Editorial

Editorial

Photography and the idea of national identity, nation-building, national heritage and archive have gone a long way together. If it is now commonly received that there is no single history of photography but only histories of photographies, it is also accepted that the idea of photography is deeply determined by diverging local traditions, convictions and bias. As has been convincingly demonstrated by François Brunet in his book La naissance de l'idée de photographie, the difference between the French daguerreotype, the British calotype, and the US snapshot cameras, is less technical than cultural (or ideological, if one prefers). ¹ Moreover, from the very beginning of photography the medium has been used to represent the nation, while at the same time its concrete practices have evolved along cultural lines that are often national and linguistic. What appear behind these differences are completely different ideas on the meaning of a photographic picture and, even more, on that of taking pictures or looking at them – contrary to the long-held dream of photography as a universal language, the epitome of which may have been Edward Steichen's famous exhibition The Family of Man. ²

With the spread of globalisation, the apparent streamlining of taste, as well as the universal success of comparable technologies, the traditional link between photography and nation has entered a crisis, in society and politics as well as in photography. Yet the contestation and gradual dismantling of the national paradigm does not necessarily imply that photography as a medium is no longer concerned with aspects of place, or that the local has been swallowed by the global. Place, on the contrary, is once again a top priority on the research agenda, although no longer along national lines. This new focus on place does not characterise place in abstract terms (e.g. when we discuss general and often over-generalising oppositions between, for instance, the West and the Rest, the Empire and its colonies, or the hegemonic versus the subaltern), but it does so in concrete, material terms. As argued by Jody Berland in North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, ³ the notion of space actually covers a complex field defined by the intertwining of geography (both as a physical environment and as a subject representation), communication (how does one move or travel in or through the place in question?), technology (how is communication made possible or enhanced by technologies, from roads to satellites, from films to weather forecasts?), and, inevitably, politics (which Berland situates at the crossroads of the three other domains).

Glocalisation – a compound of globalisation and localisation – is generally understood as a major aspect of contemporary life, in which the ceaselessly expanding tendency towards globalisation has to be negotiated with a no less increasing awareness of the importance of smaller or local environments and vice versa. It is, in a certain sense, the return of the real in the often utopian or disembodied approach of cultural (ex)change. The importance of the glocal is dramatic in photography as well. The increasing unease with general approaches of national traditions in photography, on the one hand, and the significant results of the spatial turn in cultural studies, on the other, make room for new visions of photography as a spatially, and hence culturally and politically, informed practice. The themes under scrutiny in this issue aim first at stressing well-known but perhaps ignored aspects of this glocalisation (since the glocal aspects of photography are not made visible by some new theory: they are what all of us are experiencing day after day). Secondly, they try to disclose the many tensions between the local, the national (or the regional) and the global, while emphasising also the links (or the gap) between photography and language. Finally, they focus strongly on the concrete manifestations of glocalised photography in travel(ling) photography.

Foregrounding the contradiction between photography's alleged universalism and its national polarities, François Brunet's essay reconstructs a capital aspect of the debate between the French and the English ideas on photography, as illustrated in some early discussions (1843–1857) on the expression of nationality as a criterion of the new medium. Brunet examines several key texts from the period, including David Brewster's and Elizabeth Eastlake's landmark essays, as well as reports from the juries of the Expositions of 1851 and 1855, and demonstrates that patriotism may have played a crucial role in certain universalist claims.

Nationalism, or rather the lack of it, is also a key issue in the contribution by Mieke Bleyen and Hilde Van Gelder, who apply the notion of ‘minor culture’ (borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's book on Kafka ⁴ ) to the field of Belgian photography. The case study of the slightly schizophrenic situation, split between two minor photographies (Flemish and francophone) each with a very different position toward their respective major models, is illustrated by the work of a ‘typically’ Belgian photographer, Marcel Mariën, a post-Cobra artist who is critical of the medium but also of the place where he was living and working.

Graham Smith's essay ‘Photographs without Frontiers’ examines the fundamental question of the disjunction of the original work and its copies and transformations – a situation that seems relatively manageable in older forms of visual arts but whose problematic relationship has become an essential feature of any form of photography. Smith focuses mainly on a corpus of postmodern re-uses and re-appropriations of widely circulating pictures to demonstrate how images by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton have to some extent superseded the photographs that generated them, not only by their technical remediation but by the new forms, meanings and stakes that were added by the creative impulse of the artists.

The next two essays present in-depth case studies of a concrete author and of a concrete works that demonstrates the multifarious relationships of the local and the global. Sara Stevenson's contribution, ‘The Empire Looks Back: Subverting the Imperial Gaze’, looks at a visual encounter between west and east in China in the early years of the twentieth century. Stevenson examines and compares various representations of a very remote part of China as made by pictures taken by Chinese and British photographers, taking into account both formal characteristics of the images and historical evidence on their different relations with the local governors.

A similar although different case is presented by Nina Lager Vestberg in her article on the most iconic of images of French humanist photography, Robert Doisneau's The Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville. Rejecting the traditional two-fold interpretation of this picture as the perfect illustration of post-war photography in France, on the one hand, and of love and romance in the public sphere, on the other hand, Vestberg brings to the fore a completely different spatial and cultural intertext, whose meaning and success cannot be separated from the way it was inserted and politically and ideologically ‘framed’ by LIFE magazine.

The essay by Danièle Méaux on new forms of travel photography in the era of globalisation stresses dramatic shifts undergone by the notion of travel as a cultural form in the past decades. Travelling is less an alternative way of living, open to either the rich, as part of the leisure society, and the poor (as, mythically, in Kerouac's On the Road), as a form of social critique and antisocial behaviour, than a way of reinventing new attitudes toward space. These new uses of space, however, are not deprived of social meaning, for their very inventiveness, which may remember procedural writing, can be seen as a model of new social behaviour.

Stéphanie Roy Bharath's essay on John Edward Saché, a nineteenth-century British photographer specialising in the picturesque, addresses similar questions, but from the viewpoint of originality, authorship and style. Using in his Indian photographs the formulas of Samuel Bourne, who had set up a paradigm for composing landscape and architectural views, Saché had become so successful in his reinterpretation of his model's schemes that the public often interpreted his pictures as made by Bourne. Bharath's careful reconstruction of Saché's career sheds light on the production and attribution of his images.

Dwelling on questions that appear to be as old as photography itself, while also stressing the importance of history for our present reflections on the future of the image, this issue of History of Photography brings into focus a number of critical debates and artistic practices that demonstrate once more the crucial place of the photographic medium in modern culture.

Notes

1 – François Brunet, La naissance de l'idée de photographie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 2000.

2 – See the special issue of History of Photography edited by Katherine Hoffman, History of Photography, 29:4 (2005).

3 – Jody Berland, North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, Durham: Duke University Press 2009.

4 – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986.