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History of Photography: The State of ResearchAuthor(s): Douglas R. NickelSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 548-558Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177242 .Accessed: 20/02/2011 23:21

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History of Photography: The State of Research

Douglas R. Nickel

Fifteen years ago there appeared in these pages a brief state- ment by then Art Bulletin editor Richard E. Spear announcing a series of stock-taking essays on the principal fields of the

discipline. These were intended to address "the current state of art-historical research" and question "those recent research tendencies that appear to be most important intellec-

tually." The impetus for the series was reported unambigu- ously: Spear, as the quarterly's manager, had observed what he held to be a disturbing downward trend in the quality of

manuscripts submitted to it-to the point where peer review

judged five out of six unworthy of publication, for want of "substantive art-historical contribution" or failure to raise any question whatsoever involving "historical consequence." Openly concerned for the scholastic well-being of the disci-

pline and troubled that this trend from history to theory might indicate some kind of growing taxonomic incoher- ence, the editor prescribed his course of methodological self-examinations as a way to diagnose "what research methods are producing the most promising results, and how schol-

arly inquiry from other disciplines may be affecting art his-

tory, whether beneficially or not." Some essays would extol

experimentation and interdisciplinarity, he predicted, while others would oppose change in favor of what the editor termed "conventional approaches."'

The history of photography never appeared among the

topics in this first series of deliberations on the state of research. From an editorial standpoint, this is no surprise: photographic subjects had as a rule fallen outside the wonted

purview of the Art Bulletin, deemed better suited to occasional treatment in the pages of the College Art Association's second house organ, the Art Journal, and other periodicals than to the organization's more established quarterly.2 Yet, ironi-

cally, at the very moment of the so-called crisis in the disci-

pline there stood no province of art historical writing more contested along these exact lines-methodologically, ideo-

logically, as theory-than photographic history. A latecomer to institutional attention and intellectual respectability, the field suddenly found itself in the 1980s in the uncomfortable

position of being the arriviste of academic subjects, both

newly sanctioned by officialdom and an occasion for heated

controversy. As the decade witnessed, on the one hand, endowed chairs and university courses created specifically to address a burgeoning interest in photography and its history, increasing numbers of doctoral students gravitating toward

study in the area, the widening popularity of photographic activities within museums and the book trade, and a vora- cious new collecting market, it also encountered a growing body of critical writing that took exception to the methods of

photography's formal canonization, one that argued against the mapping of traditional art historical approaches and values onto photographic subjects and, ultimately, for the

nonidentity of photography and photographic history itself.

We might imagine this situation as having two moving tar-

gets-the advent of a permanent critique of the domain

nominally indicated "the history of photography" at the moment of, and in reaction to, its academization on the pattern of (chiefly) the history of art, and the concurrent event of art

history itself emerging as an unsettled, contested discipline internally at odds about method, theory, and its relationship to the sphere of visual culture. This situation, generally speaking, obtains today.

But is the history of photography a discrete field? Or is it an

essentially interdisciplinary area of study, and if so, how then does it stand in relation to the "conventional approaches" of art history? Does it have its own traditions, canon, and literature? Is photography, in the last analysis, a medium? A set of social practices? A technology with its own identity, unique in its imagistic capacities? These fundamental questions frame

any clear understanding of the current state of research into

photography's history, for they decide not only what kinds of

problems will be posed of its materials but even who is

qualified to pose them, and what criteria are used to judge the results. Where previous installments in this series enjoyed the luxury of assessing how vigorously and in what directions their fields were growing, this one must treat as an open question whether photographic history ever amounted to a delimitable academic subject in the first place, and why whatever promise it might have had as such now seems all but dissolved or reallocated to other areas and specializations. If

nothing else, the casebook on the history of photography's abortive field formation offers a general lesson, for the way it demonstrates the essential contingency of any intellectual

cosmology and-perhaps of more immediate concern-for how its long-standing implication in visual culture might predict the disciplinary fortunes of art history as a whole. Classification has its consequences: redrawing of frontiers of

knowledge in a particular fashion not only circumscribes, in the abstract, what can and cannot be thought about a subject, but also determines the real-world constitution of departments, careers, curricula, dissertations, research programs, grants, symposia, exhibitions, the language of textbooks, the editorial policies of academic journals, and a host of other concrete exigencies. To discern the historical a priori that

brings (or fails to bring) a new object of knowledge into

being is, as Michel Foucault once argued, to glimpse some-

thing of the threshold conditions that shape our modernity.3 Therefore, before arriving at a description of the present

state of affairs, it is crucial to recognize the means by which the past has staged discussion of photography as a historical

proposition before now, and how this discussion has been handed down to the present generation. If, as a working proposition, we understand a field to be simply the consensus of knowledgeable people, reflected through joint activity, that a subject has appreciable cognitive density and order,

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE STATE OF RESEARCH 549

then a field's imminent "history" may be perceived most

directly by tracing the shadow of its written histories. With

photography, interestingly, the critical enterprise of formu-

lating official history begins simultaneously with its public announcement in 1839. That announcement was fraught with controversy: both the Englishman William Henry Fox

Talbot and the Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, backed to varying degrees by their respective national science

establishments, claimed priority to the invention, with Da-

guerre's bid being further complicated by a challenge from his countryman and original partner, Nicephore Niepce, and the civil servant Hippolyte Bayard.4 For this reason, both the French and English announcements logically featured a narrative of their claimants' actions and intentions leading up to their independent successes, with the clear polemical aim of

affirming precedence. Photography's literature begins with tremendous self-consciousness about the invention's origins in experimental science, its potential as technology, its rela-

tionship to the traditional representational arts, and the

seemingly superhuman properties of its results. The most noticeable strain in the first fifty years of writing

about photography's history, accordingly, is the partisan, sometimes disguised, usually nationalist debate over who

might profess to be its true author, with arguments often

hinging on how much of a workable method one need assume to declare the process discovered. Works with titles such as Historique de la decouverte improprement nomm&e Daguerre- otype, La verite sur l'invention de la Photographie, and The Evolu- tion of Photography, with a Chronological Record of Discoveries, Inventions, etc., frequently taking the form of practical manu- als or handbooks, installed the literature that would admin- ister the earliest accounts of photography to posterity.5 The result was to embed a Whig version of history into its foun-

dations, emphasizing technological improvement over any other element. "The inventors of photography did not wait for the historians to make their discoveries part of written

