An archaeological approach to photography - media archaeology, focusing on medium as mode of engagement;

also serving as notes for Archaeography - the class.

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Some points

• 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)

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Here is a menu for thinking about the material properties of photographs, how they are made, how they feel when they are handled and viewed.

Behind the menu lie different qualities and values that are applied to the photographic image, as an item of material culture.

Ways of conceiving the materiality of (photographic) mediation, the photographic mode of engagement.

taking a materialist view

of photowork, the materiality of the image

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origins and genealogy

the camera obscura

the camera lucida

optics, geometry and perspective - the transformation of three into two dimensions

the sketch, the architectural drawing, the painting, the mural, the print and the illustrated book as fixed images

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1839 and the fixing of the image in light sensitive materials

the daguerreotype - ghosts in the mirror, and the uncanny

the negative and the positive - the reproducibility of the photographic image

other chemical processes - alchemy and chemistry, poisons, acids and alkalis, smells in the photolab

the print and the notion of the art of darkroom developing, processing and printing

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science, craft and industry - the commercialization and industrialization of photography

standardized processes and products

the antiquarian avant-garde in contemporary photography and the interest in "alternative" processes

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the materiality of viewing the photograph

modes of engagement - prints, projected images, CRTs, the stereo viewer, the daguerreotype case, the album, the exhibition print, the book plate, the newspaper image, the iPhoto slideshow

the tain of the mirror - photographic papers and surfaces

published photographic prints - half-tones and screens, duotones, fine printing processes

patina and longevity

colors and dyes, grain and resolution, sharpness, dynamic range, surface quality and other fetishistic interests

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work to think about -

David Hockney on optics and the old masters - see camera obscura

the anonymous daguerreotype

Abelardo Morrell, the pinhole camera and camera obscura

Andreas Gursky and the ultimate print - [link]

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