This edition first published 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Bull, Stephen, 1971– editor.
Title: A companion to photography / edited by Stephen Bull.
Description: Hoboken, NJ, USA : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018060332 (print) | LCCN 2018061636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118598795 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118598801 (ePub) | ISBN 9781405195843 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Photographic criticism. | Photography–Philosophy. | Photography, Artistic. | BISAC: PHOTOGRAPHY / Criticism.
Classification: LCC TR185 (ebook) | LCC TR185 .C66 2019 (print) | DDC 770–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060332
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: Hannah Starkey Mirror‐Untitled, September 2015 (Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London)
| Figure 2.1 | The cover of William Shepperley's A History of Photography (1929). Source: Sabine T. Kriebel. |
| Figure 2.2 | Notice in Erich Stenger's The History of Photography: Its Relationship to Civilization and Practice (1939). Source: Sabine T. Kriebel. |
| Figure 3.1 | Yasuzo Nojima Nude torso (1930). Source: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 3.2 | Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). Untitled. n.d. Gelatin silver print. Source: Christopher Pinney. |
| Figure 4.1 | Documentation of the making of Towards a Promised Land by Wendy Ewald. Photograph by Pete Mauney. Source: Courtesy of Wendy Ewald. |
| Figure 4.2 | Documentation of the making of Open Shutters by Eugenie Dolberg. Source: Courtesy of Eugenie Dolberg. |
| Figure 5.1 | Cover of Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001). 63 |
| Figure 5.2 | Susie Freeman, Liz Lee, and David Critchley, Cradle to Grave installation at the British Museum (2005). Source: © Susie Freeman, Liz Lee and David Critchley. Image courtesy of Susie Freeman. |
| Figure 6.1 | William Henry Fox Talbot Crossed Muslin (1852–1858). Source: © National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 9.1 | Child recycling. Source: Fotolia.com. |
| Figure 9.2 | Recycling at school. Source: Fotolia.com. |
| Figure 9.3 | Boy and wind turbines. Source: Fotolia.com. |
| Figure 9.4 | Man in “green” office. Source: Fotolia.com. |
| Figure 13.1 | A Boots photographic services advert, aimed at women, from 1918. Source: Courtesy of Alliance Boots Archive and Museum Collection. |
| Figure 13.2 | A Boots photographic services advert, aimed at women, from 1998. Source: Courtesy of Alliance Boots Archive and Museum Collection. |
| Figure 14.1 | Maybelline, “The Eraser” advert (2011). Source: L'Oréal UK and Ireland. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 14.2 | Julia Roberts, Lancôme, “Teint Miracle” advert (2011). Source: L'Oréal UK and Ireland. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 15.1 | Viviane Sassen, Kinee Diouf for An Other Magazine Fall/Winter 2013–2014. Styled by Mattias Karlsson. Source: Courtesy of Viviane Sassen. |
| Figure 18.1 | R.H. Allan (2014). Caged Serenity. Source: © Rachel Hope Allan. Image courtesy of Rachel Hope Allan. On the edges of each photograph that comprise the diptych we can see exact same simulated (digital) emulsion marks, which on a traditional analog Tintype would be different and unique to each photograph: on Hipstamatic, they are the same on every image, produced by a computer algorithm. |
| Figure 18.2 | R.H. Allan (2013). Ladydrive #1 (Installation Image). Source: © Rachel Hope Allan. Image courtesy of Rachel Hope Allan. 1120 Digital Chromogenic prints, dimensions variable. Simulation and repetition are key tropes in “App photography.”320 |
| Figure 20.1 | Uta Barth From … and of time. (Untitled 00.4), 2000; LightJet prints in artist frames; Diptych, 35 × 90 inch (88.9 × 228.6 cm) overall; Edition of 2, 2 Aps. Source: © Uta Barth. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 20.2 | Laura Letinsky Untitled #54, from Hardly More Than Ever series, 2002. Source: © Laura Letinsky. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. |
| Figure 21.1 | Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Tin Building, Moundville, Alabama, 1936. Gelatin silver print (1936). 17 × 23.2 cm (6 11/16 × 9 1/8 inch). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. |
| Figure 21.2 | Sarah Pickering, Denton Underground Station from Public Order (2003). Source: © Sarah Pickering. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 22.1 | Mishka Henner, Unknown site, Noordwijk aan Zee from the series Dutch Landscapes (2011). Source: © Mishka Henner. Reproduced with permission. |
| Figure 24.1 | Cover of LIFE World Library: Britain (1961). Source: Photo: Val Williams. |
| Figure 25.1 | Cover of Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold's Foto‐Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (Photo‐eye: 76 photos of the time), F. Wedekind, Stuttgart, 1929. Source: Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild‐Kunst, Bonn. Public domain. |
