The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography

Philosopher Patrick Maynard makes a provocative case for revising commonly held definitions of photography by arguing that photography is a technology. Maynard defines technology as a way to enhance and filter human power, and photography as a technology for visual display, that is, for surface marking with visual intent. His argument for this redefinition of the term “photography” has implications for historical and cultural studies of photographs. Maynard’s approach to photography also facilitates historical connections between photography and other “marking” technologies, even those such as sound recording, in which the surface marking is made with a different intent. Maynard’s study is of methodological interest for his formulation of technology as a functional category, synthesized from sources that include Clifford Hooker, Raymond Williams, Don Ihde, Ursula Franklin, and George Basalla.

Maynard’s examination of photography as a productive process, an “engine of visualization,” challenges studies in which the category “photography” is evaluated in terms of photographs, which are, in turn, evaluated in relation to the things to which they refer. He cites writings on photography by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes as examples of this approach. Working with philosopher Kendall Walton’s theory of imagining and depiction, Maynard evaluates examples of imagining in popular songs and in pictures to compare photography’s similar and distinctive contributions to imagining technologies. Maynard revises examinations of photography that turn around a photograph’s relation to a referent to consider photography’s imagining as a distinctive combination of depicted and invented material. “Like any other depictive technology, photography provides methods of marking surfaces that entice imagining. Sometimes this is accomplished by photographing what is depicted, sometimes [as routinely in movies, such as King Kong] not” (p. 114). Depictive uses, however, can’t be considered apart from what Maynard characterizes as photography’s “detective functions.” Like other detection technologies, photo-detective technologies extend the body’s information gathering and processing systems, with photography capable specifically of registering those changes registered by light on surfaces. Photography is distinctive, according to Maynard, for its capacity to combine detecting and imagining capabilities.

Maynard’s evaluation of photography as technology, specifically a “branching family of technologies with different uses” with mark making through the agency of light as the common stem (p. 3), relates human agency to photographic production in distinctive ways. Photography as technology functions as an amplifier of human power (p. 75) that deals with physical materials, the effects of light on surfaces. Such physical amplification of power typically involves a related suppression, or filtering, of this power. “[W]e should expect that the use of photographic technologies will suppress some of our important abilities to do things” (p. 82). Human imagining, for example, is now powerfully shaped by photographic technologies; if the influence of photography is to suppress other human capacities for imaging, this “is the effect of any successful technology,” not a result particular to photography (p. 82).

As a primer concerned with categories, The Engine of Visualization is most effective when Maynard examines how categories have worked and continue to work in different historical and cultural studies of photography. His account of photography as a technology for visual display is an interesting approach for our contemporary moment, when established categories of photography are less suited to both rapidly multiplying visual forms of the late twentieth century and historical studies of modern visual culture. Maynard makes much of his case on established photo-art historical ground—the experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot and Nicéphore Niépce, the commentary of Elizabeth Eastlake and Charles Baudelaire, the aesthetic theories and projects of P. H. Emerson and Edward Weston. Maynard’s approach is, however, more capacious, revising definitions of photography used in these, raising connections with other industrial, scientific, and artistic activities, and also working with ideas on photography by less canonical figures, such as Siegfried Kracauer and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Maynard’s use of technology as a functional category works at a...