This first issue of photographies Volume 11 marks our transition into the second decade of the journal. We celebrated our first 10 years with an exciting international conference hosted in London in May 2016. Many papers from that event will be brought together as a special double issue of this Volume (11.2‒3) later this year. With participants from several different continents, that issue will represent issues and themes in currency around the world. This first issue brings together a number of articles, each submitted independently of one another, that variously critically address uses of and responses to images.
If all images are constructs, what constitutes a “fake” photograph? Since the inception of photography there have been discussions relating to images as mediators of “facts” and to the theoretical interrogations of photographic transparency, meaning and interpretation. Debates have taken various forms — for instance, in the 1990s, arguments relating to photojournalistic ethics in an era wherein the possibilities afforded by digital tools generated fears of extensive image manipulation. The most recent manifestation resonates not in terms of theoretical critique — although debates about indexicality and photographic meaning rumble on — but as a response to concerns about “fake news” that are playing out variously, particularly in certain political contexts. But to address questions of authenticity risks distracting from broader interrogation of photographic storytelling, ideological discourses and images as critical intervention.
As Ruth Peltzer-Montada notes, the ubiquity of photography and the ease with which photographs are made, circulated and accumulated has increased the illusion of transparency that continues to be attributed to photographic imagery. She argues that, by contrast, printmaking as a material procedure with tactile properties significantly contributes to the critical potential of the photographic. For her the question is how to foster reflection through slow looking. Kate Addleman-Frankel likewise emphasizes the role of print processes within the address to the viewer in the work of Pierre Trémaux, the nineteenth century architect, naturalist and expeditionist, whose publications on the geography, people and architecture of Anatolia and of northern and central Africa deployed diverse technical methods including lithography, engravings based on drawings, photo-mechanical print and photography. The essay is framed through material culture, rather than photography theory, thereby positioning the then new medium within a complex visual representational field.
Agustina Triquell focuses on work by Mexican photographer Mayra Martell, to consider visual narrativity on women victims of forced disappearances in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, contrasting these with uses of photographs of the missing in Argentina. Whilst the context is one of human rights, she analyses ways in which photographic strategies operate at the intersection of the personal and the broader community. It is argued that, by contrast with more traditional social documentary models, her intention is to create a continuing space for those who have disappeared. Also focusing on moments of trauma, Neil Matheson examines the embodied sensorial aspects of photographic documentation in the legacies of nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Referencing the multi-sensorial within film theory, he centres on haptic aspects of reading and experiencing photographs to suggest that the acknowledgement of photographs as objects within material culture facilitates further ways of considering how photography contributes to addressing memory and trauma.
Jong-chul Choi takes Boris Mikhailov’s Case History as an example through which to interrogate photographic ethics in the picturing of human misery. The question associated with Mikhailov’s work is in part one of agency; the photographer takes images of people, not through collaboration but through observation and objectification. In contrast, taking the notion of “positive computing” as a starting point, Andrew Cox and Liz Brewster examine everyday photo-sharing as collaborative practice. Drawing upon interviews with 16 people regularly engaged in photo exchanges, they argue that image sharing contributes to wellbeing, particularly as people and events are generally presented in a good light and social networks are expanded. In addition, they find that making photos for sharing leads people to seek out relatively mundane yet novel experiences that may contribute to generating new interests. They argue that identity is performed through everyday practice; sequences of images reveal aspects of character without the self-consciousness of personal profiles on other types of site.
As this issue demonstrates, the journal continues to foster a broad approach to the photographic, historically and now, encompassing a range of theoretical positions, issues and interrogations that together contribute to elucidating characteristics of photographic concerns and practices. The range of examples through which theoretical concerns are addressed, and the fact that contributors to this issue are based in Japan, Mexico and Canada, as well as in the UK, demonstrates the global remit of the critical questioning that characterizes photography now.