Introduction

3

now be classified as ‘photography theory’ is not quite the one envisioned inBurgin’s ‘Introduction’; for there is an implicit teleological moment in Burgin’sclaim to be ‘contributing towards photography theory’, even though ‘ the theorydoes not yet exist’. The implication is, of course, that photography theory, as aunified and unitary body of thought, is the goal towards which contributorsto Thinking Photography are working. Subsequent developments suggest thatthis utopian faith was, in one sense, misplaced. Photography’s emergence as acentral object of study in the humanities and social sciences has in fact beenaccompanied by a vast proliferation of theoretical approaches to the subject thatexceed the notion of ‘photography theory’ espoused by Burgin. It is to this veryplurality and diversity that this volume responds.At the same time, despite the intensive theoretical and critical activity thatphotography has generated in recent decades, one of the most interesting aspectsof photography studies remains its relative youth. It is true that many of thedisciplines making up what we now tend to think of as the ‘arts and humanities’are relatively young in terms of the history of scholastic and academic study.Even the grandest and seemingly most established of subjects, such as EnglishLiterature, only really acquired academic legitimacy at the end of the nineteenthcentury, as Terry Eagleton for one reminds us, and did so after a long struggle(Eagleton 1983: 17–53). Nevertheless, contemporary generations of Englishscholars now find themselves entering a discipline carrying a heavy weight oftradition and history, whose canons and critical orthodoxies must be negotiatedand acknowledged even by those who might want to challenge or resist them.Photography studies remains a discipline in formation, one which has properlytaken shape over only two or three generations of academic activity, a lifetimewhich we can measure by the fact that those scholars who were taught by, orencountered, the pioneers in the field (figures such as Burgin and Tagg) arenow themselves engaged in teaching a new generation of academics. The still-youthful status of photography studies arguably leaves those working within itin a distinctive and valuable position as they contribute to shaping the directionof photography studies and its theoretical foundations. They can, at the sametime, remain aware of the ways in which other, older disciplines have takenshape, and remain alert to the ways in which the sediments of critical ortho-doxy were able to accumulate around them.Indeed, the very nature of photography as a cultural phenomenon may wellmilitate against the coalescence of critical orthodoxies. John Tagg notes that inthe 1970s people were attracted by photography as an object of study preciselybecause it was not bound by a specific institutional canon: if it could boastan aesthetics then this exceeded the paradigm of art history because its prac-tices were both too diverse and formulaic (Tagg 1992: 76). This diversity is sobroad that any attempt to enumerate photographic practices would be sense-less. The point to note, perhaps, is that this very diversity means that while‘photography studies’ can lay claim to a high degree of disciplinary legiti-macy, it does so without a fixed institutional home. While English literature is