Michael Shanks - site 2006: Archaeography

A class - Winter 2006 - CLASSART 141, CLASSART 241

with Michael Shanks

Contact - mshanks@stanford.edu 650 996 8763

Uploaded Image

Archaeologists were pioneers in photography. For a discipline that specializes in the interrogation of historical sources that do not take a textual form, photography is a central practice, photographs essential resources.

Every university archaeology program includes some training in photography. But every archaeology program I know of treats photography as a technique rather than a practice, where the challenge for the student is to learn a more or less simple set of skills and principles for applying photography to archaeology. Learn the algorithms and you are able to apply the techniques to archaeological problems and circumstances: this is the orthodox pedagogical position in the discipline.

I take a very different view - that the disciplinary field of archaeology and the technology and forms of photography are part of a modern(ist) constitution - historically, from the late eighteenth century, they came into being together and are both part of a particular modern archaeological sensibility and imagination. Neither photography nor archaeology can be legitimately reduced to technique. Yet they almost always are.

Instead of technique therefore, this class focuses on material practice, instruments, workflow, engagments with places and things - archaeological work and photowork which together work on the (remains of) past in various ways to answer different needs and desires.

I am coming to think that this is actually a new (archaeological) way of dealing with media - as "modes of engagement".

Aims

The aim of this class is a simple one - to provide an environment in which students can develop the beginnings of a skill set and intellectual toolkit for practising thoughtful photography in archaeology.

By thoughtful I mean reflective and critical practice that constantly asks questions of the purpose, implications, forms and outputs of archaeological work. Not content with orthodox routines, critical practice is strategic and tactical thinking that constantly reevaluates its purpose, aware that productive change occurs through knowing precisely which rules to break and in what circumstances, and strives to increase its technical expertise on this basis.

For me, this is what the Archaeology Program at Stanford is all about.

Argument

Photography has deep roots in particular technologies of seeing and engaging with place, collection and temporal change.

Photography and archaeology, in the nineteenth century, helped constitute each other as fields of practice.

Photography is part of an archaeological mode of engagement with the past.

The concept of "Mode of engagement" is a way of understanding media forms, like photography, in a new and more productive and critical way.

The concept also helps to dismantle the radical opposition between digital and analogue photographic imagery. All photography is digital, just as digital photography has essential materlal manifestation.

Objectives

To become acquainted with a set of concepts that can be applied to the critique of photowork.

To increase the skill set associated with some different photographic techniques relevant to archaeological practice.

To tune a sensibility to the instruments and products of photography - cameras, lenses, prints and images.

To apply this intellectual toolkit, skill set and sensibility to archaeological scenarios.

To apply this intellectual toolkit, skill set and sensibility to a personal portfolio of work.

To deliver this portfolio in a digital medium.

Assignment and assessment

The class assignment is a personal portfolio of images on an archaeological theme. This is to be accompanied by a 3000 word critical essay explaining the context and rationale for the portfolio. Both are to be submitted digitally and online via the class web site.

Assessment of the portfolio will be according to criteria such as: technical facility, personal improvement in technical facility, realization of objectives set in the accompanying essay, mode of delivery, originality, effectiveness of visual narrative/argument in relation to the accompanying paper/critique.

Resources

The facilites of the Metamedia Lab are available for all class members. These include a collection of over 40 analogue and digital cameras and full digital publishing facilities.

The class website will develop its own gallery of images, with commentary, exploring the themes of the course.

The readings for the class are available under each week's theme. They can also be found collected in Archaeography Readings

Schedule

Basics

The photograph

the photograph is a material form, as well as a signifying image
we engage with photographs in different ways - as prints, projected transparencies, digital media upon screens, printed forms in books ...
these are conditioned by many standards and infrastructures that were rapidly established after the release of practical chemical photography in 1839 - material substrates (plate, paper, film), manufactured chemical formula, formats (plate, film and paper sizes)
the invention of light sensitive media and chemical fixing comes at the end of a long genealogy of optics, geometry, arrangements of subject, light source, screen and observer (as in the camera obscura) and the fixing of a projected image by other means (drawing, for example)
this implicates an historical perspective in every photograph - from early processes to digital media
the photograph, under this materialist perspective, cannot and should not be reduced to a representation (this is what I call the fallacy of expression or representation)

The camera

the camera is an architecture - an arrangement of subject, light source, observer, so as to transform three into two dimensions
the camera is a clock for making images
the camera is thus a place-event
different architectures/temporalities imply different modes of engagement between subject and observer - from large format ground glass to the 35mm SLR prismatic viewfinder, to the pixelated screen of the digicam - from site to studio
as with the photograph, standards and infrastructures were quickly established after 1839, though they have undergone significant evolution - with the development of 35mm cameras, for example, and, of course, digital

