The initial ambition of the journal (as printed on every inside cover of each issue) was to “construct a new agenda for theorising photography as a heterogeneous medium”. Whilst we may need to question its status as a unitary and unified “medium”, a term that has probably outlived its usefulness, the papers published here demonstrate the importance of the journal as a vital discursive space and forum for contemporary thought on the photographic image. It is in the assemblage of essays, as published here, that the patterns of thought and practices begin to formulate a contemporary consensus about the critical condition of photography and its studies. We have avoided the temptation to reach towards a general theory of photography, which would make expansive claims about photography as a crucial component of the “social totality”. Something of the problem of any such claimed unity is embedded in the essays of this issue, which refuse any easy unity or singular coherent general strategy. As with Michel Foucault’s idea of theory as a tool kit, the workings of the arguments in these papers are established by the problems raised.
Like other well-known established art photography figures, Stephen Shore’s Instagram account has come to the attention of many. Cláudio António Moreira Alves do Carmo-Reis considers Shore’s online work in a comparative analysis with the poetic structures of modernist poetry and diaristic mode of notation — the old spaces of “high” and ’low’ culture find themselves mutated in our “liquid postmodernity”. Agne Narušyte’s essay reflects on historical photographs relating to Lithuania, architecture and war to raise more general questions about the shattered temporality in their legacy as monuments and memorial devices. Doron Altaratz and Paul Frosh explore what they call “sentient photography”, active smart phone apps that, like the “operational images”, activate machine-based responses to data network environments. Sara Dominici’s essay on darkroom networks shows that the concept of “networked image” has a longer history, and was already in play a long time ago. As outlined in her essay, “photographic autonomy” is at the heart of the cultural-technological passion of the image among travelling photographers. The argument about travel, body and space is taken up in a different axis by Brent Luvaas in his auto-reflective essay on “street photography”, which is considered here as a practice that both embodies the figure on the street and the photographers place in it. Alison V. Dean takes up the spatial thread more ethically through the question of how the image of the migrant is constructed in photographs. She navigates the complex dynamic between smart phone images and all other mediatized representations of migrants and refugees. Neil Matheson’s essay takes the inter-cultural practices of Japanese-European avant-garde practices between the Japanese photography of Nakahira Takuma and the French new novel (nouveau roman) as a strategic strategy of alienation.
We are delighted to see the internationalism of the journal develop apace, not only in the many different directions and geographic locations of our contributors and their enquiries, but also to the methods adopted towards this interdisciplinary object, which we still often cast in an oddly singular term, “photography”.