Katherine D'Auria

In the 1970’s, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes sought out to explain the significance of photography as he stared at an old photograph of his recently deceased mother. He wanted to determine what exactly were the universal, innate constituents of photography’s power over the viewer. What he discovered and attributed to photography’s “aura” was its picturing of things past, of “that has been” and photography’s indexical quality to record and therefore capture a part of the scene before the camera lens.

Roland Barthes’ investigation into the ontology of photography incorporates the theory of agency, of an object’s ability to emit some control or evoke particular feelings over a human subject. The term “photography” itself embodies the medium’s association with agency, with the compound term translated as both “writing with light” and “light writing itself.” My final paper will study photography with an archaeological perspective, viewing the photograph as a prominent object in everyday material culture and concentrating on Gell’s technologies of enchantment as well as the theory of agency in general. By specifically examining photography’s origins, tracing back from the eighteenth century until its public announcement in 1839, I wish to uncover how this particular invention/discovery was first endowed with its agency. Through this investigation I hope critique an application of agency theory in a more modern context in comparsion to a prehistoric one.

Note: My discussion on the photograph will be limited to traditional (film) photography, as digital and computer-based images would involve a distinct set of issues that are outside the concerns of this paper.

Preliminary Bibliography

Barthes, Roland; 1982. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang.

Dobres, Marcia-Anne; 1995. "Gender and Prehistoric Technology: On the Social Agency of Technical Strategies" in World Archaeology (Vol. 27, No. 1). p.25-49. Available at jstor.org

Dobres, Marcia-Anne and John E. Robb; 2000. “Agency in archaeology: paradigm or platitude?” in Agency in archaeology. Marcia-Anne Dobres and John E. Robb (eds.). London and New York: Routledge, 3-17.

Dornan, Jennifer L.; 2002. "Agency and Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future Directions," Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 9/4: 303-329.

Gell, Alfred; 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press.

Halle, David; 1987. "The Family Photograph" in Art Journal. (Vol 46, No. 3). Available at jstor.org

MacFarlane, Alistair G. J; 2003. "Information, Knowledge and Technology'" in Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. p.1581-1616. Available at jstor.org.

Nakamura, Carolyn; 2005. “Mastering matters: magical sense and apotropaic figurine worlds of Neo-Assyria” in Archaeologies of materiality. Lynn Meskell (ed.). Malden MA: Blackwell, 18-45.

Posted at Apr 16/2008 02:07PM:
omur: Hi Katherine,
Very excited about your project. The Armenian-Iranian photographer I mentioned to you was Antoin Sevruguin, who was recently discovered. Check this publication Sevruguin and the Persian image : photographs of Iran, 1870-1930. I think we also spoke about Photography's Other Histories. It might be interesting to look at Carl Knappett's "Photographs, Skeuomorphs and Marionettes: some Thoughts on Mind, Agency and Object" published in Journal of Material Culture, Mar 2002; vol. 7: pp. 97 - 117.