ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to make a link between the various ideologies of photographic authorship that have historically sustained the medium and the devaluation of collaborative labor that the author touched on in the introduction. It conceives of seven dominant ideologies of photographic authorship: nature, law, subjectivity, worker, medium, cultural codes and software. The photogram in fact continues to offer a profound metaphor for the complications of photographic authorship. Or, as John Roberts put it more recently, all aestheticized theories of photography as art stem from the legal codification of the photographer as creator, although this legal codification does not in itself produce the ideology of aestheticization. Bourgeois photographers have often been known as "camera workers". But it was the working class who offered another ideology of authorship in the interwar period, as part of a collective attempt to produce a political documentary practice.
