Photography as Gesture: How Photographs Make Things Happen (original) (raw)

2018, National Gallery of Canada Review May 2018, Vol. 9, pp. 22-35

This paper explores photography not simply as an image or document of an event, but an event in its own right. The photograph, inscribed as gesture, prompts movement outward, demanding to be held, exchanged, and manipulated. Within albums and personal displays of remembrance, it entangles the subjectivities of those it encounters. The photograph, set in motion through interpersonal relationships and consumer economies (tourism, celebrity), creates imagined communities of shared experience. Albums, often a product of women's domestic labour, demonstrate how photographs actively create communities. A portrait of its assembler's desires, the album retains not simply images, but traces of events initiated by the photographic act, revealing rich relations between photographs and users.