ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a review of recent work that brings together photography and affect, emotion, and feeling. After a brief discussion of how photography scholars have taken up these terms, it identifies fruitful new directions concerning photography, emotion, and the sonic; affect’s role in constituting the optical unconscious; and the idea of “presence” as a site of abundance that indexes affective histories within the photograph. A second section takes up the role of emotion as an analytic within historical studies, while demonstrating the possibilities for photography studies through a brief, comparative history of tears and their photographic significance.
