Why Asian Photography?

Must we be forever condemned to study territories rather than networks?

Perhaps it is useful to imagine a spectrum with ‘photography’ at one end and ‘culture’ at the other. What might be called ‘core’ photographic history (by which I mean that which describes Euro-American practices) erases ‘culture’ as a problematic whereas ‘peripheral’ or ‘regional’ histories by virtue of their very regionality tend to foreground ‘cultural’ dimensions of practice. In part this reflects the continuing neo-colonial conditions of global photographic history[1] in which, as Deborah Poole has noted “...the non-European world and its images have been oddly elided [even] from virtually all the photographic histories that attempt to link photography with the history of disciplinary and ideological systems forged during the height of Europe’s colonial era” ( 1997:140). The ‘sovereign’ Euro-American Subject of whom Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote (and who, within conventional historiography, has now been largely displaced) remains – within the history of photography – alive and well. The ex-nomination of the centre endures: British and French photography is just ‘photography’ whereas African or Indian photography is always configured by an unshakeable ‘local’ specificity.

This stress on locality is symptomatic of a ‘territorializing’ logic: photography imported into India, or Japan or Peru, presumed in some sense to be French or English, is co-opted by a new set of Indian, Japanese or Peruvian practices. This is certainly a view that I have previously argued myself (Pinney 1997) so it is worth marking the distance between the argument I am exploring here and that earlier position. A key exemplar of a process of ‘Indianisation’ would be the overpainting of the photographic surface (see Gutman 1982, and Allana and Kumar 2008). Similar narratives have been developed in other locations. Following Shunnojo-Tsunetari’s thwarted 1843 attempt and subsequent success in 1848 in importing a Daguerreotype camera into Nagasaki, Eliphalet Brown takes a daguerreotype camera to Japan as part of Commodore Perry’s 1854 Expedition, and in the same year the first Japanese Daguerreotype manual appears (“Ensei Kikijutsu” – “Use of Novel Devices from the West”) and it is then only a matter of time before photography appears incarnated in a territorialized guise. Thus Kinoshita Naoyuki in his extremely interesting account directs our attention to photography’s co-option as “ihai”, the wooden memorial tablets “on which were written the Buddhist names of the deceased” (Naoyuki 2003:18-19). Similarly, when approaching work by the Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi (or for that matter Figueroa Aznar) our desire is usually to localize: to find in their astonishing portraits and landscapes an embrace of a sophisticated Cusqueno indigenismo, a political romance of territory (Poole 1997:168-197).

We touch here on the paradox of the reaffirmation of an old order that is frequently permitted by the conquest of a new territory, what (in another context) George Orwell described as “the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished” which “come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises” (2008:124). The same might be said of the concept ‘visual culture’. This quasi-anthropological demotic initially promised a liberating challenge to a civilizational art history still gripped by an exclusionary aesthetics. However, this promise of freedom bore within it what now seems like the return of the repressed. Michael Baxandall’s “period eye” (1972) and Clifford Geertz’s “Art as a Cultural System”(1983) constituted the visual as a new territory for a familiar kind of anthropology in which culture, history, and locality continued to be the ruling concepts

Within the history of photography regionalization is , as I’ve suggested, a mark of centre-periphery asymmetries. But it is also evidence of a more general desire to dissolve technical practice in the balm of heroic human activity. Photography in these accounts is simply, or chiefly, a void, waiting to be filled by pre-existing cultural and historical practice. These stories of photography are like those eighteenth-century object narratives (“The Story of My Pipe” or “Memoirs of an Armchair” etc) described by Roland Barthes which he suggested were in fact not the stories of the objects themselves, but of the hands between which those objects passed (Barthes 1972). These stories of heroic culture and heroic man triumphing over the camera are articulated within a structured choice between what Latour describes as the notion of technology as “neutral tool” and its obverse, technology as “autonomous destiny” a dichotomy that might be rephrased as a choice between “culture” versus “technological determinism” (Latour 1999:178-180).

My suggestion here, following Latour, is that we need a different kind of history of photography, one which allows us to escape from the choice of either a technological determinism, on the one hand, or (on the other) a belief in photography’s neutrality in which what matters are remarkable individual practitioners, or photography’s “Indian-ness’ or ‘Peruvian-ness’, all of which give colour to an otherwise blank space. We need to come up with a new kind of ratio, a new way of conceptualising photography as technical practice itself in a state of continuous transformation (or as Barthes would say “declension”), which is imbricated with equally fluid subjects (both in front of, and behind, the camera) and to understand the ways in which this entangled practice has itself transformed that domain that many of us used to call ‘culture’.

Must we be forever condemned to study territories rather than networks?[2] The Trans of TAP is a good place to start, especially if it blossoms as a space paradigmatic of all networked practices, and rejects the default setting as localized footnote to a general (ie Euro-American) history.

Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. His books include Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), Photography’s Other Histories (co-edited with Nicolas Peterson, 2003), and The Coming of Photography in India(2008).

References

Allana, Rahaab and Kumar, Pramod (2008) Painted Photographs. Coloured Portraiture in India Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Ltd.

Barthes, Roland (1972) ‘The metaphor of the eye’, in Critical Essays trans. Richard Howard, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 239-248.

Baxandall, Michael (1972) Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geertz, Clifford (1983) ‘Art as a cultural system’ in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Gutman, Judith Mara, (1982) Through Indian Eyes: 19th and early 20th Century Photography from India New York: Oxford University Press & International Center of Photography.

Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern trans. Catherine Porter, London: Prentice Hall.

Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies Harvard University Press.

Marien, Mary Warner (2006) Photography: a Cultural History. London: Laurence King (2nd edition).

Naoyuki, Kinoshita (2003) ’The early years of Japanese Photography’, in Anne Wilkes Tucker et. al. eds. The History of Japanese Photography New Haven: Yale University Press & Houston: Museum of Fine Arts.

Orwell, George (2008) ‘Inside the whale’ in George Packer comp. All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, Orlando: Harcourt Inc.

Pinney, Christopher (1997) Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs London: Reaktion/ Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poole, Deborah (1997) Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World Princeton: Princeton University Press.