history," notes Eugenia Parry Janis. "They assumed the task themselves. By situating the discoveries within the evolution of science and technology . . they established a tradition that would mark every written account that followed: the

story of photography would be the history of its technique."6 The model of photographic history as the history of its

technical refinement lived on into the twentieth century, its nationalist overtones becoming most virulent in the 1920s and 1930s, as French- and then German-speaking historians rendered increasingly factional and self-serving versions of

photography's first hundred years.7 More important, these same decades witnessed the advent of the first synthetic histories of the photographic image-the first discernible art histories, monographic studies, and social histories of photography as picture making. To be sure, camera aesthetics had been discussed and debated regularly, from the very moment of announcement, in the journals of photographic societies and the popular press, but an awareness that individual creative achievement, artistic biography, stylistic influence and periodization, or other art historical concepts might be brought to bear on photography had to await the

alignment of several factors. One was the capacity for inex-

pensive photomechanical reproduction. As Anne McCauley has noted, illustrated histories of art of any kind were rare in

the nineteenth century, and thoughtful consideration of specific images, when it happened, fell more to the province of

art criticism than art history in this period.8 Furthermore, the

audience of professional historians, collectors, and interested

laypersons needed to make publishing an art history of photography commercially viable did not yet exist. Technical histories and handbooks, fashioned on a popular history-of- science model, were written by and appealed to practitioners of the medium, a specialized but at least extant market.9

Another factor was the more universal presumption by the 1930s that photography could function as art. The saga of Peter Henry Emerson, Alfred Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession and its international counterparts, and the fin-de-siecle pro- motion of photography as a legitimate form of high art is too

familiar to want rehearsing here. The relevant point is that the pictorialist movement, reflecting contemporary Arts and

Crafts philosophy, wished to disavow photography's techno-

logical basis-its adherents took great pains to make the by now industrialized photograph appear to be a handmade,

unique object, expressing the sensibility of the artist (Fig. 1)-and as a corollary went searching for a usable past, one in sympathy with their ideological aims. For pragmatic as well as intellectual reasons, two nineteenth-century figures were

doggedly advanced to serve as forebears: Julia Margaret Cam- eron and David Octavius Hill. Stieglitz showed Hill's images at his 291 gallery in 1906 and reproduced gravures after Hill and Cameron in his periodical Camera Work; Clarence White extolled Cameron's contributions in the pages of the Plati- num Print; Alvin Langdon Coburn included Hill and Cam- eron in the 1914 exhibition he organized for the Ehrich

Gallery in New York and the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, titled (significantly) Old Masters of Photography.?0 The selections were strategic: Cameron was generally held to be care- less of technique, yet the imaginative force of her composi- tions suggested a prophetically "modern" character in her efforts. Hill represented "naivete and freedom from all the-

ory," as Paul Strand wrote in 1920, and possessed an intuitive

understanding of camera aesthetics that might now ground "a living photographic tradition.""1

The fact that the first art historical studies of photography in the 1920s and early 1930s chose Cameron and Hill to be their subjects is thus no accident. Roger Fry was conscripted by Virginia Woolf, Cameron's grandniece, to furnish art world authority to her 1926 biographical study Victorian Pho-

tographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cam- eron. He complied, with certain qualifications, but along the

way theorized in expansive historical terms about the coinci- dence of the cult of personality and the rise of photography in the 1860s.12 Heinrich Schwarz, a classically trained modernist art historian, is credited with writing the first scholarly, full-length photographic monograph, David Octavius Hill- Der Meister der Photographie of 1931.13 Schwarz, born in Prague, studied under Julius von Schlosser and Max Dvorak at the

University of Vienna after World War I, completing his doctoral thesis on the origins of Austrian lithography in 1921.14 He brought to his analysis of Hill the Vienna school's engage- ment with the social history of art and its openness to ne-

glected periods and materials. Even the structure of his text is remarkable. Nodding to tradition, the book begins with a deliberation on photography's genesis, but Schwarz, as stu-

550 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 3

1 Frank Eugene, Horse, photogravure, Camera Work 30 (1910): n.p.

dent of the graphic arts, was singularly concerned with how

photography's invention might be integrated into a cultural

history of continuous-tone reproductive printmaking. (This discussion prefigures William Ivins's published theory of "visual syntax" by some twenty-two years.15) In the hands of an artist like Hill, Schwarz argues, the graphic potential of pho-

tography-"a medium of artistic expression having un- dreamed-of strength and effectiveness"-might be realized.16 He consequently links early photography with the Realist

project, tying it to an urge for naturalism in both the arts and sciences. Hill is made to embody "the essential character" of

photography: its truthfulness, its democratic reproducibility, its modern marriage of technical and artistic knowledge. Though ostensibly monographic in intention, Schwarz's study activated the brand of Geistesgeschichte explanation that would bedevil photographic history for the rest of the century.

Out of the 1930s and these trial projects emerged the

English-language text that has shaped thinking on the subject more permanently than any other. Beaumont Newhall's The

History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day began its life as the exhibition catalogue to his 1937 survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Photography 1839-1937. Newhall, trained in art history at Harvard under Paul J. Sachs, had

developed an amateur interest in photography as a young man and set about exploring photography as an art historical

topic privately as early as 1932. In 1934 he delivered a paper at the College Art Association's annual meeting in New York on the relationship between painting and photography in the nineteenth century, which was printed that same year in the CAA journal Parnassus. By then he was already regularly

publishing book reviews on photographic titles, such as Hel- mut Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann's pictorial Aus der Friih- zeit der Photographie, and reading what available literature he could find.17 When Newhall was appointed librarian in 1935 at the six-year-old Museum of Modern Art in New York, he was immediately put to work compiling the bibliography for Cubism and Abstract Art, the first of four sweeping, didactic exhibitions organized between 1936 and 1938 under director

