ABSTRACT
This appropriation of nineteenth-century photography to an enabling his torical generalization has been written into photography’s history by a variety of methods. I do not mean here to refer simply to a rhetorical habit or to develop a retrospective attribution of ignorance to a previous era - another version of that which the nineteenth century did to the eighteenth and the eighteenth to the seventeenth and so forth. For there is something much more troubling at stake in theoretical approaches that ultimately sanction the reproduction of a stable and essentially unproblematic nineteenth-century discourse of photography. Such approaches, in their proposition that the nineteenth century believed photographic reproduction to be unquestionably ‘true’, assume as a priori a nineteenth-century blind spot to the workings of photographic representation and fail therefore to allow for any contestation of dominant ideological modes. Furthermore, this misrepresentation of nine teenth-century photographic discourse elides those disruptions of the geome tral monopoly on the visual field, those interventions which photography courts from its inception. In fact, since nineteenth-century discourses of vision and visuality conversely constitute highly contested domains that are themselves intrinsically disrupted by photography, an allegedly stable and totalizing model of nineteenth-century theory and practice occludes a complex politics of focus and gender as they come together and are played out in the early decades of photography. With these previous occlusions taken into account, nineteenth-century photographic practice can no longer comfortably provide a foil of stability against which to posit our own twentieth-century ‘radical’ practice.
