IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.5 (2016) 99
Thierry Gervais, ed., The “Public” Life of
Photographs
Jan Baetens
This important collection of essays (but the volume is so cleverly composed and edited that one may have the impression that the book is a multi-authored monograph) is the first volume of what promises to become a key series in the field of photography studies. Copublished by MIT and the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto), the RIC Books will disseminate the research results of the Centre along three major lines: 1) “Critical Ideas” (on scholarly topics of particular importance), 2) Essentials” (new editions of key publications in the field), 3) “Collections and Archives” (which will have a focus on the RIC’s discrete collections and artist archives). A typical example of the first strand, The “Public” Life of Photographs aims at studying an apparently simple but amazingly overlooked question: how does the context in which we look at photographs influence our understanding of what they represent (in more than one meaning of the word). The method chosen to study this vital topic –after a brief introduction the book presents nine case studies covering different periods as well as different types of photography– reflects the firm conviction that photography should not be reduced to one single theory or practice, and that the key word of its readings should be the multiple, not the unique.
The collection is organized in three sections: 1) “Photographs as Mass Culture” –a section that mainly focuses on issues of reproduction (I will come back on this term) and the use of photography in public spaces other than the ones we usually think of today, such as museums and galleries; 2) “Photographs as Visual News” –a section that foregrounds the many uses of documentary and reportage photography; 3) “Photographs as Art” –a section that does not limit itself to traditional questions regarding the progressive integration of pho-tography in the commercial art world, but that highlights the ways in which the encounter of photographic images and the museum and artistic context have reshaped the proper form(s) and our experience of the latter. However, as already stated, it would be unfair to stress too much the division of the book in three independent parts and the specific content and argumentation of each individual essay. Much more striking is the unity in diversity, with a strong emphasis on unity, that characterizes the pages of this project. On the one hand, all essays tackle the same basic question: how does the context of an images determines its interpretation? On the other hand, it is no less clear that all essays share a common set of references, so that each chapter implicitly or explicitly expands on the other ones, and vice versa. This is an exceptional achievement for this kind of books and the editorial work of both Thierry Gervais and the whole RIC team can only be quoted as an example to all those who want to learn how to convert a mosaic of texts into a single work, without abandoning the enriching
The “Public” Life of Photographs
Thierry Gervais, ed.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016, 276 p., b/w & color ill. ISBN 978-0-262-03519-4
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.5 (2016) 100 diversity of each voice and each topic.
The line-up of the book is impressive and offers (much of) the best that can be found in the ongoing critical and theoretical dialogue between the North-American and the French traditions (a very encouraging observa-tion, and one can only hope that the Ryerson Image Centre will continue to foster and why not to expand this collaboration between various approaches and traditions). The collection opens with an exceptionally challen-ging contribution by Joel Snyder, who offers a critical analysis of the concept of “reproduction” in the famous essay by Walter Benjamin on the work of art. More precisely, he convincingly demonstrates that Benjamin’s definition of “reproduction” is the result of a misreading which produces a (still lasting) confusion between two aspects or mechanism: first the making of the image itself (which Benjamin considers as the reproduction of a preexisting image, while Snyder insists on the fact that the camera does not reproduce an original image but actually produces that original image itself), second the making of copies (which according to Benjamin is not different from what happens at the level of the actual making of the image). Relying on a subtle close-rea-ding of the many concepts and techniques of copying, reproducing, and multiplying images in art theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Snyder manages to propose a completely new reading of Benjamin, which should help diminish the often asphyxiating influence of this essay on photography scholarship.
All other essays of the book are, with no exception, as stimulating and innovative as the one on Benjamin. And they all have in common the contextual broadening of the field. The issue of “making images public” (a fundamental issue of photography as a social medium, for neither the first calotypes nor the daguerreotypes were actually reproducible, although for different reasons) is not only studied via the technical or technolo-gical lens of reproduction techniques (dramatically historicized by Geoffrey Batchen in his discussion of the engraved reproduction of photographs), but also through the new uses of photographical images in the pri-vate, semi-public and public sphere and through the multiple interactions between them (see Vincent Lavoie’s article on the display of forensic images in court). The issue of “making images news” is not only examined in light of a specific genre or subgenre, namely press photography, but becomes the starting point of several discussions on the use and abuse of the analogies and dissimilarities between document and art (as in the contributions by Mary Panzer and André Gunthert). The issue of “making images art” is already present in various articles on the photographic documents (see Olivier Lugon’s chapter on the “reproducible exhibitions” of both MOMA and Life in the post-war years, which shed a new light on Steichen’s The Family of Man), and the multiple interactions between the world of photography and the world of art outside aesthetic debates in the narrow sense of the art prove extremely helpful to frame the contextual prerequisites and implications of the last batch of articles that foreground the changes of the museum after the photographic turn, so to speak (for as Nathalie Boulouch, Heather Diack and Sophie Hackett make very clear, it does not suffice to notice that photography enters the museum; what matters is that the former changes the latter, for instance at the level of what is being acquired and how it is displayed and reappopriated).
To a certain extent, The “Public” Life of Photographs brings to the fore a dimension of photography we all know very well, and of which no one is unaware, but it does so in a coherent yet open way. In that sense, it could be compared to the “discovery” of the photographic picture’s “materiality” (in the work of visual an-thropologist Elisabeth Edwards). The (beautifully illustrated and well printed) book is one more outstanding proof of the extreme vitality of the field of contemporary photographic studies. The strong editorial policy as
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.5 (2016) 101 well as the exceptional merits of the collaborators of the Centre offer the guarantee that this series will become a landmark in the field.
Jan Baetens is founding editor of Image (&) Narrative.