(and fellow Sachs student) Alfred BarrJr.18 Barr had written into the museum's prospectus plans for an eventual department of photography, and a step toward that goal would be some major exhibition, which, when it was offered to him, Newhall decided to treat as a historical overview of the sub-

ject. As it turned out, of the 841 items included, some 40

percent of the photographs were contemporary.19 Newhall's formulation of the project followed closely the

schema inaugurated by Continental antecedents of the previous decade, such as the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition of the Deutsches Werkbund in Stuttgart. Reflecting current Bau- haus thinking, such presentations actively leveled distinctions between fine and applied photography; the Stuttgart show, for instance, contained astronomical images, X rays, advertis-

ing illustrations, and press photos, as well as works by the

European "new vision" photographers. Indeed, L'aszlo Mo-

holy-Nagy was adviser to both the Stuttgart exhibition and Newhall's: the Museum of Modern Art installation, designed by the Swiss modernist Herbert Matter, included the same

large blowups and groups of works hanging on panels, to avoid the "monotony of row upon row of frames" (Fig. 2).20 Barr and Newhall were each aware of the revolutionary po-


2 Beaumont Newhall, installation photograph of the entrance to the exhibition Photography 1839-1937, gelatin silver print (photo: Copyright Beaumont Newhall, 1937, The Estate of Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall, courtesy of Scheinbaum and Russek, Ltd., Santa Fe, New Mexico)

litical ethos informing this approach to display in Europe, but in New York the radical motives of the avant-garde were by and large suppressed.

The exhibition's catalogue proposes a history of photography's first century built on a tacit technological determinism; its chapters address "Daguerreotypes," "Calotypes," "The Col- lodion (Wet Plate) Process," "Dry Plate Photography," and

"Contemporary Photography," in addition to applications such as "Scientific Photography" and "Moving Pictures" (Fig. 3). But this periodization by technique is offered in the service of a larger aesthetic proposition, what Newhall calls "the Basic Laws." In an ersatz W6olfflinian move, the author isolates "two fundamental factors which have always charac- terized photography-whatever the period": "detail" and "mass."21 The daguerreotype and Edward Weston's Sand Dunes could typify the first; Hill's calotypes and modern

enlargements from miniature cameras represent the second. The aesthetic "schism" created by the medium's diverging technical potentialities remains a historical constant here, as its two faces-one optical, the other chemical-compete for dominance. Function, intention, authorship, the history of

technique per se are secondary to this master concept, whose

pedagogical aim was not strictly historical but institutional. As the exhibition's press release indicates, "it is the hope of the Museum and of the Advisory Council that this exhibition will enable visitors to understand the principles which have gov- erned photography since the earliest days and that it will demonstrate the capabilities of the camera as a medium of

expression."22 "Detail" and "mass" inaugurates a long line of

antipodal constructs that the Museum of Modern Art's de-

partment of photography would subsequently use in the performance of that demonstration.

The important things for us to consider about this, the urtext for most photo history to follow, is its lack of novelty,

its pronounced aesthetic bias, the model of historical causation that drives it, and its essential untenability as a self- sufficient explanatory framework. Newhall always acknowl-

edged the written sources he used to prepare his manuscript. He cites Victor Fouque's 1867 account of the invention, the

largely process-based histories of Josef Maria Eder and

Georges Potonni6e, the contemporary writings of Erich

Stenger, Gisele Freund's 1936 dissertation La Photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle, and, most important, the Hill

monograph of Heinrich Schwarz.23 "His writing had a great influence on me," Newhall later recounted. "To my knowl-

edge he was the only art historian of the period to consider the spiritual aspect of photography above the technical."24 As a graduate student in art history, Newhall was much attracted to Weltanschauungsphilosophie, moving from Heinrich Wolfflin to Wilhelm Worringer to Alois Riegl in his search for alter- natives to the fact-based "archaeological" approach taught at Harvard.25 In Schwarz he found ready-made the ghost for his

machine; the earlier monograph had already sketched out a

zeitgeist theory for photography's invention and develop- ment.

The practically simultaneous, and at first independent, efforts towards it as an end bear witness that the time was

ripe: and they refer the individual act of invention back to some motive power greater than the personal, to an im-

pulse that was strictly determined by historical forces.... The burgher's picture of the world had been small and narrow. Now at once he expanded it on every plane of his middle-class existence, in a great, wide circle that spread from his spiritual focus and mental attitude. And with this

expansion the need of pictorial witness to his newly awak- ened sense of life began to grow prodigiously. He felt a

pressing desire to have the novel aspects of the new life


3 Alfred Barr Jr., cover design for Newhall, Photography 1839- 1937, exh. cat., 1937

expressed plastically in some new, unique, and especially appropriate medium.26

In Newhall, photography is cast as the realization of Schwarz's evolutionary history of printmaking:

The rise of the bourgeoisie at the end of the eighteenth century created a demand for more pictures. Wood en-

graving was revived, and lithography was invented-two methods of reproducing pictures in great quantities.... The middle classes now demanded their portraits at prices they could afford. To answer this demand, new and

cheaper ways of making portraits were devised where the artist's skill was replaced by an ingenious mechanism.27

The photographic camera was one such mechanism. To this he adds another element-the rise of amateur artists in the Romantic period, with their desire for optical sketching ap- paratuses. When Newhall later recast his exhibition catalogue as a history text, a third imperative was drawn out of the first two: a mounting cultural need for representational verisimil- itude. "The fever for reality was running high. The physical aid of camera obscura and camera lucida had drawn men so near to an exact copying of nature and the satisfaction of the current craving for reality that they could not abide the intrusion of the pencil of man to close the gap. Only the

pencil of nature would do."28 Newhall's attempted synthesis of technics and aesthetics

was deployed in the ministry of another not altogether orig-

inal idea: historically justifying certain contemporary approaches to photography while ignoring or repudiating others. Just as the turn-of-the-century pictorialists mined the nineteenth century for progenitors, Newhall saw his delinea- tion of history leading directly to what he considered the best work being done by his modernist peers. Their aesthetic ideal was monolithic: sharp focus, a full range of tones, clarity of detail, no darkroom trickery (Fig. 4). The operative principle was what came to be a hallmark of formalist criticism, namely, that each medium had its own unique properties and should be judged according to its fidelity to internally specific criteria. Enunciations of this view in the 1920s and 1930s are

legion and international. Albert Renger-Patzsch declared, "Photography has its own technique and its own means. Try- ing to use these means to achieve painterly effects brings the

photographer into conflict with the truthfulness and un-

equivocalness of his medium, his material, his technique."29 Moholy-Nagy argued, "In today's photographic work, the first and foremost issue is to develop an integrally photographic approach that is derived purely from the means of photography itself."30 Strand wrote that photography "finds its raison d'etre, like all media, in a complete uniqueness of means. This is an absolute unqualified objectivity. Unlike the other arts which are really anti-photographic, this objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation.... The full potential power of every medium is dependent upon the purity of its use .... "31 Such differentiation of photography from the manual arts had the local agenda of distancing modernists from their generational predecessors, the pictorialists, whose aesthetic they felt was mongrelized, adulterated with painterly impurity. New- hall's text was direct on this point: "We are seeking standards of criticism generic to photography."32

