“Photographs Objects Histories”: The Material Turn in Image Studies
This is not an image history focused on authors and masterpieces; it is a procedural guide to the “material turn,” advocating for the “object biography” method to understand how photographs continuously change meaning through use.
In 2004, anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards and museum scholar Janice Hart edited this collection of essays (Routledge). Drawing from anthropology, museum studies, and image history, the book systematically proposes to study “photographs as objects.” This means looking beyond the image content to analyze paper quality, size, mounting, annotations, wear-and-tear, and trajectories of circulation, thereby rewriting the history of photography’s social interactions.
Core Concepts: The Photograph as Object, Not Just Image
The book’s argument unfolds along four primary paths:
1. The Photograph is an Object, Not Just an Image
Every photo has material properties: paper type, process (e.g., silver gelatin), toning, mounting, and inscriptions on the back (the verso). These traces are sources of meaning, not just metadata; they point to producers, contexts, and uses, and they also constrain how the photo can be viewed and circulated. Conclusion: One must read the substrate and surface simultaneously with the image.
2. Object Biography: From Creation to Re-Contextualization
A photograph moves through a life-cycle: from shooting and printing to being gifted, pasted in an album, entering an archive, being displayed on a wall, or being digitized. Every transfer (including damage, repair, and re-labeling) rewrites its relationships and referents. Therefore, “a photograph” is actually many different objects in multiple contexts, and needs to be historicized as such.
3. Archives and Museums as Meaning-Making Machines
Collection systems (cataloging, classification, mounting) absorb photographs into a knowledge order. The institution’s attributions (titles, dates, provenance) redefine the subject, but may also erase the original community context. Researchers should treat the shelf, catalog card, box, and exhibition wall as co-producers of the image’s meaning.
4. The Sensory and the Relational: Touch, Smell, and Bodily Handling
Studying photos as objects means paying attention to how they are touched, handled, and passed along, as well as their proximity to the body (an album on the lap, a portrait held to the chest, an ID in a wallet). These micro-practices constitute evidence of affective and social bonds, making the photograph a medium for “relationships,” not just a vehicle for “representation.”
Value and Impact: As a Toolkit for Materiality
The enduring value of Photographs Objects Histories can be understood on two levels:
- Value as Method and Tool: The book delivers a hands-on toolkit: (a) Reading the *recto* and *verso* (front and back) simultaneously; (b) Writing an “object biography” for a photo, noting every transfer and re-contextualization; (c) Reading the archive and the exhibition as part of the argument; (d) Taking multi-sensory notes (on texture, thickness, smell, and traces of use).
- Long-Term Impact: This book is considered the landmark text for the “material turn” in photography studies. It complements the Sekula/Tagg “archive-as-institution” line (by grounding it at the object level) and echoes Batchen’s reassessment of vernacular objects. In our era of digitization, it reminds us that even when scanned, the original object’s *thickness* and *verso* remain irreplaceable sources of knowledge.
Photographs Objects Histories teaches us: to read a photograph, don’t just look at the front—read it as an object with a life history, including its back and its biography.
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