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Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination
Edited by Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan. London, New
York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2003. xiv, 354 pp. Illustrations. ISBN
I 86064 751 O cloth $75.00, ISBN I 86064 752 9 paper $27.50.
Review essay published in American Archivist (Vol.
66, No.2, Fall/Winter 2003)
The twelve scholarly essays that make up Picturing Place: Photography
and the Geographical Imagination underscore the vast intellectual distance
traveled from William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 assertion that his
invention was the “pencil of nature.” Nor is the medium conceived
of here as the “bastard of science left on the doorstep of art,” to
borrow a phrase from curator Peter Galassi. Rather, editors Joan Schwartz
and James Ryan pluck photography from the swirl of simplistic either/or
art versus science debates to demonstrate the ways in which photographs
have historically insinuated themselves into every conceivable aspect
of people’s lives and thus powerfully influenced individuals perceptions
of the world. The focus of the volume, as the editors describe it, is
to present photography as a “socially constructed, culturally constituted
and historically situated practice, and photographs as visual images,
historical documents and material objects.”
To be sure, editors Schwartz and Ryan are in a position to know. Schwartz
was until recently a Senior Photography Specialist at the National Archives
of Canada in Ottawa. A long-time member of the Society of American Archivists
and its Visual Materials Section, Schwartz recently became Associate
Professor in the Department of Art at Queen’s University. Ryan,
a Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Geography at Queen’s
University Belfast, scoured photographic archives while researching his
influential book on colonial encounters in the Victorian and Edwardian
eras, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the
British Empire (The University of Chicago Press, 1997).
The editorial conceit of this book is that photography has been the “bastard
child” not of science but of academia, its sheer ubiquity rendering
it perversely invisible in discussions about space and place. Picturing
Place strives to right this imbalance by making photography central to
discourses of the “geographical imagination.” What does this
term mean, appearing as it does with varying degrees of clarity throughout
the volume? Broadly conceived, “geographical imagination” describes
the complex ways people come to understand the world and situate themselves
in it. Photographs – in both their content and context – are
at the core of each author’s argument.
Three thematic sections (Picturing Place, Framing the Nation, Colonial
Encounters) and an epilogue provide the book’s framework. As becomes
quickly apparent there is, as the editors attest, no unifying theoretical
or methodological approach across essays, with more than half concentrating
on the nineteenth century. All authors used photographs as primary source
documents, and the volume uncovers a wealth of archival material. A dozen
separate analyses of photographs made by amateurs and professionals,
commercial photographers and artists, and appearing in government reports,
personal albums, museums, and scientific surveys make for an engaging
overview of the extent and variety of photography’s uses throughout
its 150-year history; this survey is the book’s decided strength.
As with any assemblage of essays, some stand out. In the first section, M. Christine
Boyer wrests discussion of Mission Héliographique – the 1851 project
sponsored by the French government to document the country’s architectural
legacy through images – away from a prevailing art historical emphasis
on individual photographers and connoisseurship. Boyer acknowledges the aesthetic
merits of these images, made by such luminaries as Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le
Secq, and Éduoard Baldus, while restoring a sense of context to the project.
The photographs function beyond the realm of art, argues Boyer, and were perceived
and used in myriad ways by French officials as they attempted to establish an
architectural patrimony for the nation. David Nye explores an entirely different
time and place in his essay concerning photography’s role in bringing the
Grand Canyon to national consciousness in the United States. Unlike Yosemite,
a site embedded in the American psyche as early as 1860, the Grand Canyon arrived
late to visual prominence. Nye traces an increased recognition of the Grand Canyon’s
grandeur to the circulation of photographs by the Santa Fe railroad and the resultant
tourist influx. The corporation and its tourist customers focused their images
on the view “from the rim.” This look down into the glorious abyss
represented, Nye claims, “the Kantian vastness of eternity” and was
the dramatic, inverse equivalent of an earlier generation’s views upward
to thundering falls and the sublime mountaintops of the American West.
The book’s second section – Framing the Nation – begins with
an essay by Jens Jäger that contrasts Britain and Germany’s attitudes
toward landscape imagery in the construction of national identity. Jens claims
that whereas Britain embraced landscape photography to impart patriotic ideals,
Germany shunned photography as too crudely factual to inform an ideological campaign.
Brian S. Osbourne centers his essay on a group of immigrant photographs commissioned
by the Canadian National Railway between 1925 and 1930. Osbourne explores these
images through the respective Foucaultian gazes of the bureaucrat, the public,
and the immigrant to highlight the nation’s competing attitudes toward
immigration practices. In the third and final section, authors address the notion
of the gaze further, specifically of the colonizer upon the colonized. In Derek
Gregory’s essay, this means the photographic distillation of nineteenth
century Egypt to a series of monuments and exotic “types” created
for touristic consumption. Alison Blunt interprets the photographs of British
elites in the 1856 Lucknow Album as oddly sterile scenes of domesticity particularly
when viewed against the backdrop of the bloody Indian “mutiny” that
occurred just a year later. Finally, the epilogue by William J. Mitchell traces
the trajectory of image production, dissemination, and storage from Talbot’s
1839 invention to the digital age, and speculates on the archival challenges
facing the digital generation.
With Picturing Place Schwartz and Ryan admirably succeed in putting photography
at the center of scholarly conversations about place. While the “imaginative
geographies” of these essays range widely across centuries and countries,
more work still needs to be done. This is one of only a handful of books beginning
to take seriously the vital position of visual images within wider social and
political contexts, but their numbers are growing. Archivists should applaud
the creative approaches to cultural studies that these varied uses of photography
invite. Alas, the primary weakness of this collection is the jargon and convoluted
writing that mar some of the essays. One favorite example is: “The spatiality
of social interaction, naturalized, and indeed neutralized, within the realistic
appearance of photographs, is inscribed by socio-political relations of which
photographs were simultaneously a medium and a product.” Come again? If
one has the patience to wade through this kind of language – including
the current vogue for the terms “spatiality,” “discursive,” “mimetic,” “alterity,” and
(my personal favorite) “facticity” – the effort is genuinely
worthwhile. Picturing Place gives photography its due as primary source material,
and this is reason enough for archivists to include it on their reference shelf.
Schwartz is the model of a scholar-archivist, bringing her considerable experience
to bear in a book that will undoubtedly inform academic and curatorial discussions
on photographic imagery and geographic understandings for many years to come.
JENNIFER A. WATTS
The Huntington Library
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