The net effect was a history constructed as teleology. If the

only good or true photography was "straight," then the his-

tory of photography would be a chronicle of the medium's erratic climb from primitive intuition to modern-day aesthetic self-knowledge. The pictorialist phase, which modernists viewed as a dead end but which in 1937 occupied about a third of photography's life span, is treated summarily, its

antitechnological underpinnings curiously distorted to fit the author's scheme. "Instead of 'improving' or altering the camera's image by manual processes," Newhall writes, "the mem- bers of the Photo-Secession believed that the camera's image was the only valid basis for an artistic photograph. Any control which the photographer had over the image was admitted, insofar as that control was 'photographic,' that is chemical or optical."33 Late in life, Newhall admitted the narrow and monological criteria that informed his decisions:

I was absolutely bowled over by the school of straight photography.... When I began making my selection of

photographs for the 1937 retrospective exhibition, I treated soft-focus work as an aberration that should be eliminated. And I found a strong affirmation of straight

photography in the magnificent nineteenth-century work of Nadar, the Brady school, Hill and Adamson, among others, and in the twentieth-century work of Eugene Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.34


4 Edward Weston, Santa Fe, gelatin silver print, 1941. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of George Knight. (photo: Courtesy Edward Weston Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson)

In this version of history, Timothy O'Sullivan predicts Ansel Adams, Talbot's contact images anticipate Rayographs, and Civil War documentation looks forward to modern "candid"

photography. The rhetoric of the exhibition put the stress on these pioneering "primitives" and on contemporary work, which by Newhall's estimation made up almost half of the

survey's contents. The point of this excursion is not, of course, to disparage

Newhall-for its day, his was an intellectually ambitious and

groundbreaking text, and the author was personally the most

genial of men and generous of scholars. His History went

through five editions over a period of forty-five years, doing more than any other one source to develop a subject practically nonexistent in this country at the time of its drafting. (Even after other histories began to appear in the 1980s, many instructors retained Newhall as their primary course

reading; its concision, clarity, and narrative linearity made it in many ways a model textbook.) Nor is it to privilege a single author as the voice for all photographic history in the high- modern period. We simply need to appreciate how the structure, the assumptions, the scope-to say nothing of the canon-of this work became something like the field's subconscious, so invariably did its ideas, directly or otherwise, remain before us. Newhall envisioned himself to have written a "vertical" history, "I think that what we are doing now is

spreading out horizontally from this core into many areas," he observed in 1986.35 That "core" reflected a set of personal and generational values operative in the interwar period, and once instated, they did not change fundamentally or suffer serious challenge until the 1980s.

An example of this horizontality may suffice. Newhall, following Schwarz, embeds an essential tension into his 1937 text: he introduces the notion of an integrated social history

of picture making (the photograph as reproducible print) and argues, per New Vision ideology, for photography's pictorial uniqueness, its exceptionalism. The history begins not in 1839 with the invention of photography but in the fourth

century B.C., with Aristotle's observation of the effect of the camera obscura. Improvements of the camera over two mil- lennia set the stage for the invention, which is "brought into

being by a desire to make pictures. Without exception, those men who were instrumental in making it practical were im-

pelled by an artistic urge."36 This thesis was elaborated by Schwarz in a paper delivered at the 1963 CAA annual con- ference in New York, titled "Before 1839: Symptoms and

Trends," where the speaker would contend: "Only in 1839-or to be exact, as early as 1827-does photography emerge.... Its spirit, however, has been somehow present ever since, to quote Panofsky, 'the Renaissance established and unanimously accepted what seems to be the most trivial and actually is the most problematic dogma of aesthetic

history--the dogma that a work of art is the direct and faithful representation of a natural object."37 The supposition that "in spirit" photography was an invention of the Renais- sance impressed John Szarkowski, who, as director of the

photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in

1963, heard Schwarz's lecture. In 1979 Szarkowski invited his student Peter Galassi to develop an exhibition and catalogue around this thesis, namely, that "the ultimate origins of photography-both technical and aesthetic-lie in the fifteenth

century invention of linear perspective." Citing Schwarz as his

point of departure, Galassi counters the argument that photography's invention was primarily technical by proposing its derivation to result from a stylistic Kunstwollen. In his much-

quoted formulation, "the object... is to show that photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art,


but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition"- or, as Newhall had put it, brought into being by the desire to make pictures.38 The exhibition's title, Before Photography, happened to be the same as that designating the first section of Newhall's 1937 catalogue. A postmodern and more highly nuanced variant of Newhall's "desire to make pictures" appeared as recently as 1997, in Geoffrey Batchen's Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography.39 Each of these studies engages the terms of the one before it; none stops to consider if the initial premise stands up to scrutiny-if, indeed, the desire/invention scheme is not tautological, built on a by now exhausted model of historical causation.

Insofar as it branched away from Newhall's vertical core, photographic history of the past several decades has suffered from the intellectual weaknesses introduced by the original configuration. A genealogy of photographic exceptionalism could be traced, most noticeably in the writings of John Szarkowski, and it also finds a curious parallel manifestation in the many discussions of photographic ontology and indexi- cality by such writers as Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, Hubert Damisch, Stanley Cavell, and a host of others. Little attention has been paid to how the imperative to define photography's "essence"-formally, semiotically, or phenomenologically- brackets out discussions of epistemology, that is, how such essences have been (and continue to be) constructed socially, discursively, as de facto apologia for certain preferred stylistic approaches or other ideological agendas.40 Also latent in Newhall is the potential for a broader cultural history of

photographic picture making, but modern attempts remain encumbered by the vast umbrella the 1937 project attempted to throw over its subject.41 By using history to justify function with aesthetics-by refusing to separate a tradition of photographs conceived as pure aesthetic objects from those intended for documentary or other utilitarian purposes-New- hall consolidated every type of photographic image into the rubric of art history, as he knew it. But where cultural history might ably handle aspects of the complex social, political, and economic circumstances surrounding the production and consumption of art photographs, traditional art history has proven insufficient to the task of handling nonart photographs. The structural deficiencies of such aesthetic total- ization lay behind much of the debate arising around photography in the period after 1975.

