report published by the Gwich’in
Steering Committee)
“Protecting ‘The Sacred Place Where Life Begins’” (Gwich’in Steering Committee
website, ourarcticrefuge.org; online)
Each time one of the caribou migration images appeared in a new forum, I engaged
with that space. From the path-breaking book The Alaska Native Reader: History,
Culture, Politics, I learned about the rich history of “Native Solidarity” and began to
think and speak about Alaska differently. As editor Maria Shaa Tláa Williams writes in
the book’s preface:

I grew up reading about the brave pioneers who came to Alaska or the early Russians
who “discovered” my ancestral land. Most non-Native people do not realize what an
affront this is—to read about the “discovery” of the place that is our home/heart/spirit
and where my ancestors have lived and hunted since the end of the Pleistocene age,
as if we have been somehow invisible all these tens of thousands of years.3

From A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, I discovered

ecocriticism and the signifcance of close reading. From “Contemporary Art and the

3
Maria Shaa Tláa Williams, “Preface,” in Maria Shaa Tláa Williams (ed.), The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), xiii.

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Politics of Ecology” and later, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics
of Ecology, I began to think about art’s role in addressing political ecology. All of these
disciplinary forays profoundly infuenced my writing, teaching, and activism, not to
mention my subsequent photography. New, sometimes even contradictory, ideas
started to surface as I began to build bridges across all that I was learning from the
social life of my photographs.
For example, in the introduction to American Earth: Environmental Writing Since
Thoreau, the book’s editor, infuential environmental journalist and climate change
activist Bill McKibben, writes that “only here [in the United States] did that witness [to
environmental destruction] take place in a context of general affuence that made
vigorous questioning possible—more and more of us were freed from the need to
directly subdue the natural world in order to secure our dinner.”4 Beyond the obvious
and problematic nationalism evident in the larger paragraph in which that text appears,
two questions jumped out at me. Do I need to be affuent to be environmental? Can I
not secure my dinner from conservation worthy land? Then, as if in response, in A
Moral Choice for the United States: The Human Rights Implications for the Gwich’in of
Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I found the following: “For thousands of
years, the Gwich’in have relied on the caribou as their primary food source” and, “The
herd and its birthing and nursery grounds are so signifcant to the Gwich’in that they
call the Coastal Plain Izhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, ‘The Sacred Place Where Life
Begins’”5—one of the most biologically diverse nurseries in the Circumpolar North.
The caribou migration photographs acted as a portal into such radically different
spaces as American Earth and A Moral Choice for the United States. I then interpreted
and brought together some of the information presented in those two documents to
illustrate the principal aim of peripatetic photography: to apprehend the signifcance of
the cross-pollination of knowledge and practices across various spaces into which
photographs migrate across time. Such cross-pollination has also helped me to
develop the concept of “long environmentalism,” which arises out of multiple-decades-
long social-environmental engagement. The two principal tenets of long
environmentalism are (i) collaboration among unlikely allies through the act of sincere
listening giving rise to radical hope, and (ii) a period of time that is long enough to
enable what was once considered marginal (like a human community or an idea) to
become signifcant and essential.6 In the preceding paragraph both of these two tenets

4
Bill McKibben, “Introduction,” in Bill McKibben (ed.), American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (New York: Library of
America, 2008), xxiii.
5
“Executive Summary,” in A Moral Choice for the United States: The Human Rights Implications for the Gwich’in of Drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Fairbanks: The Gwich’in Steering Committee, 2005), iii.
6
I gave several talks on “long environmentalism” between 2013 and 2015, which resulted in the book chapter “Long
Environmentalism: After the Listening Session,” in Salma Monani and Joni Adamson (eds.), Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies:
Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (London: Routledge, 2016).

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are highlighted: the idea of securing dinner from conservation worthy land was once
considered antithetical to conservation aims, and yet today, indigenous food security is
an essential argument in the campaign to defend the Arctic Refuge from oil gas
development; and this social transformation has happened because unlikely allies—
white environmentalists and indigenous human rights activists—have worked together
to defend the Arctic Refuge over the past four decades.
In February 2018, I convened “The Last Oil: A Multispecies Justice Symposium
on Arctic Alaska and Beyond” (https://thelastoil.unm.edu) to address the expansive
war the Trump administration had launched on Alaska’s Arctic by aiming to open up
vast areas to oil and gas development, including the coastal plain of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. With nearly thirty speakers from diverse disciplines and
indigenous activists and conservationists, participants gathered at UNM to speak
about how US energy policy threatens biological nurseries of global signifcance and
endangers indigenous food security. I presented the symposium program as a blueprint
of what a twenty-frst-century university could and ought to strive for: to dissolve
disciplinary silos. The myriad entangled ecological and social crises of our time—
climate change and the Sixth Extinction included—caused and/or amplifed by
capitalism, colonialism, militarism—impel us to—not enter our individual wells and
fortify the walls but instead to reach out and build bridges across cultures,
geographies, disciplines, institutions, race, class, gender, age. Scholars in
environmental humanities have also made a similar call for integration, as is highlighted
in Joni Adamson and Michael Davis’s 2016 book, Humanities for the Environment:
Integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice. Peripatetic photography
participates in this contemporary development by showing the possibilities of crossing
borders and building bridges.

Art in the Anthropocene

T. J. Demos in conversation with Charlotte Cotton
This interview was originally published in Aperture, issue 234, “Earth,” spring 2019.
Reprinted here courtesy of the authors and Aperture Foundation.

Charlotte Cotton (CC): In the frst chapter of your book Against the Anthropocene, you
raise a question that really struck me: “How does the Anthropocene enter into visuality,
and what are its politics of representation?”
Conversations around independent, authored photography are extremely adept at
working through the politics of representation, especially those of identity. But
“landscape photography,” even photographic works that are at least symbolically
aligned with environmental trauma, is rarely positioned under the same critical

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microscope as other photographic genres. Why do you think we are reluctant to

consider the intersectionality of representation and our socioecology?

T. J. Demos (TJD): The frst thing to remind ourselves is that, as you indicate, there’s no
unifed feld of photographic practice, but rather a multiplicity of approaches, many
confictual. Long-standing conventional and dominant ones tend to aestheticize
landscapes in ways that exclude confict and socioecological, political concerns.
Landscape has a long art-historical tradition, and the tendency to portray “nature” as a
separate realm, defned by the absence of humans and highlighting the beauty of
“wilderness,” has been endlessly repeated. Yet we know that the construction of
landscapes has been part of the colonial project. The translation of that construction
into conservation practice is no less predicated upon the forced displacement of
Indigenous Peoples and supporting racial and class privileges, something that
continues to this day under the aegis of the extractive economy, which also contains a
strategic visual component.
In this sense, landscape photography, driven by the art market or commercial
journalistic imperatives, tends to support that expansive colonial project, sometimes
unintentionally, by practicing the objectifcation of the nonhuman and its transformation
into a commodifable picture that can be possessed within economies of wealth
accumulation. Perhaps some are reluctant to consider this intersectionality because it
threatens not only deeply held beliefs and aesthetic values, but also economic
interests.

CC: How has the pronouncement of the Anthropocene affected landscape

photography’s approach to image making?

TJD: With the Anthropocene epoch, we’re witnessing a shift in visuality toward post-
photographic remote-sensing, where the landscape becomes regionalized, becomes
the Earthscape. The image is not only directed toward commercial markets, but also
toward the technoscientifc corporate–state–military complex, in the name of
surveillance, climate data modeling, green capitalist rationality, and geoengineering.
The problem here is that the environment is once again reifed as a discrete
realm, cut off from sociopolitical realities. Environmentalist activism often follows
suit by challenging carbon pollution but also accepting the delimitation on what
climate means. By doing so, it perpetuates the nature–culture divide and limits its
own intervention in the science that is alienating and irrelevant to the present
urgencies of many submerged in the conditions of everyday state, corporate, and
police violence.
Meanwhile, genres of portraiture and social documentary, for their part, tend to reify
their own respective categories, failing to consider how present climate transformation
exacerbates economic inequalities and social violence.

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CC: What alternative approach do you think you are calling for?

TJD: One thing I’m calling for is the disarticulation of the term environment into its
many possible meanings so that we can recognize and engage with cross-sectoral
conditions. A “climate” might be one of antiblackness (as Christina Sharpe writes, as
John Akomfrah and Arthur Jafa visualize). “I can’t breathe” is not only a matter of police
brutality directed disproportionately at people of color, but also a matter of polluted air
owing to the Capitalocene, where geology is increasingly determined on a global scale
by our economic order, and its violences and inequalities. I write now from a burning
California where it’s unsafe to be outside for extended periods—but for the multitudes
who are houseless there is no option.
An intersectional approach would insist on seeing the visual feld as structured by
these inextricable relations of power, economic forces, and ideological mechanisms.
Certainly there are numerous practices today attempting to do just that. Works by
Forensic Architecture, Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, Laura Kurgan, and Richard
Misrach in collaboration with Kate Orff and Scape, to mention only a few, are exemplary
for me. Such an approach might also include focusing on sites of environmental
trauma, in order to raise awareness or inspire new legal orders based in biocentric
imperatives. Yet even here there’s a danger—that of aestheticizing destruction,
something I address in Against the Anthropocene. For example, the epic photography
of Edward Burtynsky for me calls up Benjamin’s Nazi-era but still resonant critique of a
political aesthetics that relishes scenes of self-destruction, which is not helped by
Burtynsky’s determinedly apolitical self-positioning and market-directed practice.

CC: You’ve mentioned a number of contemporary art practices you admire. One of the
elements I appreciate so readily about your writing and thinking is that the artists you
focus our attention upon—which include Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, the
Argos Collective, Amy Balkin, Ravi Agarwal, Kristina Buch, and the Otolith Group—are
revealed to the reader rather than offered up as illustrators of a theory.

TJD: In creating images, framing points of view, arranging affective sensation, and
reconfguring perception, artworks exhibit intelligence, model forms of life, produce
subjectivities, and enact politics. In my work, I’m always interested in exploring these
convergences between theoretical writing, political force felds, and aesthetic
emergences, where art plays an active role in constructing intersections.
When I look at the work of the artists you mention, my ultimate objective is to get at
that distinctive movement that only this or that particular work achieves. I try to honor
its contribution by thinking with it, and by articulating the resonances that speak to the
relevance and signifcance of its project.

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CC: In your perspective, where and how do artists shape our socioecological narrative?

TJD: Without perpetuating the notion of the heroic, exceptionalist quality of art that’s
long been part of the avant-garde mythos, I do believe that art is able to shape
narratives in unique ways. Though art history and criticism have been, as art has,
corrupted by markets, they still hold the potential to redeem art as a place where we
can invent, experiment with, deliberate, and critically consider emergent forms of life,
which is more urgent than ever, now that we’re facing an ever more likely near future of
mutually assured self-destruction.
This points to the sociopolitical and, indeed, ecological signifcance of artistic
practice as a laboratory where we can create, restore, and decolonize futures on the
basis of social justice and multispecies fourishing, where social transformation can be
advanced, where we can “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway advises. It’s a place
where we can insist on the importance of anti-anti-utopian thinking—thinking against the
nihilism and cynicism that otherwise rule the current hegemony of capitalist realism.

CC: Can you illustrate how art might create meaningful space for this kind of thinking?

TJD: One of my most recent essays is on Arthur Jafa. Looking at Jafa’s work, in
particular his video Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), allowed me to
open a dialogue between environmental studies and its technoscientifc leanings, on
the one hand, and social-justice critiques of racial capitalism, on the other. By situating
this conversation alongside Jafa’s video, we can avoid what some call white
environmentalism, or ecologies of affuence—modes of advocacy based on privilege
that seek to sustain livability without addressing profound social inequalities—and
while also pushing antiracist activism toward wider considerations of unjust
atmospherics and ecologies of inequality. Ultimately, the art allows us to think with it in
the experimental formulation of new collectivities that might actually contribute to
widening social transformation in crucial and necessary ways.

CC: You write about how artists can provide us with proximity to our socioecology, and,
therefore, to some hope of social transformation. I am curious where your own
proximity to our socioecology stems from.

TJD: I frst had the chance to address political ecology in a catalog essay for Radical
Nature, an exhibition at the Barbican in London in 2009. I wrote about the ideological
functions of sustainability discourse in environmental art and activism, where, as it
turns out, “sustainable development” has always meant the imperative to sustain
economic growth before all else. Meanwhile, I had been researching politico-economic
conficts under globalization since 1989, particularly in relation to U.S. military zones,

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migration and border control, and the way many artists were investigating these
subjects, which led to my book The Migrant Image (2013). It was only a logical step to
consider the environmental impacts of our world economic order in turn.
Soon it became clear that environmental violence was not simply a peripheral problem
to social inequality and state violence, but integral to globalization. What’s more,
conditions were gradually worsening to the point where our very livability as a global
civilization was increasingly seeming imminently at risk. What drives my work, after years
of researching ecology, stems from the basic activist imperative I feel, which requires
doing everything possible to contribute to the movement to stop catastrophic climate
breakdown, and to work toward solutions grounded in social justice rather than green
capitalism. It not only matters that we address this crisis, but how we do so, and it’s clear
that fnancial elites, for instance, are already mobilizing climate-change responses to serve
their own interests. This, as journalist Allan Nairn points out, is allied with “incipient
fascism” in the U.S., mobilizing the worst elements of white supremacy and antimigrant
xenophobia to reach its goals. We’re facing a war of the worlds, and we must do whatever
we can, as well as all we can, by advancing a progressive and intersectional agenda.

CC: Is your commitment to writing and teaching driven by a desire to serve the human
imperative?

TJD: Writing is a key instrument for me, and it connects to researching, collaboration,
teaching, and activism. Like art, writing isn’t illustrative or supplemental to thinking or
meaning making. It’s a generative process. Through its very diffculties and revisions,
mistakes and corrections, dead-ends and breakthroughs, it allows and provides the
material conditions for new insights and realizations to emerge, for positions to be
tested and taken, for commitments and political stakes to be articulated.
That said, I don’t generally speculate about where my texts might end up someday, or
how they’ll be regarded in the future. Certainly we can think of books as messages to
the future, as time-travel machines, and I defnitely consider past literature in this way.
Take experimental sci-f where the text is a place where time-travel can occur, as in
Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), or the Otolith Group’s notion of erstwhile events as
holding within them past-potential futures, which might be critically decoded and newly
mobilized in the present—also part of the magic potential of photography, you might say.
In my recent writing, though, I’m more interested in writing as a site where we can
collect and refect on messages from the future by considering multiple, confictual
potential movements that are now at stake. Knowing that things can get worse, even to
the point of the end of human civilization as we know it, ultimately drives my work. I
fgure it as a contribution to social transformation, which nonetheless, as I’m well
aware, may still not be enough to save us.

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Ravi Agarwal (b. 1960), like Subhanker Banerjee, positions himself as both a photographer and an
environmental activist. Trained as an engineer in his native India, Agarwal seeks to create images that
picture nature not as a view, but, in his words, as “culture, mythology, relationships, water, livelihood.”20
His series Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? (2007–12) was completed in New Delhi on the banks
of the Yamuna river. This river is often described as dead because of its black color, and the “toxic
cocktail of raw sewage, industrial waste and surface runoff” that spills into it. As Manoi Mishra, a noted
environmentalist, has said about the Yamuna, “A river that does not fow is no river.”21 Yet Agarwal,
unwilling to completely abandon the Yamuna, represents it as a complex site that enables and sustains
part of New Delhi’s signifcant fower economy, and as a place where families cook and bath and raise
their children along its banks. For Agarwal, the river is “not just a water body fowing through the city, but
a network of myriad relationships—interconnected to the city and its people, and to nature.”22 In one
photograph from this series, Agarwal contests the idea of a “dead” river by portraying the intense
saturated colors characteristic of the fower economy: the orange of marigolds, the rich green of felds,
blue sky, and the bright sandy tan of the fertile land by the river’s bed (see Plate 6). A bicycle with clothes
draped over the handlebars rests in the foreground of this image, as if to invite the viewer to ride through
the marigold felds and witness for herself this sustainable use of land.
Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? consists not only of individual photographs representing
aspects of the fower economy, but also videos, postcards, a blog, feld notes, walking tours, a public
picnic, and other components all designed to show the possibilities, if not current realities, of what the
river could be for Delhi. The constellation here of different events, practices, and images combine
historical, political, and aesthetic discourses in a manner designed to disrupt a straightforward linear
narrative of progress, which in the end, always seems to aid those with power. And, despite Agarwal’s
work on Have You Seen the Flowers on the River?, the Indian government has already acquired thousands
of acres of land from farmers around the Yamuna in order to meet the demands of the expanding city and
to construct buildings, including a number of stadiums built for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The
sustainable life and economy that Agarwal began to record as evidence of what can exist in the middle
of a densely populated city has thus already begun to disappear. This raises diffcult questions about the
relationship between progress, ecology, and equality. For part of the appeal of Agarwal’s images is their
ground-up perspective, that is, the way in which the images feel rooted in a specifc location, but also
tactile—as if the viewer could touch the illustrated scene and in so doing begin to understand the site’s
local history. As the Indian government and other corporate entities acquire land around the Yamuna, that
grounded, local specifcity—understood and captured so well by Agarwal’s photographs—will inevitably
give way to new development spawned by the city’s continuing globalization.23
Another recent project organized around the life of a river is Zhang Kechun’s (b. 1980) The Yellow
River (2012), a series of photographs documenting the effects of modernization along the Yellow river in
China.24 The second longest river in China, the Yellow is associated with ancient Chinese civilization; from
the frst Chinese dynasty, the Xia (c. 2010–1600 BCE ), onward, the area has served as the center of
economic, political, and cultural life. Prone to fooding, in recent years a number of developments and
towns along the river have been devastated by climatological changes, increasing pollution, and shifts in
the direction of the river’s fow.25 Zhang’s photographs capture the visual impact of such change on the
Chinese landscape, the scars of development, as well as the affective impact on local populations. But
when Zhang frst began photographing the Yellow river, he did not anticipate the project becoming a
meditation on China’s changing environment. It was only after he started traveling (by bicycle, one month
at a time, over several years) along the river from Shandong, a coastal province, to Dongying, a city with

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approximately 2 million residents, to the mountains of Qinghai, a largely rural area, that he realized how
tensions caused by modernization in China have become visible along the river’s path. Zhang’s choice
to travel from urban to more rural settings, from the river’s mouth to its source, contributed to this
recognition as it threw into relief the astonishing rate of development that has characterized China
for decades. As Zhang explains, “I started off wanting to photograph my ideal of the river, but I kept
running into pollution . . . [and] I realized that I couldn’t run away from it, and that I didn’t need to run
away from it.”26
In keeping with the river’s mythical status in Chinese culture, Zhang employed a large format Linhof
camera, which in photography’s own history also carries a certain mystique. Though the technology is
outdated (the camera uses analog flm rather than digital fles, for example) and the process is slow and
manual, the Linhof does give a photographer a lot of control over image-making. With a large format
camera, it is nearly impossible to photograph anything accidentally, and the larger negatives necessitated
by the large format allow for sharper and more detailed images. Zhang embraced both this slowness and
the control, explaining that he wanted to take his time when photographing the river, “to slow down and
experience every second of the moment.” He further explains that he chose to photograph only on
“cloudy, gloomy days” and that he overexposed his images in order to add “a soft and gentle touch.”27
The result of these choices is that almost every photograph in The Yellow River series is blonde, consisting
of shades of white and gray, tan and beige, speckled with periodic bursts of color or spots of darker
contrast.
One picture from the series, People Fishing by the River, Shaanzi, China (2012) (see Fig. 4.6), features
a single abandoned concrete and brick cylinder jutting out from a deep pool of water in which two small

Figure 4.6 Zhang Kechun, People Fishing by the River, Shaanzi, China, from the series The Yellow River, 2012.
© Zang Kechun. Courtesy of the artist.

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fgures stand, or possibly swim. Their dark clothing contrasts with the image’s overall sandy grayness,
highlighting the difference between the scale and temporality of the abandoned ruins and the living
subjects. A number of writers and curators have described Zhang’s project as depicting everyday life
along the Chinese waterways, yet nothing feels daily about an image such as People Fishing by the
River. The picture’s slow dreaminess endows it with a contemplative quality not unlike, at least on an
emotive level, the photographs from Koudelka’s Wall series. As with the images in that series, the Yellow
River photographs develop conceptually over time in the viewer’s mind. This is in sharp contrast to
China’s rapid pace of development, and key to the work’s impact. In other words, Zhang’s choice to use
an analog camera invites a comparison between the development of his ideas about the ecological
consequences of China’s rapid growth and the photographic medium’s process. The imprint of an image
or idea has to be there from the start, but time deepens its defnition, contrast, and complexity.28
In their ethereal otherworldliness, Zhang’s photographs draw an analogy between disturbances in the
social or human world and disruptions in the natural one. The other photographers examined in this
section, Ravi Agarwal and Subhanker Banerjee, reject the idea of analogy because for them, “nature”
and “culture” do not exist as distinct categories or separate orders of being. In the nineteenth century,
avid outdoorsman George Shiras (1859–1942) created images that, at least at frst, seem to straddle
the two approaches mapped out by Zhang on the one hand, and Agarwal and Banerjee on the other.
Shiras once served in the U.S. Congress, was friends with prominent American conservationists such as
Theodore Roosevelt, and considered himself not only a photographer and conservationist, but also a
hunter. Shiras believed that photography connected conservation and hunting in that both relied upon a
rugged method of tracking and capturing wild animals—the click of the shutter replacing, in a sense, the
trigger of a gun. In essence, Shiras and other like-minded individuals—many of whom published work in
National Geographic, which was frst printed in 1888—believed that the hunt to get a good picture would
replace actual hunting expeditions, and correspondingly, that photographs would replace hunting
trophies. As wildlife photographer William Nesbit described in 1926, a number of hunters underwent in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a “conversion from gun to camera.”29
In 1890, Shiras took a photograph—or rather, helped create a photograph—captioned “The frst wild
animal to take its own picture” (see Fig. 4.7). The phrase “helped create” is used here to communicate
how Shiras sought to abdicate his own agency in the making of this picture, and pass it onto the
represented “wild animal,” in this case, a doe. In reality, the photograph was taken with a trap camera
posted on a stake or tree. Trap cameras are remotely activated cameras equipped with a wire that when
tripped, triggers the shutter’s click. By identifying the doe as having taken its own picture by tripping the
wire, Shiras positioned his animal-generated photographs as declarations of animal agency. In this, the
marks left on icy terrain by migrating herds of caribou in Banerjee’s Caribou Migration I relate to the doe’s
clicking of the wire, both gestures giving voice to non-human agents. But the similarities end there. For
while Shiras may remove the sight of humans from his photographs, it is nonetheless human life that
dictates the terms of his production. Setting up the camera, knowing where to place it, leaving treats for
animals next to the trip wire—these actions all reinforce human mastery over wild lands and animals, and
remind us that Shiras’s images are guided as much, or more, by a mode of hunting-imperialism as they
are by a belief in animal agency. Importantly, this outlook, which encourages the imagined absence of
human life in spaces considered “wild,” also contributed to the erasure of indigenous people and histories
from any pictured land.
On a fnal note, denying the presence of human agents in spaces considered “wild” also obscures the
ways in which human interaction with non-humans has shaped both species. For a scholar like Donna

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Figure 4.7 George Shiras, “The frst wild animal to take its own picture,” 1891. Courtesy of National Geographic
Creative.

Haraway, this is a critical point. Haraway, as a critic of the Anthropocene, believes we live in an age of
multispecies ecological being. Humans, according to Haraway, can no longer be considered singular
discreet beings; rather, the human is an assemblage dependent on companion species such as the
bacteria in our guts or other external environments, such as water, soil, plants, and animals, without
which we could not live.30 Haraway’s work, along with an increasing number of artists, critics, and
scholars, refuses the boundaries that cordon nature from culture and in so doing look for the possibility
of sustaining life in the Anthropocene, or in what anthropologist Anna Tsing identifes as capitalist ruins.31

History
In 1959, the collaborative photography team Hilla Becher (1934–2015) and Bernd Becher (1931–2007),
founders of what is now known as the Düsseldorf School of Photography, began a project that
preoccupied them until Bernd’s death in 2007: the systematic recording of anonymous European and
American industrial architecture. The Bechers grew up in devastated post-World War II Germany (Hilla
under the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic, Bernd in West Germany), and the objects
they chose to document and archive—structures such as water and winding towers, gas tanks and coal
tipples—emerge from that landscape. Under threat of disappearance through neglect and decay, the
Bechers developed an extraordinarily controlled approach to recording these structures by establishing

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a number of self-imposed and rigorously enforced restrictions on their practice. Critic and art historian
Benjamin Buchloh has identifed a number of these, including a prohibition on color; the systematic
exclusion of human agents; a focus on structures erected during a particular temporal frame (the 1880s
to the 1960s); and the suppression of photographic effects that might lead to expressive interpretation.32
Water Towers (Wassertürme), from 1980 (see Fig. 4.8), perfectly conforms to the Bechers’s self-
imposed rigid production conditions. Arranged in a grid, as is typical of their display methods, the nine
photographs here each portray a centrally framed water tower in a crisp gray scale. The fat presentation
defects any anecdotal or symbolic interpretation even as the picture’s formal stillness grants the work a
deep sense of melancholia. Such a sense of loss typifes the Bechers’s work and is largely responsible
for their project’s uncanny ability to draw in viewers. But this sense of loss is also part of a dialectic that
governs the work, a dialectic between a desire to record and preserve on one side, and the melancholic
realization of loss on the other. As Buchloh again explains, “This dialectic articulates the extreme
ambivalence with which the Bechers contemplated the once-utopian Enlightenment, the promises of the
industrial age as an era of continuous progress and collective advancement, only to recognize that these
had now also delivered the legacies of industrialized death, dystopian catastrophe, and ecological
destruction.”33 The Bechers’ work, in other words, traces the German experience of capitalist development
(and its culmination in fascism) by mapping a landscape of industrial decay.

Figure 4.8 Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, (Wassertürme), 1980. © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented
by Max Becher. Courtesy of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive,
Cologne.

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The Bechers’ work thus poignantly demonstrates how photographs of the land register memories and
history even when those memories are not immediately apparent and that history is largely repressed.
Santu Mofokeng’s Dikgoro with Washing Line, a peaceful image about South Africa’s violent past—and
the photograph that opened this chapter’s discussion—likewise demonstrates how the quiet accumulation
of history can map onto a photograph’s surface. Another South African photographer, David Goldblatt
(1930–2018) has similarly approached his country’s past, focusing his camera on daily life rather than
explosions of hostility or a blood-soaked landscape. But Goldblatt, in some ways like the Bechers, looks
to buildings and structures as a way of representing, or analogizing, the racist structures that governed
his country during apartheid rule. Goldblatt’s Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein, Johannesburg. November,
1964 exemplifes this approach (see Fig. 4.9). The image illustrates a coffee cart, the kind used to serve
food to black workers in Johannesburg who were not welcome at nor could afford other cafes or
restaurants. Built from cast-off construction materials from white-owned and occupied projects, carts
such as the one pictured in Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein stood on sidewalks wherever there were
signifcant numbers of workers—such as in front of factories or by bus and rail stations. In 1962, thousands
of these carts populated the landscape, but by 1965 there were almost none. The entrepreneurs who
operated these establishments were put out of business and the carts themselves destroyed.

Figure 4.9 David Goldblatt, Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein, Johannesburg. November, 1964, 1964. © David
Goldblatt Legacy Trust. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery on behalf of David Goldblatt Legacy Trust.

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Photographed in 1964, just as these structures were disappearing, the formal precision and straight-
on view of Goldblatt’s photograph at frst seems to downplay the cafe carts’ charged history, framing
them as neutral, uncontested objects. Yet the ubiquity—and then ensuing disappearance—of these
objects across Johannesburg’s landscape tells a history of social segregation. The seeming neutrality of
an image like Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein, Johannesburg. November, 1964, then, might be thought
of differently, understood not as a sign of detachment, but instead as a measuring device set to analyze
the city’s history of racist objectifcation. Just as colonizers feigned neutrality in their images of indigenous
bodies (as discussed in Chapter 3), Goldblatt’s photographs mobilize objectivity in order to map aspects
of apartheid’s repressive regime. In this way, Goldblatt’s work critiques the tyranny of South Africa’s visual
hegemony. In Goldblatt’s own words:

Embedded in the bricks, mud, stone, steel, and concrete of all the structures in South Africa are
choices we and our forebears have taken . . . For as long as a building or structure is, it may “tell”
something of the needs, imperatives, and values of those who put it there and of those who used it
and of the ideologies upon which their beliefs and lives may have been contingent . . . When buildings
cease to exist as coherent structures, their remains or footprints may yet be eloquent not only of what
ruined them but what may follow.34

As with other photographers discussed in this chapter—including the Bechers and Mofokeng, but also
Subhanker Banerjee, Emily Jacir, Zhang Kechun, and Ravi Agarwal—Goldblatt’s work, as exemplifed in
Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein, Johannesburg. November, 1964 presents place—that is, the land we see
and space we occupy—as itself a dynamically historical process. Photographs of land, the images in this
chapter thus assert, make claims for spatial justice, tell histories, mourn the past, and propose new futures.

Summary
• Photographers play with seeing and obstruction, or presence and absence, as a way to visually
illustrate the precarious position occupied by many migrants traveling across borders.
• Expansionist discourse, especially in the nineteenth century, relied upon photographic
representation to support its goals.
• Since the nineteenth century, photographers have taken a variety approaches toward the
imaging of animals and non-human life, with some seeking to break down the distinction
between the “natural” and human worlds.
• Photographs that appear peaceful or beautiful might nevertheless address struggles over land,
and associated violence.

Discussion points
• What constitutes a landscape photograph?
• How do some photographers capture the difference between the natural and human worlds?
What strategies do other photographers use to erase such differences?

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• Does the type of camera used by an artist affect the way that artist’s work will be interpreted?
• How can a beautiful photograph of an expansive landscape reveal histories of oppression,
violence, and suffering? Is this an effective method of communication?

Additional case studies

Robert Adams (b. 1937)
Pia Arke (1958–2007)
Amy Balkin (b. 1967)
Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955)
Martin Chambi (1891–1973)
Weng Fun (b. 1961)
Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964)
Chris Jordan (b. 1963)
Sanjay Kak (b.1958)
Manuel Pina (b. 1958)

Notes
1 The Land Act of 1913 or the Natives Act of 1923 were laws that offcially zoned all towns and cities as white-only
areas; plans were then made to construct black-only townships as well as ethnic enclaves in rural areas.
2 Finis Dunaway, “Hunting with a Camera: Nature Photography, Manliness, and Modern Memory, 1890–1930,”
Journal of America Studies 34 (2000): 209.
3 T. J. Demos, “Life Full of Holes,” Grey Room 24 (Summer 2006): 73.
4 Yto Barrada and Charlotte Cotton, “Morocco unbound: an interview with Yto Barrada,” openDemocracy, May
2006, https://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-photography/barrada_3551.jsp.
5 Demos, “Life Full of Holes,” 73.
6 T. J. Demos, “Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir,” Art Journal 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 72.
7 Edward W. Said, “Refections on Exile,” Granta 13 (Autumn 1984): 159.
8 Josef Koudelka, Israel and Palestinian Landscapes (New York: Aperture, 2013), n.p.
9 When the Wall came out, some criticized Koudelka for omitting fgures and thus also the human suffering that
he must have witnessed on his trips to this area.
10 Kristin Romberg, “Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful,” http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2402#.
WcV5da2ZM6g. Romberg also makes the point in this review about the wall functioning as fgure and edge in
the Shu’fat Refugee Camp photograph.
11 Texts such as Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay on “The Signifcance of the Frontier in American History,”
in which he contends that westward expansion accounts for the individualistic and democratic characters of
Americans (a term which at this time referred exclusively to those of European ancestry) should be seen in
relationship to survey photographs and as part of this trend toward American exceptionalism.
12 Claire Urbanski, “Genocidal Intimacies: Settler Desire and Carceral Geographies,” paper presented at the
American Studies Association, 2016.
13 Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 75–142.

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14 For more information on the relationship of the Patterson-Gimlin flm to expansionist discourses and the
construction of nature, see Jessica Landau’s dissertation, “Critical Habitat: Picturing Conservation, Extinction,
and the American Animal in a Long Twentieth Century,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2020.
15 The continued infatuation with Bigfoot is evidenced by the FBI’s 2019 release of secret Bigfoot fles.
16 The fact that these photographs emerge from a multinational corporation’s marketing material underscores the
fact that westward expansion was always a commercial endeavor.
17 Some scholars date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the late ffteenth century, specifcally to the beginning
of the colonization of the Americas. This dating is signifcant for it connects the Anthropocene with other
practices of dispossession and genocide.
18 For two more critiques of the Anthropocene, see Jason Moore Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the
Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015) and Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene,
Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” e-fux 75 (January 2017), https://www.e-fux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-
thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/.
19 Subhankar Banerjee, “Photography’s Silence of (Non)Human Communities,” in Catherine de Zegher and Gerald
McMaster (eds.), The 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2012), 362.
20 Interview with Ravi Agarwal, “Regarding India: Conversations with Artists,” www.regardingindia.com.
21 Julie McCarthy, “Can India’s Sacred But ‘Dead’ Yuma River Be Saved?” National Public Radio, May 11, 2016,
http://www.npr.org/2016/05/11/477415686/can-indias-sacred-but-dead-yamuna-river-be-saved.
22 Ravi Agarwal, “Have you Seen the Flowers on the River?” http://raviagarwal.com/webdocs/text-18-e16d1e39.
pdf.
23 See Agarwal’s comments in T. J. Demos, “The Art and Politics of Ecology in India: A Round Table with Ravi
Agarwal and Sanjay Kak,” Third Text (January 2013): 157–8.
24 Sometimes Zhang exhibits these photographs as individual works in galleries, but they also exist as a series in
book form.
25 Given the impact that the shift in the river’s fow has had on local populations, the work’s Chinese title, Bei Liu
Guoguo, which means “the river rushes north,” is perhaps more evocative than the English: Yellow River. Adam
Monohon, “Zhang Kechun: Photographing China’s Sorrow,” YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 15,
no. 4 (July 2016): 47.
26 “Zhang Kechun, The Yellow River,” Huxley-Parlour, http://www.beetlesandhuxley.com/zhang-kechun-yellow-
river.html.
27 Zhang Kechun cited in Emily Rauhala, “Root of the Nation: Zhang Kechun Photographs China’s Yellow River,”
Time, November 12, 2012, http://time.com/54766/root-of-the-nation-zhang-kechun-photographs-chinas-
yellow-river/.
28 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989), 7. Buck-Morss discusses Walter Benjamin’s work as developing only in the sense of how a
photographic plate would develop.
29 William Nesbit, How to Hunt with the Camera: A Complete Guide to All Forms of Outdoor Photography (New
York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1926), vii.
30 See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
31 See Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2015).
32 Benjamin Buchloh, “Passages: Hilla Becher 1934–2015,” Artforum 54, no. 5 (January 2015): 54.
33 Buchloh, “Passages,” 58.
34 David Goldblatt, from “Structures,” 1987, quoted in David Goldblatt and Nadine Gordimer, “David Goldblatt:
Homeland,” Aperture 108 (Fall 1987): 42.

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Selected further reading

Albers, Kate Palmer. Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography.
Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
Azoulay, Ariella. From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–50.
Translated by Charles S. Kamen. London: Pluto Press, 2011.
Biemann, Ursula and Brian Holmes, eds. The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa.
Barcelona: Actar, 2006.
Chaudhary, Zahid R. Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012.
Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016.
Kirsch, Scott. “Watching the Bombs Go Off: Photography, Nuclear Landscapes, and Spectator Democracy.”
Antipode 29, no. 3 (1997): 227–55.
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter.
Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Lippard, Lucy. Weather Report: Art and Climate Change. Boulder, CO: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts,
2007.
Miles, Malcolm. Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature, and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change. London:
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Sheehan, Tanya, ed. Photography and Migration. New York: Routledge, 2018.

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 PART THREE

ETHICS
Photography has long been conceived of as a medium of witnessing. Whether photographs picture
people one knows or strangers living at a great distance, photography invariably summons a complex
relationship between viewer and subject pictured, a relationship that involves an ethical encounter as well
as a power dynamic. For what does it mean to be visible? Or to have the capacity to look and thereby
bear witness? On the most basic level, what does it mean to look at others through photography? Artist
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) explicitly brings these questions to the fore. Weems confronts the viewer
with the unavoidable ethics of looking and asks how the viewer might be complicit in the injustice,
inequity, and violence purported not only within the scene of the image, or by the photographer, but,
perhaps more poignantly, by photography itself. For her series From Here I Saw What Happened and I
Cried (1995–6), Weems implicates photography as an agent of exploitation, used to perpetuate demeaning
racist stereotypes and contribute to the systemic implementation and justifcation of racism (see Fig. 5.1).
Each of the thirty-four images in Weems’s series are appropriated photographs of enslaved people in
the American South and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs of Africans and African
Americans that Weems found housed in respected museum and university archives. Among these are
daguerreotypes of South Carolina slaves, originally commissioned by the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz
in 1850, and photographed by Joseph T. Zealy. Agassiz used these images to develop a visual taxonomy,
claiming them as evidence of the racial inferiority of people of color. According to Weems, “When we’re
looking at these images, we’re looking at the ways in which Anglo America—white America—saw itself
in relationship to the black subject. I wanted to intervene in that by giving a voice to a subject that
historically has had no voice.”1 Weems challenges the history and legacy of these photographs, as well
as the institutions that preserve them, by rephotographing and enlarging them, printing them through
color saturated flters, and presenting them within circular mattes. Each print is exhibited under glass,
furthering the physical impression of looking through a camera’s lens. Evocative text is etched over top.
Consider Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself—Ha—Smack
Into the Middle of Ellington’s Orchestra Billie Heard It Too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears, a work that
incisively layers references to the subjugation of slavery, violence on the black body, the iconic lament of
jazz music, and the history of photography.2 In this case, the source image depicts an escaped slave
named Gordon, who enlisted with the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–5). Titled
The Scourged Back and taken in 1863, the image, showing a man’s back gruesomely laced with scar
tissue, was widely circulated by abolitionists as antislavery propaganda.

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Figure 5.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself—Ha—
Smack Into the Middle of Ellington’s Orchestra Billie Heard It Too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears, from the series From
Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried, 1995–6. © CARRIE MAE WEEMS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman
Gallery, New York.

This image and the others that compose From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried trouble easy
presumptions regarding the role of photography, the politics of representation, and the ethics of confict
photography. Using this visceral image of violence inficted on the body, Weems questions how painful
images might complicate and shape notions of subjectivity, empathy, and political engagement. What
ethical considerations are involved in the photographic documentation of violence? And, what does it
mean to look at such images? How can a viewer engage with this mode of photography? The following
section deals with issues of representation and agency, investigating ethical dilemmas that face
photographers and artists as they grapple with how to represent their subjects. It also addresses the
ethical relationship that the viewer is drawn into via photography. Moreover, the next two chapters ask
what responsibility we as viewers might have towards those framed by particular pictures.

Notes
1 Carrie Mae Weems, audio interview for MoMA 2000: Open Ends, Museum of Modern Art and Acoustiguide,
Inc., 2000, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/207/2012.
2 See Jennifer Doyle, “Feeling Overdetermined: Identity, Emotion, and History,” in Hold It Against Me: Diffculty
and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 112–25.

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 5
POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

A key question facing photographers today is how to represent visually those who are not represented
politically. In an attempt to grapple with this diffculty, numerous contemporary photographers create
images that attempt to acknowledge the power dynamics of photography itself, both in terms of who is
pictured and how, as well as who is able to look and what they are allowed to see. These photographers
consciously approach photography as a political tool and propose an ethical encounter between the
viewer and the subject pictured. Ahlam Shibli’s (b. 1970) series Unrecognised (1999–2000), for
instance, depicts fellow Palestinians, the inhabitants of a Bedouin village, ‘Arab al-N’aim in Galilee,
located within the borders of Israel but not offcially recognized by the Israeli government. Consisting of
twenty-four photographs and centered on the village of ‘Arab al-N’aim and its 900 inhabitants, Shibli’s
images appear sparse yet poetic, characterized by few people, many rocks, and dusty, desolate roads.
Set within a ravaged geography, a view of small homes looks as vulnerable as the humble stones that
outline burial plots or the laundry pictured blowing in the wind. The visual language of Shibli’s photographs
is down to earth and ordinary, with somewhat haphazard framing. While much of the color appears
muted, pops of vibrancy appear in every still. For Shibli, this contrast “underlines the self-empowerment
of the inhabitants who decided not to give in to the bleakness of the situation imposed on them.” 1 As
opposed to seeing these scenes of mundane life as either art photography or documentary, they appear
instead with the immediacy of snapshot photography. In order to capture the precarious position of
the fgures she photographs, some of Shibli’s images show people who are not fully discernible to the
camera’s lens—for example, a fgure might be obscured by shadow or architectural elements, off in the
distance or cut off by the frame’s angle, looking away from the camera entirely, or, as in one particularly
tender moment, a child peers from behind the garments of a woman one imagines is his mother. One
way to understand this decision would be to say that the partial visibility of Shibli’s subjects refects in
some ways their partial political recognition.
At frst glance, Shibli’s photographs seem to conform to the tradition of social documentary, with its
commitment “to expose the plight of the disenfranchised who are otherwise rendered invisible by mass
media and ignored by political elites.”2 However, as art historian T. J. Demos explains, by contrast these
photographs deliberately interrupt expectations regarding the role of photography and the viewer’s ability
to “know” the subjects pictured. Demos continues, “The austere, enigmatic photograph, disjointed and
unwelcoming to the viewer, frustrates exposure in more ways than one, thus troubling the basis of
documentary’s logic.”3 Moreover, in spite of the meager provisions pictured, many of Shibli’s photographs
also seem to be covert assertions of kinship and the persistence of life, even under duress. Children, for
example, appear repeatedly, playing together and running down the road, as in Back from school
(Unrecognised no. 5) (see Fig. 5.2). However, even these interpretations are unstable. From another point
of view, playing looks like fghting, and, especially since their backs face the viewer, whether the children
run joyously or in fear is indiscernible. Though still deeply connected to the realities of lived experience,

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Figure 5.2 Ahlam Shibli, Back from school (Unrecognised no. 5), ‘Arab al-Na’im, Palestine/Israel, 1999–2000.
Chromogenic print, 60 × 91 cm. © Ahlam Shibli. Courtesy of the artist.

in effect documenting what was indeed in front of her camera, Shibli’s matter-of-fact representations
function as a mode of counter-discourse. By resisting the expectation of clearly showing her subjects,
Shibli uses obscurity to her advantage as a means to address the complexities of photography and
representation as such, as well as to document the unique situation of the people she photographs and
the strictures placed on their daily existence.
This chapter situates the recent interplay between visibility and invisibility in terms of the rich and
varied practice of documentary photography, which traditionally sought to expose the unrepresented
and publicly reveal that which was previously hidden or unseen. The critique of documentary photography,
and in particular the challenge to the presumed or desired neutrality of images, is referred to by the term
“politics of representation,” a designation that frst appeared in the subtitle to Allan Sekula’s essay
“Dismantling Modernism” (1976/1978).4 Building on this logic, the chapter historically situates recent and
emerging practitioners in relation to documentary impulses of the past in order to develop a complex
understanding of how the politics of representation have changed over time and in relation to specifc
social conditions.

Visual signs
Inspired at an early age by Lewis Hine’s social documentary work (which we discuss in more depth in
Chapter 3), Catherine Opie’s (b. 1961) practice is built around a compassionate questioning of the

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relationship between identity and representation—who is visible, who is not, and, moreover, how are they
made visible? Opie’s Bush Smiling, Help Us, from the series Close to Home (2005), uses a strategy of
juxtaposition to provoke viewers to think about the politics of mass media representations (see Plate 7).
The artist has described the genesis of this project as having developed from watching disparate news
narratives unfold and wanting to make poignant connections across stories. Turning to her Polaroid
camera, Opie photographed directly from her television screen and organized the results into sets of
images. Notably, this is the only artwork by Opie that uses Polaroid technology, a square-shaped,
negativeless process that uses instant flm. As Opie explains, “I was trying to play metaphorically with the
notion of manipulation of the media versus the non-manipulated material of Polaroid. The news is
instantaneous and it just foods thorough your life on a constant level. I was able to really think about the
materiality of that on a photographic level, it landed with Polaroid for me, at that moment in time.” 5 In
trying to build compelling relationships between stories, and underscore how the news is framed, it is
diffcult to read Opie’s comments, and their evocation of the “food” of images, without being immersed
into the specifc subject matter of the two images conjoined in Bush Smiling, Help Us.
The moment pictured is late summer 2005, and more specifcally the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States,
making landfall as a Category 3 storm. The effects were devastating and, more than a decade later, are
still felt. Hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were displaced from
their homes. The city of New Orleans was particularly vulnerable, especially neighborhoods that existed
below sea level and housed many of the city’s poorest residents. Despite mandatory evacuation orders,
many were unable to leave, without transportation or places to turn. The fooding occurred quickly,
breaching levees, and rising steeply to between eight and twenty-fve feet in some areas, forcing
numerous people to go on top of the roofs of their homes for safety.
The federal government was woefully unprepared for this situation. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) took days before they began to establish operations. President George W.
Bush, then already in his second term in offce, was away on a fve-week vacation, and needed to return
early to Washington, before traveling to New Orleans several days later. Publicly, the President’s
indifference to the crisis was mind-boggling to many. He appeared unphased and the gravity of the
situation, including the mounting death toll, did not seem to register in his reactions. This led a Newsweek
journalist to write on September 18, 2005:

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less “situational
awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in
a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of
heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.6

Importantly, the televised and photographed aftermath showed a disproportionate number of those
effected were African Americans, refecting the fact that 64 percent of the city’s residents were black, and
30 percent of the overall population lived in poverty. The Bush administration’s inaction famously
prompted rapper Kanye West to declare “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” during a
televised concert for hurricane relief. More than a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina brought a preexisting
social and political disaster to the fore. Bush Smiling, Help Us encapsulates this terrible reality. Bush grins
absurdly on the left-hand side, while to the right, we see two young black boys holding a sign scrawled
with the words “Help Us.” Their faces are occluded from view, and, somewhat paradoxically, their

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anonymity becomes folded into their plea to be seen. The fragility of the photograph itself adds to the
tension between the two scenes and, moreover, the untenability of the situation.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the global threat of rising food waters and the disturbing normalization
of environmental disasters around the world have taken on increasing prominence as social and
environmental justice concerns as well as photographic subjects. In response, some photographers and
artists have attempted to fnd ways to pierce through the problems of denial and complacency that often
surround these events when they are witnessed at a remove. Moreover, these practitioners have tried to
use photography as a vehicle to challenge the uneven media coverage of various populations suffering
from the effects of climate change. The politics of representing this growing crisis in part has to do with
the idea (or ideal) that seeing the effects of climate change will motivate individual action. Such projects
(as discussed in Chapter 3) often aspire to make people more knowledgeable about climate change and
global warming via visual evidence and, perhaps more hopefully, thereby encourage advocacy and the
systemic implementation of policy in ways that are preventative rather than simply responsive. However,
since the devastating effects of humans on the Earth and its environment are diffcult for many people to
fathom without direct experience, these photographs often occupy an unsettled position.
Photographs that engage with the politics of environmental degradation often run the risk of
aestheticizing situations that are indeed calls for action rather than contemplation. This kind of criticism
has been leveled at numerous photographers, including for example Edward Burtynsky, whose work
some argue turns the ugly realities of environmental degradation into sublime scenes. A key question
with such works is what the ultimate power of a picture can be. When exhibited within the context of art
as opposed to photojournalism, the troubling implications of making a beautiful picture are exacerbated
further. The photographic work of Gideon Mendel (b. 1959) poses a fascinating case study in this
regard. Like Opie, Mendel has built an art practice concerned with representing those who are often
invisible and drawing affective connections between communities. For his project Drowning World (2007,
ongoing), Mendel documents a series of interconnected situations, which, brought together, remind us
of humanity’s fragility and its mutual responsibility.
Rather than seeing climate change and sea level rise as an abstract phenomenon, Mendel hopes his
viewers will recognize the personal impact. As part of Drowning World, Mendel began his Submerged
Portraits in 2007, after photographing two foods that occurred in quick succession, one in the United
Kingdom and the other in India. Though the contexts of these natural disasters were very different, the
“shared vulnerability” of the food survivors was remarkable. 7 Since that time, Mendel has documented
people in the aftermath of foods all around the world, including Haiti (2008), Pakistan (2010), Australia
(2011), Nigeria (2012), Germany (2013), the Philippines and Bangladesh (2015), and the U.S. (2015),
among others. Importantly, each portrait is accompanied by specifc information regarding the individuals
pictured in the respective photographs, including their name, location, and the date.
This mode of title as caption takes seriously the need to put not simply a face to a name but also to
a crisis, and it personalizes the photograph in a manner that might affect the viewer and respect the
subject. Take the subject in João Pereira de Araújo, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015, who
is neck-deep in murky waters, wincing sternly at the camera (see Plate 8). Or, the subject in Anchalee
Koyama, Taweewattana District, Bangkok, Thailand, November 2011, who holds her young daughter
steadfastly in her arms above the water line, while the child’s feet disappear beneath the dark wet
surface. Standing in the foodwaters with the remains of their submerged homes and destroyed
belongings in the background, Submerged Portraits fguratively brings the magnitude of climate change
home. Each photograph is eerily composed. The subject of the picture is centered and calm. They stare

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intently out at the viewer, returning our gaze, challenging us to bear witness, and, in effect, refusing to be
simply there to look at. Instead they seem to challenge the outsider to come into the frame, to feel the
threat of global warming which threatens all humans, and moreover to act. The tone of Mendel’s
photographs is disturbingly still, working against the spectacle that characterizes much disaster
photography. The waters themselves are placid around the food survivors in an ominously permanent
manner. Each individual is doubled as a mirror-refection in the water, suggesting a world that is literally
and fguratively turning upside down.

Absence
Questions of visibility are paramount to gauging the politics of representation within individual images and
photographic practices. As such, an equally important assessment is what remains invisible or
inaccessible to the camera and to the viewer. Hrair Sarkissian’s (b. 1973) series Execution Squares
(2008) depicts the locations of public execution in three Syrian cities: Aleppo, Lattakia, and Damascus.
Comprised of fourteen large color photographs of vernacular urban scenes mounted on aluminum, each
image was photographed purposefully in the dawn of the early morning light, the time executions usually
take place (see Fig. 5.3). The artist explains how, for him, these “quiet images reveal a fragile paradox
that exists between the beauty and constancy of the physical environment and the political and social

Figure 5.3 Hrair Sarkissian, Execution Squares (detail), 2008. © Hrair Sarkissian. Courtesy of the artist.

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realities that they obscure.”8 Indeed, the warmth of the morning sun in these photographs creates a
scene that appears fresh, open, and full of possibility as opposed to being weighted with violence and
ominous memories. In one sense Sarkissian’s images may be understood as memorials to the dead.
And yet, in the stark absence of any bodies at this early hour, either dead or alive, these photographs
also testify to erasure and the perplexing limits of photography to relay a coherent history.
According to Sarkissian, the fourteen images together form a single work of art, and therefore it is
important that they be exhibited as a group. The culmination of the photographs together, rather than
individually, is paramount. In this way, a strong notion of community and complicity between pictures and
people is underscored. Produced using a large format flm camera, rather than a digital one, and with no
post-production manipulation, Sarkissian’s decision to document the sites of execution without corpses
is crucial to the work’s internal politics of representation. Consider how the knowledge of the title changes
the way the photograph is understood. The many windows of various homes and apartment buildings
surrounding the squares become much more than architectural studies, and the subtleties of how many
are open or shuttered take on a new resonance. Amidst the empty streets, the scattered palm trees, the
billboard advertisements, and the parked cars, one begins to imagine the experience of living there, and,
perhaps even dying there. These photographs call attention to photography’s role as a witness and how
viewers are by extension interpellated as witnesses themselves when confronted with photographs.
Execution Squares is also an act of sharing. In interviews, Sarkissian tells the personal story of a
disturbing moment from his childhood, walking to school in the early morning at around the age of twelve
and passing the dead body of a man hanging in the neighborhood square, eyes startlingly and morbidly
open. Though Sarkissian’s work appears unpopulated, signs of life abound, and its ghostly aspect eerily,
nearly threateningly, flls each frame. On the other hand, however, the ultimate absence of explanatory
detail and context poses its own challenges. The viewer is not given suffcient information to understand
the specifcities of what they are seeing with any signifcant depth. Why, for example, were people
executed and by whom? Who was executed? Paradoxically, without this background, the onus to know
more is left to the viewer.
Questioning surface appearances and negotiating between absence and visibility in photography are
also part of Oscar Muñoz’s (b. 1951) photographic investigations. Recognized for his artistic use of
ephemeral materials and his preoccupation with memory and mortality, Muñoz is a Columbian artist who
has used video, painting with water, charcoal dust, shattered glass, and bathroom curtains, among other
unconventional materials, to examine the intersecting dimensions of the politics of representation and the
permeability of the photographic medium. For example, Muñoz’s The Game of Probabilities (2007)
addressed the fragmented nature of identity photographs in an inventive play on self-representation and
identifcation photographs. Collected over the course of a number of years, Muñoz appropriated six of
his own “offcial” portraits—including passport photographs and driver’s license identifcation cards—
showing the artist aging and donning various hairstyles. These were then cut into smaller sections and
rearranged to create twelve new confgurations, a material gesture that suggests the endless mutability
of identity and photographic representation.
In his 1988 book, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, photography
historian John Tagg examined the role of photography within power relations and discussed how
photographs are always enmeshed with the dynamics of power and control. On the one hand, according
to Tagg, the “politics of representation” functions as a rhetorical inversion of “the representation of
politics,” importantly shifting attention to the constructed (and therefore contestable) relationships
between subjects and the apparatuses of power.9 On the other hand, emphasizing an understanding of

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politics as “representational” also offers a means to structurally critique the power dynamics that are
often concealed by purportedly objective images, such as photographs. Acknowledging the entrenched
power of photography has similarly been central to Muñoz’s practice, particularly in terms of the
relationship between the state and “offcial” memory. For Aliento (Breath) (1999), ten steel discs are
mounted on a wall, inviting the viewer to look at themselves (see Fig. 5.4). Drawn in by one’s own
refection in front of the concave mirror, the viewer’s breath activates the image embedded in the glass
to surface. These photographs have been fused to the metal mirror through a photoserigraph technique
used in silk-screening. In contact with human exhalation, a barely perceptible, sepia-toned obituary-style
photograph of a young man appears, excerpted from a Columbian newspaper, before vanishing again
with the dissipation of breath. As a result, the viewer is made keenly aware of the temporality of the image
as a larger refection on the fragility of life, as well as their own inescapably ethical engagement with
representations of others. In the artist’s own words, “In this instant, which the spectator cannot retain for
very long, his refection is lost in order for the image of the other to appear, activating a dialogue which
includes him.” As witnesses to these faces, we are called into relationship with them, and yet their
identities are not discernible to us.

Figure 5.4 Oscar Muñoz, Aliento, 1996–2002. © Oscar Muñoz. Courtesy of the artist and Sicardi/Ayers/Bacino Art
Gallery, Houston.

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The portraits that appear, document men and women who count among the tens of thousands of
Desaparecidos—Columbian citizens proclaimed “disappeared” by their government. By some
estimations, the disappeared number over 90,000 in the course of the last ffty years, including many
who are “victims of armed confict between government troops, right-wing paramilitary groups and leftist
rebels, while others are victims of ongoing drug-turf wars.”10 The sheer magnitude of Columbia’s history
of violence impedes our ability to identify the people pictured, the nameless and the bodiless. This fact
is made even more poignant by way of Muñoz’s strategic blending of refections and representations or,
as scholar Maria del Rosario Acosta Lopez elucidates, “[I]t summons our responsibility, as spectators, to
assume the task of memory to which the work’s evocative darkness responds.”11
Performance historian Amanda Graham notes the ways breathing functions in Muñoz’s work as both
an event and a metaphor, explaining that “the aesthetic disappearance parallels the corporeal-political
one.”12 By virtue of using breath and the viewer’s own bodily engagement as a vital component of the
work, Muñoz thus defes the photograph’s ability to objectify the subject captured in the image. Instead,
we are reminded of the lived experience of the body, in relation to images and in relation to other people.
Graham further argues that each photograph acts as a memento mori, thereby embodying writer Susan
Sontag’s summation of photography’s inevitable relationality and temporality: “To take a photograph is to
participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this
moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”13 Understood in this way, we
recognize that the qualities of absence and disappearance are as fundamental to an understanding of
photography as the acknowledgment of presence.

Identifcation and dislocation

The invention of photography and its proliferation as a medium coincides with a period of global
mass migration. During the Progressive Era in the United States (1890–1920), Danish American social
reformer Jacob Riis (1849–1941) engaged with the dynamics of displacement and dispossession that
too often accompany immigrants, using photography as a critical tool for social change. Riis argued
adamantly that poverty was the result of imperfect social and economic systems. Being an immigrant
himself who landed in New York in 1870 at the age of twenty, Riis claimed to understand the plight
of the poor. He had lived in desperate circumstances before becoming a police reporter for the New
York Tribune in 1877, and ten years later for the New York Evening Sun. Throughout his life, Riis
waged a continual fght for model tenements, more parks, and better playgrounds, leading President
Theodor Roosevelt to dub him “the most useful citizen of New York.”14 Riis believed that if people were
confronted with photographic evidence and accompanying discourse, social injustice would no longer
be tolerated.
Riis made a practice of dramatically recounting his harrowing trips to the city’s slums as he presented
illustrative lantern-slide presentations documenting his visits to audiences in upper Manhattan, often
accompanied by music. Now iconic images such as Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement,
from 1889, demonstrate his nocturnal experiments with fash powder as he startlingly catches his
sleeping subjects unaware. Riis’s Madonna of the Slum (1890) solicits the viewer’s sympathy as it
references the classically pious pose of the Madonna and Child within the rugged setting of a New
Jersey slum. The subjective enhancement of Riis’s own point of view by extra-photographic means,
including oral and written rhetoric, is worth considering in more depth. It calls into question not simply

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the documentary claim to objectivity but furthermore draws attention to the many ways the framing of an
image affects its received meaning.
In 1890, Riis published the infuential book How the Other Half Lives, a compendium of photographs
accompanied by text that provoke complex questions regarding immigration, assimilation, social control,
and cultural diversity in the late nineteenth century. According to historian Edward T. O’Donnell, “those
who bother to read How the Other Half Lives are more often than not shocked by what Riis wrote about
the people he proposed to save.”15 For example, Riis

. . . dwell[s] in considerable detail on racial and ethnic stereotypes of the German whose “Teutonic wit
is too heavy”; of Jews for whom “money is their God”; of “John Chinaman” about whom “there is
nothing strong, except his passions when aroused”; of the Negro who accepts “poverty, abuse, and
injustice alike . . . with imperturbable cheerful-ness”; and of the “swarthy” Italian who is “gay,
lighthearted and if his fur is not stroked the wrong way, inoffensive as a child.”16

Marguerite Lavin, Curator of Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, recalls her experience
with the disjuncture between Riis’s photographs and his writing: “For years no matter how many times I
reproduced Riis’ photographs for books, documentaries, and museum exhibits, I never ceased to be
moved by the heroic images of the inspiring masses of poor immigrants. Eventually I picked up a copy
of How the Other Half Lives and when I read what Riis had to say about these people I almost fell out
of my chair.”17
Riis, of course, is only one among many photographers who have taken the social documentary
approach in ways that are questionable and in need of critique. It is after all a privilege to be able to look
at others in photographs. And moreover, particularly when an image is presented of people suffering or
in need, the politics of representation urge the viewer to consider how the subjects pictured are actually
affected by the image’s creation and dissemination, by being made “visible” so to speak. In addition to
challenging the perceived neutrality of images, as noted at the outset of this chapter, it is important to be
vigilant about the implied artistry of photographs as well. Consider briefy, for example, the work of
Sergio Larrain (1931–2012). Largely considered the most prominent Chilean photographer in history,
Larrain worked internationally for the Magnum Photos agency for many years. Using predominantly
black-and-white photography, Larrain frequently depicted homeless and orphaned children in the streets.
He is praised for his poetic approach, for an inventive use of shadow and angles. One particularly
captivating photograph from Santiago in 1955 shows a pile of at least fve boys asleep atop a metal
sidewalk grate. Caught unaware, most of their faces are obscured, tucked into the bodies of each other
for comfort while they slumber. One child’s face is propped out, facing the viewer, eyes closed and mouth
agape. While the composition of this image is indeed formally stunning, enigmatically flled with textures
and gestures, what does it mean to regard these children in this way? Ostensibly, to turn their
dispossession into a pleasing work of art? “A good image is created by a state of grace,” Larrain once
explained, continuing by saying, “Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions, free
like a child in his early discovery of reality. The game is then to organize the rectangle.” Larrain’s allusion
to the implicit innocence or freedom in this passage gives some sense of the illusory state of “grace” he
aspires to. It is also suggestive of one of the central escapist fantasies projected onto such images, one
of the key reasons this particular image of sleeping boys and others like it are largely celebrated. Yet this
statement also reveals the photographer’s, and potentially the viewer’s, disturbing disconnect from the
harsh worldly realities experienced by the impoverished individuals pictured.

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Artist Martha Rosler has written one of the most incisive critiques of Riis and other photographers
working in this vein of social documentary as part of her study of documentary photography and
photojournalism that she initiated alongside Allan Sekula, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and others in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. She refers to Riis’s muckraking use of photography as “social-work
propagandizing” and argues that such work “strongly appealed to the worry that the ravages of
poverty (crime, immorality, prostitution, disease, radicalism) would threaten the health and security of
polite society as well as to sympathy for the poor, and their appeals were often meant to awaken the
self-interest of the privileged.”18 In this way, as art critic Craig Owens explains, “‘concerned’ (or what
Rosler calls ‘victim’ photography) overlooks the constitutive role of its own activity, which is held to be
merely representative (the myth of photographic transparency and objectivity.)”19 This mode of
photography thereby runs the risk of reinstating the very thing it claims to want to overturn. In Owen’s
estimation, the subjects of such photographs “are twice victimized: frst by society, and then by the
photographer who presumes the right to speak on their behalf.”20 Riis’s photography book thus poses a
crucial historical example of how important it is to critically evaluate the claims made about particular
images in conjuncture with close looking at the pictures themselves, questioning how they are
characterized and contextualized. Without this kind of critical engagement, we risk leaving problematic
and established systems of power intact, and in fact adding to their concealment within the visual and
verbal rhetoric of benevolence.

FOCUS BOX 5
In her infuential 1981 essay, “In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary
Photography),” artist Martha Rosler identifed a number of recurring ideological
blindspots within documentary photography. Rosler framed her argument against the
claims of social documentary (including conficting ones of objectivity and of concern
for the subjects pictured), as well as against the young street photographers
championed by curator John Szarkowski in his 1967 New Documents exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York—then photography’s most important curatorial
perch. The three photographers in the show, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry
Winogrand, exhibited a disimpassioned, if not cynical, view of the world. Szarkowski
presented the work of these photographers within a modernist-formalist frame (a
subject we discuss at greater length in Chapter 9), emphasizing the incidental details
and compositional elements of their photographs as evidence of their status as art. For
Rosler, this anti-humanist stance was unethical, failing to acknowledge the privileged
position of art and photography, on the one hand, or to engage with the fraught socio-
political contexts of the late 1960s, on the other. On the 50th anniversary of
Szarkowski’s exhibition, Rosler explored the ways the politics of representation are
concealed by the rhetoric surrounding the famed exhibition. Rosler provides a poignant
account of how “documentary is a process, often an embedded one.” Below is an
excerpt adapted from Rosler’s consideration of the show.

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Documents and documentary

Martha Rosler

The introductory texts and proposals for John Szarkowski’s New Documents exhibition
direct us to the show’s signifcance (see Fig. 5.5). The title itself, New Documents, firts
with the word “documentary,” but with a clear difference: documents are objects, while
documentary is a process, often a socially or journalistically embedded one. The text
opens a generational divide, telling us that pre-war documentarians “made their pictures
in the service of a social cause,” to make things right. Their photos, then, were
communicative acts, prodding viewers toward action. The “social cause” was likely to be
among the many left movements of the era—the Spanish Civil War and interwar European
unrest, photographed by Robert Capa, Greta Taro, David Seymour, and others—as well as
the militant worker-photographers’ movements whose view of photography went beyond
the arguments of more mainstream documentarians, speaking not about the people
pictured but from and to them. In contrast, the photographers in the show have “directed
the documentary approach to more personal ends”—more fully, “non-social, non-
hortatory, and personal.” This deals a powerful rebuke to the dreams of political utopia or
just social betterment, further spelled out by assertions like these: “They hold in common
the belief that the world is worth looking at, and the courage to look at it without
theorizing.” Or more strongly, “The world, in spite of its terrors, is … the ultimate source of
wonder and fascination, no less precious for being irrational and incoherent.”

