Photography and doubt

Abstract

"Recent decades have seen photography's privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place. Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography's referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism's hold on audiences across the medium's history? Have doubts about photography's testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?"--Publisher.

Contents

Introduction / Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón -- Prelude -- Three or Four Kinds of Indeterminacy in the Photograph / Douglas R. Nickel -- Part I Between Facticity and Fiction -- 1 No Room for Doubt? Daguerre and his First Critics / Steffen Siegel -- 2 Blowing Up the World: On the Evidentiary Cultures of Enlargement, ca, 1893-1917 / Jordan Bear -- 3 A Magician Among the Spirit Photographs: Reflections on Houdini's Doubt / Louis Kaplan -- Part II Instabilities of the Medium -- 4 Reaching Beyond the Index: The Publication of News Photographs / Thierry Gervais -- 5 The Camera Work of the PM Sketch Report / Jason E. Hill -- 6 Robert Capa and the Turn to Forensics / Vincent Lavoie -- Part III From Aporia to Anomie: Photography Deconstructed / 7 Moholy's Doubt / Susan Laxton -- 8 Max Ernst: Graceful Photographer / Adrian Sudhalter -- 9 Atomisation, Anomie and Farewell to Photography / Sarah Kelleher -- Part IV Indeterminacy -- 10 Controlling Doubt: Abstract Painting and Photography / John J. Curley -- 11 Clouded Judgment: Conceptual Art, Photography and the Discourse of Doubt / Heather Diack -- 12 Methodological Position for Second Degree Art History / Robert Slifkin.