Re-Picturing Photography: A Language in the Making

Abstract

This imaginary monologue incorporates the casual jargon of a photographer but could just as well describe the planning and commission of a perverse crime. Taken out of context, the aggressive metaphors are jarring. This universally employed language remains a largely unconscious and unquestioned convention in photography. For over one hundred and fifty years practitioners, critics, and historians have continuously challenged and added dimensions to the meaning and uses of photography. Yet there has been little challenge to its highly disturbing linguistic conventions. By uncritically accepting and using these conventions, those involved in the culture of photography have failed to recognize that language is not a passive but an active construction of meaning and value. The violent terminology embedded in the practice and culture of photography betrays a disturbing ideology, full of myths and limited conceptions about the medium. These notions are as powerful today as they were in 1859 when physician, poet, and humorist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

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