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Spontaneity and materiality : what photography is in the photography of James Welling
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Costello, Diarmuid and Lopes, Dominic McIver (2019) Spontaneity and materiality : what photography is in the photography of James Welling. Art History, 42 (1). pp. 154-176. doi:10.1111/1467-8365.12417 ISSN 0141-6790.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12417
Abstract
Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting. Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent writing attends in detail to the materials and processes of photography, the agency of photographic artists, and the social determinants of the production and reception of photographs. As such writing makes plain, photographs cannot be reduced to mechanical traces. Yet background conceptions of photography as trace or index persist almost by default, as no framework of comparable explanatory power has yet emerged to replace them. A conception of photography adequate to developments in recent scholarship is long overdue. Rather than constructing such a conception top–down, as philosophers are wont to do, this paper articulates it by examining selected works by James Welling. There are several reasons for this: Welling’s practice persistently explores the resources and possibilities of photography, the effect of these explorations is to express a particular metaphysics of the mind’s relation to its world, and appreciating why this metaphysics is aptly expressed by exploring photography requires a revised conception of what photography is. In as much as it provides a framework for a richer interpretation of Welling, the new conception is also capable of underwriting a wide range of critical and historical approaches to photography.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | T Technology > TR Photography | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Welling, James -- Criticism and interpretation, Photography | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Art History | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd. | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0141-6790 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | February 2019 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 42 | ||||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 154-176 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1111/1467-8365.12417 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | "This is the peer reviewed version of the following article:Costello, D. and Lopes, D. M. (2019), Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography is in the Photography of James Welling. Art History, 42: 154-176, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12417. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions." | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 23 June 2018 | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 25 January 2021 | ||||||||
| Related URLs: |
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