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Elizabeth Edwards

and thus the sensory, in thinking about photographs. Bodies literally performimages.Kracauer (1995a: 52) wrote of photography that in order for history to presentitself, its mere surface coherence must be broken, because the ‘likeness’ of thephotographic image might refer to the look of the subject, but does not imme-diately reveal itself to understanding. One could understand this as a challengeto the visual surface of the photograph: that its full apprehension lies withinand beyond the visual. If photography produces a set of objects, meanings andsocial relationships – what we might gloss as ‘histories’ – we need to look formore diverse ways to understand the apprehension of photographs, to breaktheir reduction to the visual alone. Paul Stoller (1997: 89), in his book SensuousScholarship has argued that ‘fully sensuous scholarship encompasses reality, imag-ination and reason, difference and commonality fused and celebrated in bothrigorous and imaginative practices as well as in expository and evocative expres-sion’. Of course, such an approach requires specific, ethnographically groundedstudies of embodied apprehensions of photography and photographs in orderto be meaningful. As Mitchell (2005: 257) rightly points out, ‘all so-called visualmedia turn out to involve the other senses’, and thus we have to understandthe precise role of the visual in this wider domain. However, the sensory shouldnot be seen merely as a way of extending our understanding of vision, but offundamentally refiguring our understanding of not only the social functions ofphotography – although this is perhaps the most obvious of areas – but also inarenas of aesthetic practice: from the privileging of certain forms of sensory andmaterial response in traditional connoisseurship (Willumson 2004: 47–76), tothe engagement with the multi-sensory character of images by contemporaryartists (Schneider and Wright 2006).While I have only been able to map out thecontours of a territory of where and how we might take these ideas further, myoverall aim has been to contemplate whether it is time to extend our thinkingabout photographs beyond the visual and beyond the simply material existenceof photographs, and to position the apprehension of photographs across thecomplex exchanges of sensory experience (Burgin 1986b: 58), to move themfrom the objectifying tendencies of vision, to the connectedness of sound andtouch (Ingold 2000: 246). Such an approach moves photographs beyond thedichotomy of the oral and the visual, to a broader sensory apprehension of theworld. An anthropological approach points to different modes of consciousnessfrom which emerge differently figured ways of knowing, and so (who knows?)we might eventually arrive at a reconfigured theory of photography: a theorythat emerges from what people actually do with photographs.