I.
I would frame Szarkowski’s task in rescuing an artistic strain in photography—a
personalized, idiosyncratic body of work—as teasing it away from the noise in the
channel, whether photojournalism, on the one hand, or the immense array of vernacular
photos, on the other. The allure of the snapshot—however appealing to institutional
gatekeepers in the 1960s—was its apparent authenticity, without conscious scripting. It
offered a record of an interactive event in which the photographer confronts the
audience as one of its own. Snapshots can convey a certain unfathomability of human
motives in that the photographers’ intentions may be recoverable only with diffculty
from these found archaeological artifacts of an unselfconscious world.
Two of the three photographers in New Documents (but Arbus only rarely) are
classifable as snapshooters, if only superfcially. The authenticity of the snapshot is
differentiable from propaganda and public relations on the one hand, and from the
political certitude of the ideologically driven, on the other. Szarkowski puts his faith in the
confnement of the work to the “four walls of the frame,” reiterating the Cold War caveat
that serious art is not about messages nor is it thematic. It does not join documentary; at
the end of a decade of widespread war and upheaval, it supersedes it and blots it out.

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Figure 5.5 Wall Label by John Szarkowski, New Documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967.
The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 821.3. The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

II.
High rates of college attendance and the growing power of consumers did not forestall
critiques by intellectuals and Bohemians of the political repression and saber rattling of
1950s Cold War America: If this was a prosperous nation, with a burgeoning suburban
expansion, why was it experienced by so many as a vacuous and conformist
nightmare, with its unfulflled subjects in a land of plenty? And then, upending the
quiescence of the 1950s, came the upheavals of the 1960s, which brought civil rights
struggles, political assassinations, wars, and nuclear crises, a huge student revolt, and
a growing counterculture.
In the 1960s, sociological studies became widely appealing for the educated middle
classes’ attempts at self-understanding. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgical

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approach” to human interaction, particularly in reference to everyday life rather than

extraordinary events, introduced the idea of the performance of the self and won him a
broad readership. It also underpins any serious discussion of Diane Arbus’s work, with
its focus on the construction of appearance and the role of consciousness in dealing
with stigma (Stigma was one of Goffman’s most-read books) in producing oneself as an
object of the public gaze. Arbus’s portraits raise the question of whether the people are
unaware of the faws of their performance. I think the faws are always visible to viewers,
certainly, but in Arbus’s late-career photographs of children seemingly with profound
degrees of mental disability, we see subjects unconcerned with the management of their
appearance; they suggest an Arbus at the telos of her project: people without masks.
This performative frame applies as well to the other New York photographer, Garry
Winogrand. Stemming from the working-class Bronx rather than Arbus’s decidedly
upper-middle-class Manhattan milieu, Winogrand frequently enacts his alienation by his
position within the photographic transaction. But I should note, in passing, the role of
Jews during that era within both urban sociology and urban photography. Often of
immigrant background, the Jewish working class in New York, though sensitive to the
often-unexpressed divisions and exclusions they experienced on the basis of class and
race, were brought up to respect the importance of social criticality, since it aligned
with their interest in personal opportunity as well as socialist ideals of universal justice.
But I would be hard pressed to locate any of that complexity in Winogrand’s
photographs, whose sometimes bitter cynicism and separation has led me to think of
him as one of the cranky, permanently disaffected guys from the Bronx, and Brooklyn,
who I always imagined populated the ranks of marauding street photographers.
Friedlander, however, brings to the trio as leavening a Northwest-coast-formed,
small town or suburban sensibility, of looking at stuff in passing and surprise perhaps,
but without the invested bite of the other two of urban origin and habitat. Friedlander, if
no less “alienated” than the other two, shows the cooler infuence of Pop but also of
humor. He often allows the joke to be on himself as he exhibits a kind of defated
dishevelment. He is a young self-portraitist exhibiting a transparent failure to manage
his image—but slyly he is a master formalist.

III.
The politics of identity, while a major formation of the late 1960s, had not yet become a
persistent theme in society or in the art world. The trajectory of New Documents was
toward abjection, in the sense of that which provokes a recognition in viewers of a
disturbance in identifcation and which consequently disturbs one’s sense of identity
and the understanding of the social order. This is something that stares out at us from
Arbus’s photos.
It is here, within the sociological and inevitably psychoanalytic frame, that
Szarkowski’s assertion regarding the photographers wanting their work to be seen as

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life, not as art, fnds its most contemporary purchase. New Documents established the
foundations for a new, drastically restricted canon largely on the basis of exclusions.
This differentiation can be read in terms of the political: from the critical observations of
documentarians bent on social change or even just revealing the living culture of urban
working-class people—of whatever color or ethnicity. The exhibition’s efforts were
instead to relocate the practice of documentary, even of photography tout court, within
the confnes of Modernism. Of course, there are more recent and more nuanced
counter-arguments to this version of documentary. As documentarian and curator
Jorge Ribalta suggests, documentary exists as a fragile compromise between the
aesthetic, the communicative, and the epistemic conditions of photography. It exists,
he writes, at “the intersection of the discursive spaces of the museum, the archive, and
the media.” And so, at the very moment that the certainties and boundaries of
Modernism were growing imprecise, and at a moment when the understandings of
photography as resident within them was subjected to an increasingly insistent
contestation, the documentary practices in New Documents were reappropriated as
the self-representation of the suppressed and excluded others.

In 2010, Martina Bacigalupo (b. 1978), a photojournalist from Italy, came upon curious piles of
discarded portraits with their faces nimbly cut out. Identical blank spaces appear in place of each face,
thereby marking the absence of what is commonly considered to be the most pertinent information in any
portrait. This truism is all the more relevant considering the source of these particular photographs. These
abandoned images were found in the back of the Gulu Real Art Studio, the oldest photo studio in Gulu,
northern Uganda, a business whose main source of commerce is creating identifcation photos. The
studio owner and photographer Obal Denis explained the rationale behind the rejected images as a matter
of effciency. His machine for developing passport-style photographs prints four at a time, whereas most
people only need one. Therefore, it is less expensive to shoot a regular full-length portrait and cut out the
necessary headshot. Bacigalupo recognized the potential trove of these vernacular castoffs, however,
and, with Denis’s permission, reclaimed the photographs as part of her own art project (see Plate 9).
Displayed at the Walther Collection in New York during 2013, as a series of ninety images, and also
assembled in book form, art critic Holland Cotter has described these gathered photographs as “images
technically bereft of identity but flled with personal and cultural information.”21 The startling lack of faces
diverts the viewer’s attention to other previously unnoticed aspects of the picture. The subtle positioning
of individual sets of hands on laps takes on new resonance and the posture and clothing of each sitter
becomes a site of interest. Vibrantly patterned dresses or military uniforms, hands folded or hands
tentatively resting on knees, a purse or a child’s head resting on a lap, the variation is eclectic. Among
the strange details that stand out as one peruses these serial photographs is a recurrent dark, navy blue
blazer, which, as it turns out, is in fact the same blazer. The jacket is kept on hand at the studio because
it is an offcial requirement for all account applicant and employee identifcations at Barclays Bank. This
compulsory garment adds to the repetition and standardization of the series, while at the same time
strangely challenging that very premise. On some bodies it appears excessively oversized and out of

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place, while on others it seems fgure-ftting and distinguished. The salvaged photographs from the Gulu
Real Art Studio operate in opposition to the expectations and strictures typical of the identifcation
photograph, namely their insistence on uniformity and anonymity—or, in other words, conformity. As
scholar Tina Campt has insightfully explained, “Ironically, details intended to impose uniformity—jackets,
poses, and backdrops—are now serialized enactments of individuality and difference.”22 In this way, the
subjects pictured assert their uniqueness even from within the constraints of categorical photography.
The proliferation of identifcation photographs in contemporary life is a widespread phenomenon.
Specifcally, within the context of Gulu, its ubiquity correlates to the institutionalization of post-confict
Uganda and the many ways everyday life is policed. Employed as a means to “validate and verify identity,”
these offcial photographs contribute to the enforcement of neoliberal economic structures created after
the unrest of civil war during the 1980s, required by non-governmental organizations, international aid
organizations, and corporate fnancial institutions, among others.23 Powerfully, however, what remains
most striking about Bacigalupo’s seemingly mundane collection of Gulu photos is the way they serve as
a perplexing archive of identities that ultimately refuse to be assimilated within the conventions and
authority of categorical photography. Instead, the project speaks of displacement and diaspora, and the
possibility of counter-narratives, to and within the politics of “offcial” documentation.
Korean-born Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon (b. 1960) is familiar with the dynamics of displacement
and identity and has developed a practice that investigates the intersections of multicultural feminism
and the politics of race. For A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996–7), Yoon invited sixty-seven members of
Vancouver’s Korean community to be photographed standing in front of Lawren Harris’s renowned
painting, Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (1924) (see Fig. 5.6). These same individuals were then photographed
with their backs to the camera, looking towards Emily Carr’s celebrated oil on canvas painting, Old Time
Coast Village (1930). Importantly, Yoon herself was also photographed and included amongst the fnal
sixty-seven double portraits. Arranged in a grid pattern and installed with the rectos and versos on
adjacent walls, Yoon created an immersive environment in which the viewer could feel physically and
cognitively involved in the piece.
The title, A Group of Sixty-Seven, sounds like a conceptual conceit, a plain pseudo-scientifc report of
what is presented. It contains multiple layers of meaning, however. On the one hand, it refers to the
Group of Seven, the eponymous assembly of seven male artists painting between 1920 and 1933 who
became synonymous with Canadian art and culture. The Group created numerous iconic modernist
landscape paintings, focusing primarily on the wilderness of northern Ontario, and are foundational to the
mythology of Canadianness. Harris is historicized as a core member of the Group. Carr, on the other
hand, painted mostly in isolation from a broader artistic community, was not a member of the all-male
cohort, and practiced predominantly on the West Coast. Both Harris and Carr shared an interest in
experimenting with form, and it is worth noting that their vision of nature was frequently abstract, flled
with diffuse colors, obscure geometries, twisted contours, and distinctive lines. Against these canonical
works of Canadian art, Yoon’s subjects stand rigidly within each portrait, and as an installation, the
seriality of the piece is mesmerizing, if not dizzying.
Picturing her Korean-Canadian subjects within the context of “Canadian” aesthetics, A Group of
Sixty-Seven calls attention to the rights of belonging and the resoundingly abstract nature of Canadian
national identity through its engagement with the politics of representation. There is indeed a play here
on the immigration concept of “naturalization,” and, moreover, on the perplexing instability of national
identity. In photographing Korean immigrants in the context of these paintings, Yoon created, in the
words of Cynthia Foo, “a space for race in traditional iconic representations of Canadianness.”24 On the

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Figure 5.6 Jin-me Yoon, A Group of Sixty-Seven (detail), 1996. 134 chromogenic prints. Collection of the Vancouver
Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund, VAG 97.2 a-eeeeee. © Jin-me Yoon. Courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

one hand, these considerations lead the viewer to think more deeply about immigration as a result of the
economic, political, and social forces of globalization. On the other hand, they deal with specifc debates
regarding national identity and culture, or as Nicole Elizabeth Neufeld aptly explains, Yoon “makes
reference to recognizable landscapes which she exposes as exclusionary in the way they frame
representations that visualize subjectivity.”25 Neufeld discusses the Canadian predilection for landscape
images emptied of human presence, and how such representations perpetuate colonial fantasies of
uninhabited land on offer. This ideological backdrop points to yet another key reference embedded in
Yoon’s title, namely, the year 1967, which marked the 100th anniversary of the confederation of Canada
by British settler colonials, claiming indigenous territory as their own and displacing First Nations peoples.
The artist puts it plainly when she asks, “Imaged in the heroic setting of the Canadian [landscape], can I
as a non-Western woman enjoy a ‘naturalized’ relationship to this landscape?”26 Yoon’s photographs
problematize the possibility of nature and natural relations, while critically redressing the mutable
characteristics of culture.
Wang Jinsong (b. 1963) uses photography to document the experiential effects of government
policies on contemporary Chinese society, in effect capturing and critiquing distinct elements of “Chinese-
ness.” In order to understand Wang’s project, it is important to recall the crisis of 1989 in Tiananmen
Square, Beijing. That spring, student-led demonstrators called for democratic freedoms (including
freedom of speech for individuals and freedom of the press), as well as increased government
accountability. Media coverage of these events was heavily censored. Violence erupted on the evening
of June 4 as these demonstrations were violently crushed by the government’s declaration of martial law,

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resulting in the deaths of protestors numbering somewhere between several hundred to 10,000. No
consensus has ever been reached regarding the death toll, in part because the history of this event
remains suppressed in China.
In the wake of this political and social turmoil, Wang actively criticized the communist regime and
turned to photography as a vehicle for this critique. Working in a style that has been referred to as
“cynical realism,” in opposition to “socialist realism,” Wang employs a conceptual method of accumulation,
gathering a large series of images together in order to represent the real effects of government policies
on everyday life.
Arranged in a tight grid, Wang’s Standard Family (Biaozhun Jiating) (1996), for example, shows the
viewer a collection of family studio portraits, each organized in an identical way (see Fig. 5.7). Seen
alongside one another, the repetition of generic expressions, postures, and family forms becomes
apparent. These are a combined result of collectivism and the will of the state. Wang’s photographs
attempt to make these underlying social structures visible. Comprised of 200 straightforward photographs
of single-child families, Standard Family specifcally documents the effects of China’s “one-child” policy,
put into effect in 1973 as a means of mitigating China’s massive population. Discontinued only in 2016,
China’s one-child policy severed the tradition of multi-generational families, resulting instead in a “standard
family,” limited to three people—two parents and one offspring.27
In China, the family unit is envisioned as a micro-model of state collectivity, and thus conforms to
specifc conventions. Adhering to the rules of Mao’s China, the father is positioned on the right, the mother
on the left, and the child in the middle, giving an overall impression of collective similarity.28 Furthermore,
Wang photographs each family against a stark red background, chromatically creating an additional
reference to the communist state. Picturing a “standardized” lifestyle, this project is hypnotic in its formal
echoes between portraits. In spite of its inherent structural constraints, however, it bears asking what we
do not see represented in Standard Family as well as who is not included and who does not belong.
Noticeably male children appear more frequently than girls, and all of the children pictured appear
healthy. This too is a direct outcome of China’s socio-economic policies. As sociologist Leslie K. Wang
discusses in her study Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China (2016),
this may in part be attributed to parental aversion to caring for special needs children or children with

Figure 5.7 Wang Jinsong, Standard Family, 2006. © Wang Jinsong.

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costly illnesses, as well as a desire to bear at least one healthy male heir who can care for them in old
age. Moreover, “in what has been labelled a ‘gendercide,’ parents have turned to sex-selective abortion,
abandonment, hiding, or even killing of tens of millions of daughters to protect the possibility of having a
son.”29 Wang remarks further on the correlation between rapid economic expansion, environmental
pollution, and the number of children born in China with congenital illnesses and disabilities. Notably,
these populations are not represented within Standard Family. Rather, what is reiterated is an idealized
view of content, middle-class Chinese families, whose upward mobility has been made easier by virtue
of providing for an only child.
The overwhelming lack of individual expression in these family portraits is also striking in the way it
resists the viewer’s ability to glimpse personality. As art historian Roberta Wue has explained, this uniform
aspect of Chinese portraiture functions directly against “two assumptions of nineteenth-century Western
portraiture in general and American portraiture in particular: that the individual and his or her inner life
could be understood through telling physical idiosyncrasies and that conveying the sitter’s individuality
was crucial to a successful portrait.”30 There are moments that defy these strictures however. Smirks and
head tilts can be found amongst Wang’s photos, suggesting the possibility, however subtle, of escaping
“standard” codes. Like Wang’s City Wall—Beijing (2006), a cumulative series of photographs that visually
attempts to represent an experience of the startling speed of urban architectural change in China,
Standard Family employs an overwhelmingly uniform approach that intrigues one to search for
inconsistencies, uniqueness, and where social and political barriers might waiver.
It is also worth noting that the very concept of the politics of representation considered throughout this
chapter is neither stable nor static. Indeed, there exist a multitude of variations on this mode of critique
in relation to visual images. For example, the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl (b. 1966) recently coined
the term “post-representational” as a means of experimenting with new modes of contemporary politics
and aesthetics, while addressing the emerging socio-technological conditions of visual culture. It is
curious to consider how the politics of “post-representation” might be envisioned within this rubric. In an
interview with Marvin Jordan for DIS magazine, Steyerl relates an encounter with a smartphone camera
developer in Holland, who helped her realize how fundamentally different the representational mode of
camera phone technology is from traditional understandings of analog photography and indexicality.
Steyerl explains, that since

. . . the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The
trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to defne the picture from
within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on
the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the
pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes.

What Steyerl is describing is the way that photographs now regularly generate and defne other
photographs, often without the user taking any notice. The camera on the smartphone creates pictures
based on pictures, interpreting aggregate data and the user’s history of preferences in order to anticipate
what it thinks you might like to see. Strikingly, though a connection to what was in fact in front of the
camera’s lens still exists, it is modifed by, and linked to, already existing pictures. “You don’t really
photograph the present, as the past is woven into it,” declares Steyerl.31 This socio-temporal-technological
shift has profound implications for the politics of photographic representation and the political economy
of seeing.

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Renowned for her writings on the intersections of representation with postcolonialism, globalization,
and feminism, Steyerl has pushed for reinventing documentary practices in face of the multiplicity of
global media, the increasing challenge of sifting misinformation from fact, and the continuing need for
“social engagement and historical integrity” in a digitally mediated era.32 Addressing the conditions of
hypervisibility and surveillance that characterize the world of the present, Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen:
A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013) parodies the conventions of the internet tutorial. Within
this fourteen-minute single channel video projection, a digitized male voiceover narrates fve satirical
lessons on how individuals can resist being visually captured, including camoufage or reducing oneself
to less than a pixel, and living in a gated community or a militarized zone. While these strategies are
recounted, individuals, including the artist, humorously pantomime movements to accompany the
instructions, against the backdrop of a green screen. In Steyerl’s own words, the piece is “precisely
about being unable to escape the gaze.”33 As with other works by Steyerl, this video questions how the
status of “visibility” has changed in the age of information and a world replete with constant monitoring,
and how a nuanced contemporary re-envisioning of the politics of representation is therefore necessary.
Moreover, Steyerl’s artwork and writings posit that being “visible” or documented photographically does
not always mean being seen in any real sense, let alone understood as a subject with agency.
Throughout this book, we have emphasized the ways that the indexical underpinnings of the photograph
have been crucial to the way the photograph is believed and, by extension, its meaning interpreted.
Steyerl’s description of the camera phone’s technological and representational challenge to this dynamic
alters the way that the medium is conceived. In this way, we might more aptly describe this mode of
photography as “pre-conceived” and “recombined,” not based on the photographer’s intentions, choices,
or desires, but rather shaped by the technological aggregation of visual information and predetermined
digital algorithms. One implication of this new form of photography is that it decreases the likelihood of ever
seeing unpredictable subjects, since it draws on ratios of probability and statistics of occurrence. Within
this technological example, Steyerl sees clear political analogies to the state of representational politics and
contemporary democracies, as in the representational paradigm in which a citizen assumes that they are
voting for someone who will represent them. If this were indeed the case, then the interests of the population
would be proportionally represented. Current democracies, however, work rather more like smartphone
photography by algorithmically clearing noise and boosting some data over others. It is a system in which
the unforeseen has a hard time happening because it is not yet in the database, which ultimately impinges
on the possibilities for actual political change and progress. Through this lens, the need to rethink the
political potential and limitations of photography in the present becomes all the more urgent.

Summary
• Photography poses an ethical encounter between viewers and subjects.
• Questioning the politics of representation in relation to particular photographs challenges the
idea of documentary photography as neutral.
• Making complex situations such as climate change and social injustice visible through
photography can offer a sense of mutual connectedness and responsibility.
• Portraiture is a long-standing photographic genre with various tropes in different cultural
contexts.

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Discussion points
• What ethical questions are potentially involved in looking at photographs of other people?
• What kinds of power relationships might be implicated in documentary photography?
• Are there limits to the role photography can play in making a social or political issue visible?
• How have artists and photographers created counter-narratives to the established tenets of
portraiture?

Additional case studies

Taysir Batniji (b. 1966)
Victor Burgin (b. 1941)
Hichem Driss (b. 1968)
Pablo Ortiz Monasterio (b. 1952)
Malik Nejmi (b. 1975)
Farah Nosh (b. 1974)
George Osodi (b. 1974)
Trevor Paglen (b. 1974)
Gordon Parks (1912–2006)
Althea Thauberger (b. 1970)

Notes
1 Correspondence with author, July 9, 2018.
2 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013), 123.
3 Demos, The Migrant Image, 124.
4 See Heather Diack and Erina Duganne, “Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s
Photography,” photographies 10, no. 3 (Autumn 2017): 235–43, fn 3: “The term politics of representation frst
appeared in the subtitle to Allan Sekula’s 1978 essay ‘Dismantling Modernism,’ and in James Donald’s
introduction to the special issue of Screen Education 36 (Autumn 1980), which included John Tagg’s essay
‘Power and Photography.’ In a footnote to her essay ‘Who is Speaking Thus?,’ Abigail Solomon-Godeau
further associates this term with Victor Burgin’s 1977 essay ‘Looking at Photographs’ and his 1980 essay
‘Photography, Phantasy, Function,’ as well as with Martha Rosler’s 1981 essay ‘In, Around and Afterthoughts
(on Documentary Photography).’”
5 “Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media,” Getty.edu, http://www.getty.edu/art/mobile/center/
breakingnews/stop.php?id=362201.
6 Evan Thomas, “How Bush Blew It,” Newsweek, September 19, 2005.
7 “Submerged Portraits,” Gideon Mendel, http://gideonmendel.com/submerged-portraits/.
8 “Execution Squares,” Hrair Sarkissian, http://hrairsarkissian.com/work/execution-squares/.
9 John Tagg, “Discipline and Protest: Thinking Photography after Foucault,” in Lars Willumeit (ed.), The (Un)
Becomings of Photography: On Reaggregating and Reassembling the Photographic and Its Institutions
(Krakow: Fundacja Sztuk Wizualnych, 2016), 62.

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10 Anastasia Moloney, “Silence surrounds Colombia’s 92,000 disappeared: ICRC,” Reuters, https://www.reuters.
com/article/us-foundation-colombia-missing/silence-surrounds-colombias-92000-disappeared-icrc-
idUSKBN0GT22520140829.
11 María del Rosario Acosta López, “Memory and Fragility: Art’s Resistance to Oblivion (Three Colombian Cases),”
CR: The New Centennial Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 71–98; 88.
12 Amanda Jane Graham, “Assisted Breathing: Developing Embodied Exposure in Oscar Muñoz’s ‘Aliento’,” Latin
American Perspectives 39, no. 3 (May 2012): 63–73; 63.
13 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1997), 15.
14 Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (Oakland, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 45.
15 See Edward T. O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis,”
Public Historian 26, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 7–26.
16 O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words,” 8; Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of
New York (New York: n.p., 1890).
17 Marguerite Lavin, curator of photographs, Museum of the City of New York, telephone interview with Edward T.
O’Donnell, May 10, 1998. See O’Donnell, “Pictures vs. Words,” 7–26, fn 1.
18 Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)” (1981), in Decoys and
Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 177.
19 Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), 178.
20 Owens, Beyond Recognition, 178.
21 Holland Cotter, “A Local Place for a Global Neighbourhood,” New York Times, November 7, 2013.
22 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 20.
23 Campt, Listening to Images, 22.
24 Cynthia Foo, “Portrait of a Globalized Canadian: Ken Lum’s ‘There Is No Place Like Home’,” RACAR (2005):
39–47; 42.
25 Nicole Neufeld Elizabeth, Displacing Identity Politics: Relocating Sites of Representation in the Work of Jin Me
Yoon, Master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008, 40.
26 Yoon quoted in Germain Koh, “Jin-Me Yoon,” in Diana Nemiroff (ed.), Crossings (Ottawa: National Gallery of
Canada, 1998), 182.
27 “Wang Jinsong,” in Lines of Descent: The Family in Contemporary Asian Art, 2000, http://www.visualarts.qld.
gov.au/linesofdescent/works/wang.html.
28 Jiehong Jiang, Burden or Legacy from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2007), 21.
29 Leslie K. Wang, Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China (Oakland, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2016), 9.
30 Roberta Wue, “Essentially Chinese: the Chinese portrait subject in nineteenth-century photography,” in Wu
Hung and Katherine R. Tsang (eds.), Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2005), 257–82; 261.
31 Hito Steyerl in conversation with Marvin Jordan, “The Politics of Post-Representation,” DIS magazine, http://
dismagazine.com/disillusioned-2/62143/hito-steyerl-politics-of-post-representation/.
32 “Traveling Images: The Art of Hito Steyerl,” Art Forum (Summer 2008), https://www.artforum.com/
print/200806/traveling-images-the-art-of-hito-steyerl-20392; T. J. Demos, “Hito Steyerl’s Traveling Images,” in
The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2013), 74.
33 Hito Steyerl in conversation with Lynn Hershman Leeson, in Eva Respini (ed.), Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989
to Today (Boston and New Haven, CT: Institute of Contemporary Art and Yale University Press, 2018), 150.

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Selected further reading

Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013.
Lind, Maria and Hito Steyerl, eds. The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art. Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2008.
Maki, Fukuoka. The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-century Japan.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Rosler, Martha. “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography).” In Decoys and Disruptions:
Selected Writings, 1975–2001, 151–206. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Sekula, Allan. “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation).” In
Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983, 53–75. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design, 1984.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Who Is Speaking Thus?” In Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History,
Institutions, and Practices, 169–83. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Tagg, John. “Discipline and Protest: Thinking Photography after Foucault.” In Lars Willumeit (ed.), The (Un)
Becomings of Photography: On Reaggregating and Reassembling the Photographic and Its Institutions, 57–61.
Krakow: Fundacja Sztuk Wizualnych, 2016.

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 6
PICTURES OF WAR

Falling Soldier is renowned as one of the most iconic extant pictures of war (see Fig. 6.1). Photographed
by Robert Capa (1913–54), co-founder of the Magnum Photos agency, the image depicts a soldier’s
death in September 1936 on an open hillside. With this close-up, we as viewers become witnesses to
the graphic scene. We see the precise moment at which he is shot, his fatally wounded body fung
backwards as he releases his rife from the grip of his right hand. Taken during the Spanish Civil War
(1936–9), this image has been studied closely since its creation for both its emotional power and as a
model of confict photography. Newly available lightweight Leica cameras and 35mm flm allowed
photographs to be taken for the frst time in the heat of battle. In capturing the instantaneity of this
startling moment, Capa’s image exemplifes photography’s prowess as a vehicle of reportage and
immediacy. Very explicitly it shows how photographs could now be shot out in the feld by nimble
photojournalists, able to capture the action of warfare with all its sudden intensities, including death.
At the same time, however, it raises a number of important ethical questions, including whether or
not the photographer has any responsibility beyond documentation, in the face of violent acts.
Notoriously, this photograph continues to be the subject of ongoing debates regarding its veracity,
opening up yet another set of ethical and visual conundrums. Since the 1970s, its authenticity as a
“true” picture has been called into doubt, and many suggest it was indeed staged. More recently, José
Manuel Susperregui, a communications professor at the Universidad del País Vasco, has conducted
detailed studies of Capa’s picture and, based on the surmised location, concludes that the photograph
is faked.1
Nevertheless, the uncanny power of this photograph endures. As addressed in the discussion of
truth-value in relation to photography in Chapter 2, staging and artistry have long been integral to the
history of photography and used in the service of making compelling images. Beyond whether or not
Falling Soldier is actually a picture of a fatality, the photograph is without question a war photograph.
Capa was indeed on the ground, so to speak, and was both emotionally and ideologically invested in the
Spanish Civil War. By all accounts, he “sympathised with the plight of the anti-fascist Republicans,
consisting of the workers, the trade unions, socialists and the poor.”2 Moreover, Capa’s photograph is a
palpable attempt to convey the shocking horror of war, and as such, a statement against armed confict.
Regardless of whether the image was staged, Capa used his camera as a tool that reconceptualizes the
viewer’s relationship to war. As photography historian Sally Stein has argued, despite Falling Soldier
being “discredited as a battlefront record,” it persists as an “iconic” image in deliberations regarding the
“ever-changing criteria for, and boundaries between, photography, propaganda, and art.”3 The element
of persuasion, as a mode of address, is worth exploring in more depth.

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Figure 6.1 Robert Capa, Falling Soldier, 1936. Robert Capa [Death of a Loyalist militiaman, Córdoba front, Spain],
early September 1936. © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos (2560.1992).

From author Richard Whelan’s perspective, Falling Soldier engages viewers in fundamentally subjective
ways by calling them to think about the mortal effect of war on individual humans. Whelan explains:

The horrifc tendency of modern warfare is to depersonalize. Soldiers can use their weapons of mass
destruction only because they have learned to conceptualize their victims not as individuals but as a
category—the enemy. Capa’s strategy was to repersonalize war—to emphasize that those who suffer
the effects of war are individuals with whom the viewer of the photographs cannot help but identify.4

This realization triggers a series of crucial questions, pertaining to the role and subject matter of war
photography, as well as its modes of creation, dissemination, and reception. Ultimately, what is the
meaning and effect of a photograph such as Falling Soldier, in its depiction of deadly violence? Moreover,
are photographs of war ever simply documents? What role do they play in engaging public sentiment?
Can or should they function as calls to public action more broadly? These uncertainties, among others,
are central to this chapter.
Almost immediately after the so-called invention of photography in 1839, journalists and photographers
used the medium to record and report on war to citizens located at a distance from their nations’
conficts. Beyond reportage, affnities between photography and modern warfare were evident early on,

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including the shared allusion to “shooting.” As writer Susan Sontag aptly remarked, “War-making and
picture-taking are congruent activities.”5 And yet, from the outset, the relationship between images of
war and the actualities of war were far from natural or self-evident. Many early photographs of conficts
(for example, Felice Beato’s 1858 photograph from the Indian Mutiny, discussed in greater detail in
Chapter 12, or Alexander Gardner’s photographs from the American Civil War, which we take up later in
this chapter) show scenes that we know were staged, a fact that would seem to challenge the medium’s
presumed evidentiary function as well as the journalist’s desire for truth-telling. This chapter investigates
the constructed nature of war imagery and asks whether or not its staging—what might be called its
manufactured realism—automatically makes such pictures any less “real.” Can staged or even imagined
images of war still function as “true” pictures, that is, “true” expressions of the frustration, violence, and
trauma of war? Additionally, what happens when pictures of war are viewed within the context of art,
and the photographer identifes as an artist rather than a journalist? How might this change the register
and affect of pictures of war?

The politics of proximity

“If you’re pictures aren’t good enough, you are not close enough.” This oft-quoted piece of photographic
advice is attributed to none other than Robert Capa. For Capa, the notion of “getting close” implied not
simply a metaphorical intimacy but rather a literal dictum for photographers to physically get closer to the
subject of the photograph. By such means, the revered photojournalist believed a more powerful picture
would result. Falling Soldier exemplifes this logic. But again, what does this kind of closeness suggest
beyond the photographer’s willingness to be up close and personal with danger, death, and despair?
How does “getting close” connect to the role of the viewer in relation to the image? In other words, what
are the politics of proximity as regards pictures of war?
Artist Martha Rosler has refected deeply on the impetus of the “real” in photography, and relatedly,
the photograph’s claim to evidence. Furthermore, critically examining the politics and ethics of individual
engagement in relation to representations of war has been central to Rosler’s practice. Consistently
topical and prescient, her work has critically examined the role of visuality in the Vietnam War, the multiple
incarnations of the Gulf Wars, feminism, globalization, and, not coincidentally, homelessness—all issues
that are profoundly interconnected.6 Created and circulated frst as photocopied fyers before being
published in anti-war journals, Rosler’s series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72)
addresses the politics of proximity specifcally during the war in Vietnam. Frequently referred to as “the
livingroom war,” the war in Vietnam spanned two decades between 1955 and 1975 and was the frst to
be systematically televised. Publications such as Life were immensely popular during this time period. Art
historians Carol Payne and Laura Brandon explain that “[b]etween 1961 and 1972, Life magazine
published more than 1,200 images of Vietnam War zones, largely focusing on individual soldiers’
experiences, and a further six hundred from the home front depicting mounting resistance to the
confict.”7 Now iconic photographs such as Eddie Adams’s picture of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc
Loan executing the Vietcong suspect Bay Hop in 1968 and Nick Ut’s image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc and
other children feeing a napalm strike in 1975 frst came to public attention in this way.
By such means, graphic coverage of the atrocities of war entered the homes of ordinary American
civilians on a daily basis. Nevertheless, within the comfort of one’s personal space, viewers had the
prerogative to tune out this news coverage or to see it simply as a spectacle at a remove. And, moreover,

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the war raged on. Poignantly, Rosler employed the strategy of photomontage, which allowed her, as
curator Brian Wallis argues, to “seamlessly splice together grim Vietnam War photographs from Life
magazine with views of attractive upper-middle-class homes from the popular magazine House
Beautiful”8 in order to shatter any sense of comfort within one’s assumed private refuge of the home.
Rather than allowing the horror of war to be seen as remote and mundane, Rosler used unexpected
juxtapositions to point to the implicit and complicit presence of militarism in daily life. GIs searching
through designer kitchens and rooms with views onto battlefelds strewn with corpses are imaged in
order to critique the complacency and insular reality of United States consumer culture. These
manufactured scenes relay important information about the true experience of war while collapsing the
distance between home and abroad, pointing to the fact that these two realities are interdependent.
Addressing the effects and limitations of the circulation of images of war, Rosler seeks to undo the
problematic binary of “us and them.” The notion of “bringing the war home” suggested by the subtitle
implies making familiar, begging the question: What does it mean to become familiar with the terrible
realities of war? Are there ways in which desensitization sets in?
One particularly jarring photomontage from the series is entitled Balloons (see Fig. 6.2). We see a
panic-stricken woman bracing a bloodied infant’s body amidst a serene, affuent, idealized domestic

Figure 6.2 Martha Rosler, Balloons, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967–72. © Martha
Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

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interior. By contrast, the balloons are inconsequential, tucked decoratively in the far corner. This
photomontage is heartrending while simultaneously asking how images mobilize feeling. In Regarding
the Pain of Others (2003), writer Susan Sontag discusses the “exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion,
indignation) in war photography and of rote ways of provoking feeling,” explaining that, “It used to be
thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen,
bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography
is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can
be taken for granted.”9 Rosler’s use of photography is particularly attuned to such risks. It is also notable
that her original series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home received renewed attention from the
public and the media during the frst Gulf War in 1991, in tandem with the uncanny sense that the new
war was all too familiar. Rosler returned to the subversive strategy of photomontage with an updated
version of the project in the early 2000s, during the onset of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq,
this time including new technologies of communication and imaging, including cellular phones, and
featuring disquieting sites such as the ruins of Saddam Hussein’s palatial residence.
Yet another controversial home front forms the subject of “Hurrah! The butter is fnished!” (Hurrah, die
Butter ist alle!), frst published in AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung—Worker’s Illustrated Newspaper) 14,
no. 51 (December 19, 1935) (see Fig. 6.3), a leftist weekly dedicated to advancing the political education
of workers. The publication began in Berlin in 1921 and later relocated to Prague after the Nazis came
to power in 1933, where production continued until the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. This
1935 photomontage by Dada artist John Heartfeld (1891–1968) parodies a speech by the Nazi leader
Hermann Göring (a fgure prominently involved in the establishment of concentration camps) delivered in
Hamburg, a quote from which is included at the bottom of the image. It reads, “Ore has always made an
empire strong, butter and lard have made a country fat at most.” The quote exemplifes Göring’s
aggressive militarist rhetoric and his callous attempts to convince Germans of the necessity of making
sacrifces for the country’s rearmament, even if it meant going hungry. For though it is the interwar period
between World War I and World War II, Weimar was characterized by a continuation of food scarcity and
the new National Socialist regime is asking Germans to make further sacrifces. Heartfeld’s photomontage
uses wit and sensationalism to lay bare Göring’s cold-hearted logic, and the ruthless cruelty of Nazism
more broadly.
Shown as a single image, despite the fact that it is a cut-and-paste montage of elements, the absurdity
of the scene is presented as a unifed whole, as credible, as real. This montage is a prime example of
manufactured realism. Art historian Sabine Kriebel describes the imagined instant, noting that “[f]or a
hallucinatory moment, we suspend disbelief: Hitler is a Kaiser, and this family obligingly eats a bicycle in
their ornate dining room, the decorative excess competing with their nutritive austerity.”10 This terrifyingly
patriotic family devours inedible metal parts, including a bicycle, farm implements, weights, and weapons,
surrounded by ornamental swastikas. Most gruesome of all is the sneering baby in the lower-left
foreground chewing on a threatening axe. The image is disturbing and deliberately so. Heartfeld was
vehemently opposed to the spread of fascism and saw the potential of art and photography as political
tools. He also believed in the critical power of humor. Formerly Helmut Herzfeld, the artist adopted his
anglicized pseudonym as “a wartime protest against German chauvinism and a symbolic alliance with
the English enemy.”11 Furthermore, in response to the Nazi mobilization of propaganda, Heartfeld
explained, “I started making photomontages during the First World War. I found out how you can fool
people with photos, really fool them . . . You can lie and tell the truth by putting the wrong title or wrong
captions under them.”12 Heartfeld’s trenchant critique of fascism and militarism uses photomontage to

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Figure 6.3 John Heartfeld, “Hurrah! The butter is fnished!” (Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!), from AIZ 14, no. 51,
December 19, 1935. Collection of the Akron Art Museum. Gift of Roger R. Smith.

activate the viewer. Confronted with the intimidating prospect of this macabre domestic scene, we
acknowledge that the monstrousness of war is inextricably connected to ordinary families, to the stuff of
everyday life, and can grow out of quotidian ideologies.
More than seventy years separate Heartfeld’s artistic practice from that of Tehran-based Gohar
Dashti (b. 1980), and yet, like Rosler and other artists working with manufactured realism as a means of
critique, Dashti creates compelling pictures of war that interrogate seemingly ordinary everyday life as a
site which is ripe to reveal the sutures of confict and the far-reaching effects of war. Though Dashti’s work
deliberately engages with the “staging” of war as a subject, she does not use photomontage. Rather, she
employs a tableau aesthetic, featuring a single coherent image that questions the “real” effects of war on
daily life. Notably, Dashti’s birth coincided with the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war (1980–8), on the heels
of the Islamic Revolution (1979) under the leadership of the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Growing
up within this context, war obtained an unnerving level of normalcy. As such, Today’s Life and War
(2008), a series of ten color photographs, engages with the emotional impact of the direct experience
of war on the continuation of everyday life (see Fig. 6.4). We see a young couple go about their daily

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Figure 6.4 Gohar Dashti, Today’s Life and War, 2008. © Gohar Dashti. Courtesy of the artist.

activities, hanging laundry out to dry, celebrating a birthday, and watching television, among other
seemingly mundane moments. In each image, the two don blank, unaffected facial expressions. All the
while, in each scene, they are surrounded by the unsettling military materials of war. We see soldiers in
gas masks with assault rifes, the laundry line is in fact a barbed wire fence, and their meagre celebration
takes place behind a sandbag bunker. In one image, the couple sits down for tea together, and the
woman is distracted by a cellphone call. The man stares absorbingly at her, and yet, astoundingly, neither
seem preoccupied at all with the massive tank that encroaches on their peaceful meal, the daunting
barrel of its gun aimed straight at them. Within Dashti’s fctionalized battlefeld flmset, in spite of being
staged, a very real and moving sense of the insidiousness of warfare can be felt. These photographs
question what one is able to accept as routine, as well as the ways that the violence of war seeps into all
aspects of society and personal relationships.

Afterimages
In 1994, An-My Lê (b. 1960) returned to her homeland of Vietnam to capture images of the aftermath and
upheaval of the war between American forces and the Viet Cong. According to the art historian Lisa
Saltzman, once there, Lê found “the war-torn landscape of her disrupted childhood remained largely

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invisible beneath signs of postwar industrial development and consumer culture,”13 and as such the
resulting photographs demonstrate this new layer of reality. Born in Saigon, Lê recalls living in her family
home, amidst nightly mortar attacks, before relocating to the United States in 1975 as a refugee. For Lê,
the temporal disjuncture between now and then intersects irrevocably with the geographic displacement
of here and there. Her photographic work and its investigative take on the genre of war photography
demonstrate this attention. Building on her interest in the afterlife of war, both in terms of memory and
physical traces, Lê subsequently created Small Wars (1999–2002), a series of photographs documenting
American civilians who spend their free time re-enacting the Vietnam War in the forests of Virginia,
regardless of the fact that the landscape bears little resemblance to Southeast Asia (see Fig. 6.5). Invoking
the aesthetics of documentary photography and combat photojournalism, Lê’s black-and-white images,
and their sometimes-gritty blurs, mimic battle scenes while in fact being the result of restaging. Armed
men in camoufage and helmets appear poised for battle, positioned around props, maneuvering for
rescue operations in some pictures and ambushes in others. Lê’s large format photographs focus on
armed confict and yet rarely show any actual military engagement. Instead, though they are re-enactments,
many of these photographs nevertheless seem to be characterized by an anticipation of action. In
photographically documenting re-enactors, Lê effectively, as curator Karen Irvine writes, “explores the
cumulative effect that various accounts of war have on memory, both individual and collective, and

Figure 6.5 An-My Lê. Small Wars (Sniper 1), 1999–2002. © An-My Lê. Courtesy of the artist.

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ultimately questions how we remember, glorify, and imagine war after the fact.”14 Above all, Small Wars
evokes a profound sense of ambiguity, in terms of both depicted content and meaning. As viewers, we
must ask ourselves by what criteria an “authentic” photograph of war might be assessed, while questioning
how representations of war shape our broader understanding of confict. Moreover, these complex
photographs are also striking in that they are quite beautiful, even contemplative. On this point, curator
Mark Godfrey has argued that their aesthetic appearance “mitigates against any danger of them being
taken for two-dimensional political statements.”15 This possibility presents yet another dilemma requiring
further consideration, namely the troubling status of beauty when depicting subjects of war.
Lê’s decision to explore scenes of war that do not depict the heat of action has many precedents in
the history of photography. Photographs of fast-paced, active battles are in fact absent from the
photographic records of the two most heavily documented conficts of the nineteenth century, namely
the Crimean War (1853–6) and the American Civil War (1861–5). Rather, photographs from these wars
consist predominantly of portraits. Carol Payne and Laura Brandon elucidate: “Today, viewers are often
surprised by the inert, calm formality of nineteenth-century war photography, but cumbersome and
fragile equipment, as well as long exposure times simply prohibited photographing battlefeld action.”16
Dominated by tranquil and controlled poses, the demeanor of the soldiers might seem misleadingly out
of sync with the violence and chaos of war. This tension, however, can be mined for its own effects.
Consider the work of Richard Mosse (b. 1980) in this regard. Using Kodak Aerochrome, a
discontinued brand of reconnaissance flm developed in the 1940s that registers infrared light as it is
refected off the chlorophyll in live vegetation, Mosse’s series Infra (2011) transforms the war-torn
landscape of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), turning foliage that would normally
appear green into shocking hues of pink. These photographs depict child soldiers, refugee camps, and
armed rebel forces presented against the backdrop of ravaged topographies that appear nearly extra-
terrestrial in glowing, unnatural shades of magenta, fuchsia, and rose. The vibrancy of pinks becomes all
the more disturbing in relation to the context—more than 5.4 million people have died in war-related
causes since 1994 in the DRC. This particular war is a notoriously complex confict, fought by numerous
factions, largely over the ownership and exploitation of the country’s mineral resources, including rare
materials necessary to make smart mobile phones and computers (such as tantalum from coltan and tin
ore). Despite, or perhaps because of, the overwhelming atrocities in this region, including an estimated
30,000 children conscripted into various fghting forces, more than 300,000 women raped, and 3.4
million people forced to fee their homes,17 the confict has not retained the interest of the international
news media.
In an effort to document this ongoing war, Mosse describes his desire to fnd a new way of showing
what he refers to as a “forgotten war,” explaining, “I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation,
to up-end the generic conventions of calcifed mass-media narratives and challenge the way we’re
allowed to represent this forgotten confict . . . I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance
technology, to use it refexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed.”18
Noting the widely popular reception of these images, and the obsessive return of critical attention to the
loaded potential of pink, art historian Gabrielle Moser has insightfully refected on whether the intensive
visual pleasure of the work in fact detracts from the violent reality represented, particularly when the
photographs are understood foremost as surreal or dreamlike. Moreover, Moser points to the racialized
dimensions of this violence, and how the instability of color throughout the series might serve to “remind
us of photography’s long-standing role in constructing race as a category of natural, visible, classifable,
coloured difference.”19

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Among the compelling shots by Mosse, Rebel Rebel particularly resonates (see Plate 10). We see a
young armed rebel on the Lukweti to Pinga road, Masissi Territory, North Kivu. He poses with his AK47
in a manner that exaggerates his biceps, in a performance of machismo. His childish face stares
assertively back at the viewer from behind the mask of aviator sunglasses. One can only imagine the
horrors he has seen and participated in. His pretense of fearlessness and control is tempered by a detail
that is at once inconspicuous and yet entirely disquieting: he is wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants cut-
off T-shirt. The presence of this goofy-grinned American cartoon character reinforces the terrible irony
that there is nothing to be taken lightly here, and moreover, that even childhood innocence is a luxury that
is not available to everyone.
Visually stunning photographs of war have the potential to be mobilized in various and contradictory
ways. Toshio Fukada’s photographs of an ominous mushroom cloud blooming over Hiroshima on August
6, 1945, less than twenty minutes after the United States dropped the atom bomb, remain potent
images. They possess what has been characterized as an “evil beauty,” that still has “the power to terrify
in their roiling ordinariness.” 20 Only fourteen years old at the time, the photographs Fukada took are
chilling reminders of the terrifying capacity of nuclear warfare. Yet what they do not show clearly are the
horrifc and enduring results of nuclear war on human life.
The ongoing aftereffects of war form the subject of Shomei Tomatsu’s work (b. 1930), an artist
widely considered the most important fgure in Japanese postwar photography. Nagasaki, Tomatsu’s
photographic book made twenty-one years after the horrifc bombing of that city on August 9, 1945,
grapples with the manifestations of trauma that remain long after war has “offcially” ended. Featuring
graphic black-and-white images of the scarred and disfgured faces and bodies of survivors as well as
everyday remnants, such as a cracked wristwatch with its hands halted at 11:02 am, the exact time of
the nuclear detonation, the series is a powerful indictment of the physical and mental impact of war.
Using a characteristically raw and grainy style, numerous warped objects are recorded by Tomatsu,
including a haunting Coca-Cola bottle deformed by the searing intensity of the atomic blast, which, at
frst glance, appears to be the grotesque corpse of a fayed animal.
Tomatsu uses a formalist approach to photography, focusing on details, close-ups, and composition,
in a manner that at once underscores the aesthetics of its subjects, drawing viewers in by its appearance,
while persuading them to take the time to contemplate and question what exactly is pictured before
them. Within the book format, looking at damaged objects alongside the visceral physicality of human
suffering further suggests the disturbing ways in which the violence of war dehumanizes, turning people
into objects. These moments of optical confusion possess both symbolic and ethical implications.
Tomatsu’s Untitled, from the series Memory of War, Toyokawa, Aichi (1959), is one such instance (see
Fig. 6.6). Speckles of light, reminiscent of a starry sky, emerge like whimsical constellations within a
darkened expanse. Nevertheless, like other photographs by Tomatsu, this image is in fact a brooding
record of the aftermath of atomic devastation and military occupation. Closer inspection reveals that the
subject is a corroded wall of a bombed munitions factory, pierced with holes that may be read as “a
powerful symbol of the deterioration of martial ambition in Japan.”21 Simultaneously, the connotations
derived from the night sky remain important, particularly in the ways they evoke existential questions
regarding the fnite fragility of human life by contrast to the infnite unknowns of outer space.
Jo Ractliffe (b. 1961) shares Tomatsu’s interest in capturing the haunting traces of war. And like
Mosse, she photographs eerie landscapes that link vision and violence while revealing the ways war
permeates both social and territorial space. Her series Terreno Ocupado (2007) depicts scenes of the
aftermath of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), following Angola’s independence from Portuguese rule,

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Figure 6.6 Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled, from the series Memory of War, Toyokawa, Aichi, 1959. Printed 1974 Art.
© Shomei Tomatsu—INTERFACE.

focusing on what arts writer Karen Wright has described as “the acceptance necessary for survival, the
quasi-normality of living contrasted with the trauma.”22 These black-and-white photographs “explore the
idea of landscape as pathology; how past violence manifests in the landscape of the present, both
forensically and symbolically.”23 Roadside stall on the way to Viana captures a stretch of bare ground in
and around Angola’s capital city, Luanda, showing traces of urban life in the background (see Fig. 6.7).
The area is home to unmarked mass graves and vestiges of military testing sites from the protracted civil
war. However, the camera does not show these disturbing elements explicitly. Instead, in the photograph,
the land appears harsh and dusty, desolate and empty. It seems marked more by anonymity than
recognizable specifcs. This ghostly aspect is further reinforced by the foreboding dark garments hanging
from a tree. Uninhabited and suspended, these workmen coveralls take on a symbolic importance,
combining abstract poetics with the rawness of the real. The bodies may have vanished but the signs of
them have not. The artist has described her interest in such spaces and in their connotation of temporal
disjuncture, explaining, “Quite often, sites of signifcance don’t evidence their historical weight.”24
Ractliffe’s project engages themes of dispossession and erasure that are also inextricable aspects of
war, questioning what it means to be occupied as well as abandoned.

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Figure 6.7 Jo Ractliffe, Roadside stall on the way to Viana, 2007. Digital silver gelatin print, 50 x 50 cm. © Jo
Ractliffe. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Bearing witness
In 1924 the conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich (1894–1967) published Krieg dem Kriege! Guerre à
la Guerre! War against War! Oorlog aan den Oorlog!, initially in German, English, French, and Dutch. It
has since been published in over ffty additional languages. Featuring graphic photographs from World
War I (1914–18), including mutilations, suffering, and death, drawn from previously censored German
military and medical archives, the book was intended as a condemnation of war.25 Friedrich believed that
if people saw the atrocities of war that they would be motivated to prevent future wars. In other words,
by bearing witness to war through photography, war could be prevented. As historian Dora Apel explains,
“Friedrich’s visual strategy depended primarily on an identifcation of the viewer with the humanist image
of the suffering soldier as a universal subject.”26 One reviewer in 1926 described the “shocking and
horrible photographs” contained therein as being far beyond the capacities of language, explaining that,
“no written work can come near the power of these images . . . Whoever sees these and does not
shudder is not a human being . . .”27 Throughout this chapter, we have seen numerous photographers

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and artists who have engaged with photography as a means of assessing the implications of the act of
looking at violent events that defy description, and how images can be mobilized in varying ways as anti-
war visual campaigns. In thinking of Friedrich’s approach, we return to the questions posed at the outset
of this chapter regarding the impact of seeing death. Does the visibility of violence on bodies aid in
preventing the militarization of society? Is the viewer positioned as a passive bystander when confronted
with photographs of the victims of war, or as an active witness, with the capacity to effect social and
political change?
Yet another German anti-war publication forms the basis of Adam Broomberg and Oliver
Chanarin’s (b. 1970; b. 1971) War Primer 2 from 2011. In this case, Broomberg and Chanarin developed
a project that layers photographic history, using appropriated copies of an English language edition of
Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfbel (War Primer), originally published in German in 1955. The artists were inspired
by Brecht’s creative gesture and his critique of the mystifying power of mass media images. Brecht
himself had appropriated photographs of World War II (1939–45) from newspapers, adding four-line
poems as captions to each image, which he referred to as photo epigrams. Sharing Brecht’s skeptical
view of photojournalism within the political economy of capitalism, Broomberg explains, “Our project was
a continuation of his concerns. [Brecht] was obsessed with how opaque photographs were. He called
them hieroglyphics, and 70 years later we are further away from understanding how images work than
they were back then.”28 In their version, Broomberg and Chanarin superimposed low-resolution
screenshots, culled from Google image searches of the ongoing “War on Terror,” onto the pages of 100
copies of Brecht’s book. In order to avoid War Primer 2 becoming an exclusive, rarefed object, they also
made it available as a scanned free e-book.
Broomberg and Chanarin share connections with Heartfeld’s anti-fascist montages. The duo similarly
used photographic images in unexpected combinations as a means of activating the viewer’s perception,
thereby posing complex questions rather than giving the impression of either easy explanation or
empathy. These images and their attendant text are not immediately transparent and, in many cases,
deliberately subvert rational understanding. One page shows a jovial image of former U.S. Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld balancing on a unicycle, pastiched atop a news photograph of Adolf Hitler
presenting a speech. Another shows a photograph of an American soldier languidly smoking a cigarette
above the dead body of a Japanese soldier. An image from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, of a wildly
smiling female U.S. Army soldier, Sabrina Harman, giving a proud thumbs-up sign to the camera as she
bends over an unidentifed rotting corpse, is pasted on top. Brecht’s poem here reads:

We saw each other—it happened very fast—

I smiled, and both of them smiled back at me.
And so at frst we stood and smiled, all three.
One pulled his gun. And then I shot him dead.

Such visual and textual combinations offer a critique of the horrors of war, the banality of evil, and,
additionally, the voyeuristic ways images of war are disseminated and consumed. War Primer 2 includes
numerous pictures of photographers taking photographs, further underscoring the point that images and
the politics of vision are integral to contemporary warfare. Plate 62, for instance, consists of a grid of
photographs (see Plate 11). The bottom layer includes a black-and-white series of dead soldiers, some
in trenches, some nestled on the ground. They could nearly be mistaken for sleeping bodies. Broomberg
and Chanarin have then included a color image of a dead body, face exposed to the camera phones held

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by four sets of hands looming above his head. This conjunction of gruesome images, as well as the
complex drive to document and view them, forces the viewer to ask whether pictures of war indeed
awake moral outrage and, by extension, the possibility of ethical intervention.
It has been nearly two decades since the U.S. war in Afghanistan began in October 2001. The iPhone
had not yet been invented and there was no cellular service in Kabul. Cell-phone towers now dot the
Earth and we are more than twelve generations into the world’s favorite smartphone. Nevertheless, with
the development of new technologies for recording, circulating, and seeing atrocities, wars continue to
proliferate. At present, war is widely acknowledged as the leading cause of human displacement, and it
is questionable whether our ability to view confict and to “bear witness” via photography has reduced
this onslaught.
It is worth remembering that the frst full-scale attempt to document a war occurred during the
American Civil War by a frm headed by Mathew Brady. According to writer Susan Sontag, these
photographs showed subjects such as “encampments populated by offcers and foot soldiers, towns in
war’s way, ordnance, ships, as well as, most famously, dead Union and Confederate soldiers lying on the
blasted ground of Gettysburg and Antietam.”29 When Alexander Gardner (1821–82), a photographer
operating in Brady’s employ, exhibited a series of Antietam photographs at Brady’s New York Gallery in
1862, American civilians were exposed for the frst time to pictures of casualties of war. Brady and others
are said to have justifed the brutality evidenced by the photographed bodies of the dead as the necessary
duty of the photographer. Supposedly, in defense of these graphic images, Brady quipped, “The camera
is the eye of history.”30 In other words, despite the cruelty depicted, the photographs were captured, and
needed to be seen, as a matter of historical integrity. However, the loftiness of historical documentation
is far from all that is at work in this scenario. It is now well known that, in some cases, the Brady
photographers rearranged the bodies of the recently dead in order to convey a more persuasively
photogenic picture. Gardner’s The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1865), from his
Photographic Sketchbook of the War (1865), poses an infamous example of such intervention. The body
of a dead Confederate soldier was moved, his head propped up to face the camera, and even the
adjacent rife, leaned to the side of the barricade, is an erroneous detail, identifed as an infantryman’s rife
rather than a sharpshooter’s. Nevertheless, the inconsistencies between the image and the truth here are
not so clear-cut. While some viewers may feel manipulated by this revelation of the photographer’s role
in constructing the image, the body before us is all the same dead as a result of armed combat. Sontag
succinctly summarizes the irony of this attachment to the fdelity of the photograph: “What is odd is not
that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures
from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were
staged, and always disappointed.” Arguably, Gardner’s alteration of the scene before the camera
intensifes the emotional effect of the photograph. The Battle of Gettysburg was the deadliest of the Civil
War. Though Gardner and his assistant Timothy O’Sullivan arrived two days after the battle, many bodies
remained unburied, and they were determined to capture the overwhelming impact of the ferocious
carnage. As such, is it any less a real picture of war? By some measure, could it in fact be more “true”
than had the photographer not added these elements?
In some instances, perhaps paradoxically, the removal of the bodies of victims of war has been
employed as a strategy to make visible the systemic realities of war and its intricate image economy.
Khaled Barakeh’s (b. 1976) The Untitled Images series (2014) denies the voyeuristic spectacularization
of victims of atrocity while also questioning the politics of mass media censorship, asking when, where,
and whose bodies are shown and viewed. In Barakeh’s sequence of images, casualties, often children,

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are cut out of the picture with a scalpel. This technique leaves behind a blank space etched into the
photographic paper, which appears as a solid white trace of their absent bodies when hung against the
gallery wall (see Fig. 6.8). The artist has described these as productive “excisions” that open up paradoxes
of “concealment.”31 These pictures were taken during the brutal, ongoing civil war in Syria. We see anguish,
panic, fear, distress, and mourning—the corporeal impact of confict made visceral. Each photograph
shows individuals clinging to the limp, abstract fgures of the wounded and dead. In Miriam Wilhelm’s
words, “By altering the modes of visibility and invisibility through erasure, forgetting and disappearance
become radical, profoundly productive acts.”32 Notably, these photographs are hung low when exhibited,
both as a means of humbling the viewer physically while also embodying further the discomforting reality
of the images, as we try to make sense of what we are witnessing. Barakeh’s project addresses the
limitations of looking, laying bare the relationships that the circulation of pictures of war assumes.
On this subject, Ariella Azoulay, a scholar of visual culture and contemporary philosophy, has written
provocatively about the mass circulation of photographs of atrocity, and in particular the “interrelations
prompted by the image as a productive political space.” In describing what Azoulay calls the “civil
contract of photography,” she explains how viewing photographs itself is a “civil act,” which always
demands more contextualization, thus enacting a form of participant viewership. The ways pictures of
war engage the viewer’s responsibility towards the photographed subject is crucial for Azoulay. Such
theorization builds upon the critique of documentary photography enacted in the writings and artistic

Figure 6.8 Khaled Barakeh, Untitled Images, 2014. © Khaled Barakeh. Courtesy of the artist.

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projects of Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula in the 1970s and 1980s, as a means of moving beyond the
apathy that so often characterizes the aestheticization of suffering and towards a critical politics of
representation, as discussed in the previous chapter.
Ultimately, examining the history of war photography reveals that such images are created and used
in a number of varying and even contradictory ways. Some photographs claim to provide documentary
truth, while others serve to challenge preconceptions of war and broaden our understanding of how we
are implicated in battles that seem very distant, in part by virtue of looking at photographs. Recall that
among the impactful elements in Rosler’s Balloons from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War
Home (1967–72), one of the most striking is the perplexing incongruity contained within a single frame.
How can we make sense of the anguish and fear on the face of the woman holding a child’s blood-
spattered body, against the backdrop of the meticulously decorated and tranquil home? Combined
together, as discussed previously, they draw attention not simply to the stark inequities of everyday life in
different locations around the world, but more potently suggest the ways these seemingly opposed
realities are intertwined. In other words, how the comforts of some often depend on the discomforts of
others, and how the complicity of some can be linked to the visceral suffering of others.
Another result of this provocative visual combination is that the viewer might be able to recognize
realities that are unfamiliar or seemingly remote by virtue of seeing them within a familiar context. In this
regard, imaging ordinary, everyday life can be a powerful tool. Rather than sensational or dramatic
photographs of war, which frequently alarm, confuse, and overwhelm with their unfathomable violence,
pictures such as Rosler’s allow space for thinking about relationships between oneself and others. Again,
Sontag’s ideas resonate: “Something becomes real—to those who are elsewhere, following it as ‘news’—
by being photographed.”
The photographic work of Muhammed Muheisen (b. 1981), the Associated Press chief photographer
for the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is revealing in this regard. Let’s look more closely at one
of his photographs. The descriptive caption reads, “An Afghan refugee girl, right, holding her younger
brother, sits on a wooden-cart looking at her friend playing with a balloon, in a poor neighbourhood
on the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, Sunday, Feb. 2, 2014” (see Fig. 6.9). We see no weapons or
corpses, but this too is a photograph of war. Though battle may not be explicitly pictured, the effects of
confict are as visceral here as in the Rebel Sharpshooter. Muheisen spent six months capturing a series
of portraits of Afghan children living in refugee camps in Pakistan. The children appear unguarded, and
in their visible vulnerability, Muheisen seems to ask for the viewer’s compassion. What kind of life is
possible in war zones? Muheisen’s photograph might be categorized as a picture of everyday life.
However, the specifcities of the lives pictured compels more critical detail. We have before us another
kind of “livingroom war,” and in this case, it is perhaps the complete absence of familiar domesticity that
brings the message home. As the Associated Press reports:

For more than three decades, Pakistan has been home to one of the world’s largest refugee
communities: hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have fed the repeated wars and fghting in their
country. Since the 2002 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan some 3.8 million Afghans have returned to
their home country, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency, but thousands of others still live without
electricity, running water, [sewage disposal] and other basic services.33

In this image, we see squalor and desperation, but also innocence and hope—the pink balloon appears
almost as a symbolic beacon of the latter, offering a stark contrast to the dust and ruin of its surroundings.

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Figure 6.9 Muhammed Muheisen, Islamabad, Pakistan, 2014. Courtesy of Muhammed Muheisen/AP/Shutterstock.

And yet we know that balloons are fragile, transient, and the joy they might provide is both short-lived
and superfcial. The impact of Muheisen’s photograph (and the same could be said of many of the
images we have looked at throughout this chapter) is due in part to its beauty and its unresolved diffculty.
Such photographs ask the viewer to think as well to look, and moreover, emboldened by this new
awareness of the complicated pain of others, to potentially act, if and when possible, as a citizen of the
world. Particularly considering the protracted nature of war in the present, its seemingly interminable
presence, and the expansive scale of dispossession it engenders, our understandings of war, and thus
of pictures of war, also demands expansion.

FOCUS BOX 6
Images of war or war of images?
Khaled Barakeh

The most successful and well-known curator of the twenty-frst-century is technology.

