ABSTRACT
Studies of photography as a social and cultural process have undergone significant changes since the 1970s. Challenging modernist assumptions about the universality of photographs, theorists and practitioners have drawn attention to the social and cultural frameworks through which photographs are produced, circulated and interpreted. These theorists and practitioners adapted theories including psychoanalysis and post-Marxism, and social movements such feminism, civil rights and queer politics to argue that photography did not just reflect the social and cultural world; it produced it. While the ‘cultural turn’ furthered this interest in the discourses, relationships, and systems of power that inform photography, a concurrent trend reflected growing interest in photography’s links to memory, emotion and trauma. This chapter will examine how these approaches variously neglect or reconcile ongoing tensions between photography’s status as a trace of the social world and a cultural construction, before speculating on future directions for the study of photography.
