Introduction

7

subjectivity, rather than governing the processes of photographic meaning,is accommodated and managed by them. In doing so, it reasserts the persist-ence and continued relevance of questions that Tagg first examined in his owncontribution to Thinking Photography .In the volume’s closing essay, Donald Preziosi re-situates photography withina broader history of the institutions of visual culture. Examining the ‘dreamworlds’ of the museum and the culture industries, and their role in creating thephantasmagoria of the modern world, Preziosi calls on us to interrogate thesocial functions not just of photography and art, but of the disciplines whichframe our understanding of them. He reminds us of the need to engage withrepresentation and artifice not simply as a defining feature of the artistic realm,but as constitutive of social organization and modes of perception in general; hereminds us too of the political imperative of doing so.In inviting us to think more generally about the modern world’s ‘regimesof representation’, and the professions and institutions which underpin them,Preziosi contributes to another aim of this volume, which is to encourage amore self-reflexive approach to the discipline of photography studies, or toparticipate in what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu terms a ‘science of science’(Bourdieu 2001). Throughout his work, Bourdieu underlines the need forthose involved in an academic discipline to pay attention to the ways in whichit constructs and defines its objects of study, and the social mechanisms thatgovern the knowledge it produces. Central to this process are the battles forauthority which take place between different actors in the field as they try toimpose the conditions in which legitimate statements about the object of studycan be made; decide who has the right to speak about it; and legislate on thevalidity of what is said (Bourdieu 1984).Maintaining what Bourdieu calls ‘epistemological vigilance’ (2001: 178) – acritical awareness of the discourses, interpretative frameworks and relationshipsof power governing a field of enquiry over time – is arguably of particularimportance in relation to photography studies if it is to maintain the relativehybridity and fluidity which has defined it so far, and avoid as much as possiblethe sclerosis of critical orthodoxy. As Kelly Dennis observes in this volume, ‘it isundoubtedly useful to rethink the field of study as it becomes increasingly insti-tutionalized and thus subject to the dogmatism, cult value, and embeddednessof any institutionalized field of study’. After all, the strength and distinctivenessof photography studies lies in its radical and inevitable interdisciplinarity, oneto which it is condemned by the very nature of a medium that pervades allaspects of life and therefore must come to the attention of a multitude of fieldsof enquiry. The next section of the introduction sets out to contribute to thatprocess of critical reflection by revisiting the pivotal moment of the early 1980srepresented, amongst other things, by the publication of Thinking Photography ,in order to consider its role in defining the direction of photography studies andto sketch out the broad trajectory of the discipline since then. It emerges thatwhile Burgin’s volume certainly sets out to revolutionize both understanding