We are constantly bombarded by data and especially visual information. According to a
2014 annual web trends report, we are sharing and uploading upwards of 1.8 billion

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photos a day. With an approximate number of 95 million photos and videos posted to
Instagram and 300 million to Facebook daily, it is hard to keep track of every piece of
visual information that is available for us to see. Social media, with its immense
availability and wide range of information, has created a new context within which
anybody can become a creator of social debate. The result is a competition of images
in their potential to go viral.
As the volume of horrendous war images increases alongside this infux, the world
becomes more and more indifferent, almost accepting towards them. After years of
repetitive images of Middle Eastern misery shown in the Western media, one can notice
the numbness, even the cruel boredom, of viewers who are used to seeing scenes of
massacre on a daily basis. During the past few years as part of the Syrian Civil War, this
problem has escalated into a cruel war of violent images. The Syrian regime, the
opposition, and all other actors in the confict have entered into a cold-blooded war of
images, a competition to see who can reach the global news feeds frst and attain the
highest numbers of views—with only those who post the most horrifc visual materials
gaining the world’s attention. The intensity of this war continues to increase, as certain
players, guided by the necessity of creating ever more exaggerated visual materials to
satisfy the world, have begun to stage images by replaying the horrors they did not
manage to capture on flm. Groups like ISIS have understood and leveraged this
dynamic, creating images of extreme violence with an almost Hollywood-esque
dramaturgy. The victims of the Syrian war also started to produce images with their
own cameras, not only documenting events directly and immediately from the confict
zones that they were in, but also taking part in a violent competition of imagery being
played out on all sides in the confict. Feeling that their pain was no longer recognized
and that they could win more of the world’s attention only by posting more and more
extreme pictures, they started to create overly intensifed depictions of a reality that is
already brutal. Exaggerating the real pain and real stories became a must in this cruel
war of images, as the more shocking the content and the more attention it attracts, the
more real extreme violence becomes.
To challenge the reality of this horror and fnd ways to recontextualize and intervene
in it, I created a series of artworks, Untitled Images. After selecting a collection of
photographs from the Syrian confict zones portraying scenes of terror and grief, I
began to erase the bodies of those deceased from the images, leaving just an outline of
their silhouettes. This act of visual manipulation allowed me to recreate the real
events—however, in this restaging, the victims are no longer present, though their
deaths are more visible than ever. Syrian reality is often more surreal and brutal than
what we are used to seeing in photographs, even war images—and anything beyond
what we are accustomed to seeing has the potential to be categorized as staged. On
the other hand, for the sake of creating more convincing and descriptive images,
staging pictures is sometimes inevitable. Even if the timing is not exactly real, the

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scenes are still valid and portray realistic events. A lack of both photographers and
professional equipment results in millions of lost scenes daily, which would not
otherwise be seen by anybody but witnesses and which will never fnd their way into
public imagery. It should be noted that while we can indeed stage a photo, we should
not stage the reality, as the unthinkable horrors of war should not be viewed as purely
visual material. Those who were still determined to show Syrian reality as it is have had
to carefully put the images they produce in a time-space frame, constantly proving that
they are not hoaxes. Accused of faking news, Syrian media activists started
highlighting the realness of their photographs and videos by including newspapers with
dates on them or well-known buildings within frame so as to put them in a real context.
At the same time, we are witnessing an increasingly popular phenomenon of
anonymous war photography that has a potential to shift the importance of real-time
journalism and irreversibly change the roles of photographers and their agencies. Since
anybody with access to the internet can create, upload, and share images, therefore
shaping the public debate and reality itself, professional photography agencies stand
to lose their credibility and demand for their products. Images created by regular
people, civilians, and even victims of certain conficts themselves are distributed
throughout social media outlets, fghting for acknowledgment of their authors’
desperation and hoping for users to temporarily stop their casual scrolling.
In 2015, I stumbled upon a collection of amateur photographs, posted anonymously
on Facebook, that pictured the bodies of refugee children who had drowned during
their attempt to reach Europe. Their meaningless and horrifc deaths, which had
scattered their bodies along Libya’s shores, meant not only that they stopped existing
physically but that they departed without any remembrance, adding to the growing
percentage of refugees who have lost the battle with the sea. They were to be unknown
to the world forever, not existing in a collective memory of any country, any continent,
or any group of people, except their grieving relatives. They were no longer considered
human, but from now on, only as numbers. After I reposted those photographs, I
witnessed a wide range of social media dynamics. Within a few days, the album had
thousands of comments, shares, and reactions—some compassionate and others
outraged by the visual brutality of the images. Eventually, the album that I’ve titled
“Multicultural Graveyard,” was blocked by the authorities. Apparently, death only feels
real when on social media—maybe, even, terrifyingly too real—so the victims and their
corpses became inconvenient, unpleasant to look at, even with the low quality of the
images. Clearly, uploading this kind of content—not approved by mainstream media—
to one of the most powerful social media platforms created a new discussion and
social debate about digital curation and censorship.
Within seconds, from any place in the world, at any given time, through a digital
search engine we are granted access to any information we wish to access. After
typing any words into the search bar, a specially designed algorithm decides what

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information we should fnd based on our search history and other factors that defne us
as targets of customized data. As we move through the internet and interact within
social media, we continuously create our own media programs. The hundreds of
images that we see daily are suggestions based on our previous clicks, and so our
perceptions of reality become framed—everything outside of this frame is hidden and
therefore not available for us to acknowledge. Due to the proliferation of images in a
globally connected world, the mass media follow editorial strategies that protect or
expose people to certain content. It is decided from above what content should and
will be promoted, allowing us to create a position and opinion—or letting us believe we
are doing so.
When we believe the image is an undeniable fact, it becomes real. Therefore, viewers
create a new reality, not only for themselves but, because a photograph holds the
power to shape collective memory, for large groups of people. Last year, a former
Syrian military photographer known as “Caesar” smuggled a staggering 55,000
photographs picturing those deceased in Assad’s prisons out of the country. Flash
drives full of haunting photographs, taken between 2011 and 2013, depicted around
11,000 dead bodies that Caesar was assigned to document. Recently, he began
posting those images online, hoping to help families to track the fate of their missing
relatives. Those prisoners and their deaths are becoming real only now, with their
tortured bodies showcased to the public. We could say that, in fact, these images exist
only in connection with the attention we give them.
Perhaps we should try to save the dignity of the victims by not showing photographs
of their deepest despair, horror, or grief. By capturing on flm moments that destroyed
their lives, are we not sentencing the victims to a never-ending exposure of those harsh
memories, and somehow hurting them and robbing them of their inner peace all over
again? James Nachtwey has said about his experiences photographing war:

[T]he worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am benefting from someone else’s
tragedy. This idea haunts me. It is something I have to reckon with every day because
I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition I
will have sold my soul. The stakes are simply too high for me to believe otherwise.1

On the other hand, not showing their stories would mean ignoring them and cold-
bloodedly denying the realness of their struggles. Those people, including Syrians,
want their voices to be heard, want their stories to be seen, and want to get their
dignity back through the public eye—even if it was brutally taken away from them a
long time ago.

James Nachtwey, quoted in the flm War Photographer, directed by Christian Frei (Switzerland: Christian Frei Film Productions, 2001).
1

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Summary
• Confict photography raises a number of ethical dilemmas for both the photographer and the
viewer.
• The concept of “war photography” has changed over time and within various contexts.
• Some photographers approach confict photography with an emphasis on the aftermath rather
than the action of direct combat.
• A number of artists have developed bodies of work that explore the links between photographic
technologies and war.

Discussion points
• What kinds of ethical dilemmas are photographers and viewers confronted with in relation to
confict photography?
• How has the defnition of “war photography” changed?
• What can be learned from war photography that does not picture combat?
• How can photography and its technologies be instrumentalized in war?

Additional case studies

Felice Beato (1832–1909)
Larry Burrows (1926–71)
Luc Delahaye (b. 1962)
Fouad Elkoury (b. 1952)
Rula Halawani (b. 1964)
Kikuji Kawada (b. 1933)
Lee Miller (1907–77)
Louie Palu (b. 1968)
Gilles Peres (b. 1946)
Sarah Pickering (b. 1972)
Geert van Kesteren (b. 1966)

Notes
1 See José Manuel Susperregui, Sombras de la Fotografía: los enigmas desvelados de Nicolasa Ugartemendia,
muerte de un miliciano, la aldea española, el Lute (Bilbao, Spain: Universidad del Pais Vasco, 2009).
2 “Robert Capa and the Spainish Civil War,” Magnum Pro, https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/confict/
robert-capa-spanish-civil-war/.
3 Sally Stein, “Republican Soldier, Spanish Civil War, 1936,” in Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.),
Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of News (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 60–1.

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4 Richard Whelan, “Robert Capa in Spain,” in Heart of Spain (New York: Aperture, 1999), 29–32.
5 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 66.
6 “Too Close to Home: Rethinking Representation in Martha Rosler’s Photomontages of War,” Prefx Photo 14
(Fall/Winter 2006): 59.
7 Carol Payne and Laura Brandon, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Photography at War,” RACAR 39, no. 2 (2014): 3.
8 Brian Wallis, “Living Room War,” Art in America (February 1992): 104–7.
9 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 79–80.
10 Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 11.
11 Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty, 5.
12 Quoted in Krieble, Revolutionary Beauty, 65.
13 Lisa Saltzman, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 24–5.
14 Karen Irvine, “An-My Lê: Small Wars Oct 27–Jan 7, 2007,” Museum of Contemporary Photography, http://
www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2006/10/an-my-le-small-wars.php.
15 Mark Godfrey, “An-My Lê,” in T. J. Demos (ed.) Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (London:
Phaidon, 2006), 154.
16 Payne and Brandon, “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” 1–6.
17 Adam Hochschild, Infra: Photographs by Richard Mosse (New York: Aperture, 2012), 26.
18 Olivier Laurent, “Richard Mosse: La Vie En Rose,” British Journal of Photography (November 2010): n.p.
19 Gabrielle Moser, “Chromophobia: race, colour and visual pleasure in Richard Mosse’s The Enclave,” Prefx
Photo 32 (Winter 2015): 32.
20 Karen Wright, “Photographing war: 150 years of confict in Tate Modern’s new exhibition,” Independent,
November 24, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/photographing-war-150-
years-of-confict-in-tate-moderns-new-exhibition-9880619.html.
21 “Untitled, from the series Memory of War, Toyokawa Aichi,” The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/
collection/search/266343.
22 Wright, “Photographing war.”
23 Kate de Klee, “Jo Ractliffe’s black and white images show the eerie silence that remains after war,” Design
Ibada, September 18, 2015, http://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/jo-ratcliffes-black-and-white-
images-show-eerie-silence-remains-after-war.
24 Jo Ractliffe quoted in Marcus Buyan, “The Photograph As Unoccupied Land,” Art Blart, December 16, 2015,
https://artblart.com/2015/12/16/exhibition-the-aftermath-of-confict-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-new-
york/.
25 Dora Apel, “Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War,” New German Critique 76 (Winter,
1999): 49–84.
26 Apel, “Cultural Battlegrounds,” 50.
27 Kurt Tucholsky, “Waffe gegen den Krieg,” Die Weltbühne 8 (February 23, 1926): 312–13.
28 Lucy Davies, “The new war poets: the photographs of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin,” Telegraph,
March 29, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/9955106/The-new-war-poets-the-
photographs-of-Adam-Broomberg-and-Oliver-Chanarin.html.
29 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 51.
30 Judith A. Giesberg, “‘Eye of History’: Looking at Civil War Prisoners of War,” in J. Matthew Gallman and Gary
W. Gallagher (eds.), Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War (Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 2015), 188.
31 “Selected Projects: Untitled Images,” Khaled Bara, http://khaledbarakeh.com/the-untitled-images.html.

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32 Miriam Wilhelm, “Absent Atrocities,” https://khaledbarakeh.com/absent-atrocities.html.

33 “Close Up: Photographer Muhammed Muheisen,” Associated Press, October 21, 2014, https://apimagesblog.
com/blog/2014/10/21/close-up-muhammed-muheisen.

Selected further reading

Apel, Dora. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
Batchen, Geoffrey, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London:
Reaktion Books, 2012.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2010.
Hayes, Patricia. “Vision and Violence: Photographies of War in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia.” Kronos 27
(November 2001): 133–57.
Kennedy, Liam and Caitlin Patrick. The Violence of the Image and International Confict. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014.
Lavoie, Vincent. Photojournalisme, les canons des images de presse. Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2010.
Reinhardt, Mark, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, eds. Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffc in Pain.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press in association with the Williams College Museum of Art, 2007.
Sliwinski, Sharon. Human Rights in Camera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003.
Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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36461_16_Plates.indd 1
Plate 1 Farrah Karapetian, Riot Police, 2011. © Farrah Karapetian. Courtesy of the artist.

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36461_16_Plates.indd 2
Plate 2 Wolfgang Tillmans Ostgut Freischwimmer rechts, 2004. Collection of Kunstmuseum Basel. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York.

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Plate 3 Hasan and Husain Essop, Thornton Road, 2008. C-print, 70 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artists and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town.

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 Plate 4 Sammy Baloji, Untitled 13, Mémoire series, 2006. © Sammy Baloji. Courtesy of Twenty Nine Studio &
Production, Brussels.

Plate 5 María Magdalena Campos-Pons, When I am Not Here/Estoy Allá, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery
Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

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36461_16_Plates.indd 5
Plate 6 Ravi Agarwal, Have You Seen the Flowers on the River?, 2007–12. Courtesy of the artist.

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 Plate 7 Catherine Opie, Bush Smiling, Help Us, from the series Close to Home, 2005. © Catherine Opie. Courtesy
of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Plate 8 Gideon Mendel, João Pereira de Araújo, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015, 2015. © Gideon
Mendel/Drowning World. Courtesy of the artist.

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 Plate 9 Obal Denis/Martina Bacigalupo, “Gulu Real Art Studio” (Uganda), 2013. © Martina Bacigalupo. Courtesy of
the artist.

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 Plate 10 Richard Mosse, Rebel Rebel, 2011. © RICHARD MOSSE. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman
Gallery, New York.

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36461_16_Plates.indd 9
Plate 11 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, War Primer 2, 2011, Plate 62: Palestinian mourners use their mobile phones to take pictures during the funeral of
Mosub Daana, who was shot and killed by Israeli troops during clashes at a rally by Hamas supporters against Israel’s military operation in Gaza, in the West city of
Hebron, Friday, January 16, 2009. Artist book, 30 x 25 x 19 cm, 11¾ x 97∕8 x 7½ in. (B&C110005). © Broomberg & Chanarin. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery, London.

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 Plate 12 Elad Lassry, Circles and Squares (A Tasteful Organic Melons Arrangement), 2007; c-print, in artist’s frame,
11 x 14 ½ in. (27.9 x 36.8 cm). © Elad Lassry. Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York.

Plate 13 Raghubir Singh, Pavement Shop, Howrah, West BengalI, from the series The Grand Trunk Road, 1991.
© Raghubir Singh.

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 Plate 14 Barbara Kasten, Construct NYC 11, 1982. © Barbara Kasten. Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami Gallery,
New York.

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36461_16_Plates.indd 12
Plate 15 Alfredo Jaar, Life Magazine, April 19, 1968, 1995. Three pigment prints on Innova paper mounted on 6 mm Sintra. Overall dimensions: 65 x 132 in./165.1 x
335.28 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.

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Plate 16 Installation view, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, the International Center of Photography, 2006, with Tracey Rose’s
Lucie’s Fur Version 1:1:1–I Annunciazione (After Fra Angelico), c. 1434–2003. Courtesy of International Center of Photography, New York. Photograph by John
Berens.

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Plate 17 Rosângela Rennó, Rio Montevideo, 2011–16. Photograph by Kate Elliot.

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 Plate 18 Kimiko Yoshida, Painting (Monna Lisa) Self-Portrait, 2010. © Kimiko Yoshida. Courtesy of the artist.

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 Plate 19 Darren Almond, Fullmoon@Cerro Chaltén, 2013. Print 180 cm x 180 cm. © Darren Almond. Courtesy of
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Plate 20 Saïdou Dicko, La Bouilloire (The Tea Kettle), 2014. © Saïdou Dicko. Courtesy of ARTCO Gallery, Aachen.

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 PART FOUR

ART
In 1913, Mexican-born artist and art critic Marius de Zayas proposed understanding photography’s
relationship to the category of art as one that depends on the ways a photograph refects its own unique
means of representation, and by extension, its own formal qualities. “[P]hotography is not art,” wrote De
Zayas, “but photographs can be made into art.”1 It is true that since its inception as a medium,
photography has been repeatedly taken to task over whether or not it possessed the status of “Art.” Its
mechanical nature denied the value usually associated with the artist’s hand, including skill and labor.
Where was the human techne in something so technical? Furthermore, the reproducibility of the
photograph denounced the uniqueness and preciosity of the art object, another well-worn criterion of
art. Dating back to the nineteenth century, claims were made for photography as art by virtue of its ability
to imitate painting. De Zayas’s view strikes out against this logic and instead opens the possibilities of
photography as a self-refexive and even a self-critical practice. During the twentieth century, numerous
artists took innovative positions in relation to photography and questioned photography in or as art. In
the twenty-frst century, artists continue to expand those frames of reference even further, exploring how
photography alters human vision, mobilizes the mundane, and exists as a malleable material object.
Consider, for example, the photographs of Israeli-born artist Elad Lassry (b. 1977). Some of his
artworks are actual, direct appropriations, culled from vintage picture magazines and flm archives, while
others are scenes photographed to resemble appropriations. Imitating the generic look of stock
photography, Lassry’s saturated hues challenge expectations of still-photography and artistic originality.
Using techniques such as double exposures and superimpositions, adding frames keyed to match the
contents, Lassry magnifes and extends the commercial logic of art photography in the present. In works
like Circles and Squares (A Tasteful Organic Melons Arrangement) (2007) an admittedly ordinary scene
is subtly transformed into an intriguing formal and conceptual puzzle (see Plate 12). Lassry playfully
blends the historic genre of still life with an abstract geometric construction, while punning on “taste.” As
he explains, “I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories and the confusion that results when there is
something just slightly wrong in a photograph.”2 Never exceeding the proportions of a magazine page
or spread, Lassry’s photographic compositions impose their own constraints and make reference to
the networked reality of images in contemporary life. The following two chapters expand further on the
dimensions of form and appropriation specifcally in the context of art photography, looking at how the
register and rationale of photography as art shifts across time and place.

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 Notes
1 Marius De Zayas, “Photography and Artistic Photography,” in Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays in
Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 125–32. Originally printed in Camera Work, 1913.
See Graham Clarke, “The Photograph as Fine Art,” in The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
167–86.
2 “New Photography 2010: Elad Lassry,” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/
newphotography/elad-lassry/.

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 7
FORM

Using a spare and poetic aesthetic vocabulary, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–96) engaged themes
of love and loss, or more broadly presence and absence, throughout his career. For his installation
Untitled (Aparición) (1991), Gonzalez-Torres created a stack of posters, each featuring an identical
photograph of hovering cloud formations.1 Despite its focus on a single reproduced image, the piece is
in fact never the same twice. Rather, the form of the work changes over time with the interaction of the
gallery visitor. Installed low on the foor, this stack of photographic posters is conceived of as endless. In
an act of generosity and sharing, it is offered as a free take-away for visitors, that is replenished at
intervals by the gallery as the stack diminishes. Its evocation of clouds metonymically refects on the
persistent formlessness of photography, including the ways the medium morphs and is ever changing. It
also suggests the legacy of photography as art, by reference to Alfred Stieglitz’s famed fne art cloud
studies from the 1920s, known as the Equivalents series. However, whereas Stieglitz claimed his
photographs were apolitical and foremost about beauty, Gonzalez-Torres self-consciously activates the
formal possibilities of photography as a socially-engaged form. Gonzalez-Torres’s art deliberately
disorients: the ephemerality of sky becomes paradoxically grounded, as the viewer looks at it lying on the
foor. Moreover, the piece also works against the view of photography (or art for that matter) as either
static or transparent. Instead, Untitled (Aparición) challenges the viewer to understand photography
simultaneously as a formal object and as an elusive form.
“Form” itself has posed long-standing and varied sets of problematics within the history of photography,
as well as in terms of the conception of photography’s artfulness. A much-discussed trend in recent
contemporary photography is what some have called New Formalism, a term coined by curator
Christopher Bedford.2 Included within this approach are photographers such as Liz Deschenes, Eileen
Quinlan, Anthony Pearson, Mikko Sinervo, and Walead Beshty, who explore issues around photography’s
material and physical properties, including its relationship to light and space. While discussions of New
Formalism have largely centered on its relationship (or not) to abstraction, this chapter instead situates
the practice in terms of other relevant historical antecedents that have likewise pursued the formalist
properties of the medium, including Italian Futurism, Bauhaus photography, Russian Constructivism,
and twentieth-century street photography in Asia. Through these historical examples, we explore the
diverse social uses to which a formalist practice in photography has been put and raise signifcant
questions about the ways in which the recent practice of New Formalism departs from or connects to
these past examples, especially in its self-refexive investigation of the photographic image-making
process itself.

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The shape of vision

A formalist approach to art emphasizes visual aspects above all else, including paying special attention
to the way the work is made and what it looks like. That is not to say that visual appearance is without
psychological or political impetus. In fact, throughout the history of photography many artists have turned
to the medium as a means of engaging a radical form of aesthetics that was specifcally motivated by
ideology. Consider for example the Russian avant-garde in the early twentieth century. After the Bolshevik
Revolution of October 1917, Russian artists were enlisted to promote an active citizenry in the service of
the state. With roots in Cubism and Futurism, Constructivists challenged realism as a mode of
representation. Akin to Gonzalez-Torres’s experiments with inverting photographic expectations (for
example by placing his work horizontally on the foor rather than vertically on the wall), Aleksandr
Rodchenko (1891–1956) fundamentally altered the orientation of photographic practice. Rodchenko
saw photography as a heightened way to express the dynamic reshaping of his country. According to art
historian Abigail Solomon Godeau, the artist’s “use of vertical rather than horizontal perspective”
exemplifes the strategy of ostranenie (or “making strange”), an implicitly political notion, and was
“intended as the optical analogue to revolution—quite simply a revolutionizing of perception to accord
with the demands of a revolutionary society.”3
Importantly, Rodchenko and the Russian avant-garde more broadly understood their work to be
distinctly against the established tenets of art, inherited over centuries. In fact, the ordinary and
instantaneous ways photography could evade artistic conventions formed part of the medium’s allure.
As Rodchenko asked:

What ought to remain of Lenin . . . an art bronze, oil portraits, etchings, watercolors, his secretary’s
diary, his friend’s memoirs—or—a fle of photographs taken of him at work and rest . . .? I don’t think
there’s a choice. Art has no place in modern life . . . Every cultured modern man must wage war
against art . . . Photograph and be photographed!4

For Rodchenko, a revolution of daily life required destabilizing the entire canon of art, including the very
notion of “fxity.”
As part of a program to overhaul traditional habits of perception and visual representation under the
banner of Socialist order, Constructivists used a repertoire of defamiliarizing devices, including extreme
close-ups, abstracted forms, dramatic angles, upward and downward perspectives. This visual
inventiveness is visible in photographs such as Rodchenko’s Demonstration (1932) or Parade on Red
Square (1938), shot from above rather than the then dominant “belly button” view of most photographs.5
Aided by the invention of the Leica camera by Oskar Barnack in 1914, this lightweight, handheld
35mm camera, freed from the constraints of the tripod, made the radical photographic experimentation
of the Russian avant-garde in part possible. A photograph such as Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) (1935)
demonstrates Rodchenko’s use of photography to problematize objective vision (see Fig. 7.1). The fgure
of a taut diver in midair appears nearly supernatural in this photograph. It is not clear if this is the body of
a man or woman, and with that we also understand that this anonymous fgure is the inspirational stand-
in for the concept of participation. The elegantly folded body hurtles diagonally through the image, across
the abstract ground of the sky. Here we have perspectival games with revolutionary meaning. For one
thing, the documentation of sporting displays and athletic bodies was crucial to the image and ideology
of the Soviet state, for the physical form of these bodies represented the vibrancy and health of the

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 FORM 163

Figure 7.1 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dive (Pryzhok v vodu), 1935. Digital Image © Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive,
DACS RAO 2019. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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communist future, with ftness being tightly wound up with the notion of the nation. The astounding
suspension of the contoured body in space adds to the sense of revolutionary (even utopian) defance of
gravity created by Rodchenko in this captivating picture.
The son of a pioneer in the Italian flm industry, Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960) preceded
Rodchenko in his experiments with photography’s visual fexibility. An early member of the Italian Futurist
movement, Bragaglia was a close associate of the group’s leader, the Milanese poet Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) derided the past in favor of a new, hyper-masculine,
modern industrial age, calling for the destruction of all museums and libraries. In its place, Marinetti
heralded the power of the machine, and the triumph of speed and dynamism. Photography’s instantaneity
easily lent itself to these desires, even as the medium remains essential to the logic of archives and
museums (as we discuss in more detail in Chapter 10). In response to Marinetti’s Futurist and intensely
fascist call to arms, Bragaglia produced a treatise titled Fotodinamismo Futurista (written in 1911 and
published in 1913), and developed what he dubbed “photodynamism,” thereby declaring his avant-
garde break from pictorial conventions.6
Bragaglia renounced objective vision, stating for example, “It is a pleasure to observe that my brother
Arturo and I are not photographers and could not be further from that profession.” He also criticized the
“the pedestrian photographic reproduction of the immobile reality, stopped instantaneously,”7 and
derogatorily referred to Pictorialism as “overly mummifed ‘artistic photographs’ where the monkey
imitation of Old Masters is evident.”8 For Bragaglia, the camera offered a means of “formalizing images
of active motion.”9 Leaving the lens open for an extended exposure, he sought to capture action within
a single frame, showing, as art historian Antonella Pelizzari has put it, “a ghost-like trace almost
dematerialized through its movement.”10 His emphasis was above all on the continuity of movement and
thus the sensation of dynamism, which Bragaglia described as “the vertiginous lyrical expression of life,
the lively invoker of the magnifcent dynamic feeling with which the universe incessantly vibrates.”11 Lo
Schiaffo, or “The Slap,” of 1912 encapsulates this view of dynamism, as the subject receiving the blow
is thrown from his chair in a blurry trajectory (see Fig. 7.2). The violence of this act as subject matter also
attests to the fascist leanings of the Futurists, who lauded aggression, force, and machismo. It also

Figure 7.2 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Lo Schiaffo, 1912. © DACS 2019.

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 FORM 165

suggests the infuence of Etienne Marey’s chronophotography or motion studies—however, for Bragaglia,
“the formal marks in Marey’s images served to convey not realism but psychic values,” reinforcing his
own interests, above all else, in the potency of dynamic energy and formal synthesis.12
Tina Modotti’s (1896–1942) black-and-white photography is closer to Rodchenko’s aesthetics and
his view of “movement.” Like Bragaglia, Modotti believed in the revolutionary role of photography, yet
Modotti shared Rodchenko’s astute attention to variations in tonality. Consider Workers Parade (1926),
a photograph that has been praised for balancing formalism with socially engaged content, while using
the aesthetic dimensions of the image to buttress ideological meaning (see Fig. 7.3). Cropped tightly and

Figure 7.3 Tina Modotti, Workers Parade, 1926. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/
Art Resource, NY.

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viewed from above, the crowd pictured is propelled forward, moving up through the frame vertically. The
dominant motif of the sombrero, and the rhythmic display of circular hats, structures the image. In one
sense, this formal pattern and its visual privileging of sombrero over body might be interpreted as
distancing the viewer from the individual subjects, and by extension the politics, in the photograph.
Importantly, the photograph was made in the aftermath of the 1910–20 Mexican revolution, an armed
struggle that toppled the twenty-seven-year dictatorship of Porfrio Diaz. However, rather than seeing the
emphasis on form in this image as objectifying or abstracting, we might recall that within the context of
1920s Mexican cultural politics, the sombrero was an iconic symbol of the revolution and mass
mobilization.13
In her brilliant close analysis of Workers Parade, photography historian Andrea Noble draws critical
and nuanced connections to the historic and iconographic contexts of the photograph’s creation, arguing
for Modotti’s photograph as a document of “the continuing surge of popular power as the revolution
entered its institutional phase.”14 According to Noble, though Modotti’s work has frequently been read in
relation to the autonomous modernist photographs of Edward Weston, an understanding of a specifcally
Mexican context is crucial to grasping this image: “As viewers, we are immediately drawn to the
sombreros: to their circular shape with their indented peaks, to the way in which the light bounces off
them, producing points of focus set against the grainier, textured bodies below.”15 Ultimately, form
dominates Workers Parade as a means to mobilize aesthetics in the service of politics and participation.
Finding new subjective positions within formal compositions was also at the center of Japanese-born
Ishimoti Yasuhiro’s (1921–2012) postwar photographic practice. Famed foremost for his formalist
photographs of modern Japanese architecture, Yasuhiro studied with Harry Callahan and took a deep
interest in the evocative power of shape and light. Untitled from the Tokyo series (1970) uses manifold
layers of representations (see Fig. 7.4). A close-up of a man’s profle juts dramatically into the scene from
the left. Uncannily, we realize it is the protagonist from a movie poster—with supporting actors appearing
almost comically in miniature in the lower corner. As planes formally collide and shadows crowd this
street, multiple realities merge. There is the reference to mass media and popular culture, as well as the
alienation of the man in the trench coat striding pensively down the city block with a plastic take-away
parcel in hand. Abstraction is graphically employed here by Yasuhiro, whose street photograph stills a
moment in time in a manner that contrives to have it appear as though constructed from the outset,
denying its actually reality.
Connecting Yasuhiro’s work to the discourse on eizô (“image” or “camera-generated image”) usefully
unpacks the multivalent and ambiguous aspect of the image. Eizô, a Japanese term coined during the
Meiji era (1868–1912) to refer to the optical refection of light, acquired the dual meaning of a “mental
image” in the 1920s, and by the late 1950s signifed active experimental processes and mental
associations. More literally according to scholar Fabienne Adler, eizô means “refected image,” and
encapsulates an important photographic paradox: “a medium that both mirrors and ponders, off of
which things bounce, and through which they are also bent and altered.”16
Film critic Okada Susumu presents the term eizô as a break away from a simplistic understanding of
realism, and a move “towards a more complex defnition of the role of subjectivity in the image: ‘the word
eizô has two meanings,’ he explains, ‘it is a visual medium of expression (me de miru hyogen baitai), as
well as the image emerging mentally for the viewer (atama no naka ni omoiukaberu imejiimeji).’”17 It is
worth thinking about the ways that the very notion of realism might be challenged and even overhauled
through photography, a medium that has been so weighted by associations to the “real.” Noticeably,
black-and-white photographs have been somewhat ironically associated with credibility and with

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Figure 7.4 Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Untitled from the series Tokyo, c. 1975. Gift of the artist in memory of Ishimoto
Shigeru, 2009.325. © Kochi Prefecture. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

documentary “truth.” This is in spite of the fact that life is certainly not lived in such a reduced palette. In
this regard, it is worth marking how every black-and-white photograph is an abstraction from the outset.
From yet another angle, Raghubir Singh (1942–99) strikingly captured the fux of everyday life in
contemporary India, including what art critic Max Kozloff referred to as “all of its cultures, whose ordinary
sights he treated as glimpses from a vast epic.”18 In Singh’s series The Grand Trunk Road (1991–1995),
the photographer documented his passage through this legendary route across India, from Calcutta to
Atari-Wagah, with unprecedented vibrancy. Singh has been heralded as a pioneer of color street
photography. He began working with color flm in Jaipur during the mid-1960s, a time when black and
white was frmly established as the dominant mode of art photography, and created thirteen photobooks
before his untimely death at age ffty-six. Singh embraced color by contrast to the monochrome bent of
the times, breaking with the limits of two-toned images. According to art historian Partha Mitter, “One
singular quality of [Singh’s] photographs is the balance of intensity and saturation in the range of colors
that adds essential drama and texture to the bustling humanity in his images.”19
Pavement Shop, Howrah, West Bengal (1991) exemplifes the frieze-like logic of Singh’s practice, with
its intriguing repetition of forms and its unexpected refections and framing (see Plate 13). We see what
appears to be a cart vendor within the frenzy of a crowded street, selling mirrors that hang at uneven

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slants throughout the image, thereby creating fractured and refracted images across the larger whole.
Though layered with multiple and competing focus points, the photograph is remarkably composed. As
though playing a self-conscious game with the act of looking, the artist himself can be spotted in a
mirrored echo, camera poised, at the top-center margin.
Lively color has frequently been emphasized as a source of beauty and directness in Singh’s
photographs, and in particular as being revealing about the people in his pictures. “Even the clothes
they wear,” writes Singh, “those bright and vivid fabrics, are a symbol of their colorful spirits.”20 Critic
Ratik Asokan demands more of these photographs however, including a more rigorous analysis of
the social valences they assume.21 For Asokan, Singh’s obsession with compositions of “visual interest”
and his celebration of India being “colorful” as an inherent statement of joy are deeply offensive, and
in fact belie the artist’s larger avoidance of issues of class, caste, and the lived reality of many Indians.
While Asokan commends Singh on his “manipulation of perspective, latitudinal tension, gestural
choreography or melodies of colour,” he also adamantly challenges the dominant interpretation of
Singh’s photographs. Noting Singh’s upbringing as “a semi-royal Rajput pursuing an elite art form”
(when for example, due to heavy import duties, access to cameras and flm was a unique privilege),
Asokan calls Singh’s work “rosy abstraction.” Moreover, he likens Singh’s documentation of the
idiosyncrasies of India to Diane Arbus’s photographs of marginalized members of society in the United
States of the 1960s, including giants, midgets, cross-dressers, and nudists. From this point of view,
Singh’s formal complexity avoids grappling with the actual social complexities of contemporary India,
instead concealing and spectacularizing them in seductive color. This debate over Singh’s photographs
and in particular the problematic relationship between their formal appearance as art and the diffcult
social conditions they in fact depict serves as a helpful reminder that photography is always more than
initially meets the eye.

The unexpected in the ordinary

Still life is an artistic genre in which inanimate objects often take on allegorical meanings. Exemplifed
by Dutch sixteenth-century paintings, realism is central to the history of the still life in art. A central trope
in the tradition of Netherlandish still life painting is vanitas, a symbolic means of alluding to the ephemerality
of life, in spite of the captured stillness or sense of timelessness presented in the work of art. This might
be an orange or a vase of fowers. While at frst glance they may appear ideal in the image, often, if one
looks more closely, early tell-tale signs of decay and decomposition are visible, a peel falling off, a petal
wilting. Photography’s ability to “still” the transience of life with the camera, as well as the medium’s
inherent connection to realism, lends itself nearly naturally to this genre. In fact, for this reason,
photography’s somewhat paradoxical connection to the genre of still life has formed crucial fodder for
contemporary artists using photography. Our earlier discussion of Elad Lassry’s Organic Melons
Arrangement offers a rich example of this maneuver. In the following section, we consider still life through
the lens of photography, by contrast to the emphatic dynamism we saw in the work of Rodchenko,
Bragaglia, and Modotti, Yasuhiro, and Singh earlier in this chapter, and yet sharing their interest in the
formal capacities of photography.
Luigi Ghirri (1943–92) is a photographer recognized for his interest in how ordinary scenes can
become intriguing by virtue of photographic framing. With connections to Surrealism, particularly in the
ways his photographs prompt free associations of meaning, Ghirri has been lauded by curator and

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critic Germano Celant for his “interrogative vision”22 In Ghirri’s work, the traditional art conventions of
still life take on new resonance, combining a documentary approach with a Surrealist imaginary. Using
straight photography rather than procedures such as collage and montage, Ghirri registers a provocative
sense of strangeness in which the rational and the irrational blur. Among the many artist books Ghirri
assembled, one captivating collection of photographs created between 1975 and 1981 was in fact
entitled Still Life. In this series and others, Ghirri surprises the viewer by what might be hidden in plain
sight.
The power and intrigue of ordinariness is visible in works such as Marina de Ravenna (1972) or
Tellaro (1980). Most of Ghirri’s photographs focus on Emilia-Romagna, a small area in northern
Italy where the artist was born. The scale of each photograph is intimate and small, no larger than
a snapshot, and its quietness adds to the unassuming and often bizarre details found in banal
scenes. Reminiscent of the artwork of painters like Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi, Ghirri’s work
was also in dialogue with his Italian contemporaries such as Franco Vaccari, Mario Cresci, and Vittore
Fossati.
Photography critic Teju Cole has pointed to Ghirri’s “defamiliarization of scale” and washed-out color
as among the artist’s elusive compositional techniques. Cole quotes Ghirri directly when he writes:

The world might appear at frst through a telescope, and then under a microscope, or perhaps through
a set of binoculars that can be used to both magnify and minimize. In some photographs we can
make out the building blocks of fables, the supporting framework and the scaffolding which props up
this “land”; and yet, rather than exposing the tricks or taking away the magic, they contribute to the
illusion.23

For Ghirri, the world is vast yet flled with unresolved fragments, and as such his photographs refect this
consistent and compelling lack of coherence in everyday life.
Angolan artist Edgar Chagas’s (b. 1977) Found Not Taken (2013) consists of photographs
documenting his walks through the streets of Luanda, London, and Newport, Wales, that, like Ghirri’s,
intervene in the conventions of still-life art while embracing the camera’s ability to make visible that
which previously went unnoticed. In each instance, Chagas came upon a discarded object and
rearranged it within a nearby setting, creating what one critic has deemed “abstract icons that animate
the city.”24 Importantly, the photographs were then enlarged to posters, exhibited in stacks atop wooden
pallets, and, much like Gonzalez-Torres’ practice of generous dispersion discussed earlier, available
as take-aways for the gallery visitor. This mode of installation art offers a new way of interacting with
photographic images as art and, furthermore, calls attention to the constructed nature of photography.
One picture shows an upended piece of a dilapidated chair, positioned against the crumbling corner
of a white building, between the rusty slats of two vent blocks. Another presents an empty, lop-
sided clothing rack framed against a patterned brick wall amidst the outlines of bricked-in rectangles
where windows had once been. Using the logic of the Surrealist found object, the viewer’s attention
is drawn to the shape and color of ordinary things while also refereeing to the cast-offs of urban life.
This aspect is underscored by the invitation to “take away” an image of the objects that were
“cast away,” suggesting the possibilities of renewed attention to the everyday. Luanda contains a
population that is estimated to be as numerous as New York City with approximately 8 million people,
and yet without any sense of adequate infrastructure. Chagas’s artwork is surely a comment on this
situation as well.25

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Figure 7.5 Edson Chagas, Angola Pavilion ‘Luanda, Encyclopedic City’ 55, International Art Exhibition organized by
La Biennale di Venezia, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and APALAZZOGALLERY. Photograph by Paolo Utimpergher.

Found Not Taken formed the centerpiece of the Angolan pavilion at the 2013 edition of the Venice
Biennale, in an exhibition titled Luanda, Encyclopedic City, where it was awarded the prestigious Golden
Lion prize (see Fig. 7.5).26 It was the south-west African country’s frst offcial representation at the
biennale, and just over a decade after the end of twenty-seven years of brutal civil war. Curated by
Stefano Rabolli-Pansera and Paula Nascimento, Chagas’s work was installed in the Palazzo Cini, in the
Dossoduro district, a space that houses a private collection of Tuscan and Ferrara Renaissance art.
Keeping the Cini collection of art on the walls, Chagas’s forms and imagery posed both contrast and
conversation with the religious triptychs and realist oil paintings. His photographic reproductions of
crumbling plaster and disowned objects were put in tension with the European art history on the adjacent
walls. By contrast to Gonzalez-Torres’s stacks, it is worth noting that once Chagas’s prints were taken
by gallery visitors, they were not replenished. Instead they were limited, and as the exhibition continued,
fewer and fewer pallets with pictures were available to view. Recontextualization and questions of how
value in art is not only established but also preserved or discarded are at the crux of this exhibition.
Chagas’s work also formally engages with unease, access, and ambiguity while questioning what in the
world is worth paying attention to.
A dialogue between abstraction and representation (a subject we explore further in Chapter 1)
continues in the playful photographic art of Barbara Kasten (b. 1936), who has questioned repeatedly
whether it is actually possible to make an abstract photograph considering photography’s deep

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connections to the “real.” Her Construct series from the 1980s draws connections to Constructivist
experiments with form in the 1930s, yet, as Kasten explains, “ultimately points back to the conceptual
question of the construction of the photograph,” though it is “less concerned with the state of media than
with material.”27 For these works, Kasten built structures in her studio and photographed them, using
columns, pyramids, spheres, wires, and mirrors. Construct NYC 11 (1982), for example, demonstrates
Kasten’s recurrent interest in sculpture, and volume, as well as the seductions of color, light, line, and
refraction (see Plate 14). More than simply formal geometry, however, Kasten’s interrogation of the visual
possibilities of three-dimensionality through photography possesses an uncanny sense of tactility and
phenomenological awareness.
Describing Kasten’s Construct A + A (1984) as “a prismatic tableaux of arches, isosceles triangles,
and stuccoed domes that give a taste of history enmeshed in warped spaced,” art historian Alex Kitnick
concludes that, “[b]oiled down to dislocated elements, the past is dropped into a mise en abyme.”
Moreover, hybridity and inconclusiveness are central to this series. Since “[m]aterial and image appear
only as refractions of one another,”28 Kitnick sees poignant connections to the material logic of postmodern
architecture, for example in Kasten’s extensive use of glass and mirrors. Frequently employed in the
construction of corporate buildings, such materials prompt hallucinations and even the mystifcation of
capital through formal means. The writings of Marxist geographer and social theorist David Harvey are
revealing in this regard: “Wherever capitalism goes its illusory apparatus, its fetishisms, and its system of
mirrors comes not far behind.”29 Through this lens, we might rethink Kasten’s evocation of unreality
through photographic form and staging, in order to see it as underscoring the real conditions of
contemporary life, rather than distracting us from it.
Spatial ambiguity was central for Florence Henri’s (1893–1982) photographic practice in the early
twentieth century as well and may serve as a touchstone for further understanding work by contemporary
artists such as Barbara Kasten and Elad Lassry. Henri’s work is perhaps best known for her mirror
compositions, and the use of spherical balls, including those that she exhibited in the famed Film und
Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929 (which we take up in more detail in Chapter 10). Henri was infuenced
by Constructivism and Cubism, particularly in the ways their formal compositions could not only disorient
but also provoke new dimensions from within a picture’s surface. In 1927 (at the age of thirty-four), Henri
enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she studied photography with László Moholy-
Nagy and developed a close friendship with Lucia Moholy (two artists we explore further in Chapter 1).
Having begun frst as a painter, Henri’s work is characterized by an awareness of artifce and an
imaginative approach to composition.
Obst (1929) consists of a black-and-white still life photograph and uses devices such as angled
mirrors to suggest multiple surfaces and colliding planes (see Fig. 7.6). Featuring a lemon, a pear, and an
apple, the photograph is at once ordinary, and yet compelling in its subtle abstraction of form. In the
absence of color, the formal texture and shape of each fruit appears nuanced. Working against the
camera’s realism, “Henri’s manipulation of mirrors, prisms, and refective objects to frame, isolate, double,
and otherwise interact with her subjects—one of the most distinctive and adventurous features of her
photographic work—often confounds viewers’ ability to distinguish between reality and refection.”30
“What I want above all,” Florence Henri explained, “is to compose the photograph as I do with painting.
Volumes, lines, shadows and light have to obey my will and say what I want them to say. This happens
under the strict control of composition, since I do not pretend to explain the world nor to explain my
thoughts.”31 Openness and multiplicity, but also ambiguity, are pivotal to her forms, and to the artist’s
keen awareness of photographic artifce.

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Figure 7.6 Florence Henri, Obst, 1929. © Galleria Martini & Ronchetti, Genoa, Italy. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles.

Hybridity and objecthood

The desire to exceed the traditional two-dimensional form of the photograph has existed since the
medium’s beginnings in the nineteenth century. Consider, for example, Hippolyte Bayard’s (1801–87)
Lace Glove (c. 1843–7), a piece that attempts to bring physical presence and tactility to the fore (see
Fig. 7.7). As though reaching beyond the surface of the image, we see a ghostly hand pressed fat. And
yet, this photograph touches simultaneously on the implied depth of its dimensions, as the viewer’s eyes
are drawn to the ridges of the lace, the perforations throughout, and the gaps between the fngers. With
this cyanotype (a photographic process we elaborate on in Chapter 1), we are also presented with
abstract images within a larger abstracted image—namely the diamond pattern that runs along the wrist
and the representation of a fower with its leafy stem woven into the center. In alluding to the deep and
sometimes contentious connection between objects, images, and representation in photographic terms,
Bayard’s work turns our attention to the ontology of photography, or in other words, the recurring
question of what is photography?
Bayard is perhaps best known for his staged death for the camera in 1840, a dramatic portrait of
himself as a drowned body accompanied by the caption, “The corpse which you see here is that of M.

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Figure 7.7 Hippolyte Bayard, Lace Glove, c. 1843–7. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable
experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government, which has
been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the
poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life . . .!” Bayard in fact made and exhibited
positive paper prints as early as June 24, 1839, and while his claims to the invention of photography itself
in his lifetime were not recognized, his oeuvre of nearly ffty years of photographs demonstrates his
careful attention to the “art” of photography. For one thing, Bayard’s earliest photographs include still-life
images of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, pictured with tonal variation, remarkable texture,
and attention to detail. The answer to the question of whether photography was art seems obvious to
Bayard, and his creative energies and dedication to the medium evidence as much. By the same token,
it is notable that Bayard’s work with photography also refects careful sensitivity to the fragility of
photographic meaning.
Photography’s inherent multiplicity contributes to its poignancy as an art form and had been one of its
many gravitational pulls for artists. According to the contemporary artist Liz Deschenes (b. 1966), the
medium is never quite what it seems; in fact, “photography has always been a hybrid.”32 Deschenes’s
practice frequently returns to analog and camera-less processes in order to think about the physicality
of form and the generosity of photography as a material medium. For Deschenes, photography is indeed
akin to sculpture. Deschenes’ immersive Tilt/Swing (360° feld of vision, version 1) (2009), for example,
is a formal manifestation of a concept illustrated in a 1935 drawing by the infuential designer Herbert
Bayer, “Diagram of 360 Degrees Field of Vision” (see Fig. 7.8). Like Florence Henri, Bayer studied and
taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, training in graphic design, architecture, and sculpture, and
like many avant-garde artists of his time believed in the power of form to infuence society. In Bayer’s
“extended-feld-of-vision” scheme, images would be hung on all six walls of a gallery space, including the

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Figure 7.8 Liz Deschenes, Tilt/Swing (360° feld of vision, version 1), 2009. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern
Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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foor and the ceiling, thereby breaking with established conventions of exhibition display. In this new
environment, the viewer would feel much more interactively involved in the work and in the space,
creating a lineage between this early avant-garde mode of installation and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s
interventions in space through photography decades later.
Using six photograms (a photographic process we discuss at length in Chapter 1)—each made by
exposing photosensitive paper to the night sky and then fxing with silver toner—Deschenes’ camera-
less panels contain traces of subtly varying light from the moon, stars, and surrounding buildings, literally
and fguratively bringing Bayer’s proposal to life. The resulting photograms are suspended in a 360-degree
aperture formation around the room. Due to their mirrored surfaces, the photograms refect fragments of
the changing environment back into the work itself and onto the architecture in which it is displayed.
Strikingly, their cloudy surfaces are left untreated, and thus continue to be open to change over time, as
they oxidize in response to shifting atmospheric conditions. In this way, Deschenes photograms and their
specifc installation in a circuit around the room reframe the aesthetic experience of the art exhibition
space as well as the formal and conceptual expectations of what a photograph is. Furthermore, their
refective surfaces mirror the viewers in the space, making them all the more aware of the complicit
relation between their physical selves and the ways that the meaning of the work of art depends upon
their collective and performative roles.
Calling attention to the objecthood of images by using three-dimensional form is a tactic that many
contemporary artists around the globe have turned to. Crucial to such interventions is a consideration of
physicality, both of the image as well as the viewer’s bodily experience. For the artist Graciela Sacco
(1956–2017), the involvement between the viewer’s body and the photographic image posed a visceral
concern. And ultimately, at the heart of this preoccupation was form. According to Sacco, “Any reading
of a work radiates from the form. It’s a search for form, for a way to materialize our questions, conficts,
quests, and discoveries.”33 Moreover, this artistic search demonstrates some of the ways that the life of
images is intricately tied to the lives of people.
Having lived through the Dirty War in Argentina during the 1970s and early 1980s, under a brutal
military dictatorship, Sacco was attuned to the dynamics of repression and memory during and after
confict. Over the course of her long career, she engaged with this dynamic explicitly within many
contexts. Always fascinated with the transfer of images from one surface to another, she began
transferring images to various objects, either by placing them on a chemically treated surface exposed
to sunlight or by imprinting thrown shadows on transparent acrylic sheets. Sacco used these techniques
to adhere images to various, and often surprising, objects from everyday life, including spoons, suitcases,
a table, and a window blind. These inventive photographic images have appeared as installations in
outdoor sites in Havana, Jerusalem, Cairo, Petra, Venice, and São Paulo, as well as in Rosario and
Buenos Aires. In an interview with literature scholar and translator Marguerite Feitlowitz, Sacco revealed
how she was “infuenced by what is commonly called arte popular: Mexican corridas, the Guadelupe de
Posada, the Brazilian practice of decorating town squares with sheets of drawings or poetry set to hang
like laundry drying in the sun. When you walk into a chapel covered with objects and offerings, you are
caught up in a dialogue where art is totally entwined with daily life. I think that from a conceptual
standpoint, my work has a lot to do with this.”34
The unexpectedness of Sacco’s material conjunctions raises powerful conceptual connections. For
the series Cuerpo a cuerpo (Body to body) (2011), an edition of multiple works though each is individually
hand printed, Sacco appropriated photographs of the student protests from May 1968 in Paris. The
photos show crowds of enraged demonstrators, shouting with fsts raised, some carrying placards,

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some hurling stones in the direction of the viewer. These photographs were transferred onto jagged
wooden posts and gathered into a fence-like formation. Leaning against one another, the assembled
wood construction references the barricades and the crowd in tandem. The fuctuating sizes of the
panels echoes the volatility and momentum of the throng moving forward. The title’s evocation of bodies,
and the relations between bodies, emphasizes the point further. Here we have the coming together of
objects and photographs as statements regarding the mobilization of dissent.
The location of the scene in these images is not immediately clear—it would be diffcult to determine
that this is Paris, 1968. This uncertainty of location adds to the impact of the artwork. Sacco has used
similar images from many disparate uprisings, including the Prague Spring (1968) and First Palestinian
Intifada (1987–93). Despite the specifcity of each of these conficts, it is striking that viewers are frequently
drawn to associating them with events in the cities in which they see the work installed. Sacco relates
how, when shown in Rosario, Argentina, the food riots of 1989 and 1999 came to mind, while in Córdoba,
Argentina, people believed they were from the Cordobazo (the uprising in 1969 which sparked socio-
political risings all over Argentina).35 The unlocatable quality of these photographs allows for the possibility
of drawing shared connections across conficts and cultures. Their form summons ideas about how
actions and histories captured by photographic form are never static. Indeed, more poignantly, it shows
how photography’s potential and ever-changing form continue to animate and reanimate social, political,
and aesthetic realities more broadly.

FOCUS BOX 7
Abstract labor
Drew Sawyer

How can photography adequately give form to human labor when its absence is already
prefgured in modernity? Or, how does a medium wedded to realism and stasis capture
the formal complexities of the body in motion through time and space? These are
questions that have haunted photography since its invention, itself a culmination of a
period, known as the Industrial Revolution, that witnessed the mechanization of human
production. Consider, for example, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1839 photograph
of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. Often presented as the frst photograph of a human
fgure, the picture is also a scene of labor and economic exchange. In his essay “An
Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” artist and critic Allan Sekula points out that
the daguerreotype depicts not just one fgure having his shoes shined, as commonly
held, but at least two, if the bootblack also is included.1 The fgure, however, is
abstracted, registered as an amorphous shape and shadow, precisely through the very
activity and motion demanded of his labor, which the camera was unable to capture due
to the necessarily long exposure time. For Sekula, the blur from the shoe shiner’s
motion can then be seen as a cipher of abstract labor power—another version of the

1
Allan Sekula, “An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 24.

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human under erasure, demonstrating “an instance of average labor, eminently

replaceable, eminently forgettable, vaporizing in the fux of the moving throng.”2
Daguerre’s picture anticipates the fraught history of labor’s representation as well as
Karl Marx’s formulation, several decades later in Capital (1867), of capitalism’s
reduction of people and their labor to abstract and homogenous bodies, in other
words, to pure form. This early photograph also demonstrates how forms of abstraction
in fact belong to the medium from its very beginning, complicating the conventional
oppositions between abstraction and realism posited in most histories of photography.
Labor, in particular, has been a key subject for exploring the limits of naturalism long
before the early twentieth-century avant-garde. How, then, has photography been
essential not only to representing labor but also to shaping and transforming the
understanding of it in modernity? And conversely, how has labor challenged
photography as a medium to be able to capture movement and time in a single image?
Throughout the nineteenth century, labor and sites of production became popular
subjects for photographers, from the construction of modern engineering feats to the
development of large-scale agriculture. Due to the required exposure times of the
medium, these scenes almost always included posed fgures, either standing at rest or
performing an arrested gesture. One of the frst attempts to more fully visualize laboring
bodies comes at the end of the century, in one of Étienne-Jules Marey’s
chronophotographs from 1894. Charles Fremont, a civil engineer who assisted Marey in
his laboratory, used multiple exposures to study blacksmiths at the anvil. The most
conspicuous aspect of the image is not the worker but the tool. As the historian Anson
Rabinbach observes:

Fremont’s forgers perform before a dark feld with only the chromometer visible in
the foreground … These ffteen super-imposed shots completely blur the body of the
man, while only the hammer is visible. In order to capture the successive positions of
the hammer and the hands, the chronophotographer must obliterate the worker.3

Fremont’s photographic investigations into the conservation and expenditure of energy

during human labor established principles that laid the foundation for modern industrial
production. Yet, in order to do so, the human fgure is rendered as an abstract form, a
smudged bright shape against a feld of black.
Fremont and Marey’s photographic studies coincided with the development of
“scientifc management” by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the United States during the
1880s. While Taylor had used photographs in his book On the Art of Cutting Metals
(1906), it was Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, followers of so-called
“Taylorism,” who used photography to study the body of the worker and what they

2
Sekula, “An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” 25.
3
Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 116.

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called “motion economy” during the frst decades of the twentieth century. Building on
the motion studies of Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, as well as the work of Taylor,
Frank Gilbreth used photography to demonstrate to industrial laborers the most
effcient way to work with a minimum of fatigue. He recorded an array of activities, from
typing to surgery. To produce the photographs, which he called “chronocyclegraphs,”
he used a clock, blinking lights attached to their subjects’ hands, a grid to measure
distance, and stereo cameras. Using the images of light tracings, the Gilbreths created
wire models of train workers. As historian Elspeth H. Brown has shown, Gilbreth’s
attempt to rationalize and industrialize the working body resulted in the formal
abstraction of the human fgure and labor.4 Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that labor
unions protested against the camera’s reduction of humans into standardized actions
and units. Shortly after Gilbreth’s death in 1924, the Worker Photography Movement
arose, which offered a mode of self-representation that countered both the Taylorists
and documentarians.5
In the postwar period, artists continued to use photography to explore the
representation of labor, but often avoided depictions of the human fgure. Instead,
many focused on abstract forms as meditations on both the medium and labor. In 1959,
for example, German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher began a collaborative project that
lasted nearly ffty years: the systematic documentation of architectural structures of an
industrial era in Europe and the United States that were already on the verge of
extinction. Like the Taylorists before them, the duo pursued a scientifc and objective
approach to photography that privileged the sequence and the grid. While their
extensive series provides in-depth studies of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine
tipples, and other industrial facades, their black-and-white photographs do not
consider the workers and others involved with the structures they represent. For art
historian Benjamin Buchloh, the Bechers’ project is one instance in the broader
challenge issued by conceptual photography to traditional forms of portraiture that had
privileged subjectivity at the expense of larger social and material relations.6 Such a
conception of subjectivity was simply not possible in the years following the atrocities
of World War II, when the traditional laborer of the industrial age was, not unlike the
factory itself, marked for erasure.
More recently, Berlin-based artist Viktoria Binschtok produced a series of seemingly
abstract photographs at the employment center in Germany’s capital city. The resulting
works are called Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller or “the absence of the claimants.”
Instead of people, they depict the smudges and marks that “claimants” left on the wall,

4
See Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
5
See Jorge Ribalta, ed., The Worker Photography Movement (1926–1939): Essays and Documents (Madrid: Museo Nacional
Centro De Arte Reina Sofía, 2011).
6
See Benjamin Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the End of Portraiture,” in Melissa E Feldman (ed.), Face-off: The
Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), 53–69.

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leaning against it as they waited to be interviewed about their eligibility for benefts.
According to literary historian and critic Walter Benn Michaels, “What the photograph
shows instead is not a class but a mechanism—the ‘pivot’—that helps make the class
system work. Which means that the effect of replacing the people with the marks they
leave is less that of de-individualization than it is of de-personifcation; the marks
represent, without personifying, not a group but a structural element.”7 Binschtok’s
gesture toward painterly abstraction attempts to picture the system, using photography
to give form to what economists have called the “natural rate of unemployment,” itself
based on abstract mathematical models.
Using a similar method, Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty has made a series
of polished copper sculptures that record, like a photograph, art world labor and its
economies, while also being preoccupied foremost with the formal aspects of the
medium. In 2014, Beshty replaced the desktops at New York’s Petzel Gallery with
polished copper. As dealers and their assistants worked at their computers, bodily oils,
spilled coffees and other offce corrosives tarnished the bright metal, leaving a record
of these workers’ labors. The altered copper sheets were then hung in Petzel’s nearby
gallery spaces, making the path between production, display, and sale shorter than it
has ever been. The artist has always worked in photography’s most expanded feld.
Like conventional photographs, they provide a direct, indexical trace of the world
around them. They also expand the reach of that trace so that it records the economic
activity that makes their own existence possible, while erasing or avoiding the
depiction of the actual humans.
The works of contemporary photographers such as Binschtok and Beshty force us
into a renewed engagement with the historical implication of photography in
modernity’s regimentation of time, space, and bodies. The instances where workers’
actions or inactions are registered on surfaces suggest analogies to the individual
articulations of the hammer and hand in Fremont’s image. In both cases, the paradigm
of “work” is made legible through a process that either abstracts or totally effaces the
body and its labor.

Summary
• One of the early claims to understand photography as art was through an analogy with painting.
• A formal approach emphasizes the way an object looks.

7
Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015), 39.

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• The early avant-garde believed that photography could be a revolutionary tool due in part to its
ability to formally reorient vision.
• Formal decisions, including whether a photograph is black and white or in color, or whether a
photograph is hung on the wall or installed as a sculptural form, affect the meaning of the work
of art.

Discussion points
• What reservations have people had about thinking of photography as an art form?
• In what ways have artists emphasized form in photography?
• How did artists conceive of photography as both radical and aesthetic?
• In what ways do formal decisions regarding the photograph and its display affect meaning?

Additional case studies

Eugene Atget (1857–1927)
Kader Attia (b. 1970)
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902–2002)
William Eggleston (b. 1939)
Franck Abd Bakar Fanny (b. 1970)
Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977)
Iman Issa (b. 1979)
Germaine Krull (1897–1985)
Maria Aparicio Puentes (b. 1981)
Christopher Williams (b. 1956)

Notes
1 See Heather Diack, “Clouded Judgment: Conceptual art, photography, and the discourse of doubt,” in Sabine
Kriebel and Andres Zervigón (eds), Photography and Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2016), 218–36.
2 Christopher Bedford, “Catherine Opie: Regen Projects,” Frieze Magazine 117 (September 2008): 189.
3 Abigail Solomon Godeau, “Armed Vision Disarmed,” in Richard Bolton (ed.), Contest of Meaning: Critical
Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
4 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 95.
5 Heather Diack, Photography Collected Us (Toronto: University of Toronto Art Center, 2012), 20. See David
Campany in “Documents for Artists,” episode 2, The Genius of Photography (London: BBC, 2007).
6 Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 82.
7 Pelizzari, Photography and Italy, 82.
8 Quoted in Pelizzari, Photography and Italy, 82–3.

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9 Giovanni Lista, “Futurist Photography,” Art Journal 41, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 358–64; 358.
10 Pelizzari, Photography and Italy, 83.
11 Fotodinamismo Futurista, 1911–13. See Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamica Futurista (Turin: Edizioni Einaudi,
1980).
12 Lista, “Futurist Photography,” 358.
13 Andrea Noble, Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2000), 93.
14 Noble, Tina Modotti, 93.
15 Noble, Tina Modotti, 93–4.
16 Fabienne Adler, “First, Abandon the World of Seeming Certainty: Theory and Practice of the ‘Camera-
Generated Image’ in Nineteen-Sixties Japan,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2009, 27.
17 “Camera Geijutsu no ‘atarashii nami’ (The New Wave of Camera Geijutsu)—Conversation between
Watanabe Tsutomu, Okada Susumu, and Tomatsu Shomei,” Camera Geijutsu (July 1960): 177. For another
instance of discussions between contemporary photographers and flmmakers, see “Wakaki geijutsuka-tachi
no kadai (Topics of the Young Artists), a conversation including Abe Kobo, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Tomatsu
and Hani,” Ikebana Sogetsu (July 1960). See Adler, “First, Abandon the World of Seeming Certainty,” 117,
fn 185.
18 Max Kozloff, “Remembering Raghubir Singh,” Aperture 156 (Summer 1999): 96.
19 Mia Fineman, Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs, trans. Partha Mitter and Amit
Chaudhuri (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007).
20 Raghubir Singh, Rajasthan, India’s Enchanted Land (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).
21 Ratik Asokan, “Out of Focus: What Raghubir Singh did not see,” The Caravan, February 1, 2018, http://www.
caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/what-raghubir-singh-did-not-see.
22 Germano Celant, Luigi Ghirri: It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t it . . . (New York: Aperture, 2008), 12.
23 Teju Cole, “Luigi Ghirri’s Brilliant Photographic Puzzles,” New York Times, June 28, 2016.
24 “Edgar Chagas,” Africana.org, April 11, 2014, http://africanah.org/edgar-chagas/.
25 Nicholas J. Cull, “Africa’s breakthrough: Art, place branding and Angola’s win at the Venice Biennale, 2013,”
Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 10, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–5.
26 See Isabelle Alica Zaugg and Emi Nishimura, “Angola and Kenya Pavilions in the 2013 Venice Biennale: African
Contemporary Art and Cultural Diplomacy in the ‘Olympics of Art,’” Journal of Arts Management, Law, and
Society 45, no. 2 (2015): 134–49.
27 Kasten in interview with Leslie Hewitt, “Barbara Kasten by Leslie Hewitt,” BOMB 131 (March 2015): 143.
28 Alex Kitnick, “Use Your Illusion,” in Barbara Kasten: Stages (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2015;
Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier, 2015), 72.
29 Cited in Kitnick, “Use Your Illusion,” 73, fn 15; David Harvey quoted in Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost:
Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 103.
30 “Florence Henri,” International Center of Photography, https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/
forence-henri?all/all/all/all/0.
31 Florence Henri, quoted in Micheal Juul Holm, Kirsten Degel, Mette Marcus, and Jeanne Rank (eds.), Women of
the Avant-Garde, 1920–1940 (Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 26.
32 Alex Greenberger, “‘Photography Has Always Been a Hybrid’: Liz Deschenes on Her ICA Boston Survey,”
ArtNews, October 12, 2016, http://www.artnews.com/2016/10/12/photography-has-always-been-a-hybrid-liz-
deschenes-on-her-ica-boston-survey/.
33 Graciela Sacco in interview with Marguerite Feitlowitz, Bomb 78 (January 1, 2002), https://bombmagazine.org/
articles/graciela-sacco/.

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34 Sacco in interview with Marguerite Feitlowitz.

35 Sacco in interview with Marguerite Feitlowitz.

Selected further reading

Bender, Henning. The Frozen Image: Scandinavian Photography. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1982.
Bensusan, Arthur D. Silver Images: A History of Photography in Africa. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1966.
Chudakov, Grigory. Pioneers of Russian Soviet Photography. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1983.
Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Demos, T. J., ed. Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography. London: Phaidon, 2006.
Fogle, Douglas, ed. The Last Picture Show. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2004.
Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October 19 (Winter 1981): 3–34.
Stieglitz, Alfred. “Pictorial Photography.” In Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography, 115–23. New
Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.

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 8
APPROPRIATION

A group of artists joined together in the United States during the late 1960s to form the Art Workers’
Coalition (AWC), mobilizing numerous actions and interventions to push for greater gender and racial
diversity in the art world and against the continuing war in Vietnam. The AWC realized that these issues
were interrelated, and that local battles carried global signifcance. Major art institutions, for example the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, were run by powerful
boards of trustees, with members such as David and Nelson Rockefeller, who had vested fnancial
interests in companies including Standard Oil and the Chase Manhattan Bank with known connections
to the production of napalm, chemical and biological weapons research, and other armaments. Within
this context, in what has become recognized as their most legendary action, the AWC used appropriation
as its central tactic. They created a lithographic reproduction of one of army photographer Ron Haeberle’s
ghastly photographs of the notorious My Lai massacre of 1968, which had been published in Life
magazine in December 1969 (see Fig. 8.1). Shot in color, the intense realism of the image is suffocating,
exacerbated further by the close-up view and the tight cropping of the picture to frame dozens of dead
bodies, women and children, sprawled along a desolate dirt path. Atop the image, the AWC superimposed
large red letters asking: “Q. And babies? A. And babies.” In addition to the photograph, the text was also
an appropriation, a quote drawn from a television interview by the journalist Mike Wallace with the army

Figure 8.1 Jan van Raay, Art Workers’ Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group members protest in front of Pablo
Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with the Q. And babies? poster, January 8, 1970.
© Jan van Raay. Courtesy of the artist.

