ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, ‘Methodologies: Instrumental Purpose and Disruption’, focuses on arguments concerning the purpose of photography practice: whether it should be politically instrumental or aim for more affect. It outlines three radical developments in the twentieth century that provide a background for methodologies developed in the twenty-first: first, the avant-garde worker-photography movements of the 1920s and 1930s that use photography as a ‘political tool’, and which find a vibrant resurgence in 1970s Britain; second, the ruptures to modernist traditions of photography in the 1960s and 1970s by conceptual art, text-based works, and feminist practices and theories, such as Julia Kristeva, which resist reductive aspects of analysis and the rejection of sensual experience; and third, tensions between aesthetics and politics in the 1980s and the influence of politically engaged art on attitudes to photographic documentation. It features discussion of photomontage and works by Christian Boltanski, Jo Spence, Victor Burgin, and Stephen Willats.
