Kaja Silverman

The Miracle of Analogy

or The History of Photography, Part 1

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book is the first of a two-volume study of photography that challenges both how photography has been theorized and how it has been historicized.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. März 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 254mm x 179mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 528g
• ISBN-13: 9780804793995
• ISBN-10: 0804793999
• Artikelnr.: 41748281

Autorenporträt

Kaja Silverman is Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author, most recently, of Flesh of My Flesh (SUP, 2009).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
0Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction discusses the shortcomings of the three categories into
which we have slotted the photographic image: representation, index, and
mechanical copy. It shows that the first leads to a Cartesian account of
photography, that caters to our will-to-power; that the second anchors the
photographic image in the past, and associates it with absence and loss;
and that the third promotes the belief that photography is about
"sameness," and that capitalism can be defeated through its own
operations-rationalization, consumption, disillusionment. It argues that
the photographic image is actually an analogy, and it offers a preliminary
definition of this term.
1The Second Coming
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that the user of the room-sized camera obscura
attributed its images to the world, and imputed an aesthetic value to them.
They were self-portraits, drawn with the pencil of nature, and he was their
receiver. When the camera obscura was transformed into a portable box, into
which he could peer, and equipped with lenses and mirrors that rectified
its inversions and reversals, the device's user began thinking of it as a
tool, with which to "take views." This narrative began anew when Louis
Mandé Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot unveiled their rival processes.
Photography's early practitioners and viewers attributed its images to the
world, emphasized their aesthetic properties, conceptualized them as
self-portraits, and thought of themselves as receivers. Industrialization
fostered the illusion that photographic event begins with the human eye,
and transformed the camera into a device for "taking pictures."
2Unstoppable Development
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that early photographs were as labile as the camera
obscura's image-stream. Because they required such long exposures, they
emerged slowly, through the gradual accumulation of luminous traces, and
they often vanished, blackened, or continued to change after they were
chemically "fixed." Early photographs also changed in tandem with the
world, revealing that it, too, is constantly evolving. After the
photographic image was chemically stabilized, it no longer changed
internally, but it continued to develop in other ways: through the memories
and associations it triggered in the viewer's psyche, through
trans-historical and cross-medium analogies, and through the "reproduction
process."
3Water in the Camera
chapter abstract
This chapter theorizes the developmental impulse in photography through
Jeff Wall's notion of "liquid intelligence," and the human drive to master
the world through his notion of "dry" or "optical intelligence." The human
drive to master the world motivated the search for "fixative" agents. It
also led to repeated attempts to equate photography with the camera, and to
subordinate the camera to the human look. These goals proved surprisingly
elusive; only after half a century of technological innovation did the verb
"to receive" fall into disuse, and three other verbs-"to take," "to
capture," and "to shoot"-become standard usage. Chapter 3 traces the
journey leading from the former to the latter.
4A Kind of Republic
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that photography does more than disclose the world to
us. It also shows us that we are linked to each other through the most
binding of analogies: the one called "chiasmus." Chiasmus is the most
binding of analogies because it stitches the seer to what is seen, the
toucher to what is touched, and visibility to tactility. Photography
reveals these reversible and reciprocal relationships to us through the
inversion and lateral reversal of the camera obscura's image-stream, the
positive print's reversal of the reversal through which its negative was
made, the chromatic variety of Fox Talbot's prints, the two-way street
leading from the space of the viewer to that of the stereoscopic image,
cinema's shot/reverse shot formation, and the cross-temporal practices of
some contemporary artists.
5Je Vous
chapter abstract
After the industrialization of the chemical medium, photography went
elsewhere. Chapter 5 discusses three instantiations of this "photography by
other means": Freudian psychoanalysis, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and
the opening sequence in Chantal Akerman's The Captive. The tropes that were
associated with the camera obscura and early photographs resurface in
Freud's account of the psyche, and Proust's account of art-making. Both
writers conceptualize the psyche as a receptive surface on which perceptual
images are traced, identify the world as the source of those images,
maintain that many of them never become conscious, and compare those that
do not to undeveloped negatives. Both also liken the process through which
unconscious images become conscious to photographic development, and
Proust's narrator compares his relationship to Albertine to the
relationship between a negative and a positive print. Akerman carries this
project further in The Captive, her filmic adaptation of Proust's story.
6Posthumous Presence
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that the most famous passages in Benjamin's "The Work
of Art in the Age of it Technological Reproducibility" come from "Little
History of Photography," which privileges similarity rather than sameness,
and reprises and expands upon the tropes associated with the camera obscura
and early photography. Benjamin arrives at this account of photography
while gazing at three nineteenth century photographs, and ruminating on a
series of passages from Der Geist Meines Vaters, Max Dauthendey's memoir
about his father. These passages all turn on the look-the male look, the
female look, and the look that the figures in early photographs direct at
the viewer. These passages inspire an astonishing claim: the claim that
during the long exposures of early portrait photography, the sitter "grew"
into the "picture," allowing the figures who appear in them both to solicit
and to return the viewer's gaze.