Photography and its Violations

In a 1987 interview with Joanne Lukitsh on how art historians might have a practice outside the academy, John Tagg provided a somber assessment for having to radically rethink “how” and “where” the practice of cultural history might take place (Tagg 1992, 62–64). Reflecting on his own engagement with the history of photography in the late 1970s, he noted that it was precisely because photography provided an alternative space to the demands of the art institution that he was allowed to ask an alternative set of questions, not just of photographic representation, but also of the social relations of photography outside of the paradigm of art (Tagg 1992, 76). Over 25 years later and John Roberts’s Photography and its Violations (written from a very different historical vantage point), sounds a shriller note on the relations between art, photography and cultural history. Roberts has elsewhere identified the turn to aesthetic philosophy and photography theory by Marxist art historians in the 1980s as the consequence of an impasse within the new art history of the previous decade to get beyond the relations between the museum and the market place (Roberts 2013, 33–34); in Photography and its Violations, however, it is a particular impasse in recent photography theory to move beyond the discrete categorizations of “documentary,” “technical” and “art photography” that he identifies as requiring a radical intervention (5). The focal point of Roberts’s discussion pivots around the relationship between the categorizations of the photodocument and art photography. Organized into two sections, the book addresses itself to this relationship in the first part of the book through the centrality of the index within the tensions of modernism and documentary, and figural and non-figural photographic practices. In the second part, the photo-document and figural photography are explored through affective and empathic Photography & Culture