Photography, Allegory, and Labor

Abstract

There is a story about photography that we all know. It is the tale of photography's struggle to be regarded as a fine art. After numerous setbacks and false paths, the story suggests, the banner of photography was eventually planted firmly on the pinnacle of art. The problem is not so much that this tale is wrong, but rather that it is one part of a much more complex narrative. Photography was, and is, an allotropic mode of representation that, like the element carbon, exists in two different forms. It too has both its precious and commonplace forms because the elevated art picture and the vulgar document make up two parts of a historical process. An adequate account of photography in the nineteenth century must reflect this dual existence. To do so will not leave the traditional story of photographic art untouched. This essay seeks to open out photography onto a series of wider and deeper historical questions than those offered by the familiar tale of its relation to art. In particular, I am concerned with deploying the example of photography in order to examine the emerging narratives of industry in nineteenth-century England. Studied in this manner, photography will lead us directly into matters of substance—namely, into the taxonomy of industrial knowledge and its relation to the fetishism of commodities.

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