‘Light reading’

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Reading Photography: A Sourcebook of Critical Texts

Edited by Sri-Kartini Leet

In its ubiquity and myriad functions, photography is always liable to outflank attempts to define or delimit it. As early as the Great Exhibition of 1851 there were arguments about the nature and purpose of the young technology – would it be proper to exhibit it alongside other examples of 19th-century industry? Or did it more rightly belong with the creations of artistic imagination? Photography's stunning versatility and its shifting range of applications have always hampered the possibility that any consensus might emerge regarding such central questions as: What it is for? What are its products? And what is its value?

It is a brave editor, then, who undertakes to compile – as Sri-Kartini Leet has done – a serviceable anthology of writings on the medium (or technology, or practice...). Reading Photography – A Sourcebook of Critical Texts, 1921–2000 stands as the most ambitious and – dare I say it of a subject so diverse – comprehensive attempt to date. This is no mean feat. Readers familiar with Charles Harrison's co-edited Art in Theory volumes will feel at home: the selected texts here are grouped thematically, and each is introduced by a useful brief passage that outlines relevant background information, and details key points.

We start with four chapters with artistic, or formalistic, leanings: ‘Photography as art’, ‘Modernist visions’, ‘Photography and Surrealism’, and ‘The renaissance of colour’. But, of course, throughout there are the disparities and contradictions so characteristic of writings on the medium. Compare the critic A.D. Coleman's valorization of subjectivity: 'The work of every photographer describes a unique, personalized world, a version of the universe shaped by that photographer's sensibility and intentions’, with the supra-human ideals of the Russian avant-gardist Ossip Brik: 'The cinema and the photo-eye must create their own point of view, and use it. They must expand – not imitate – the ordinary optical radius of the human eye.'

This anthology is anglocentric; and I don't think too many feathers will be ruffled by the observation that, for much of the period covered here, there simply was no sustained critical discussion of photography's possibilities. Indeed, as Leet notes in her introduction, 'the primary focus is on writings developed from the late 1970s and 1980s onwards’. In other words, this is a collection of texts informed to a large extent by developments in photography theory as it matured under the sway of such diverse influences as feminism, postmodernism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. In the wrong hands this can prove a heady mix, but Reading Photography introduces and presents its material in a thoughtful and, more importantly, accessible manner.

There are, then, sections dealing with ‘Photography and postmodernism’, ‘Observations of the “Other”’, ‘The body and the gaze’, ‘Memory, time and narrative’, ‘The everyday’, ‘Shooting war’, and ‘Beyond the darkroom’, amongst others. Given the breadth of the ground covered, it is not altogether surprising to feel on occasions that this is something of a whistle-stop tour, but perhaps that is precisely what such ambitious anthologies always are. That said, informed readers may find themselves wishing for inclusions, or surprised at exclusions. 'Photography and the idea of the everyday', for example, focuses on snapshots and family photographs, but it has little to say on the equally important, often radical, broad-based European photographic explorations of the commonplace.

There is much to recommend to students of the discipline and interested enthusiasts; the work’s structure and tone encourages leisurely browsing and stimulates further reading. Alongside extracts from essential texts by the likes of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, and Allan Sekula, readers will encounter provocative and perceptive offerings from less familiar sources including, on occasions, the photographers themselves. William Eggleston writes on ‘photographing democratically’, Robert Adams on addressing evil, and Jeff Wall on Conceptual art, for instance. These names are all male but I do Leet a disservice:  not least amongst her achievements here is the welcome inclusion of work by women authors, from photographers as varied as Dorothea Lange, Martha Rosler and Jo Spence, to theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Kaja Silverman.

Reading Photography A Sourcebook of Critical Texts edited by Sri-Kartini Leet is published by Lund Humphries, 2011. 408 pp., hardback, 12 colour and 80 mono illus, £125.00. ISBN: 978-0-85331-976-4