Photography: A Critical Introduction

Liz Wells is Professor in Photographic Culture in the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth. Her teaching and research covers photography history, theory, criticism; contemporary photographic practices; Independent and Experimental Film and Video, with a special interest in landscape photography. Editorial Advisory Group member , Visual Communications, Sage Editorial Advisory Group member, Visual Culture in Britain, University of Manchester Press. Along with David Bate and Martin Lister, Liz Wells is currently working on a new Routledge Journal, `Photographies’, which will launch early 2008.

Notes on contributors


Editor’s preface


Acknowledgements


Illustration acknowledgements





Introduction





1 Thinking about photography: debates, historically and now


DERRICK PRICE and LIZ WELLS





Introduction


Aesthetics and technologies


The impact of new technologies


Art or technology?


The photograph as document


Photography and the modern


The postmodern


Contemporary debates


What is theory?


Photography theory


Critical reflections on realism


Reading the image


Photography reconsidered


Theory, criticism, practice


Case study: Image analysis: the example of Migrant Mother 00


Histories of photography


Which founding father?


The photograph as image


History in focus


Photography and social history


Social history and photography


The photograph as testament


Categorical photography


Institutions and contexts


The museum


The archive





2 Surveyors and surveyed: photography out and about


DERRICK PRICE





Introduction


Documentary and photojournalism: issues and


definitions


Documentary photography


Photojournalism


Documentary and authenticity


The real and the digital


Surveys and social facts


Victorian surveys and investigations


Photographing workers


Photography within colonialism


Photography and war


Bearing witness


The construction of documentary


Picturing ourselves


The Farm Security Administration (FSA)


Discussion: Drum


Documentary: New cultures, new spaces


Theory and the critique of documentary


Cultural politics and everyday life


The real world in colour


Documentary and photojournalism in the global age





3 `Sweet it is to scan . . .’: personal photographs and popular photography


PATRICIA HOLLAND





Introduction


In and beyond the charmed circle of home


The public and the private in personal photography


Beyond the domestic


Fiction and fantasy


Portraits and albums


Informality and intimacy


The working classes picture themselves


Kodak and the mass market


The supersnap in Kodaland


Paths unholy and deeds without a name?


Twenty-first-century contemplations


Post-family and post-photography?


And in the galleries . . .


Acknowledgements





4 The subject as object: photography and the human body


MICHELLE HENNING





Introduction


The photographic body in crisis


Embodying social difference


Objects of desire and disgust


Objectification, fetishism, voyeurism


The anti-pornography campaigns


Photography and homoerotic desire


Class, commodities, `real’ bodies


Case study: La Cicciolina


Technological bodies


The camera as mechanical eye


Interventions and scientific images


The body as machine


Digital imaging and the malleable body


Photography, birth and death


Summary





5 Spectacles and illusions: photography and commodity culture


ANANDI RAMAMURTHY





Introduction: the society of the spectacle


Photographic portraiture and commodity culture


Photojournalism, glamour and the paparrazzi


Commercial photography, image banks and corporate media


Commodity spectacles in advertising photography


The grammar of the ad


Case study: The commodification of human relations and


experience – Telenor Mobile TV, `Everywhere’


The photographic message


The transfer of meaning


The creation of meaning through context and photographic


styles


Hegemony in photographic representation


Photomontage: concealing social relations


Concealing labour relations


Gender, fashion and the gaze


Fashion photography


Case study: Tourism, fashion and `the Other’


The context of the image


Image worlds


Case study: Benetton, Toscanini and the limits of


advertising





6 On and beyond the white walls: photography as art


LIZ WELLS





Introduction


The status of the photograph as art


Early debates and practices


The complex relations between photography and art


Realism and systems of representation


Photography extending art


Photography claiming a place in the gallery


The modern era


Modernism and Modern Art


Modern photography


Photo-eye: new ways of seeing


Case study: Art, design, politics: Soviet Constructivism


American formalism


Case study: Art movements and intellectual currencies:


Surrealism


Late twentieth-century perspectives


Conceptual art and the photographic


Photography and the postmodern


Women’s photography


Questions of identity


Identity and the multi-cultural


Photography within the institution


Appraising the contemporary


Curators, collectors and festivals


Internationalism: festivals and publishing


The gallery as context


Case study: Landscape as genre








7 Photography in the age of electronic imaging


MARTIN LISTER





Introduction


The early 1990s and worries about the truth


The humanist response


The humanist subject


Techno-progressivism


Media archaeology and other histories of photography


Further critical issues


Reception


Theory and practice


Virtual, hybrid, networked


The virtual image


Kodak and Nokia


Citizen (photo)journalist


Surveillance


Archives and digital image banks








Glossary


Photography archives


Bibliography


Index