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offcer Paul Meadlo.1 The choice to reproduce this unsettling matter-of-fact exchange in red was effective.
As one art critic has described it, “The red ink does not have the shrill tone of advertising graphics. It is
transparent, but dark and tinged with brown, like oxidized blood.”2
Overlaying text on image was a recognizable strategy of conceptual art practices of the time, in part
motivated by the realization that an image’s meaning depends heavily on the caption that accompanies
it. Acts of appropriation often extend this logic, questioning how chains of signifcation are prompted
by the associations that are stirred between originals and copies, between initial utterances and
their repetitions. In this regard, And babies resonates on manifold levels, using appropriation and its
accumulated meanings as a strategy for critique. One famed photograph by Jan van Raay shows
members of the AWC protesting at MoMA in January 1970, holding up multiple copies of their And
babies poster in front of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a renowned artwork about the atrocities of
the Spanish Civil War, thus linking instances of systemic violence on a broader scale, across geopolitical
borders. Calling attention to the power of photographic meaning and the impact of the circulation of
images was crucial to the AWC protest and to the infuence of the And babies project. This example also
points to how photography has long been bound to histories of appropriation in ways that can be
productive as well as controversial.
In one sense, photography is at base an act of taking. As opposed to traditional notions of making
that are associated with mediums such as painting and drawing, for example, photography appropriates
images directly from the fabric of everyday life, capturing what is before the camera, and thereby calling
the image its own. Moreover, photography is an explicitly reproducible medium, meaning that the
possibility of proliferating “copies” is built in from the outset. Within the wider feld of visual art, appropriation
refers predominantly to the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of already existing images and
objects. Depending on the context of creation or the content of the image, however, appropriation can
be extremely murky territory, engaging complex debates regarding representation and power structures.
This chapter examines a range of appropriation strategies in relation to photography and asks how
recent changes in the access and availability of images have shifted the nature of appropriation, and
moreover, what the implications are for appropriation as an artistic device.
In so doing, the chapter explores both the nature and complexity of the so-called Pictures Generation
artists of the 1980s such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, who used purloined images (often from
the art world and advertising, among other sources) to question commonly held ideas around authorship
and originality, as well as examining appropriation’s larger role within the history of photography
that extends back from the recent search-generated images of Zhang Dali, to the images of American
“para-photographer” Robert Heinecken, to the photomontages of Berlin Dadaists such as Hannah
Höch, and beyond.

Iconic images
Czech photographer Pavel Maria Smejkal (b. 1957) creates haunting images by appropriating iconic
photographs and then digitally removing all humans from the picture. His Fatescapes series (2009–10)
includes instantly recognizable and widely-circulated news photographs, such as Jeff Widener’s Tank
Man from the protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing (1989), Joe Rosenthal’s Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,
Japan (1945), Nick Ut’s Terror of War (popularly known as “Napalm Girl, Vietnam”) (1972), Kevin Carter’s
Starving Child and Vulture, Sudan (1993), and John Paul Filo’s Kent State, Ohio Shootings (1970), among

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others. Despite the absence of faces and bodies from these scenes, these ghostly images nevertheless
connect to deep-seated, culturally constructed memories, shaped not only by historically signifcant
events, but also by historically signifcant (and often traumatic) photographs. Smejkal’s artistic act of
appropriation highlights this fact, while simultaneously questioning the indelible meanings accrued by the
original photographs, challenging the author status of the associated photographers, and engaging with
the technological interventions made possible via the internet and its extensive capacity for sharing and
altering images.
Consider Smejkal’s Saigon (1968) (see Fig. 8.2). At frst glance, we see a dusty, vacated street. Blurred
shadows of a cropping of trees smatter across the left foreground and the right side of the image shows
a receding line of low-rise buildings. The photograph’s aspect is nearly tranquil. And yet, this seemingly
unremarkable landscape is in fact the site of Eddie Adam’s famous Saigon Execution, taken February 1,
1968, during the Tet Offensive. Adam’s original photograph depicts the moment Brigadier General
Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, shot Nguyen Van Lem at point-blank range through the
head. Startling, disturbing, and impossible to reconcile with the otherwise plainness of the scene, Adam’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph increased the anti-war sentiment in the U.S. by reinforcing the futility
and brutality of this war. What does it mean, then, for Smejkal to erase this event in his appropriated
version?
According to Smejkal, the gesture is in part about registering the weight and signifcance of the
original pictures, encouraging viewers to think about the importance of photographic representation and
the ways its recordings shape the collective memory of history. In an interview with the New York Times,
the artist explained, “I remove the central motifs from historical documentary photographs. I use images
that have become our cultural heritage, that constitute the memory of nations, serve as symbols or tools
of propaganda and exemplify a specifc approach to photography.” Moreover, he continues, “by

Figure 8.2 Pavel Maria Smejkal, Saigon (1968), from the series Fatescapes, 2009–10. © Pavel Maria Smejkal.

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manipulating their content I explore their purpose, function, and future.”3 Recognizing disjunctures
between what has been and what may be is a recurrent theme in the history of photography. Smejkal’s
tactic of appropriation also seems to ask whether photographs of critical world events are able to remain
relevant with the passing of time, and what the stakes might be if they were to be forgotten.
Conceiving of the future as predicated on how we understand the past has been an intrinsic theme of
Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s (b. 1956) practice. Throughout his career he has returned repeatedly to
issues surrounding the public’s desensitization to images and the representational limits of art in the face
of severe social plights, including genocides, epidemics, and famines. After moving to the United States
in 1982, Jaar was disturbed to see how racial tensions continued to be an ordinary part of everyday
American life, in spite of the extensively chronicled and celebrated accomplishments of the Civil Rights
movement in the 1960s that he had witnessed through news media abroad. In 1995, as a means of
highlighting this troubling disconnect, Jaar appropriated an iconic photograph by Gordon Parks, taken
at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral procession, in order to create Life Magazine, April 19, 1968 (see
Plate 15). Presented as a triptych, the work alludes to the traditional format of Christian altarpieces,
thereby identifying King as revered martyr. In Jaar’s piece, three versions of Parks’ photograph appear:
a nearly indistinguishable reproduction of the original that ran in Life, one in which all of the African
American faces participating in the funeral march are identifed with black dots, and a third frame, in
which the white people present are marked with red dots. Jaar’s act of graphic accounting via
appropriation reveals thousands of black dots by contrast to only a few dozen red ones, thus making
visible the stark disparity between the number of black and white mourners. Jaar received little interest
in this work until 2013, when the content seemed to hold new relevance in light of the growing Black
Lives Matter movement and was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Perhaps Life
Magazine, April 19, 1968 could more aptly be considered an “alter-piece” than an altarpiece, in that it
calls attention to an historical memory that is frequently repressed, namely the segregated status of King
and the nation at large at the time of his assassination. As Civil Rights historian David Garrow recounts,
“People in the Democratic Party thought King had self-marginalized. His murder alters his historical
status hugely. What people now remember is his post-assassination enshrinement.”4 In this case,
photographic appropriation takes collective memory to task and prompts us to think critically about how
historical narratives are told, and when they gain or lose salience.
More than “How?” and “When?” it is the multivalent question of “Where?” that preoccupies Hüseyin
Bahri Alptekin’s (b. 1957) artistic practice. For example, Alptekin’s Capacity/Capacities (1998)
addresses the implications of ubiquity and globalization (see Fig. 8.3). Punning on the idea of “city/cities”
by embedding these words within his title, Alptekin’s project asks what it might mean to have unique
places around the world lose their iconic specifcity, and instead become simulated clichés, interchangeable
and homogenous. Consisting of thirty-six appropriated photographs mounted on a single panel and
topped with an LED sign that reads “Capacity” in red, the piece refects Alptekin’s fascination with “the
difference between the promise of something and its banal reality.”5 The work is busy with a multitude of
images arranged in a grid. The installation is crowded, nearly flling the space, or at “capacity,” so to
speak. A play of semiotic signifers, their circulation and their exchange, the photographs show cheap
signs marking hotels, bars, and corner stores named after places far-fung from their actual geographic
locations. Nearly all of Alptekin’s photographs for this piece were taken in Istanbul, by the artist himself.
Yet, the photographs are nevertheless evidence of appropriation. Hotel and restaurant signs heralding
cities such as Tibet, Lima, Libya, Dallas, Berlin, Firenze, and Rio, to name a few, appear uncannily out of
place in this collection of photographs of Istanbul businesses. Here, place is reduced to a concept, with

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 APPROPRIATION 187

Figure 8.3 Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Capacity/Capacities, 1998. SALT Research, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin Archive.
Courtesy of the artist.

notions of imagined distinction or exoticism emptied out and at a remove. Instead, each place, like each
photograph, seems to be substitutable and leveled. In this way, Alptekin uses the appropriating
mechanism of photography to critique the appropriating tendencies of global capitalism more broadly.
Relating his profound sense of exasperation, Alptekin once told the curator Vasif Kortun that the main
themes of his art practice were borders and boredom. On the one hand, Capacity/Capacities is about
excess and tourism, and the loss of site-specifc cultural meaning. On the other hand, it is about
diaspora and the yearning for the comforts of home, by any provisional means possible.
Collective memory in tension with appropriation is also a central theme in the work of Wang Youshen
(b. 1964). His 2017 installation Washing was prominently included in the group exhibition Working on
History at the Museum für Fotografe (Museum for Photography) in Berlin, a project that brought together
artists whose work refects back on the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Washing is an interactive
piece, which (like Oscar Munoz’s work discussed in Chapter 5) asks the viewer to consider the physicality
involved in photography’s developing process. Tables topped with developing trays lined the perimeter
of the gallery, flled with photographs bathing in developing chemicals, simulating an exposed darkroom.
Viewers were invited to move and stir the submerged pictures thereby contributing to the process of not
simply their development, but in fact their eventual erasure through over-development. For this version
of Washing, Wang used archival photographs culled from the Prussian Heritage Image Archive, directing
attention to the unsettled histories of both Germany and China. Previous iterations of Washing have dealt
with subjects both deeply personal and troubling. In 1994, Washing fgured in Wang’s work Before and
After my Grandmother Passed Away, which consisted of black-and-white photographs made by the
artist between 1989 and 1994 as his grandmother’s health waned. In 1995, one version of Washing was
subtitled 1941—Datong, Ten Thousand Men in a Ditch and featured two enlarged photos documenting
the brutality of the Japanese invasion and the reported live burial of tens of thousands of Chinese. Within

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the photographic bath each of these images is washed away with the assistance of the viewer, amplifying
the title’s allusion to Washing to imply both catharsis and amnesia in relation to history and memory. The
eventual disappearance of the photographic image summons the viewer’s ethical imperative to remember,
even in the face of absence.

Altered histories
Understanding the power of photography has been instrumental to political regimes since the medium’s
invention. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), didactic images of communist leader Mao
Zedong were crucial to promoting and maintaining the credibility of the Great Leader, even though it is
now clear that many of these state-produced images were in fact highly manipulated. In part for this
reason, the omnipresence of Mao’s face in popular culture has provided fodder for numerous artists
using photography since then, many of whom used appropriation as their key technique. Andy Warhol’s
famboyantly silkscreened versions of Mao from 1973, for example, reproduce his portrait at a towering
scale of ffteen feet tall, emphasizing his dominance, the ubiquity of his image, and the ways his
“communist” use of photography and reproduction techniques had (somewhat ironically) much in
common with the language of advertising and capitalist mass reproduction. Famously, even acts staged
specifcally for the camera were not always idealized enough for Mao. Citing Stalin’s Soviet Union as a
prime example, in which the falsifcation of photographs was notorious, curator and historian Mia
Fineman explains, “The temptation to ‘rectify’ photographic documents has proved irresistible to modern
demagogues of all stripes, from Adolf Hitler to Mao Zedong to Joseph McCarthy.”6 This deep history of
appropriation and alteration, using the photograph’s presumed indexicality to disguise its fraudulence, is
at the heart of Beijing-based artist Zhang Dali’s (b. 1963) explorations. Zhang’s Second History (2003–
ongoing) is a result of extensive archival research, in order to assemble an appropriated body of
photographs that examine the widespread use of photographic manipulation carried out by the Chinese
government during the regime of Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) from 1949 to 1976.
Compiled in book form in 2012, the project uses juxtaposition to present a chronological sequence of
ninety original, unmodifed images together with their doctored doppelgangers, which were manipulated
in party-run photo labs between the 1950s and 1970s for the state-run Chinese propaganda market.
Stark and subtle changes are noticeable, including editing out particular fgures, adjusting brightness and
adding color, as well as maintaining Mao’s appearance as being perpetually youthful in spite of aging, via
retouching. As noted by Zhang, “people will naturally fx what they consider ugly, and touch those objects
that are visible to them.” In Chairman Mao at the Xiyuan Airport in Beijing, 1949, from 1978, the weaponry
and military men that surround Mao, protecting him at the airport, are removed from the original photograph
in order to demonstrate the remarkable fearlessness of the leader (see Fig. 8.4). For the Great Achievements
in Agriculture (original black and white paste up photos) (1959) reveals the manipulations of Mao’s gaze
and hand wave as he walks through a cheering crowd. Seeing these alterations in this way seems to
function nearly as parody, for it is diffcult not to detect some degree of humor in the regime’s obsession
with minutiae of detail and idealized representations. Far from simple vanity, however, such modifcations
have far-reaching ramifcations when orchestrated by the state. Moreover, these photographs represent
a critical part of Chinese history; as Zhang explains, “they have guided our lives, studies, work, and family
values.” Zhang’s appropriated examples of artistic and political censorship make the viewer aware of the
“second” history, a gesture, which in effect questions the integrity of any original or “frst.”

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Figure 8.4 Zhang Dali, Chairman Mao at the Xiyuan Airport in Beijing 1949, 1978. © Zhang Dali. Courtesy of
the artist.

Art historian Atreeyee Gupta’s research into the temporality of photography in India offers an excellent
case study of how appropriation can be used as a tactic to produce counter-discourses and challenge
dominant power dynamics. Gupta evokes the example of the Bengali artist Abanindranath Tagore as
someone who thoughtfully selected photographs from their mainstream circulation in the colonies and
modifed their context in order to critique their original imperialist meanings. Known primarily for his

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paintings, Tagore was the leading artist of the early twentieth-century art movement called the Bengal
School of Art. For his artist’s book Khuddur Ramayana (1934–42), Tagore created a handwritten version
of the Indian epic Ramayana (a Sanskrit epic dating back to seventh century BCE , and one of the largest
in world literature), layered with montages of photographs from early twentieth-century newspapers,
prints, and advertisements. In meshing times—ancient history with his present—Tagore also challenged
the perception of progressive or linear time. Instead the past, present, and future were seen simultaneously,
thus questioning any presumption of inevitability and proposing an opening for dynamic change.
Tagore’s reinvention of the Ramayana narrative speaks to the contradictions, ironies, and tensions of
the colonial world. Using advertising photos from European jewelers, images of new technologies
including airplanes and automobiles, news photographs of military parades in Moscow’s Red Square,
and images that referred to Japan’s plans for territorial expansion, Tagore brought the story of Rama, the
legendary prince of the Kosala Kingdom, versus the demon Ravana into the context of colonial modernity.7
All of the photographs were strategically appropriated from British newspapers during the 1930s, each
having been circulated through the vast network of the Reuters news service. Reuters possessed a
monopoly over news media across the British Empire due to their ownership of undersea cables. The
news they published was explicitly empire-centric, but also offered graphic material for artists like Tagore
to contest those versions of reality. In this way, according to Gupta, the raw visual material of British
newspapers “connected a vast anti-imperial network that cut across the colonial worlds of Shanghai,
Kolkata, and Cairo,” pointing to the realization that “the world was distant, yet already very close.”8
The battle between Rama and Ravana, as characterized by Tagore, refected and anticipated the
impending World War II and the divisions that were already in place in the interwar period. References to
the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and the Spanish Civil War linked Mussolini’s invasion and Franco’s
Army of Africa (or Spanish Moroccan army corps) to the deep-seated racial politics involved in these
conficts. Moreover, as Gupta explains, these connections point to the emergence of new networks of
solidarity, especially between people of color separated geographically, yet sharing experiences of the
imperialist violation of their respective sovereignties. From these connections, an Afro-Asian solidarity
grew, and would eventually be consolidated under the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War.
The Non-Aligned Movement is an organization of 120 member nations that sought alternatives to the
bipolar politics that dominated the Cold War era. Members of the movement avoided formally aligning
themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union, seeking instead to remain independent or
neutral. The basic concept for the group originated in 1955 during discussions that took place at the
Asia-Africa Bandung Conference held in Indonesia. This complex and tumultuous geopolitical history
fnds correspondence in the shifts in photographic technologies. As anthropologist and art historian
Christopher Pinney writes:

With photography we engage a fantastically protean technology, and a fuid and revolutionary medium
engaged in an endless series of transformations: from daguerreotype to calotype, wet collodion to dry
plate, glass to nitrate, bulky wooden and brass cameras to box brownies, to nearly invisible spycams.
And we will see it used by amateurs and professionals, British colonials and Indians, rulers and
subalterns.9

Photography was never simply a way of depicting the world. More than this, photography offered an
unwieldy means of discovering new, sometimes antagonistic and always multivalent, ways into the
future.

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During the Weimar period in Germany, numerous artists used appropriation as a critique of the
legitimacy of state propaganda and to make their disillusionment with the status quo known. Using
images that were already in mass-media circulation and creating montaged works as counter-narratives,
John Heartfeld, who is also discussed in Chapter 5, presents a compelling example. Hannah Höch
(1889–1978) was another radical pioneer in this regard. Splicing together images and typeface
appropriated from a multitude of sources within the broad feld of visual culture, including popular
magazines, illustrated journals, and fashion publications, Hoch’s photomontages deal with a constellation
of social issues. Her subject matter frequently addresses gender issues and celebrates the emergence
of the Neue Frau or New Woman in the interwar period, while humorously and cuttingly (both literally and
fguratively) deriding political and social institutions, including the government, the military, and economic
fnanciers. Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
(Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands)
(1919–20), Da-Dandy (1919), and Hochfnanz (High Finance) (1923) are among her most celebrated,
dynamic, and incisive pieces. In Dada-Review (1919), Hoch appropriates a newspaper photograph of
German President Friedrich Ebert on holiday, wearing bathing trunks, hands on his hips, smiling proudly
(see Fig. 8.5). While the German leader was vacationing at the beach, however, the nation itself was
falling to pieces, with numerous citizens out of work and starving, certainly unable to partake in the
relaxation that Ebert revels in. The inequity and chaos of the times provide inspiration for the fragmentary
arrangement of Hoch’s montage, as she points to the contemptible and casual disregard Ebert has for
the everyday realities of the German people. Hoch further ridicules Ebert’s self-indulgence by inserting a
small pansy down the front of his shorts. Other caricatures using appropriated photographs appear
throughout, including American President Woodrow Wilson dressed as an angel of peace, and soldiers
lined up with their heads foating absurdly and disquietingly above their bodies.10

Figure 8.5 Hannah Hoch, Dada-Review, 1919. © DACS 2019.

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As with Hoch’s larger body of the work, the piece plays on Dada irrationality. Historian Graham Clarke
explains that “it cannot be read in literal or narrative terms; nor can it be reduced to the sum of its
parts.”11 Moreover, its use of appropriation, with “its fragmented structure and underlying cynicism,
refects the mood in Europe one year after the end of the First World War.”12 In effect, Hoch’s montage
functions almost like a code that the viewer needs to decipher. The reference points in the work might
appear obscure to viewers in the present, but certainly, if we were encountering these pieces in 1919,
and living within the context of Weimar Germany, the resonances and criticism would be quite stark. The
references would be recognizable and easily traceable, and thus less cryptic. The critique embedded in
acts of appropriation using visual culture and photography depends heavily on the ability of the viewer to
recognize the content and by association, the meaning. In Hoch’s case, appropriation is envisioned as
an act of contempt, for bourgeois art and aesthetics, as well as their attendant notions of originality,
preciosity, and genius.
Figural decapitations and folly often appeared in Victorian photocollage during the nineteenth century.
Playful assemblages were made for private pleasure rather than public consumption; yet notably, from
the vantage of the present, these works by aristocratic women reveal themselves as incredibly creative,
often beguiling, and sometimes derisively witty, as in the work of Lady Mary Georgina Caroline Filmer.
Combining cut and pasted photographs, frequently decorated with painting and drawing, these
photocollages necessarily involved the appropriation and assemblage of various photographic materials.
A precursor to Surrealist montage, dating back to the phenomenon of album-making begun in the 1850s
with the “cartomania” fad in England, the French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri’s
invention of carte de visites can in part be credited to the collectible format of Victorian photocollage. Art
critic Peter Plagens characterizes such practices as prototypes for both baseball trading cards and
Facebook.13 We see a clever coming together of these impulses in a page of the English aristocrat
Georgina Berkeley’s (1831–1919) album of 1867 to 1871, in which individuals snipped from personal
photographs are montaged atop playing cards in the place of kings, queens, and jacks.
Berkeley was the daughter of a non-titled branch of the Berkeleys of Berkeley Square, London. Her
inventive and extensive mixed-media photocollage album, now housed by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris,
is at turns fantastical and humorous.14 She pasted photographs of friends and family atop numerous
objects, from jewelry and luggage, to the posters and sandwich boards crowding London streets,
making obscure statements about contemporary life, class, and mobility in ways that might only be
decipherable to her intimates. These hybrid inventions suggest, as art historian Patrizia Di Bello has
argued, “narratives of social and affective connections, as played out through a range of objects and
locations,” ultimately questioning the “realism of the photographic space.”15 Not simply a product of
domestic seclusion, such albums were concerned, however subtly, with social structures and even the
possibility of disrupting conventional expectations around class and gender.
Under the banner of socialism in the Soviet Union, appropriation and photographic montage were
used for strikingly different purposes, explicitly for politics as opposed to play. The Latvian propagandist
Gustav Klutcis (1895–1938), for example, was instrumental to the visual promotion of the communist
cause and support for the state. Deeply committed to both communism and aesthetic innovation, Klutcis
in fact saw the two as closely entwined. A member of the Communist Party and a soldier in the Latvian
Red Rifes Regiment, Klutcis came to Russia during the 1917 Revolution as part of a volunteer machine-
gun unit that helped topple the Provisional Government. He then attended the state-run art school
VKhUTEMAS and went on to produce photomontages celebrating Lenin’s Plan of Monumental
Propaganda (1920), Lenin’s life (1924), and the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), often with the help of his

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wife and collaborator Valentina Kulagina.16 Rather than seeing photographs as individual works, he
took them primarily as material for photomontage and poster designs, emphasizing collectivity and
modernization through agitprop. Klutcis’s practice was aligned with the tenets of Constructivism, an
avant-garde movement that included practitioners such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitsky,
among others, who were dedicated to a rigorous exploration of elemental shapes and basic materials in
the service of agitational propaganda. Klutcis turned to photography specifcally as a means of including
subject matter that a mass audience would fnd accessible, identifable, and compelling. His desire to
emphasize his participatory view of photomontage as a practice is evidenced by works in which he
includes his own image, for example, montaged symbolically on the body of a communist worker.
Klutcis’s face appears atop the central muscular fgure of a shock worker, marching forward with two
others alongside him, in We Shall Pay Back Our Coal Debt to This Country, from 1930. Set against a
stark red background, all three fgures are abstracted, and yet they are employed here for the realistic
effect of their photographic representations (see Fig. 8.6). Again, in The Struggle for Heat and Metal
(1933) Klutcis inserts himself as laborer into the photographic image, clearly asserting his vision of artist-
as-worker.

Figure 8.6 Gustav Klutcis, We Shall Pay Back Our Coal Debt to This Country, 1930. Digital Image © The Museum
of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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In Let Us Fulfll the Plan of the Great Projects (1930), Klutcis summarized the idea of work in the iconic
image of a hand, specifcally aligning the hand of the artist with that of the masses. Scholar and curator
Margarita Tupitsyn eloquently describes the dynamism of the composition: “An arm (actually Klutcis’s)
stretches from the lower right to the upper left and confronts the viewer with an open palm, pushing the
whole image toward the viewer.” Further, slogans written in white on both sides of the hand and crowds
of workers packed into the lower right underscore the logic of a “codifed metaphor” that runs through
this poster.17 Like many examples of photographic appropriation, it relies on the power of associative
meaning for its impact.

Ownership, authorship, and originality

Among the infuential examples of artists and photographers self-consciously using techniques of
appropriation for varying ends, including engaging the power and multiplicity of the image in society, the
Pictures Generation remains a touchstone. Distinguished by a tone of cool indifference, these artists
were primarily preoccupied with the role of representation in a media-saturated culture. During the late
1970s and 1980s, this loosely affliated group of American artists were in part defned by Douglas Crimp’s
Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in the fall of 1977, and further by his essay of 1979 on the
subject. Regarding his curatorial decision to conceptually focus on “pictures,” Crimp has explained the
postmodern impetus of his project: “I hoped to convey not only the work’s most salient characteristic—
recognizable images—but also and importantly the ambiguities it sustains.”18 Under this rubric,
approaches such as Richard Prince’s brazen remediation of advertising images, Louise Lawler’s reframing
of the way artwork by other artists is displayed within various institutions (discussed further in Chapter 9),
Cindy Sherman’s chameleon performance of cinematic stereotypes, and Barbara Kruger’s play on mass
media tropes and graphic design used photography and appropriation as their key devices.
Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) poses an interesting case study of “pictures” production. Renowned as a
Pictures artist, in 1979 Levine notoriously rephotographed Edward Weston’s photographs of his son
young Neil in the nude from 1926, without any detectable alterations, and presented the appropriated
picture as her own artwork. In many ways, Weston represented the establishment of photography as art.
As a canonical modernist photographer in the U.S., he was a Pictorialist photographer in the 1910s, and
an exponent of straight photography in the 1920s (two styles of photography we discuss further in
Chapter 9). Levine’s “undisguised theft of already existing images,” returning to Crimp, does not adhere
to the conventional expectations of traditional artistic production.19 Rather, Levine’s clever artistic
appropriations recontextualize the “originals” and thereby ask the viewers to re-evaluate them and the
cultural assumptions they depend upon.
Among other canonical male modernist artists whose work Levine has appropriated, and
rephotographed, are Aleksandr Rodchenko and, famously, Walker Evans’s Depression Era photographs
for the Farm Security Administration. According to Levine, her use of photographic appropriation is akin
to “a regenerative act of collaboration, transforming the considered extraordinary masterpiece into
something organic and continually renewable.”20 Levine’s series, After Walker Evans (1981), became a
landmark of postmodernism, as well as a feminist critique of patriarchal authority. “Like Melville’s Bartleby
the Scrivener,” in art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s assessment, “Levine’s critical stance is
manifested as an act of refusal: refusal of authorship, uncompromising rejection of all notions of self-
expression, originality, or subjectivity.”21

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Inspired by Levine’s blatant approach to appropriation, many contemporary artists have turned to her
work as the basis for creating their own. Using Google for source material, Hermann Zschiegner, for
example, entered the words “+walker evans +sherrie levine” into the search engine, which then became
the eponymous title of his own exhibited artwork. Whereas Levine photographed Evans’s photographs
of the Burroughs family directly from an exhibition catalogue and presented them as her own, Zschieger
appropriated twenty-six found versions of Levine’s and Evans’s Allie Mae Burroughs portrait. These
copies of copies, are each different in their ratios of black and white or sepia, pixel clarity, and image size,
and speak to the expanded and immeasurable feld of image accumulation and dispersal, along with the
ways authorship is ever cloudier with the proliferation of new technologies.
Notably, in 2014, Levine also revisited her own work, by returning to Evans’s photography yet again,
this time in the form of African Masks After Walker Evans: 1–24 (see Fig. 8.7), re-presenting a set of
twenty-four images drawn from more than 600 that Evans was commissioned to photograph by MoMA
during their 1935 exhibition African Negro Art. Because these were initially photographs for hire, there
have been debates on whether to place them within Evans’s larger oeuvre as works of art rather than
objective documents. Levine calls attention to the assumptions that underlie these categorical differences,
art and document, and the slippage between the two. With this project she also expands upon her well-
established investigations into the implications of appropriation. In connecting Evans’s work to the
institution of the museum and its appropriative and colonialist tendencies with regards to African art,
Levine posits a long chain of cultural appropriations, and questions the position of Evans, MoMA, and

Figure 8.7 Sherrie Levine, African Masks After Walker Evans: 1–24, 2014. Twenty-four giclée inkjet prints. Overall
dimensions: 45½ x 221 x 1½ in., 115.6 x 561.3 x 3.8 cm. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner,
New York.

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herself within that circuit, while continuing to trouble notions of authenticity, authorship, and
commodifcation. Evans’s photographic framing of works of African art in MoMA’s collection contributed
to the reception of African art within the Western canon of art history, extending the ways by which
African art had been used as an aesthetic model by European modernist artists such as Henri Matisse
and Pablo Picasso.
Evans’s photographs of African Negro Art were stored in portfolios at the museum for educational
purposes, yet despite their pretense of documentary objectivity, these photographs are far from neutral.
For one thing, the standardized frame of the photograph subsumes their uniqueness. Pictured in stark
black and white against plain monochromatic backgrounds, they are further decontextualized. By virtue
of being photographed in this way, the objects pictured ostensibly transform from ritual artifacts to
modern sculptures, removed from their origins and repurposed and recontextualized as art. In other
words, they are appropriated. Levine’s decision to select only photographs of masks from Evans’s larger
collection further underscores this project’s troubling status in terms of identity and its relationship to
appropriation.
Edward Curtis’s staged and romanticized vision of the indigenous peoples of North America, discussed
in Chapter 2, functions in an analogous way. Though Curtis did not employ appropriation techniques in
ways described so far in the present chapter, they nevertheless participate in cultural appropriation,
using the camera as the means to do so. Curtis has been repeatedly accused of appropriating subject
matter, or more precisely people and their histories, from the Piegan of the Great Plains to Kwakiutl of
Vancouver Island, among others, and, through his photographs, not simply misleading viewers and
perpetuating stereotypes, but also occupying a position of authorship and authority to which he was not
entitled. As Teju Cole has eloquently observed, “Photography is particularly treacherous . . . Capturing
how things look fools us into thinking that we’ve captured their truth.”22 Cole contrasts Curtis’s
photographs with those of Horace Poolaw, a Kiowa native, born and raised in Oklahoma. Noting the
undeniable beauty of Curtis’s depictions of Native Americans in “traditional” regalia, including feathered
headdresses, for example, in contrast to Poolaw’s pictures of his own family dressed in contemporary
clothes within ordinary scenes, Cole casts suspicion on the value and guise of “beauty” as instrumentalized
in Curtis’s images, and the ways it might artfully mislead. Offering a further conundrum in his analysis of
appropriation, Cole asks, “Is the lesson here that the truth of a given community can only be delivered by
an insider?” This question reaches back to the work of Levine and Evans, and many other photographers,
especially since, as we established at the outset, photography is inherently a medium predicated on
“taking,” or put another way, on the logic of appropriation.
In a project focusing on redressing the long history of appropriation of indigenous culture in North
America, Daniella Zalcman (b. 1986) created Signs of Your Identity (2014) to further investigate the
complicated legacy of forced assimilation of First Nations people in Canada. Using double exposures,
Zalcman superimposes landscapes and still lives with portraits of survivors. Beginning in the nineteenth
century, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families, often kidnapped, and
forced to attend Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, the last of which closed in 1996. According to
Zalcman:

These portraits are my attempt to get to the root of historical trauma. Each of these double exposures
layers a former residential school student with something related to his or her experience: the sites
where schools once stood, the cemeteries where over 6,000 indigenous children are buried, the
documents that enforced strategic assimilation.23

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Allowing her subjects to have a voice in the artwork, including written excerpts from her interviews with
First Nations members, was crucial.
One image shows a profle portrait of a man in a hat. In place of his face we can discern a village, a
line of teepee tents, and a man on a horse. The montage here is suggestive of the thoughts occupying
the mind of the person in the image. The photographic montage alone is diffcult to read, but then the
attendant caption poignantly directs the viewer’s attention:

Mike Pinay, who attended the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School from 1953 to 1963: “It was the
worst 10 years of my life. I was away from my family from the age of 6 to 16. How do you learn about
family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even known by names back then. I was a number.”
“Do you remember your number?” “73.” (see Fig. 8.8)

Zalcman’s use of photography in this project and Cole’s writing on appropriation raise the rife ethical
dilemmas of appropriation and speaking on behalf of others more broadly. “It is not about taking
something that belongs to someone else and making it serve you,” Cole explains, “but rather [it is] about
recognizing that history is brutal and unfnished and fnding some way, within that recognition, to serve
the dispossessed.”24 This observation raises yet another crucial dynamic in the matrix of photography
both as a medium and as an historical agent. Beyond, photography’s tendency towards appropriation

Figure 8.8 Daniella Zalcman, Signs of Your Identity, 2014. Mike Pinay, who attended the Qu’Appelle Indian
Residential School from 1953 to 1963: “It was the worst 10 years of my life. I was away from my family from the age
of 6 to 16. How do you learn about family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even known by names back
then. I was a number.” “Do you remember your number?” “73.” © Daniella Zalcman. Courtesy of the artist.

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as one of its central operating principles, photography also provides the viewer with an illusory sense of
possessing, and even knowing, the subject within the image. Of course, there are inevitable limits to any
visual representation, so many ways that the subject of an image remains unknowable, and one must be
careful of the seductive impression of possession that photography suggests.
In an unforgettable passage in his “Short History of Photography” from 1931, literary theorist Walter
Benjamin writes, “Today, people have as passionate an inclination to bring things close to themselves or
even more to the masses, as to overcome uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it. Every day the
need grows more urgent to possess an object in the closest proximity, through a picture or, better, a
reproduction.” Echoing Benjamin in her 1977 publication On Photography, writer Susan Sontag expands
on this idea and the desire Benjamin described. Sontag explains the phenomenon in the following way:
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having
knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically
possessed.” According to Sontag, photography is always an ethical encounter between the photographer
and the subject. Inevitably, the viewer’s role in this dynamic must also be taken into account.
Artist Joan Fontcuberta’s (b. 1955) fascination with the history of photography and the possibilities
of possession connoted by photographs culminated in a project entitled Googlegram: Niepce (2005).
The work begins with an appropriation of the earliest known photograph, namely Joseph Nicephore
Niepce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (c. 1826). Fontcuberta aggregated the results of a Google
image search for the words “photo” and “foto,” which he then processed through photomosaic software
and used to create a composite recreation of Niepce’s image, using 10,000 images. The artist has
referred to these as “archive noise,” pointing to how they emblematize the continuous and ultimately
uncontainable movement of photographs across time and within endless contexts. Characterizing this
work as exemplifying the “itinerancy of images,” scholar Eduardo Cadava posits “that images can never
remain identical to themselves, precisely because the memories and traces they bear are always
multiple.”25 Only from a distance is Niepce’s photograph recognizable amidst the multitude of
disconnected, pixelated thumbnails. Though enabled by digital technologies, Googlegram also seems to
be a meditation on photography’s powerful capacity for appropriation and transformation, and, moreover,
how these elements have existed since its very beginnings.

FOCUS BOX 8
The following is an excerpt from an interview between Juan David Laserna Montoya,
Gina McDaniel Tarver, and Erina Duganne, conducted on March 13, 2017 and originally
published in photographies 10, no. 3 (September 2017). It focuses on Extracción
publicitaria (Advertisement Extraction), an ongoing series, currently comprising about
130 “extracted” magazine pages, that Laserna began in 2012. The artist alters the
pages through a meticulous process of erasure, using sandpaper. The resulting
artifacts are fragile and the delicacy of the leaves contrasts with the boldness of their
isolated images. Images of protest, political power, and the economy foat free of their
specifc contexts, generating ambiguity and even mystery. The artist encourages
viewers to engage with the pages as cultural objects and to think about their force as
symbols of our consumerism.

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Advertisement extraction: an interview with Juan David Laserna

Montoya
Juan David Laserna Montoya, Gina McDaniel Tarver, and Erina Duganne

Gina McDaniel Tarver (GMT): Can you tell us about your process of fnding images for
the series?

Juan David Laserna Montoya (JDM): What I do is go to second-hand bookstores, and I

look through piles of old magazines. I’ll buy groups of them after reviewing the
contents, twenty to thirty magazines at a time. At frst I was looking for political
imagery, like protests, but there were also economic magazines that had a lot of charts
and advertisements with graphs and numbers, and I knew that there was something
there, and as the project opened into broader iconography, I knew those images were
there to be worked on, so that constituted the second “movement” of the series, and
then the third movement was perhaps text, and right now there are images showing up
that are about representations of nature; I think there is also gender there somewhere.
But the idea is that, when the theme is clear in my mind, when I have a group of maybe
twenty pages that I can see as a potential part of the series, then I will start with that.

Erina Duganne (ED): And were the magazines old, or were they recent, as well?

JDM: I’d say I work with magazines from the 1980s, 1990s. There were a lot of
magazines from 2008, that had to do with the economic collapse, a lot of coverage of
the Palestinian–Israeli struggle, and also, I started fnding Time magazine [New York],
Der Spiegel [Hamburg], European magazines that were using the same kind of imagery
but related, for example, to the Middle East, and it was the same imagery that is used
in Latin America. There is the idea that if you want to express or depict these situations
of protest, it doesn’t matter where you are, Europe, the United States, it’s going to be
the same kind of icons.

GMT: You work a lot with repeated images, not just of protest. That seems to be a big
part of your work. How much do you think that has to do with the photographic
condition in which we live, where we are inundated with repeated images? It’s not just
print or television, as it was when we three were growing up. It’s the internet. It’s this
infnite possibility of repetition. Do you think of your work as very linked to that certain
visual condition?

JDM: Yes, absolutely. The current visual condition is one of extreme production and
circulation. Everyone is aware of that phenomenon. I guess my work aims to play with
certain products that were prior to today’s digital logics, and though I haven’t included
any digital media, I’m sure that it’s the same territory.

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GMT: It’s the repetition of images that makes them so recognizable, but then their
meanings become generalized from use in widely varying contexts, and often they
begin to drift further and further away from any original signifcance.

JDM: The raised fst is really interesting, because it is one of those icons that can’t
really be traced to an origin (see Fig. 8.9). With Che Guevara, it’s really easy, because
someone took a picture, and it became a leitmotif. It’s used everywhere now, perhaps
because of the look in his eyes. The entire story of the Cuban Revolution seems
condensed in that symbol, so there’s an entire myth behind the simple portrait that’s
well known. Perhaps the fst comes from Socialist Realism, and therefore it has
everything to do with class struggles, and from there it is related to any given promise
of victory. When you fnd it in magazines, it is often in relation not to photojournalism
but to advertisements, usually of some product that promises you prosperity. I’m pretty
sure that many of the raised fsts in the series come from football propaganda, but also
later from journalistic coverage of miners in Bolivia, and defnitely some from ads that
had to do with bank loans.

Figure 8.9 Juan David Laserna Montoya, Untitled, from the series Extracción publicitaria, 2012–17.
© Juan David Laserna Montoya. Courtesy of the artist.

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Repetition is a resource that comes from the mass production of images, from a
great network of circulation. It is a heritage, a tradition of visual depiction that gets
refreshed by the media but never absolutely rebuilt. Repetition in this series is not just
about accumulation in a single moment or place, but rather about the everlasting return
of archetypes. Thus, it is not solely about how imagery repeats. It’s about how
advertisements use the same kind of imagery as political protest in order to create or
confrm an idea or a product. The series insists on certain images—like the fst, or like
the police wearing the crowd control outfts—because they are frequently used. Not
necessarily because they are present in many situations registered by the media, but
because every time you think about social tension, violence is a variable and, in that
context, you need to depict the players of that violence, usually crowd control is one of
them.

GMT: When these images are on the pages of a magazine, they might seem non-
problematic: you just look at them and pass them by. But your art practice extracts
fragments, makes them more ambiguous, and asks the viewer to look for complexity, it
seems to me. You appropriate the images and alter them in a way that problematizes
their packaging.

JDM: That’s the whole point. Magazines have a lot of noise, a lot of information. You
can easily consume them because they are designed like that; they are designed so
that you can see a guy dead here and then you can see a piece of cake on the next
page, and it’s okay. It’s almost like when you’re surfng on the TV or when you’re
scrolling down the page on Facebook. Looking at a magazine is like scrolling down.
You can move forward, or backward, it doesn’t matter; you stop somewhere and then
go on. But there’s something within the lines that could be traced, isolated through
erasure.

ED: Gina used the term appropriation. Do you think of your work as appropriation? It’s
such a loaded term, especially here in the U.S.

JDM: I’m not really sure if the word appropriation contains the whole operation of this
work, that of reaching something hiding behind the narrative of communication. Maybe
appropriation takes on a lot of issues that are different than what I’m doing. You are a
consumer of these images. If you’re not a consumer, then maybe you can be a
producer. So, how do you become a producer, instead of a consumer? I try to think of it
as a differentiated action toward something that is not supposed to allow your
interaction. At least, it is about being an active consumer.
The idea is taking the narrative apart, so that the pieces, by themselves, can perhaps
tell you something about the system that brought them to life in the frst place. I’m not

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trying to make a judgment, whether the system of representation is good or bad. I’m
just trying, maybe, to reveal that, for example, it repeats itself, that it takes into itself the
same icons, over and over, to talk about different topics. That images, without a
context, become a common ground, and that’s, in a way, a political approach. It’s
without the context that you can fnd images that relate to everyone. It’s the system of
quotations and context that magazines place, that media places on imagery that you
get judgmental about, but if you take the context away, what is there to judge? Can the
spectator make a judgment about an image that has no context? Maybe he can forget
about the structure that gives meaning to the visual information and read the image
when it’s naked, when it’s alone, and I guess that’s what has seduced me about the
work. Finding images and taking them apart reveals them as extremely interesting and
mysterious, in a way, really signifcant, because even if stripped from their factual
meaning, they leave something behind that echoes as visual experience. Therefore, you
are not entirely lost. There is an effort to relate and remember something that can bring
rational meaning to whatever you are seeing. In my own experience, there was an
opening during that process, and the possible relationships between yourself and the
object in front of you is also surrounded with ambiguity, humor, and a critical
understanding of your own visual background.

ED: It seems to me also crucial that the works in the series have real materiality to
them, which is very different than eighties appropriation, in which images are
appropriated but then a photograph is taken of it, that takes away that materiality.

JDM: But they’re really cheap, and fragile, and in a way close to disappearing.
Extracción publicitaria came to life at a time when I had no budget to make big things,
and yet it turned out to be a huge project, so this series had a very humble beginning.
Its success derives from the fact that inexpensive materials tend to be dismissed easily,
and old magazines are at the bottom of the barrel, even though many times they are the
result of very expensive and complex processes of production. It’s as if they carry
along something of that in their DNA, and a simple archaeology can claim their power
as symbols of our consumerism.

Summary
• Appropriation has been used as a conceptual tactic to intervene in dominant narratives and
expose complex histories.
• Acts of appropriation call attention to the relationship between originals and copies, as well as
the ways meaning is altered by context.

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• The global circulation of images offers the possibility of a multiplicity of iterations and
signifcations.
• Photomontage can serve as a dynamic form of propaganda.

Discussion points
• In what ways can appropriation be mobilized as a politicized art practice?
• Considering that photography is an inherently reproducible medium, how do “copies” challenge
traditional notions of art?
• What role might photography play in cultural appropriation?
• In what ways can appropriated photographs reconfgure notions of authorship?

Additional case studies

Florencia Blanco (b. 1971)
Claude Cahun (1894–1954)
Nermine Hammam (b. 1967)
Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971)
Robert Heinecken (1931–2006)
Jason Lazarus (b. 1975)
Dora Maar (1907–97)
Youssef Nabil (b. 1972)
Sabah Naim (b. 1967)
Joachim Schmid (b. 1955)

Notes
1 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 20.
2 Elena Volpato, “The Art Workers’ Coalition,” Mousse 25 (2010), http://moussemagazine.it/art-workers-
coalition-elena-volpato-2010/.
3 James Estrin, “Iconic Scenes, Revisited and Reimagined,” New York Times, January 4, 2012.
4 Krissah Thompson, “This powerful image perfectly captures how divided America was when MLK died,”
Washington Post, January 18, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/this-powerful-image-
perfectly-captures-how-divided-america-was-when-mlk-died/2015/01/16/602b271c-9d94-11e4-a7ee-
526210d665b4_story.html?utm_term=.5ef60e1333aa.
5 “Hüseyin Bahir Alptekin,” Tate Modern, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/huseyin-bahri-alptekin-10753.
6 Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2012), 91.
7 Atreyee Gupta, “Belatedness and Simultaneity: A Short History of Photography from India,” in Jodi
Throckmorton (ed.), Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (San Jose and Berkeley: San Jose
Museum of Art and University of California Press, 2015), 28.

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8 Gupta, “Belatedness and Simultaneity,” 30.

9 Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008), 7.
10 “Hannah Höch: Dada-Rundschau [Dada Review], 1919,” Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, https://
www.berlinischegalerie.de/en/collection/prints-and-drawings/highlights/hannah-hoech/.
11 Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 197.
12 Clarke, The Photograph, 199.
13 Peter Plagens, “Eye Level: Cut Me Up, Paste Me Down,” Art in America (March 2010).
14 See Francoise Heilbrun and Michael Pantazzi, Album de collages de l’Angleterre Victorienne (Paris: Musee
d’Orsay, 1997).
15 Patrizia Di Bello, “Photographs, Fun and Flirtations,” in Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian
England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (London: Routledge, 2007), 181
16 Christina Lodder, “Revolutionary Photography,” in Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris
Hambourg (eds.), Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949. An Online
Project of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 8, https://www.moma.org/
interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Lodder.pdf.
17 Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996),
119.
18 Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring, 1979): 75–88.
19 Douglas Crimp, “Appropriating Appropriation,” originally 1983, reprinted in On the Museum’s Ruins
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 129.
20 Renske van Leeuwen, “Sherrie Levine,” International Center of Photography, 2010, https://www.icp.org/
browse/archive/constituents/sherrie-levine?all/all/all/all/0.
21 Abigail Solomon Godeau, “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Changed: Art Photography and
Postmodernism” (1985), in Liz Heron and Val Williams (eds.), Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography
from the 1850s to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 307–18; 309.
22 Teju Cole, “Getting Others Right,” New York Times, June 13, 2017.
23 “Signs of your Identity: Photojournalist Daniella Zalcman Discusses Residential Schools,” Institute for the Study
of Human Rights, April 24, 2017, http://www.humanrightscolumbia.org/news/signs-your-identity.
24 Cole, “Getting Others Right.”
25 Eduardo Cadava, “The Itinerant Languages of Photography,” in The Itinerant Languages of Photography (New
Haven, CT: Princeton Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2013), 29.

Selected further reading

Diack, Heather and Erina Duganne. “Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography.”
photographies 10, no. 3 (Autumn 2017): 235–43.
Ellegood, Anne and Johanna Burton, eds. Take It Or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology. Los Angeles: Hammer
Museum, 2014.
Fineman, Mia. Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2012.
Lavin, Maud. Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Makholm, Kristin. “Strange Beauty: Hannah Höch and the Photomontage.” MoMA 24 (Winter–Spring 1997):
19–23.
Siegel, Elizabeth. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. New Haven, CT, and London: Art
Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press, 2009.

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 APPROPRIATION 205

Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009.
Tupitsyn, Margarita. The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Wang, Huangsheng and Guo Xiaoyan. Working on History: Contemporary Chinese Photography and the Chinese
Revolution. Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2017.
Witkovsky, Matthew S. Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007.

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 PART FIVE

COLLECTIONS
For his 2011 installation Photography in Abundance, Erik Kessels (b. 1966) flled a gallery with close to
a million photographs that he downloaded from the image-sharing site Flickr during a single twenty-four-
hour period. Many have read the excess of images in this installation as making palpable the image
“overload” brought about by camera-equipped smartphones and social media sites, which allow
individuals to share their photographs almost instantaneously across the globe. Others discuss Kessels’s
glut of images, which viewers were encouraged to “wade through, touch and examine,”1 as provoking
anxiety, including the “feeling of drowning in representations of other people’s experiences.”2 Our interest
in Kessels’s installation, which was commissioned by Fotografemuseum Amsterdam, or Foam, for an
exhibition on the future of the photography museum, is slightly different. We use his demonstration of a
single day’s digital demand to signal challenges that the recent digital explosion of images poses to both
the collecting and collections of photography.
As artists like Kessels have mined photography’s digital profusion for their artworks, so too have
museums used the infux of digital technologies to transform the structures and processes through
which their art collections are curated and consumed. Museums now regularly stream their collections
through image-sharing sites such as Flickr and Instagram and use online cataloguing systems and
touch-screen technologies to give wider access to them. For photography collections, however, this
digital turn has not always been benefcial. Because of their inherent reproducibility, photographs occupy
an uncertain position within what photography historians Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid Lien call the
“ecosystem” of a museum. Unlike other museum objects, photographs hold multiple, even divergent,
uses: they function, as Edwards and Lien explain, at once as “a recording technique, as objects in the
collections, [and] as display techniques, on websites and for commercial and marketing purposes.”3 This
fuidity has rendered photographs both fundamental to the collecting practices of museums and other
cultural institutions and, at times, unseen.
To explore the collections history of photographs and by extension their history as collected objects,
the chapters in this unit look at two distinct institutional sites of photography collections and collecting:
museums and archives. The chapters are divided in this manner for several reasons. First, though
photographs are called on to serve documentary purposes in both museums and archives, their role as
fne art objects that can be curated and exhibited is fundamentally different in museums. Second, the
considerable theorization of photography and the archive necessitates discussing this more conceptually

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driven use of the medium separately. The chapters come together, however, in their inclusion of
photographers, curators, and exhibitions, both contemporary and historical, which engage with and
raise questions around photography’s broader collections history.

Notes
1 Alexandra Genova, “Exploring the Power of One Tragic Photograph,” Time, January 3, 2017, http://time.
com/4595565/erik-kessels-one-image/.
2 Eliza Williams, “24 hours in photo,” Creative Review, November 11, 2011, https://www.creativereview.
co.uk/24-hours-in-photos/?nocache=true&adfesuccess=1.
3 Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid Lien, “Museums and the Work of Photographs,” in Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid
Lien (eds.), Uncertain Image: Museums and the Work of Photographs (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 5.

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 9
MUSEUMS

In 2013, Alexis Fabry and María Wills co-curated the exhibition Urbes Mutantes: Latin American
Photography 1944–2013, a major survey of street photography from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. First shown at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in
Bogota, Colombia, the exhibition subsequently traveled to the International Center of Photography (ICP)
in New York, where, alongside exhibitions such as América Latina 1960–2013, co-produced by the
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and Museo Amparo, Mexico, it brought renewed
interest in and attention to Latin America’s underrepresented photographic history and infuence. But
while Urbes Mutantes served to propel the careers of a number of Latin American photographers as well
as the market value of Latin American photography, more broadly, it also perpetuated certain biases,
including the privileging of photography from wealthier Latin American nations and the notable absence
of photography from the less examined countries of the Caribbean and Central America as well as
Paraguay, Bolivia, and others in South America, or the “extreme periphery,”1 as art historian Gustavo
Buntinx calls them.
This chapter investigates the critical and at times controversial role that museum exhibitions have
played (and continue to play) in defning and controlling photography’s meaning and value. It takes as its
premise that museums are never neutral. Instead, how and what they collect, organize, and display form
the basis of particular narratives and interests, which become, as art historian Salah Hassan notes in his
introduction to the Third African Photography Festival in Bamako, Mali, “the very basis for the history of
art.”2 Yet, because photographs are objects that are both collected by a museum and a means to collect
or document a museum’s artifacts, they share a long and complex relationship with this institution. This
chapter explores the interdependency between museums and photography by taking up a selection of
exhibitions that have shaped our understanding of photography’s identity, most especially as art, and
what these institutional histories in turn have overlooked or excluded about the medium.

The judgment seat

In 2015, Ocean of Images opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to much acclaim. Organized
as part of “New Photography,” MoMA’s annual showcase of recent work in photography, the exhibition
marked a departure for the thirty-year-old series. Rather than highlight two to six photographers, as had
been the standard since MoMA’s former chief curator of photography, John Szarkowski, began “New
Photography” in 1985, curators Quentin Bajac, Roxana Marcoci, and Lucy Gallun changed the format to
a biannual one and increased the number of artists to nineteen. They also, more signifcantly, altered the
tendency of “New Photography” to feature framed pictures on the wall. Ocean of Images, in contrast,
included “images that are born digitally, made with scanners or lenses in the studio or the real world,

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presented as still or moving pictures, distributed as zines, morphed into three-dimensional objects, or
remixed online.”3 Through these modifcations, the curators emphasized photography’s expanded feld
(a subject we turn to in more detail in the following unit), a term that art historian George Baker, building
on Rosalind Krauss’s seminal 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” employed to signal the
medium’s “multiple sets of oppositions and conjugations, rather than any singular operation.”4 But,
whereas Baker used this term to address artworks that operate in between photography and cinema,
Ocean of Images navigated photography’s place within the connectivity, circularity, and liquidity of the
internet.
Katja Novitskova’s (b. 1984) Approximation (peacock spider), from 2015 (see Fig. 9.1), exemplifes
this so-called post-internet sensibility. For this work, Novitskova frst blew up the jpeg of a recently
discovered species of spider that she sourced online from an image-sharing website. Next, she pasted
the appropriated image onto a cut aluminum carrier, normally used for advertising displays, to create a
menacing spider of gargantuan size. Through this transformation from digital image to human-sized
sculpture, Novitskova points to the ease with which online images both proliferate and materialize as well
as their capacity to both threaten and seduce. Novitskova’s photo-based sculpture also signaled
for MoMA, at least, the willingness of its photography department to forgo the medium’s autonomy,

Figure 9.1 Installation view, Ocean of lmages: New Photography 2015, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015,
with Katja Novitskova’s Approximation (peacock spider). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by
SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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or idea that it is self-contained, which many of its previous curators had so painstakingly worked
to secure.
Since its opening in 1929, photography was of interest to MoMA’s curators and especially its director,
Alfred H. Barr. But it was not until 1940, when Beaumont Newhall was named the museum’s frst curator
of photography (the frst time any museum created such a post) that the medium received any sustained
consideration. During his tenure at MoMA, Newhall curated nearly thirty exhibitions, most of which
centered on historical surveys, the canonization of masters, and the promotion of a select group of
younger photographers. For these exhibitions, Newhall famously treated photographs in the same
manner as other fne art prints or drawings within the museum: they were carefully matted, framed
behind glass, and hung at eye level so that they could be admired and appreciated as autonomous
works of art. This approach, as curator Christopher Phillips notes in his infuential 1982 essay, “The
Judgment Seat of Photography,” established photography’s “cult value.”
Phillips borrows the term “cult value” from literary theorist Walter Benjamin’s important 1936 essay,
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this essay, Benjamin uses cult value
alongside its binary, “exhibition value,” to distinguish two different modes of experiencing works of art.
According to Benjamin, cult value, which is rooted in ritual, refers to a work of art’s unique presence and
aura, while exhibition value, which develops out of a work of art’s portability and reproducibility, signifes
its accessibility and universality. In his essay, Phillips uses these two terms to trace shifts in the reception
of photography at MoMA. But whereas Benjamin believed photography’s reproducibility could dispel the
aura of traditional art, Phillips shows how through MoMA’s “judgment seat,” this cult value was (ironically)
restored to photography, most especially during the tenure of John Szarkowski, who used his exhibitions
to position the medium within a distinctly autonomous aesthetic realm.
With its focus on photography’s “connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and
communication models,” Ocean of Images therefore seems to trouble MoMA’s long-standing judgment
seat. But, while the exhibition’s focus on post-internet art certainly “compromised photography’s
autonomy, the curators,” as critic Colby Chamberlain explains, “never abandoned Szarkowski’s criteria.”5
Here Chamberlain alludes to the formalist criteria for evaluating photography that Szarkowski put in
place during his tenure at MoMA from 1962 to 1991. Laid out in his infuential 1964 exhibition and
subsequent book, The Photographer’s Eye, Szarkowski uses the categories of “The Thing Itself,” “The
Detail,” “The Frame,” “Time,” and “Vantage Point” to construct the discourse of photography as one
that is predominately concerned with issues of form. Lucas Blalock’s (b. 1978) digitally manipulated
photographs in Ocean of Images upholds this formalist agenda. In his works, Blalock uses a scanner
and Photoshop not to alter or improve his analog images but to purposely draw attention to the
mechanics of their digital production. In Strawberries (Fresh Forever) from 2014, for instance, Blalock
arranges real strawberries on a feld of bubble wrap and then uses the clone stamp to clumsily duplicate
strawberry candies over them. Through this approach, Blalock at once reveals the digital contrivances
behind his work and explores the interplay between their illusionism and fatness. In so doing, the
internet becomes less a site of community or connectivity, as explored, for example, by Blalock’s
contemporary, Penelope Umbrico, whose work, often appropriated from such image-sharing websites
as Flickr, Craigslist, and eBay, is notably absent in Ocean of Images. Instead, Blalock turns to the digital,
much like Szarkowski before him, as a self-refexive tool through which to examine issues of form and
its depiction.
While MoMA’s judgment seat remained relatively unscathed in Ocean of Images, since the late 1970s,
Louise Lawler (b. 1947) has used her photographs and installations to ask probing questions around

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Figure 9.2 Louise Lawler, Arrangements of Pictures, 1982. © 2018 Louise Lawler. Courtesy of the artist and Metro
Pictures, New York.

how museums and other cultural institutions create value through their display of works of art. Lawler is
particularly well known for her “arrangements,” which were frst exhibited in the 1982 exhibition
Arrangements of Pictures at New York’s Metro Pictures (see Fig. 9.2). The exhibition consisted of two
parts. In this frst section, Lawler exhibited an “arrangement” of works that the gallery had on hand by
“gallery artists” Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Laurie Simmons, and James Welling. For
visitors entering the gallery, the room looked like a routine group show of Metro Pictures’s appropriation
artists (or Pictures Generation, as they are more commonly called today), with whom Lawler is often
associated. But upon reading the label, “Arranged by Louise Lawler,” or remembering that this exhibition
was a one-person show, these assumptions about what was “on view” quickly dissipated. Likewise, the
price attached to Lawler’s “arrangement”—the combined price of all the individual works plus 10 percent
for the artist (the fee usually charged by art consultants)—was also unexpected and encouraged visitors
to rethink long-standing ideas about art’s autonomy and the institutional apparatuses in which artists and
their artworks circulate and accrue value.
In addition to her arrangement of artworks by Metro artists, for the second part of Arrangements of
Pictures, Lawler hung a series of photographs in the main gallery that she took of Metro artists’s works
in the contexts of the private collections to which they had been sold. To these images, she appended
the label “Arranged by” and the name of the collector. Lawler has continued to pursue this approach in
her own practice by photographing artworks in corporate and museum collections as well as in storage

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 MUSEUMS 213

spaces and auction houses. What is most signifcant about all of these “arrangements” is that the art is
secondary and the contexts of its display—architecture, labels, vitrines, pedestals, guards, staff members,
security systems, among others—are foregrounded. In Arranged by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage,
and Cheryl Bishop at Paine Webber, Inc., NYC, from 1982, for instance, Lawler pictures two Lichtenstein
silkscreen prints that adorn the wall of an offce copy room, while in Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton
Tremaine, New York, from 1984, she photographs a Robert Delaunay painting partially obscured by a
television set, next to which sits a Lichtenstein sculpture head that has been converted into a lamp base.
At once biting and humorous, these juxtapositions lay bare both the presentational apparatuses and
cultural and economic systems that underpin the circulation and reception of art. They also, as art
historian Douglas Crimp explains, “undermine our sense of a photograph’s autonomy . . . presenting
them as always impinged on by something else within our frame of vision.”6
While Lawler’s practice is indebted to photography’s indeterminacy, or its ability to function as both art
and information, museums have long sought not only to separate photography from these more
documentary functions of the medium but also to differentiate certain types of photography as “art.” The
preferential treatment of “straight photography” is a case in point. In his 1993 memoir Focus, Beaumont
Newhall recounts that when he began to make his “selection of photographs for the 1937 retrospective
exhibition” at MoMA, he “treated soft-focus work as an aberration that should be eliminated.” In its place,
he gave preference to straight photography, or images that emphasize and engage with the camera’s
own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail, through the “nineteenth-
century work of Nadar, the Brady school, Hill and Adamson . . . and in the twentieth-century work of
Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, and later Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.”7 This privileging
of straight photography was not only championed by curators at MoMA. In his 1940 exhibition, A
Pageant of Photography, organized for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco,
California, photographer Ansel Adams (1902–84) likewise sought to distinguish straight or pure
photography as superior, since these images were not supposed to be manipulated in the darkroom.
The term “straight photography” was popularized in the early twentieth century by critic and poet
Sadakichi Hartmann. In a 1904 article titled “A Plea for Straight Photography,” Hartmann took issue with
the painterly and expressive qualities of Pictorialism, the then dominant mode of “art photography,”
arguing that, if “We expect an etching to look like an etching, and a lithograph to look like a lithograph,
why then should not a photographic print look like a photographic print?”8 Adams adopted a similar
position in his practice. In 1934, on the pages of Camera Craft, he boldly stated, “I have nothing in
common with ‘Pictorial’ aims and means . . . Photography, as a pure medium of art, does not admit
conceptions that are reminiscent of other mediums.”9 In distinguishing his own “purer” use of photography,
Adams sought to distance his work from Pictorialism, whose darkroom manipulations and soft-focus
compositions he considered out of date, imitative, and theatrical.
Adams used a similar line of argumentation for A Pageant of Photography. In the exhibition, he
positioned the historical legacy of straight photography not in terms of Pictorialism, out of which it in fact
had developed, but rather the nineteenth-century United States survey photography of Carleton Watkins,
Timothy O’Sullivan, and Eadweard Muybridge. For Pictorialist photographers such as William Mortensen
(1897–1965), whose theatrical manipulations Adams detested and so deliberately omitted from A
Pageant of Photography, this curatorial decision was devastating. At the time of Adams’s exhibition,
Mortensen’s photographs were widely exhibited, published, and collected. Moreover, he also oversaw
the Mortensen School of Photography in Laguna Beach, California, and wrote a series of bestselling
instructional books as well as a weekly photography column in the Los Angeles Times. Despite these

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accomplishments, because of Adams’s “purist purge,”10 to quote photography critic A. D. Coleman,

Mortensen’s Pictorialist photography was virtually forgotten until the late 1970s, when Coleman revived
it as part of his survey book The Grotesque in Photography.
For most of the twentieth century, then, museums and especially MoMA played a fundamental role in
setting forth the terms of photography’s status as art. But, while MoMA may have been the frst institution
to employ a curator of photography, it was not the frst museum to exhibit photography as art. Scholars
attribute this title to London’s South Kensington Museum, which would eventually become the present-
day Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1858, under the directorship of Henry Cole, the museum
simultaneously hosted the annual exhibitions of both the Photographic Society of London and its
French counterpart, the Société Française de Photographie. But though art photography was
showcased, including works by notable nineteenth-century photographers Roger Fenton, Benjamin
Brecknell Turner, and Gustave Le Gray, among many others, it is clear from the 1,009 photographs on
view that the terms defning photography’s status as art were still quite malleable.

Figure 9.3 Charles Thurston Thompson, Exhibition of the Photographic Society of London and the Societe Francaise
de Photographie at the South Kensington Museum, 1858. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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At the same time, for instance, that the exhibition featured Oscar Gustav Rejlander’s allegorical
tableau The Two Ways of Life, discussed in Chapter 2, it also showcased, as curator Gerry Badger
more recently has pointed out, survey photographs “made by soldiers of the Royal Engineers in
Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Singapore, and used by the Ordnance Survey to help with map-making.”11
Charles Thurston Thompson’s documentation of the exhibition suggests a similar elasticity (see Fig. 9.3).
Though singled out today as “the earliest known photograph of a photographic exhibition,”12 the
image is equally signifcant for what it reveals about the South Kensington Museum’s treatment of the
medium. With framed images hung from ceiling to foor, the display at frst recalls the salon-style
installation tactics of the French and British Royal Academies of Art. Closer inspection of the images
on view, however, reveals a variety of photographic styles and approaches—portraits, landscapes,
architectural views, and reproductions of works of art—that did not ft the Academies’s strict hierarchy of
genres, which favored history above all else. In addition, visible in the center of the room are tables on
which sit an abundance of stereoscopes, a popular form of three-dimensional vernacular photography
that soared after Queen Victoria frst encountered these devices at The Great Exhibition of the Works of
Industry of All Nations (or Crystal Palace Exhibition) in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. From Thompson’s
photograph, it is clear, then, that photography’s judgment seat at the South Kensington Museum was far
from absolute, a status that would not change until 1977, when the medium fnally became a curatorial
sub-department within the Department of Prints, Drawings, Paintings, and Photographs at the Victoria
and Albert Museum.

