Photography
‘Photography’ is a large and complex phenomenon, with diverse histories, driven by everything from aesthetics to technology. My interest is in those photographic practices – variously named documentary or editorial photography, news photography or photojournalism, remote-sensing or satellite imagery – that seek to portray our world to us. In this context, photography is a technology through which the world is visually performed.
The pictures that the technology of photography produces are neither isolated nor discrete objects. They have to be understood as being part of networks of materials, technologies, institutions, markets, social spaces, emotions, cultural histories and political contexts. The meaning of photographs derives from the intersection of these multiple features rather than just the form and content of particular pictures.
This means we have to be concerned with how images work as they circulate. While it is not possible to discount the individual biographies, habits and skills of selected photographers, my major concern is with the practices through which a place and its people are enacted and the possibility of our response as distant observers is made possible.
Following along these lines, I have researched particular photographs of atrocity, famine and HIV/AIDS in order to understand how they have functioned. Details of these projects are available on this site.
In addition, I have published a series of essays dealing with related themes. In Representing Contemporary War I reviewed Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others in the context of photography covering the invasion of Iraq, while Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance considered how war photography by Don McCullin and others might resist the performative constitution of state identity. In Salgado and the Sahel I examined Sebastiao Salgado’s 1984-85 reportage of famine in the Sahel, while in Horrifc Blindness I explored the issues of when and how we saw images of death in the media. Most recently, in Geopolitics and Visuality I began to ask a series of conceptual questions about how photographs make geopolitics visible to us, using coverage of the crisis in Darfur as an example, while in Tele-Vision I considered the production of satellite images in recent conflicts. My current project involves developing those arguments into a book that deals with the pictorial economy of atrocity, famine and war in the Sudan.
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One Response to “Photography”
‘Still pictures are not still…’ « praxis books February 16th, 2009 at 10:33 am #
[...] But the next day, my thoughts returned to what David had said, and to the general discussion that had followed. On David’s website, I came across how he understands photography, ‘a technology through which the world is visually performed,’ and a gist of his theoretical argument. I quote: ‘The pictures that the technology of photography produces are neither isolated nor discrete objects. They have to be understood as being part of networks of materials, technologies, institutions, markets, social spaces, emotions, cultural histories and political contexts. The meaning of photographs derives from the intersection of these multiple features rather than just the form and content of particular pictures.’ (http: //www.david-campbell.org/photography/). [...]