| Figure 26.1 | John Baldessari, The Spectator is Compelled …, 1966–1968. Photo‐emulsion and acrylic on canvas (59 × 45 inch). Source: Courtesy of John Baldessari. |
| Figure 27.1 | Peter Friedl. 2006. Theory of Justice (1992–2006) (detail). Newspaper clippings. Display cases: Stainless steel, Plexiglas, painted plywood, 100 × 160 × 75 cm each. Exhibition view at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2006. Source: Photo: Tony Coll. Reproduced with the permission of the artist. |
| Figure 28.1 | Roundtable discussion, London, 2011. Source: Photo: Terence Dudley. Reproduced with permission. |
Malcolm Barnard is a Senior Lecturer in visual culture at Loughborough University (UK) where he teaches the history and theory of art and design. His interests lie in the theories and philosophies of fashion and graphic design and they are turning increasingly to photographic theory. His background is in recent French philosophy and he is the author of Graphic Design as Communication (Routledge, 2005), Fashion as Communication (Routledge, 2002), Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001) and Art, Design and Visual Culture (Macmillan, 1998). He is also the editor of Fashion (Routledge, 2011) and Fashion Theory (Routledge, 2007).
David Bate is an artist and writer based in London. He is Professor of Photography at the University of Westminster, London, UK. Recent publications include the books Photography: Key Concepts, second edition (Bloomsbury, 2016), Art Photography (Tate Publications, 2015), Zone (Artwords, 2012), Photography: Key Concepts (Berg, 2009), and Photography and Surrealism (I.B Tauris, 2004). Forthcoming works include a monograph of visual work called Notes on Otherness.
David Brittain is a writer, curator and former editor of Creative Camera magazine (1991–2001). He is MIRIAD Research Associate and Senior Lecturer in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University. David edited Creative Camera: 30 Years of Writing (2000) and conceived and was essayist for The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit (2009).
Stephen Bull is a writer, artist and lecturer. He is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton, UK. As well as editing this Companion to Photography, he is the author of Photography (Routledge, 2010) and Photography and Celebrity (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). He has contributed to books including Mark Durden (ed.) Fifty Key Writers on Photography (Routledge, 2013) and magazines and journals such as Source: The Photographic Review, Photoworks and Photography and Culture. His books of photographs include Meeting Hazel Stokes (Neroc'VGM, 2006), a series of found snapshots of celebrities with a theater usherette, which was also exhibited at Tate Britain as part of How We Are: Photographing Britain in 2007. He originated and hosts Desert Island Pics, an ongoing series of live events with Photoworks.
David Campbell is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University. He is a founding member of the artists' group Common Culture and exhibits internationally. He has published on Sigmar Polke and art and commodity culture. With Mark Durden, Campbell co‐wrote Variable Capital (Liverpool University Press, 2007) and Double Act: Art and Comedy (Bluecoat, 2016).
Paul Cobley is Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University. His books, include Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016), Narrative, second edition (2014), and the edited collections The Communication Theory Reader (1996), Communication Theories, 4 vols. (2006), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics (2010), and “Semiotics Continues to Astonish”: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs (2011).
Karen de Perthuis is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Her work exploring the intersection of fashion, media and the body has been published in a range of journals, including Fashion Theory, Cultural Studies Review, About Performance and Film, Fashion & Consumption, as well as in several edited volumes. She is currently working on a monograph, The Fashionable Ideal: Bodies and images in Fashion.
Edward Dowsett is a practicing artist and writer. He holds a BA in Photography from the London College of Communication. His research interests include photography's uses in the contemporary technological/media landscape, cultural theory, and semiotics.
Mark Durden is currently Professor of Photography at the University of South Wales. He has written extensively on contemporary art and photography. His Photography Today (2014) has now been translated into Chinese, Turkish, French, and Spanish. With David Campbell, Durden has co‐curated major exhibitions on consumer culture and art and comedy as well as co‐writing two related books, Variable Capital (2008) and Double Act: Art and Comedy (2016). They have also co‐authored an essay on Andy Warhol's film The Chelsea Girls for the BFI publication Warhol in Ten Takes. Durden works as an artist with Campbell and Ian Brown, exhibiting regularly as the collective Common Culture.