African agency
As photography’s aesthetic value was negotiated by museums over the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the medium’s informational capacity, especially as a way of knowing and representing
racial difference, remained largely steadfast. This power structure is especially evident in the display of
African photography. Historically when museums have exhibited such images, they have most often
been “assigned,” as art historian and curator Okwui Enwezor explains, “to the terrain of the ethnography,
as documents providing secondary information to more primary information observed in the feld.”13 This
ethnographic focus has meant that, until recently, African photographers have been largely absent from
the history of photography. The exhibition of the photographs of Malian studio photographer Seydou
Keïta (1921–2001) is a case in point. Even though a stamp with Keïta’s name was clearly visible on the
front of his photographs when they were exhibited in 1991, as part of the exhibition Africa Explores: 20th-
Century African Art, curated by Susan Vogel at the Center for African Art in New York, the didactic labels
identifed the images as produced by an unknown photographer from Bamko, Mali.
To restore agency to African photographers as well as counter the kinds of disparaging
misrepresentations about Africa promoted by this documentary lens, beginning in the early 1990s, a
group of African curators, writers, and thinkers initiated a series of exhibitions to explore “the way Africans
pictured themselves.”14 Two of the most notable of these exhibitions took place in New York: Snap
Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, on view at the ICP, and
In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. In both exhibitions, the curators positioned African photography within postcolonialism,
which is a theoretical framework that seeks to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people
subordinated under colonialism and its imperialist power structures. For the curators, this meant that,

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instead of depicting Africans in terms of exotic and pathological stereotypes, or “the terrain of Afro-
pessimism,” as Enwezor calls it, their exhibitions foregrounded African agency.15
Curated by Enwezor in 2006, Snap Judgments featured over 250 works—ranging in scope from
photographs and performance documentation to videos and installations—by thirty artists from across
the African continent. Through these varied formats, the exhibition challenged both photography’s
mimetic capabilities, or documentary status, and long-standing narratives about gender and sexuality in
Africa as well as race and identity, more broadly. This approach is especially evident in Lucie’s Fur, a
photographic and video series by South African Tracey Rose (b. 1974) included in Snap Judgments (see
Plate 16). Filmed and photographed in her studio and on location in Johannesburg, South Africa, Rose
constructed the work as a “tableau vivant,” or “living picture” (a term we discuss in more depth in
Chapter 2), in which actors, including herself, perform scenes taken from works of art and literature. For
her source material, Rose turned to biblical and literary narratives about the origin of humankind as well
as archaeological and scientifc research about “Lucy,” the extinct species Australopithecus Afarensis
discovered at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974. Rose used this material to retell the Christian origin
story of Adam and Eve through the allegorical characters of two black gay lovers named Adam and Yves.
Through these and other characters, Rose weaves together an alternate African allegory of creation that
at once troubles racial typologies and biblical imagery and serves to interrogate established religious
ideas about gender, sexuality, and the nuclear family.
In contrast to Snap Judgments’s more recent, varied, and globalized photographic works, In/Sight,
curated ten years earlier by Enwezor in conjunction with Clare Bell, Danielle Tilkin, and Octavio Zaya, was
more traditional in scope. To this end, much of the work in the exhibition was portraiture, produced
during the period in which African nations gained their independence. But though the photographers in
In/Sight did not approach the medium with the same conceptual and self-refexive frames of reference
as the artists in Snap Judgments, they nonetheless represented a crucial shift from a colonial to a
distinctly modern African photography. Among the thirty artists represented in the exhibition, commercial
studio photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé stand out (see Fig. 9.4). Working at slightly different
times in Mali, both photographers pose their fashionably dressed subjects, who gaze assertively out at
the viewer, as distinctly self-determined and modern. In so doing, they serve as historical precursors to
the “analytical, postdocumentary photographic work” of the artists in Snap Judgments.16
Together In/Sight and Snap Judgments established a historical lineage of African photography that
until then had been entirely absent in the history of photography. At the same time, the exhibitions also
set forth certain ideas about which types of photography constituted an African tradition. Most critics, for
instance, lauded In/Sight for its portraiture; yet, the exhibition also included documentary forms, most
notably a large section dedicated to the mid-century photojournalism of Drum magazine as well as the
photography of South African David Goldblatt (whose practice we take up in Chapter 4). This embrace
of documentary photography, however, ended there. As photo historian Darren Newbury laments, “In/
Sight appears in retrospect to have been an obituary for the documentary tradition in Africa.” Here
Newbury comments on how, after its inclusion in In/Sight, documentary photography not only “disappears
from view” but, more detrimentally, becomes that against which Enwezor defnes a “genuinely African”
photography in Snap Judgments.17
For Enwezor, the documentary tradition, though bound historically and geographically to the struggle
against apartheid in South Africa, ultimately cannot offer a path forward for the “depiction of a social self,
more specifcally, the African self.” This is because, as a tool of “the primitivizing apparatus of colonialism”
and, more recently, “the global media industry,” the informational capacity of documentary photography

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Figure 9.4 Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1956–7, printed 1995. Digital image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Licensed
by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

has “yielded a huge archive of visual tropes about Africa that have persisted in the popular imagination.”18
Even worse, Enwezor claimed that within Africa, these documentary images perpetuated ideas of
anomie—or the absence of clear social norms and values and a lack of sense of social regulation—
which are at odds with how Africans see themselves photographically. But though Enwezor correctly
notes how the assumed truth-value of documentary photography has historically been used in support
of Afro-pessimism, the potential of this tradition to function as a tool of resistance and transformation,
prior to the struggle against apartheid, likewise cannot be overlooked.
Since the nineteenth century, photography has been used within Africa, as Enwezor rightly argues,
“to perpetuate a uniform, fxed, and singular approach to the study of Africa.”19 Within the context of
South Africa, idealized images of indigenous African life, produced by turn-of-the-century British
photographer Sir Benjamin Stone and Irish-born South African photographer Alfred Duggan-Cronin,
support this reading. Yet, by the 1940s this primitivizing and aestheticization of black South Africa
was not the only model, especially as images of black urban life began to emerge alongside more
dominant representations of indigenous black South Africans. The photographs of black South Africans
by Lithuania-born Leon Levson (1883–1968) belong to this shift and, as Darren Newbury contends,
signal the “tentative emergence of the social documentary paradigm in South Africa.”20

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Levson’s photographs of black South Africa gained notoriety through a series of exhibitions that took
place in both England and South Africa in the late 1940s and early 1950s. With small differences, the
exhibitions—whose titles ranged from Meet the Bantu (1947) and Where Are We Going (1948) to
Whither Now? (1950) and The Native Way of Life (1950)—were all structured the same. Each was
divided into nine sections whose images progressed from depictions of traditional black South African
ways of life and styles of dress to representations of Western contact and urban employment. Through
this organization, as the opening text to London’s Royal African Society’s Meet the Bantu states, Levson’s
photographs provided “an introduction to the Bantu people of South Africa at this crucial time in their
development, as they strive to pass from their old primitive way of life into the stream of the Western
World.”21 Given the paternalism of this approach, it seems counterintuitive that Newbury reads Levson’s
photographs as precursors to an oppositional documentary practice in South Africa. Indeed, this is the
criticism leveled at Levson in 2005 by historians Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool. Borrowing from the
critique of documentary photography initiated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by artists and critics
such as Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau (which we discuss in more detail in

Figure 9.5 Leon Levson, Basutoland National Council, 1947. Courtesy of the artist and UWC-Robben Island
Museum Mayibuye Archives.

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Chapter 5), Minkley and Rassool argue that Levson’s subjects were victims, turning to the words of
Solomon-Godeau, of “a double act of subjugation: frst in the social world that has produced its victims
and second in the regime of the image produced within and for the same system that engenders the
conditions it then re-presents.”22
Without a doubt, Levson’s exhibitions supported Afro-pessimism. The stereotypes about black South
Africa perpetuated by his photographs denied Africans the very agency and self-determination that
Enwezor and his fellow curators sought to reinstate through Snap Judgments and In/Sight. At the same
time, in dismissing exhibitions of documentary photography such as Levson’s outright, the more complex
readings that they also engendered are adversely overlooked. For instance, while the introductory text
and organizing framework of Levson’s exhibitions promoted a white paternalist view of South Africans,
they also pointed out, as Newbury explains, “the need for a more sophisticated appreciation of the
African perspective.” The concluding section of Levson’s exhibitions, which sought to present a positive
future for black urban South Africans, makes this point most forcibly. The concluding image for each
exhibition was Levson’s photograph of the Basutoland National Council (see Fig. 9.5). This image is
important because it documented the means through which the Basuto people administered their own
affairs. Even if still under the indirect guidance of British legislative rule, the self-determination represented
in Levson’s photograph was in direct confict with the South African’s government’s “ambition,” as
Newbury continues, “to incorporate British protectorates, and from 1948, the Nationalists’s ideological
hostility to black involvement in any form of government.”23 It is such instances of African agency that
subsequently led the anti-apartheid movement in the late 1980s to situate Levson’s photographs,
alongside those of Ernest Cole, Bob Gosani, Willie de Klerk, Ranjith Kally, and Kli Weinberg, as
foundational to subsequent South African resistance photography. While not without ambiguity, and
even, controversy, these exhibitions of Levson’s documentary photography belong as much to the
complexity of African photography’s historical lineage as Snap Judgments and In/Sight.

FOCUS BOX 9
This text is an edited excerpt from curator Amy L. Powell’s conversation with Monica
Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective on the occasion of the
group exhibition Time/Image at Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2016.

Correspondence and annotation: an interview with Raqs Media

Collective
Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Amy L. Powell

Amy L. Powell (ALP): I’m grateful for this opportunity to talk with Raqs about
photography, because it could be perceived as a focused question—how do
photographs appear in your work? But the history and theory of photography gives
us questions that you put into play in many forms: performance, theatre, flm, a full
range of things. Photography for you is not medium-specifc, but expansive. You

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have said that you think of photography as encounter. Whether it’s between Raqs
and the archive, between text and image, presence and absence, the present
with memory and history—how does the photographic encounter inform your
work?

Shuddhabrata Sengupta (SS): We are interested in the sensation of thinking itself and
the photograph as bearer of that sensation. That has partly to do with the tension
between the indexical function that a photograph performs, which is that it is telling us
that here is a picture of this, and its other iconic functions, which have to do with
photography as a bearer of memory, as a possible purveyor of memories and dreams.
Our initial interest in the status of the photograph stemmed from a curiosity about the
nature of anthropological photography, where photographs were taken as objective
instruments of the measure of human bodies. But we realized very quickly that these
objective instruments—all these photographs of bodies against grids in prisons or
hospitals or against anthropometric backgrounds—had their own poetics, which they
sought to disguise.

Monica Narula (MN): And a politics.

SS: And a politics. But also that there is a rhetoric to this photography, there is a
performance of facticity of truth that is actually a performance. And the nature of the
photograph, because it is a condensation of light on a surface at a given point of time
makes for the most perfect disguise for this performance. The performance of the
photograph is sort of like hiding in plain sight. Our interest in the photographic has
always been to ask questions of this performance, to be critical audiences of the
performances made by photography.

MN: The word encounter has many stories in the sense that the encounter can be a
romantic encounter, for example, but also in our parts of the world the word encounter
implies an extrajudicial assassination by police, an encounter killing. Because the three
of us are coming from a history of documentary, the idea of the encounter for us frst
comes from stepping in with the camera to allow a certain other kind of encounter in a
public situation, in the midst of and yet protected by or sheltered by, or sharpened by
the fact that you have the camera. And the camera has its own weight and heft and
history there at every moment of the encounter. What is the quality of this encounter,
what is the poetics and politics of this encounter that we are making? But at the same
time, for us to make an encounter, not just to have an encounter, has become an
interesting proposition. When the apparatus is no longer what’s defning the encounter,
then what is the nature of the photographic image when you’re paying attention to its
fctional aspect more than its fact aspect?

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ALP: You think a lot about photographic archives and the performance of truth—you
often use historical images in your work.

MN: The future is open, right, we don’t know the future. But we’re saying, okay, it’s the
same about the past; the past is also open. If we’re acknowledging that both sides of
this non-arrow of time or constructed arrow of time are to be left open, then you start
fnding tools to ask that question, and the archival image is that. There may be images
that one has seen or one remembers but it’s not that one is driven by the photograph
frst. So the encounter is really, okay, let’s open this pipe out between past, present,
and future, see what emerges from that. And then images are found that may help in
the making of the riddle and the answering of it at the same time.
The idea of “Indra Jaal” or “Indra’s Net,” a metaphor used in Mahayana Buddhism to
elucidate the idea of “dependent origination,” suggests that everything in the world is
inter-connected, and that everything refects everything else at the same time. This is
the concept that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he thought of the world wide web
as a way of describing the domain created through hyperlinking. It also denotes the
notion of going beyond personhood, how there is no such thing as a self that comes
outside of the refections that constitute each of us.
This line of thinking takes us beyond causes, effects and the indices of these
relations. If one were to go beyond the arrow of time that connects an event and its
trace, then we could begin to see not in terms of causes and consequences, but also
as refections and connections, as fully refective nodes. We sometimes think about
what would happen to the way we thought about photography if we were to think about
time and consciousness in this way. The photograph refects everything; it’s a surface
that throws things back at you. This is something we’ve thought a lot about. It means
one is free not to obsess about the specifc points of origin of an image, because
maybe one can hold in suspension the question of whether or not there are such
origins. How does our thinking about photography change if we say that instead of an
arrow there is a boomerang of time? What is the relation between form, part, and idea,
and where does this take you? This question is a tough one, but it’s a productive one, I
think.

ALP: A primary mode of encounter as well is among Raqs yourselves. An encounter

with the archival image is that much more complicated, or at least shaped, because it’s
through the three of you that things happen.

SS: It’s a practice of correspondence and annotation. It’s interesting to think of a work
we made called A History of Photography (2014) as an instance of what you mention
because what we do between ourselves is a correspondence practice, we write to each
other all the time (see Fig. 9.6). A History of Photography is also a correspondence

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showing text from letters written by solders from sub continental India in the First
World War in the battlefelds of Europe. And each of these letters—there are several of
them in the work—are actually letters about photographs.

Figure 9.6 Raqs Media Collective, A History of Photography, 2014. Courtesy of the artists and Frith Street
Gallery, London.

SS: Yes, fragments from letters about photographs, because these are young men who
are encountering photography for the frst time. Photography has an interesting history
in South Asia. It comes primarily as a means to record mortality. It starts in Bengal as a
feld of mortuary photography, as commemorative photography of deceased people
with their relatives. And there is another history of photography, which is a military

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history. So, because we’ve been interested in photography as a marker of the threshold
between life and death and as a kind of marker of signs of life, both the military history
of photography and the photography of the moment.

MN: Of passing.

SS: Of the threshold of being alive and not alive are of interest to us. We have also
used a photograph by Felice Beato [in a work called Seen at Secundrabagh] dated
to the early spring of 1858. It is part of a suite of photographs which, we conjecture,
are the frst records of human presence in war as bodies. Felice Beato is a
photographer from Italy and he ends up being a roving war correspondent in the
Crimean War. But the photographic apparatus he is using is not sophisticated enough
to register the presence of moving bodies. So there are battle scenes, quite ghostly,
you see cannon balls and tents and weapons, but there are no human beings, not even
bodies in those photographs. Then he comes to India in 1858, barely one and a half
years later, and he starts taking photographs in the wake of the war of 1857, which is
called the Sepoy mutiny. And then he moves to China, where he records the Opium
War, so he’s in a sense the frst war photographer to show you human bodies in
battlefelds. Then there is an explosion of photography, and there is photography of the
American Civil War, which actually becomes the largest body of images of human
beings in battle at that time. But the canons of war photography and the consequences
of confict are more or less set in place by the 1857 photographs, which have immense
circulation. They are produced as albums and postcards, they are circulated and
become the basis for lithographic prints. So we were very interested in this conjunction
of the photographic image, military encounters, what happens to bodies in battle, and
what happens to bodies facing battle. By the time we get to the First World War, which
is what A History of Photography is referring to, there are soldiers looking at
photographs in Europe, and they’re actually writing back to their relatives, their friends,
their brothers, their lovers, about photographs. One of them, for instance, is, “with this
letter I’m enclosing a picture card showing the death of an English girl. You will notice
the man in the picture and the young woman lying senseless on the ground in front of
him. She was a nurse in Belgium and used to attend to the wounded. Nowadays
Belgium is in the hands of the Germans. The name of the young girl is Miss Kavell. She
was charged with the crime of helping English soldiers escape to England via the
Netherlands and was sentenced to death. She fainted, and the soldiers refused to fre
on her body and then the offcer blew her brains out with his revolver.” So it’s this
strange episode of an Indian soldier describing the death of an English nurse who was
helping people desert. And there are other such photographs; there are other such
accounts. There are all of these annotations to the photograph as a bearer of stories
and memories.

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MN: This was a response to an invitation to make a photographic work, and it was
interesting to us what form it should take, playing with the status that text, image and
photograph can have formally. It is a digital print of the text from the letters shot on
medium format flm.

SS: Of letters about photographs.

MN: There is also that heightening of affect that happens in the situation of crisis and
trauma and fear, and we wanted to talk about that aspect as well. This is A History of
Photography in that sense, this is very much a story of the image itself.

SS: Speaking of the annotative process, here is a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Run on a Bank is taken in Shanghai in 1948 when the People’s Liberation Army, which
is the Chinese Red Army, is moving into Shanghai. Everything is in fux. Shanghai is a
commercial center, people are very afraid of what’s going to happen to money and
capital, so there’s a run on a bank. We thought in 2013 that this was a very interesting
moment to revisit this image and its history. Initially we thought we would work with the
fabric of the image itself, with the material of the image. So we wrote a letter to the
Cartier-Bresson estate asking for permission and there was no reply. So the only way to
annotate this moment was to actually make it happen again, which is what happens in
Re-run (2013). This is a video work at the threshold of movement and stillness because
it’s a video work that barely moves.

MN: And yet the movement is essential to it.

SS: There is a character in the video who lifts his head and looks straight at you. As in
La jetée by Chris Marker, it’s that kind of moment where something happens and a
glance is exchanged. We have sometimes said that Cartier-Bresson took that
photograph so that we could do this. Or that he’s taking that photograph as the world
fnancial crisis is happening in 2013 because of what was going to happen in 1948,
except that 1948 is the future of 2013. Annotated possibilities create these wormholes
in time and space, which make you think about connected but different moments of
history. It also makes the claim that 1948 and 2013 are contemporaneous moments, so
they become interlocutors to each other through the making of an image.

Everyday pictures
Photography’s status as art within the museum has not only been at the expense of documentary
photography but also so-called vernacular photography. Also referred to as amateur or everyday

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photography, vernacular photography is frequently defned as connected to or originating from the

people. It is produced, in short, by ordinary individuals with no professional training or schooling and
mostly for utilitarian purposes. With little monetary or seeming artistic value, a resistance to categorization,
and a tendency to have multiple authors, these largely banal and ubiquitous images “don’t easily ft into
a historical narrative still anxiously, insecurely, focused on originality, innovation, and individualism,” as
photography historian Geoffrey Batchen argues.24 For this reason, vernacular photography has historically
been neglected in traditional art historical accounts of the medium and, most especially, the art museum.
While these characteristics of the genre ring true, as photography historian Catherine Zuromskis
reminds us, this does not mean that vernacular photography has gone unnoticed by art museums,
especially recently. Beginning in 1998, with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition
Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present and continuing with the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection in 2000
and the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Close to Home: An American Album in 2004, vernacular
photography, Zuromskis explains, has repeatedly been the subject of numerous signifcant museum
exhibitions. Yet, the problem is that when vernacular photography is recognized by these museums, it is
generally at the expense of its social and cultural functions. The Metropolitan’s exhibition Other Pictures
is a case in point. Rather than focus on how its exhibited snapshots were initially used, the curators
emphasized their status as “successful failures,” chosen by the discerning eye of collector Thomas
Walther, whose name appeared prominently within the exhibition’s title. One notable exception to this
aestheticizing tendency of the exhibition of vernacular photography is The Family Camera, on view
concurrently in 2017 at Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
Organized by the curatorial team of Deepali Dewan (lead), Jennifer Orpana, Thy Phu, Julie Crooks,
and Sarah Bassnett, with the assistance of Sarah Parsons and Silvia Forni, as part of a larger collaborative
research partnership called the Family Camera Network, The Family Camera differs from previous
exhibitions of vernacular photography in several notable ways. First, rather than use more general terms
such as “vernacular photography,” “snapshots,” “popular photography,” or even “amateur,” the curators
deliberately chose the phrase “family photography.” They justify this shift in terminology on the basis that,
as “visual evidence of the imbrication of the state and sexuality in everyday life,” family photographs are
already “broad and complex” and therefore do not need to be replaced by these seemingly more
capacious categories. Another signifcant feature of the exhibition is that its more than 200 objects were
acquired not through dealers or collector donors, as is the case with most exhibitions of vernacular
photography, but from actual families who had migrated in the near or distant past, either to or within
Canada. To ensure that the “thick histories and private networks of signifcation that gave these images
meaning in the frst place” were not lost, members of the Family Camera Network conducted oral
histories with ffty narrators about their relationships to the donated materials, including how these items
“were produced, circulated, and acquired meanings over time.”25 Finally, unlike other collections of
vernacular photography, which typically end at the digital age, the Family Camera Network actively
collected born-digital images. The curators presented these images within the exhibition on digital
screens and also preserved the digital fles, alongside other donated analog materials, as part of the
permanent collections of the ROM as well as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, its partner
organization in the project.
Through these collected visual and auditory materials, The Family Camera positioned family
photography frst and foremost as a social and cultural practice. This means that rather than assume a
universal defnition of the family or invest in the art of family photography, the exhibition considered how

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Figure 9.7 THE FAMILY CAMERA, INSTALLATION VIEW, 2017. Photo Credit- Brian Boyle, MPA, FPPO. With
permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.

this genre both visually represents and structures a sense of self, family, community, and nation across
time and space. The exhibition’s introductory image speaks to this goal. After passing through a mirrored
hallway that includes a series of digital reproductions depicting family photographs of people with
cameras, viewers encountered a wall-sized enlargement of a young boy posing with a small doll in front
of the family luggage (see Fig. 9.7). The boy depicted in the image is fve-year-old Hon Lu. Visitors know
this because Hon’s family donated materials to Family Camera Network. From the family’s oral history,
visitors learn that the photograph was taken in 1979 by Hon’s mother, Luong Lu-Thai, during a stop-over
at Japan’s Narita International Airport on the Lu-Thai family’s way to Canada from Hong Kong. After the
fall of Saigon in 1975, the family fed Vietnam in a wooden boat, leaving behind everything, including the
family’s photographs. While waiting for their resettlement application to be processed, Luong sent a
letter to her parents, who were still in Vietnam, asking them to mail the abandoned photographs to the
family’s temporary residence in Hong Kong. The large green and white box in the snapshot next to the
family’s luggage is the box of family photography sent by Hon’s grandparents.
To further emphasize this history of displacement and recovery, next to the photograph of Hon, the
curators placed a framed letter from Hon’s grandfather. In the letter, the last one he sent, Hon’s grandfather
confrms that he mailed the family photographs as Luong had requested. While this letter arrived safely,
the boat carrying Hon’s grandparents from Vietnam, which they took shortly after posting this letter, sunk
and they did not survive. In pairing this letter with the enlarged snapshot, the curators not only poignantly

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preserve the story behind this image but, more crucially, suggest how the movement of family photographs
across great distances serves to visually assemble families that cannot otherwise be together. As such,
the photograph of Hon “pushes back against a narrow idea of Canada and of Canadian family
photographs being produced only within the geographic terms of the Canadian state, thus de-
provincializing our understanding of Canada” and, as the curators continue, “illuminates the transnational
dimensions of visual kinship.”26
Because most family photographs, returning to Batchen, “are cloyingly sentimental in content and
repetitively uncreative as pictures,”27 their ability to establish familial and national identity across time and
space is often overlooked. One of the ways that The Family Camera sought to overcome this problem
was through enlarging the snapshot of Hon as well as another image in the exhibition. In so doing, the
curators compel visitors to engage with family photographs, usually quite small in size, on different, even
unfamiliar terms. The practice of displaying enlarged and, sometimes even, recropped photographs was
not new to The Family Camera. Many associate this practice with the mass media approach employed
by Edward Steichen for his much discussed 1955 exhibition The Family of Man at MoMA, which would
go on to travel to over 150 museums worldwide before becoming permanently installed in 1994 in
Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg. For Steichen, however, the practice of enlarging and recropping the 503
images on display in The Family of Man was more about creating an immersive viewing experience than
defamiliarizing viewing habits. Likewise, for the 1944 exhibition The American Snapshot: An Exhibition
of the Folk Art of the Camera, also on view at MoMA, Willard D. Morgan, director of the museum’s
department of photography, enlarged and recropped many of the featured images. But whereas Steichen
hoped to use this display strategy to create a more unifed, global family, Morgan, in fact, employed it to
make the pictures better or, in short, to make them more like art.
For The American Snapshot, Willard selected 350 photographs from thousands that had been
submitted to contests sponsored by the Eastman Kodak Company and subsequently purchased by
the company (see Fig. 9.8). Such contests were part of Kodak’s larger marketing strategy to “cultivate a
sense among Americans that their ‘amateur’ photographs,” as scholar Nancy Martha West argues,
“could in fact attain a quality high enough to sell the practice of photography to other Americans.”28 It
was precisely their status as commodities that troubled Nancy Newhall, who at the time was serving as
acting curator of the photography department at MoMA, while her husband Beaumont Newhall was
away on military service. For Nancy, what was most problematic about this exhibition was its “low”
standards. Two years earlier she had proposed an exhibition on the origins of the snapshot aesthetic,
which was to include the photography of Paul Martin, Alfred Stieglitz, Helen Levitt, and Henri Cartier-
Bresson. She tried in vain to convince Morgan to supplement the exhibition with these kinds of quality
images “which have really broadened and infuenced man’s vision, and whose impact is felt throughout
the art of this century.”29 For Morgan, however, the import of the snapshot, which he likened to folk art,
was that it was “spontaneous, almost effortless” or, as he continues, “unself-conscious.”30 Here Morgan
seems to value the snapshot for its unmediated or accidental nature. Paradoxically, however, the
photographs that he selected to include in The American Snapshot were not so-called successful
failures. Rather, as art historian Erin O’Toole points out, they were “photographic tripe—literally pictures
of babies and puppies—antiseptic, uninteresting, and aggressively cheerful pictures,”31 which Morgan in
turn enlarged and recropped in an effort to make them more visually compelling, or like art.
The American Snapshot suggests that the diffculty of aligning the ubiquity and banality of family
photography with the aestheticizing function of the art museum is not a recent issue. In fact, this problem
extends back to the nineteenth century. In 1897, British pictorial photographer George Davison, who in

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Figure 9.8 Joe May, L’Allegro in The American Snapshot: An Exhibition of the Folk Art of the Camera (New York:
Museum of Modem Art, 1944). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1889 became the director of the Eastman Photographic Materials Company in England, organized the
Eastman Photographic Exhibition (see Fig. 9.9). On view at the New Gallery, in London’s Regent
Street, the exhibition, like The American Snapshot, was the product of a Kodak-sponsored competition.
In this instance, two British art photographers, Henry Peach Robinson and Andrew Pringle, as well as
painter George Adolphus Storey, an associate member of the Royal Academy, were tasked with selecting
images from over 25,000 entries that came from across the globe. For Eastman, this exhibition again
functioned as a form of advertisement. As he pointed out, “the exhibit is going to dispose of the idea that
Kodaks cannot be used for the highest class of work.” But though Eastman reported that “[e]veryone is
astonished at its size and extent as well as its beauty,”32 there remained some uncertainty about the
exhibition’s aesthetic value. To this end, Davison convinced several of his art photography friends,
including Robinson, Eustace Calland, J. Craig Annan, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, Francis Benjamin
Johnson, and other prominent pictorial photographers, to try out Kodak rollflm cameras. Their resulting

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Figure 9.9 Installation view, Kodak exhibition interior, 1897. Printing out paper print of a Kodak exhibition interior
designed by George Walton (1867–1933), at the New Gallery, Regent Street, London. Courtesy of Getty Images.

images were in turn printed as hand-pulled photogravure plates in a thirty-paged exhibition catalogue
titled Kodak Portfolio—Souvenir of the Eastman Photographic Exhibition 1897, a Collection of Kodak
Film Pictures by Eminent Photographers. Today, this collectible portfolio, printed on heavy antique,
deckle-edged paper, is more well known than the exhibition.
In their attempt to justify Kodak snapshots as art, both The American Snapshot and the Eastman
Photographic Exhibition failed to fully appreciate the breadth and allure of the company’s marketing
strategies and, most crucially, how Kodak attempted to use the judgment seat of the museum to
legitimize (and sell) their products. Returning once again to The Family Camera helps to clarify this point.
In the exhibition’s thematic section “Snapshots don’t grow up,” the curators included family photographs
that make use of popular visual tropes to represent childhood: the baby photo, the birthday photo,
photos of girls with their dolls, and Christmas snapshots, among others. But rather than attempt to
legitimize the aesthetic value of these photographs, the curators instead juxtaposed them with
reproductions of similar Kodak advertisements. Through these comparisons, they encouraged viewers
to think not only about the visual conventions of the snapshot genre but, more signifcantly, how Kodak’s

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marketing strategies normalized certain representations of the family, which consumers, in turn,
incorporated into their own family photography collections. At the same time that the photographs in this
section unmasked Kodak’s commodifcation of family photography, they also pointed to moments of
resistance, such as when a child refuses to cooperate for the camera, when those conventions begin to
break down. The photograph of Hon ostensibly belongs here as well. Though he is a willing subject and
thus the product of convention and sentimentality, the kinds of intrafamilial and transnational identities
that his picture so movingly evokes demonstrate that Kodak’s commodifcation of the snapshot, in which
The American Snapshot and the Eastman Photographic Exhibition are irrevocably intertwined, could be
put to different ends and that the museum’s judgment seat could be deployed for something beyond
legitimizing photography as art.

Summary
• How and what museums collect, organize, and display form the basis of particular narratives
and interests about photography.
• The Museum of Modern Art in New York has played a fundamental role in setting forth the terms
of photography’s status as art.
• Beginning in the early 1990s, a group of African curators, writers, and thinkers initiated a series
of exhibitions to restore agency to African photographers as well as counter the kinds of
disparaging misrepresentations about Africa promoted by a documentary lens.
• Many curators have found vernacular photography’s ubiquity and banality diffcult to align with
the aestheticizing function of the art museum.

Discussion points
• Why are museum exhibitions never neutral?
• What are some of the ways in which curators at the Museum of Modern Art have sanctioned
photography as art?
• What role does documentary photography play in the exhibitions Snap Judgments: New
Positions in Contemporary African Photography and In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to
the Present?
• What makes The Family Camera different from other exhibitions of vernacular photography?

Additional case studies

The Family of Man (1955)
For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 (2015)
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (1851)

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NADOC ’86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers (1986)

Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia (2009)
Bente Geving (b. 1952)
Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973) and Lucy Skaer (b. 1975)
Charles Sheeler (1883–1965)
Giorgio Sommer (1834–1914)
Thomas Struth (b. 1954)

Notes
1 See Gustavo Buntinx, “Communities of Sense/Communities of Sentiment: Globalization and the Museum Void
in an Extreme Periphery,” in Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (eds.),
Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press,
2006), 219–46.
2 Salah Hassan, “Vers une renaissance,” in Ja Taa, Prendre l’image, Illes Rencontres Africaines de la
Photographie, Bamako (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 9.
3 “Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015,” Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/calendar/
exhibitions/1539.
4 George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 124.
5 Colby Chamberlain, “Ocean of Images: Museum of Modern Art,” Artforum 54, no. 7 (March 2016): 277.
6 Douglas Crimp, “Close-Up: Indirect Answers—Douglas Crimp on Louise Lawler’s Why Pictures Now, 1981,”
Artforum 51, no. 1 (September 2012): 505.
7 Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1993), 46.
8 Sadakichi Hartmann, “A Plea for Straight Photography,” American Amateur Photographer 16 (March 1904):
101–9; reprinted in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays and Images (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1980), 186.
9 Ansel Adams, “An Exposition of My Photographic Technique,” Camera Craft 41, no. 1 (January 1934): 19.
10 A. D. Coleman, “Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William
Mortensen,” in Larry Lytle and Michael Moynihan (eds.), American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William
Mortensen (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2014), 279.
11 Gerry Badger, “‘The Most Remarkable Discovery of Modern Times’: Three Photographic Exhibitions in 1850s
London,” in Alessandra Mauro (ed.), Photoshow: Landmark Exhibitions That Defned the History of
Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 50.
12 Julius Bryant, ed., Art and Design for All: The Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 207.
13 Okwui Enwezor, “Okwui Enwezor and Artur Walther: A Conversation,” in Recent Histories: Contemporary
African Photography and Video Art (Göttingen: Steidl, 2017), 13.
14 Carol Squiers, “Seeing Africa Through African Eyes,” New York Times, May 26, 1996, H30.
15 Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (Göttingen: Steidl,
2006), 11.
16 Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 25.
17 Darren Newbury, Defant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Unisa, South Africa: Unisa Press,
2009), 2–3.
18 Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 12–13, 25–6.
19 Enwezor, Snap Judgments, 11.

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20 Newbury, Defant Images, 18.

21 Introduction to Meet the Bantu: A Story in Changing Cultures, reproduced in André Odendaal (ed.), The Leon
Levson Photographic Collection: Catalogue and Background Material (Bellville, South Africa: University of the
Western Cape, 1990), 75.
22 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” in
Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991), 176, cited in Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, “Photography with a difference: Leon
Levson’s camera studies and photographic exhibitions of native life in South Africa, 1947–1950,” Kronos 31
(November 2005): 213.
23 Newbury, Defant Images, 52, 55.
24 Geoffrey Batchen, “Snapshots,” photographies 1, no. 2 (September 2008): 124.
25 Thy Phu, Elspeth H. Brown, and Deepali Dewan, “The Family Camera Network,” Photography and Culture 10,
no. 2 (July 2017): 149–52.
26 Phu, Brown, and Dewan, “The Family Camera Network,” 159.
27 Batchen, “Snapshots,” 123.
28 Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 27.
29 Nancy Newhall, Enduring Moment, unpublished manuscript, 248, cited in Erin O’Toole, “No Democracy in
Quality: Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and the Founding of the Department of Photographs at
the Museum of Modern Art,” Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2010, 252.
30 Willard D. Morgan, The American Snapshot: An Exhibition of the Folk Art of the Camera (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1944), n.p.
31 O’Toole, “No Democracy in Quality,” 257.
32 Elizabeth Brayer, George Eastman: A Biography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 172.

Selected further reading

Caraffa, Costanza, ed. Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag,
2011.
Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Sigrid Lien, eds. Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs. Farnham, UK:
Ashgate, 2014.
Mauro, Alessandra, ed. Photoshow: Landmark Exhibitions That Defned the History of Photography. London:
Thames and Hudson, 2014.
Phillips, Christopher. “Judgment Seat of Photography.” October 22 (Autumn 1982): 27–63.
Ribalta, Jorge, ed. Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man,
1928–55. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008.

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 10
ARCHIVES

Archives are often thought of as repositories, where public records, historical documents, and
photographs are classifed, stored, and preserved. But, though frequently delineated by these contents,
archives are not passive receptacles. Instead, taking a cue from photography historian Elizabeth Edwards,
they are “actively resourceful” sites, in which history, memory, and knowledge are continually produced,
negotiated, and contested.1 This conceptualization of archives also extends to photography, which, as
art historian Ernst van Alphen notes, “is not only an archival record, it is also an archive in itself.”2 This
reciprocity between photography and archives depends in part on the medium’s assumed indexicality.
Because a photograph is thought to hold not only a similarity with or a resemblance to what it depicts
but also to have been directly caused by this referent, many delineate photographic archives as reliable
and truthful. Yet, this causal relationship between a photograph and its referent, as Chapter 1 points out,
is anything but stable. The meanings of photographs are elusive; they shift over time and vary according
to the contexts in which they are used and produced. This contingency also extends to photographic
archives, which “compel us,” as archivist Tim Schlak writes, “with their capacity to evoke rather than tell,
to suggest rather than explain, so that they simultaneously allure and frustrate us with what we naively
perceive in their content to be history and fact.”3
Thomas Demand (b. 1964) references this uncertainty in the construction of his 1995 photograph
Archive. To make this image, Demand frst turned to a photograph of the archive of Nazi propagandist
and flmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. From this image, he meticulously built, using colored paper and
cardboard, a life-size model of Riefenstahl’s archive. Next, he photographed the reproduction and then
destroyed it, leading to, among other things, a meditation about the uneasy relationship that photographic
archives share with history and vice versa. The subject matter of Archive further advances this contingency.
The photograph depicts a room from Riefenstahl’s flm archive with what appears to be endless rows of
shelves containing identical gray, unlabeled boxes that spill onto the foor in neatly arranged stacks. Yet,
while these boxes appear neutral, orderly, and anonymous, they are not passive receptacles. Instead,
returning to Edwards, their very organization and character are part and parcel of the archive’s “constitution
and meaning.” In other words, what may appear as a seemingly unexceptional space is not happenchance;
instead, the very organization and construction of archives “elicit responses, stimulate affects, which
would not have existed in that form if the photograph, its card, its box had not existed in that way.”4
It is this conceptualization of photographic archives as not only institutions and instruments of history,
memory, and knowledge, but also as having agency, affect, and materiality, that is the focus of this
chapter. To take up some of these complexities and contradictions, each section considers a single
material and affective quality of the archive: its function as a collection, its connection to memory, and its
relationship to time. Each section begins by situating these qualities in terms of the archival tendencies
of recent photographers. At the same time, each section also historically situates this so-called archival
turn in relation to photography’s own distinctive archival potential, including its use throughout history to

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document the past, impose order, and mediate identity and social relations. By looking at these two
narratives simultaneously, the chapter foregrounds the ways in which photography and archives both
depend upon each other and are dynamically interwoven.

Collections
In Archive Fever, frst published in French in 1995 as Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne,
philosopher Jacques Derrida theorizes the archive in terms of two conficting forces: the death drive
(Thantatos) and the pleasure principle (Eros). Through these antithetical terms, he suggests that archives
are defned by a struggle over what they preserve or save and what they destroy or exclude. This leads
Derrida to defne the “archivization” process as that which “produces as much as it records the event.”5
This contingency of the archive, or the notion that the social, political, and technological forces that go
into producing an archive shape history, memory, and knowledge as much as its contents, including
what is left out, is central to the practice of Akram Zaatari (b. 1966) and, most notably, his work with
the Arab Image Foundation (AIF). Founded in 1997 by Zaatari, Fouad Elkoury, and Samer Mohdad, the
AIF initially grew out of a desire by these artists to acquire and preserve photography in the Arab region
that was being lost to both natural disasters and the destruction of war. The AIF, however, quickly
exceeded this more traditional collecting function to also become a site for staging contemporary art
projects that explore the archivization process itself.
Zaatari’s ongoing project based on the archive of Lebanese commercial photographer Hashem el
Madani addresses this distinction. Zaatari met el Madani in his hometown of Saïda (Sidon) in 1998 and
promptly became interested not only in his individual photographs but, more signifcantly, his working
process. To foreground, as Zaatari explains, “how Madani worked and how he made his choices,”
Zaatari turned to a number of artistic strategies—restoration, collection, research, restaging, exhibition,
flming, among others—to highlight aspects of el Madani’s archive and Lebanese society, more broadly,
that had otherwise remained hidden or unseen. For his series, Objects of study/The archive of studio
Shehrazade/Hashem el Madani/Studio Practices, Zaatari compiled photographs that el Madani took
between 1948 and 1982, including a 1957 portrait of Mrs. Baqari (see Fig. 10.1). For this image,
el Madani, upon the insistence of the subject’s jealous husband, made deep scratches in the negative
so that Mrs. Baqari’s face would be forever mutilated. Zaatari revitalizes this damaged photograph by
mounting it on white paper and displaying it in a plain white frame with el Madani’s signature on the back.
Presented on the gallery or museum wall, the disfgured image speaks to gender expectations in 1950s
Lebanon at the same time as it “expose[s],” as art historian Hannah Feldman explains, “something of
photography’s economy, conventions, and even conficting relationship with the social and political.”6 In
this way, Zaatari uses el Madani’s archive both as a collection of images and a platform from which to
study photography, history, and desire.
Like Zaatari, Joachim Schmid (b. 1955) also operates as a collector and curator. But, where Zaatari’s
interest focuses on the story, gesture, or performance constructed around archives, Schmid, guided by
the principle that basically everything in the world is worth looking at, is more concerned with resuscitating
that which has been omitted, scorned, or neglected. This approach forms the basis of his project Archiv.
Produced between 1986 and 1999, Archiv consists of 725 panels, with each panel containing anywhere
from two to sixty images that Schmid mostly found—postcards, baseball cards, commercial photographs,
snapshots, photographs of missing people, newspaper images, to name but a few—and organized into

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Figure 10.1 Akram Zaatari, Objects of Study/Hashem el Madami/Studio Practices/Scratched portrait of Mrs. Baqari
Saida (Lebanon) 1957, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg.

groups (see Fig. 10.2). While some of the categories employed by Schmid are organized around familiar
visual tropes—people with dogs, wedding couples, new cars, sports celebrities—overall, the collections
are largely arbitrary and depend as much on content and type as form and pattern. Some panels, for
instance, are arranged according to technical characteristics, such as cropped heads, a fnger in front of
the lens, and double exposure. The result of this cool indifference on the part of Schmid, however, is not
only a leveling of visual culture. What Schmid’s archivization, itself carefully choreographed, enables is for
a heretofore “buried past,” as curator John S. Weber explains using the metaphor of Frankenstein’s
monster, “to rise and walk again.”7
Schmid’s determination to give that which has been excluded or excised from the archive an
opportunity to live again also informs his series Pictures from the Street, which he began in 1982 and
concluded in 2012. For this series, made up of 1,000 photographs that he found discarded on streets
across the world, Schmid amassed an archive of anonymous images that are identifed and subsequently
displayed only by the time and location of when and where he discovered them. For Schmid, what is

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Figure 10.2 Joachim Schmid, Archiv 28, 1988. © Joachim Schmid. Courtesy of the artist.

most “interesting” about these images is not who or what they depict but rather their “destructive energy.”
Here he refers to the energy that was expended when these images, with their tears, scratches, and
missing parts, were damaged and discarded. It is this “destructive energy” that Schmid maintains
transforms the photographs from images to be looked at into objects that have an affective and social
function in the world.
While Schmid’s Pictures evoke the loss and pathos of the archivization process, their collection as
“interesting” objects, as Schmid refers to them, also points to the contradictory position that so-called
vernacular photographs occupy within the history of photography and, most especially, as is detailed in
Chapter 9, the art museum. Schmid argues that his projects work against the aestheticizing function of
the museum’s judgment seat. Nonetheless, his recuperation efforts have the unforeseen effect of
facilitating the recognition of these hitherto discarded images as art. They also raise the question about
whether vernacular photography can ever truly be dislodged from the marketplace and the extent to
which archival collections remain, therefore, irrevocably intertwined with capital. Returning again to
Akram Zaatari and the AIF may offer a way out of this conundrum. Though the AIF was initially begun as
a site of preservation, over time Zaatari has increasingly questioned what exactly it is that requires
safeguarding. He extrapolates: “If emotions can be preserved with pictures, then maybe returning a
picture to the album from which it was taken, to the bedroom where it was found, to the confguration it
once belonged to, would constitute an act of preservation in its most radical form.” 8 It is this understanding
of the value of the “archivization” process in and of itself that is most lacking in Schmid’s practice.
Just as archival collections can be subjected to loss, destruction, and decay, they can likewise be
sites of proliferation, plethora, and excess. For artists associated with the German New Vision (neues
Sehen) and New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) movements of the 1920s, the logic of archival
inexhaustibility was especially compelling. Beginning around 1925, artists associated with these
movements began to refute efforts by the then dominant Pictorialist photographers (who we also discuss
in Chapters 2 and 9) to elevate photography as art by foregrounding the medium’s rarity, even non-
reproducibility. In contrast to the Pictorialists, who sought to mark their images as special and unique
through strategies such as retouching and manipulations to the plate, New Vision artists like László
Moholy-Nagy argued that “the value of photography,” as photography historian Olivier Lugon notes,
“would henceforth reside not in rarity, but in quantity.”9
The landmark exhibition Film und Foto, or Fifo, organized by the German Werkbund association in
Stuttgart in 1929, and which subsequently traveled to Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, Danzig (today Gdansk),
Zagreb, and Japan, exemplifed this shift. With over a thousand images, the exhibition was marked

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by abundance and plethora apparent not only in its contents but very organization. Fifo did not limit
its contents to art photography but rather exhibited images from felds that ranged from science,
design, and industry to advertising and the press. The organizers intended this variety to signal
a transformation of human vision, or a new vision, as Moholy-Nagy called it, that would not only
broaden what the eyes could see but the very ways in which the world was seen (for more on New
Vision, see Chapter 1). In other words, a New Vision belonged to the infnite number of subjects recorded
in these photographs and to the multiplicity of viewpoints from which the images were taken and
viewed—from above and below or as partial and complete, to name but a few—as well as to their
endless reproducibility.
Albert Renger-Patzsch’s (1897–1966) book The World is Beautiful (Die Welt ist schön), published
in 1928, was likewise informed by the logic of abundance. Though Renger-Patzsch adopts a relatively
unifed style throughout his book—extreme clarity and the close-up—his subjects, which range from
details of plants and animals to machines and factories, was truly copious. Printed full-page
and numbering exactly 100, the photographs, as art historian Carl Georg Heise notes in the book’s
preface, “recognize the inexhaustible life itself in all its parts.” This is because, as Heise continues in
reference to Renger-Patzsch’s 1927 close-up of a grass snake (see Fig. 10.3), upon seeing “the head
of the adder . . . so integrated in the coils of the snake’s body . . . the picture appears to be flled
with ornaments composed of scales and the viewer’s imagination is expanded—uncannily—into
infnity.”10
But despite the success of Renger-Patzsch’s book, the boundlessness of New Vision and New
Objectivity photography was relatively short-lived. In addition to literary theorist Walter Benjamin’s well-

Figure 10.3 Albert Renger-Patzsch, Snake Head, 1927. Gilman Collection. Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas
H. Lee Gift, 2005. 2005.100.147. © Albert Renger-Patzsch Archiv/Ann and Jürgen Wilde/DACS 2019.

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rehearsed 1931 critique of The World is Beautiful as turning his subjects into objects of aesthetic
consumption and pleasure, in the aftermath of Fifo, there was a general weariness about photography’s
abundance and a desire to somehow curb its excess, which Benjamin’s contemporary Siegfried Kracauer
and others likened to the waste of capitalism. Ironically, it is the logic of the archive that provided an
antidote. As a system of classifcation and categorization, the archive allowed the “infnity” of Renger-
Patzsch’s photographic collection to become both manageable and controllable. August Sander’s
1929 book Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit), part of the Citizens project discussed in Chapter 3,
best epitomizes this archival turn. A collection of sixty typological portraits, arranged together
according to social profession, this volume, according to Benjamin, provided a radical counterpoint
to the fetishized commodities of Renger-Patzsch’s The World is Beautiful. Yet, as artist and critic
Allan Sekula later cautions in his 1981 essay “The Traffc of Photography,” the systematic arranging and
sorting of Sander’s archive is equally problematic for how it, like the National Socialist German Workers’s
Party, or Nazi Party, which grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany through totalitarian means
from 1933 to 1945, not only organizes but controls representations of the body and asserts power over
them.
While interwar Germany grappled with questions over the perceived threat of image profusion, other
nations have struggled with “archival loss,” a term that international archivists and UNESCO use to
designate the destruction, decay, and outright disappearance of entire archive collections. Archival loss
is especially tangible in the coastal countries of West Africa, where the legacy of colonialism has
contributed to, as photography historian Jennifer Bajorek writes, “whole swaths of archives [going]
missing because they have been sold to European collectors.” Likewise, due to shifts in economics
and geopolitics during the postcolonial period, many African studios have had to close their doors
outright or discard their negatives entirely. To counter and prevent these instances of loss, countries
in the Global North have made efforts to create and fund archives as well as their digitization. Yet,
though much needed, these projects blatantly overlook, continues Bajorek, “the ephemerality of the
photographic image”11 and, most especially, the ways in which the logic of archive and its collecting and
preservationist tendencies disregard, in the words of visual anthropologist Liam Buckley, “the right to
allow for decay.”12
In the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), the practice of writing, drawing, and painting on photographs
as well as their replication across generations speaks to the power of ephemerality and decay of
photographic collections. A portrait of Effuah Nicol of the Cape Coast, which hangs prominently in the
hallway of the home of her grandchildren Augustine, Francis, and Katherine Abraham, is a case in point
(see Fig. 10.4). Taken initially around 1890, the image, according to photography historian Erin Haney, “is
visibly a photograph of a photograph.” Evidence of this rephotography is found on the right side of the
portrait, which itself is a replication, taken after 1961, the year, as the text on the picture’s matte explains,
of Nicol’s death. There, clearly noticeable within the visual frame, are the crumpled, darkened, and torn
edges of the frst portrait, which due to local conditions or the harsh climate had deteriorated over the
course of its seventy-year life. For Nicol’s family members, however, this remaking of their grandmother’s
portrait, which itself had been enhanced by the photographer or a studio retoucher at the time of its
making, was entirely commonplace and utterly unremarkable. What mattered most was not the saving
of the original or the safeguarding of its duration over time, but, in Haney’s words, its “fexibility and
mutability,” or ability to be modifed and made new again.13
In addition to rephotography, within Ghana, alterations to the surface of prints are also a pervasive
practice. Faces will often be outlined or outright redrawn with charcoal and hair as well as other features

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Figure 10.4 Unidentifed photographers, Portrait of Effuah Nicol, after 1961, based on photograph c. 1890. Courtesy
of the Abraham family.

darkened with ink so as to overcome fading or deterioration. It is likewise common to carefully cut out
certain individuals from a picture, to replace them entirely with new ones, and to mark an “X” above the
head of someone who was deceased. Together these additive practices call attention to photography’s
materiality and suggest that within Ghana, impermanence, deterioration, and loss are established
aspects of photographic archives that demand not prevention or eradication but rather imaginative
engagement.

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FOCUS BOX 10
The surface of things: a history of photography from the Swahili
coast
Prita Meier

The Swahili coast of eastern Africa fgures prominently in the pictorial remains of
European colonization and empire-making in Africa. Today photo archives across the
world continue to catalogue, disseminate, and display thousands of images of this
African littoral society. Pictures and descriptions of Swahili men and women have long
ignited the imagination of Europeans and Americans, because they evoke a much-
loved phantasm of ruthless slavers, languid harem girls, adventuring seamen, and
mysterious “hybrid races.” This trope has its beginnings in the sixteenth century, when
the Portuguese empire colonized key ports on the Swahili coast, but it reached
unprecedented heights in the nineteenth century, as new machineries of representation,
mass-production, and telecommunication created a modern visual economy around
the bodies and faces of Swahili coast people. Especially studio prints and postcards
depicting local women circulated all across the western world during the colonial
period, when the coast was part of the British Protectorate (1890–1963). Most
show young girls in contrived poses, meeting the eye of the viewer either with a
suggestive stare or a bright smile of welcoming warmth. Photographic profles of the
human face were also common. In such mass-produced postcards, voyeuristic
pleasure is conveniently coupled with “scientifc” data about humankind and the head
and planes of women’s necks and shoulders were often bared to document their
physiognomy.
Of course, all photographs are in a sense reductive, turning people, their bodies, and
experiences into static representations. The evidentiary effcacy of photography was
exactly why it was consistently deployed as a technology of exploration, propaganda,
and bureaucracy in the colonization of Africa. Photography endowed racist discourse
with the power of the “real,” and claims about the essential difference between the
colonizer and colonized were anchored in photographic representation. But the
representational protocols of photography can of course be deployed for diverse ends.
While photography was and is a technology of empire, it is also a technology of self—a
site of embodied performance. That is, photographs are very much connected to
bodies; they can work as images that hold people’s lived experiences and memories.
After all, the reality effect of photography can materialize a person’s presence, however
mediated or even displaced. Especially if one focuses on the sitter in the photograph,
then photography’s documentary and social aspects come into focus.
Research on African photography, often focused on west and central Africa studio
photography from the 1940s to the 1960s, has been at the forefront of exploring issues

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of identity formation, selfhood, political struggle, and class aspiration. Clearly a focus
on issues of portraiture and its social dimensions has been immensely generative, but
other aspects of photography in Africa remain largely unexplored. By delving into the
early history of photography on the Swahili coast I began to see that photography,
including studio pictures of individuals, were sometimes not primarily about bodies or
the people in the photographs. Instead, especially before independence from Britain in
the 1960s, the photograph was primarily understood as an itinerant thing that
expressed opaque, even intractable meanings that exist at the intersection of
objectifcation and haptic experience. Even locally commissioned photographs,
although seemingly about the sitter’s desire to express some essential aspect of his or
her being, were often about quite the opposite. Surprisingly, it was about the one thing
scholars are usually trying to move beyond: the surface of things.
Photographs frst became available locally in the 1860s or 1870s, arriving as exotic
imports via the mercantile networks that connected Swahili port cities to other trade
hubs across the western Indian Ocean. In fact, before European colonization, Swahili
coast residents avidly collected photographs, especially in the form of cartes de visite,
in their homes. The frst carte de visite and pictorial chromolithographs likely arrived
from Bombay and were sold in Zanzibari markets with other South Asian imports, such
as textiles, housewares, and decorative ornament destined for the realm of bodily
display or to beautify interiors.
On the Swahili coast, photography did not connect to pre-existing picture-making
practices (although low-relief, semi-abstract zoomorphic carvings were not
uncommon). Despite the absence of such traditions, the pleasure of looking at,
touching, and sharing photographs was a pastime instantly embraced by locals, the
majority of whom were Muslims. Swahili coast residents certainly knew how to look
beyond the surface, so to speak, into the perspectival depths of the photograph, but
they very much enjoyed the haptics of engaging the photograph as an object. While
older residents perhaps found photography’s realist illusionism unnerving or even
uncouth, local reservations about photography were mainly concerned with preserving
a proper separation between male and female bodies and gazes in the photographic
encounter. Many likely felt that unrelated men and women should not be photographed
together, an opinion certainly expressed by many locals today. Yet it must be
emphasized that no evidence suggests that they considered the making of or looking at
photographic likenesses as something fundamentally un-Islamic. Late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century sources suggest instead that consuming photographs was
considered a tasteful pastime, one that was intimately connected to homemaking.
Displaying photographs was part of one’s ability to craft spaces of tasteful
sophistication, international connectedness, and hospitality in one’s home. For
example, Zanzibaris enjoyed inviting Westerners to their homes, offering them “Arab
style” coffee and almond-infused sweetmeats, and showing them their fashionable

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collections of imported objets d’art, which included boxes and albums flled with cartes
de visites of European princes, princesses, and other famous personages.
This interest in overseas things was not a recent phenomenon or simply a result of
capitalist globalization. Rather, collecting and displaying imported objects expressed
the ability to make the exotic one’s own. It was a local tradition for women to stage
elaborate assemblages of imported exotica, giving material form to memories and even
fantasies of long-distance travel and mobility. During the height of the nineteenth-
century economic boom, cheaper and new commodities fooded the market, which
also, in part, gave new life to old ways of consuming “the world.”
Studio portraits commissioned by local elites also suggest that people of means
very much enjoyed simply playing with photographed bodies of fashionably dressed
distant others. Converted into an image, bodily surfaces became tangible and stylized
forms that could be “tried on” for one’s own appearance in front of the camera. Young
men connected to powerful Omani families likewise enjoyed engaging the pictured
appearances of Europeans in photographic portraits. These photographs present
young men as stylish and carefree dandies, cosmopolitan fâneurs par excellence. The
sitters in these examples are embracing the performative aspects of sitting for one’s
picture; they are temporarily masquerading in the clothes and postures of distant
places. They are also in part signaling their familiarity and engagement with European
cultures and fashions, although it should be noted that these outfts were not
necessarily read as “Western” but also associated with Ottoman imperial modernity,
because wearing tailored suits in combination with a fez as a head covering was
popular in Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Middle East among the elite at that
time.
Photography also gave material force to local practices of turning the body into
objects of “good taste,” which was in many respects an expression of the cultural
dimensions of nineteenth-century capitalist globalization. A culture of refnement and
social distinction developed on the Swahili coast that revolved around the ability to
force others to act as ornaments, as pleasing tableaux vivant of worldliness and wealth.
It is unclear when exactly the display of bodies became essential to public
performances of urbane sophistication and social power, but it was common among
plantation owners, the ruling classes, and rich city dwellers by the 1830s.
Women especially had to act as ornaments, their owners reducing them to
assemblages of wealth. Photographs that once belonged to the Busaidi family reveal
the local logic of objectifying people into photographic things. Such women were
chosen for their beauty and amassed as retinues by powerful men and women.
Patricians had the privilege not only to ornament themselves but also took pleasure in
dressing up enslaved women. Women had to don identical or matching textiles and
ornaments to create pleasing multi-sensorial events. There even existed a category of
bonded or servant women, called wapambe (the ornamented ones), whose role during

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festivals was to signify the wealth and infuence of their owners. Sumptuously dressed
in the most expensive silks and cottons, they would accompany patricians at various
public festivals and processions, the mass of their bedecked and bejeweled bodies
transforming the spaces of the city into a spectacle of wealth and luxury. Their owners
began to photograph them, creating collections of their bodies for display in their
palaces. Such photographs, although also likenesses, primarily have the effect of
intensifying the surface qualities of their bodies. Forced to pose for the photograph,
their bodies act as a kind of ornamental screen. These young women had objecthood
imposed on them, and through the photograph they are forever giving material form to
other people’s concepts of the beautiful, aesthetic, and exotic. In a sense, then, these
photographs reveal how photography was used to heighten the ornamental effect of
bodies, creating a series of striking surface equivalences between bodies, objects, and
ornament.
Like elsewhere in the world, on the Swahili coast the uses and meanings of
photography changed rapidly over the years, always working in tandem with a range of
old and new media cultures. Around the 1940s the aesthetics and local signifcance of
photography had been radically transformed, refecting, in part, the social and political
landscape of life during the high colonial period. Photography and sitting for one’s
picture were increasingly associated with modern portraiture, middle-class
respectability, and cosmopolitan city life. By the 1960s, going to a commercial studio
was a popular leisure activity, and teenagers often went with their friends to sit for
group portraits for the fun of it and to celebrate their consumption and production
of global youth cultures. By then, how one chose to pose for one’s portrait signaled
the growing interest in international mass media, including flms and lifestyle
magazines.
Yet during the second half of the nineteenth century, photography was still very
much linked to older cultural practices that had much to do with practices of display
and collecting. The Swahili coast therefore offers a different genealogy for
understanding the early history of photography, one that emphasizes its role as an
object in the world. Locals often emphasized photography’s shape-shifting qualities, its
work as a mobile artifact, instead of its abilities as a picture. At this time, photographs
worked as relational things, colliding with other things—such as bodies, commodities,
and heirlooms—creating a landscape of transoceanic materiality. As a traveling object,
the photograph often provoked viewers and users to understand it as a thing in the
world rather than a representation of the world. Furthermore, looking at, displaying, and
posing for photographs was often very much about exteriority. People knowingly
played with photography’s ability to create a contingent—even objectifed—and
superfcial self.

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Memory
Just as photographic archives are structured by what they preserve or save as well as by what they
destroy or exclude, they are equally formed by both remembrance and forgetting. This is the paradox of
the archivization process for Derrida: the desire to archive or remember is driven as much by the
possibility, even fear, of forgetting. Because human memory is partial and limited, photographs, which
like archives store information, are often called up to “memorize” things for us. But though we may want,
even desire, using Derrida’s term from Archive Fever, photographs to serve as memories, they are
necessarily contingent and incomplete. This means that photographs produce memory as much as they
are structured by memories. Put differently, they are informed as much by what is remembered as what
is forgotten.
Dinh Q. Lê’s (b. 1968) Erasure from 2011, composed of thousands and thousands of found family
photographs collected by Lê, speaks to this paradoxical relationship between photography, memory,
and the archive (see Fig. 10.5). After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Lê and his family fed Vietnam as “boat
people” refugees and settled in Los Angeles, where he stayed for just under twenty years. When Lê
returned to Ho Chi Minh City in 1996, he went searching in antique stores and second-hand shops for
his family’s personal photographs, which had been lost in his family’s hasty departure from Vietnam.
What Lê discovered in these shops, however, was not his own family photographs but rather thousands
of personal photographs of other South Vietnamese families, including images of loved ones, couples on

Figure 10.5 Dinh Q. Lê, Erasure, 2011. © Dinh Q. Lê. Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York.

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vacation, scenic vistas, weddings, birthdays, and family gatherings. For Lê, these orphaned images,
which he began to collect and use in his multimedia installation works, became a kind of “surrogate”
family album.
In amassing these lost photographs, certain ethical questions arise. Because many of these orphaned
images, or “orphan works,” as they are often referred to in legal debates, have been removed from family
photography albums, little is known about who they depict or to whom they belong. This situation has
led a number of archives to act like surrogate orphanages in their effort to recoup and preserve these
abandoned photographs. Lê’s Erasure, originally commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art
Foundation in Sydney, Australia, in response to the tragic deaths of asylum seekers whose boat crashed
on the shores off Christmas Island, an Australian territory, on December 15, 2010, belongs, in part, to
such reclamation efforts. Upon entering the darkened gallery, visitors encountered both a video of an
eighteenth-century wooden ship, beached on an isolated coastline with its hull and sails rapidly consumed
by fames, as well as an actual boat wrecked amid a sea of orphaned images that Lê had collected upon
his return to Vietnam. Walking along wooden blanks through this sea of memories, as Lê likens the
thousands of discarded photographs lying face down on the foor, visitors were encouraged to bend
down, turn over, and pick up photographs with the hope that they would think about the families who
abandoned them and perhaps even fnd lost family members of their own. To facilitate this reclamation
process, the exhibition housed a computer and digital scanner to which, during the course of the
exhibition, visitors could bring photographs they “rescued” to be scanned, catalogued, stored, and
uploaded to a digital archive (www.erasurearchive.net), thereby creating an online collection of oan hon
(lost souls) for others to likewise access as well as to add to over time.
Through this collective reclamation process, Lê gives these orphaned images, or lost memories, a
home. In her book on the black diaspora in Europe, scholar Tina M. Campt takes exception to recovery
efforts such as these. She argues that in becoming so-called orphanages for lost images, archives, like
the one created by Lê, “leave out an inclination, will, or desire for fugitivity, that is, the orphan’s capacity
to reveal not the cultural memory, history, or heritage we believe he or she should tell or reveal to us . . .
but that which we neither want to see nor necessarily recognize when it is shown to us.”14 In making this
argument about the importance of loss and the waywardness of orphaned images, Campt, writing from
the perspective of the black diaspora, overlooks the specifcity of the transnational experiences of the
Vietnamese diaspora, which, as photography historian Thy Phu deftly argues, “is shaped not by the
specter of slavery” but rather in defance of offcial state histories that make “the very preservation of
kinship ties a suspicious and punishable act.” In becoming a surrogate family to these orphaned images
or erased memories, Lê’s installation and accompanying archive becomes part of a family that is not
structured by biology and can thereby, through its gesture of repatriation, begin to heal “treacherous
political bifurcations that persist beyond the war’s end and despite the nation’s reunifcation.”15
Like Lê, Christian Boltanski (b. 1944) also believes in the power of archives to act as sites of
memory and remembrance, even as he remains more skeptical about how photography itself aids in this
process. Since the late 1960s, Boltanski has worked with photographs that he fnds, including passport
photographs, school portraits, newspaper pictures, and family albums. For his 1988 installation, Chases
High School, for instance, he turned to photographs of the graduating class of a private Jewish high
school that he discovered in a book on the Jews of Vienna. For the installation, Boltanski rephotographed
eighteen portraits of students from this book. Yet, rather than merely duplicate the image, he enlarged
each portrait to such a degree that the students lost their individual features, including their eyes, which,
most notably, no longer hold any personality but instead appear like the darkened sockets of a corpse.

