JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Critique. 5W e live in the "cybernetic age." The presence of machines and technological devices in our culture is so pervasive that it no longer makes sense to talk of technology as separate from the general sphere of human activity. In The Soft-Machine: Cybernetic Fiction, David Porush says we need look no further than today's children to find a telling barometer of the shift into this new age. Here is the sinister picture he paints of the local video arcade where the offspring of the new age are to be found:In their off hours, their fingers play over the controls of video games and "micros," their faces lit up by the light of CRT screens, bodies moving in rhythm to a complex feedback mechanism, eyes, minds and hands locked in a looped circuit of reflex and reward with a more-than-mere-game. In the video arcade, the machines are united by a single principle: ultimately, hardware defeats exhaustible and vulnerable organs and intelligences grown in flesh and housed in bone. Next time you're there, watch the players hitched to their boxes and ask who controls what. Or what controls whom (1-2) ) 1996 by Cultural Critique. Fall 1996. 0882-4371/96/$5.00. 163
This article is part of a larger project on the cultural history of Polaroid photography and draws on research done at the Polaroid Corporate archive at Harvard and at the Polaroid company itself. It identifies two cultural practices engendered by Polaroid photography, which, at the point of its extinction, has briefly flared into visibility again. It argues that these practices are mistaken as novel but are in fact rediscoveries of practices that stretch back as many as five decades. The first section identifies Polaroid image-making as a photographic equivalent of what Tom Gunning calls the 'cinema of attractions'. That is, the emphasis in its use is on the display of photographic technologies rather than the resultant image. Equally, the common practice, in both fine art and vernacular circles, of making composite pictures with Polaroid prints, draws attention from image content and redirects it to the photo as object. A photograph is not exhausted by its image-content, but is also something akin to a body. This is the case that is being made in a growing branch of photography studies that takes as its subject what it calls 'photo-objects'. For instance, near the end of his extensive survey of photographic memorial objects, Geoffrey Batchen (2004) writes of the 'need to develop a way of talking about the photograph 190 journal of visual culture 9(2) that can attend to its various physical attributes, to its materiality as a medium of representation ' (p. 94). By this, he means taking into account the following: the way a photograph has been worked upon, with paint or writing; the modes of organization it undergoes alongside other photographs, in albums or collages; its juxtaposition with other materials, such as human hair; and the heterogeneous forms of framing it submits to. A photograph is an image, so goes this school of thought, but it is also an object, it has a physical being in space and time. As Elizabeth Edwards (1999) puts it: 'the photograph has always existed, not merely as an image but in relation to the human body, tactile in experienced time, [an] object functioning within everyday practice' (p. 228). 'Not merely … an image', Edwards writes, and it is a phrase that appears again in her introduction, with Janice Hart, to Photographs Objects Histories (Edwards and Hart, 2004):It is not merely the image qua image that is the site of meaning, but that its material and presentational forms and the uses to which they are put are central to the function of a photograph as a socially salient object. (p. 2) They might have written more neutrally that a photograph is 'more than an image', but that 'not merely' signals a polemical intent: a call to arms to take note of that which in the photograph exceeds the photographic image. They call this the 'materiality' of the photograph and they identify three key forms that it takes: 'the plasticity of the image itself, its chemistry, the paper it is printed on'; its 'presentational forms' (such as albums, mounts, and frames); and 'the physical traces...
This article explores "the play element in photography", to adapt a key phrase from Johan Huizinga 's Homo Ludens (1938). The context for this exploration is the melancholic paradigm that dominates much of contemporary writing and thinking about vernacular or popular photography, a paradigm that emphasises memory, death and mourning, at the expense of other practices and dispositions, not least the ludic. It notes that the existing literature on photography and play concentrates almost entirely on humorous images: optical jokes, trick photography, and a wide variety of distorted pictures. But play is an activity, a practice, as much as it is a product or an outcome. In other words, the ludic in photography is not just a quality of the object photographed, but of a photographic doing. Following this principle, the article shows the ways in which key modes of play such as competition, chance, make-believe and vertigo, are at work in photographic practices old and new, including in the aerostatic photography of Félix Nadar, with which it begins and ends. Seeing ghostsWhatever photography is, it isn't much fun. 1 We know this because a host of sombre critics tell us so. Take, for example, Félix Nadar's Quand j'étais photographe (1900), which, if we are to believe one of its translators, is the gloomiest of books. In his introduction to the English translation, When I Was a Photographer (2015), Eduardo Cadava dwells soberly on the connections that he says Nadar establishes between photography, death and mourning. For Nadar, Cadava tells us, "photographs are taken by the living dead" and "there can be no photograph that is not associated with death". 2 He makes much of a story Nadar tells of a young man who takes photographs of the town of Deuil from Montmartre, ten miles away. It was the improbable
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