Unfixing the photographic image

Over the past few years I have been engaged in writing a cultural history of photography, to be published by Routledge. You may wonder why such a history is needed, when there are excellent books on the subject already. Here, I set out the difference between my approach and existing ones, in particular my emphasis on media,mobility and transience, and some of the ways in which I am exploring this through archival research

Image flow: photography on tap

This essay is about the phenomenon of mass, mobile photographic images in a digital, networked context. In response to recent writings that challenge the relevance of the close reading of singular images, it proposes rethinking the opposition between singular images and images en masse through philosophical ideas of multiplicity and, in particular, via the concept of image flow. It examines four connected contexts in which concepts of flow have been used: in discourses surrounding the internet and digital media, where it is used to naturalise these media; in psychology, where ideas of flow underpin descriptions of consciousness and human/ animal perception; in robotics and Artificial Intelligence, where ideas of flow from psychology joined with a move away from dependence on representation to facilitate increasingly autonomous mobile machines; and finally, in studies of television, where the on-tap transmission of images has been understood in terms of a flow that articulates or choreographs bodies and attention, connecting the rhythms and temporality of private and public space, cities and suburbs. This model of flow, in particular, allows for analysis that operates across different scales, and undoes oppositions of scale and surface / depth that pervade recent photography theory

Anthropomorphic taxidermy and the death of nature: The curious art of Hermann Ploucquet, Walter Potter, and Charles Waterton

This refereed journal article was commissioned by the editor Barbara Gates following an abstract in response to a call for papers. It draws on talks and writing on taxidermy for the exhibition Nanoq Flat-Out and Bluesome by the artists Mark Wilson and Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir (Spike Island, 2004; Bristol City Museum 2005, Blackdog Press, 2006). This and other outputs formed the basis of a successful bid for AHRC research leave in 2008

Of tennis courts and fireplaces: Neurath's internment on the Isle of Man and his politics of design

This talk is based in archival research in Otto Neurath’s correspondence and papers, and secondary and primary reading on the Isle of Man, and on wartime internment policy. It is also based in my own brief research at the Manx Museum in Douglas, my visit to the site of the Onchan internment camp and discussion with friends and relatives of internees in nearby camps. My argument, however is speculative and heuristic, and should be taken in that spirit. In this paper I am interested in teasing out connections, and in working with unresolved loose ends from my research, to address the connections between Neurath's ideas about interior design, furnishing and architecture or everyday objects (chairs, fireplaces, tennis courts, and shoes), with his lived experience of internment and in the context of 1940s Britain

Image flow: photography on tap

This paper discusses networked digital-photographic images, in terms of “image flow”. I link current liquid metaphors (photo streams etc.) with theories of televisual “flow”, the flow of capital, and of image flow in robotics / computer vision. How might singular photographs be attended to in the context of the continuous, on-tap model of electronic and digital media

We are here but where are you?

This paper addresses contemporary theoretical arguments about how the digital image is not principally visual, is beyond representation, and how this constitutes a significant break between chemical and digital photography. Henning uses 1930s American urban documentary photographs, particularly by John Gutmann and Helen Levitt, to rethink the assumptions about analogue, chemical photography implicit in such theories. The street is a place where these photographers found the traces of activities and encounters that are not always explicit or observable, but happening off-scene, inside buildings and basements, or at night. Photographs by Gutmann and Levitt challenge the idea that pre-digital photography was concerned with visual truth, or was a static and direct record or representation of events, people and places. They also allow us to engage in new ways with the differences and connections between contemporary mobile photography and older documentary and street photography practices

From a world in a box to a world without borders: art museums, media technologies and cosmopolitanism

This was an invited lecture given at the Muzeum Sztuki. It addresses the notion of universality in museum practices, in an age of electronic communication, globalisation and artistic multiculturalism. The art museum tasked to be a "universal museum" to map the development of art, historically resorted to the use of reproductions. The paper discusses how the universal museum project relied both on hand-­‐made facsimiles and technical reproductions (such as photographs); how we map or visualise a history of modern art, and how the ways in which we do this are related to the media technologies of our time. It considers the idea of the museum as a container (or box) in which all the world’s stuff is stored, and as a kind of narrative journey. Finally it addresses the ways in which the notion of cosmopolitanism has been proposed as an alternative to the perceived Imperial aspects of the universal museum, and briefly comments on the situation today for museums as public spaces in a global context and their responsibility to their publics

Photography Sets The Image Free: Inaugural Professorial Lecture

Photography is commonly understood as a static medium that “freezes” the moment. This characterisation of photography privileges certain kinds of practice, draws a sharp distinction between it and moving-image media such as film and video, imagines the photograph as primarily a print, and underpins arguments about the predatory nature of photography and about the novelty of digital images. In her inaugural lecture, and through a close reading of aspects of Walter Benjamin’s Little History of Photography (1931) Michelle Henning argues for a different understanding of photography as something that sets images loose. Benjamin, following the art historian Heinrich Schwarz, characterised the photographs of David Octavius Hill in terms that would shape his theory of aura as an oscillation between distance and proximity. Drawing on her background in art history, cultural studies and artistic practice, Henning discusses this oscillation, this slipperiness of the image, in relation to questions of academic and artistic freedom