Elkins J 2006 Photography Theory, Routledge, London
Edgar Allen Poe (1840) on photography "the most important and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science"
Charles Baudelaire
(1859) on photography "a form of lunacy tied to the stupidity of the masses"
Photography could at best be a tool of memory, a record keeper, an archive, but never a fine art. "Poetry and progress are two ambitious men that hate each other".
Siegfried Kracauer
The multitude of photographs displayed in the press forces the beholder to confront the truth of capitalist society: its mechanical superficiality, its banality, its spiritual meaninglessness. "Photography is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production".
"In the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving." He suggested seeing is not the same as being critically conscious of what one sees. The same could be argued with social media today, people are driven by, constrained by and blinded by the images on social media of what life should be, what is desirable, what is attainable, what is success.
Walter Benjamin
Assets that photography shatters capitalist, bourgeois tradition by destroying the aura of the sacred, authentic, and original art object.
A reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels destroys the at object's aura, bringing the distant object closer and making it accessible to a mass public, at simultaneous moments, in multiple locations.
The issue is plurality of copies versus a unique existence "to ask for an "authentic" print makes no sense."
Nothing is inaccessible; even poverty and suffering are aestheticized ("represent as beautiful or artistically pleasing") by elegant camera angles or glossy reproductions. Photography now transfigures the world by aestheticizing it, reporting on surfaces not struggle.
Benjamin argues that the way to rescue photography from its replication of capitalist modishness is to mobilise language, by way of the caption, to direct the meaning of the photography to revolutionary ends.
Benjamin argues that inscription anchors photographic meaning, offering it a constructed depth that rescues it from surface meaninglessness.
Benjamin bases his understanding of photographic meaning in a technological determinism, proposing that photographic matter and process determine the meaning of an image.
"Optical unconscious" things visible to the camera eye and the unconscious eye but invisible to the waking eye. Photography reveals associations and presences not immediately available to the conscious mind.
Roland Barthes
He focused on photography's constriction of cultural myths on a mass scale.
He asserts that photography is not nature, not a "universal language" but a form of coded, historically contingent, ideological speech, amendable to scientific study, semiotic ("the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation") analysis in particular.
Photography is constitutive of structures of power - history transformed to look natural. Above all, photography is malleable. "A photograph can change its meaning as it passes from the very conservative L'Aurore to the communist L'Humanite."
Barthes considers text as a repressive form of ideological control: text helps the viewer to "choose" the correct level of understanding, leading the view to some signifieds in the image and avoid others. It remote controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance.
As soon as a photography enters into circulation, it becomes culturally coded.
Camera Lucida
Although photography's material base is a mechanical and chemical process, the medium offers a melancholy poetics, imparting an element of romantic mourning to this very banal object.
Studium - images which are coded, cultural, ideological
Punctum - a noncoded detail in a photograph that unexpectedly pricks or wounds the viewer. It is a subtle kind of beyond that the image permits us to see.
The punctum which disturbs the stadium, is private and personal.
The photograph is never separated from its referent.
The photograph belongs to a class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both - referent and photo.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
John Szarkowski
Proposed that five interdependent qualities are inherent in the medium of photography:
1) The thing itself, because photography deals with actual;
2) The detail;
3) The frame, because the photographer's picture is not conceived by selected;
4) Time, because there is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph; and
5) Vantage point, by which he means the various perspectives from which the thing itself can be framed.
Andre Bazin
Photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
Photographs are like long dead insects preserved in amber.
Photography delivers hallucination while it deliver fact, offering us an image of the real, of something that was, that we can hold in our hands, paste in an album or put in a frame, but that does not physically exist in our time and space.
Susan Sontag
Taking photographs is a way of limiting experience of the world and making it safe by transferring it into a photogenic image, as souvenir.
She offers up a Brechtian argument, which assets that photographs only show the surface, not the complex relations below surface:
"Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks... The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism...It will be knowledge at bargain prices.
Pierre Bourdieu
Believes that photography has not aesthetic norms proper to itself, instead borrowing them from other arts and movements. Because a photography can be replicated endlessly from its celluloid negative, its condition conflicts with the values of originality and singularity that are the underpinnings of the fine arts discourse that seeks to emphasise photography's "cult value".
Alan Sekula
Consistently condemns the aestheticization of photography instead looking to its functions in the system of capitalist commodity exchange.
Examines how the discourses of power and class relations within capitalism construct photographic meaning.
Photography is an incomplete utterance that always depends on external conditions in order to signify.
Every photographic image is a sign, above all, of someone's investment in the sending of a message.
"Every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police."
The materiality or physical quality of the photograph is less significant that how the photograph functions to serve and reinforce capitalist power structures.
John Tagg
Without a specific historical context, the photograph is meaningless.
The discourses of photography that centre on its truth value, such as the legal record or criminal evidence, are validated bot by its natural relation to fact, but by institutional and social practices.
Joel Snyder
Argues that the so called nature of photography is not at all natural, that it does not replicate vision, but that it was constructed according to habits of vision established during the Renaissance.
"The problem for post-Renaissance painters was not how to make a picture that looked like the image produced by the camera, it was how to make a machine that produced an image like the ones they painted."
Victor Burgin
Vision is never a question of just looking, the look always, already includes the history of the subject.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Rejects the notion that photography is a thing in itself but rather believes it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and is always already framed by preexisting discourses.
Geoffrey Batchen
Postmodern critics argue that photographic meaning is determined by context and deny there is such a thing as "photography as such"; on the other hand, the formalist critics seek to identify fundamental characteristics of the photographic medium.
Bachen argues both positions are guilty of looking for some kind of essence.
Both camps believe that "photography's identity can be determined as a consequence of either nature or culture".