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Since the publication in 2004 of the first volume of , intense interest among both scholars and collectors has focused on photography in print, creating a minor bubble in the market for photographic books. In this seminar, I want to take a somewhat broader look not just at the photobook but also at the larger history of the photograph’s imbrication in text and, indeed, at the rather more vexed question of the relation of vision and reading, image and textuality.

 

In the 1970s in Britain, on the walls of art galleries and on walls in the street, the addition of text to a photograph came, perhaps oddly, to take on the mantle of a radical act, something capable in itself of politicizing the image––undoing its supposed autonomy by affirming its social character as sign. The largeness of these claims, which may seem odd today, consciously echoed those made earlier, in the 1930s, by Walter Benjamin and others, for the political force of the caption. Paradoxically, however, it was already very clearly the case that, across the entire history of the development of the photographic apparatus, it was only in quite exceptional and rather contrived circumstances that a photographic image would be encountered free from the overdeterminations of writing. From Talbot’s first printing of The Pencil of Nature to the photographically illustrated press of the 1890s, from the archiving systems of the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the pictorial magazines and photo-documentary books of the 1930s, the photograph had never occupied a pristine space. What does this tell us about radical investments in photography in the 1930s and 1970s and about the hopes that photography would be the key to an effective and transformative cultural politics? More broadly, what does it entail for our view of photographic meaning, for the notion of the purely visual image and for our attempts to define the history of photography as the history of a distinct and integral medium? If the photograph is always part of a hybrid assemblage can it have its own history or, indeed, a single history ? 

 

This seminar will come at these questions backwards, as it were, through a series of staged encounters with specific instances of photographic production, from postconceptual art back to those hybrid technological products that prompted such exaggerated predictions but that also exacerbated the deep uncertainties about the status of the photograph that haunted the nineteenth century and perhaps haunt us still––all the more so in the age of the photograph’s digital dissemination.