With the growth of a collecting market for photography in the 1970s and 1980s and its mounting assimilation by the museum into the precincts of high art, the theoretical limits and market interests of formalist criticism's application to

photography--especially vernacular photography-became apparent to several writers, most of whom approached the

subject from outside its perceived disciplinary boundaries.

Nineteenth-century photography, in particular, was seen as

being repositioned and functionally decontextualized, as the

imperatives of the museum wall and catalogue page declared the object's aesthetic autonomy over its historicity as a (usually) published commodity of complicated authorship. The blanket importation of traditional art historical concepts (artist, style, oeuvre, masterpiece) to photographic materials of all stripes in this period engendered forceful reaction in the form of a metacritique, as commentators as diverse as Rosa- lind Krauss, Allan Sekula, Sally Stein, Abigail Solomon-

Godeau, Douglas Crimp, Victor Burgin, Christopher Phillips, andJohn Tagg lined up against photography's indiscriminate appropriation as art.42 Though arriving from a variety of theoretical perspectives-Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and linguistics among them-these writers brought to their task an orientation steeped in the 1960s politics of confron- tation, and they joined with certain contemporary artists in prompting photography to assume a central position in the larger project of postmodern criticism. In the pages of the journal October, photography became a favored object from which to extend theory, whether it was the putative indexical character of the photographic image (brought to bear, for instance, on Marcel Duchamp and the conceptual art of the 1970s), Freudian or Lacanian exegesis (Jean-Martin Char- cot's 1870s photographs of hysterics, for example, as entree to a phenomenology of psychic states), or the critique of institutions (Christopher Phillips's analysis of photography installations at the Museum of Modern Art and Louise Law- ler's picture essay on the arrangement of pictures in museums and private homes appeared in 1982 and 1983, respec- tively).43 At the extreme, this metacritique denied all but a nominal existence to photography and its history, as the logic of photographic exceptionalism was turned on its head:

What alone unites the diversity of sites in which photography operates is the social formation itself: the specific historical spaces for representation and practice which it constitutes. Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work .... Its

history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces.44

Building on an alternative literature and tradition (Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes,John Berger, Louis Althusser, Walter

Benjamin, and so on), the period cleared the way for what in

principle could have become a cultural history of the photographic image-an analysis of the precise historical and material conditions out of which discursive meaning and author-

ity is constituted-though that program has seen only sporadic realization since.

It is important to note that the postmodern critique of

photography responded directly to its apotheosis as a museum object; since Newhall's day, a disproportionate share of what might be termed the "normal science" of photographic history has arisen from that institution rather than from academic quarters. This continues to be the case today-and therein lies a difficulty. While we must be grateful for the new information and insights museum-based research has tire-

lessly brought to light, it is undeniable that the practical imperatives of museum business and the museum audience inflect the sorts of scholarship that might be generated there.

Monographic exhibitions are favored over thematic projects; marketable subjects get better catalogues than specialist topics or unknown artists; the contents of a show will invariably be dictated by the condition, availability, and attractiveness of

original objects.45 Scholars realize, too, the ongoing problem of art history's "two cultures," as the generally shorter texts of

nonjuried exhibition catalogues are not perceived to carry


the same intellectual weight as publications through univer-

sity presses. Moreover, the arena of the photographic exhibition has proven itself a sometimes precarious setting in which to venture critical or revisionist approaches to contemporary practice. One need only remember how the curators of the Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano exhibitions in 1988 and 1989 were rewarded with criminal trials and culture-war campaigns over their contents and funding to rec-

ognize how overt political pressure induces self-censorship in the all-too-public realm of display. The traditional conserva- tism that surrounds museum culture and its congenital diffi-

culty in abandoning the transhistorical, transcendental aesthetic assumptions of its trustee- and audience-derived power base handicap whatever impulse toward open consideration of photographs as historically and culturally begotten arti- facts to which scholars within that institution might aspire.

Photographic history's identity as an academic subject, meanwhile, is even more fraught with contradiction. What seemed like an emerging new area of study for art history in the 1970s and early 1980s discovered its ordination encumbered by the dual challenges of critical theory and art histo-

ry's own disciplinary crisis. With a categorical urge born of the flourishing collecting market and museological attention to the subject, that period saw new positions created specifically to teach the history of photography within art history departments on a number of American campuses, including the University of New Mexico (Beaumont Newhall was hired there in 1971), the University of Chicago (Joel Snyder, 1976), the University of California, Santa Barbara (Ulrich Keller, 1982), the University of Rochester (Carl Chiarenza, 1986), and, notably, Princeton University, where Peter Bun- nell was appointed to the first endowed chair in the field in 1972.46 At the same time, the history of photography became increasingly visible as a subject area within modern or Amer- ican art curricula: William Innes Homer at the University of Delaware, Eugenia Parry Janis at Wellesley, Alan Trachten- berg at Yale, Carol Armstrong at the University of California, Berkeley, Sally Stein at the University of California, Irvine, Abigail Solomon-Godeau at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh at Columbia, Anne McCauley at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Mary Warner Marien at the University of Syracuse, and Kim Sichel at Boston University are but a few of the more prominent scholars who would make photographic topics an important part of their academic compass henceforward.47 To varying degrees, this later generation absorbed critical theory and the lessons of photography's postmodern critique and incorporated it into their writing and teaching, helping to set the stage for photography's reconfiguration as a material available to interdisciplinary, visual-culture analysis.