Elizabeth Edwards is Professor and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre. A visual and historical anthropologist, she has held academic and curatorial posts at Oxford and London works on the complex relationships between photographs, anthropology, and history, in many different contexts from field to museum exhibitions. In particular, she has developed anthropological methods for the analysis of a wide range of photographs and their archives, drawing on phenomenological anthropology and material culture studies. She is especially interested in the social and material practices of photography’s historical and contemporary contexts, and has published extensively in the field. Her most recent book is The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885–1918, on the photographic survey movement England (Duke University Press, 2012).
Clare Gallagher is Lecturer and Course Director for the BA (Hons) Photography at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. Her photographic practice and research examine everyday domestic activities and experiences. Her current focus is “women's work” and finding room for ingenuity and resistance to expectations about home.
Rachel K. Gillies is an artist, educator and writer. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton, UK, with Course Leadership of BA (Hons) Photography, and previously was Senior Lecturer and Course Co‐ordinator of Photography at Dunedin School of Art, NZ. Her practice engages with contemporary photography as it responds to digital process and visual communication.
Fergus Heron is an artist, photographer and Senior Lecturer in photography at the University of Brighton, with Course Leadership of MA Photography. His writing is included in Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation (London, 2014), Visible Economies: Photography, Economic Conditions and Urban Experiences (Brighton, 2012), and Eventful: Photographic Time (London, 2000).
Francis Hodgson is Professor in the Culture of Photography at the University of Brighton. He is the longstanding photography critic of the Financial Times and a former head of the photographs department at Sotheby's. He is one of the founders of the Prix Pictet, the richest prize in photography, given for pictures on the theme of the environment and sustainable development. He has been a gallerist, a creative director in industries centred upon the photograph, and a curator. Hodgson is also an art adviser specializing in fine photographs who advises on many aspects of collections (public and private). Hodgson has served upon many prize juries and awards.
Sarah E. James is an art historian, writer and lecturer based in Frankfurt. From 2010‐2017 she was a Lecturer at University College London, where she taught on photography and art in the twentieth century, photographic modernity, and art and culture during the Cold War. Her first book, Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain, was published by Yale University Press in 2013. Her second, Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant‐Garde, is forthcoming with MIT Press. She is currently a Paul Mellon Fellow completing her third book project, The Militant & the Mainstream: The Remaking of British Photographic Culture. She has published numerous chapters, articles and essays on photography and contemporary art.
Sabine T. Kriebel has taught photography and photography theory at the University College Cork, Ireland, since 2004. Her recent books include Revolutionary Beauty: John Heartfield's Radical Photomontages (University of California Press, 2014) and Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2016), co‐edited with Andrés M. Zervigón.
Kathy Kubicki is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston University, UK, editor of peer‐reviewed journal Photography & Culture (Routledge). Her research includes poststructural philosophies, women artists, and psychoanalytic theory. Recently she contributed to Twenty Years of Make Magazine: Back to the Future of Women's Art (I.B. Tauris: 2015).
Martha Langford is Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a Professor of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her publications include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007); and A Cold War Tourist and His Camera, co‐written with John Langford (2011).
Matthew Lindsey is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at UCA, Farnham. He has exhibited works in a number of galleries and worked on various arts publications including Scope: A Visual Archaeology of Photography.
Anthony Luvera is an artist, writer and educator. He is an Associate Professor and Course Director of Photography at Coventry University. His writing appears in a wide range of publications, including Photoworks, Source and Photographies. His photographic work has been exhibited in galleries, public spaces and festivals including Tate Liverpool, the British Museum, London Underground's Art on the Underground, the National Portrait Gallery London, Belfast Exposed Photography, the Australian Centre for Photography, Malmö Fotobiennal, PhotoIreland, Goa International Photography Festival, and Les Rencontres d'Arles Photographie. He gives workshops and lectures for the Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers' Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery, Tate Britain, Magnum, and community projects across the UK.
David Machin is Professor of Media and Communication at Orebro University, Sweden. His books include, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2007), Global Media Discourse (2007), Media Audiences, 4 vols (2008) Analysing Popular Music (2010), and The Language of Crime and Deviance (2012), and How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Approach (2012).
