Introduction: Photography's “And/Or” Nature

Abstract

This special issue of Visual Resources contributes to a dynamic new history of photography, which seeks to locate the development of the medium within broader structures of visual persuasiveness. To understand the impact of the photograph in any historical period, scholars have begun to study the adjacent forms of visual belief with which it variously competes and collaborates. The orthodox history of photography, as a mode of representation isolated from the mosaic of visual belief, as a medium which held nearly undisputed persuasiveness throughout its flowering, has begun to yield to a far more dynamic account. This issue presents articles from a number of leading scholars, whose work engages diverse periods of photography's history, ranging from the first major international conflict to be represented by the medium in the 1850s, to contemporary debates about the trustworthiness of photographic representations of history in the digital age. Together, these contributions explore the changing fortunes of photography's privileged relationship to the referential world.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Illusion
• Belief
• Verisimilitude
• Scientific Imagery
• Invisibility

Notes

1 William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th ed. (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2000), 64.

2 James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (London: Routledge, 2007).

3 The photomontage mastered by the Dadaists was by no means the first attempt to combine elements from multiple photographic sources into a single image. As early as the 1850s, British photographers Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–1875) and Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901) created fictional narrative scenes by printing several negatives onto a single sheet of photosensitized paper. The resulting works have generally been referred to in the art historical literature as “combination” or “composite” photographs. Although the techniques of these earlier ventures sometimes prefigured those of the avant‐garde of the next century, the more important distinction is to be found in the realm of their conceptual differences. While the efforts of the Victorians aspired to transform a panoply of fragments into a coherent pictorial whole, it is the radically opposed disintegration of the traditional picture plane that characterizes both Soviet and German photomontage. The diversity of ends to which the manifold means of photographic amalgamation were put reminds us of the extraordinary historical variability of the medium's relationship to visual truths.

4 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 154.

5 Bertolt Brecht, “Zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der A‐I‐Z,” in Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus‐Detlev Müller, vol. 21 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 515.

6 Joel Snyder, “Pointless,” in Elkins, Photography Theory, 385. Emphasis in the original.

7 See especially Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1959).

8 Warren Neidich, American History Reinvented: Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1989).