Dancing with images: embodied photographic viewing

Abstract

This essay discusses nineteenth-century photographs by Nicéphore Niépce, Joseph Saxton, and Gabriel Lippmann, made with processes that render the images literally difficult to see. It argues that these images impose protocols of fully embodied seeing upon viewers. Their difficulty of viewing slows down what is otherwise immediate and automatic, rendering that process accessible to analysis. By attending to the experience of seeing, we necessarily engage directly with the images as objects, privileging the viewer’s and the object’s materiality while de-emphasizing the photograph’s indexicality. These image-objects embody a photography that refuses to operate within traditional categories of representation and invites material, embodied, experiential approaches. Contemporary photographers’ return to these archaic processes emphasizes their materiality’s call for an embodied viewing. In this essay, John Dewey’s description of art as transactional process incorporating viewer as well as artwork provides a useful model for such engagement, and offers an opportunity to satisfy James Elkins’ call for genuine discussion of materiality of works of art.