Touching Seeing

Photography, as Geoffrey Batchen points out, is an intensely self-reflexive medium: since its emergence in the 1830s, it has operated not only as a mechanism for viewing objects but also as a means for making visible our ways of seeing (9-10). This latter function was largely hidden by the longstanding belief in photographic objectivity and transparency, which positions the photographic image as an unmediated record of the world. When photography became a topic of serious academic study in the 1970s, semiotically and historically minded theorists of the medium began clearing away the obfuscating myth of transparency to illuminate the systems of economic power, racial subjugation, and other techniques of social control in which photography has historically been embedded.¹ Yet the long-dominant critical emphasis on photography’s imbrication with power, so crucial to dismantling the fantasy of photographic objectivity, no longer suffices. As Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith observe in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (2012), “something vital has been overlooked in the effort to delineate photography’s repressive functions” (4). An increased focus on previously overlooked archives, and especially on minor, indigenous, and non-Western counter-traditions, has done much to revitalize photography studies, as has a newly intensified pursuit of viewing/reading practices that bring the photograph to life. As widely as these practices vary, they favor a more capacious critical gaze, one capable of attending more closely to the photograph’s synesthetic and emotional appeal. We might call this a “touching sight,” in both senses of the term.²

There is, strictly speaking, nothing new about this way of seeing photography. What early writers on the medium called the “charm” of the photographic image registered this more-than-ocular address to the viewer. Yet it was neglected, for the most part, by historical materialist critics, since it seemed of a piece with the mystification that they saw themselves as combating. Thinking through the feel of the photograph threatened to prioritize an a- or even antihistorical emphasis on personal responsiveness above the hard-fought critical awareness of the social construction of sight. The best examples of this new critical attention to the multisensory dimension of photography, however, seek not to abandon but to reimagine the historical implications of photography studies. They shuttle provocatively between sensory attentiveness and historical awareness, crafting new relations between the two, as when Fred Moten finds in the sound of the photograph a “piercing historicality” that keeps the past alive (71).³ Because of the way photography keeps the past circulating in the present, as Zahid Chaudhary argues, it “contain[s] the potential to retrain the human sensorium itself” (194). Hence the optimism with which the touch of the photograph is often greeted: it keeps faith in the medium’s participation in inventing other possibilities for living.

The books addressed here provide an intriguingly textured view of the critical implications of touching sight, underscoring both its limitations and its undeniable speculative appeal. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu’s edited collection, Feeling Photography, situates these considerations in relation to the “affective turn,” a loosely defined but provocative emphasis on sensation and emotion (7). Shawn Michelle Smith’s At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen shares many of these concerns (indeed, she contributes the first essay, drawn from two of her chapters in At the Edge of Sight, in Brown and Phu’s collection). Yet Smith’s attention to touching photography is routed through an extended meditation on the excesses and insufficiencies of photographic visuality as these spark the development of an alternative critical sensibility. By contrast, Marcy Dinius’s The Camera and the Press is invested in media archeology: her analyses are largely devoted to print, the medium, she maintains, in which photographs were initially elaborated and circulated. For Dinius, a...