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Boltanski further emphasizes death through his installation of the photographs. Hung on the wall above
stacks of rusting biscuit tins that recall both the preciousness of childhood containers and funerary urns,
the enlarged, close-up features of the students are aggressively illuminated by the glaring light of desk
lamps that hang above each portrait. Obscured by these lights and by Boltanski’s own manipulation, the
“empty, blinded faces,” as Ernst van Alphen calls them, have been fguratively objectifed and killed.16
The featureless students, who attended Chases High School in Vienna in 1931, also recall photographs
of emaciated Holocaust survivors widely published after World War II, and the installation itself references
lists of the deceased put together by the Red Cross after the war. But, while the subjects of Chases High
School are likely Jewish students who were killed in the Holocaust, Boltanski has always been clear that
his installations are more about the fact of dying than the Holocaust itself. The illegibility and anonymity
of Boltanski’s manipulated photographs further indicate that his interest is not in creating an archive of
the Holocaust or its victims per se. Rather, what concerns him is how our expectations, even desires, for
archives to remember and memorialize might be used to re-enact, or “perform,” using van Alphen’s
terminology, the Holocaust and its archival tendencies. Photography is central to that re-enactment.
Though Boltanski’s archival installations are framed as monuments, shrines, and altars (and many are
even titled as such) that seek to remember and memorialize, the photographs they contain are dead.
This is because the portraits do not function in the traditional way we expect: their subjects are featureless
and exchangeable, and they evoke absence, not presence. In other words, through photography,
Boltanski has created an archive of depletion and failure that objectifes its subjects, much in the same
way that, as van Alphen cautions, the Nazis classifed, sorted, and objectifed those who entered into the
camps (new detainees would get a number tattooed on their arm, for instance) as a means of killing their
memories. In foregrounding this connection between Boltanski’s installations and the archival potential
of the extermination practices of the Nazis, van Alphen argues, in a manner that recalls the criticism of
the archival principles of New Objectivity artists, that installations like Chase High School—and by
extension archives, more broadly—“do not by defnition preserve memories or the past” but, more
gravely, can be used for the “murder or depletion of memory.”17
Despite Boltanski’s deep-seated suspicion of photography and the archivization process, might
photographic archives also be sites of joy and pleasure rather than just pain? The rediscovery of Bryan
Heseltine’s (1923–2008) photographs of Cape Town, South Africa, from the 1950s, speaks to that
possibility as well as to how photographic archives, like memory, returning to the language of Walter
Benjamin, act not as “an instrument for exploring [the] past, but rather a medium.”18 This idea is especially
useful for approaching the images of black townships that Heseltine took during the early years of
apartheid and which re-emerged half a century later during the post-apartheid era. This legacy demands
that Heseltine’s South African photographs be taken up not only for their historical value, or what they tell
us as visual records of black urban settlements during apartheid, but as a photographic archive of
memory that has the potential to open up new and sometimes unexpected dialogues between the
present and the past.
Heseltine, as photography historian Darren Newbury explains, most likely began photographing the
black townships of Windermere, Langa, and Nyanga as a personal undertaking but soon thereafter
received funding for the project from the South African Institute for Race Relations. It was the staff at this
institute who both helped him, as a white South African-born, English-educated photographer, to gain
access and permission to photograph black subjects in these townships and sponsored the frst
exhibition of his work in 1952, under the title African Dilemma: A Survey of Urban Conditions. Taking
place on the fourth foor of Stuttafords, a department store in Cape Town, the Institute used Heseltine’s

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photographs largely in the service of their white liberal social reformist agenda of promoting better
housing and by extension good health in Cape Town’s black townships. A subsequent exhibition of
Heseltine’s photographs took place three years later. Titled A People Apart, this exhibition, on view in
the crypt of St. Martin in the Fields Church in London, was used by the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel to support an emerging anti-apartheid movement. Yet, while A People Apart marked the
beginning of an important tradition of anti-apartheid exhibitions in Great Britain, following a provincial
tour, Heseltine’s photographs were rapidly forgotten. This disappearance, as Newbury elaborates, was
a product of its historical moment: the “essentially humanist and paternalist message” of Heseltine’s
Cape Town photographs was “drowned out by the uncompromising ideology and brutality of apartheid.”19
So why return to them now? For Newbury, at least, Heseltine’s photographs offer a way “to fold time
back on itself, bringing the present face-to-face with the past.” Here Newbury references the memorial
potential of Heseltine’s photographic archive, or the ways in which it is “unusually open to the present.”20
Put another way, Heseltine’s photographs hold not only historical value regarding the postwar and early
apartheid years, but more crucially, as images of black townships, they are places where black urban
identities were formed, unfolded, and took shape in relation to local, national, and international concerns.
The care and visual attention that Heseltine bestowed upon his subjects and their surroundings attest to
this concern (see Fig. 10.6). Though initially presented within a paternalistic framework, Heseltine’s
photographs are ultimately not about “lack” or “desperation.” They depict moments of encounter

Figure 10.6 Bryan Heseltine, Cape Town, c. 1949–52. Courtesy of Gail Thorpe.

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between photographer and subject that extend beyond a white liberal discourse of poverty and suffering
to explore issues around desire, reciprocity, and defance. They are images of black urban identities and,
as such, they “provide a site of dialogue about the past and a space for imagination in the present, as all
South Africans must remake their identities in an urban geography that has both continuities and
discontinuities with the apartheid period.”21 It is this “openness” to the present that renders Heseltine’s
photographs an archive of memory.

Time
For Derrida, the fundamental question about the archive deals not with the past but the future. He writes
in Archive Fever, “It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our
disposal or not at our disposal . . . [I]f we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in
times to come.”22 Rosângela Rennó (b. 1962) takes up this temporal dimension of photographic
archives in her project Rio Montevideo (see Plate 17). In 2011, the Centro de Fotografía in Montevideo,
Uruguay, invited Rennó to respond to a photographic archive that had remained hidden for over three
decades. In 1973, the communist Uruguayan newspaper El Popular was forced to shut down when an
authoritarian military dictatorship took power. Anticipating the closure, chief photographer Aurelio
Gonzalez hid almost 50,000 photographic negatives from the newspaper within a wall cavity in his offce
building. In 2006, the negatives were rediscovered and, from these, Rennó selected thirty-two images to
reproduce as digital slides for her project. In selecting the images, Rennó was cognizant of the impossibility
of using the photographs to represent, in any sort of totality, the years of economic and social unrest
leading up to the coup in Uruguay. Likewise, she was equally aware of the limited understanding of her
perspective as a Brazilian who, though she had experienced a similar repressive military rule within her
own country, nonetheless came to this history as an outsider, albeit a sympathetic one.
To foreground the fragmentary nature of these relationships that both she and the El Popular archive
share with the past, Rennó chose to present only a small selection of images, many of which defy
expectations of what Uruguay looked like during this period of intense civil confict. This meant that while
some of the images depict the violent confrontations that occurred, including the murder of a student fve
years before the coup, an equal number of images represent scenes from daily urban and rural life, such
as a young girl taking her frst communion. In so doing, the series at once links the particular and the
universal, the personal and the shared. To further emphasize this kind of exchange, Rennó projected the
selected photographs onto the gallery walls using twenty slide projectors of various formats and eras
that she purchased in fea markets in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo. To view the images, visitors had to
actively participate by manually pressing a button to turn on the projectors, which in turn illuminated the
photographs on the gallery walls. Through this action, or possible inaction, viewers became implicated
in an ever-changing making and remaking of the past as it meanders through time, sometimes slowly,
sometimes quickly, and sometimes not at all, all the while asking them to consider their relationship to it
as potential bystanders, spectators, and, occasionally, even performers.
Time is also central to the photographic practice of Craigie Horsfeld (b. 1949). Like Rennó, he
holds a deep-seated fascination with “the relationship between things of the world, the way things are
told and our understandings of them.” But, whereas Rennó appropriates and reconfgures archival
images, Horsfeld takes photographs, mostly in cities in which he has lived. Together these images form
an archive of his daily and seemingly ordinary encounters with people and things in the world. But, unlike

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other photographers who have approached the quotidian through photography’s instantaneity, Horsfeld
differs in the slowness of his approach.
From 1972 to 1979, Horsfeld lived in Krakow, Poland, a place that he describes as flled with “desires,
confused and distant memory, the subterranean movements of cultures, of people and the land.”23 For
Horsfeld, in other words, Krakow, which at the time was in the midst of a period of economic depression
and social unrest, existed in what he refers to as “slow time.” Borrowed from historian Fernand Braudel’s
notion of “slow history,” Horsfeld uses slow time to reference both the “temporal register in which the
work is made and received”24 and the stillness, even anachronism, of the work itself. Horsfeld’s Klub
Pod Jaszczurami, Rynek Glowny, Krakow, February 1976 exemplifes this idea of slow time (see
Fig. 10.7). Horsfeld took the image in the mid-1970s but did not print the negative until ffteen years later.
This delay is standard practice for Horsfeld, who waits to print his images anywhere from a few months
to several decades. The images themselves also bear witness to photography’s uneasy relationship to
time both in their contents and making. Horsfeld prints his negatives with great attention to the tonal
contrasts between the inky blacks and soft whites that form the “skin” of his images, as he calls them.
In addition, he prints his negatives in a large-scale format (around 8 x 8 feet) as single images or in very
small editions. With these large sizes and matted surfaces, the photographs have a vulnerability and
stillness that is mirrored in his subjects who likewise appear, through their delayed viewing, to exist
outside of time. It is during these moments of lapsed time that, as art historian Carol Armstrong poignantly
explains, Horsfeld’s photographs become “something that comes between, something that is at once

Figure 10.7 Craigie Horsfeld, Klub Pod Jaszczurami, Rynek Glowny, Krakow, February 1976, 1991. © ADAGP,
Paris and DACS, London. 2019. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Rollwagen/Cray Research
Photography Fund, 1991.21.1–3.

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boundary and threshold, that both limits and permits communication and relation, something that is as
inherently social as it is inescapably corporeal.”25 One could also say that it is during these in-between
moments that the archival logic of Horsfeld’s photographs becomes most palpably materialized.
Like the “lapses” of time embodied in the production and reception of Horsfeld’s photographs, the
images produced by Provoke, a group of postwar Japanese avant-garde photographers, designers,
and writers, also represent a kind of gap or “lacuna” in archival time. In the 1960s, members of this group
discovered, in various libraries and museums, archival photographs of Hokkaido, a northern island
colonized by the Japanese Empire in 1869. But, whereas these photographs had been initially used in
the nineteenth century by the Meiji government in support of their nation-building and modernizing efforts
in the north, for Provoke artists such as Moriyama Daidoˉ (b. 1938), their “spontaneous, non-manipulated,
and non-staged characteristics,” as photography historian Gyewon Kim explains, provided the means to
establish a new form of art photography. These formal features provided a model from which these
artists could construct a form of art photography that would depart from traditional photojournalism and
documentary photography and thereby “liberate” the history of Japanese photography from “political
agendas that had weighed down the medium in the past.” Yet, in using Hokkaido photography as the
basis of this new style of avant-garde photography, the Provoke artists elevated the aesthetic properties
of these historical images at the expense of their colonialist function, which included the elimination of
Hokkaido’s indigenous people, the Ainu. In short, in establishing a stylistic legacy with these images from
the past, this group of artists “eradicated another origin—that is, the modern and imperial origin of
northern photography” in Japan.26
To counter this kind of undoing of indigenous history, the Maˉ ori people of New Zealand have insisted
that they must be consulted and grant permission prior to photographs of their ancestors being used in
publications and exhibitions. This restriction comes from Maˉ ori belief in tapu or photography’s spiritual
power. For the Maˉ ori, photographic images of their ancestors are taonga (cultural treasures). This means
that they are considered “living” objects imbued with mauri (life force) and mana (prestige, reputation) of
the people depicted in them. Thus, photographs for the Maˉ ori are not just material objects, but rather a
“medium,” as curator Arapata Hakiwai explains, that links “present generations to an umbilical cord of
genealogy, history, and identity.”27
The “Mana Taonga” policy of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa)
embodies this Maˉ ori understanding of the connection between the past and the present. Located in
Wellington, New Zealand, Te Papa is a bicultural museum that houses a substantial collection of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of the Maˉ ori. Many of the images in this collection
were amassed by the museum’s nineteenth-century predecessor, the Colonial Museum, whose staff
members classifed them according to such categories as dress or activity (see Fig. 10.8). Over time,
however, the meanings of these photographs have shifted away from these ethnographic and colonialist
imperatives. In parallel with New Zealand’s decolonialization process, in the early 1990s, as the Maˉ ori
began to gain increased agency and become stakeholders in their country’s resources, Te Papa
established the “Mana Taonga” policy. This policy recognized the vital role of whakapapa (genealogical
connections) for the Maˉ ori and how photography served as a living link to this past. This shift also
brought about a reclassifcation of Te Papa’s photography collection to include the names of subjects
and tribal affliations so that present generations could search for photographs connected to their iwi
(tribes). Recognizing these photographs as taonga has meant that Te Papa’s photographic archive no
longer relegates the Maˉ ori to the past but instead offers a space in which their past can connect both to
the present and to a yet to be determined future.

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Figure 10.8 James Bragge, Colonial Museum, c. 1880. Purchased 1955. Courtesy of the Museum of New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa (D.000014).

Photography, as this chapter details, is not only an archival record but an archive itself. This
interdependence between photography and the archive extends to the very beginnings of the medium.
William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800–77) Articles of China is one of several photographs of collections or
taxonomies that Talbot includes in his seminal publication, The Pencil of Nature (1844–6). In this book,
Talbot notes that “the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper
in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory.”28 Here we see Talbot’s understanding
of photography’s archival potential: it is a repository or a collection that can remember things for us. But,
beyond this memorizing capability, Talbot also recognizes its ability to anticipate a future.
Talbot’s Nelson’s Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square, London from 1844 addresses this
temporal disjunction of the photographic archive (see Fig. 10.9). In the image, taken almost four decades
after the death of Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, Talbot constructs, as photography historian David Bate
argues, “the memory of Nelson . . . quite literally, being constructed and re-presented.” This is because,
though Nelson’s column was erected in London’s Trafalgar Square to the “memory” of Nelson’s defeat
of the French and Spanish navies at the Battle of Trafalgar, Talbot depicts not the monument in its
fnished state but rather during the process of its construction. In electing to photograph at this moment,
he emphasizes how the memory of this war hero, and by extension the patriotism of the British imperial

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Figure 10.9 William Henry Fox Talbot, Nelson’s Column under Construction in Trafalgar Square, London, April
1844. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

nation-state, is constructed. Bate continues, “At the heart of Talbot’s image is not only a ‘record’ of the
retroactive remembering of Nelson, whose historical purpose is forming a national identity but also an
interpretation of it.”29
Crucial to Bate’s argument is the angle from which Talbot photographs the monument so that only the
unfnished base and part of the shaft of the column are visible within the frame. In electing to exclude the
top part of the column, including its seventeen-foot-high statue of Nelson, Talbot calls attention to
contemporary debates about the monument as an oversized intrusion. His camera position also brings
into view the early eighteenth-century St. Martin in the Fields Church (where Heseltine’s Cape Town
photographs would subsequently be exhibited), whose steeple is framed by the edge of the picture.
Dwarfed by the enormity of this nationalist monument that dominates the foreground of the composition,
this mirroring of church and national monument (or state) brings the past into dialogue with the present
and thereby raises questions about the role of religion within the current-day Victorian nation-state.
Likewise, Talbot’s photograph also anticipates a future. In electing to crop out Nelson’s statue, Talbot
opens up the image not only to the past, or “that-has-been,” but also to the future, or “this-will-be,” using
literary critic Roland Barthes’s terminology from his infuential book Camera Lucida. This future potential
includes the protests, riots, rallies, and celebrations that Nelson’s column has yet to see, including, in
2017, when controversy over whether or not, like the confederate statues in the United States, Nelson’s
statue should be removed on the basis that he was a white supremacist. As a photographic archive,

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then, Talbot’s image is not a passive receptacle for the storage of memory. Returning to Elizabeth
Edwards, it is an “actively resourceful” site, in which history, memory, and knowledge are as much
imagined as they are activated, produced, and reconfgured.

Summary
• Photography is not only an archival record but an archive itself.
• Photographic archives are defned by a struggle over what they preserve or save and what they
destroy or exclude.
• Photographic archives are “actively resourceful” sites in which memory is as much imagined as it
is activated and produced.
• In photographic archives, the past is continually assembled and reassembled as its contents
shift and change in and through time.

Discussion points
• How are photographs and archives related to each other?
• How are photographic archives structured by both loss and abundance?
• What role does memory play within photographic archives?
• How is time fgured within photographic archives?

Additional case studies

Eugene Atget (1857–1927)
Sophie Calle (b. 1953)
Park Chan-kyong (b. 1965)
Hanne Darboven (1941–2009)
DATAR Photographic Mission (est. 1983)
French Mission of Heliographique (est. 1851)
Anri Sala (b. 1974)
Taryn Simon (b. 1975)
Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943)
Fiona Tan (b. 1966)

Notes
1 Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive,” in Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo
Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 47.

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2 Ernst van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (London: Reaktion
Books, 2014), 22.
3 Tim Schlak, “Framing Photographs, Denying Archives: The Diffculty of Focusing on Archival Photographs,”
Archival Science 8, no. 2 (2008): 85.
4 Edwards, “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive,” 52.
5 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 11, 17.
6 Hannah Feldman, “Excavating Images on the Border,” Third Text 23, no. 3 (May 2009): 317.
7 John S. Weber, “Joachim Schmid and Photography: The accidental artist,” in Gordon MacDonald and John S.
Weber (eds), Joachim Schmid, Photoworks 1982–2007 (Brighton: Photoworks, 2007), 12.
8 Akram Zaatari, “Against Photography: Conversation with Mark Westmoreland,” Aperture 210 (Spring 2013): 63.
9 Olivier Lugon, “‘Photo-Infation’: Image Profusion in German Photography, 1925–1945,” History of Photography
32, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 220.
10 Carl Georg Heise, preface to Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt is schön, reprinted in David Mellor (ed.),
Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 10, 14.
11 Jennifer Bajorek, “Decolonizing the Archive: The View from West Africa,” Aperture 210 (Spring 2013): 66, 67.
12 Liam Buckley, “Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive,” Cultural
Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2005): 150.
13 Erin Haney, “Film Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs,” History of Photography 34,
no. 2 (May 2010): 123, 126.
14 Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2012), 90.
15 Thy Phu, “Diasporic Vietnamese Family Photographs, Orphan Images, and the Art of Recollection,” Trans-Asia
Photography Review 5, no. 1 (Fall 2014), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0005.102.
16 Van Alphen, Staging the Archive, 198.
17 Van Alphen, Staging the Archive, 211.
18 Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 576.
19 Darren Newbury, “Photographs of Windermere: The Bryan Heseltine Collection,” Photography & Culture 3, no.
2 (2010): 227.
20 Darren Newbury, People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013), 36, 37.
21 Newbury, People Apart, 37.
22 Derrida, Archive Fever, 36.
23 Craigie Horsfeld, interview with Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood, in Jean-François Chevrier and
James Lingwood (eds.), Craigie Horsfeld (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), 8.
24 Nancy Princenthal, “Slow Time,” Art in America 95, no. 2 (May 2007): 165.
25 Carol Armstrong, “The Dilation of Attention,” Artforum 42, no. 5 (January 2004): 119.
26 Gyewon Kim, “Reframing ‘Hokkaido Photography’: Style, Politics, and Documentary Photography in 1960s
Japan,” History of Photography 39, no. 4 (November 2015): 356, 364.
27 Arapata Hakiwai, “The Meaning of Ancestral Photographs in Maˉ ori Culture,” in Wulf Köpke and Bernd Schmelz
(eds.), A Glimpse into Paradise: Historical Photographs of Polynesia (Hamburg: Museum für Völkerkunde,
2014), 145.
28 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844–6), n.p.
29 David Bate, “The Memory of Photography,” photographies 3, no. 2 (September 2010): 255.

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Selected further reading

Alphen, Ernst van. Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books,
2014.
Davidson, Kathleen. Photography, Natural History, and the Nineteenth-Century Museum: Exchanging Views of
Empire. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Downey, Anthony, ed. Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle
East. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Christopher Morton, eds. Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and
Information. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York: International Center of
Photography, 2008; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008.
Morton, Christopher and Darren Newbury, eds. The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial
Strategies. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

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 PART SIX

EXPANDED FIELD
In 1993, art historian and curator Douglas Crimp, musing about the photographic activity of postmodernism
wrote:

The centrality of photography within the current range of practices makes it crucial to a theoretical
distinction between modernism and postmodernism. Not only has photography so thoroughly
saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also
clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained
within traditional defnitions of art. Photography will always exceed the institutions of art, will always
participate in nonart practices, will always threaten the insularity of art’s discourse.1

This section on the expanded feld focuses on photography’s excess, that is, its discursive promiscuity,
or ability to operate across academic felds, what Crimp explained as beyond the institutions of art.
Photography’s unwillingness to rest solidly within one feld has always caused some consternation
among scholars of photography. But more recently, as artists increasingly mix photography with other
media, such as flm, or borrow strategies from other disciplines, such as fashion or medicine, anxiety
about photography’s future viability, or possible end, has increased. The chapters in this unit address
such concerns. Yet they also, more pertinently, conceptualize “photography in the expanded feld” in
terms of the globalization of the image. This involves opening up photography’s history to new narratives
and different interpretative approaches more than it does looking at the medium’s ability to disrupt
already established discourses of art.
For example, Malick Sidibé’s (1936–2016) photographs of nightlife in Bamako, Mali, which he shot
from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, demonstrate how the medium of photography pushed against
the boundaries of rigidly defned categories (of gender roles, decorum, tradition, and even religion) in the
new global space of post-independence Mali. In graphic, dynamic, black-and-white pictures, Sidibé
captured the fashion, energy, and joy that characterized the rapidly changing West African nation. In
particular he honed in on the vernaculars of style: the brash suits, the purposefully clashing prints,
headdresses paired with cat-eye sunglasses, costumes of all sorts, face paint, and dancers kicking off
their shoes. The party, the club, the dance foor—these were Sidibé’s settings: the places where people
came to be seen and dressed the part. On Friday and Saturday nights, Sidibé roamed the city, party-

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hopping, shooting hundreds of frames of flm, welcome wherever he went as his presence seemingly
granted any party additional signifcance. Sidibé recalls, “People said if [I] was at a party, it gave it
prestige. I would let people know I’d arrived by letting off my fash . . . you could feel the temperature rise
right away.”2 Historical and sociological records of life in post-independence Bamako, Sidibé’s
photographs bring together discourses of postcoloniality, fashion, and sexuality and, at the same time,
reveal how the country’s youth embraced internationalism and a pan-Africanist ideology.3 His work
embodies the idea of photography’s globalization, and in the two chapters that follow, “Celebrity style,
the publicity shot, and the maverick language of fashion” and “Photography and the cinematic,” Sidibé’s
example continues to resonate.

Notes
1 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 134.
2 Malick Sidibé, quoted in Aaron Schuman, “Malick Sidibé: Chemises,” Aperture 193 (Winter 2008): 12.
3 Thanks to Sarah Richter for generously sharing her thoughts on Malick Sidibé.

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 11
CELEBRITY STYLE, THE PUBLICITY
SHOT, AND THE MAVERICK
LANGUAGE OF FASHION

The July 1945 cover of Vogue magazine (see Fig. 11.1) features a photograph taken by Erwin
Blumenfeld (1897–1969). The image portrays a woman wearing an elegant gray dress and gloves. She
dons a gold belt cinched around her waist and holds a matching gold handbag. Shadows of what seems
to be an odd-shaped mobile fll the bottom half of the picture. The image is glamorous, but the shadows
make it feel a little bit eerie, and gloomy. Gloomy in that we see the woman through a broken window,
and it feels, at least on our side of the glass, as if we might be standing outside in the rain, spying on a
woman inside.
This issue of Vogue, as the headline at the top of the cover states, includes a series of articles on
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the broken glass through which we glimpse the model
is not any broken window, but part of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23). Though a complex piece, The Large Glass can essentially be
described as an enigmatic dysfunctional machine that diagrams thwarted desire. Divided between
female and male halves, the bride resides above; the bachelors, below. The bachelors want to
consummate their feelings, but cannot reach the bride above, and so their desire remains unfulflled. On
the cover of Vogue, Blumenfeld’s model, positioned such that we see her only by looking up and through
The Large Glass, becomes unavoidably implicated in the tangle of frustrated impulses and unsatisfed
desires established by Duchamp’s work. But Blumenfeld’s gesture, his decision to feature Duchamp’s
work on Vogue’s cover is signifcant not only for how it positions his model, but also for how it brings
together the language of the avant-garde with that of commercial fashion—a relationship largely denied
or repressed in past histories of photography for fear of appearing too commercial. Though this fear and
the attendant snubbing of fashion by some historians of photography is now largely over (thanks to
important work by scholars such as Charlotte Cotton), a new tendency has emerged to conceptualize
“fashion” and “art” as adjacent felds, in relation to one another—even interdependent—but still as
distinct approaches.1 While a welcome development, this chapter strives to imagine wholly different
terms and alternative frames through which to examine the embeddedness of fashion’s maverick
language in photography’s history.
Japanese photographer Kimiko Yoshida’s (b. 1963) work is instructive in this regard, for it seamlessly
operates across multiple felds. In her series of large-scale color self-portraits, for example, Yoshida
photographs herself in costume, sometimes wearing clothes by Spanish designer Paco Rabanne,
sometimes wearing outfts that refer to indigenous cultures, or just as likely, to the canon of Western

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Figure 11.1 Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue cover, 1945. © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld/Condé Nast Publications.

European painting—as in Painting (Monna Lisa) Self Portrait (2010) (see Plate 18). Art critic Jean-Michel
Ribettes explains that, although the costumes and colors in Yoshida’s work varies, the underlying
conceptual protocol remains the same: “always the same subject (herself), the same point of view
(frontal), the same lighting (indirect), the same chromatic principle (the subject is painted the same colour
as the ground) and the same format (square). Thus, the same fgure is repeated, but never identically: the
more it is repeated, the more it differs. The more it is the same, the more it changes.”2 The work thus
imagines the self through a structure of difference in repetition. The self is not taken as a given, but
formed through the habit of saying “I,” through dressing, through color, through disguise. Yoshida
employs the standard signifers of high fashion only to unsettle them. This chapter, taking its cue from
Yoshida, thinks through the language of fashion by imagining how the normally stable terms associated
with the feld—here: celebrity, graphic design, and dress—might be undone, transformed, and expanded.
Throughout, the signifcance of collaboration—between the photographers, art directors, and designers;
or between photographers and their imaged subjects—will also become apparent.

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Celebrity
Critical theorist Guy Debord wrote his infuential book Society of the Spectacle in 1967, but the rise of
spectacle culture—defned either as pure media frenzy or life mediated through and subsumed by
images—begins much earlier in the twentieth century. This is particularly true in the United States, as
Hollywood was establishing itself as the dominant site of flm production in the West. The shift in Edward
Steichen’s (1879–1973) celebrity portraits from a focus on the dancers and actors of the New York
stage in the 1920s to the new emerging stars of Hollywood’s talking pictures in the 1930s refects this
development. Steichen’s 1930 portrait of Gary Cooper epitomizes the new look of the spectacularized
celebrity portrait: dapper and in crisp focus, Cooper emerges from a dark light to face the viewer with a
direct and captivating stare. Such images, often imaginative and glamorous, without doubt helped the
movie industry promote and construct a world of fantasy in which everyday Americans (and others
around the world who consumed Hollywood flms) might fnd escape, love, or pleasure—the photographs
functioning as a conduit for a viewer’s emotional experience.
Though the Hollywood of talking pictures was (and continues to be) particularly adept at dictating and
refning the terms of celebrity—and by extension the celebrity portrait—photographs similar in feel and
approach to Steichen’s earlier portrait work from the 1920s emerged in urban centers throughout the
world. In Arequipa, Peru, for instance, the work of Carlos and Miguel Vargas (1885–1979 and 1887–
1976, respectively), produced at their Estudio de Art Vargas Hermanos, chronicled fashionable high
society in the southern Andes with a chic bohemian stylishness. Many of their portraits, like Steichen’s,
were taken using dramatic artifcial lighting and featured single fgures in theatrical dress adopting
famboyant poses. This aspect of the Vargas Brothers’ practice, however, which had been supported by
the area’s prosperous bourgeoisie, largely ended after the global economic downturn and Great
Depression of the 1930s when the patrons who supported it disappeared.
In contrast to the Vargas Brothers’ independent studio work, the industrialized production of cultural
goods (such as the “star” or celebrity portrait) survived the Depression and went on to achieve
unprecedented hegemony during World War II and the postwar period. Today, the culture industry
continues to produce these kinds of celebrity portraits, though now both photographer and photographed
subject are hyper-aware of how such portrait images can or will be used in the media and public sphere.
Dan Winters (b. 1962), who has photographed an enormous number of celebrities in the United States,
including musicians and Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, Willie Nelson,
Bono, Tupac Shakur, Denzel Washington (and also political star Barak Obama), expresses a keen
awareness of his role in creating images for public consumption, and the effect that has on his practice.
Asked in an interview what it is like to photograph well-known subjects, Winters states, “I understand
that their image is often their commodity so I am very respectful of that when shooting and do everything
possible to capture portraits that are mutually agreeable.”3 Still, Winters’ images possess an identifable
style that is his own, independent of the pictured subject. His palette often consists of earthy, toned-
down greens and steely grays, and his pictures are always sharp, meticulously framed, and usually shot
with dramatic lighting. Winters prefers as well that his subjects disengage the camera in order to avert
the viewer’s gaze because he feels this creates an opportunity for voyeuristic looking—or as Winters
euphemistically claims, “not necessarily voyeuristic, but not feeling shy or reluctant to scrutinize the
subject’s physical self.”4 The freedom to inspect another person’s physical body or face is key as the
construction of many celebrity portraits turns on the photograph’s ability to transform the subject into an
object to be looked at and a commodity to be consumed.

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One image that certainly capitalizes on the viewer’s desire to scrutinize the subject is Winters’ image
from 2003 of rapper, producer, and entrepreneur Shawn Carter, or Jay-Z (see Fig. 11.2). Part of Jay-Z’s
popularity, and what makes his rise to mogul-dom so fascinating, is the way in which he combines the
two seemingly opposed positions of outlaw and businessman. Although American culture embraces
both of these roles, rarely are they so thoroughly embodied by one person.5 Winters’ photograph exploits
this double fascination by presenting Jay-Z as simultaneously powerful and (emotionally) vulnerable.
Positioned solidly in the center, wearing a simple black knit hat and dark overcoat, light bouncing off
his face, Jay-Z here seems to declare not only his having-made-it and never-going-back success, but
also the stress such success begets. The this-and-that-ness of the picture (the outlaw and the
businessman; the epitome of cool and the object of stress) is repeated by Jay-Z’s stare, which appears
both to engage the viewer and look away. The picture’s stillness—and its contemplative mood—holds
these multiple positions together and adds a sense of internal complexity and narrative texture to Jay-Z
and his image. It is the quality which makes the photograph a successful celebrity portrait capable of
circulating in a spectacularized media world. Despite any personal or professional ups and downs, the
fgure of Jay-Z remains intact, present for us to consume.
While Jay-Z’s image may remain unbroken in Winters’ picture, the camera does possess the ability
to problematize and reveal the cracks and fssures behind the slick, seamless veneer of a celebrity’s
façade. Richard Avedon’s (1923–2004) image of Marilyn Monroe from 1957 is often cited as an example
of this kind of unexpected exposure, a moment when celebrity performance disappears to reveal a

Figure 11.2 Dan Winters, Jay-Z, 2003. © Dan Winters. Courtesy of the artist.

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glimpse of an individual’s actual lived experience underneath. In the case of Avedon’s photograph,
Monroe’s firty public persona has been replaced with a quiet, disconcerting, almost expressionless
stare. Years after that photo-shoot, Avedon talked about making this image: “For hours she danced and
sang and firted,” he said; she “did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the
inevitable drop . . . she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone.”6
Almost two decades before Avedon’s Monroe, Lotte Jacobi (1896–1990) made portraits of celebrities
that similarly defed popular expectation. One of her most well known is of Albert Einstein taken at his
home in Princeton in 1938 while Jacobi was on assignment for Life (see Fig. 11.3). Jacobi shot the image
from the near middle distance, so the viewer sees not only Einstein’s famous white tussled hair, but also
the upper half of his body, which here, covered in a black leather jacket, seems to droop down in his
chair. In this, the picture is a far cry from the highly graphic, glamorous head shots of fgures from the
German theatre (such as those of Lotte Lenya or Kurt Weill) that Jacobi took when she was still living in
her native Germany during the Weimar years. The melancholia of Einstein’s slouch, moreover, is matched
by his distant stare: eyelids half shut, he appears caught in an unreachable world. At the bottom right of
the photograph, we see his hands, which mirror in tonal value and gesture his face and hair. He also
holds a pen in his right hand, and though he appears to be working on a document, he does not write.
The slouch, the stare into space, the interrupted writing or computation—these qualities, which are

Figure 11.3 Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein, 1938. © The University of New Hampshire.

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present in so many of Jacobi’s portraits, cause the image to look and feel suspended: Einstein, suspended
in a moment of thought, but also Einstein—like many of his colleagues who fed Nazi Germany—
suspended in time, in a state of exile between two historical moments.
Life commissioned this image but never published it. Jacobi reports, “[Life] said such a man should
not be photographed wearing a leather jacket. It is too casual.”7 But was it really the image’s casualness
that made it unft for Life’s pages? When Jacobi moved to the United States from Germany in 1935, she
quickly realized that New York, unlike her home city of Berlin, was a place of celebrities, a place where
renown had become a matter of recognition rather than reasoned respect. Art historian Benjamin
Buchloh explains:

If historical subjectivity within the bourgeois conception was measured—however problematically—

by an individual’s achievements in the public interest, by service to the common cause of social
and political progress and cultural and scientifc enlightenment, spectacular subjectivity in late-
capitalist consumer society is measured according to the degree of acquired visibility and public
exposure.8

Jacobi’s image of Einstein is notable, then, for how it captures the scientist’s unwillingness to become a
spectacularized subject, someone famous but without accomplishment, which suggests that it is the
picture’s melancholia, not its casual familiarity, that led Life’s editors to conclude that the image was unft
for the magazine’s pages. In other words, in Jacobi’s photograph, Einstein’s subjectivity is not easily
consumable—unlike Jay-Z, he is not represented in a condition of suffcient object-hood.
Jacobi’s confict with Life shows, among other things, how photography and mass media transformed
society’s expectation of what celebrity means, though really one could argue this transformation began
in the mid-nineteenth century almost immediately after photography’s introduction. In Western Europe
and the United States, along with the continued growth of capitalist economies and the rise of bourgeois
individualism, there was an explosion of new media technologies—photography included, but also
lithography and mechanized printing—that encouraged the dissemination of names and faces to a
growing audience of curious readers and attentive viewers hungry to learn about celebrated individuals.
Cultural historian Michael Graval observes that in France “diverse vehicles for fame included: abundant
journalistic discourse on renown (e.g., gossip columns, success stories, celebrity obituaries); memoirs,
biographies and other popular publications on the famous . . . [as well as] new legal and commercial
modalities, like ‘property,’ ‘brand’ names, and paid advertising, that promoted the fame of people and
products.”9 The concept of celebrity was expansive in the nineteenth century, and the division between
fame, notoriety, and renown was porous rather than fxed. Images like Winters’ of Jay-Z (a celebrity
portrait) and Jacobi’s of Einstein (an image of renown) would not, in short, have been perceived as
presenting mutually exclusive positions.
Augustus Washington’s (1820–75) images of Liberian government offcials from the late 1850s
provide one compelling example of how celebrity, fame, and renown overlapped in the nineteenth-
century imagination. Raised in the United States by his formerly enslaved father and stepmother,
Washington spent years in Hartford, Connecticut, operating a successful daguerreotype studio. But
in 1853 he gave up his studio and emigrated with his family to Liberia, the West African nation that
began as a settlement created by whites working with the American Colonization Society (ACS). The
ACS encouraged free and formerly enslaved black Americans to move to Liberia as an alternative
form of emancipation, promoting the idea that only through the separation of the races and removal

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of blacks to Africa could equality and prosperity be achieved. Washington notwithstanding, the
ACS was unpopular with African Americans and abolitionists, and it proved diffcult to convince
Americans to move. To allay fears that Liberia was an African wilderness, and combat representations
in the abolitionist press that framed a return to Africa as a second middle passage, the ACS
hired Washington to take pictures of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, that portrayed it as a blossoming
“city on a hill.”10
These pictures, which sought to make Liberia look like a little America on the shores of Africa,
constituted just one aspect of Washington’s effort to depict the young country as a place where African
Americans could become capable citizens of a black republic.11 Other images—particularly a series of
daguerreotypes taken between 1856 and 1860 of Liberian government offcials, including senators,
clerks, the vice president, and secretary and sergeant of arms of the legislature—function similarly.
Though instead of seeking to make the landscape look or feel “American” (read: “civilized” as opposed
to “wild”), these images mobilize a Euro-American fascination with representations of renown, including
images of civic prominence, to evidence African Americans’ (now Liberians’) ability to self-govern. They
also work to solidify a specifc view of Liberia’s state of development.12 For instance, Washington’s
picture of Alfred Francis Russell, a senator who eventually became Liberia’s tenth president, includes all
the trappings of the public portrait as it developed in the United States and Europe: dressed in formal
clothes—here in satin vest and tie—seated at a desk, holding “offcial”-looking papers, this three-quarter
view offers a distanced rather than emotional view of Russell in order to communicate his elite status and
generate support for the young nation of Liberia.
Complicating Washington’s effort to picture Liberia’s leadership was his own growing skepticism
about his adopted country’s ability to self-govern. In a series of strongly worded letters to the New York
Tribune, Washington describes Liberia’s poor living conditions, lack of industry, and oppressive treatment
of the local population. That his photographs of the country’s government offcials were made precisely
at a time when he himself doubted the viability of the Liberian experiment reveals the extent to which the
images rely on standard formulas for representation of renown, and on developing conceptions of the
publicity shot, to make real that which may not actually exist, or only barely does so. As scholar Mary J.
Dinius relatedly argues about Washington’s Liberian work, these images “were meant to strengthen
[the Liberian government] by means of the popular idea of daguerreian portraiture’s representational
power to make its subject ‘real’—not only to viewers . . . but also and especially to the subjects
themselves and even to the daguerreotypist himself, who harbored signifcant doubts about the
government’s effcacy.”13 With these government portraits, Washington strove to reveal to those pictured
their own notoriety and prominence or, put another way, he sought to show to the represented what
others see in their representations. In this, Washington’s portraits also uncover the intersection of
aesthetic and political representation and ask what justice or ethics in representations of celebrity might
look like.

Design and the editorial layout

The rise of fascism in Europe created one of the greatest transnational migrations of artists and
intellectuals in history. Artists, designers, and photographers, along with scientists, authors, and other
intellectuals, fed Europe during the 1930s for refuge, mostly in North America, though a signifcant
number of émigrés also settled in South America and South Africa. Russian-born, French-educated

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Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971) came to the United States in 1930—shortly before the threat of fascism
led so many others to fee—to head a department of design advertising at the Pennsylvania Museum
School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) in Philadelphia. Brodovitch’s gig in Philadelphia
only lasted a few years, as he moved to New York in 1934 to become the art director at Harper’s Bazaar.
During his time at Harper’s, Brodovitch helped revolutionize magazine design, in part by collaborating
with many of the photographers who had fed fascist Europe, which had the double effect of exposing
American students to European art and design. Brodovitch remains a revered fgure in the histories of
design and photography, though the generative and symbiotic relationship he nurtured between graphic
design, fashion magazines, and photography is still often overlooked. Yet this is a critical history to tell for
when these various discourses are brought together, the objects and images that emerge from their
convergence—including magazine covers, tear sheets, editorial layouts, and so on—can be understood
more clearly as signifcant cultural products that move through society with the ability to communicate
on a mass scale.

FOCUS BOX 11
Owning beauty
Stephanie Baptist

I remember the frst time I saw the work of J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere. The image that lay
before me was a black-and-white studio portrait of an unknown Yoruba woman,
photographed at close range and from behind. Titled Onile Gogoro/Akaba, (1975),
Ojeikere’s precise lighting highlighted the composition of this subject: a sculptural
tower of intricately woven braids (see Fig. 11.4). Further research revealed the
extensive legacy of this Nigerian photographer: the image was one of more than 1,000
unique portraits from his Hairstyles series, taken shortly after Nigeria gained its
independence from Britain in 1960. From 1968 onwards, Ojeikere began documenting a
hairstyle called Onile-Gogoro, which translates from Yoruba to mean “skyscraper and/
or stand tall.” Each unique sculptural expression would refer to a particular component
of Nigerian life, ranging from its diverse ethnic groups to the ever-growing shapes of
the Lagos skyline. For example, one image titled Untitled (Modern Suku) (1975) shows
the graceful curve of a woman’s neck and hair “cornrowed.” The hair is tightly braided
to the scalp with an underhand technique of continuous rows, forming a shape
mimicking that of a cylindrical turret or cone-shaped dome. Ojeikere’s distinct oeuvre
encapsulates the endless possibility of hair as subject. Moreover, using photography,
pliable lighting, and stark white or black backdrops, Ojeikere formally stages the
anthropomorphic and architectural aspects of such coiffure. His full archive of pristine
black-and-white prints includes a range of social, cultural, and environmental images of
his country’s traditions and daily life. His life’s work embodies the region’s varied
cultural and social identities, as well as the independence of a postcolonial Nigeria
from the 1960s up until his death in 2014.

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Figure 11.4 J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, Onile Gogoro Or Akaba, 1975. © J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere. Courtesy of
Amaize Ojeikere.

For example, through his photographs, one can see the evolution of hairstyles in
relation to Nigerian status in society. Many royal families often had ownership of
particular hairstyles. This fact is highlighted by Ojeikere in Shangalti (1971), which
portrays a female subject in a profle position against a stark white background. We can
see two tribal marks on her right cheek; her gaze looks softly towards the ground. Her
hair is micro-braided close to her scalp three-quarters of the way down, while the rest
of her hair delicately frames her face. Hair, as Charlotte Lokke-Madsen writes, is often
seen as the “crown of the female beauty and represents everything from emotion, age,
identity, political or cultural power, marital status, and work position.”1 For Ojeikere,
hairstyles were evanescent works of art and a way to immortalize a society he felt was
rapidly changing. In interviews, Ojeikere has described how “hairstyles are an art form:
but all these hairstyles are ephemeral. I want my photographs to be noteworthy traces
of them. I always wanted to record moments of beauty, moments of knowledge.”2

1
Charlotte Løkke-Madsen, “Sculptures for a Day,” in Artists in Society (Jutland: Trapholt Museum, 2016), 159.
2
J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, quoted in Brian Wallis, ed., The Order of Things: Photography from the Walther Collection (Göttingen: Steidl,
2015), 66–7.

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Artist and photography historian Deborah Willis has spent decades documenting
and producing publications on the black body, black imagery, and visual
representation. For Willis, “the notion of beauty is constructed and or embodied.
Photography interests the poetics of a desired and assumed state of mind created by
both the photographer and the subject within the frame, and refects societal issues of
the time.”3 This holds true for Ojeikere, who believed it was important to subjectively
refect the intersectionality of his home country through the topical documentation of
diverse hairstyles, gele headdresses, wedding ceremonies, and traditions, to an
evolving environmental landscape. Art historian and curator Bisi Silva describes how a
large portion of Ojeikere’s work speaks to the sartorial and its relationship to the micro
and macro identities of Africans, despite the fact that Ojeikere did not focus on fashion
as an explicit category. The work of Ojeikere can be viewed as a corrective to what has
not been examined by many mainstream, dominant institutions. The celebration of
one’s own cultural experience, lends insight into the nuance of a society and provides a
global context, as dress is inevitably tied to culture as well as identity.
Art historian Richard Powell speaks about the democratizing ability of a photograph
in Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), which examines how people of
African descent have been perceived in society and the lasting effects of these
perceptions on portraiture. Powell argues that a signifcant segment of black portraiture
is hidden due to historical and societal racism, as well as the relationship between the
subject and the photographer, which often includes the conscious and unconscious
negotiations that invest black subjects with social capital. Powell and Willis both identify
this social capital as tied directly to black photographers and their willingness to turn the
lens on their own communities, and for said communities to be willing to engage and
participate. This powerful act is directly connected, in the words of Powell, to the
“subject’s sense of self—an awareness that through self-adornment, self-composure,
and self-imagining upsets the representational paradigm and creates something
pictorially exceptional.”4 Susan Sontag in On Photography (1977) describes the premise
of fashion photography as built on the belief that something can be more beautiful in a
photograph than in real life. Additionally, she asserts that fashion photography can serve
as a reaction against the conventionally beautiful, with photography expanding our ideas
around that which is aesthetically pleasing. When I look at a photograph that is visually
appealing or exceptional, I often ask myself what makes this photograph beautiful?
Subjectively, I seek out the cultural markers or cues within the image that either speak
directly to my own circumstances, lived experience or an aspirational view of life. Our
society has a complicated history of what has been deemed beautiful, which is
paramount when thinking about the role of fashion photography and its ability to

3
Deborah Willis, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 13.
4
Richard Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xv.

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democratize the term “beautiful.” Ojeikere’s vast archive of simple backgrounds,

subjects from his own circle of family and friends, all help to portray a unifed Nigeria
and “[t]hrough the power of photography, he creates possibilities for a sense of
belonging and strongly participates in the process of constituting meaning.”5
More recent contemporary artists like Lakin Ogunbanwo put the milliners of Nigeria
centerstage in his ongoing series of obscure portraits which explore identity and what it is
that shapes or defnes an individual within a larger cultural milieu. His works raises
questions such as Who are they? and How do they wish to be perceived? Ogunbanwo
has pared down the communicative aspect of the project to the power of the hat, which
speaks directly to masculine identity in Lagos. The series Are We Good Enough (2015–17)
focuses on the traditional dress of various ethnic groups in Nigeria: the Yoruba, the Ibo,
the Hausa-Fulani, and others. Ogunbanwo’s studio portraits present a collection of men
photographed from behind, wearing different hats of various colors, shapes, and patterns.
These images represent the younger generation of Nigerians creating sartorial hybrids of
Western and traditional style, thereby reinventing the visual codes through which they
publicly communicate aspects of themselves. One striking image is of a man wearing a
colossal red cap, which is of the Igbo tribe and represents “authority, tradition, and
culture; and it also represents the entire institution of leadership, authority, and power in
Igbo culture.”6 Ogunbanwo’s images help to create an expanded view of Ojeikere’s
Nigerian society, where tradition and the contemporary are presented side by side.
Similarly, Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj uses the language of African studio
photography and fashion photography to challenge the West’s stereotypes about North
African Arabic society. His best-known series, Kesh Angels (2010–14), is a juxtaposition
of Muslim and Western culture. Women are posed on motorcycles or in odalisque
poses wearing hijabs, niqabs, or bouches of Western brands, like Gucci, Louis Vuitton,
or Nike. Like Ojeikere, Hajjaj often photographs subjects from his own circle of friends.
He incorporates patterns, motifs, or Arab products specifc to the region of Morocco as
entry points. These graphically bold colors and regional markers help to highlight and
redefne a culture that has historically been defned by Hajajj as “mint tea and camels.”
While one photograph might be unable to encapsulate an entire phenomenon or
social construction, the development and exploration of themes by these African
photographers help us to feel that pictures and progress are not mutually exclusive.
Living in an overtly visual world, within which we consume information about culture
and society, the photograph has the ability to redefne paradigms of beauty, provide
possibilities for social equity, and solidify our place in the world.

5
Aura Seikkula and Bisi Silva, “Moments of Beauty: Art of J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere,” in ARS 11 (Helsinki: Kiasma Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2011), 11.
6
Immanuel Jannah, “Signifcance of the ‘Red Cap’ in Igbo Culture,” Obindigbo, March 17, 2017, http://obindigbo.com.
ng/2017/03/signifcance-red-cap-igbo-culture/.

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Nontsikelelo Mutiti (b. 1982) is a contemporary artist/designer whose multimedia practice

consciously weaves together photography and design with the aim of engaging a broad audience.
Working in the early 2000s as a painter in Harare, Zimbabwe, Mutiti recalls feeling frustrated at the
closed-off local art scene that mostly catered to expat-owned galleries. As she drove along the roadways
and looked at billboards, she thought to herself, “I want my work to be up there . . . Why can’t I be
communicating with people in that space?”14 Eventually Mutiti enrolled in Yale University’s graphic design
MFA program and began producing print material, artist books, and posters, as well as videos, web
projects, and installations. Among the objects she made shortly after graduating from Yale is an 8.5 x
11-inch spiral-bound booklet titled African Hair Braiding Salon Reader (2014). The book’s pages include
photographs of combs and clips, video stills from black American flms (such as House Party and Poetic
Justice that informed Mutiti’s idea of black aesthetics growing up in Zimbabwe), photocopies of academic
essays, drawings of braiding made by Mutiti, and cellphone photographs of salons that the artist took
while walking past such spaces when she lived in Harlem in New York City. In addition, the book’s orange
glow—all of the pages are bright orange—is meant to evoke the feeling of being in a salon for hours,
where color, music, and conversation fll the air.15
African hair braiding functions in the African Hair Braiding Salon Reader as both a technology and a
marker of black African diasporic identity. As a technology, braiding is presented as an ancient system of
pattern and repetition. In her essay, “Hair Braiding is Technology,” which is included in the booklet, artist
and activist Nettrice Gaskins explains this in mathematical terms: “[T]he braiding of hair shows the formal
possibilities of geometric variation. Hair braiding demonstrates an inclination for interrupting the expected
line . . . it is not the braid itself but the act of interweaving shapes that form the intricate patterns that unify
the design.”16 But the African Hair Braiding Salon Reader also positions African hair braiding as a
diasporic historical and cultural tradition that has spread to salons all over the world, as evidenced in part
by Mutiti’s cellphone photographs of such sites in Harlem. The presence of flm stills from American
movies further signals braiding’s globalization and how traditional braiding styles mix with trends in
African American culture. Intimately connected to black women’s identity across vast geographic spaces,
braiding is presented here as at once sited in an exact time and place and dislocated from any particular
locale. Braiding operates as a space of exploration, in part geographic and in part personal or imagined.
When the African Hair Braiding Salon Reader was released, Mutiti turned the event into a performance,
where visitors could pick and collate their own pages and then bind them together with spiral coils—an
act the artist likens to the process of braiding itself. Braiding—as a concept, as an action, and as a
design theory—thus becomes in the pages of Mutiti’s book a communication tool and programming
language of which the photographs, sampled from American movies or taken on a cellphone, are just
one component.
K8 Hardy (b. 1977), co-founder with several others of the queer feminist art collective LTTR, is
another artist whose work explores how photography, in conversation with book and magazine design,
can reach broad audiences while addressing issues of identity formation.17 In her zine FashionFashion
(2002–6), Hardy developed a DIY fashion aesthetic rooted in gender play and multiplicity rather than
the heteronormative performance of traditional glamor spreads.18 Zines might be described as non-
commercial, self-published pamphlets, booklets, or journals that exist outside mainstream publishing
channels and which are typically put together with tools like tape, sharpies, and xerox machines, though
more recently, programs such as illustrator and Photoshop might also be used. In FashionFashion,
Hardy’s deployment of these kinds of low-tech tools, in conjunction with images that have a self-
consciously low production value, undermine—as is typical of many zines—notions of quality and

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generate a feeling of insurgent spontaneity. Hardy, and sometimes a friend or her older sister Hallie,
appear in FashionFashion in various provocative (and at times ridiculous) poses that simultaneously
mimic and mock those found in mainstream fashion magazines. To style her subjects, Hardy rummages
through thrift shops and then pieces together disparate items into outfts for her models. This is not an
ironic process. For Hardy, clothes come to defne and shape identities; they are not seen as consumer
products for sale, or tools for marketing, or even seductive costumes for imaginative play. Rather, Hardy
seeks to take charge of styling, posing, and photographing her models in a manner that encourages
experimentation and rejects commercialism and America’s conformity-driven culture.
In one two-page spread from FashionFashion (see Fig. 11.5), a woman wears bright yellow stilettoes,
blue shorts, and a series of multicolored belts fastened across her torso in a manner that mixes a frisky
bondage aesthetic with colorful eclecticism—the collaged clothes mirroring the collaged layout. One
version of the spread includes three photographs of a fgure; in two of them she is posed upside-down
in a handstand with her legs splayed against the wall. In the image on the left page, the woman’s mouth
is open, perhaps in a playful expression of surprise. The only other element depicted is a radiator, which
painted sky blue, matches the model’s shorts. But the radiator also appears vaguely pathetic, and as an
additional character, counters the silliness of the model’s clothes and pose. On the right page, in the
image farthest to the right, the same model, dressed in the same loopy outft, sits awkwardly and
suggestively on a tripod. The gesture, in both stressing and suppressing the camera’s presence
combines reticence with extreme extroversion. The fgure’s self-presentation feels oddly (and authentically)
multiple, dissonant, and anti-consumerist. Clearly Hardy rejects constructed categories of beauty, but

Figure 11.5 K8 Hardy, FashionFashion 4, 2006. © K8 Hardy. Courtesy of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York.

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more than this, and in a manner reminiscent of Kimiko Yoshida, her FashionFashion spreads disrupt the
idea that fashion-related signifers (clothes, poses, models, “looks”) are necessarily stable communicators
of conventional meaning. In this, her work challenges the limits of fashion and our own assumptions
about gender politics.
In a review of one of K8 Hardy’s exhibitions for the New York Times, author Guy Trebay asserts, as if
surprised by his own realization, “Maybe fashion is a stealth tool of cultural critique.”19 Looking at Hardy’s
work, this sentiment certainly rings true. But Hardy, and others such as Nontsikelelo Mutiti, are not alone in
this reassessment. Neither are they the frst to combine tools from fashion and graphic design in order to
introduce a critique—about gender, race, economics, and community—into an area of cultural production—
fashion—that has too often been perceived as trite. Two earlier examples appeared in London in 1980,
when the independent journals i-D, started by former British Vogue art director Terry Jones, and The Face,
created by former NME (New Music Express) editor Nick Logan, were launched. Both magazines focused
on youth culture, emphasized creative self-expression, and embraced a post-punk DIY aesthetic. Both
journals also experimented with graphic elements in a manner that announced their opposition to fashion’s
perceived excess. Designer Neville Brody defned the look of The Face with experimental graphics and
what Phil Bicker, The Face’s former art director, calls a “classical approach to cool.”20 i-D, especially in its
frst years—and despite the fact that Jones came from Vogue—was less slick and more irreverent.
Among i-D’s frst features was a series called “Straight Up,” which consisted of full-length portraits of
individuals seen on the street and photographed standing against blank urban walls. Many times these
images portrayed punks hanging out around London’s King Road. Steven Johnston was among the frst
photographers to create a spread for “Straight Up,” including for the journal’s inaugural issue in 1980
(see Fig. 11.6). The collaged-together two-page spread includes text written in four different type faces
and pasted to the page as if assembled on a dining room table. The word “Wild!” written half in pink and
half in black runs across the center, connecting the two sides of the spread. The text’s black letters
replicate the magazine’s logo—i-D—suggesting in this context that the “straight up” functions like a kind

Figure 11.6 Steven Johnston, “Straight Up,” i-D magazine, 1980. Courtesy of i-D, London.

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of alternative ID card. The fgure on the left is identifed as “Colin,” and his style as “Mode.” We also learn
that he made his own pants and the places he bought his other clothes, and for how much. On the right,
the caption simply reads “anonymous girl with spiky hairdo.” Her posture appears less confdent than
Colin’s, but she still makes herself available to the camera, forcing viewers to confront her attitude as they
inspect her style. The pink lines of the “W” and the “L” in the word “WiLD,” along with the sharp edge of
the exclamation all echo the “straight-up” lines of her spiky hair.
The language of “straight up,” however, applies not only to the magazine’s content and DIY attitude,
as in the reader is getting the “straight up” about the style and feel of Britain’s youth culture, but also to
the photographic approach. The images in i-D’s “straight up” are unembellished, direct, and shot in black
and white; they appear, in some ways, closer to documentary than fashion photography. In fact, it could
be argued that the “straight up” editorial feature mimicks the conventions and form of documentary
photography, a point made in a slightly different context by critic Alistair O’Neill. O’Neill explains that in
the late 1940s and 1950s, Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman, often referred to documentary
photographer Walker Evans’s image Citizen in Downtown Havana (1933) as an example of the type of
picture he was after in Vogue, saying “while not a fashion photograph, I believe this is a statement
essentially about style.”21
Magazines like i-D and The Face emerged in part as alternatives to Britain’s increasing conservatism
under Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s—and to the excesses of the mainstream fashion
world that accompanied that conservatism. In New York in the 1960s, a number of design and
photography-oriented journals also presented themselves as part of an alternative press, though in this
context it was in loose alignment with a developing counterculture focused on Civil Rights and free
speech. Billed as a magazine “entirely devoted to Love and Sex,” one such journal, called Eros, was
launched in 1962 by radical publisher Ralph Ginzburg and art director Herb Lubalin. The magazine’s
transgressive subject matter led to its early demise, when Ginzburg was jailed for sending erotic material
through the mail, and as a result only four issues were ever published.22 The issues that do exist, however,
show how photographers and graphic designers began to think of the magazine format as a space that
allowed for experimentation with scale, white space, and visual fow. For example, Eros’s third issue
featured a series of photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken by Bert Stern just six weeks before her death
in August 1962. Originally intended as fashion reportage for Vogue, photographs from this shoot were
used on the journal’s front cover and in an editorial spread. Unlike Avedon’s 1957 image, these pictures
feature a nude Monroe seducing the camera: she plays with her hair, covers her face, and suggestively
bites a necklace of beads. The spread uses unedited strips of flm, some of which show the original
rejection crosses made by Monroe herself with a transparent yellow marker, including one that is scaled
up to fll an entire page.23
The effect of scaling up a photograph with Monroe’s transparent “X” scratched across her face is
visually and emotionally startling; it also poignantly demonstrates the collaborative nature of fashion
work. And in this way, projects like the African Hair Braiding Salon Reader, FashionFashion, i-D, and
Eros, whether done for a client or as self-generated work, all challenge the idea of a traditional “authorial
voice” because none have a lone creator. By contrast, the fashion spread in these books, journals and
magazines exists as a cultural product created by multiple imaginations, including those of photographers,
editors, stylists, and designers. Sometimes such work is mediated by the fashion industry—as was the
case with Alexey Brodovitch during his years at Harper’s Bazaar in the early twentieth century or in the
case of Blumenfeld’s cover discussed at the beginning of this chapter—but other times fashion spreads
offer a distinct cultural critique from an oppositional position and with an activist’s agenda.

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The politics and power of dress

The works of contemporary artists like Nontsikelelo Mutiti and K8 Hardy, or a more historically situated
one like Alexey Brodovitch, reveal how fashion editorials in both commercial and self-published journals
can challenge mainstream culture. Though these artists also play with dress, for all them, it is the
photographic image that, embedded in a cultural object like a magazine, remains open for creative
refection, analysis, and reworking. Anti-capitalist fashion blogger Hoda Katebi (b. 1995) is similarly
interested in how fashion can create moments of productive cultural friction, though she focuses primarily
on dress and secondarily on its representation in photographs. Fashion, Katebi argues, not only
engenders self-expression (including in societies deemed repressive by the West), but can also facilitate
understanding between cultures that may at frst view themselves as oppositional. More than anything,
however, Katebi views fashion and clothes as multi-layered “politically dense forms of art” that frame
bodies in public space.24
Katebi’s Chicago-based blog, JooJoo Azad, as well as her book, Tehran Streetstyle (2016), use
photographic images to demonstrate how individuals can and have taken charge of that framing, and in
a variety of geopolitical contexts. The photographs posted to JooJoo Azad, characterized by Katebi as
an “unapologetic fashion blog written by a Muslim-Iranian,” are a mix: some are taken by Katebi, some
are of Katebi (see Fig. 11.7), and still others are sampled from online clothing and political websites. The
photographs in Tehran Streetstyle, on the other hand, are all taken by Katebi and picture fashionable
women and men in Tehran, Iran’s political and fashion capital. Both for the blog and in her book, Katebi
gravitates toward images that play with the colors, shapes, and patterns found in Islamic art and
architecture in a manner not totally unrelated to the work of Yto Barrada, discussed in Chapter 4. For
Katebi, however, the reference is both an assertion of her Iranian identity and part of her refusal to
privilege Western style. Even as Katebi embraces elements of Western consumer culture, for example,
she rejects the assertion that a hijab represents repression and that somehow the West’s aestheticization
of women’s bodies (including the consumption of products like hair dye, lipstick, and nail polish) signals
liberation.25 Indeed, in Katebi’s images, the hijab is depicted as an object in motion—whether blowing in
the wind, loosely framing her face, or draping her shoulders, the fabric’s color, pattern, and movement
seems simultaneously to indicate intimacy, fux, and freedom more than anything else. In this her work is
defant, as she refuses to cover herself in clothes chosen simply for their ability to make her body
intelligible to Western eyes.
Sites like Katebi’s, and others hosted by artists and cultural critics such as Ruth Ossai (b. 1990) in
Nigeria or Brian Otieno (b. 1993) in Kenya, perform the important task of helping to free imaginations
from the specter of neoliberal conquest. The sometimes awkward engagement between high fashion
and rural life, as depicted in Ossai’s work, or between high fashion and extreme poverty, as depicted in
Otieno’s images from Kibera—a vast slum in Nairobi—reveals how localities embrace, play with, and
ultimately transform the products of global capital. This kind of co-production of culture is often unstable
and risks being coopted by multinational corporations and international fashion brands as evidence of
their progressive agenda and global sensitivity. Nevertheless, when the BBC publishes a headline about
one of Otieno’s models, “Kenyan fashionista dares to stand out in Kibera Slum,” it is diffcult not to see
how such practice can be genuinely liberating.26
Analogously, Philip Kwame Apagya (b. 1958) creates photographs of fashionable Ghanians that
resist both Western tropes of self-presentation as well as the West’s attempt to claim ownership over
what it means to be modern. Apagya frst learned photography in his father’s studio (his father was a

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 CELEBRITY STYLE, THE PUBLICITY SHOT, AND THE MAVERICK LANGUAGE OF FASHION 275

Figure 11.7 Kevin Serna, Hoda Ketabi, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

crime-scene photographer), went on to study photojournalism at the Ghana Institute of Journalism in

Accra, and then in 1982 opened his own studio in the Ghanaian port-city of Shama. Since opening the
studio, Apagya has become known for creating photographs of subjects in front of commissioned
backgrounds painted specifcally to reveal the dreams, aspirations, and humor of his clients. These
backdrops might depict big public spaces like Accra International Airport in Ghana or illustrate interiors
laden with consumer goods such as TVs, stereos, modern kitchens, and well-stocked refrigerators.
Regardless of the imagined setting, clients pose and interact with these painted scenes as if the spaces
were real—as if they were actually boarding a plane, turning on a television, or grabbing a product out of
a refrigerator. In an essay about photography in southern Ghana, visual anthropologist Tobias Wendl’s
explanation of the “truth value” of studio portraiture in that region of the world provides further context:
“[The] idea of exploring and documenting social reality by photographic means seems never to have

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been a major concern in Ghana. Ghanaian photographers were rather interested in using the photographic
medium for creating and imposing new realities.” “Truth,” Wendl notes, “is something that is negotiated
and agreed on by the community.”27
Apagya’s studio thus functions as a kind of dream chamber in which individuals explore, through the
staging of photographs, new identities and fantastical visions of themselves.28 Apagya’s Come on Board
(2000) is an example of this kind of empowered representation (see Fig. 11.8). In the image, a young
woman, wearing an outft made from Ghanaian cloth, stands in front of a painted backdrop of an airplane
at Accra International Airport, as if getting ready to board the plane. She smiles at the viewer, and seems
almost to laugh at her own gesture, at her own fantasy of travel and the delicate playful way she touches
the painted handrail. Europeans introduced the painted backdrop in Ghanaian photographic portrait
studios in the early twentieth century. Those backdrops, however, tended to depict landscapes, clouds,
roman columns, and other tropes appropriated from European portrait painting typically commissioned
by wealthy patrons. In the 1940s, these colonially inherited representations lost cultural acceptance and
new backdrops, depicting spaces such as airports, that is, spaces of modernity, began to appear. As the

Figure 11.8 Philip Kwame Apagya, Come on Board, 2000. Courtesy of CAAC—The Pigozzi Collection.

