Writing photography's history before Newhall

Abstract

My aim in this essay is to suggest some of the modes of inquiry and the subjects that I think need to be broached before we can more clearly conceptualize what photography's histories have been and may be. I say ‘histories’ advisedly, because what I do not want to suggest is that we need to exchange the canonical ‘master narratives’ perpetuated by textbook publishers and sesquicentennial museum shows for new, more inclusive registers of great pictures and their makers. Despite their usefulness for introductory courses, or for the general public that wants a linear, abridged and palatable summary, such survey histories rarely identifY their exclusions or justifY their inclusions. Furthermore, as the single-volume history has evolved in the twentieth century, it has increasingly attempted to define a history of ‘art’ photography without declaring that it is doing so. This parading of a history of a single function (the ‘aesthetic’) as a history of a technology (photography) has resulted in the uncomfortable frictions between form and content, or style and usage, that mark most recent writing. Examples of amateur, scientific, advertising and documentary photography are inserted next to self-consciously ‘artistic’ images (almost by definition twentieth-century) when they are seen to anticipate, influence or accidentally approximate the satisfYing formal qualities of such images. Separate histories of photographs defined by function (popular photography, the family album, police photography, etc.) have been written but were often relegated to the less lucrative (in terms of value and book profits) category of sociology and history until the recent consolidation of the ‘cultural studies’ rubric, through which these images are beginning to carve space back in the museum and the art history classroom.

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