Re-framing Photography – Some Thoughts

Abstract

Conventional historiography on photography stresses its evolution as a story of technological progress.Histories of photography, even "world histories of photography", have long lacked a global perspective.A global narrative of photography would thus have to not only include these neglected regions but would also alter the conventional narratives.Research in this area is currently booming and what is being uncovered are stories of connection beyond western exceptionalism.Central in this research is the discovery and use of photographic archives outside of Europe (Morton/Newbury 2015; Lydon 2005; Pinney/Peterson 2003).Photography never belonged solely to the West nor was the idea of creating a likeness of a thing or person an exclusively western or modern notion.As a technology photography was easily integrated into visual practices that had preceded it in all world regions.In nineteenth century Cameroon grassfields, for example, the idea of the portrait of an important person -male or female -was realized in three dimensional portraits (Brain 1971).In time photography was added to funerary practices and coexisted for several decades until solely assuming this social function.In East Asia photography entered a visual culture in which "dissonant seeing" (Fukuoka 2011) was practiced long before photography came about.In Meiji Japan, older Tokugawa visual practices and photography were easily integrated (cf.ibid.).In 1925 a camera was developed in China that could create photographs in the pictorial tradition of panorama paintings and thus integrated bi-ocular visual practices with photography (cf.ibid.; Gu 2015: 165 f.).Only a couple of months after the announcement of the technical process of daguerreotyping in Paris in 1839, the ottoman-egyptian Pasha Mehmet Ali 1 The Chinese Photographer Afong Lei is even mentioned in Naomi Rosenblum

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