ABSTRACT
In most exhibitions or books about photographs, each image is presented as a singular act of personal expression, and therefore as artistic rather than capitalist in aspiration. The assignment to a single positive print of a single proper name—“Richard Avedon,” for example, or “William Henry Fox Talbot”—serves to displace all these complications from our attention. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, the privileging of a singular author marks the manner in which the people fear the proliferation of meaning, because it limits the ways in which the people are allowed to think about the production of photographs as things in the world. Indeed, the apparent collaboration of the photographic camera and the light that inscribes the images within it (nature incarnate) continues to provide photography with its most compelling conundrum. Far from making the biographies of artists unimportant, it contextualizes them in a way that makes visible the larger political stakes at play in every individual photographic practice.
