I recently did a talk for a self-organised OCA student group, a recording of which can be accessed via my study blog. Roughly 70 OCA students attended the talk where I was one of three panellists; all students ourselves, nearing the end, or having just completed the degree, were Hugh Hadfield, Jane Coxhill, and me. The tone of my talk was a little different to the previous one I did for Redeye and arguably too dense and academic. However, that was not what I intended when I sat down to plan it. In fact, I had thought I’d opt for a personal approach, perhaps discussing the way I’d used the degree courses during level one to process feelings of grief and disappointment following a divorce. And how the questions I was asking then have not really changed, even though they may no-longer be couched in the sadness and madness of loss. Despite the academic tone, loss did play a significant part in my talk, along with its relationship to mark-making. And for all its dryness, I suspect revisiting this particular connection and the notion of leaving a trace was incredibly useful (for me, if not anyone else).
Perhaps one of the most surprising things to have come out of it (and there were a few surprising moments, least of which was having been asked in the first place to do it) was a discussion I had following the talk via email about photography and mark-making. In my mind, there is no question –photography is mark-making. However, my peer suggested that all the traditional discourse around photography disagreed with this. I’m not really in a position to agree or disagree with her. Since doing Understanding Visual Culture in 2016, I have probably focused more on structuralism and other social sciences rather than photography. In fact, the photography discourse feels parochial, and doesn’t really interest me, which is what I said in the talk. Although I am sure I have some way to go before being a truly ‘diffractive’ researcher, as Karen Barad (2007) and later Deborah Lupton (2020) advise in their respective writings, I suspect I have always looked at photography through a variety of interdisciplinary lenses and so the fact that the discourse might suggest that photography was never an issue for me. In any case, I wrote to my OCA peer, “The issue with traditional photography discourse is that it always seems to want to elevate photography to something more than – above and beyond other mediums. If find this an irritating trope, especially when the same people are claiming to be deconstructors of the status quo – in effect, they are reinforcing the hierarchical value system where one thing is more worthy of another, which comes back to the Cartesian mindset that informs how the West organises itself. I.e. pitting itself against painting or writing, for instance instead of seeing itself as an interactive element that only comes into being while interacting with other elements. I suspect this urge in photography comes from a sense of inferiority, (and the perennial question around photography being an art) which, as inferiority complexes so often do, manifests as a superiority complex.” Yes, it was magical once. But today, we’re all photographers.
Perhaps too, I am so used to seeing objects (instruments and devices) as continuations, prosthetics, that it never dawned on me, photography should be conceived as anything but a mark. However, I do recall being pleasantly surprised by another student’s work when she made her phone camera move as she filmed something and referred to that as a kind of drawing. Perhaps it was then that the idea of photography being just another media, one of many, ubiquitous and mundane, at our disposal, became even more deeply reinforced me.
I sent several links about photography as a mark-making technology to my fellow student and have been wondering since if I should have simply done a talk titled Photography as a Mark. (As I read and edit this, I recall, how when I first started learning photography, I did so believing I was speaking with it, even if I didn’t always consciously choose what I was saying when I took the image, so perhaps that informs my view too. My photography has long been about something rather than of something.)
I’m certainly not the first or only one to refer to photography as a mark, and Lori Wike’s (2000) essay which was suggested to me a few years ago by the same Peter Haveland I mention in my talk is a case in point, when she writes, “In other words, what I am provisionally suggesting is that, in fact, Barthes does not deny the applicability of the logic of the mark, the law of structural iterability, to photography in this passage, nor in Camera Lucida as a whole”. This view is re-inforced once you begin to look at the world through the lens of new materialism, which, as Lupton (2020) explains in her book, Data Selves reintroduces the “poststructural emphasis on language” to “matter”, citing Barad (2007) throughout her work, whose entire project is committed to the “entanglement of matter and meaning” (indeed, that’s the subtitle of her 2007 book). I guess, having been so focused on my own research, I forget how potentially ‘radical’ Barad and others who follow similar views are, since they are interested in reconfiguring boundaries that eschew “imperial temporality and spatiality” (Azoulay, 2019) (which is an immensely difficult concept, and one can understand how these academics might be mistakenly (in my view) lumped together with the ‘alternative facts’ brigade, an issue which I address in an essay for Digital Image and Culture (2019: 11)). And it is that potential for blurring that prompts the current right wing UK government to jump up and down, accusing universities of rewriting history, when in fact, what is actually happening is that values are being reconfigured – white Colonial men are literally being pulled off their pedestals and people who were considered less-than-human by those men, rightly elevated – or equalised. I must try to recall the reaction my peers had when I talked about Azoulay and her assertion that photography was ‘invented’ in 1492. Some of my fellow students were horrified and dismissed Azoulay, suggesting she was making things up. When writing that essay, I was still trying to figure this out, and actually wrote to her as I couldn’t comprehend what she meant either – so yes, I must remember where I came from and how my understanding has evolved. Azoulay, incidentally, very kindly explained in simple terms for me, but perhaps this paragraph from her 2019 blog will work here:
“I also question imperial temporality and spatiality and attempt to account for the world in which photography could emerge. It is not about questioning the exact moment of the inception of photography and proposing that it was this optical device or that chemical substance that made it possible. It is about questioning the political formations that made it possible to proclaim—and institutionalize the idea—that certain sets of practices used as part of large-scale campaigns of imperial violence are separate from this violence and unrelated to it, to an extent that they can even account for it from the outside. Let me frame the question directly: How do those who wrote different histories and theories of photography know that it was invented sometime in the early nineteenth century? They—we—received this knowledge from those invested in its promotion. Accounting for photography based on its promoters’ narratives is like accounting for imperial violence on the terms of those who exercised it, claiming that they had discovered a “new world.”
So, I should not be surprised by people querying these concepts. They are still relatively alien and once again, I will re-iterate, the best, most accessible explanation of a Cartesian view of reality which informs an imperial understanding of temporality and spatiality is in Jason Hickel’s Less is More. There is nothing in that book about photography, but there is plenty about why our Cartesian view is immensely unhelpful, along with some suggestions for a more holistic future (echoed in Aaron Benanav’s book Automation and the Future of Work (2020), which I’ll write about soon). The loss we will all face, if we don’t examine and address that, will be utterly insurmountable, no matter where any of us put our grubby little X’s at the ballot box.
Azoulay, A. (2019) Unlearning Imperial Sovereignties, UNLEARNING DECISIVE MOMENTS OF PHOTOGRAPHY. At: https://www.fotomuseum.ch/de/series/unlearning-decisive-moments-of-photography/ (Accessed 23/02/2021).
Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Field, S. (2019) A3: The Democratisation of Form – essay re-written for assessment submission. [Blog] At: https://sjfdiculture.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/a3-the-democratisation-of-form-essay-re-written%e2%80%8b-for-assessment%e2%80%8b-submission/ (Accessed 04/03/2021).
Hickel, J. (2020) Less is more: how degrowth will save the world. London: William Heinemann.
Lupton, D. (2020) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.
Sanzo, C. (2018) New Materialism(s) – Critical Posthumanism Network. At: https://criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms/ (Accessed 04/03/2021).
Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida – InVisible Culture (s.d.) At: https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/photographs-and-signatures-absence-presence-and-temporality-in-barthes-and-derrida/ (Accessed 04/03/2021).