without_barthes

wouldn’t it be good if we could sometimes write about photography without using Barthes. DM your favourite photography quotes!

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Liam Kennedy, "Photojournalism and Warfare in a Postphotographic Age." Photography and Culture 8, no. 2 (2015): 159-71.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

[...T]he workings of power are more resistant than ever to the evidentiary truth claims of visual and news media. Long-cherished assumptions about the revelatory powers of visual documentation have been cruelly challenged
by the selective blindness of the democratic
polity.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

[Photography …] has come to shape not only what we now understand as portraiture but also the individual and his or her relation to consciousness, memory and embodiment.
Celia Lury. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1998

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Because quotes and quotes are all too well known, it does not resemble an exciting match, but rather a game of two phlegmatic baseline specialists on a wet clay court, which over unfortunately far more than five sentences always beat the same ideas into the other half.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Thanks to @steffen_siegel for sharing this great text by Christoph Ribbat https://t.co/FFlBWOjd0k

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Barthes. Benjamin. Barthes. Benjamin. Barthes. Benjamin. The more ambitious a text about photography today is, the more he often has a tennis game.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Nancy Armstrong. ‘Monarchy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22, no. 4 (2001): 495-536.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Beginning in the late 1850s, the free circulation, collection, exhibition, and exchange of photographic portraits in the form of cartes de visit operated much as nouns do in a language, as they substituted familiar images for persons, places, and things actually seen.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

The result was that each display or exchange of an image reinforced the social rules that automatically situated one variety of human face and figure in a specific relation to all others on the basis of a few visual characteristics.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

As more and more images could be had, identity, and corresponding social hierarchies, were imagined increasingly to be mutable.
Shawn Michelle Smith. American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1999.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

As photographic images proliferated, so did the anxieties concerning them. If the exact copy, a reproducible positive, obliterated the notion of the original in mechanical reproduction, what happened to the self whose semblance was reproduced in photographic portraits?

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

While daguerreotypy [...] troubled the very essence of what could be seen, photography in the age of mechanical reproduction multiplied the questions surrounding the cultural prerogative of the look and its connection to identity.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Annie Rudd. "Victorians Living in Public: Cartes De Visite as 19th-Century Social Media." Photography and Culture  (2017): 1-23.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

As a small, relatively inexpensive portrait photograph that was intended for circulation and that people employed as a kind of social currency, the carte de visite compellingly demonstrates that the public, circulatory, ephemeral, and performative nature of digital photography

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

is not altogether new, but rather has historical roots
in the early decades of photography’s existence. A reconsideration of the carte – [...] suggests that there is underexamined historical precedent for the ways people use, and feel about, photography today.'

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

Eugénie Shinkle, "Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the Aesthetics of the Banal." Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 37, no. 4 (2004): 165-184.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

'Banality is a problem of late capitalism, a creation of macroeconomics, and an effect of material culture. [...T]he banal is a kind of shorthand for those routines and value systems of high capitalism that are as annoying and trivial as they are obligatory.

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

As a photographic aesthetic or style, banality could be described as a kind of postindustrial realism, a turn away from the spectacular and an often pitiless focus on its antithesis.'

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

art photography distancing itself from vernacular representations of the city that have thoroughly absorbed the language of art photography.’
Rosemary Hawker, 'Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience.' History of Photography 37, no. 3 (2013)

[without_barthes @WithoutBarthes]

‘…the numbing emptiness of the city as found in so many contemporary photographs can in part be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form and a popular cultural practice. These starkly depopulated urban settings are the result of