Image Atlas

I found John Tagg’s piece on photography and filing cabinets to be a really great nudge to rethink the history of photography — particularly how it was instrumental (but perhaps also itself instrumentalized) for the “archiving apparatus” (Tagg 33) which must now include platforms such as Google, etc. Photography’s role in the production of certain knowledges — especially that of ethnographic discourse further facilitated by the networks of colonial empires — is certainly within Tagg’s discussion; there are countless other scholars who write about this, or the association between photography (as light-writing) and that of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on illumination, transparency, and the light of reason. But what I really found helpful in Tagg’s piece is the unhinging of photography’s centrality, and to situate photography within a broader apparatus which included the technology of filing systems.

Under the long shadows of the archiving apparatus, and reflecting on search engines today coming up with more and more powerful reverse-image searches, I wonder if photography is increasingly pressed to the service of the archive. *Side-note: I love the Image Atlas project by Taryn Simon and the late Aaron Schwarz, which politicizes search engines and their geographical biases when it comes to image search results.

Though digressing a little from the class’s focus on archives/archiving, but keeping the line of inquiry on photography, and for those who might be interested in rethinking the definition/history/origin of photography, Joanna Zylinska has a wonderful lecture “Photography After Extinction”. It links photography and geology together, and as such forms also an interesting link back to the 1977 Original Sun Pictures exhibition mentioned in Anna-Sophie Springer’s article.  

 

One Reply

  • Thank you, Kenneth! Yes, it is helpful to think about the larger apparatus of the archive, which encompasses histories, ideologies, discourses, architectures, etc. And thank you for the Simon/Schwartz and Zylinska references!

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