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

Comparing photography with other discursive practices of visual representation would help to distinguish more clearly the specificities of photography and identify its common relations with other media. A usual historical chronology of media technology would situate photography as the inheritor of the condition of painting. Photography is then seen as the precursor to and the precondition for cinema, which gives way to television, video, and the Internet (while we wait for the next installment). Of course, all these media continue to co-exist. Yet, in such chronologies of media, the particularity of photography as a plurality of practices is missed, ignored--as it is in the other media too. The thing is that these media pervade one another just as the photographic still image saturates these other media: cinema is nothing but a sequence of still images, which projected at (the right) speed, fools the eye into believing it sees "movement." Yet cinema can be related to the traditions of the theatre, the novel and even the mise-en-scene of painting. The photographic image is now completely central to all these technological devices, even if the material substrates have changed. Even the Internet uses relations between images and texts in ways that repeat older practices ("illuminated manuscripts"), but in new forms (the "photoblog" or where the still image serves even as a "button" to trigger MPEG-animated movement).

Across these differences and similarities, an archaeological discourse would, instead of chronologies of media, seek to show, for example, how "reality" is specifically constructed across such forms in what Foucault would call an interdiscursive configuration. (6) In such comparisons can be found the "interpositivity" between discourses without reducing them to either a single unity or complete difference. So, for instance, with the theme of realism there is a network of relationships, an "interdiscursive configuration" of practices that work across writing, photography, film, television, Web pages and so on, that constitute, lay claim to portray, social "reality." It would thus be possible to delineate the features of this reality (the reality of "terror," conditions of the family, etc.) across these forms, yet maintain the diversity of their description--despite any difficulties encountered in doing this. Thus, as a discursive practice, the archaeology of photography would look quite different to the imagined unity produced by a "history of photography." What implicit propositions do the various practices of photographic images share in common about the world, about what is ordinary and shocking or "everyday"? In an archaeology of photography we would be free to draw together such "diverse" practices as the photographs of Andreas Gursky and a reality television show like "Big Brother," which in many ways mirror each other in providing contrasting aspects of actuality: the former concerned with the articulation of the public sphere and social space, the latter concerned with the social dimension of private relations. How might an "amateur" bloggers negotiate those same public/private relations? An archaeology of such apparently diverse practices would construct a quite different understanding of the strategies of visual representation and the objects signified within them. We might learn something new from it.

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These questions I have tried to introduce (and others) are somewhat provisional, but based in an archaeological approach that might liberate the study of photography from the straightjacket of institutionally bound versions of its history. An archaeological approach might thus release photography from those methods applied to it derived from media (painting, cinema, media studies) that were not designed for the study of such a polymorphous and ever-present phenomenon across culture: the photographic image. It demands a form of study that would develop methods beyond the iconographic approach that Ernest Gombrich tried to develop as a "general history" of images in his book The Uses of Images. (7)

Foucault shows a way: doing history--an archaeology of knowledge--as a practice that recognizes complexity and even contradiction without reducing it to some hidden or spurious unity. As Rosalind Krauss once hinted, this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. She concluded her 1982 essay, "Photography's Discursive Spaces" by saying of scholarship on nineteenth-century photography:

Everywhere at present there is an attempt to dismantle the

photographic archive--the set of practices, institutions, and

relationships to which nineteenth century photography originally

belonged--and to reassemble it within the categories previously

constituted by art and its history. It is not hard to conceive of what

the inducements for doing so are, but it is more difficult to

understand the tolerance for the kind of incoherence it produces. (8)

Today, the same criticism can be levied at the incoherent categories applied to twentieth-century photography, their reduction from complex histories to a discourse of photography as art. This may even be one of the key issues confronting recent photographic practice, too. With the massive accumulation of photographs that are currently appearing, perhaps even the contemporary photographer must become more of an archaeologist. To rephrase Walter Benjamin's famous quote, "perhaps the ignorant photographer of the future will be the one who cannot read the archaeology of their own photographs."

DAVID BATE is a photographer and course leader of the Master of Arts in Photographic Studies program at the University of Westminster in London, United Kingdom.

NOTES 1. My essay and title alludes to Michel Foucault's book. The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1985). 2. Ibid., 130. 3. Ibid., 144. 4. Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others," The New York Times Magazine (May 23, 2004). 5. One exception to this is where the photographer, for example, is a component of the advertisement itself and the photographer's name is included in an advertisement, as when a famous photographer "recommends" a product (e.g., a camera), or where their type of photography offers a particular quality, say, a guarantee of "truth." (Don McCullin, the British documentary photographer known from the Vietnam War did a series of billboard advertisements for the police that brandished his name to give an authority of "truth" to the photographs.) In such instances the authorship of the photographer or even the photograph is part of the meaning given to the product. 6. Foucault, 158. 7. E.H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images (London: Phaidon, 1999). 8. Rosalind Krauss. "Photography's Discursive Spaces," in The Contest of Meaning, Richard Bolton, ed. (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. 1996), 298.