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woman in Come on Board embarks on the plane, her fashion choices, her hairstyle, her look at us—all
reveal her ability to travel between here and there, between home and overseas. At the airport, she exists
in multiple spaces at once: she is local and global, an everyday citizen of Ghana and a modern
cosmopolitan citizen of the world.
In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman Arabs, particularly those in the developing middle class, were
also keen to establish themselves as “modern” citizens. And, as with Apagya’s clients, they used
photography to help them do so. One photographer particularly adept at creating images of the ideal
modern subject was Jurgi “George” Saboungi (1840–1910) whose practice involved photographing
an emerging Arab bourgeoisie, including some of the leading intellectual fgures of the nahdah. Nahdah
is Arabic for Renaissance and refers to a period in the Arab world from the mid-nineteenth century until
World War I that saw a revitalization of classical Arabic literature and culture in conjunction with a growing
attention to Western ideas and texts. Saboungi, who was born in Mardin (now part of Turkey), emigrated
to Lebanon in the 1850s and eventually opened one of the frst Arab owned and operated photography
studios in the region. This fact is signifcant for it positions Saboungi as the producer and possessor of
photographic knowledge, not its colonial recipient. Moreover, as historian Stephen Sheehi explains, in
mastering photographic knowledge, local photographers such as Saboungi performed their modernity.
Their mastery, Sheehi asserts, was itself “a social and political act, whereby the new effendiyah [middle
class] owned the cultural capital necessary for the reform of Ottoman Arab societies.”29
How Saboungi’s clients dressed was also key to the staging and performance of a modern Arab
subject, though there was substantive debate around this question. The nahdah was a product of
combined native developments and foreign infuence, and correspondingly, the debate centered on
whether to adopt European-style clothes and accessories or reform-oriented Arabic fashion trends such
as the fez (hat) and sirwal pants. Saboungi’s portraits, which depict subjects both in native and Western
attire, thus reveal not only the coexistence of these different approaches to self-fashioning, but also how
fashion choice was itself part of the visual semiotics of nahdah ideology. Saboungi’s images often show
anonymous clients in a full-length view wearing native attire—a fez, sirwal pants, and a waistcoat—as if
the image is designed at least in part to display his reformist fashion choices. But other portraits by
Saboungi picture subjects wearing Western dress, including suit jackets, vests, and ties. Whether
donning native or Western garb, Saboungi tends to picture his subjects holding the same gesture: one
arm rests on the back of a parlor chair while the other sits atop a thin walking cane. The difference within
this repetition suggests that a multitude of forms and sartorial codes coexist in Saboungi’s work, a
multitude that speaks to the dynamism of his sitters’ identities and that embodies the nahdah’s social
formations and cultural desires.
In 2004, Vogue editor Anna Wintour wrote, “I’ve long believed that the content of fashion does not
materialize spontaneously but in ways both mysterious and uncanny, emerges from the fabric of the
times.”30 How that fashion is pictured and framed, whether glamorous, ugly, humble, or spectacular,
similarly reveals the social history of its time.

Summary
• In the West, spectacle culture and celebrity portraiture developed hand in hand.
• Graphic design and magazine layout are under-analyzed yet critical elements of fashion
photography; they contribute to its mass distribution and provide opportunities for disruption.

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• In the 1980s, a number of fashion photographers, stylists, and designers rejected the excessive
glamor promoted by mainstream fashion, and developed an alternative fashion press.
• Fashion is inherently political, and fashion editorials in both commercial and self-published
journals can have (in contrast to popular opinion) an antagonistic relationship with mainstream
culture.

Discussion points
• What is the difference between “celebrity” and “renown”? How does that distinction manifest
itself in photographic portraits of famous people?
• How would you characterize the difference between a zine and a commercial magazine? Who is
the audience for each?
• How would you characterize the difference between a disguise and haute-couture?
• How does dress, self-fashioning, and self-imaging relate to identify formation?

Additional case studies

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou (b. 1965)
Clarence Sinclair Bull (1896–1979)
Corrine Day (1965–2010)
Hassan Hajjaj (b. 1961)
Ruth Harriet Louise (1903–40)
Hein-Kuhn Oh (b. 1963)
Ruth Ossai (b. 1991)
Lisa Reihana (b. 1964)
Collier Schorr (b. 1963)
Manit Sriwanichpoom (b. 1961)
Yelena Yemchuk (b. 1970)

Notes
1 Charlotte Cotton has written a number of signifcant articles and books on fashion photography, including
Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs (London: V&A Publications, 2000); and
Fashion Image Revolution (Munich: Prestel, 2018).
2 Cited in Brent Taalur Ramsey, “Kimiko Yoshida Reincarnates in YoshidaRorschach,” Paste Magazine (February
2017), https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/02/japanese-photographer-kimiko-yoshida-has.html.
3 Dan Winters interview with Rhaggart, posted May 27, 2016 on Photo Folio News, http://news.photofolio.io/
dan-winters-interview/.
4 Dan Winters interviewed by Zack Seckler, edited by Greg Faherty, The FStop, September 1, 2010, http://www.
thefstopmag.com/?p=1049.

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5 Shawn Cater, or Jay-Z, National Portrait Gallery, https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2010.40.

6 “MoMA Learning: Richard Avedon and Marilyn Monroe,” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/
richard-avedon-marilyn-monroe-actress-new-york-may-6-1957. Originally quoted in Maria Morris Hambourg,
Mia Fineman, and Richard Avedon, Portraits: Richard Avedon (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2002).
7 Gaylen Moore, “Lotte Jacobi: Born with A Photographer’s Eye,” New York Times, September 16, 1979: SM11.
8 Benjamin Buchloh, “Residual resemblance: three notes on the ends of portraiture,” in Melissa E. Feldman (ed.),
Face-Off, The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Fine Art, 1994), 62.
9 Michael Graval, “‘A Dream of Stone’: Fame, Vision, and the Monument in Nineteenth-Century French Literary
Culture,” College Literature 30, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 85–6.
10 Dalila Scruggs, “‘Photographs to Answer Our Purposes’: Representations of the Liberian Landscape in
Colonization Print Culture,” in Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (eds.), Early African American
Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 203–30.
11 Scruggs, “Photographs to Answer Our Purposes,” 208.
12 Marey J. Dinius, “‘My daguerreotype shall be a true one’: Augustus Washington and the Liberian Colonization
Movement,” in The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 154–91.
13 Dinius, “My daguerreotype shall be a true one,” 179–80.
14 Madeleine Morley, “Nontsikelelo Mutiti’s Book Designs Explore Black African Identity, the Aesthetics of Hair
Braiding, and Brooklyn Police Brutality,” AIGA Eye on Design (July 2017): 10, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/
nontsikelelo-mutitis-book-designs-explore-black-african-identity-the-aesthetics-of-hair-braiding-and-harlem-
police-brutality/.
15 Morley, “Nontsikelelo Mutiti’s Book Designs Explore Black African Identity.”
16 Nettrice Gaskins, “Hair Braiding is Technology.” Written in parallel with Nontsikelelo Mutiti, “Ruka (To Braid/to
knit/to weave),” August 2014, https://www.recessart.org/nettrice-gaskins-critical-writing/.
17 LTTR stands for anything from “Lesbians to the Rescue” to “Lacan Teaches to Repeat.”
18 In 2014 Hardy remade parts of the zine in over-scaled editions, so some of the images have a life after and
outside of FashionFashion.
19 Guy Trebay, “Playing Dress Up for Keeps, New York Times, September 30, 2009.
20 Phil Bicker, “i-D, Jill and The Face: Fashion’s Maverick Magazines,” Aperture 216, “Fashion” (Fall 2014): 107.
Bicker was The Face’s art director from 1987 to 1991.
21 Alistar O’Neill, “Uneasy Bedfellows,” Aperture 216, “Fashion” (Fall 2014): 55.
22 In fact, Eros’s content was deemed so transgressive that Ginzburg was charged and found guilty of distributing
obscene material through the mail, and in 1972, after a series of appeals, he served eight months in federal
prison.
23 See Adrian Shaughnessy, Herb Lubalin: American Graphic Designer 1918–81 (London: Unit Editions, 2012).
24 Hoda Katebi, “On the Political Value of Fashion,” JooJoo Azad, December 26, 2016, http://www.joojooazad.
com/2016/12/on-political-value-of-fashion.html.
25 Ellen McLarney, “The Burqa in Vogue: Fashioning Afghanistan,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 5, no.
1 (Winter 2009): 2–3.
26 “Kenyan fashionista dares to stand out in Kibera Slum,” BBC, June 16, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/
world-africa-40012435.
27 Tobias Wendl, “Entangled Traditions: Photography and the History of Media in Southern Ghana,” RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (Spring 2001): 98.
28 Wendl, “Entangled Traditions,” 88.

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29 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography 1860–1910 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016), 32–3.
30 Anna Wintour, “Signs of the Times,” Vogue 194, no. 7 (July 2004): 30.

Selected further reading

Bolton, Richard. “In the American East: Richard Avedon Incorporated.” In Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of
Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, 261–82. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Brown, Elspeth H. Work! A Queer History of Modeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Cotton, Charlotte. Fashion Image Revolution. Munich: Prestel, 2018.
Crawforth, Hannah. “Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine.” American Periodicals 14, no. 2 (2004): 212–46.
Pham, Minh-Ha T. “Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body.”
Camera Obscura 1, no. 76 (2011): 1–37.
Shinkle, Eugenia, ed. Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
Sundell, Margaret. “From Fine Art to Fashion: Man Ray’s Ambivalent Avant-Garde.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, 2009.

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 12
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE
CINEMATIC

A little more than a decade after the October Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union,
flm director Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) produced the experimental silent flm, Man with a Movie
Camera (1929). The flm begins with a cameraman emerging from the distance, carrying a camera
over his shoulder. As he walks toward the viewer, he appears to stop on top of another larger camera
in order to adjust his own. He makes some modifcations, and then quickly turns around and walks
back out of the frame, at which point the flm begins its kaleidoscopic tour of Soviet urban life in
the 1920s. In the swirl of images that follows, Vertov presents Soviet citizens at work and at play,
moving through streets, riding motorcycles, and working in factories. He shows close-ups of faces,
park benches, and machines in motion. There too are moments when the screen splits and two different
shots of the same object or space, like a building or a street, are projected together at tilted and
odd angles, creating for the spectator a viewing experience that both documents and distorts reality
(see Fig. 12.1). Throughout the flm, Vertov also regularly returns to images of the cameraman flming,
and as others have pointed out, if the flm could be described as having characters at all, they would
be the idea of modern life in the Soviet Union, the cameraman of the title, and the presence or
concept of flm editing.1 Man with a Movie Camera is thus a flm about flmmaking, and how the camera’s
lens—what Vertov calls the objective cinematic eye—can help build the Soviet Union’s new proletarian
society.
Part of what continues to interest scholars about this flm is the way it straddles the divide
between two opposing camps in early- and mid-twentieth-century cinema theory: on one side sit the
realists, who advocate for a pure recording of reality, an “as it is”—to use Vertov’s words—approach to
documenting the world; on the other side reside the anti-realists, the more aesthetically oriented
modernist flmmakers who believe that the ability to manipulate reality is flm’s most signifcant quality.2
Vertov sought to balance these two positions by creatively guiding the public’s perception of fact, and,
as critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1927 in the frst issue of the Soviet avant-garde journal Novyi lef,
showing them how “to see things as they have not been described” before.3 Some of Vertov’s Soviet
contemporaries were thus pleased with his results, while others were not. Regardless, Man with a Movie
Camera does successfully break down cinematic perception. He uses a number of methods to achieve
this, but especially effective is the way in which he plays with, and at times inverts, still and moving
images. A viewer might see, for instance, a still or frozen shot in one scene, followed by the animation of
that exact frozen frame(s) in the next. The impression of motion is thereby exposed, in the words of flm
historian Malcolm Turvey, “to be a subjective appearance caused in part by the perceptual limitations of
the human eye.”4

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Figure 12.1 Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 2009. Album/Almay Stock Photo.

Well before Vertov, however—really since the advent of the cinema in the later part of the nineteenth
century—still and moving images have shared an intimate and, at times, fraught relationship. This chapter
addresses that history. As it does so, it also situates the photographic object in an expanded feld of
artistic production, one that freely borrows strategies and methods from other felds and media. But—
and this is crucial—the idea of photography’s expanded feld is not conceived here exclusively, or even
primarily, in the terms posed by a scholar such as George Baker, whose important 2005 essay,
“Photography’s Expanded Field,” analyzes how flm and cinema have cast the medium of photography
in crisis by displacing it—or at the very least, transforming it in radical ways. Rather, here, the “expanded
feld” is conceived as an extended global space, open to new narratives and interpretative approaches
completely outside the terms of debate regarding medium specifcity. Of course, one need only consider
the fact that this introduction addresses the work of Dziga Vertov, or notice the chapter’s subsection
titles—“An uncertain perception: stilled movement and staged stillness,” “Extended time in still and
moving images,” and “Projection”—to realize that issues of medium are also addressed. But this address
is done with some self-consciousness, and always with a conception of the expanded feld as the
image’s globalization in mind.

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An uncertain perception: stilled movement and

staged stillness
Before digital technology, photography was, in some sense, a fnite chemical process. Photographers
and artists played with prints and negatives in the darkroom, but there was a limit to the medium’s
fexibility. The introduction and wide use of digital technologies, especially since the 1990s, has changed
this, as we discuss in Chapter 2, and the once fnite photographic practice has become more elastic,
open to endless adjustment, and in dialogue with other media such as flm. As a result, the look and
meaning of the “photographic” has also changed. Qualities such as the “decisive moment,” a concept
introduced in 1952 by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson describing the spontaneous, essential
moment captured by photography; or representational certainty, a side effect of the medium’s
indexical status; or even the moral certainty that can accompany social observation and reportage
practice—these traits no longer seem ftting characterizations of the digital photograph. Granted, to
some extent, these attributes are just idealized memories of photography’s past (and Chapters 1 and 2
discuss how there has always been an element of uncertainty in photographic imaging); nevertheless, a
steadfast faith in representation, the temporal ordering of photographic imagery, and the affect—or
feeling—one experiences looking at photographic pictures has been irrevocably altered by digital
technology. As much as anything, the acceptance that images exist in a state of constant fux and that
perception is uncertain undergird how contemporary viewers now see and understand photographic
pictures.
It should be added, however, that such uncertain perception does not necessarily mean the end of
photographic legibility or that images can never again be believed or grasped as “real.” Consider, for
instance, the digital photographs taken by U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War of human rights violations
against detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Some critics claim that when these images frst surfaced in 2004
the American public had a relatively passive (or worse, morally blind) response to them. But in fact, the
revelation of their existence led to an investigation by the U.S. military and Congress, and arguably
contributed to the decline in U.S. support for the war. What these pictures point out, then, is that even
digital images, which sometimes get theorized as a kind of fction, as a “photographic” picture divorced
from reality, still present themselves as a legally actionable trace of the real, and retain, to use literary critic
Roland Barthes’ term, punctum, or visual shock capable of striking the viewer with emotional force. The
digital image’s ability to function in a complex representational and documentary mode—simultaneously
to challenge and maintain the norms of photography—might thus be seen as evidence of the continuing
(rather than diminishing) power of the photographically based image and its potential to operate not only
in an art space, but also with signifcant ramifcations in the political public sphere.5
The work of Iranian-British artist Mitra Tabrizian exists precisely in this complex space between
representation and documentation. Tabrizian, who is both a photographer and a flmmaker, left Iran for
Europe in 1977, shortly before the Iranian Revolution. She now lives and works primarily in London,
though periodically returns to Iran. Infuenced by flm noir and the look and style of flms by directors such
as Michelangelo Antonioni, Quentin Tarantino, and Japan’s Takeshi Kitano, Tabrizian analyzes portrayals
of crime, violence, and shady corporate dealings in order to transform that content in her own work into
a commentary on the conditions of everyday life in a global economy. From the mid-2000s on, however,
Tabrizian’s imagery has more explicitly tackled issues of social upheaval and alienation. Cultural
theorist Stuart Hall explains that Tabrizian’s photographs do not function simply as “illustrations” for these
already-constituted and profoundly complex concepts, but act as “‘visual concept-spaces’ in which

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ideas are worked through . . . [and then] expanded and developed in another register—a kind of ‘thinking
with/in the image.’”6 Tabrizian achieves this “thinking/in the image” in part by creating condensed
narratives, as if an entire storyline has been fused into a single image.7 Signifcant in this way too are her
pictures’ obvious staging.
For instance, to make a photograph like Tehran 2006 (2006), which tells a story about dislocation and
social fragmentation in a then-recently developed residential section in the northwestern part of Tehran
(see Fig. 12.2), Tabrizian, like a flm director, instructed the fgures in the photograph on where to stand,
what attitude to express, and what gestures to hold. The characters in this story though play themselves:
they are ordinary citizens (a taxi driver, a factory worker, a dressmaker, a cleaner, and so on) portrayed in
aimless wander through the image’s visual space, trapped by their own circumstance. There is too a
disorienting sadness to the picture, which feels like a direct expression of the fgures’s social isolation as
they are shown stopped mid-step, on an empty plot of land, in front of a billboard displaying Iran’s
revolutionary leaders (Khomeini and the current Supreme Leader Khamenei). This giant billboard has
been erected next to two high-rise towers, which themselves appear modern, even though the
surrounding space looks run-down and suffers from a kind of infrastructural violence: there are no
sidewalks, no parks, a car sits on a dirt path and there is no apparent system or plan for future
development. The women wear hijabs, and the black cloth of their dresses, especially those fgures on
the left, has been stilled by the camera, caught mid-gesture, in what feels like a simulacrum or imitation
of the “decisive moment.” Individuals stand apart, they look askance; the camera has stilled them too. In
his book on photography and cinema, photography historian David Campany writes, “The indexicality of
a photograph combined with its stillness tends to produce not just a fxed record of the world but a fxed
pointing at it.”8 In Tehran, the bodies dispersed across the picture’s surface both occupy and point at
their unsure social space. Grouped together yet isolated, these fgures reveal that Tabrizian’s uncertain
perception speaks not only about changes to the photographic medium, but also about a troubled
cultural and social landscape.
Like Mitra Tabrizian, Beijing artist Wang Qingsong (b. 1966) makes large-scale color photographs of
staged scenes that address issues of social upheaval, migration, and shifts in national identity. Sometimes
with humor and sometimes with dark seriousness, Wang’s work—especially that made since 2000—
asks what kind of future will emerge for Chinese citizens as the country’s communist past confronts

Figure 12.2 Mitra Tabrizian, Tehran 2006, 2006. © Mitra Tabrizian. Courtesy of the artist and Leila Heller Gallery,
New York.

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today’s global capitalist economy. Wang began his career as a painter and graduated from the Sichuan
Academy of Fine Art, but in the late 1990s began producing sarcastic photographs depicting scenes of
materialistic Buddhas holding objects like beer cans and cellphones. In Thinker (1998), Wang posed
himself as a Buddha sitting atop three giant cabbage leaves made to look like a lotus, with a McDonald’s
logo engraved on his chest. About the ridiculousness of this and other similar images, Wang explains
that in Europe and America

. . . [it] is well known that McDonald’s and Pizza Hut are just fast-food stores . . . nothing more than
convenience. However, when [these establishments] came to China, they became the top cuisine and
hot rendezvous [spots] for people to have parties, invite friends, celebrate birthdays and meet lovers.
On the surface, this phenomenon of going after what is Western style represents an ideal for Euro-
American materialistic life. But . . . does this ideal also represent worship that can create a lot of
ridiculous contradictions?9

Thinker refects this observation: just as the introduction of Western fast food in China generates an
uneasy play between the seemingly normal and potentially absurd, this picture is as imaginary and
nonsensical as it is clear and rational.
Later photographs by Wang, such as the mural-sized Competition (2004), taken with a large format
camera, present a more nuanced view of the conficts and zones of cultural friction embedded in
contemporary Chinese culture (see Fig. 12.3). To make this photograph, Wang frst built a massive stage
set in a Beijing flm studio and then covered the walls of the constructed space with over 600 fake
advertising posters, all of which were drawn by hand. The posters simulate corporate logos, both
domestic and international; some can be read in English, like McDonalds, Shell, and Apple, others are
written in Chinese. Wang has said that the wall in this particular image generally refers to a time during
the Cultural Revolution when different factions of the Red Guard plastered public walls in Chinese
cities with their own propaganda. In Competition, “the fght for advertising” becomes, in Wang’s words,
“as ferce as a struggle for military power.”10 Competition thus positions politics as an event experienced
and expressed with one’s eyes as much as through any other kind of civic action. Wang’s own presence
in the image as a director holding a megaphone and choreographing the scene (he stands on the
shortest ladder on the left) reinforces this point. He is both in charge—moving props and people around
the constructed reality—and a citizen-spectator—consumed by the overwhelming visual feld that he
himself manufactured. The picture is lucid and clean, but there is too much to see, too much detail, too
many words in too many languages. The clarity becomes uncertainty, and the propaganda wall’s
reference to the Cultural Revolution, that is, to another moment when truth was hard to identify, is
transferred via photography to the contemporary moment and the modern global economy. Estranged
by its own extraordinary precision and excessive stillness, Competition allows spectatorship to be
conceived as political experience, recognizing and pointing to the power dynamics of viewing.
Not all photographers who create narratives in imagined spaces, like Wang Qingsong and Mitra
Tabrizian, make pictures that so clearly reveal their own constructed-ness, however. Like Tabrizian and
Qingsong, Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960) stages her photographs and plays with cinematic visuality, but
unlike their work, many of Moffatt’s images, especially those from the 1990s, appear at least on some
level to be contiguous with the world we live in, rather than manufactured by it. Born in Brisbane,
Australia, Moffatt earned a degree in visual communication at the University of Queensland in 1982, and
since the 1980s has switched back and forth between making flms and making photographs. In both

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Figure 12.3 Wang Qingsong, Competition, 2004. © Wang Qingsong. Courtesy of the artist.

media, her work expresses an interest in artifce or the composed scene, and is infuenced by cinema,
television, and popular culture. Scarred for Life (1994), one of Moffatt’s best-known series, comprises
nine images featuring children and adolescents in suburban settings. Each picture presents, in a
documentary-like fashion, the memory or moment of a trauma being enacted on a child by parents or
older siblings. A caption based on a true story accompanies each picture. One example, Useless, 1974
(1994) shows a girl—an actor hired by Moffatt for the photo shoot—wearing shorts and a tank top,
crouching down to wash the headlight of a car (see Fig. 12.4). She looks toward the camera with a
sideways glance, though it is diffcult to know if she is engaging the camera or looking at something else
outside the frame. The caption reads, “Her father’s nickname for her was ‘useless.’ ” The photograph has
been shot from an angle that situates the viewer above the girl, and that positioning, combined with the
girl’s expression—a mix of anger and woundedness—suggests (though somewhat ambiguously) that
the viewer occupies the position of the father. Placed in the narrative this way, what is the spectator to
do? Accept the cruel ambiguity of the view? Or, knowing that the image is staged, read and understand
it as part of a cinematic experience that thereby relieves the viewer of responsibility?
But it is not just the viewer’s position which confounds in Useless, 1974; the image itself exists in a
contradictory space characterized by another type of uncertainty. That is, if Tabrizian’s Tehran and Wang’s
Competition play with, and in some sense update, the conventions and expectations associated with
photography’s “decisive moment,” then Moffatt’s work, particularly images from her Scarred for Life
series, undoes and reconstructs those associated with the family snapshot. Instead of providing a family
with the typical mythical idealized image of itself, photographs such as Useless, 1974, show families
wallowing in pain, enabling abuse, and exploiting unequal power relationships—all to suggest that ugly
family histories have a way of coming back to haunt us. In Moffatt’s work, this last point could also be

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Figure 12.4 Tracey Moffatt, Useless, 1974, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and Tyler Rollins Gallery, New York.

applied to the nation-state. One might see in Useless, 1974, or the Scarred for Life series more generally,
the chattering ghost of Australia’s colonial past recast as traumatic childhood memories, including the
country’s assimilationist policy, which legally took Aboriginal children from their mothers and fostered
them out to white women.
Moffatt’s Aboriginal identity, and concern in a number of her flms with frst Australians’ rights, underlies
this interpretation, as does her explanation of the title of her 1993 flm beDevil, a flm which repeatedly
points to how development has destroyed Aboriginal land and people. “beDevil,” Moffatt states, “is a
very playful, old fashioned word that no one really uses anymore. It means ‘to haunt and taunt’. The style
of the flm is teasing. You’re following characters who are haunted by something, and I suggest perhaps
we’re all a little haunted in a way, and we probably don’t ever come to terms with it.”11 In Useless, 1974,
as in other of Moffatt’s work, specters from the past refuse to liberate the present in a manner that

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challenges our perception (photographic, cinematic, or even political) and shows that what the camera
makes legible offers no guarantee of objectivity.
Moffatt composes narratives and stages documentary-style photographs to comment on colonialism’s
ugly and violent past, yet in the nineteenth century, colonial photographers employed many of the same
strategies for opposite purposes: to dominate colonized bodies and demonstrate control and power
over their surroundings. Felice Beato (1832–1909)—an Italian-British photographer who traveled
extensively, lived in Japan shortly after the country opened itself up to the West, and eventually devoted
himself to photographing Asia and the Near East—is one such example. Well known for his war images,
including those of the Opium War in China in 1860, and the Sudanese colonial war in 1885, the images
of concern here are those he made in partnership with his brother-in-law, James Robertson, of the Indian
Mutiny and its aftermath. The Indian Mutiny (1857–8)—also referred to as the Indian Uprising or the First
War of Indian Independence—was a popular uprising in India against British rule that saw participation
from native soldiers serving in the Indian Army as well as civilians. The rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful,
and the British waged a retributive campaign of extraordinary brutality in response. As art historian Sean
Willcock describes it, “Indian civilians were terrorized, suspected collaborators or sympathizers were
hanged by the dozen from makeshift gallows, and sepoy [Indian soldiers employed by the armies of the
British East India Companay] rebels were blown from the mouths of cannons in grisly spectacles of
imperial justice.”12
After the British suppressed the rebellion, tourist visits to war memorials and sites of rebel violence, as
well as photographic representations of those sites in the form of commercial and amateur images and
postcards, became popular among the British. One of the most discussed images memorializing the
rebellion is Beato’s elaborately titled Interior of the Secundra Bagh After the Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels by
the 93rd Highlanders and the Punjah Regt. First Attack of Sir Colin Campbell in November 1857, from
1858 (see Fig. 12.5). At frst, the image appears to depict a small group of fgures standing amidst the
architectural debris left from a rebel attack on the villa. As one looks more carefully, however, it becomes
clear that the image in fact displays the scattered bones of Indian insurgents who had been massacred
by the British when they stormed the site. Skulls, femurs, ribcages are distributed across the picture’s
surface. The bodies are fully deconstructed, part-objects, detached from any whole. The image is made
even more gruesome by the fact that Beato did not arrive at the site until March 1858, many months after
the November 1857 massacre he pictures, which means the image is a constructed restaging of dead
bodies splayed out in a public space. Sir George Campbell, then judicial commissioner of Lucknow
where Secundra Bagh is located, commented on the shock of this dramatization, exclaiming, “The great
pile of bodies had been decently covered before the photographer could take them, but he insisted on
having them uncovered to be photographed before they were fnally disposed of.”13
Beato’s photograph thus must be seen not as a war image nor a simple staged documentary shot,
but as a macabre cinematic tableau (a term we discuss in more detail in Chapter 2). In Moffatt’s Useless,
1974, the space between the staged scene and the traumatic event to which it gestures (whether that
event be personal or political) stimulates some degree of discomfort and uncertainty in the viewer. In
Beato’s photograph, however, that same contrived space seeks to intimidate the imagined Indian viewer
and generate a sense of sadistic dominance for the assumed British one. Restaging the scene of
spectatorship, the pose of photography in Beato’s image of the slaughtered rebels conforms to
colonialism’s pictorial demands in which photography’s artifce—its structured stillness and disconnection
of image from referent—reinscribes rigid categories of racial difference and seeks to control and frame
moments of social upheaval.

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Figure 12.5 Felice Beato, Interior of Secundra Bagh After the Massacre, 1858. Digital image courtesy of Getty’s
Open Content Program.

FOCUS BOX 12
Moving stills
Marta Zarzycka

The relationship between cinema and photography has been culturally fraught since
the former’s invention. The principle of stillness was inherent to photography from its
early days: subjects had to remain immobile for a long time in order for the camera
operator to capture the image, often to the point of physical discomfort. Photographs
were thought to have no temporal directionality, unless connected to other shots in a
sequence. Motion pictures, then, have been widely seen as “liberating” photographs
from their stasis, expanding the possibilities for perception, involvement, affective
response, and narrative. Animation has been understood as “putting life” in an image
that has been long declared dead, facilitating identifcation with and empathy for
characters, as well as bringing about immersion into a projected setting. Additionally,

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stillness and movement have been perceived as vital components of our affective
response to images. Visual and environmental studies scholar Giuliana Bruno aptly
emphasizes the capacity of moving images to move their spectators through her claim
that motion produces emotion as much as emotion contains movement. While the Latin
root emovere, which comprises movere, “to move,” and e, “out,” is at the heart of both
the words “movement” and “emotion,” the Greek word for cinema, kinema, likewise
encompasses “motion” and “emotion.” Stillness, on the other hand, often signifes the
state of retreat, arrest, and contemplation.
The stillness–movement divide has had a great impact on practitioners and scholars
alike. The “white cube” of the gallery space containing photographs and the “black-
box” of cinema space have been perceived as two disconnected realities. To date,
scholarship on cinema and photography forms two separate, rarely overlapping
disciplines, with different trajectories, methodologies, and intellectual traditions.
The dialectical tension between still and moving images can be a source of
particularly fruitful exploration. Various types of physical movement that are involved in
the process of production and reception of images—ranging from camera motion, the
gesture of a photographer, and the fickering of our eyelids, to the fact that we as
contemporary spectators are perpetually on the move—have sparked new and exciting
scholarship. Since the invention of the medium, the means of viewing photographs
have resisted stillness in the form of ocular inventions: fip books, moving-image
automats, panoramas, magic lanterns, the wheel of life, the daedalum, the mutoscope,
as well as the Ken Burns effect. Today, photographs—understood not as a material
objects to be held, but rather digital images across electronic screens—further defy
what once was seen to constitute a fundamental difference between the photographic
and the cinematic. YouTube clips that can be paused and unpaused at any given
moment, or still shots incorporated into moving footage in various multimedia projects,
constitute a hybrid form that is as cinematic as it is photographic, rapidly becoming a
part of such photography contests and online news platforms as Magnum in Motion or
MediaStorm. Contemporary art projects increasingly explore the threshold that
separates cinema and photography—the barely perceptible movement in Andy
Warhol’s flm showing the Empire State Building, Robert Wilson’s video portraits, or
Gillian Wearing’s Sixty Minute Silence, an installation in which a group of people dressed
as police agents were flmed in such extraordinary slow motion that the video seems to
be a photograph, are but a few examples. Surveillance techniques, photographs
“animated” by digital effects, biomedical imagery (x-ray, MRI, nanoimages), and
photoflmic images generated digitally in programs such as iMovie, photosynth,
AutoStitch, and PhantaMorph, and other visual forms also render the once apparently
stable wall between cinema and still photography increasingly permeable.
Moreover, still photographs are on the move more than ever before, passing through
various distribution channels, assuming different forms, and undergoing mediation by

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different technologies and users. The contemporary spectator has splintered: her visual
experience is no longer limited to images encountered in one place, but rather consists
of endless encounters as images travel across (sometimes overlapping) sites, spaces,
and screens. Visual technologies themselves have become more portable and mobile,
becoming powerful tools in the hands of social media users, forming new communities
of viewers across viewing contexts. A photograph in a Gaza paramedic’s Twitter post,
for instance, makes the front page of the Guardian, while an embedded reporter’s
snapshot posted to Instagram becomes an exquisite (and expensive) prize-winning
print in a professional photography contest. The “stillness” of photography has become
an archaic concept.
Another aspect of differentiation between photography and cinema worth rethinking
in present mediascapes is the absence/presence of sound. With the invention of cinema
(though silent at frst), sound, whether diegetic or not, has been seen as integral to the
cinematic image, whether in dialogue, voiceovers, music, or in other sounds that
accompany the moving image and create sensory experiences beyond the visual. By
contrast, the “stillness” that has been ascribed to photography has been implied not
only as “immobile” but also “inaudible.” Photography has been culturally perceived as
being a soundless practice. Yet, still photographs are and have been accompanied by
various soundscapes, music, dialogues, or voiceovers—for example, Nan Goldin’s slide
show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in the 1980s (paralleled by popular everyday
practices, such as playing music over a slideshow during a wedding or birthday party),
or, once again, contemporary multimedia projects such as Family Love by Darcy Padrilla
(1993–2014). In these projects, “seeing” incorporates listening, either confusing or
enhancing our engagement with the images. The aural participates directly in
conveying, prolonging, and amplifying the emotional impact of images. The formal
qualities of the photographs (texture, contrast, lighting, composition) also interact with
the formal and temporal qualities of sounds. Together they create a multisensory
experience of unison or discontinuity, one that is radically different from what sight
alone could have produced. The relationship between sound and cinema on the one
hand, and silence and photography on the other, can no longer be taken for granted.
Undoing the binaries between movement–stillness and sound–silence involves re-
educating our comprehensive and receptive skills in an era where media genres become
fuid and merge into one another. Such an approach breaks through current discipline-
bound debates to examine a media landscape in which stillness and movement are both
deeply integrated into our visual experience. Rather than concentrating on the decoding
of images as static or mobile, and audible or silent, a renewed interest in “media
ecologies,” emerging in contemporary cultural studies, offers a chance to theorize the
cross-fertilizations of the cinematic and the photographic and tap into the ongoing debate
on the politics and ethics of representing the contemporary world.

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Extended time in still and moving images

In 1985, French flm theorist Christian Metz sought to map out the connection between photography and
flm. He described both as sharing certain technical aspects, but noted that the two media have different
relationships to time, framing, and object-hood. With regard to time, the photograph, for Metz, was fxed
and tied to the past, while flm always seemed to unfold in the present.14 German cultural critic Siegfried
Kracauer, in his text Theory of Film (1960), similarly argued that the difference between photography
and flm has to do with temporality, and that photography is limited by always being a fxed representation
of the past.15 Today, as art historians, flm theorists, and communications scholars speak more and
more about a photographic–flmic hybridity, fewer and fewer would make such all-encompassing
pronouncements. Still, the question remains: how can a static photograph produce movement and
generate extended time? And relatedly, when does a photographic encounter end? After the shutter
clicks? After a photographer prints her or his work? After a viewer engages with an image and then stops
looking at it?
The relationship between duration and photography can be thought of in a number of ways. On one
level, it might refer to the long-term commitment to recording a process that occurs over a substantial
amount of time. For example, U.S. photographer Susan Meiselas’s photographs of the Nicaraguan
revolution (1978–9) and its aftermath took place over a period of more than twenty years. As a result, her
images depict the revolution as an ongoing, durational process. Correspondingly, in its commitment
to extended moments of looking, observing, documenting, and relating, the work builds a sense of
history and community that allows social relations to make sense—to become, in a word, narratable.
This point further suggests how photographers might extend time through the production of durational
viewing experiences, which might involve creating books, making slide shows, producing flms, online
sites, or other structures where images move from one to the next such that they become inextricable
from a narrative succession. Often guided by an awareness that the present is a dynamic of past and
future, such looking might be described as photo-chronographic viewing, out of which another kind of
durational experience emerges, one characterized by an impossible closure on meaning production.
In 2006, photographer James Rodríguez (b. 1972) developed an online venture, MiMundo.org, that
aims to engender this type of viewing experience and combat efforts (by governments and multinational
corporations) to seal off past political and historical events from the present social world. MiMundo.org
is a long-term online project dedicated to recording in image and explanatory text postwar justice
processes, human rights abuses, and other kinds of political and social conficts in Guatemala and the
surrounding region.16 Rodríguez, who was raised in Mexico, came to the United States as a teenager,
worked in Japan after graduating from college, and moved to Guatemala in 2004 to join Peace Brigades
International. Working with Peace Brigades, he became aware of how Guatemala’s civil war, though
offcially declared over in 1996, continues to grip the country. One legacy involves gang activity; another,
violent land struggles between indigenous populations and mining companies. Both cause thousands of
Guatemalans to migrate north. But the legacy of the war’s disappeared also continues to haunt the
country, which has led to the development and use of sophisticated forensic technology labs in hopes of
identifying the missing as part of the reconciliation process.
Rodríguez initially started a photo blog, which then morphed into MiMundo.org, as a way to let others
know about the forensic work being done in Guatemala. Photographs on his site, including one that
depicts a hand-woven blouse recovered from a mass grave and accompanying caption outlining the
work of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, visually disclose how Guatemala’s past

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Figure 12.6 James Rodriguez, A traditional Mayan Huipil, or hand-woven blouse, recovered at a mass grave, dries
under the sun at the headquarters of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG), 2015. © James
Rodriguez. Courtesy of the artist/MiMundo.org.

war endures in the present (see Fig. 12.6). Exhumed from a grave, pulled literally from the past, this
photograph shows an object in the process of drying in the sun, of, in some way, reconstituting itself and
fnding a way to retell its story. In this way, Rodríguez’s project works against an idea of photographic
fxity that forecloses on the past. This is no small point, for representations that give a sense of elapsed
time frequently also show the relationship that events, actions, and structures have with their historical
contexts. It is also how still photographs can acquire transformative potential in shaping the way political
subjects identify and recognize themselves, a vital precondition for the formation of politicized individuals
and communities, and for coming to terms with past events as they affect the future. In other words,
such durational viewing becomes a way to refuse the temporality of defeat and the temptation of narrative
closure.
Yet not all durational viewing results from sequences of text and image, or other types of traditional
time-based media that require spectators to spend prolonged moments looking. Darren Almond’s (b.
1971) series Fullmoon, taken of mountains, streams, and other unusual geologic formations in Patagonia
and Cape Verde, provide one example of photography’s ability to communicate protracted time within a
single frame. Almond shot the images from this series in the middle of the night, using light from the full
moon as his only source of illumination. The relative darkness of these working conditions necessitated
that he use long exposure times ranging from twelve to ninety minutes depending on cloud cover. In this
sense, Almond’s practice might be thought of as recording duration, and his images look as if stacked

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beneath every single photograph—compressed underneath—are thousands more. The effect of this
slow-motion exposure is also somewhat disorienting. Fullmoon@Cerro Chaltén (2013), for instance,
illustrates what at frst glance looks like a beautiful, perhaps even sublime, view of a river cutting back
into a landscape toward mountains (see Plate 19). But the longer one looks at the image, the stranger it
gets. The water, which is the Rio Baker, has somehow been stilled and looks almost like petrifed lava,
while the clouds in the upper left, blurred together, resemble smoke coming out of a chimney. Because
the land forms appear both hyper-real and totally fake, the image produces a kind of surreal estrangement.
The durational aspect of Almond’s process, in other words, exposes the artifciality of photography
itself—we see how his method affects and frames our vision.
In 1831, Charles Darwin received an invitation to travel around the world as a naturalist on a small
vessel known as the Beagle. The trip, originally planned as a two-year journey, ended up lasting almost
fve years. Much of those fve years were spent exploring the southern end of South America, including
Patagonia, an area shared by Argentina and Chile, and the region where Almond photographed much of
his Fullmoon series. Indeed, Almond—who like Darwin is British—used Darwin’s earlier trip as a loose
reference point for his own, and even read Darwin’s Journal of Researches (1839) during his journey
south. The reference back to Darwin fts well with the durational component of Almond’s images: if it is
possible to imagine thousands of pictures stacked beneath the surface of Fullmoon@Cerro Chaltén then
surely one of those is the view glimpsed by nineteenth-century explorers like Darwin. But the citation
back to Darwin is important for another reason. When Darwin wrote about this site in the Southern
Patagonian Ice Field, he described it as “a country completely unknown” near “the end of the world.” 17
Almond’s image, as if in response to Darwin’s words, erases the possibility of belief in the untouched
“natural” landscape (an idea discussed further in Chapter 4). The Fullmoon series, then, via Almond’s
prolonged photographic process, reveals the artifce of such beliefs and transforms those spaces into a
beautiful, dreamy unrealness where nature can only be seen as coterminous with human culture.
Like Darren Almond’s Fullmoon series, Island (2008) by Fiona Tan (b. 1966) shows a temporally
extended view of a natural landscape (see Fig. 12.7). Tan, who was born in Indonesia, and lives and
works in Amsterdam, focuses in this work on Gotland, an island off the east coast of Sweden. Filmed in
black and white, Island is a twelve-minute video that begins with a still shot of a distant view of a
lighthouse and trees. A gently swaying body of water flls the foreground and keeps, for a drawn-out
moment, the land at bay. The flm eventually cuts to another shot, and the viewer is brought to shore.
Once here, however, only a single tree and some scrubby bush is visible. As with the previous views, the
camera holds this shot for a long time. It looks like a photograph, except that the wind moves the tree,
and it sways, just as the water had in earlier views. The flm cuts to another shot. Again, the camera holds
the view still; again, it looks like a photograph that moves just slightly in the wind. The soundscape, like
the imagery, communicates a mix of stillness and movement: the spectator/listener hears the surf, the
wind, birds, the island’s natural hums and echoes. These are the sounds one would hear standing still
while listening to movement. A voice-over, spoken by British poet and playwright Heathcote Williams,
recounts the story of a woman who came to the island as a retreat—as a place to think—and who
experiences both insight and restless anxiety. There are a few moments when the camera’s view seems
to overlap with the unseen woman described by the narrator, and in these moments the camera is
disruptive and swerves aimlessly across a grassy feld. Such instances feel in some way like a plea to the
viewer to listen to their inner voice, and to run.
Tan has identifed her work as occupying a “strange twilight zone” between photography and flm.
About Island specifcally she has said, “much of the flm could almost be called anti-cinematic. It is as if

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Figure 12.7 Fiona Tan, Island, 2008. © Fiona Tan. Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London.

the images are not moving but are still images but not actual flm stills.”18 Interpreting Tan’s roundabout
formulation, scholar Louise Hornby explains that “the anti-cinematic is neither contra-cinema nor simply
pro-photographic. Instead, it occupies the suspended area between photography and flm: composed
of still images but not images that have been stilled completely. The origin of stillness is transferred from
photographic technology (the still camera) to the flm subject (the still image).”19 The confrontation, and
confusion, staged in this work between photography and flm—including the lingering long takes and the
absence of a clear narrative—does not generate the surreal estrangement found in Almond’s work, yet
it does open up for the viewer a space of agitated calm. In Island, the interplay of stasis and motion
undoes the terms of opposition between photography and flm such that thought—that is, the very idea
and experience of stilled contemplation—is represented through the depiction of its opposite. This model
of looking at and conceiving images provides a way to think not only about how images behave over
time, but also how a certain form of representation itself fgures elapsed time.
A number of precedents exist for the kind of photographic–flmic hybridity explored by Tan in
Island. One of the earliest is chronophotography or stop-motion images developed in the nineteenth
century by Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Etienne Marey of human and animal bodies in motion.
Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is another. Less expected
examples also come to mind, such as the work produced by American Paul Strand (1890–1976) in
Mexico in the 1930s. Though today best known for creating images such as Blind Woman (1916), a
brutally frank picture of a blind street peddler in New York City taken without the subject’s knowledge,
Strand’s pictures from Mexico reveal how photographers in the early part of the twentieth century already
understood photography’s stillness as a quality not necessarily at odds with the durational aspect of
cinema.

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Strand frst traveled to Mexico in 1932, at the invitation of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. Though
it was not initially clear if Strand would take photographs on his visit, once there, he began shooting
pictures of people, the Mexican countryside, churches and religious icons known as bultos fgures,
which are small wooden sculptures that frequently depict a suffering Christ. Strand encountered these
religious fgures in churches where there was minimal natural light. Thus, like Darren Almond photographing
Patagonia by the light of the full moon, Strand had to utilize a very slow shutter speed, sometimes using
exposure times of an hour or more. As a result, his images of religious objects are also representations
of duration, a fact that contributes to the work’s meaning. That is, the slowness of Strand’s images
encourages the viewer to draw a parallel between the suffering bultos fgures and the people he saw in
the street.20 Or as critic Elizabeth McCausland describes it, Strand’s photographs from Mexico operate
in a space between stasis and dynamism. In a 1940 essay, McCausland elucidates: “It is possible to look
at [Strand’s] photographs [from Mexico] as at still lifes executed with consummate skill, or to study them
as documents of the culture which created them. But this is a static approach: the terrible stillness of
their plastic organization proves that behind the surface representation seethe volcanic forces.”21 For
McCausland, part of the power behind Strand’s Mexican photographs emerges from the way he inverts
stillness and movement—static and “volcanic” forces—with the implication that a similar kind of inversion
can drive changes in political consciousness.
Strand’s flm, The Wave (in Spanish, Redes) from 1937, also shot in Mexico, further reveals how his
work from this period reverses moments of action and stillness in order to highlight moments of dramatic
historical possibility. The Wave tells the story of how fshermen in a small village in Veracruz, Mexico,
struggle to organize a union. When the local businessman, who typically buys the fshermen’s catch,
refuses to pay them a reasonable amount for their goods, one worker, a man named Miro, calls a
meeting to organize. Throughout, Strand’s exceedingly slow camera interrupts the general movement of
the storyline, creating extended moments of looking, listening, and waiting. This is especially the case at
the meeting where the fshermen assemble after Miro’s organizing call. At this point in the flm, a series
of shots appear that seem designed as still pictures: Miro raises his hand to the crowd, the crowd
assembles, Miro faces the crowd and turns his back to the viewer, Miro appears in profle with the sea
behind him, and so on. These moments have been stilled and animated such that the viewer becomes
aware of how one, in this case Miro, sees and thus organizes the world. Looking—seeing—as art
historian Stephanie Schwartz has argued, is here denaturalized, understood as helping to produce, not
simply refect, society’s structuring.22 Towards the end of the flm, a fght breaks out between the fshermen
Miro has successfully unionized and the scabs—a fght that ends in Miro’s death. This event, orchestrated
by an evil businessman, does not, as the businessmen hoped, further divide the fshermen, but instead
unites them. And in this, Miro’s death is neither fnal nor fxed; its stillness unleashes volcanic forces and
creates movement—in this case, a political movement.

Projection
In a passage from his 1973 autobiography, civil rights activist Cleveland Sellers describes what it was like
to see a movie in the segregated South of the United States:

We always entered the side door of the theatre, the one reserved for blacks, and invariably sat in the
balcony, thus segregated from whites . . . We sat in the same place—the front row of the balcony—

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 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE CINEMATIC 297

and propped our feet on the banister while watching the movies. When the pictures were boring, we
would throw popcorn, empty soft-drink cups and water on the whites seated below. We got a big kick
out of that.23

This memory, as scholar Elizabeth Abel has described, exposes the material conditions of viewing—what
it feels like on your body to sit in a seat, consume beverages, experience boredom. The persistent reality
of these conditions challenges much European flm theory from the second half of the twentieth century,
which situates cinema’s viewers inside a hermetically sealed, darkened cave severed from any exterior
social relationships, and glued to the fickering images on the screen.24 A photograph from 1912 of a
segregated theatre in Hannibal, Missouri, illustrates this point well (see Fig. 12.8). In the image, rows of
white audience members fll the downstairs while above them, in what feels like the way-way back, is a
balcony reserved for people of color. One child in the front row covers his ears, but for the most part, the
theatergoers appear accommodating, their bodies disciplined by their viewing positions: they are

Figure 12.8 [Herbert?] Tomlinson, Opening Night at the Rex Theater Hannibal, MO, 1912. Courtesy of Hannibal Free
Public Library.

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 298 GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY

prepared to consume whatever appears before them. The same is not so true for the crowd in the
balcony, however. Situated beyond the established frame of viewing, the theater’s architecture neglects
the African American audience. And yet this exclusion uniquely positioned the audience to see the whole
movie environment outside of any prescribed perspective or predetermined narrative, be that Hollywood’s
or any other institution connected to the culture industry.25
Like Sellers’ memory of throwing popcorn and empty cups from the balcony above and behind the
white audience, the work of Saïdou Dicko (b. 1979) demonstrates how bodies and lived experience can
be projected into space without succumbing to the pitfalls of the traditional cinematic setting. Dicko, who
was born in Burkina Faso in West Africa and currently lives and works in Paris, began his career as a
painter of shadows, inspired by the images he saw on the desert landscape working as a herdsman. In
2005, he switched media and began photographing shadows of people and animals, such as La
Bouilloire (Tea Kettle) from 2014, which shows the shadows of two young boys projected onto a cerulean
blue wall. A blue-and-white kettle occupies the foreground along with other shadows projected from an
object(s) and/or person(s) that stands outside the image’s frame (see Plate 20). Dicko sometimes talks
about his pictures in utopic terms, exclaiming that as his cast shadows remove signs of religion, skin
color, and ethnic and national identity, they also erase difference. But this abstracts his images too much.
In La Bouilloire, for instance, we are given an expanded feld of vision that reveals a surprising amount
about the boys whose shadows we see, as well as their environment. In fact, their likenesses here merge
with, and become inseparable from, their lived experience. In almost direct opposition to the kind of
spectacular transcendent vision promised by the movie theatre experience, Dicko’s La Bouilloire re-
embodies the projected image and gives it life outside the theatre’s determining space.
In a way, this volume has similarly tried to make visible a history of photography that exists outside of
any hermetically sealed box. Returning to the Rex Theatre photograph, the orderly rows of the white
audience members resemble perspectival lines leading to single viewing point—the flm’s projection
window. They might also be thought of metaphorically as representing various photographic genealogies
that all ultimately converge in a stable origin point. And, just as individual faces with different expressions
and clothes can be seen in the audience, different artists and different global contexts might be mentioned
in these genealogies, but the history still traces back to the same spot. But what of the crowd hovering
above the downstairs audience? What kind of story can be told from a position that takes this perspective
into account? In this book we hope to initiate a conversation that thinks about photography’s history and
“expanded feld” in a manner that offers new interpretative approaches outside the stable viewing position
that is so elegantly, if unwittingly, illustrated in Tomlinson’s 1912 photograph.

Summary
• Digital technology has made photography a more fexible open-ended medium, which
sometimes results in an uncertain perception.
• The expression “photography’s expanded feld” refers not only to changes in the medium, but
also to photography’s globalization, its openness to new narratives and interpretive approaches.
• The play between still and moving images affects the temporal ordering of the photographic
image.

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• Photography is a discursively promiscuous media, evidenced in part by recent

acknowledgments of a photographic–flmic hybridity.

Discussion points
• Does it make sense to distinguish flm and photography as two distinct media? Why or why not?
• Describe the difference between flm’s freeze frame and a photograph’s still picture.
• How does an emphasis on duration in photographic imagery change the way a photograph
might be used or circulated?
• Is narratability a quality unique to cinematic viewing, or can a photograph also possess this
quality?
• How do the material conditions of viewing affect the way one sees and interprets imagery?

Additional case studies

Knut Asdam (b. 1968)
Black Audio Film Collective (active 1982–98)
Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962)
Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977)
Steve McQueen (b. 1969)
Juan David Laserna Montoya (Collectivo Nasti) (b. 1980)
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938)
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972)
Mike Osborne (b. 1978)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948)

Notes
1 See Annette Michelson’s introduction in Annette Michelson (ed.) and Kevin O’Brien (trans.), Kino-Eye: The
Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Also, see the Museum of Modern Art’s
description: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/89505.
2 See Dziga Vertov, “On Kinopravda,” in Annette Michelson (ed.) and Kevin O’Brien (trans.), Kino-Eye: The
Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 45. For a nuanced discussion of
Vertov’s place in the realist/anti-realist debate and his ethical positioning, see Malcom Turvey, “Vertov, the View
from Nowhere and the Expanding Circle,” October 148 (Spring 2014): 79–102.
3 Cited in Leah Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 144.
4 Turvey, “Vertov, the View From Nowhere,” 87.
5 See Terri Weissman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, review by Stephen F. Eisenman, caa.reviews, December 18, 2007,
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1067#.V9PclFce7ww.
6 Stuart Hall, “The Way We Live Now,” in Beyond the Limits (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004), 2.

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7 Hall, “The Way We Live Now,” 9.

8 David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 143.
9 Wang Qingsong, quoted in Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, “Wang Qingsong’s Use of Buddhaist Imagery (There
Must Be a Buddha in a Place Like This),” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 12, no. 1 (2013): 42–3.
10 Wang Qingsong, quoted in Carol Carter, “Contemporary Photomedia in China,” 2004, http://www.
chinaphotoeducation.com/Carol_China/Wang_Qingsong_2.html.
11 Tracey Moffatt, Vogue Australia (June 1993): 57, quoted in Catherine Summerhayes, “Haunting Secrets: Tracey
Moffatt’s bedevil,” Film Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 14.
12 Sean Willcock, “Aesthetic Bodies: Posing on Sites of Violence in India, 1857–1900,” History of Photography
(June 2015): 145.
13 Sir George Campbell, Memoirs of my Indian Career, quoted in Willcock, “Aesthetic Bodies,” 157.
14 See Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Fall 1985): 81–90. Also see David Campany’s
summary of this text in his Photography and Cinema, 11.
15 See Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
16 MiMundo.org, http://www.mimundo.org/about.
17 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 108, quoted in T. J. Demos,
“Photography at the End of the World: on Darren Almond’s Fullmoon Series,” Image and Narrative 16, no. 1
(2015): 32–44.
18 Fiona Tan, interview by Magdalena Malm, September 2008 in Project Archive, Mobile Art Production
(MAP), quoted in Louise Hornby, “Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan,” Grey Room 41
(Fall 2010): 50.
19 Hornby, “Stillness and the Anticinematic,” 50.
20 Amanda N. Bock, “‘The Artist Who is Also a Citizen’: Paul Strand’s Photography, Film, and Politics, 1930–50,”
in Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 151–2.
21 Elizabeth McCausland, “Paul Strand: The Photographer and His Work,” U.S. Camera 8 (February–March
1940): 65.
22 Stephanie Schwartz, “Paul Strand’s Living Labor,” ArtMargins 2, no. 3 (October 2013): 29–30.
23 Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life
and Death of SNCC (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), 9. Also cited and analyzed in Elizabeth
Abel’s excellent essay, “Double Take: Photography, Cinema and the Segregated Theatre,” Critical Inquiry 34,
no. 52 (Winter 2008): 52–70.
24 See Abel, “Double Take,” and her Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2010).
25 Abel, “Double Take,” 53.

Selected further reading

Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso, 2013.
Beckman, Karen. Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2007.
Chion, Michel. Film, A Sound Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Guido, Laurent and Olivier Lugon. Between Still and Moving Images: Photography and Cinema in the 20th Century.
London: John Libbey Publishing, 2012.
Hoelzl, Ingrid. “Moving Stills: Images that are no longer Immobile.” photographies 3, no. 1 (2010): 99–108.

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 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE CINEMATIC 301

Juhasz, Alexandra and Jesse Lerner, eds. F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Kember, Sarah and Joanna Zylinska. Life After New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Papenburg, Bettina and Marta Zarzycka, eds. Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics.
London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Røssaak, Eivind, ed. Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2012.

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 KEY TERMS

abstract a form of representation that uses shapes, colors, forms, and gestural marks rather than accuracy and
recognizable imagery to depict the visible world
Abstract Expressionism an artistic movement in New York after World War II that used abstraction to convey
strong emotional and expressive content
Afro-pessimism a term used by Okwui Enwezor to describe the tendency to depict Africans in terms of exotic and
pathological stereotypes
ambrotypes photographic technology developed in the 1850s using a glass plate treated with light-sensitive
chemicals to produce a single image
American exceptionalism a belief that the United States is extraordinary in comparison to other nations in terms
of culture, economy, and government
analog photography non-digital photography relying on light and chemicals to create images
anomie developed by sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Robert K. Merton, the concept refers to the absence
of clear social norms and values and a lack of a sense of social regulation
Anthropocene refers to the current geological epoch during which human activity on the ecosystem and climate has
been dominant
anthropometric photography images measuring the physical characteristics of a subject often featuring a grid or
yard stick and related to the racist classifying impulse of ethnographic photography
anti-apartheid movement a twentieth century international political organization against South African racial
segregation
apartheid a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa that lasted from 1948
until 1994
appropriation the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of pre-existing images and objects
Arab Spring a series of pro-democracy uprisings and protests across the Middle East and North Africa that began
on December 18, 2010 in Tunisia with the Jasmine Revolution
archive a site where public records, historical documents, and photographs are classifed, stored, and preserved
and where history, memory, and knowledge are produced, negotiated, and contested
aura a term used by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
to refer to the authority held by the unique, original work of art
avant-garde refers to works of art which are experimental, innovative, or ahead of their time
Bauhaus an early twentieth century German art school combining aesthetics, design, and technology
born-digital photographic images created through digital means rather than converted from other media
camera-less photography photographic technology using light-sensitive surfaces rather than a machine to capture
images
carte de visite a small portrait photograph mounted on a piece of card patented by the French photographer Andre
Adolphe Eugene Disdéri in 1854
chemogram a camera-less image created from incidental deposits of water and dirt when light-sensitive paper
passes through a photo-developing machine
chronophotography stop-motion photography made famous by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1872
colonialism political and economic control of a nation by a foreign state

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 304 KEY TERMS

color-feld painting a twentieth century painting style employing blocks of color and fat planes to evoke emotions;
closely related to Abstract Expressionism
combination printing a technique of combining two or more photographic negatives into a single image
conceptual art art in which ideas are paramount and the material form is secondary that often challenges traditional
ideals of art making and includes works that are ephemeral, unpretentious, and/or “dematerialized”
Constructivism an artistic movement that started in Russia in the 1920s which is noted for its abstract angular and
industrial aesthetic
critique of documentary photography a critical evaluation of the assumed objectivity and neutrality of documentary
photography and the power relationships embedded within it
Cubism an early twentieth century artistic movement noted for its use of multiple viewpoints and geometric
shapes
Cultural Revolution the period in China from 1966 until 1976 marked by mass purges of intellectuals and opposition
fgures, the rise of the militant youth group known as the Red Guard, and the solidifcation of the cult of personality
of Chairman Mao Zedong
cult value a term coined by philosopher Walter Benjamin that refers to a work of art’s unique presence and aura; it
is a mode of experiencing art that is rooted in ritual
Cuzco School of Photography a Peruvian art movement in the early twentieth century focused on progressive
ideas such as indigenismo
cyanotype a photographic printing process invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842 that produces a cyan-blue print
decisive moment a concept introduced in 1952 by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson describing the moment in
which spontaneity and formal composition align in order to capture the essence of an event in time
decolonialization the termination of foreign control of former colonies in favor of local governance, as well as the
conscientious reclaiming of what was taken and honoring the histories and peoples that have been repressed and
exploited
dematerialization the object becomes inconsequential compared to the idea and/or no tangible object exists in the
traditional sense
digital photography photographic technology which processes images into electronic data without light-sensitive
material
directorial mode a term coined by critic A. D. Coleman in 1976 to separate photographers who privilege realism
from those who stage scenes
documentary photography refers in the broadest sense to any use of the photographic medium as visual evidence
Düsseldorf School of Photography a photography group founded at the Kunstacademie Düsseldorf under the
instruction of Bernd and Hiller Becher in the 1970s and inspired by the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s
Eastman Kodak Company a U.S. business established in 1888, known for producing inexpensive cameras and
photographic flm and bringing photography to the majority of the population
ethnographic photography an anthropological approach to documenting diverse cultures and peoples that often
emphasizes differences
ethnography the scientifc study of human cultures
exhibition value a term coined by philosopher Walter Benjamin which develops out of a work of art’s portability and
reproducibility; it signifes a mode of experiencing art that is accessibile and universal
folk art work produced by informally trained or self-taught artists and often expressing regional and cultural aesthetics
formalism the study of the physical characteristics and visual appearance of works of art
Futurist an art movement originating in Italy in the early twentieth century inspired by modern technology such as
the airplane and car to express speed, dynamism, and movement
genre an art historical category delineating the types of scenes being depicted, such as portraits, landscapes, or still
lifes
globalization increasingly interconnected individuals and companies throughout the world due to advancements in
technology and the international expansion of capitalism
Holocaust the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of
others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II
human exceptionalism the belief in the supremacy of humans, also known as Humanocentrism

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 KEY TERMS 305

indexical the idea that photography holds not only a similarity with or a resemblance to what it depicts—its referent—
but is also said to have been directly caused by this referent and thereby could not exist without it
indigenismo a progressive political movement in Latin America that focused on the rights of indigenous populations
rather than the minority rule of European and European descended elites
internet a global computer network used for electronic communication
large format camera records images in a format larger than 4 x 5 inches, with the main advantage being their
incredible image resolution
Leica camera a commercially available, lightweight, handheld 35mm camera, invented by Oskar Barnack of the
Leitz Company in 1914, that allowed for instantaneous exposure, fast flm advance, and a high degree of image
defnition under varying lighting conditions
luminogram a camera-less photographic process in which photosensitive paper is exposed to a light source and
the image is rendered based on the distance between the materials and the light source rather than an object
Magnum an international photographic agency established in 1947 by photographers to represent their work
Manifest Destiny a nineteenth century belief that the United States was ordained by God to expand westward
across the North American continent
materiality the physical qualities of an object
Missions Héliographiques a nineteenth century government-sponsored project to photograph landmarks and
monuments around France so that they could be restored
modernism a mid-nineteenth century artistic movement that rejected previous styles in favor of experimentation,
innovation, and technology refecting the reality of modern life
modernist photography a tendency within photography to produce images with a sharp focus and an emphasis
on formal qualities
moral certainty the belief that photography, especially photojournalism, presents the viewer with a truthful and
unbiased image
multispecies ecological being a theory argued by Donna Haraway that humans are not singular beings, but are
comprised of complex sympatric relationships with internal and external species
nahdah an Arabic term for awakening, referencing a cultural renaissance during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century across North Africa and the Levant
neoliberalism a twentieth century political theory marked by pro-capitalism, deregulation, and free trade
New Formalism a term coined by curator Christopher Bedford to describe a group of twenty-frst century artists
who explore issues around photography’s material and physical properties, including its relationship to light and
space
New Indianist movement a nationalist movement in Peru that elevated indigenous culture to a legitimate, positive
element
New Objectivity a twentieth century German art movement focused on realistic portraiture in opposition to the
romantic subjectivity of Expressionism
New Vision a post-World War I photography movement that used inventive and unorthodox techniques, such as
extreme close-ups, negative printing, and photograms, to experience and reframe, rather not just depict, the
world
Non-Aligned Movement an organization of 120 member nations that sought alternatives to the bipolar politics that
dominated the Cold War era
non-productive labor a theory developed by eighteenth century economist Adam Smith identifying work which
does not produce essential goods and therefore does not contribute to economic growth
objecthood the condition of being an object
Old Master paintings created by European painters between the Renaissance and 1800
ontology the philosophical study of the nature of existence; in art, it considers the matter, form, and mode in which
art exists
Orientalism western representations of the cultures and history of North Africa, the Levant, and Asia relying heavily
on stereotypes and focused on themes such as the harem
panoptic “all seeing,” or an image that presents a panoramic view
photo-chronographic the process of viewing the progression of time through artistic intervention
photogram an image created by placing objects on photosensitive material before exposing it to a light source

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 306 KEY TERMS

photographic humanism the belief that photography can communicate of “universal” values
photomontage an image constructed by merging elements of two or more photographs
Photoshop a computer program that allows artists to edit digital images
Pictorialism a photographic movement that mimicked the soft and romantic properties of painting
Pictures Generation a group formed in New York City in the 1970s dealing with issues of identity, consumerism,
and authenticity through the medium of photography, flm, and performance
Polaroid a camera with internal processing that produces a fnished print rapidly after each exposure
portrait photography a formal, posed image of an individual or group often taken in a studio with props, furnishings,
and backdrops
postcolonialism a period of rising nationalism and independence during the early to mid-twentieth century linked to
the decline of imperialism
post-internet art an artistic movement responding to the infuence of the internet and increasing interconnectivity
beginning in the late twentieth century
postmodernism a late-twentieth century movement founded on the ideas of skepticism and relativism through the
dismissal of ideology which questions the very idea of art
Provoke artists named after a short-lived 1968–9 Japanese photography magazine promoting progressive imagery
and cultural criticism through blurred or grainy photographs
punctum term developed in 1980 by philosopher Roland Barthes to describe a visual element or detail which
emotionally ties the viewer with the image
radical ethnography the practice of using traditional ethnographic imagery to critique globalization and the ongoing
effects of imperialism
rayograph a camera-less technique developed by artist Man Ray where images were created by placing small
everyday items on photosensitive paper
realism an attempt to render a truthful image by removing subjectivity, artistic convention, and idealization
referent an object, person, action, or idea denoted by a sign or symbol
representational certainty the belief that the image faithfully captures the physical reality, related to the indexical
nature of photography
Royal Academy of Art a professional art society established in 1648 in France and 1768 in England that ran
schools of instruction, held annual or semi-annual exhibitions, and provided venues where artists could display
their work and cultivate critical notice
settler colonial state the governmental practice of moving citizens from the metropole to the periphery to replace
the indigenous population such as practiced by England in the United States and France in Algeria
simulacrum an imitation or representation of something
snapshot a photograph usually taken quickly by an amateur using a handheld camera
social construction a theory that understandings of the world are created through shared assumptions about
reality
solarization photographic process in which an image is reproduced in reverse, such that light tones become dark
and dark tones become light
spectacle culture a theory developed by Guy Debord in 1967 critiquing the passive and fetishistic consumption of
mass media
staged photography images that are set up or artifcially created
stereoscope a nineteenth century viewing device which displays two images of the same object taken at slightly
different angles, creating an optical illusion of depth and dimensionality
stock photography professional, generic images licensed for commercial use
straight photography a term coined by critic Sadakichi Hartmann in 1916 calling for detailed and sharply focused
images rather than those that are manipulated to look like paintings
street photography images capturing everyday life in public, urban settings, often through random and chance
encounters between the photographer and his or her subject/s
subjective photography an international movement founded in Germany by the photographer Otto Steinert in
1951, which championed photography that explored the inner psyche and human condition rather than refecting
the outside world
sublime the experience of beauty, grandeur, or majesty which creates a sense of awe

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 KEY TERMS 307

Surrealism an early twentieth century artistic movement which attempted to tap into the unconscious mind through
strange or incongruous images departing from the principles of realism
tableau photography a staged image in which the scene and fgures are organized to create a narrative and greatly
inspired by painting traditions
tableau vivant a “living picture” in which costumed fgures pose silently within a space, combining theatrical and
visual traditions
taonga a Maˉori term for cultural treasures such as images of their ancestors
topographic photography a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of U.S. photographers
whose pictures, mostly black-and-white prints of the landscape, had a banal aesthetic
trap camera a remotely activated camera which allows an image to be captured without a photographer being
present
truth value the belief in the veracity of photography
vanitas an image containing symbolic representations of death to create a moralizing message for the viewer.
vernacular photography photographs made by amateurs, studio practitioners, and itinerant and press photographers
unconcerned with the medium’s fne art applications
zine an informal, self-published magazine with a small circulation produced by an individual or a small group

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 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Subhankar Banerjee is a photographer, writer, and activist, engaging with intersectional ecology,
climate change, and the sixth extinction. Banerjee is Lannan Chair and Professor of Art and Ecology at
the University of New Mexico, and is currently co-editing, with T. J. Demos and Emily Eliza Scott, a
volume on contemporary art, visual culture, and climate change.

