The archaeology of photography: rereading Michel Foucault and the archaeology of knowledge.

The French historian of discourse, Michel Foucault, made a clear distinction between the "archive" and the method that he describes as archaeological. While this method does not require a trowel to dig through the earth, the metaphor of digging provides a valuable image of what the historical researcher needs to do. For Foucault, the historian must excavate an archive to reveal not merely what is in it, but the very conditions that have made that archive possible, what he calls its historical a priori. (1) This historical a priori is the "condition of reality for statements," the rules that characterize any discursive practice. Thus, the archive in Foucault's work is nothing so literal as rows of dusty shelves in a particular institution, but rather involves the whole system or apparatus that enables such artifacts to exist (including the actual institutional building itself). In this model, the "archive" is already a construct, a corpus that is the product of a discourse. One must dig to make sense of the systems behind what one sees.

In fact, Foucault's argument is based on the semiotic distinction between langue and parole in linguistics. The linguistic opposition langue and parole (grammar and speech) is used to demonstrate how any utterance is always a symptom of the system that allows it to exist. In this conception, any act of speech (parole) is a specific instance, an event, that gives evidence of the rules of grammar (langue), the abstract set of rules about language through which that event is allowed its form; a form, which of course, over time, can be reformed or changed. For Foucault then, any archive is an instance of parole, where one can deconstruct the rules of the "language" (langue) that underpins it. The use of this theory by Foucault to construct a model of thinking about the archaeology of knowledge has important consequences for the field of photography and the notion of the archive.

In the first instance, the idea of photography as a type of "archive" has been around since the early days of photography. Whether it was (or is) an institution that wants to categorize its objects through photographs (e.g., criminals by the police, military and colonial campaigns mapping land, a museum its artifacts, a family through its "album") or whether it is individual photographers who construct a taxonomy of objects through their photographs (e.g., John Thomson's Street Life of London, Eugene Atget's Paris photographs, August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century in Germany, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads, to name only a few), the aim is always the same: to provide a corpus of images that represent--and can be consulted about--a specific object. This means that photographs are almost always to be found within the conception of practice as an "archive."

Everywhere around us, it seems, there are new digital photographic archives being constructed: cctv control centres, the various types of people-based "democratic" Web sites like Flickr and YouTube, millions of cell phone camera memory cards, and personal computer hard disks--not to mention the many vast commercial and governmental computer data image files. All these new archives, with their taxonomic "tab" and keyword search finder systems, insinuate the archive as an expanded field of cultural activity whose horizons appear more infinite day by day. For all these reasons, the "archive" is a central concept in the arsenal of cultural knowledge.

So the idea of photography as an archive (an archival practice) is not so abstract or strange and not limited to the province of curators, academics, museum researchers, or picture agents. The archive is a crucial basic tool of "cultural intermediaries," picture researchers, editors, and agents, etc., where finding and naming something is an essential aspect of daily work, an everyday problematic. We might say the same applies to photographers as well, be they stock library photographers, art photographers, or even amateurs: the taxonomy of "objects, things, and people" that are photographed have the issue of the archive in common. It might be thought then that the problems encountered--if not the actual situations--are similar for gallery curators just as much as they are for a photographer setting out to make some "work." The production, filing, and storage of images in archives within categories as well as the occasional configuration (selection) from these archive materials into exhibitions thus demands an approach to how we use them and this is where Foucault's concept of archaeology might be useful.

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Now, while it is typically the task of the historian (or even photographer) to use the archive to explain an object (past or present), Foucault challenges that practice. He argues first that archives are not necessarily coherent (historians often make it appear that way by the first choices--the process of decision-making--they make in their work); and, second, "interpreting" an archive is a project that already implicitly accepts the underlying terms of the system. The archive "reveals the rules of a practice." (2) Instead, Foucault, like an archaeologist, proposes that objects and documents can be examined for what they reveal about a discourse. To this end, he is not, unlike the antiquarian, concerned with the provenance of objects: who made what, how, and where. To Foucault, it is more important for the archaeologist to search for the regular features of objects in their appearance, "the regularity of statements," which in fact constitute the discourse of any discursive practice. (3) From all this emerges a very different attitude whereby one is more concerned with the raw materials (the archaeological evidence from which descriptions are constructed) than with the "accumulation of fact" (the repository of the past itself).

In Foucault's "archaeology of knowledge," objects, documents, images, and representations are so many parts of what make up a discourse--not the other way around as is commonly conceived. A discourse is not the base for other knowledge. Rather, it is itself the site of how knowledge comes to be constituted. In other words, archives of photographs do not reflect historical reality; they are the material, always incomplete, which form the "already-said," the basic construction of its description. Foucault, with his concept of the archaeology of knowledge, specifically resituates the work of history (his book is about his own work, archaeology rather than history or the "history of ideas") as the work of discourse theory. Foucault argues four main aspects to this work: the emergence of a discourse; its sustainability despite certain contradictions; the comparison of different discursive practices; and the analysis of change and transformation in a discursive practice. From this rather abstract starting point in discourse theory, one can begin to define and determine how to conceptualize the archaeology of photography.

I want to indicate some of the implications of this idea for the field of photography in approaches to history and photographic practice. First, an archaeology of photography would be different from the history of photography. The history of photography, as it is most often practiced, relies on identifying originality, naming authors, and their works and themes that contribute something "new." Genius, influence, and the extraordinary are key themes selected to represent the development of photography in a general history of photography--where the subject matter of photographs is often subservient to those categories. Typical narratives in the history of photography, for example, include where to situate its invention: in either England or France, posing the question of identifying the true inventor: William Henry Fox Talbot or Louis Daguerre? (A question about as important as the one asking how many angels can gather on the head of a pin.) An archaeology of photography would be less preoccupied with the individual rivalry between such figures, or the specific personal wishes of specific individuals "to photograph" (a history through "psycho-biography," which denies social levels of analysis) than with the issue of where and why it emerged as it did, what the photography was used for, and what regular objects appear across the surfaces of all these photographs.

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