Photography: The Abundant Art

Abstract

Photography has long been criticized for excessive reproduction that creates an image world capable of displacing more authentic relationships, while anxieties about the deluge of images have been magnified further by the comprehensive use of digital technologies. Although such concerns are not wholly misplaced, the concept of excess distorts understanding of photography and public spectatorship. By reframing photography as an abundant art, one can move beyond traditional debates in photography theory to consider how the photograph offers distinctive resources for thinking about modernity, sustainability, and the common good. In place of an antidemocratic social contract backed by assumptions of scarcity, photography enables a mode of enchanted seeing that offers a profound relationship with the world, and a model for democratic association on behalf of an abundant life for all.

Keywords:

• excess
• abundance, Scarcity
• abstraction
• modernity
• enchantment
• Susan Sontag
• Paul Feyerabend

Notes

1. Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, s.v., “excess.”

2. Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, s.v., “abundance.”

3. Examples of those operating within an emergent paradigm shift in photographic theory and criticism include Azoulay (2008), 2012), Campbell (2015), Chouliaraki (2013), Emerling (2012), Kennedy (2016), Kozol (2014), Linfield (2010), Ritchin (2010), Schwartz (1998), Sliwinski (2011), Levi Strauss (2014).

4. For a more general argument about the relationship between surplus energy and civilization, see Georges Bataille’s claim that the constant input of the sun’s energy creates surpluses in all natural and cultural systems, and that consequently “it is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury,’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems” (1991, 12; his emphasis). Although not adhering to his argument, we share four of its central claims: that human societies exist amidst far more energy than they need; that many forms of scarcity often are artificial; that the encompassing abundance is not adequately recognized or valued; and that there is need for better understanding of the relationship between abundance and scarcity. Note also the implicit homage to the sun in our Figure 3.

5. All such numbers are lower than actual use, as not all users (including many in China) are not being measured. An artistic depiction of the deluge of images was created by Erik Kessels’ exhibition, Photography in Abundance (Bond 2011). For an earlier and similar installation that features the accumulation of waste, see Hirschorn 2010. Apologies to Carl Sagan (1997) for “billions and billions.”

6. There are many reasons for the falling away from a sense of holy immanence – and many of them are of religious origin, not least in Western Christianity.  But part of that falling away may have included writing off images as vehicles of spiritual presence.  As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted, there has been an iconoclastic attitude within the secular construction of Western image culture, not least in respect to our habits of interpretation (1987).

7. Relevant scholarship here includes Mitchell (2002), Schwartz and Ryan (2003), Hoelscher (2013), and Clark (2004). An extensive bibliography of scholarship on the genre in art history and geography is available in the notes to the introductory essay in Schwartz and Ryan. For a fine-grained critique of how the category of landscape photography is itself a construction that misrepresents the nineteenth-century images now included in the history of the genre, see Krauss (1989).

8. Examples now are legion, as with time-lapse photography and satellite imagery being employed to document extreme glacial drawback. See James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey at http://extremeicesurvey.org or any number of “before/after” photo displays that demonstrate ice melt such as Katherine Butler’s “8 Before-and-After Images of Ice Melt,” Mother Nature Network (July 12, 2013) at http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/8-before-and-after-images-of-ice-melt. For a fuller discussion of the ways in which visual technologies are being mobilized to provide what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls a “countervisuality” to the effects of climate change, see “Visualizing the Anthropocene” in “Visualizing the Environment,” a special edition of Public Culture 26 (2014), 213–32. For a longer view of the role that photography has played in the environmental movement, not always to good effect, see Dunaway 2015, Peeples 2011, and DeLuca and Demo 2000, 2001.

9. Azoulay (2012, chapter 2) provides a lengthy critique of the conventional wisdom that politics and aesthetics should not be mixed together (see also Reinhardt et al. 2007; Strauss 2005, 3–11; 2014, 130–35).

10. “The sages put the abandonment of selfishness and the spirituality of compassion at the top of their agenda. For them, religion was the Golden Rule” (Armstrong 2006, 468; emphasis in the original).

11. Affirmations of the idea that philosophy begins in wonder include Plato, Theaetetus, 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book I, lesson 3; Whitehead 1938, 168. We side with those interpreters who define thaumazein as involving more than being curious or perplexed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Hariman

Robert Hariman is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University. John Louis Lucaites is Provost Professor of Rhetoric at Indiana University. They are the co-authors of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (U. of Chicago, 2007) and The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (U. of Chicago, forthcoming 2016). They also co-host the blog www.nocaptionneeded.com