Yet whatever consensus existed twenty years ago that one's subject could legitimately be identified as "the history of photography," in the 1990s a reverse trend was witnessed: that of photography's redistricting as but one kind of material worked on by scholars likely to declare their primary affiliation to social history, cultural history, or theory, if not literature, the history of science, philosophy, anthropology, or American studies. In real terms, this shift has manifested itself in a general contraction of the field as previously de- fined. Newly created positions in photographic history are

now practically nonexistent, while those left by retiring spe- cialists in the field are customarily filled either with scholars who would identify themselves with theory and media- and visual-culture studies or with modernists who may teach photographic history as a secondary subject. While the effects of this intellectual realignment have in many regards been sal-

utary in redressing the deficiencies and narrowness of a formalist art history of photography, too little attention has been directed toward what might be getting lost in the process. The argument for photography's social determination and ultimate nonidentity, as drafted by Benjamin and force-

fully articulated by the likes of Sontag, Sekula, Tagg, and the

early Barthes, is based on the notion of ideology-specifically, the idea that photography is not a medium or mere class of imagery but a commodity subject to the invariable distortions and "false consciousness" that characterize (in Marxist thought) all superstructural products of bourgeois culture. Capitalism "traffics" in a photography that is here taken as pure ideology, an empty vessel or conduit for the transaction of power relations. This is, in other words, a

negative, iconoclastic critique of culture, played out through and upon a system of representation that, in its seeming naturalness, transparency, and rhetorical authority, is taken to be disquietingly efficacious to the ends of creating and

sustaining power. Marx himself famously selected the camera obscura, with its perfectly inverted rendition of reality, as a

metaphor to describe the operation of ideology's deceptive projections onto consciousness.48 The legacy of photography's theorization in the 1980s is thus a split: while the countless ontological and indexical discussions have seemingly overplayed deliberation of photography's essence, it

may be said in equal measure that the subject of these Marxist writings was never truly photography at all.

If the nascent field of photographic history failed to estab- lish a secure academic foothold in the 1970s and 1980s, at least part of the reason must be that those recognized as its voice in this period neglected to counter its negative critique adequately with any positive program of study or founda- tional theory of their own, or even attempt to define for the field coherent limits and scope. One area that might well have been claimed as a proper, albeit more limited, subject of an art history of photography-and what seems to have lan- guished most under the conditions of the past two decades-is what could justifiably be considered the object most immune to extradisciplinary critique: the expressive photograph, consciously conceived to take its place within a tradition of previous artistic expressions and ideas and operate socially within such context. The current state of research has thrown out the baby with the bathwater, tacitly associating art photography with formalism and making its choice as a topic of research appear unfashionable, even as the cultural ascen- sion of this type of object outside the academy continues unabated. Instead, almost by default, the project of photography's metacritique-the questioning of photography's social and virtual identities, with the attendant doubt that something called the history of photography is even possible-has been installed in academic circles as its hegemonic subject. As WJ.T. Mitchell once aphoristically put it, "When the tigers break into the temple and profane the altar too regularly, their appearance rapidly becomes part of the sacred ritual."49


To a large degree, the history of photography is now

caught up in more comprehensive debates about its inclusion as an object of scrutiny in the realm of visual culture and the

implications of standing down what Aby Warburg referred to as the border guards protecting the disciplines.50 One need

only look to the official reception of books such as Anne

McCauley's study of commercial photography in nineteenth-

century Paris and Molly Nesbit's reinscription of Eugene Atget as a working photographer to find the perturbation still

looming over what academic photo history is supposed to be. In her 1995 Art Bulletin review of these books, Judith Wech- sler betrays the same anxiety about theory that motivated Richard Spear ten years before her: "the emphasis on possibilities rather than on objects of knowledge . . . characteristic of the New Art History and its dismissal of the view of values inscribed in works of art."51 McCauley's and Nesbit's books were hardly the best examples of overweening theory read into photography (what the reviewer calls "the reduction of the history of photography to discourse"); both works are

meticulously researched and annotated source-based studies in the social history of photographic patronage. Wechsler's

objections seem to lie in her colleagues' decision not to treat their materials as self-evident "art" with self-evident "values"-to not privilege style, aesthetic quality, individual tal-

ent, or individual photographs -but rather concentrate on cultural context and issues of reception. The Kunst versus kitsch debate, which, as in this case, wants to frame these terms as mutually exclusive and antagonistic, might appear to have taken on relevance to discussions of traditional art

history's relationship to the study of visual culture, but the

art/not art dialectic has haunted photography from the moment of its discovery, and the time has come to move beyond it. What is at stake in scholarship is the probity of the scholar's thought, not his or her allegiance to real or perceived "camps." Since judgments about the quality of a scholar's work are now caught up in a proliferating set of standards and the confusion that arises from their cross application (for

example, theoretical compelling but potentially ahistorical

arguments versus the more forensic, Rankian model of his-

tory writing), the disciplinary specificity of those standards should become the starting point of debate.

Photographic history's imminent demise as an aspect of art

history is neither natural nor inevitable. The elements of its

resuscitation and future articulation have already been intro-

duced, though whether these see formulation into integrated programs of study has yet to be decided. The investigation of

photographic discourse and the social construction of photographic authority-the study of photography as an idea-

remains a productive intellectual vein to mine, as does the

work that brings discourse analysis to bear on the issue of

photography's historically constituted relation to vision, perception, cognition, attention, and spectacle. (Geoffrey Batch-

en's work and Mary Warner Marien's recent study Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839-1900 illustrate the

potential of the former topic; the writings of Joel Snyder within the field and of Martin Jay, W.J.T. Mitchell, and

Jonathan Crary outside it come to mind as promising points of departure for the latter.) A theory of the "photographic apparatus" and lens-based media might be postulated, along the lines of Christian Metz and also Friedrich Kittler's treat-

ment of inscription systems and mechanisms of memory, wherein the technological possibilities of photography as a medium of information are historicized and the camera, like the printing press or the typewriter, is seen to fundamentally change the codes of representation in culture-an especially timely concern in the light of photography's latest mutation, digital imagery.52 The intellectual self-consciousness with which photography's social agency can now be contemplated is the beneficial and necessary end product of two decades of

soul-searching on its behalf, but how (or whether) the remains of this process get reassembled into something vital will be determined largely by the institutional forces that

presently control photographic history's fate. Will it, like the field of cultural anthropology over the past two decades, effectively dissolve in the face of an internally directed chal-

lenge to its ideological presumptions and limits, only to

reappear in a new configuration so different as to be hardly recognizable as the same field?53 Thomas Kuhn once observed that "successful research demands a deep commit- ment to the status quo ... ."54At this moment, the appearance of a status quo for photography, or for art history generally, seems a speculative notion indeed.

Douglas R Nickel is curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received his doctoral degree from Prince- ton University, specializing in the history of photography. Recently Nickel organized the exhibition Carleton Watkins: The Art of

Perception. He serves as field editor for photography books for CAA Reviews [Department of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Calif. 94103-3159].

Frequently Cited Sources

Newhall, Beaumont, 1986, "The Challenge of Photography to This Art His-

torian," in Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, ed. Peter Welch and Thomas Barrow (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press).