The lens

the lens (and the mirror) have been implicated in the architecture of the camera obscura since at least the fifteenth century
far from being transparent glass, an aid to achieving the accurate image, the lens is an active means of tracing/drawing an image
in this the lens is a system of compromises
the design of the lens implicates a genealogical/historical network of compromising decisions about standardised format (35mm SLR/rangefinder, lens mount, bellows extension ...), cost, glass (formulae and availability), optics (correction, resolution, speed, angle of view, coverage ...), medium (plate, film, digital sensor ...)
the lens is an active component of the camera as mode of engagement

Uses of photography in archaeology

archival photographs, of sites now changed or lost, for example, or of museum artifacts not available for direct inspection, may play a significant role in data gathering and the inscription of information
specialized formats, such as stereoscopic aerial photographs or satellite images, may play a role of sensory prosthetic - an augmentation of looking and seeing
there is an irony in much use of photography in archaeology - while photographs may be taken with the intention of documenting "evidence" (a ditch cut or a bronze fibula), I know of no discussion in archaeology centered on the interpretation of a photograph of an archaeological deposit, for example
photographs are often taken on an archaeological site as notes (aides memoires for the director in writing up the project), as archival objects (evidencing what is claimed in a text report), as visual aids (slides for a lecture), as testimony that the excavation, for example, was conducted correctly
photographs are often taken of the process of excavation
though this process of excavation is usually interpreted as cleaned-up surfaces and sections, with scale included, there is a growing interest in a more ethnographic kind of documentation of excavation as fieldwork - photoethnography, photographs of people at work, for example, in a kind of visual anthropology of archaeology
rather than documentary evidence in a forensic context (photographs of the in situ, undisturbed aftermath of a crime, for example), archaeological photographs are often quite the opposite - of highly processed locations (excavated, sanitized and prepared for documentation)
it is not surprising therefore that drawings (plans and sections, artifact drawings) are usually preferred to photographs - they contain more interpretation, less mess
the last three points mean that scientific photography in archaeology often involves a reduction of resolution/detail, in order to secure interpretive clarity

Archaeology, modernity and photography

what photography and archaeology share, common genealogical components

Critique

Classics of photocritique

Photography as mode of engagement

the term ‘medium’ has usually referred to an institutional agency of communication, such as TV, or the materials and methods used in the production of an artwork, such as oil on canvas
digital fungibility, the fluid manner in which visual material, for example, is turned into animation, photographic print, painting, digital video grab, movie, photographic transparency and so on, means that specific agencies and materials/methods are increasingly less important as a way of distinguishing and understanding cultural/communicative works
this directs attention instead to forms of mediation - the ways people engage with cultural works and thereby with those agencies which make and distribute the works
this notion of Modes of Engagement offers a more accurate and useful way to categorize the format and placement of cultural works in public and private arenas

Photography and the concept of discourse

the concept of photowork - that photography is more than taking photographs, but involves specific modes of engagement, mediations of object, instrument, representation, operative, viewer - specific workflows, from camera and film preparation to image distribution and publication
discourse refers to everything that makes such photowork possible - standards and infrastructures, instrument design and availability, schemata (Gombrich's concept of paradigms of imaging), systems of qualification and accreditation (training courses), systems of distribution and publication, funding agencies, archives ...

The scientific work of photography

an extension of the notion of photowork to scientific practice
photographs as components of citation - material quotation

Photography and negentropy

the photo captures something of a situation, a place, an event and circultates it at a spaciotemporal distance
the photograph is a materialization of neguentropy (negative entropy)

Illusion and representation

a challenge to the common notion is that a medium is a means to an end. Not just to invoke McLuhan's point that the medium is the message. Rather to challenge the separation of form and content, substance and expression, reality and representation.
I call this the fallacy of representation (or the expressive fallacy) - that media primarily express or represent
this challenge to typical Cartesian dualisms does not erode our notion of reality but makes it far more robust because it focuses on active perception and knowledge-building - active engagements with the world
we need to elide the distinctions between signifier, signified and referent through a focus on their respective and distinct materialities (this is a media archaeology)
a close corollary here is a challenge to the notion of a convincing illusion as in the concept of "virtual reality". Because VR often assumes the radical distinction between real and represented worlds. Instead we need to be far more savvy with the concept of "virtuality" and connect it closely with our understanding of materiality and engagement
so archaeological use of media is not some matter secondary to the discovery of the past, for example, as in the publication of finds. Media, as modes of engagement, as practices of mediation, are essential moments in archaeology's relationship with the past
the close relationship of media with infrastructures and standards amplifies this active mediating and material conception of mediawork
media are thus design environments, where, for example, archaeologists take up what is left of the past and translate/(re)mediate

Photography in digital light