Photography: The Unfettered Image

Photography: The Unfettered Image
ISBN-10
1000887790
ISBN-13
9781000887792
Series
Photography
Category
Social Science
Pages
165
Language
English
Published
2023-01-06
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Author
Michelle Henning

Description

We live in a time in which photographs have become extraordinarily mobile. They can be exchanged and circulated at the swipe of a finger across a screen. The digital photographic image appears and disappears with a mere gesture of the hand. Yet, this book argues that this mobility of the image was merely accelerated by digital media and telecommunications. Photographs, from the moment of their invention, set images loose by making them portable, reproducible, projectable, reduced in size and multiplied. The fact that we do not associate analogue photography with such mobility has much to do with the limitations of existing histories and theories of photography, which have tended to view photographic mobility as either an incidental characteristic or a fault. Photography : The Unfettered Image traces the emergence of these ways of understanding photography, but also presents a differently nuanced and materialist history in which photography is understood as part of a larger development of media technologies. It is situated in much broader cultural contexts: caught up in the European colonial ambition to "grasp the world" and in the development of a new, artificial "second nature" dependent on the large-scale processing of animal and mineral materials. Focussing primarily on Victorian and 1920s–30s practices and theories, it demonstrates how photography was never simply a technology for fixing a fleeting reality.

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