, 1993, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Bulfinch Press).

Notes

1. Richard E. Spear, Art Bulletin 68 (Mar. 1986): 6. 2. See, for instance, the special issue published twenty years ago, Art Journal

41 (spring 1981), and sporadic individual articles since. 3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

(New York: Pantheon, 1971), xxiv. 4. Indeed, Pierre Harmant once listed twenty-four different individuals who

publicly laid claim to the invention; Harmant, "Anno Lucis 1839," pt. 1, Camera, no. 5 (May 1977): 39.

5. Isidore Niepce, Historique de la decouverte improprement nomme'e Daguerreo- type (Paris: Astier Librairie, 1841); Victor Fouque, La verite sur l'invention de la

Photographie (Chalon-sur-Sa6ne, 1867); Michel Eugene Chevreul, La verite sur l'invention de la Photographie (Paris, 1873); and John Werge, The Evolution of Photography, with a Chronological Record of Discoveries, Inventions, etc. Contributions to Photographic Literature and Personal Reminiscences extending over Forty Years

(London: Piper and Carter, 1890), cited in Martin Gasser, "Histories of

Photography 1839-1939," History of Photography 16 (spring 1992): 59 nn. 11, 14, 15, 39. Gasser's historiographic study has provided a solid framework for elaboration by subsequent scholars, such as Anne McCauley, cited below, and

myself, in this article. He has my appreciation. I would also like to thank those who offered to speak with me about or proposed revisions to this essay: Joel Snyder, Anne McCauley, Peter Bunnell, Joel Smith, Carl Chiarenza, John Szarkowski, Kim Sichel, Mary Warner Marien, and Perry Chapman. Jeanenne


Przyblyski also read the text and allowed me to present an abbreviated version of the results (titled "Photography beside Itself') in her session at the 2001 College Art Association annual meeting, Chicago.

6. Andre Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, The Art of French Calotype, with a Critical Dictionary of Photographers, 1845-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), xi, quoted in Gasser, 50.

7. For instance, Georges Potonniee could write in 1925, in his Histoire de la Decouverte de la Photographie: "Photography is the art which renders permanent, by other means than that of manual design, the images perceived in the camera obscura. It was invented by the Frenchman, Nicephore Niepce, in 1822.... The history of photography is essentially French." Erich Stenger, building on the suggestions of the Austrian historian Josef Maria Eder, published Die Photographie in Kultur und Technik: Ihre Geschichte wdhrend 100 Jahren in 1938, wherein he acknowledged the contributions of other countries, but continued: "We know, however, of the excellent contributions by Germans and we protest against the general belief that photography is a purely foreign invention. It was a German who produced the first image by light, it was a German who first used the word 'photography' in a newspaper. It was a German who contributed to the perfecting of photography . . ." The volume included a preface by Adolf Hitler's personal photographer. Poton- niee and Stenger, quoted in Gasser, 51-52, 59 nn. 19, 20, 30.

8. Anne McCauley, "Writing Photography's History before Newhall," History of Photography 21 (summer 1997): 88.

9. See ibid., 89. 10. Hill's early calotypes were reproduced in Camera Work in 1909 and 1912,

Cameron's portraits in 1913. (The contribution of Hill's partner Robert Adamson was not recognized at the time.) See McCauley's excellent discussion of this episode (as in n. 8), 92-95. White reviews the Old Masters of Photography project in the Platinum Print 1 (Feb. 1915): 5. The singling out of these precursors was not confined to the United States, however. The German collector Ernst Juhl, for instance, proposed Hill and Cameron as historical antecedents in his 1910 survey of art photography for Berlin's Konigliche Kunstgewerbe Museum. McCauley notes that Alfred Lichtwark, the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, was already promoting Hill and Cameron in 1893. In 1926, the German Photo-Secessionist Heinrich Kuihn was still lauding Hill's achievement in the pages of Photographische Rundschau and other local publications. See McCauley, 93.

11. Paul Strand, "Photography and the New God," Broom, Nov. 1922, reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 141-51. Abigail Solomon-Godeau once cast these selections in gendered terms: "One of Camera Work's projects consisted of the positioning of D.O. Hill... as the putative 'father' of pictorial photography. Julia Margaret Cameron, while not elevated to 'mother,' was the second mid-nineteenth-century photographer to be honored in Camera Work. Both retrievals should be understood as part of the attempt to construct an ancestry and a canon for pictorialist photography"; Solomon-Godeau, "Back to Basics: The Return of Alfred Stieglitz," Afterimage 12 (summer 1984): 25 n. 25.

12. Roger Fry, "Mrs. Cameron's Photographs," in Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron, by Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 9-15.

13. Heinrich Schwarz, David Octavius Hill-Der Meister der Photographie (Leipzig: Insel, 1931). The book was published in English the same year by Viking Press as David Octavius Hill: Master of Photography (subsequent refer- ences are to this work).

14. William E. Parker, ed., introduction to Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences; Selected Essays by Heinrich Schwarz (Layton, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1985), 7-13.

15. William M. IvinsJr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). This point is made by Martin Gasser, "A Master Piece: Heinrich Schwarz's Book on David Octavius Hill," Image 36 (spring-summer 1993): 36.

16. Schwarz (as in n. 13), 18. 17. B. Newhall, "Photography and the Artist," Parnassus 6 (Oct. 1934):

24-25, 28; idem, review of Aus der Fruhzeit der Photographie, 1840-1870 by Helmuth Th. Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann, American Magazine of Art 25 (Aug. 1932): 130-31. Newhall discusses these early efforts in his autobiogra- phy (Newhall, 1993), 33.

18. The others are Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism (1936), Newhall's Photography 1839-1937 (1937), and Bauhaus: 1919-1928 (1938). See Christo- pher Phillips, "The Judgement Seat of Photography," in The Contest of Mean- ing: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 17.

19. Newhall, 1986, 6. 20. Newhall, 1993, 52. See Phillips (as in n. 18), 19, and also Allison

Bertrand, "Beaumont Newhall's 'Photography 1839-1937': Making History," History of Photography 21 (summer 1997): 141-42, 145 n. 48.

21. Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839-1937 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 41-43.

