What Photography Is, by the art historian James Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), was published by Routledge in 2011. It is conceived as a reply to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, published thirty years earlier. Elkins borrows Barthes’s form – short numbered sections, a personal voice, digressions – but turns his argument around.
Three ways of writing about photography
In the preface Elkins identifies three dominant interests in photography writing: contemporary fine-art photography and its place in the art market (Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and critics such as Michael Fried); photography’s social meaning, as witness, memory and political tool; and photography’s relation to time, memory, love and loss, the territory of Barthes, Sontag and Derrida. His book belongs to none of these. It asks instead what photographs show when we stop looking for meaning, beauty or emotion.
Against the punctum
For Barthes, the punctum is the detail that wounds us. Elkins is wary of this focus on intense personal emotion. He notes that critics such as Fried took a few sentences from Camera Lucida and ignored the troubled, hesitant prose around them. Elkins proposes to look at the rest of the picture: the blur, the dust, the surfaces nobody notices, the parts of the image that are simply there. Photography, in his account, is a machine that records far more than anyone wants to see.
An unusual set of images
The chapters move through deliberately strange subjects: selenite, ice and salt crystals photographed under the microscope; rocks and landscapes from the Green River to the Brunswick Peninsula; a drop of water and dust from the World Trade Center; the Rapatronic camera, built to photograph nuclear explosions within millionths of a second; and finally lingchi, photographs of a Chinese form of public execution made around 1900. The last chapter is the hardest to read and the core of the argument: photography can force us to look at what is unbearable, and theory should not use emotion to look away.
Why it matters
Elkins’s book is one of the most original responses to Camera Lucida. It shifts attention from what a photograph means to what it contains, from mourning to attention. It pairs well with Elkins’s edited volume Photography Theory, which gathers debates among leading critics.
Form and voice
Like Barthes, Elkins writes in the first person and in short sections, and he admits to having copied Camera Lucida’s method to understand it. The result is a book that is both an essay in theory and a reflection on how to write about photographs. Readers who expect a survey will be surprised; those who know Barthes will find a provocative dialogue with him. The book can be uncomfortable, especially in its last chapter, and Elkins does not soften that discomfort: for him, honest attention to photographs includes attention to what is painful or meaningless in them.
Reference
James Elkins, What Photography Is, New York and London: Routledge, 2011. © Taylor & Francis. The book is protected by copyright; it is available from the publisher, booksellers and university libraries.