Filip Mitricevic, "The Ways in Which I Never Thought About My Great-Grandfather: An Essay on the Potentials of Photography as a Historical Document," Currents of History 3/2020 (2020), 247-268. (original) (raw)
Tokovi istorije, 2020
This paper is on the trail of answering the theoretical question of the potential of photography as a historical source. The paper does not aim for a historical reconstruction in the classical sense but is an attempt to show the reach of this visual media in historical research, based on the correlation of a sample of family photographs, oral history, and theory. By employing the author’s “personal voice,” the paper attempts to correlate particularities with a broader context and general theory. The author uses photographs of his great-grandfather, made at a prisoner-of-war camp during the World War II, to show the limitations of photography as a historical source.
In Pursuit of the Unknown: Photography & the Artifact of Nostalgia
This paper focuses on building a conceptual framework for looking at contemporary photographic methods through the lens of historical process within the medium; its relationship to the fields of science and technology, how society’s relationship with photography has changed, and why process is not as valued today but continues to have relevance. It is also a defense for reimagining how we can approach the medium in a more holistic way, while still generating relevant and contemporary dialogue about a medium that is rapidly being replaced by it’s digital successor. My concern is that the issue of what is lost, as we barrel into the future, further and further away from the tactile and hand-made image, is that our critical thought of the past, present and future is not considering the contexts of those times respectively, lacking the universal perspective to analyzing over-arching modes of image making. What I attempt to do in the following pages is take a step back from the standard, polarized view of the differences between “then” and “now”, and elucidate the modes of common thought that continue to inform visual culture. To look holistically at the photographic, outside of time, at the objective agenda of why we make what me make.
A new kind of history? The challenges of contemporary histories of photography
2010
Since the late 1970s, when the history of photography became an academic subject, and with increasing interest in photography in the art market, there have been frequent calls by various scholars for a 'new kind of history' of photography. These calls were part of what Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson described in a special photography issue of October (Summer 1978,) as a renewed scholarly 'discovery' of the medium, characterized by the 'sense of an epiphany, delayed and redoubled in its power.' This rediscovery carried the message that photography and its practices have to be redeemed 'from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it had been consigned.'1 The calls for a new history of photography suggested that the time has come to substitute Beaumont Newhall's hegemonic modernist classic The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present with new text/s.2 Newhall was a librarian and later the first director of photography of t...
Photography and Its Shadow, Stanford University Press, 2020, INTRODUCTION
Photography and Its Shadow, 2020
In the heated debates over the significance and value of photography that swirled around the medium in the first few decades after its invention, it was already clear to both enthusiasts and detractors that the new image-making process was poised to radically alter human experience. Today, a hundred and eighty years after its inception, photography has established itself as the regulating standard for seeing and picturing, remembering and imagining, and, significantly, for mediating relations between ourselves and others. It is now so intimately intertwined within our ordinary routines that we cannot begin to imagine our everyday lives without it. Photography has become an intrinsic condition of the human, a condition that—with Heidegger in mind—may be termed “an Existential.” And yet, photography’s rootedness in the ordinary is so deep that its existential dimension also typically hides from us, challenging us to find a vantage point as well as a philosophical language for describing its pervasive presence. The book thus lays the groundwork for a philosophical interpretation of the changing condition of photography in the twenty-first century. It should be understood as a prolegomenon—not the kind of wide-ranging Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics we know from Kant and the history of philosophy, but one that is more narrowly construed, concentrating on a specific metaphysical problem: an introduction to a future metaphysics of the image or to a future ontology of the visual. The term “future” applies here, as it does in Kant, to invite further elaborations of a preliminary ontological framework; but, in contrast to Kant, it also serves to acknowledge and address the ever-changing character of the phenomenon under investigation and, specifically, the fact that as the visual changes, it generates new possibilities for the future of the image. Photography, as Hans Belting reminds us, constitutes only “a short episode in the old history of representation.” The hegemony of the photographic is a short, and likely, a passing chapter in our relationship with images. Yet, as it is caught between “today and tomorrow,” photography also provides an opportune framework for rethinking the condition of the visual image in its movement toward the future, a future for which we are responsible, since its trajectory is determined by our present age.