22. Quoted in Newhall, 1993, 47. 23. Robert Taft's Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-

1889 (New York: Macmillan, 1938), published the year after the Newhall text, does not appear to have been an influence; Newhall was indeed Macmillan's outside reader for Taft's manuscript, but only after his own catalogue had already gone to press. See Newhall, 1993, 54.

24. Newhall (as in n. 19), 4. 25. Newhall, 1993, writes, "Riegel developed the metaphysical concept that

there is a spirit that guides creative artists in the same direction at the same time, no matter where they are: the zeitgeist, which inspires the artist's 'will to form.' I found him very stimulating .... This book became a bible for the German Expressionist painters-one of the few times I've discovered an art historian who really affected creative artists. When I returned to Harvard for graduate work, I immediately expressed my new enthusiasm for Worringer and Riegel to my advisor .... Although I got slapped down at Harvard, these writers remained an inspiration to me. I hope what I learned from them is reflected in my writing" (38-39).

26. Schwarz (as in n. 13), 3-4. Freund makes a similar case for a direct relationship between social epoch and aesthetic need. See her La photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle: Essai de sociologie et d'esthetique (Paris: A. Mon- nier, 1936). Newhall (as in n. 21) seems to have depended on Freund for his discussion of Gilles Louis Cretien and the protophotographic implications of the physiognotrace (13), as this French invention is not mentioned in Schwarz's narrative.

27. Newhall (as in n. 21), 13. 28. Beamont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day,

3d ed. (New York: Museum of Moder Art, 1949), 11. 29. Albert Renger-Patzsch, "Aims" (1927), reprinted in Christopher Phil-

lips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 105.

30. L_Aszl6 Moholy-Nagy, "Unprecedented Photography" (1927), reprinted in Phillips (as in n. 29), 84.

31. Paul Strand, "Photography," Camera Work, nos. 49-50 (June 1917): 3. In Schwarz (as in n. 13), Newhall would read, "within the limits of its nature the camera can become an altogether satisfying means of artistic creation.... Only in the choice of subject and composition and in his knowledge of the sculptural effect of light, only in his prevision of the final result and his elimination of the unforeseen eventuality.. . must the artistic performance of the photographer be completed and fulfilled" (11).

32. Newhall (as in n. 21), 41. 33. Ibid., 64. 34. Newhall, 1993, 45-46. 35. Newhall, 1986, 7. 36. Newhall (as in n. 21), 40. 37. Schwarz, "Before 1839: Symptoms and Trends," in Parker (as in n. 14),

98. 38. Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography

(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12. 39. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). See Joel Snyder's review of this book in the Art Bulletin 81 (Sept. 1999): 540-42.

40. The exception would be Batchen (as in n. 39), whose first chapter effectively lays out the rhetorical stakes of various recent critical proposals for photography's identity (4-21). The habit of asserting the photograph's fundamental difference from other kinds of images dates back to the time of its earliest introduction, of course, taking on new forms with every succeeding generation. An elaboration of Batchen's discussion might well trace the intellectual and political stakes of these earlier formulations.

41. In 1979 Carl Chiarenza expanded on this implication in Newhall in an articulate and well-reasoned plea. See Chiarenza, "Notes toward an Integrated History of Picturemaking," Afterimage, summer 1979, pp. 35-41.

42. Most of these writers' essays have since been anthologized. See in particular Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Allan Sekula, Photogra- phy against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks, 1973-1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1982).

43. Joan Copjec, "Flavit et Dissipati Sunt," October 18 (fall 1981): 21-40; Phillips (as in n. 18); and Louise Lawler, "Arrangements of Pictures," October 26 (fall 1983): 3-16.

44. John Tagg, "God's Sanitary Law: Slum Clearance and Photography," in Tagg (as in n. 42), 118.

45. We might observe, by way of illustration, the major photography publications generated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the past decade, which include six monographic studies (Nadar [1994], The Photographs of Edouard Baldus [1994], Eugene Cuvelier. Photographer in the Circle of Corot [1996], Paul Strand circa 1916 [1998], Walker Evans [2000], and the republication of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz [1997]); two large projects related to corporate collections (The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century; Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection [ 1993] and The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars; The Ford Motor Company Collection [1989], and no thematic titles.

46. Interestingly, this trend was not observed outside the United States. There is presently only one university position dedicated specifically to the history of photography in Germany; none exists in England, France, Italy, or

f558 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII NUMBER 3

the other European countries, despite a thriving interest on the part of museums and the publishing world in photographic studies.

47. These two rosters obviously conflate individuals with different back- grounds, interests, and generational outlooks in order to underscore the degree to which scholars identify themselves alternately (or simultaneously) with photo history and other fields. Another way of sorting working scholars in the field would be genealogically, by training: Kim Sichel, Anne McCauley, Molly Nesbit, Maria Morris Hambourg, and Peter Galassi, for instance, emerged from graduate programs at either Yale or Columbia at roughly the same time, taught by such modernists as Robert Herbert and Theodore Reff.

Janis and Krauss, both trained at Harvard, represent an earlier moment in this trend, as do those American art or American studies figures such as Homer and Trachtenberg, who became important teachers of photographic history within the purview of their specializations (Sally Stein, for example, studied under Trachtenberg).

48. See WJ.T. Mitchell, "The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marxism, Ideology, and Fetishism," in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1986), 160-208.

49. WJ.T. Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin 77 (Dec. 1995): 541.

50. Aby Warburg, "Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo

Schifanoia, Ferrara" (1912), in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). My thanks to Christopher Wood for this reference.

51.Judith Wechsler, review of Atget's Seven Albums by Molly Nesbit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and Industrial Madness: Commercial Photog- raphy in Paris, 1848-1871 by Anne McCauley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Art Bulletin 77 (June 1995): 334.

52. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

53. Bob Scholte has written of how the notion of a permanent critique in cultural anthropology stemmed from a desire mounting in the 1960s to revitalize and contextualize the "established" anthropology with which many had by then become disillusioned. Through an "anthropology of anthropology," as Scholte puts it, critics "were in a better position to evaluate [the] discipline as the intellectual symptom of an ethnocentric and imperialist culture or, ideally, as the empathetic and humane response to a cruel and fragmented world in political and moral crisis"; Scholte, "Cultural Anthropol- ogy and the Paradigm-Concept," in Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, ed. Loren Graham (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 231.

54. Thomas Kuhn, "Scientific Paradigms," quoted in Sociology of Science, ed. Barry Barnes (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), p. 102.