| Some fresh |
party chick new
|
|
|
|
The question ‘Where is the photograph?’ presupposes that we have lost sight of photography or that photography is somehow lost; that it has lost a direction perhaps or that we do not find it where it should be; that it has been misplaced; that it remains somewhere, unclaimed, in some lost property office of culture.
Olivier Richon
In 1865, the photographer James Mudd presented a paper entitled ‘A Photographer’s Dream’ at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Mudd tells the story of a photographer who falls asleep and wakes in the 29th century. This fable represents a parody of, what Mudd saw as, the dire state of photography in the mid-19th century. His goal was to see photography valued as one of the fine arts (his particular passion was for picturesque landscapes), but photographers obsessed with chemical processes and optical devices undermined this ambition. In his ‘dream’ he was conducted through a swanky new Manchester to the ‘Grand Focus Photographic Society’. But, whereas he had expected to find photography transformed into art, he encountered just more of the same. The participants in the Society came up with one mad scheme after another: a camera, called a pointer, wound up and sent in search of views; steam proposed to raise photography to new heights; and so on. Mudd was aghast to find that photography had not really changed in all this time; still no one seemed interested in art. In fact, it turned out that there had been little opportunity for progress; he learned that, in the intervening years, photography had been lost and had only recently been ‘discovered’. This simple tale proposes a period of more than 1,000 years of modern history without photographs. It is a remarkably interesting idea.
In the 1860s British dealers regularly ordered 10,000 photographs of prominent celebrities. The revival of the popularity of the British royal family dates from roughly the moment around the middle of the 19th century when they began to promote themselves as homely bourgeois citizens. Photography played an important role in this process. The first photograph of a member of the British royal family to be shown in public appeared in 1857; within a few days of its issue, in 1860, 60,000 sets of Mayall’s photographic Royal Album had been ordered. From the point at which image and text could be produced in mass editions (the late 19th century), a symbiosis took place between popular journalism and celebrity: the publicity-hungry could then keep themselves in the public eye, while the media traded on this visibility. The modern tabloid press feeds on celebrity pictures, even if these days they show considerably less reverence for their subjects. Increasingly, paparazzi work has become more prying and voyeuristic, but this logic is implicit in the celebrity image. To be famous in Fullerton, you actually have to produce something, or do something, even if only the bad poetry-cum-rock-and-roll of chief poet Kafahvey.
The Sunday People, 29 July 2001
Noreen trained as a medical doctor with a few diagrams and the experience of the dissecting table, but modern medicine would be severely hampered without its images. Medical training combines dissection with study from photographs (or photographically reproduced illustrations). It can be easier to identify a particular pathological condition from an abstracted image than from the contingent forms it actually takes. Photographs make available an archive of diseases unfamiliar to the individual doctor or nurse. No doubt, in the absence of photographs, memory would find other ruses for recording these things, but picturing them is highly convenient. While the X-ray is not strictly a photographic technology, it becomes visible when recorded on photographic film, and all manner of surgical procedures now depend on introducing microcameras, endoscopes, and the like into the body.
An image of the interior of the body. Gastroscope (endoscope) view of a healthy stomach
If the restraints on commercial culture and surveillance might seem beneficial effects resulting from the restriction on photography, the consequences of the imageless society for medicine seem altogether less desirable.
References:
- Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: from the
Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, London:
Thames & Hudson, 1969 Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography, London: Penguin,
1939 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (5th edition) New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982
Michel Frizot ed., A New History of Photography, Cologne: Könemann,
1994 Jean-Clause Lamagny & André Rouillé eds, A History of Photography,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 Mary Warner Marion, Photography: A Cultural History, London:
Laurnce King, 2002
Gisèle Freund, Photography and Society, London: Gordon Fraser, 1980. (This book was based on, what is said to be, the first PhD on photography, which Freund presented at the Sorbonne in 1936)
See also:
Val Williams, The Other Observers, Women Photographers, 1900 to the
Present, London: Virago, 1991 Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, New York:
Abbeville Press, 1994
Vicki Goldberg ed., Photography in Print, Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico, 1981 Liz Heron & Val Williams eds, Illuminations: Women Writing on
Photography from the 1850s to the Present, Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996 Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper eds, Dialogue with Photography, New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979 Nathan Lyons ed., Photographers on Photography: A Critical
Anthology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966 David Mellor ed., Germany: The New Photography 1927–33, London:
Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979 Beaumont Newhall ed., Photography: Essays & Images, London:
Secker & Warburg, 1980 Reninah R. Petruck ed., The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2 Vols.), New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979 Christopher Phillips ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989
|