Roberta McGrath's interdisciplinary work on photography includes Seeing her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body (Manchester University Press, 2002), “History Read Backward, Memory, Migration and the Photographic Archive,” in A. Grossman and A. O'Brien (Eds.), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower Press, 2007), Passport No. 656336, an essay on gender and politics in the work of 1930s émigré photographer Edith Tudor‐Hart, In the Shadow of Tyranny, Duncan Forbes (Ed.) (Hatje Cantz, 2013).
Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His books include Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), Photography's Other Histories (co‐edited with Nicolas Peterson, 2003), The Coming of Photography in India (2008), and Photography and Anthropology (2011).
Annebella Pollen is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of Art without Frontiers (British Council, 2020), Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury 2015), The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians (Donlon Books, 2015). She is co‐editor with Ben Burbridge of Photography Reframed: New Visions in Contemporary Photographic Culture (Bloomsbury, 2018) and co‐editor with Charlotte Nicklas of Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Katrina Sluis is presently Adjunct Curator of Research at The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Head of Photography and Media Arts at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University. Her writing and curatorial projects are concerned with the politics and aesthetics of the photographic image in computational culture, its social circulation and cultural value.
Hilde Van Gelder is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture. She is editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series, and editor of Image [&] Narrative. With Helen Westgeest, she co‐authored Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2011; translated into Chinese in 2014).
Ian Walker is a writer and photographer based in London. He has published three books on documentary photography and surrealism: City Gorged with Dreams (2002), So Exotic, So Homemade (2007) and Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia (co‐authored, 2013). Before his retirement, he was Programme Leader for the MA Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, and Professor of the History of Photography at the University of South Wales.
Val Williams is a writer and curator and Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the University of the Arts London. She is the Director of the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the London College of Communication and a founder editor of the Journal of Photography & Culture. Exhibition projects include How We Are at Tate Britain in 2007; Daniel Meadows: Early Photographs, National Media Museum (and touring), 2011; Ken. To be destroyed at Schwules Museum, Berlin, in 2016. Publications include: Anna Fox: Photographs 1983–2007 (Photoworks, 2007); Martin Parr: Photographic Works (Phaidon, 2001 and 2014).
Catherine Zuromskis is Associate Professor of Fine Art in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. Her work on photography and American visual culture has appeared in Art Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, American Quarterly, and various edited volumes. Her book, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images was published in 2013 by MIT Press.
This book has been a long time in the making. Therefore, the main acknowledgment is to the patience and belief in the project of the contributors, the series editors and the publisher. I thank them for persevering over the period that this book has taken to produce and I hope that the time it has taken has not made things overly difficult for those involved in the book's creation. As I went through the chapters once again in final preparation for the manuscript, the quality of research and scholarship evidenced by the writings in this book became clearer than ever. Like me, I hope that the authors of the chapters—and you—will agree that the wait has been worth it. I give my thanks again to all the authors of the chapters in this book for their forward‐thinking, erudite contributions. I am certain that the ideas within each chapter will continue to be inspirational for many years to come.
The list of editors at Blackwell and Wiley‐Blackwell is, perhaps inevitably, also long. I thank Jayne Fargnoli very much for her invitation to edit this book and I am grateful to Julia Kirk and Allison Kostka for their enthusiasm and support throughout the Companion's early stages. Since then, editors and editorial assistants have included Silvy Achankunju, Elisha Benjamin, Emily Corkhill, Susan Dunsmore, Mark Graney, Mary Hall, Rebecca Harkin, Catherine Joseph, Sindhuja Kumar, Claire Poste, Denisha Sahadevan and Milos Vuletic, I thank them all for their assistance and, again, for their patience.
Very many thanks for the support throughout the years of my colleagues, including those at the University of Portsmouth, University for the Creative Arts (UCA) Farnham, and the University of Brighton. Thank you too to my friends and family, who have always been there for me, even when I have not been around in order to work on the book. There are far too many of you to list individually, but I am grateful to everyone for the continuous encouragement, advice, and conversations that have helped this book to happen. The University for the Creative Arts generously match‐funded the budget for illustrations and I'm very grateful for this too. I continue to learn from and be inspired by the students that I teach, and I'm confident that anyone interested in the study of photography will find the ideas in this book inspirational.
Khadija Saye was a BA (Hons) Photography student at UCA Farnham when I was course leader there. After her graduation in 2013, Khadija's excellent practice continued developing into a wonderful emerging body of work that had begun to be exhibited internationally. Her life and career were cut tragically short by the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, in which many people lost their lives. This book is dedicated to Khadija.