by Jon Lackman | 5 March 2008 | Americas, Photography
The Fall 2007 issue of American Art contains five commentaries on photography. Anthony W. Lee writes:
More than most fields, the history of photography is mercurial and eclectic in its interests and methods. This is partly because its subject has continually proved to be a moving target (even the earliest inventors could not agree what constituted a photograph) and partly because the contours of photography’s multiple histories have touched on so many areas of inquiry—aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and more. For these and other reasons, the American history of photography is and always was a hybrid affair, pillaging its questions and attitudes from many sources in an effort to get hold of its subject.
Take, for example, the earliest U.S. histories. While the first European histories were mostly preoccupied with supporting their individual claims about photography’s birth—what photography historian Martin Gasser calls “histories as priority debates”—the American versions, with no claims of priority to carry or defend, developed differently, with both the fine arts and unabashed commercial self-promotion more squarely in view at first …
If the earliest American histories were shaky as scholarly inquiries and driven by the commercial needs of the moment, they did rehearse the contradictions that would soon characterize a distinctly art-historical inquiry of photography: the awkward fit between photography’s dominant commercial character and the obsessive interest in genius-biographies and attentiveness to pictorial values; the myriad tensions between a history of photography as one of scientific and technological ingenuity and one of aesthetic awareness; and the underlying belief that a written history was inseparable from the promotion of photographs as objects worthy of serious contemplation. Paintings were assumed to be worthwhile materials for study, but photographs were not—at least not among a wider American audience until the 1930s. All kinds of strategies, many derived from art criticism, were enlisted to make readers look at photographs with the kind of intensity normally reserved for paintings …
In such a context, the hybrid character of historical writing on photography not only persists but is accentuated and accelerated. In the case of art history, the inquiries are as often peppered with questions about “the fortunes and failures of a democratic society,” as [Michael] Kammen writes here, or marked by a “historicist construction,” as Joshua Brown puts it, as they are about a photographer’s style or singular talent or the pictures’ aesthetic innovations. Just as often, those various kinds of interests are merged—sometimes seamlessly, other times awkwardly. What are the ghosts lurking around the resulting mesh? What concerns, such as those included and suppressed by [early historians] Root, Rodgers, and Newhall, create its shape?
As a way to begin to answer these and other questions, American Art asked the following writers, all eminent in their fields, to convey their experiences and insights about the development of photography as an object of study in their respective practices: in American history, American studies, the fine art studio, and the museum. Together, the essays are offered in the belief that the development of an art history of photography, however it is presently construed, bears a fundamental relation to the study of photography in cognate fields.
