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Photography Theory (The Art Seminar)
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About the Author
James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Head of History of Art at the University College Cork, Ireland. He is author of Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, and, most recently, The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art and Master Narratives and Their Discontents, all published by Routledge.
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Product details
Series: The Art Seminar
Paperback: 484 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (December 15, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415977835
ISBN-13: 978-0415977838
Product Dimensions:
5.1 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.0 out of 5 stars
7 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#855,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This book is of great help to understand some of the basis that Ronald Berthes and Susan Sontag talk about. It's a great and efficient explanation of the photography theories. Totally worth keeping on the shelf.
interesting photography as philosophy, read it.
This book is mostly a rehashing of the subject on indexicality...is a photo an index or is it not. It is somewhat interesting but i think there are better things to read and a better things to spend money on.
Totally gooblegook. Extremely academic and unreadable.A complete waste of time and money. You've got to handit to the editor, though and his publisher to make this dreck look good to the consumer. I wish I would have been givenan opportunity to sample the book because if I had been Inever would have bought this.
Even though I've studied philosophy and semiotics extensively I consider myself a photographer rather than a philosopher or semiologist. Yet I believe that photography, or at least art photography, should have meaning. Photography theory as a field has seemed to work at the intersection of philosophy, semiotics and art history. I've thought that it might provide insight into the way that photographs demonstrate meaning and that it might help me to be a better photographer and viewer of photographs. Over the years I've read the important works in photographic theory by authors like Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, and more recently, Michael Fried. Although I often found photographic theory interesting as an intellectual and sociological exercise, nothing in photographic theory seemed to bear any relevance to either my own image making or my appreciation of images of others. Even though its utility to a photographer was suspect, I wanted to test whether my general impression was correct by reading the 2007 "Photography Theory".This book centers around a seminar of photographic theory academicians held at the University College Cork. The book begins with several introductory essays that were meant to lay the groundwork for the seminar, followed by a transcript of the actual seminar. This is followed by a twenty-seven so-called assessments meant to address the points raised in the seminar, and then two essays meant to wrap up the subject.The seminar itself dealt with a number of subjects that most photographers would find esoteric. The base question was, "what is photography?", and in attempting to answer that question a number of issues were raised. Typical was the question of the index, which to semiologists is a particular kind of sign or representation. Although the discussants dwelt on the subject at length, and although a few of the discussants asked what the use of the concept of an index was in a practical world, the discussion reached no conclusions. To similar effect was the discussion of Roland Barthes' distinction between punctum and stadium, which again reached no conclusion and demonstrated a concept in search of utility.The assessments were far more interesting than the seminar. A few assessors offered up what they considered clarifications or explanations of the seminar and a few chose to dwell on their own work without reference to the discussion. Many more felt that the discussion proved the non-utility (none of the assessors used the word "useless") of either the current state of photography theory or the seminar.After most of this I was more than ever convinced that photographic theory was of no help to me as a photographer, or even as a student of photography. Then the very last essay in the book arrested my attention. In "Photographs and Fossils", Walter Benn Michaels, a literary theorist teaching at the University of Illinois, offered a synthesis of the topics discussed and even an explanation of the most recent work of Michael Fried, that placed the diverse viewpoints previously discussed into an understandable perspective. He suggested that the reason for the confusion represented the dilemma of not just photography but art at the current time as to whether the artist should attempt to wrest control of the image by forcing the viewer to accept the artist's denotation of the image rather than the viewer's connotations. (Those are my words, not Michaels'.)Ultimately then, "Photography Theory" left me skeptical as to photography theory's usefulness to the practicing photographer and viewer, although a single essay left me still hopeful. Unfortunately, Michaels' work is otherwise unavailable, so the reader will have to determine if this wonderful paper is worth the aggravation of the rest of the book
Photography Theory is the second in a projected seven volume series called The Art Seminar, edited by James Elkins and sponsored by University College Cork and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions. I have only read this volume, but all evidently have, or will have, the same basic format:(1) Introduction - an overview survey article commissioned for the book(2) Starting Points - a small collection of papers on specific topics intended to stimulate discussion.(3) The Art Seminar proper - the transcript of an extended panel discussion on the subject of the book involving 8-12 participants and gently moderated by Elkins.(4) Assessments - twenty-five to thirty mostly one-page responses to the panel discussion by qualified people, primarily (exclusively?) academics, including a luminary or two. In this volume those who contributed responses were all different(with one special exception I'll return to below) from those who participated in the panel discussion, but it doesn't seem to be a requirement of the series.