Stephanie Baptist is an independent cultural producer and Director of Medium Tings, a gallery and
project space in Brooklyn. She is the editor of Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies
in Africa and previously served as Head of Exhibitions for Tiwani Contemporary. Baptist holds an MA in
Arts Administration from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Khaled Barakeh is a Berlin-based conceptual artist and cultural artivist who graduated from art academies
in Syria, Denmark, and Germany. His works revolve around power structures in the context of politics,
identity, and culture. As a continuation of his artistically and socially engaged activities he has founded the
non-proft CoCulture, focused on connecting and empowering Syrian cultural producers worldwide.

Charlotte Cotton is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. She is the editor of the Aperture books
Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Confguration of the Self (2018) and Photography is
Magic (2015).

T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment
Today (2017), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016), The Migrant
Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (2013), and Return to the Postcolony:
Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013).

Heather Diack is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Miami. She is the
author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (2020).

Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University. She is the author of The
Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010) and a co-editor
of Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffc in Pain (2007).

Namiko Kunimoto is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at Ohio State University. She
is author of The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (2017).

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 310 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Juan David Laserna Montoya received a master’s degree in plastic visual arts from the Universidad
Nacional de Colombia. He is a member of the MASKI Collective and in 2017 he won Colombia’s
prestigious IX Premio Nacional Luis Caballero. Currently he lives and works in Bogotá.

Prita Meier is Associate Professor of African Art History at New York University. She is the author of
Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) and has published articles in The Art Bulletin,
Art History, African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Artforum, as well as contributions
in edited books.

Timothy Persons is the founder and director of Gallery Taik Persons in Berlin. He is an adjunct professor
and director of the Professional Studies Program at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and
Architecture in Helsinki, Finland, as well as the principal architect and leader of the Helsinki School.

Amy L. Powell is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM) at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her exhibitions at KAM include Autumn Knight: In Rehearsal,
Attachment (2017), Time/Image (2016), and Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to
Dance? (2016). Previously she was the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at Blaffer Art Museum
at the University of Houston, where she organized solo projects with Zineb Sedira, Clarissa Tossin, and
Anna Cambell.

Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) makes
contemporary art, edits books, curates exhibitions, and stages situations. It has collaborated with architects,
computer programmers, writers, curators, and theatre directors, and has made flms. It co-founded Sarai—
the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi—in
2001, where it initiated processes that have left a deep impact on contemporary culture in India.

Martha Rosler is an artist working primarily in photography and video, focusing primarily on the public
sphere and the media, as well as on architecture, housing, and the built environment. Her work is in major
international collections and has been shown both nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
Her writings on art and culture have been widely published. Recent books include Decoys and Disruptions
(2004) and Culture Class (2013). A comprehensive book on her work, Irrespective was published in 2018.

Drew Sawyer is the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the
Brooklyn Museum. His recent exhibitions include Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha (2019), Garry Winogrand:
Color (2019), Art after Stonewall: 1969–1989 (2019), Allan Sekula: Aerospace Folktales and Other Stories
(2017), Lucy Raven: Low Relief (2016), and The Sun Placed in the Abyss (2016).

Barry Stone is Professor and Coordinator of the Photography Program at the School of Art and Design
at Texas State University. His work is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. He is
also the founding member of the artist collective, Lakes Were Rivers.

Gina McDaniel Tarver is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University. She is a co-editor
of Art Museums of Latin America: Structuring Representation (2018) and the author of The New
Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961–1975 (2016).

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 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 311

Terri Weissman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
She is the author of The Realisms of Berenice Abbott (2010) and a co-author with Sharon Corwin and
Jessica May of American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans and Bourke-White
(2011).

Marta Zarzycka is a researcher studying User Experience for a tech company in Austin, Texas, and
formerly Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Gendered Tropes
in War Photography: Mothers, Mourners, Soldiers (2016) and a co-editor of Carnal Aesthetics:
Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (2012).

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 INDEX

Aalto University, Finland 26, 27 African Dilemma: A Survey of Urban Conditions

Abbott, Berenice 67–9, 77 (1952) exhibition 246–7
Abel, Elizabeth 297 African Hair Braiding Salon Reader 270
absence, ethics and 117–20 African Masks After Walker Evans: 1–24 (2014)
Abstract Expressionism 24, 303 series 195
abstraction African Negro Art (1935) exhibition 195
abstract labor 176–9 Afro-pessimism 216, 217, 219, 303
abstract, term 14, 303 After Walker Evans (1981) series 194
camera-less photography and 14–15 afterimages 141–6
description and 11–25 Against the Anthropocene 96
Helsinki School and 27–8 Agarwal, Ravi 101, 103
Ishimoti Yasuhiro’s use of 166 Agassiz, Louis 111
realism and 177 agency
representation and 170–1, 172 African 215–19, 230
Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller (“the absence of of animals 103
the claimants”) series 178–9 AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung—Worker’s Illustrated
Acosta Lopez, Maria del Rosario 120 Newspaper) 139
activism, environmental 97, 100 Akhlaghi, Azadeh 44–6
Ad Marginem (painting) 21 Alaska, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) 90–1,
Adam, Eddie 137, 185 93, 96
Adams, Ansel 213–14 The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture,
Adaptations (2016) series 28 Politics 94
Adler, Fabienne 166 album-making 192
Adobe Photoshop 33, 39, 211, 270, 306 alienation 125, 283 (see also anomie)
advertisement extraction 198–202 Aliento (Breath) (1996–2002) series 118–20
aesthetics Almerisa (1994–2008) series 64
aesthetic value of family photographs 229 Almerisa, Asylum Center, Leiden, The Netherlands,
ideology and 162 March 14, 1994, photograph 64, 65
Japanese 13 Almond, Darren 293–4
the mobilization of 166 Alphen, Ernst van 233, 246
post-representational 130 Alptekin, Hüseyin Bahri 186–7
tableau 140 ambrotypes 66, 303
Afghanistan 148, 150 America. See United States
Africa (see also names of individual countries) América Latina 1960–2013 exhibition 209
African agency 215–19, 230 American Earth and A Moral Choice for the United
archival loss 238 States 95
black African diasporic identity 270 American Earth: Environmental Writing Since
research on African photography 240–1 Thoreau 95
Swahili coast 240–3 The American Snapshot: An Exhibition of the Folk
Africa Explores: 20th-Century African Art (1991) Art of the Camera (1944) exhibition 227–8,
exhibition 215 229, 230

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 314 INDEX

analog photography 33, 303 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Alaska 90–1,
Anchalee Koyama, Taweewattana District, Bangkok, 93, 96
Thailand, November 2011, photograph 116 Are We Good Enough (2015–17) series 269
Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico Argentina 175–6
(1873), photograph 88, 89 Arles. Cloister of Saint-Trophîme (c.1851), photograph
And babies project 183, 184 53–4
Angola Pavilion (2013), photograph 170 Armstrong, Carol 14, 249
Angolan Civil War (1975–2002) 144–5 Arranged by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage, and
animals, agency of 103 Cheryl Bishop at Paine Webber, Inc., NYC
animation 289 (1982) 213
annotation, correspondence and 221–4 Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York
anomie 217, 303 (see also alienation) (1984) 213
Anthropocene era 90, 96–100, 104, 109n.17, 303 Arrangements of Pictures (1982) exhibition 212–13
anthropological photography 220 art (see also painting(s))
anthropometric photography 64, 303 in the Anthropocene 96–100
Anthropométries (1960–1) 18 art photography 213–14
anti-apartheid movement 303 (see also South Africa) arte popular 175
anti-cinematic 295 conceptual art 46, 59, 184, 304
Antin, Eleanor 59–60 exceptionalism and 99
Apagya, Philip Kwame 274–7 fashion and 259
apartheid. See South Africa folk art 227–8, 304
Apel, Dora 146 form 161–76
Aperture magazine 96 global turn in 3
appropriation hairstyles as 267
advertisement extraction 198–202 photograms and 12
altered histories 188–94 photography and 4, 159
of iconic images 184–8 photography as 122, 161, 173, 207, 214, 250
from image-sharing websites 211 political ecology and 95
ownership, authorship, and originality 194–8 post-internet 211, 306
photography and 183–4 still life 168
term 303 value in 170
Approximation (peacock spider) (2015) sculpture 210 Art Das Kunstmagazin journal 26
Arab Image Foundation (AIF) 234, 236 Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) 183, 184
Arab Spring 16, 44, 303 arte popular 175
Arbus, Diane 122, 125, 168 Asahi Shin- bun newspaper 72
Archeology of the Industrial Age (1986–1992), Asia-Africa Bandung Conference (1955) 190
project 77 Asokan, Ratik 168
Archiv (1986–1999) project 234–6 Associated Press 150
Archive (1995), photograph 233 Atkins, Anna 14, 15
Archive Fever 234, 244, 248 “Aufbruch im hohen Norden” (Emerging in the Far
archives North) 26
archival loss 238 aura 211, 303
archive, term 303 Australia 16–17, 287
“archivization” process 236 authenticity
collections 234–9, 244–53 photojournalism and 135
digital 245 snapshots and 123
memory and 244–8 of war photographs 143
photographic 233–4 authority 61
photography and the 251 avant-garde
power of 245 fashion and 259
time and 248–53 Italian 164
Arctic 92, 96 mode of installation 175

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 INDEX 315

photography and 180, 250 Beshty, Walead 179

Russian 162 Between the Lines (2009), photograph 48
term 303 Bicker, Phil 272
Avedon, Richard 262–3 Binschtok, Viktoria 178–9
Azoulay, Ariella 3, 149 Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change
Howled Low Blowing Itself—Ha—Smack Into
Bacigalupo, Martina 126–7 the Middle of Ellington’s Orchestra Billie Heard It
Back from school (Unrecognised no. 5) (1999–2000), Too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears (1995–6),
photograph 113, 114 photograph 111, 112
Badger, Gerry 215 Black Lives Matter movement 186
Bajac, Quentin 209 Blalock, Lucas 211
Bajorek, Jennifer 238 Blind Woman (1916), photograph 295
Baker, George 210, 282 Blumenfeld, Erwin 259, 260
Baldus, Édouard 53–4 Blushes series 22
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980s), slide “The Body and the Archive” 60
show 291 body(ies)
Balloons, photograph 138–9, 150 description, abstraction and 15–20
Baloji, Sammy 63, 64, 78 frst records of human presence in war as bodies
Banerjee, Subankar 90–100, 103, 309 223
Baptist, Stephanie 266–9, 309 ideology of the Soviet state and 162–4
Barakeh, Khaled 148–9, 151–4, 309 measuring the body 59–79
Barnack, Oskar 162 photograms and 29
Barnes, Martin 12 photography and 240, 242
Barr, Alfred H. 211 self and body 66–70
Barrada, Yto 84–5 Boltanski, Christian 245–6
Barthes, Roland 252, 283 borders 84–90, 107
Basutoland National Council (1947), photograph 218, born-digital images 225, 303
219 botanical book illustration 11–12
Batchen, Geoffrey 17, 225, 227 botanical photograms 14
Bate, David 3, 251–2 La Bouilloire (Tea Kettle) (2014), photograph 298
Baudelaire, Charles 44 Boulevard du Temple in Paris (1839), photograph 176–7
Bauhaus 24, 171, 173, 303 Brady, Mathew 148
Bayard, Hippolyte 172–3 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio 164–5
Bayer, Herbert 173, 175 Brandon, Laura 143
bearing witness, war photographs 146–51 Braudel, Fernand 249
Beato, Felice 137, 223, 288 Brazil 77
beauty Brecht, Bertolt 147
owning beauty 266–9 Breton, André 18–19
photography and 268, 269 The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The
war photographs and 143, 144, 151 Large Glass) (painting) 259
Becher, Bernd 104–6, 178 Brizuela, Natalia 2
Becher, Hilla 104–6, 178 Brodovitch, Alexey 266, 273
beDevil (1993), flm 287 Brody, Neville 272
Bedford, Christopher 161 Broomberg, Adam 147–8
Before and After my Grandmother Passed Away Brown, Elspeth H. 178
(1989–1994) 187 Brown, Wendy 75
Bell, Clare 216 Bruno, Giuliana 290
Bengal School of Art 190 Buchloh, Benjamin 105, 178, 264
Benjamin, Walter 6, 198, 211, 237–8, 246 Buckley, Liam 238
Berger, Maurice 77 Buntinx, Gustavo 209
Berghain nightclub, Berlin 23 The Burden of Representation: Essays on
Berkeley, Georgina 192 Photographies and Histories 118

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 316 INDEX

Burtynsky, Edward 98, 116 Casebere, James 51

Bush, George W. 115 Celant, Germano 169
Bush Smiling, Help Us (2005), photograph 115–16 celebrity style
By An Eyewitness series 44, 46 celebrity 259–78
celebrity portraiture 261–4, 277
Cadava, Eduardo 92–3, 198 design and the editorial layout 265–6, 270–3
Caesar 154 the politics and power of dress 274–7
Café-de-Move-On Braamfontein, Johannesburg. censorship 148, 153
November, 1964, photograph 106–7 Center for African Art, New York 215
Cahun, Claude 67 Centro de Fotografía in Montevideo, Uruguay 248
Camera Craft magazine 213 Ceylon/Fern (1854), digital image 15
camera-less photography Chagas, Edgar 169–70
abstraction in 14–15 Chairman Mao at the Xiyuan Airport in Beijing, 1949
chemigrams 21–2, 303 (1978) 188, 189
of Floris Neusüss 18 Chamberlain, Colby 211
luminograms 21, 305 Chanarin, Oliver 147–8
origins of 11 chance 35–6, 52
photograms. See photograms Chases High School (1988) installation 245–6
the referentiality of photographs and 23–4 Chasing Shadows (1996) series 83–4
representing the unseen 15–16 Chemigram 7/5/82 II «Pauli Kleei Ad Marginem» (1982)
restaging history 16–17 21, 22
of Susan Derges 12 chemograms (chemigrams) 21–2, 303
term 303 children
Camera Lucida 252 forced assimilation of 196–7
cameras refugee 150, 153
camera phone technology 33, 130, 131 Chile 121
Kodak rollflm cameras 228–9 China
large format 64, 102, 118, 285, 305 cultural friction 285
Leica cameras 135, 162, 305 Cultural Revolution (1966–76) 187, 188, 285, 304
Linhof camera 102 modernization 102, 103
trap cameras 103, 307 portraiture 130
Campany, David 47, 284 Tiananmen Square/government policies 128–30
Campos-Pons, María Magdalena 66–7 Yellow river 101–3
Campt, Tina 127, 245 Chinese Male with very long plait against a Lamprey
Canada 127–8, 196–7, 225, 226–7 grid—profle (c.1870) diptych 61, 62
Capa, Robert 135–6, 137 The Chisso Corporation: Waste-water, #1,
Capacity/Capacities (1998), photograph 186, 187 photograph 72
Cape Verde 293 choreographed images 45
Capital 177 chromolithographs 241
capitalism 69–70, 177, 186 chronocyclegraphs 178
capitalist globalization 242 (see also globalization) chronophotography 177, 295, 303
Caplan, Jay 46 cinema
Car Poolers (2011–12), series 75–6 the anti-cinematic 295
Caribou Migration I (2002), photographs 90–1, 93 motion pictures 289–91
Carr, Emily 127 photography and the cinematic 281–99
Carson, Rachel 38 sound and 291
Cartagena, Alejandro 75 Circles and Squares (A Tasteful Organic Melons
Carter, Shawn. See Jay-Z Arrangement) (2007), photograph 159, 168
cartes de visites 41, 192, 241, 242, 303 Citizen in Downtown Havana (1933), photograph 273
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 224, 283 Citizens of the Twentieth Century project 64–6
CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) series 59 City Wall—Beijing (2006) series 130
Cascading Attica (2011), photograph 49 civil contract, of photography 149

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 INDEX 317

Civil Rights movement 186 Construct NYC 11 (1982) photograph 171

Clarke, Graham 192 constructions, truth and fction and 48–54
class Constructivism 162, 171, 193, 304
the class system 179 “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology” 94–5
photography and 66 control, photography and 60, 64, 118
working class 75–6 Cordier, Pierre 21–2
Cleo (2009), photograph 48 correspondence, annotation and 221–4
climate change 90, 116, 131 (see also ecology) Cotter, Holland 126
Close to Home (2005) series 115 Cotton, Charlotte 96–100, 309
Close to Home: An American Album (2004) exhibition counterculture 273 (see also culture(s))
225 Countess de Castiglione (1837–99), photograph 69
Colard, Sandrine 63 Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione
Cold War, Non-Aligned Movement 190, 305 (1861–7), photograph 70
Cole, Henry 214 Cowboys (1980), series 89–90
Cole, Teju 169, 196, 197 Crimean War (1853–6) 143
Coleman, A.D. 52–3, 214 Crimp, Douglas 194, 213, 257
collaboration, fashion photography and 273 critique of documentary photography 114, 149, 218,
collections 304
archives 234–9, 244–53 Cuba 67
museums 209–19, 224–30 Cubism 171, 304
photographic 4 Cuerpo a cuerpo (Body to body) (2011) series 175–6
photographs and 207 culture(s)
Colombia 119–20 African American 270
Colonial Museum (c.1880), photograph 251 American 67, 261
colonialism celebrity portraiture and 277
Australia 287 counterculture 273
colonial modernity 190 cult value of photographs 211
decolonialization 250, 304 cult value, term 304
documentary photography and 216 cultural appropriation 196–7
ethnographic photographs of colonized peoples cultural friction in China 285
60–4 cultural identity 42
museums and 195 cultural memory 41
photography and 107, 240, 288 cultural politics 166
postcolonialism 215, 306 cultural value of photography 33
power and 62 culture industry 261
settler colonial states 88, 306 dress and 269
term 303 fashion and 274
color-feld paintings 23, 24, 304 nature and 103
Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square, London spectacle culture 261, 306
(1844), photograph 251–2 visual 130
combination printing 48, 304 youth 272–3
Come on Board (2000), photograph 276–7 yuppie culture 76
commodifcation, of the snapshot 230 Curtis, Edward 42–4, 196
communities, non-human (animal) 90 Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture 268
Competition (2004), photograph 285–6 Cuzco School of Photography 41, 304
conceptual art 46, 59, 184, 304 cyanotype process 14, 304
confict photography 4, 112 cynical realism 129
Connell, Kelli 33
consciousness, stigma and 125 Dada-Review (1919), photomontage 191
conservatism 273 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 5, 176–7
Construct (1980s) series 171 daguerreotypes 66, 111, 176, 265
Construct A + A (1984), photograph 171 Daidō, Moriyama 250

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 318 INDEX

DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA 34–8 Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène 192

Darwin, Charles 37, 294 dislocation
Dashti, Gohar 140–1 identifcation and 120–2, 126–31
Davis, Keith F. 52 social fragmentation and 284
Davison, George 227–8 “Dismantling Modernism” 114
de Zayas, Marius 159 displacement
The Death of Sardanapalus (painting) 47 identity and 127
Debord, Guy 261 war photographs and 142
decisive moment 283, 284, 286, 304 Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) (1935), photograph 162–4
decolonialization 250, 304 (see also colonialism) documentary
Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the documentary photography 114, 131, 149, 216–18,
Politics of Ecology 95 304
Degradés series 23–4 documents and 123–6
dehumanization 61 social 113, 121, 122, 217
Delacroix, Eugène 47 documentation, representation and 283
Demand, Thomas 48, 233 domination, photography as a tool of 64
dematerialization 24, 304 Double Life series 33
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 63, 143 double-ness 67
Demonstration (1932), photograph 162 Douglass, Frederick 66
Demos, T.J. 85, 96–100, 113, 309 dress (see also fashion)
Derges, Susan 12–13 culture and 269
Derrida, Jacques 234, 244, 248 identity and 268, 271
Deschenes, Liz 173–5 the politics and power of 274–7
description, abstraction and 11–25 Drowning World (2007, ongoing), project 116–17
desensitization, to images 186 Drum magazine 216
design, and the editorial layout 265–6, 270–3 Duchamp, Marcel 259
The Destroyed Room (1978), photograph 47 Duganne, Erina 198–202, 309
Deutsche, Rosalyn 24 Duggan-Cronin, Alfred 217
Di Bello, Patrizia 192 Dunaway, Finis 84
Diack, Heather 309 duration, photography and 292–4
Die Abwesenheit der Antragsteller (“the absence of the Düsseldorf School of Photography 104, 304
claimants”) series 178–9 Dye, Veronica 33
“Diagram of 360 Degrees Field of Vision” (drawing)
173 Eastman Kodak Company 227, 304 (see also Kodak)
diaspora, Vietnamese 245 Eastman Photographic Exhibition (1889) 228–9, 230
diasporic identities 67, 270 Eastman Photographic Materials Company, England
Dicko, Saïdou 298 228
difference 61, 64, 260 Ebert, Friedrich 191
digital archives 245 ecology 90–1 (see also climate change)
digital manipulation 33 ecocritical voices 92–100
digital photography 33, 34–8, 211, 304 mapping the land 90–1, 101–4
digital technology 33, 54, 207, 283, 298 multispecies ecological being 104
Dijkstra, Rineke 64 The Edge of the Sea 38
Dikgoro with Washing Line (1996), photograph 83, editorial layout, design and the 265–6, 270–3
84, 106 Edwards, Elizabeth 207, 233, 253
Dinius, Mary J. 265 Einstein, Albert 263–4
directorial mode 52–3, 304 eizô 166
Dirt Farmer, Hertzel, West Virginia (1935), photograph El Popular newspaper 248
77 emotion, moving images and 290
DIS magazine 130 environment
discipline 64 environmental activism 97, 100
discrimination, photography and 40 environmental issues 74

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 INDEX 319

long environmentalism 95–6 Fabry, Alexis 209

normalization of environmental disasters 116 The Face journal 272, 273
Enwezor, Okwui 215, 216–17, 219 Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit) 66, 238
Equivalents (1920s) series 161 Facebook 152, 153, 192
Erasure (2011), photograph 244, 245 Falling Soldier (1936), photograph 135–6, 137
Eros magazine 273, 279n.22 The Family Camera (2017) exhibition 225–6, 227
Essaydi, Lalla 66–7 Family Camera Network 225
Essop, Hasan and Husain 39–40 Family Love (multimedia project) 291
“An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures” 176 The Family of Man (1955) exhibition 227
ethics family photography 225, 229, 230
absence and 117–20 Farocki, Harun 74
identifcation, dislocation and 120–2 fascism 164, 265
photography and 111–12, 131 fashion (see also dress)
photojournalism 9 art and 259
pictures of war 135–55 culture and 274
politics of representation and 113–22 (see also fashion industry 273
representation) fashion photography 268, 273
theme of 4 identity and 274
violence and 112 the language of 259–66
visual signs 114–17 politics and 278
ethnography FashionFashion (2002–6) zine 270–2
ethnographic imagery 60, 63–4, 78 Fatescapes (2009–10) series 184–5
ethnographic photography 304 Feldman, Hannah 234
photography and 43 feminism, multicultural 127
racial 215 Les Femmes du Maroc series 67
radical 60–6, 306 Ferran, Anne 16–18
term 304 Ferrez, Marc 77
Euro-centricism 2 fction, truth and 33–4, 39–54
Evans, Walker 194, 195–6, 273 Figueroa Aznar, Juan Manuel 41–2, 44
Evening Sun newspaper 120 flm
evidence Kodak Aerochrome 143
labor and 74–9 photography and 292
measuring the body 59–79 Film und Foto (Fifo) (1929) exhibition 171, 236–7
provided by photographs 57, 137 Filmer, Mary Georgina Caroline 192
radical ethnography 60–6, 306 flmmaking 45–6, 281–99
self and body 66–70 Fineman, Mia 188
theme of 4 Finland, Helsinki School 26–8
Evin Hills, Tehran—Bijan Jazani, leftist intellectual who “First Manifesto of Surrealism” 18
was executed in mysterious circumstances “The frst wild animal to take its own picture” (1891),
(1975), photograph 45 photograph 103, 104
exceptionalism fash powder 120
American exceptionalism 303 Flickr 207
art and 99 Florence, Hercule 2
human 90, 304 Flyer Photograph (2011) 16
exclusions 125, 126, 297–8 Focus 213
Execution Squares (2008) series 117–18 folk art 227–8, 304
exhibition value 211, 304 Fontcuberta, Joan 198
exile 86 Foo, Cynthia 127
expanded feld 5, 257–66, 270–8, 282, 298 For the Great Achievements in Agriculture (1959)
exploitation 111 (original black and white paste up photos) 188
Extracción publicitaria (Advertisement Extraction) form 161–76
(2012-ongoing) series 198–202 hybridity and objecthood 172–6

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 320 INDEX

the shape of vision 162–8 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 67

the unexpected in the ordinary 168–72 Ghana 238–9, 275–7
formalism 165, 304 (see also New Formalism) Ghirri, Luigi 168–9
Fotodinamismo Futurista 164 Gilbreth, Frank Bunker 177–8
Fotogramm/Würmer (2013) 13 Gilbreth, Lillian Moller 177–8
Fotogramme series 12 Ginzburg, Ralph 273, 279n.22
Found Not Taken (2013) series 169–70 Girl in Red, Tangier (1999), photograph 85
framing Glissant, Édouard 3
meaning and 121 Global Photographies: Memories—History—Archives 2
modernist-formalist 122 globality 3
performative frame 125 globalization 3, 100, 101, 186, 242, 270, 304
France 53–4, 175–6 Godeau, Abigail Solomon 162
Freischwimmer series 22, 23 Godfrey, Mark 143
Fremont, Charles 177 Goffman, Erving 124–5
Friedlander, Lee 122, 125 Gold in the Morning (1985), photograph 77
Friedrich, Ernst 146 Goldblatt, David 106–7, 216
Frith, Francis 9 Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–6) 213
series 111–12 Goldin, Nan 291
Fukada, Toshio 144 Goldstein, Jack 212
Fullmoon series 293–4 Gonzalez, Aurelio 248
Fullmoon@Cerro Chaltén (2013), photograph 294 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 161
Futurism 164, 304 Google 195, 198
Futurist Manifesto 164 Googlegram: Niepce (2005) project 198
Göring, Hermann 139
Gallery Taik 26 Gotland 294
Gallun, Lucy 209 Goya, Francisco José de 45
The Game of Probabilities (2007), photograph 118 Graham, Amanda 120
Gardner, Alexander 137, 148 Graham, Mark Miller 2
Garrow, David 186 The Grand Trunk Road (1991–1995) series 167
Gaskins, Nettrice 270 Graval, Michael 264
gaze The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All
avoiding the prurient gaze 72 Nations (Crystal Palace Exhibition), London
of the camera 261 (1851) 215
inability to escape the 131 The Grotesque in Photography 214
patriarchal 70 Group of Seven 127
of power 68 A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996–7) series 127–8
public 125 Guardian newspaper 291
Gécamines mining company, Democratic Republic of Guatemala, civil war 292–3
the Congo (DRC) 63 Guernica (painting) 184
gender Guerrilla Art Action Group 183
challenging gender roles/compulsory Guevara, Che 200
heterosexuality 67, 68 Gulu Real Art Studio 126
social construction of 18 Gupta, Atreeyee 189, 190
genre, term 304 Gursky, Andreas 75
Germany Gyozoku no ikari (Anger of Fish Tribes) (1957), mixed
Berghain nightclub, Berlin 23 media work 73–4
Nazis 66, 139, 246, 264
New Vision (neues Sehen)/New Objectivity (neue Haeberle, Ron 183
Sachlichkeit) movements 24–5, 236–7, 305 “Hair Braiding is Technology” 270
post-World War II 104–5 Hairstyles (1960 onward) series 266
Weimar Republic 64, 139, 191–2 hairstyles, as art 267

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 INDEX 321

Hajjaj, Hassan 269 How the Other Half Lives 121

Hakiwai, Arapata 250 Hoymeyer, Boris 26
Hall, Emily 48 Hughes, Jim 73
Hall, Stuart 283 human exceptionalism 90, 304
Hands Resting on a Tool (1927), photograph 77 human rights violations, Iraq War 283
Haney, Erin 238 humanism, photographic 60, 306
Haraway, Donna 99, 103–4 Hunt, Robert 14
Hardy, K8 270–2 hunting, photography and 103
Harper’s Bazaar magazine 266, 273 “Hurrah! The butter is fnished!” (Hurrah, die Butter ist
Harris, Lawren 127 alle!) (1935), photomontage 139, 140
Hartmann, Sadakichi 213 Hurricane Katrina 115–16
Harvey, David 171 hybridity, and objecthood 172–6
Hassan, Salah 209 hypervisibility 131
Have You Seen the Flowers on the River? (2007–12),
series 101 i-D journal 272–3
Head Space (2011), exhibition 49 I-Lann, Yee 61–3, 64, 78
Heartfeld, John 139–40, 191 iconic images, appropriation of 184–8
Heide, Sara van der 12 identifcation, dislocation and 120–2, 126–31
Heise, Carl Georg 237 identity(ies)
Helff, Sissy 2 Aboriginal 287
Helsinki School 26–8 black African diasporic 270
Henri, Florence 171 black urban 247–8
Herschel, John 14 black women’s 270
Heseltine, Bryan 246–8 Canadian national 127
hijabs 274 Chineseness 128
Hine, Lewis 74 cultural 42
Historic Monuments Commission, France 53 diasporic 67, 270
history/histories displacement and 127
altered 188–94 dress and 268, 271
historical documentation 148 fashion and 274
landscape imagery and 84 identity formation 270
living histories 16 identity photographs 118, 126–7
mapping the land 104–7 masculine in Lagos 269
oral 225, 226 of photography 209
of photography 1–3 photography and 39–40
the restaging of 16–17 politics of 125
slow history 249 representation and 115
time and 6 ideology, aesthetics and 162
A History of Photography 221–2, 223, 224 images
Höch, Hannah 191–2 of active motion 164
Hoda Ketabi 2016, photograph 275 born-digital images 225, 303
Hollywood 261 choreographed images 45
Holocaust, the 246, 304 desensitization to 186
The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg exploration imagery 89
(1865), photograph 148 extended time in still and moving images 292–6
Hornby, Louise 295 iconic 184–8
Horsfeld, Craigie 248–50 image “overload” 207
House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72) landscape imagery 84
series 137, 139, 150 objecthood of 175
House Beautiful magazine 138 power of 116
How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. social media and 152
MOV File (2013) (video projection) 131 “thinking/in the image” 284

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immigrants 120, 127–8 (see also migration) Jay-Z 262

imperialism 62–3, 189–90 (see also colonialism) Jazani, Bijan 45
In a Piegan Lodge (photograph) 43 Jewish people, working class in New York 125
“In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary João Pereira de Araújo, Taquari District, Rio Branco,
Photography)” 122 Brazil, March 2015, photograph 116, 117
in-between spaces 49 Joe May, L’Allegro, photograph 228
In Compounds. A. Positive (1997), photograph 14 Johnston, Steven 272
In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present Jones, Terry 272
exhibition 215, 216, 219 JooJoo Azad blog 274
indexical, term 305 Jordan, Marvin 130
indexicality, of photography 3, 9, 18, 33, 131, 284 Journal of Researches 294
India 101, 189–90, 288 “The Judgment Seat of Photography” 211
indigenismo 41, 305 Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba 74
indigenous peoples, forced assimilation of 196–7 justice, social and environmental 100, 116
Industrial Revolution 176
industrialization 37–8 Karapetian, Farrah 15–16, 18
inequalities, wealth 75, 79 Kasten, Barbara 170–1
Infra (2011) series 143 Katebi, Hobi 274, 275
Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 67 A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American
injustice, social 120, 131 Art History 94–5
Instagram 207, 291 Keïta, Seydou 215, 216, 217
Interior of the Secundra Bagh After the Massacre Kelaranta, Timo 27
(1858), photograph 288–9 Kelsey, Robin 88
internet 153–4, 211, 305 Kenya 274
intersectional approaches 98 Kesh Angels (2010–14) series 269
invisibility, visibility and 114, 117–20, 169 Kessels, Erik 207
Iran 44–5, 274, 284–5 Khuddur Ramayana 190
Iran–Iraq war (1980–8) 140 Kim, Gyewon 250
Iraq War, human rights violations 283 Kitnick, Alex 171
Irvine, Karen 142 Klee, Paul 21–2
ISIS 152 Klein, Yves 18
Islamabad, Pakistan (2014), photograph 151 Kline, Franz 24
Island (2008), video 294–5 Klub Pod Jaszczurami, Rynek Glowny, Krakow,
Israel 85, 87, 113 February 1976 (1991), photograph 249
Italy, Futurism 164 Klutcis, Gustav 192–4
The Itinerant Languages of Photography project Koch, Lucia 50–1
92–3 Kodak 227, 228, 229–30 (see also Eastman Kodak
Company)
J. Paul Getty Museum 225 Kodak Aerochrome flm 143
Jaar, Alfredo 77, 186 Kodak Portfolio—Souvenir of the Eastman
Jacir, Emily 85–6, 88 Photographic Exhibition 1897, a Collection of
Jacobi, Lotte 67, 263–4 Kodak Film Pictures by Eminent Photographers
Jafa, Arthur 99 229
Jameson, Fredric 38 Kodak rollflm cameras 228–9
Janet Flanner (1926), photograph 68, 69 Körperfotogramms 18, 19
Japan Kortun, Vasif 186
aesthetics/philosophy of 13 Kossoy, Boris 2
Hiroshima 144 Koudelka, Joseph 86–8
Meiji era (1868–1912) 166 Kovacovsky, Eva-Fiore 12, 13
Minamata disaster 70–4 Kozloff, Max 167
Nagasaki 144 Kracauer, Siegfried 238, 292
Provoke 250, 306 Krauss, Rosalind 23, 210

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Kriebel, Sabine 139 A Living Doll, photograph 71–2

Krieg dem Kriege! Guerre à la Guerre! War against living histories 16
War! Oorlog aan den Oorlog! 146 Lo Schiaffo (“The Slap”) (1912), photograph 164
Kriegsfbel (War Primer) 147 Lobel, Michael 41
Kruger, Barbara 194 Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement (1889),
Kulagina, Valentina 193 photograph 120
Kunimoto, Namiko 309 Logan, Nick 272
Kuwabara Shisei 70–4 Lokke-Madsen, Charlotte 267
Kyūshū-ha (the Kyūshū School) 73 long environmentalism 95–6
Longer than Life (1997–9) 16–17
labor Longo, Robert 212
abstract 176–9 Los Angeles Times 9, 213
non-productive labor 76, 305 Louis, Morris 23
photography and 74–9 Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016),
Lace Glove (c.1843–7), photograph 172–3 video 99
Lamprey, John 60–1, 62 LTTR collective 270
landscape imagery 84 Luanda, Encyclopedic City exhibition (2013) 170
landscape photography 97 Lubalin, Herb 273
language Lucie’s Fur series 216
of fashion 259–66 Lugon, Olivier 236
visual 113 Lumière, Louis and Auguste 74
large format cameras 64, 102, 118, 285, 305 luminograms 21, 305
Larkin, Jason 75 Luoma, Niko 27, 28
Larrain, Sergio 121
Laserna Montoya, Juan David 198–202, 310 Māori people, New Zealand 250
Lassry, Elad 159, 168 Madani, Hashem el 234
“The Last Oil: A Multispecies Justice Symposium on Madonna of the Slum (1890), photograph 120
Arctic Alaska and Beyond” 95–6 Magnum 86, 121, 135, 305
Latin American photography 209 Magnum in Motion online news platform 290
Lavin, Marguerite 121 Maher, Ahmed 16
Lawler, Louise 194, 211–12 “The Making of Polar Stars: Internationalization of
Lê, An-My 141–2, 143 Finnish Photography and Video Art” 27
“Le Détroit”—Avenue d’Espagne, Tangier (2000), Mali 257–8
photograph 84–5 Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (painting) 127
Lê, Dinh Q. 244–5 Man Ray 18–20, 68
Le Gray, Gustave 36–7 Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (flm) 281–2, 295
Lee, Nikki S. 76–7 Manifest Destiny 88, 305
Leica cameras 135, 162, 305 manipulation, of photographs 33, 188
Lesotho 83 Mao Zedong 188
Let Us Fulfll the Plan of the Great Projects (1930), mapping the land 83
photomontage 194 borders 84–90, 107
Levine, Philippa 62 ecology 90–1, 101–4
Levine, Sherrie 194–5 history 104–7
Levson, Leon 217–19 Marcoci, Roxana 209
Liberia 264–5 Marey, Etienne 165, 177, 295
Liberman, Alexander 273 Marien, Mary Warner 1, 62
Lien, Sigrid 207 Marina de Ravenna (1972), photograph 169
Life and War (2008) series 140–1 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 164
A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004) Marx, Karl 177
84–5 mass media 154
Life magazine 73, 137, 138, 183, 186, 263–4 materiality 5, 23, 115, 202, 233, 239, 305
Linhof camera, large format 102 McCausland, Elizabeth 296

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McKibben, Bill 95 Minamata: Life, Sacred and Profane 72

Meadlo, Paul 184 Minkley, Gary 218, 219
meaning Mishra, Manoi 101
framing and 121 misinformation 130
representation and 23–4 Missions Héliographiques project 53–4, 305
media Mississauga, Art Gallery of 225
global media industry 216 Mitter, Partha 167
mass media 154 modernism 126, 305
media ecologies 291 modernist-formalist frames 122
media representations 40, 115, 116, 130 modernist photography 305
misinformation 130 modernity
online news platforms 290 colonial 190
MediaStorm online news platform 290 performance of 276–7
mediation, of still photographs 290–1 modernization, China 102, 103
Mediterranean with Mount Agde (photograph) 36, 37 Modotti, Tina 77, 165–6
medium-photographers 15 Moffatt, Tracey 285–8
Meet the Bantu (1947) exhibition 218 Mofokeng, Santu 83–4, 106
Meier, Prita 240–3, 310 Moholy, Lucia 24, 171
Meiselas, Susan 292 Moholy-Nagy, László 18, 24, 25, 171, 237
Mémoire (2006) photomontages 63 Monroe, Marilyn 262–3, 273
Memorial Project Minamata: Neither Either nor Neither, Montaya, Delilah 57
A Love Story, video projection 74 Moon Culmination, 1951, photograph 51–2
memory moral certainty 283, 305
accounts of war and 142–3 A Moral Choice for the United States: The Human
archives and 244–8 Rights Implications for the Gwich’in of Drilling in
catharsis, amnesia and 188 the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 95
collective 154, 187 Morgan, Willard D. 227
cultural 41 Morocco, Strait of Gibraltar 84
photographs and 244 Mortensen, William 213–14
repression and 175 Moser, Gabrielle 143
the shaping of 49 Mosse, Richard 143, 144
Memory of War, Toyokawa, Aichi (1959) series 144, motion economy 178
145 motion pictures 289–91
Mendel, Gideon 116–17 movement, stillness and 290
Mental Pictures series 22 moving stills 289–91
Metro Pictures, New York 212–13 Muaze, Mariana de Aguiar Ferreira 77–8
Metropolitan Museum of Art 225 Muheisen, Muhammed 150–1
Metz, Christian 292 Multicultural Graveyard album 153
Mexico 75, 166, 295–6 multiplicity 67
Michaels, Walter Benn 179 multispecies ecological being 104, 305
Michel, Stefanie 2 Muñoz, Oscar 118–20
Middle East 86 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 40, 122, 183, 184,
Midsummer Night (2014) exhibition 12, 13 209–10, 213, 214, 227, 230
The Migrant Image (2013) 100 museums (see also names of individual museums)
migration (see also immigrants) African agency and 215–19, 230
to Canada 226–7 collections 209–19, 224–30
mass 120, 265–6 colonialism and 195
MiMundo.org 292 digital technologies and 207
Minamata disaster, photography of 70–4 everyday pictures 224–30
Minamata: factory effuent and coastal fsherman the judgment seat 209–19, 229, 230, 236
(1962) exhibition 71 photography and 209

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Muslim population, South Africa 39–40 Nouzeilles, Gabriela 92–3

Mutiti, Nontsikelelo 270, 272 Novitskova, Katja 210–11
Muybridge, Eadweard 295 Novyi lef journal 281

Nachtwey, James 154 objecthood 172–6, 305

Nagasaki 144 objectifcation, of women 242–3
nahdah 277, 305 objectivity, photojournalism and 9
Namiko Kunimoto 70–4 Objects of study/The archive of studio Shehrazade/
Narula, Monica 219–24 Hashem el Madani/Studio Practices (1948–
Nascimento, Paula 170 1982) series 234, 235
National Geographic magazine 103 Obst (1929), photograph 171–2
The Native Way of Life (1950) exhibition 218 Occupied Palestinian Territories 85–6, 87, 113
naturalism 177 Ocean of Images (2015) exhibition 209–11
nature O’Donnell, Edward T. 121
culture and 103 Ogunbanwo, Lakin 269
description, abstraction and 11–15 Ojeikere, J. D. ’Okhai 266–9
photograms and 29 Old Master paintings 47, 305
photography and 36–7 Old Time Coast Village (painting) 127
Nayar, Yamini 48–50, 51 Ollman, Leah 51
neoliberalism 75–6, 305 “On a Method of Measuring the Human Form” 60
Nesbit, William 103 On Photography 198, 268
networks, of solidarity 190 On the Art of Cutting Metals 177
Neufeld, Nicole Elizabeth 128 O’Neill, Alistair 273
Neusüss, Floris 18, 19 Onile Gogoro/Akaba (1975), photograph 266, 267
New Abstractions (1998–2001) series 24 online news platforms 290
New Documents (1967) exhibition 122–6 ontology of photography 172
New Formalism 161, 305 ontology, term 305
New Gallery, London 228 Opening Night at the Rex Theater Hannibal, MO
New Indianist movement 41–2, 305 (1912), photograph 297–8
New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) movement, Opie, Catherine 114–15
Germany 236, 237, 305 oppression, spatial 83
“New Photography”, MoMA 209–10 oral histories 225, 226
New Vision (neues Sehen) movement, Germany 24–5, Oratorio (2013), photograph 50
236–7, 305 Orientalism 67, 305
New Woman 191 Origin of the Species 37
New York Times 16, 185 orphaned images/orphan works 245
New York Tribune 120, 265 Ossai, Ruth 274
New Zealand 250 Ostgut Freischwimmer rechts/Ostgut Freischwimmer
Newbury, Darren 216, 217, 218, 219, 246, 247 links 23
Newhall, Beaumont 211, 213, 227 Ostgut nightclub, Berlin 23
Newhall, Nancy 227 O’Sullivan, Timothy 88–9, 148
news photography 9 Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the
Newsweek 115 Thomas Walther Collection (2000) exhibition 225
Newton, Gael 2 Otieno, Brian 274
Nicaraguan revolution (1978–9) 292 O’Toole, Erin 227
Niepce, Joseph Nicephore 198 Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption
Nigeria 266, 269, 274 in Globalizing China 129
Noble, Andrea 166 Owens, Craig 122
Non-Aligned Movement, Cold War 190, 305
normalization, of environmental disasters 116 Padrilla, Darcy 291
The North American Indian 42–3 A Pageant of Photography (1940) exhibition 213

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Painting (Monna Lisa) Self Portrait (2010), photograph science and 11–12, 14
260 term 305
Painting, Photography, Film 24 as a vehicle of dematerialization 24–5
painting(s) (see also titles of individual paintings) The Photographer’s Eye 211
chemigrams and 21–2 photographic–flmic hybridity 295
Old Master paintings 47, 305 photographic humanism 60, 306
Orientalist 67 Photographic Sketchbook of the War 148
photograms and 14 Photographic Society of London 214
photography and 44, 54 photographic traces 18
truth, fction and 44–8 photographs, memory and 244
Pakistan 150 photography
Palestine, Occupied Territories 85–6, 87, 113 analog photography 33, 303
panoptic 39, 40, 305 anthropological photography 220
Parade on Red Square (1938), photograph 162 anthropometric photography 64, 303
“paradox of truth” 4 and the archive 251
Parks, Gordon 186 art photography 213–14
Pasek, Anne 36 camera-less. See camera-less photography
Pastry Chef (1928), photograph 65 chronophotography 177, 295, 303
Patagonia 293–4 and the cinematic 281–99
paternalism 218, 219 commercial value of 27
patriarchy 69–70, 194 confict photography 4, 112
Pavement Shop, Howrah, West Bengal (1991), digital 33, 34–8, 211, 304
photograph 167–8 documentary photography 114, 131, 149, 216–18,
Payne, Carol 143 304
Peace Brigades International 292 as encounter 220–1
Peirce, Charles Sanders 9, 11 ethnographic photography 304
Pelizzari, Antonella 164 expanded feld of 5, 257–66, 270–8, 282, 298
“The Pencil of Error: Glitch aesthetics and Post-liquid family photography 225, 229, 230
Intelligence” 36 fashion photography 268, 273
The Pencil of Nature 11, 36–7, 251 flm and 292
A People Apart (1955) exhibition 247 global 3
People Fishing by the River, Shaanzi, China (2012), histories of 1–3
photograph 102–3 informational capacity of 215
performance, of the self 125 modernist photography 305
peripatetic photography 92–100 news photography 9
Persons, Timothy 26–8, 310 peripatetic 92–100
persuasion, as a mode of address 135 politics and 188, 220, 283
Peru 41–2, 51, 261, 304 as “pre-conceived” and “recombined” 131
Phillips, Christopher 211 stock photography 159, 306
philosophy, Japanese 13 straight photography 44, 51, 213, 306
photo-chronographic viewing 292, 305 street photography 47, 161, 167, 209, 306
photocollage, Victorian 192 subjective photography 21, 306
photodynamism 164 survey photography 88, 213, 215
photogenic drawings 11 tableau photography 45–8, 51, 307
photograms topographic photography 307
art and 12, 14 vernacular photography 224–30, 236, 307
of Deschenes 175 war photography. See war photography
description, abstraction and 11–20 Photography: A Critical Introduction 2
of Farrah Karapetian/Anne Ferran 15–16 Photography: A Cultural History 1
of Kunié Sugiura 13–14 Photography in Abundance (2011) installation 207
Man Ray and 19–20 “Photography’s Expanded Field” 282
observed reality and 29 photojournalism 9, 135, 216

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photomontages 138–40, 191, 193, 203, 306 Powell, Amy L. 219–24, 310
photoserigraph technique 118 Powell, Richard 268
Photoshop 33, 39, 211, 270, 306 power
physico-chemical techniques 21–2 of archives 245
Picasso, Pablo 184 colonialism and 62
Pictorialism 42, 43–4, 164, 213–14, 236, 306 gaze of 68
“Pictures and Progress” 66 of images 116
Pictures exhibition (1977) 194 of mass media images 147
Pictures from the Street (1982–2012) series 235–6 photography and 113, 118–19, 188, 269, 283
Pictures Generation 23, 41, 51, 184, 194–8, 212, photography’s spiritual power 250
306 and the politics of dress 274–7
Pierson, Pierre-Louis 69, 70 Prince, Richard 89–90, 194
Pinney, Christopher 190 Pringle, Andrew 228
Plagens, Peter 192 process, description and abstraction and 20–5
Platinum (2014), photograph 75 Project Series (1997–2001) 76–7
“A Plea for Straight Photography” 213 projection 296–8
Poland, Krakow 249 propaganda 139, 191, 192, 193, 203
Polaroid technology 115, 306 Provoke artists 250, 306
politics psychic automatism 18
appropriation, photographic montage and 192 punctum 283, 306
cultural 166
of environmental degradation 116 Q. And babies? (1970) (poster) 183, 184
as an event experienced/expressed with one’s
eyes 285 Raay, Jan van 183, 184
fashion and 278 Rabinbach, Anson 177
of identity 125 Rabolli-Pansera, Stefano 170
photography and 188, 220, 283 race/racism
political ecology, art and 95 photography and 66, 111, 143, 215, 240
post-representational 130 politics of 127
and the power of dress 274–7 racial tensions in the U.S. 186
of proximity 137–41 racist social hierarchy 77
of race 127 scientifc study of 60–1
of representation 4, 96, 112, 113–22, 130, 131 societal 268
of vision 147 of Western imperialism 62–3
Poolaw, Horace 196 whiteness 77
Poole, Deborah 41–2 Ractliffe, Jo 144–5
Portrait of Effuah Nicol (after 1961), based on radical ethnography 60–6, 306
photograph 238, 239 Radical Nature (2009) exhibition 99
portraiture Ramayana 190
black 268 Raphael 47
celebrity 261–4, 277 Raqs Media Collective 219–24, 310
Chinese 130 Rassool, Ciraj 218, 219
as a genre 131 Ray, Sharmistha 48
photography and 15 rayographs 19–20, 306
portrait photography, term 306 Re-run (2013) video work 224
from the Swahili coast 242, 243 realism(s)
truth value of 275–6 abstraction and 177
post-internet art 211, 306 challenging of 166
post-representational 130 cynical 129
postcolonialism 215, 306 description, abstraction and 11–25
postmodernism 38, 194, 257, 306 digital images and 283
poverty 120, 122 flmmaking and 281

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 328 INDEX

manufactured 139, 140 Roadside stall on the way to Viana (2007), photograph
photography and 5, 9 145–6
the “real” in photography 137 Robertson, James 288
term 306 Robinson, Henry Peach 228
theme of 3 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 162–4
truth, fction and 33–4, 39–54 Rodríguez, James 292–3
reality Romberg, Kristin 87
constructed 285 Roosevelt, Theodor 120
observed 29 Rose, Tracey 216
Rebel Rebel, photograph 144 Rosenblum, Naomi 1
referents 9, 306 Rosler, Martha 122–6, 137–9, 150, 310
refugee children 150, 153 Roth, Lorna 66
Regarding the Pain of Others 139 Rothko, Mark 24
Reinhardt, Ad 14 Rouse Hill estate, Australia 16–17
Rejlander, Oscar Gustave 47–8, 215 Royal Academies of Art, French and British 215, 306
relationships, in non-human (animal) communities 90 Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Canada 225
Relyea, Lane 23 Run on a Bank (1948), photograph 224
Renger-Patzsch, Albert 237, 238 Russia 162–4, 192, 281
Rennó, Rosângela 248
repetition 201, 260 Saboungi, Jurgi “George” 277
rephotography 238 Sacco, Graciela 175–6
representation(s) Said, Edward 86
abstraction and 170–1, 172 Saigon (1968), photograph 185
digital technology and 283 Saigon Execution (1968), photograph 185
documentation and 283 Saint-Trophîme church, Arles 53–4
identity and 115 Salgado, Sebastião 77
manifold layers of 166 Saltzman, Lisa 141–2
meaning and 23–4 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 225
media representations 40, 115, 116, 130 Sander, August 64–6, 238
in a media-saturated culture 194 Sarkissian, Hrair 117–18
politics of 4, 96, 112, 113–22, 130, 131 Sawyer, Drew 176–9, 310
representational certainty 283, 306 Scarred for Life (1994) series 286–7
representational justice 66 Schad, Christian 18
self-representation 118, 178 Schlak, Tim 233
repression, memory and 175 Schmid, Joachim 234–6
reproducibility of photographs 159, 184, 207 School of Athens (painting) 47
research, on African photography 240–1 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) 13
resistance, documentary photography and 217 Schwartz, Stephanie 296
Reuters news service 190 Schwenk, Theodor 12–13
Rexer, Lyle 15, 20 science, photograms and 11–12, 14
Ribalta, Jorge 126 scientifc management 177
Ribettes, Jean-Michel 260 The Scourged Back (1863), photograph 111–12
Riefenstahl, Leni 233 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” 210
rights Second History (2003– ongoing) project 188
of animals 90 Sed: Trail of Thirst (2004–9) series 57
Civil Rights movement 186 Seen at Secundrabagh (1958), photograph 223
human rights violations, Iraq War 283 Sekula, Allan 60, 75, 114, 150, 176–7, 238
Riis, Jacob 120–1, 122 self-empowerment 113
Rio Montevideo project 248 self-presentation 66, 79
Riot Police (2011) 16 self-representation 118, 178
Riso Arborio (2006), photograph 50 Self-titled adaptation of Fourteen Sunfowers (1888),
River Taw (1997–8), series of photograms 12 photograph 28

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Sellers, Cleveland 296–7 social media 152, 153–4, 291 (see also names of
Sengupta, Shuddhabrata 219–24 individual sites)
Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in social reform 74
Water and Air 12–13 social upheaval 283
Serna, Kevin 275 socialism 192
settler colonial states 88, 306 Société Française de Photographie 214
Shangalti (1971), photograph 267 Society of the Spectacle 261
Sheehan, Tanya 3 solarization 21, 306
Sheehi, Stephen 277 solidarity, networks of 190
Sherman, Cindy 194, 212 Solnit, Rebecca 37
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 245 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 69–70
Shibli, Ahlam 113–14 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 215
Shipwreck and Workers, photograph 75 Sommer, Frederick 51–2
Shiras, George 103, 104 Sontag, Susan 120, 137, 139, 148, 198, 268
Shklovsky, Viktor 281 sound, absence/presence of 291
“Short History of Photography” 198 South Africa
Shu’fat Refugee Camp, overlooking Al ‘Isawiya, East apartheid era 83–4, 106–7, 246–7
Jerusalem (2009), photograph 87 apartheid, term 303
Sidibé, Malick 216, 257–8 black townships 246–7
Signs of Your Identity (2014) series 196–7 documentary photography and 217–18
Silva, Bisi 268 Muslim population 39–40
Silver series 21, 22 South African Institute for Race Relations 246
Simmons, Laurie 40–1, 47, 212 Trojan Horse Massacre 40
simulacrum 284, 306 South Kensington Museum, London 214–15
Singh, Raghubir 167–8 Soviet Union. See Russia
Sixty Minute Silence installation 290 spaces
slavery 67, 77–8, 111 in-between 49
Slaves at a coffee yard in a farm, Vale do Paraiba, Sao spatial ambiguity 171
Paulo (1882), photograph 77, 78 spatial oppression 83
Small Wars (1999–2002) series 142–3 of splitting 69
Smejkal, Pavel Maria 184–6 wilderness 103
Smith, Aileen Mioko 72, 73 Spanish Civil War 135, 184
Smith, Shawn Michelle 69 spectacle culture 261, 306
Smith, W. Eugene 72–3 spirit photography 15
Snake Head (1927), photograph 237 Squires, Carol 24
Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary staged photography/staging
African Photography (2006) exhibition 215, 216, contemporary 48, 50–1
219 of photographs 284
snapshots 123, 230, 306 restaging 142
Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to stilled movement/staged stillness 283–9
the Present (1998) exhibition 225 term 306
social capital 268 truth, fction and 39–44
social categorization 60 war photography and 137, 140–1, 148, 152–3
social causes 123 Stallabrass, Julian 64
social change 73, 120 Standard Family (Biaozhun Jiating) (1996) series 129–30
social construction Steichen, Edward 227, 261
of gender 18 Stein, Sally 135
term 306 Steinert, Otto 21
social documentary 113, 121, 122, 217 stereoscopes 215, 306
social fragmentation, dislocation and 284 stereotypes 41, 44, 67, 196, 219, 269
social injustice 120, 131 Stern, Bert 273
social justice 100, 116 Steyerl, Hito 4, 130–1

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 330 INDEX

Stieglitz, Alfred 161 digital 33, 54, 207, 283, 298

stigma, consciousness and 125 early photographic technology 66
still life 159, 168–9, 171, 173, 296 photography as a technology of empire/self 240
Still Live (1975-1981) series 169 Polaroid technology 115, 306
still photographs, mediated 290–1 visual 291
stilled movement/staged stillness 283–9 visual information and 151–2
stills, moving stills 289–91 Tehran 2006, photograph 284
stock photography 159, 306 Tehran Streetstyle 274
Stone, Barry 34–8, 310 Tellaro (1980), photograph 169
Stone, Benjamin 217 temporality 292
Storey, George Adolphus 228 Terreno Ocupado (2007) series 144–5
storytelling 39, 54 Thatcher, Margaret 273
straight photography 44, 51, 213, 306 Theory of Film 292
“Straight Up” (1980) series 272–3 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 6
Strand, Paul 295–6 Thinker (1998), photograph 285
Strawberries (Fresh Forever) (2014), photograph 211 Third African Photography Festival in Bamako, Mali 209
street photography 47, 161, 167, 209, 306 The Third of May (painting) 45
Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II (2009), diptych Thompson, Charles Thurston 215
61–2 Thornton Road series 39–40
subjective photography 21, 306 three-dimensionality 171, 175
Subjektive Fotografe exhibitions 21 Thy Phu 245
sublime, the 37–8, 116, 294, 306 Tilkin, Danielle 216
Submerged Portraits (2007) series 116–17 Tillmans, Wolfgang 20–1, 22–3
Sugiura, Kunié 13–14 Tilt/Swing (360° feld of vision, version 1) (2009),
Super Colliders series 22 photograph 173
Surrealism 18–19, 52, 169, 307 time
surveillance 60, 74, 131 archives and 248–53
survey photography 88, 213, 215 extended time in still and moving images 292–6
Susperregui, José Manuel 135 history and 6
Susumu, Okada 166 Tipo indígena (c.1920), photograph 42
Swahili coast, a history of photography from 240–3 Tokyo (1970) series 166–7
Sweden, Gotland 294 Tomatsu, Shomei 144, 145
Syria 117–18, 149, 152–3, 154 Tomoko in the Bath (1971), photograph 73
Szarkowski, John 40, 47, 51, 122, 123–6, 209, 211 topographic photography, term 307
Trachtenberg, Alan 42–3
Tabe Mitsuko 73–4 “The Traffc of Photography” 238
tableau aesthetics 140 transport 75
tableau photography 45–8, 51, 307 trap cameras 103, 307
tableaux vivant 45, 216, 242, 307 trauma, enactment of 286
Tabrizian, Mitra 283–4, 286 Trebay, Guy 272
Tagg, John 118 triptychs 186
Tagore, Abanindranath 189–90 Trojan Horse Massacre, South Africa 40
Talbot, William Henry Fox 11, 36–7, 251–3 truth
Tan, Fiona 294–5 fction and 33–4, 39–54
taonga 250, 307 “paradox of truth” 4
Tarver, Gina McDaniel 198–202, 310 photography and 44, 57
Taylor, Frederick Winslow 177 photojournalism and 9
Taylorism 177 truth value 33, 135, 217, 275–6, 307
Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), Museum of New Tupitsyn, Margarita 194
Zealand 250 Turvey, Malcolm 281
technology(ies) Twitter 291
camera phone technology 33, 130, 131 The Two Ways of Life (1857), photograph 47–8, 215

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Uganda 126–7 visual signs 114–17

Umbrico, Penelope 211 visual technologies 151–2, 291
uncertainty 286 Vizenor, Gerald 43–4
United Kingdom, India and 288 Vogel, Susan 215
United States Vogue magazine 259, 260, 273
African American culture 270
American Civil War (1861–5) 143, 148 Wall: Israel and Palestinian Landscapes 86–8
American Colonization Society (ACS) 264–5 Wall, Jeff 35, 46–7, 48
American exceptionalism 303 Wallace, Mike 183
Cold War America 124 Wallis, Brian 60, 138
culture of 67, 261 Walski, Brian 9
Hurricane Katrina 115–16 Walther Collection, New York 126
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq 139 Walther, Thomas 225
Progressive Era 120 Walton, George 229
racial tensions in the 186 Wang Jinsong 128–30
the segregated South 296–8 Wang, Leslie K. 129
spectacle culture 261 Wang Qingsong 284–5, 286
Vietnam war 137–8, 142, 185, 244, 245 Wang Youshen 187–8
war in Afghanistan 148 war photography (see also names of individual wars)
Unrecognised (1999–2000) series 113–14 afterimages 141–6
The Untitled Images series (2014) 148–9, 152 anonymous 153
Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography authenticity of 143
1944–2013 exhibition 209 bearing witness 146–51
Uruguay 248 beauty and 143, 144, 151
Useless, 1974 (1994), photograph 286–8 colonialism and 288
Ut, Nick 137 displacement and 142
frst records of human presence in war as bodies
value, in art 170 223
vanitas 168, 307 graphic coverage of the atrocities of 137–8
Vargas, Carlos and Miguel 261 images of war or war of images? 151–4
vernacular photography 224–30, 236, 307 indifference to images 152
Vertov, Dziga 281–2, 295 pictures of war 135–55
‘victim’ photography 122 politics of proximity and 137–41
Victoria and Albert Museum, London 214, 215 staging and 137, 140–1, 148, 152–3
Vietnam 137–8, 142, 185, 244, 245 War Primer 2 147–8
View from the Window at Le Gras (c.1826), Warhol, Andy 188
photograph 198 Washing (1994): (1995): (2017) installations 187
viewing, material conditions of 297–8 Washington, Augustus 264–5
violence Water Towers (Wassertürme) (1980), photograph 105
environmental 100 The Wave (Redes) (1937), flm 296
ethics and 112 We Shall Pay Back Our Coal Debt to This Country
infrastructural 284 (1930), photomontage 193
visibility Wearing, Gillian 290
hypervisibility 131 Weber, John S. 235
invisibility and 114, 117–20, 169 Weekly Asahi newspaper 71
vision Weems, Carrie Mae 111–12
expanded feld of 298 Weiss, Marta 53
objective 164 Weissman, Terri 310
politics of 147 Welling, James 23–4, 212
the shape of 162–8 Wells, Liz 2
visual culture 130 Wendl, Tobias 275–6
visual shock 283 West, Kanye 115

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 332 INDEX

West, Nancy Martha 227 The World is Beautiful (Die Welt ist schön) 237, 238
Weston, Edward 166, 194 World War I 223
Whelan, Richard 136 Wright, Karen 145–6
When I am Not Here/Estoy Allá (1994) series 67 Wue, Roberta 130
Where Are We Going (1948) exhibition 218
Where We Come From (2001–3) project 85–6 Yasuhiro, Ishimoti 166–7
whiteness 77 The Yellow River (2012) series 101–3
Whither Now? (1950) exhibition 218 Yoon, Jin-me 127–8
Wilhelm, Miriam 149 Yoshida, Kimiko 259–60
Willcock, Sean 288 Young, Benjamin 60
Williams, Carla 61 youth culture 272–3
Willis, Deborah 61, 268 YouTube clips 290
Wills, María 209 yuppie culture 76
Winogrand, Garry 122, 125 Yuppie Project (1998) 76–7
Winters, Dan 261–2
Wintour, Anna 277 Zaatari, Akram 234, 235, 236
witnessing 111, 146–51 Zalcman, Daniella 196–7
women Zarzycka, Marta 289–91, 310
black women’s identity 270 Zaya, Octavio 216
objectifcation of 242–3 Zayas, Marius de 159
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Zealy, Joseph T. 111
Reproduction” 211 Zegher, Catherine de 11
Worker Photography Movement 178 Zhang Dali 188–9
Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), Zhang Kechun 101–3
flm 74 Zimbabwe 270
Workers Parade (1926), photograph 165–6 zines 270–1, 307
Working on History exhibition 187 Zschiegner, Hermann 195
A World History of Photography 1 Zuromskis, Catherine 225

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