On Photography

The interdisciplinary field of cultural studies analyzes the political structures of a society in conversation with the society’s material history and day-to-day life, including popular culture and economic structures. It’s an inherently broad field that pulls from every other field of study in the social sciences and humanities. Through this interdisciplinary approach it can paint a comprehensive picture of society. Stuart Hall (1932-2014), a Jamaican sociologist, is often hailed as one of the founding figures of cultural studies in the 1960s.

The first type of photograph or process of producing photographs, the daguerreotype is named for its inventor, Louis Daguerre, who introduced it to the world in 1839. Daguerreotypes were produced on thin pieces of silver treated with light-sensitive chemicals and often required subjects to sit perfectly still for several minutes to be photographed in indoor environments. The daguerreotype’s popularity lasted until the 1860s and 1870s, when newer, faster, and more accurate forms of photography were developed. Fox Talbot’s work was contemporaneous to Daguerre and served as the basis for the paper-based photography that eventually rendered the daguerreotype archaic.

The daguerreotype was first considered an eclectic invention with little use. Advancements in photographic technology, ease of use, and accessibility in the latter half of the 19th century created the relationship that people now have with photography.

A recurring figure in Baudelaire’s work, the flâneur (literally “one who strolls/idles”) is a middle-class figure who has enough resources to spend much of the time wandering the urban landscape and taking in its sites and activities as an aloof and detached observer. In “Melancholy Objects,” Sontag asserts that photography became what it is today through its relationship with the flaneur. The camera acted as an extension of the flâneur’s aloof wandering and observations of the city. For Sontag, photographers are modern-day flâneurs.

The scholarly definition of “spectacle,” which differs from its everyday use, refers to an unrestrained profit-seeking market economy in an industrial society that seeks to turn every aspect of human life into a market to profiteer from. Such a society tends towards commodifying every human interaction and need into a “spectacle” to consume. Philosopher Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle first theorized this sense of the word, which closely relates to Marxist notions of commodities and commodity fetishism. For Sontag, cameras are a key instrument in turning life into a spectacle. They allow slices of reality to become discrete, physical objects that may be sold to people to excite, titillate, or intrigue them as “spectacles.”