Photography
Research Group
The Photography
Research Group brings together scholars in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities
whose research addresses the history, theory, and practice of photography.
We are working from different disciplines (English and cultural studies,
art history, and art practice) with the aim of investigating photography’s
relation to disciplinarity. Through this investigation, the research
group will engage with some of the central debates in photographic interpretation.
The problem of photographic interpretation has gained renewed currency
due to the recent rise of new modes of photographic production and circulation.
The ubiquity of digital photography and web-based imagery has made the
question of the photographic a central concern to a broad range of scholars.
The study and use of photographs crosses a variety of institutional
and disciplinary fields. Yet, the field devoted to its study, the history
of photography, has been located within the history of art. This tension
between the disciplinary location of the history of photography and
the interdisciplinarity of photographic practices has been a key problem
in photographic theory. One of the most obvious tensions is that scholars
from some disciplines use photographs as primary-source objects to support
research, whereas scholars from other disciplines view the photograph
as an object of research itself. We are interested in whether photography
is a disciplinary object to be studied through the traditional methods
of art historical analysis, or whether it is an interdisciplinary object
without a central methodology.
Photography theorist John Tagg has argued that photography is a discursive
system, rather than a coherent object or a unified medium or technology.
According to Tagg, the term photography refers to an array of practices,
which operate across a range of institutional spaces. In one place,
photography may be specified as instrument and record, while in another,
it could be produced as artistic expression or commodity. [1] When photography
is considered as a discursive outcome rather than as a coherent medium,
the meaning and status of a photograph are considered as an event. The
study of photography would thus entail an investigation of the rules
that govern and constrain the performance of a photograph, with an understanding
that the performance is always both conditional and specific.
Another theorist, Geoffrey Batchen, has argued that the nature of photography
can be understood through a study of its own history. He has attempted
to think through the ways that photography has changed the institutions
in which it has been deployed, and he has advocated looking at the way
photography itself has been altered by entering into various institutional
spaces. [2] Batchen has thus suggested that there are specific things
that photographs do; photography has effects that are not simply due
to its “investment” by external relations. Batchen’s
claims open up the possibility of a photographic methodology that might
move across the interdisciplinary spaces of photographic practice.
Recent scholarship, such as Tagg’s and Batchen’s, opens
up the question of how to study photography. To explore the question
of photography’s relation to disciplinarity, the research group
will bring together scholars whose work employs a range of methodologies
and investigates a variety of photographic practices. Drawing on the
group’s expertise in the study of photographs from a range of
fields, the research group will search for both points of commonality
and disjuncture in the interpretation and analysis of photographs.
Our research group is affiliated with a similar group of Toronto-area
scholars working on the history and theory of photography. The group
has been awarded a grant York Seminar for Advanced Research from 2006-2007.
The members of the UWO Photography Research Group meet regularly with
the Toronto group to discuss recent scholarship in the field and to
respond to each other’s current research projects. In partnership
with the Toronto scholars, the outcome of the research group will be
a series of papers on the theme “The Circulation of Photographs,”
which will form the basis for an issue of the international, peer-reviewed
journal, History of Photography.
[1] John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural
Politics and the Discursive Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993), 143.
[2] Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 178.
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Participants:
Sarah
Bassnett, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts
Professor Bassnett’s current research examines photography and
social progress in early twentieth-century North America. Her publications
include “Picturing Filth and Disorder: Photography and Urban
Governance in Toronto” in the journal History of Photography
(2004) and essays on exhibitions of photography and photography at
the British Library in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of 19th Century
Photography (Routledge). She has also published numerous essays and
reviews on Canadian architecture and contemporary photo-based Canadian
art
Thy
Phu, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Thy Phu is an Assistant Professor in the English Department, where
she teaches courses in cultural studies. Her research focuses on intersections
between literature and photography, as well as photography’s
role in race formation. Recent publications include articles in Essays
on Canadian Writing, Mosaic, and a forthcoming essay in Genre.
Kelly
Wood, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts
Professor Wood is a photo-based artist and writer who received her
Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1996.
Wood's conceptually based art practice arises from the international
work of the late 1960s, more specifically out of the Vancouver "Photo-conceptual
School" initiated by Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall. Her largest undertaking
is a work titled Continuous Garbage Project (1998-2003). This work
was shown in solo exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery,
Vancouver and the Power Plant, Toronto.
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