Spring 2027 - Photography, Technology, Art
The earliest histories of photography were largely technical accounts. They delved almost obsessively into the minutiae of devices and chemistry that had evolved over the preceding decades, thereby serving both as histories and user’s guides all at once. In the early 1930s, however, a new approach arose that drew from the lessons of art history. Evolutions in the medium were marked by aesthetic benchmarks reflecting the spirit of the times. Technology, if discussed at all, only served to make more sophisticated forms of photographic beauty possible. Today, the field has made a dramatic turn back toward the technical, although this time in a highly critical and thoughtful manner that almost always wrestles with aesthetics. Our seminar will take stock of these new accounts and try to evaluate their efficacy. We will study the new material histories that took shape in the 1990s, Thing Theory, which has conceptually reconfigured photographic objects and devices, recent accounts of the cultural agency propelling developments in photographic technology, studies of technologies developed outside the West to meet other cultural demands, and the new mineral histories that place the medium’s development in the context of extraction and colonialism. We will also try to map out the future of photography’s historiography by studying how histories take shape in the first place.