(5) Afterwards - a small number of papers commissioned for the book that discuss the subject with reference (but not necessarily very much reference) to the papers, the panel discussion and the responses.While not necessarily the most valuable part of the book, the panel discussion is clearly the heart of it. And in the case of Photography Theory it is a faltering one. The participants themselves seem unhappy with the results they achieve, or rather fail to achieve, and acknowledge more or less directly the following shortfalls, among others.(a) They cannot agree on "the index", a specific theoretical conception, derived from the philosophical work of C.S. Peirce, of the special "non-coded" (i.e. direct, inherent) relationship of a photograph to what it is a photograph of.(b) They cannot agree on what to make of Roland Barthes' writings on photography, particularly his late work Camera Lucida (1980), including the famous distinction between studium and punctum.(c) They cannot agree on the issue of the medium-specificity of photography as an art form and its relationship to painting and other art forms.(d) Their home territory is art history and criticism, and they are not sure what to think about forms of photography that fall outside this domain.(e) They are all academics and spend most of their time discussing photography with other academics and very little with practicing photographers.(f) They spend much more time talking about the theory of photography than about actual photographs.To their credit and especially to Elkins', there is no evidence that they improved the discussion after the fact by adding material to the transcript, or for that matter by taking material out (not counting grammatical discontinuities and easily imaginable ephemera like who ordered the chicken salad or which pub shall we go to after we're done).Similarly, and credit for this must go to Elkins, there is no evidence of the responses being limited in any way, whether in length or in content or in tone. The fact is that some of them are unapologetically negative, hammering on the weak points acknowledged by the panelists themselves, and others as well. They occasionally grind their own axes, but mostly ones relating to the topics at hand.So too for the afterwards, though these are less tied to the panel discussion and consequently less critical. (In fact, if anything they are too disconnected and take on the quality of, this is an interesting subject, here's what I think about it.)Still, there is one genuine sour note in the book that deserves mention. If you look carefully at the contents you will see that two people made contributions to two different sections. One is Rosalind Krauss, who has both a brief piece "Introductory Note" at the end of the Starting Points and another "Note on the obtuse" in the Assessments. The other is Joel Snyder, who participates in the panel discussion and also has an item entitled "Pointless" at the end of the Assessments. The two are related.Krauss says in "Notes on the obtuse" that she and Snyder "have been arguing about matters connected to the index for at least ten years now" (p. 341). They are clearly still doing so in the book, each trying to get the last word, and not in a friendly way. Snyder for his part, after noting the civility, if not the fruitfulness, of the debate about indexicality in the panel discussion, goes on to say: "Regrettably, some of the statements in this volume are not presented in the spirit of the talks at Cork, and so I will be blunt in my response", adding parenthetically "(obtusus in Latin means, among other things, blunt)", a clear reference to the title of Krauss's second piece. Then he goes on for more than twenty pages (one of the longest contributions in the Assessments sections; Krauss's two items are only a few pages each) restating his positions and addressing Krauss's statements point by point.For me all the weaknesses of the panel discussion listed above come together in this unpleasant after the fact debate. The discussion has become too academic, the positions too entrenched, and the scope too narrow. There is clearly something real in the notion of indexicality, but the Peircean foundation is too abstract and too aprioristic to truly explain it, and those whose who are trying to apply the concept to the problems of photography and art lack either the inclination or the ability or both to evolve it into a theory of photography that really works. The last essay in the book, the second of the two afterwards, by Walter Benn Michaels, is called "Photography and Fossils". It seems to me that the biggest fossil in photography is the index, as conceived by those who believe in it. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)If people really want a proper theory of photography, it should be one that covers all photography - or maybe even all of what we are now more likely to call imaging - both art and non-art (vernacular and utilitarian), both visual and non-visual (in the sense of showing something significantly different from what can be seen with the unaided eye). The theory should explain both the nature of how images are made and how they are perceived and understood by human beings.Elkins himself says something like this in the course of the panel discussion, and at one point brings up the example of side-scan sonar images. This was one of the times when people "stopped talking", but he himself says something very interesting: "It looks like a lunar landscape, but it can't be "read" like an image: you think you're seeing hills and valleys, but actually the value scale denotes hardness, softness and other properties. ..." (p. 181). I would add that you don't have to go this far afield to find images that raise interesting questions of "reading". Why do black and white photos seem realistic and HDR photos do not? Why do we trust an image made with a shift-and-tilt lens but not one that has had its perspective fixed in Photoshop? Where is the photographer in an automatic surveillance photo, or in a Gregory Crewdson shot?To conclude, if you are interested in photography theory that sees indexicality as the central overriding issue, you will probably find a lot that's worthwhile in this book, especially in the panel discussion and the responses. If on the other hand you are mainly interested in other things, for example the history of photography or the social function of photography or contemporary art photography, or simply how to take good pictures, then you will probably not find much of anything.With that caveat I give it four stars.
This is someone's term paper or research thesis turned into a book. Very educational, very much theory, and VERY BORING... I guess unless you are in education this book is a waste for time to read.
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