Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital Photography

Abstract

This article addresses popular claims that photography has been “dematerialized” in the digital era. It engages a wide range of critical writings about photography from the early 19th to the 21st century to demonstrate that different versions of these claims have always formed an important part of photography criticism. However, rather than doing justice to photographs’ materiality or their complex entanglements with what has been considered material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, they have tended to somewhat limit our understanding of the medium’s material, sensory, and affective valences. This article argues that a sustained engagement between visual culture studies, sensory studies, and the new materialisms can help us understand more fully both analog and digital photography’s contingent position within the material world, varying sensory ideologies, and different subjectivities.