ity both took away its ‘‘aura’’ of preciousness (and,
hence, its value as a commodity) and allowed for
the kind of wide dissemination thought necessary
for the formation of class consciousness and other
preconditions for revolutionary change. In its time
Benjamin’s work had little influence on the actual
practice of photography, but Benjamin’s ideas,
with their emphasis on removing the commodity
value of artworks and replacing it with value as
vehicles for social critique and improvement,
would be embraced by those writing on photo-
graphic theory in the later academic period.
The Academic Period
In the 1960s photography and journalism became
subjects studied in the university context, and art
history departments came to regard photography
as a legitimate area of research. Cross-pollination
occurred, as students took ideas they encountered
in philosophy, sociology, psychology, and political
theory and applied them to the practice and theory
of photography. The result was that photographic
theory began to question two fundamental ideas
that had been taken for granted in the previous
decades: (i) the objectivity of the photographic
process, and (ii) the idea that photographic images
have their meanings exhausted by what they lit-
erally depict.
The Demise of Photographic Objectivity
We have seen how the fine-art photographers,
the social-documentary photographers, and the
visual anthropologists all assumed that the photo-
graphic process has objectivity at its core. There
were differences between these three groups in that
the fine-art photographers tried to overcome objec-
tivity while the latter two groups relied on it, but
none of them questioned that it was present. Devel-
opments in psychology and sociology, however,
soon put pressure on this traditional assumption.
In psychology the ‘‘new look’’ movement under-
mined traditional assumptions about the objectiv-
ity of human perception. Jerome Bruner and Neil
Postman ran experiments in which subjects were
briefly shown non-standard playing cards (e.g.,
cards with black diamonds, red clubs, etc.) and
found that the cards were perceived as standard
cards. Human perception thus came to be under-
stood as being as much a product of memory and
expectation as it is of what is actually presented to
the eye—in short, human perception came to be
seen as a largely subjective process. Photographic
theorists such as Sigfried Kracauer argued that the
photographic process is in fact similarly subjective,
or that, if the process itself is not, then our percep-
tions of photographs are. If this is correct then the
images produced by visual anthropologists, for
example, are not theory-neutral documents, but
rather subjective interpretations cloaked in a false
air of objectivity.
We have seen how photographers such as Riis
and Hine hoped that the objectivity of their photo-
graphs would render them persuasive documents of
injustices and thereby bring about progressive
social change. Photographic images and their pre-
sumed objectivity were regarded by these photo-
graphers as powerful tools for use in the struggle
with the inequities produced by unchecked capital-
ism. But with the tremendous proliferation of
mass-media images in the late twentieth century
came the suspicion that photographs are more of
a mixed blessing than this traditional view would
have it. Sociologically oriented theorists such as
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh emphasized the ways in
which governments and corporations can use the
presumed objectivity of mass-media photography
to erase or reshape cultural memory, or to convince
mass audiences of the desirability of certain con-
sumption-based lifestyles. A mass audience, trained
to believe that photographs objectively record the
facts, and then continually presented with photo-
graphic depictions of the past or advertising images
in which consumer items are shown as integral
components of desirable lives, soon come to accept
the depicted histories or lifestyles as the norm, and
modify their collective memory or spending habits
accordingly. Photography and its presumed objec-
tivity in this way came to be seen, not as an instru-
ment of social betterment, but rather as a means of
maintaining the status quo.
Feminist photographic theory is similarly con-
cerned with the extent to which photographic adver-
tising imagery and its presumed objectivity shape
the audience’s understanding of social norms. How-
ever, in the work of theorists such as Abigail Solo-
mon-Godeau, less emphasis is placed on concerns
regarding the consumerist aspects of such corporate
control, and more on the extent to which mass
imagery shapes a woman’s sense of self. Such con-
cerns are well illustrated in Cindy Sherman’sUn-
titled Film Stillsseries, in which she presents the
audience with a series of self-portraits in which she
plays out roles for women depicted in the mass
media of the 1950s and 1960s. This series can be
read as an extended imagistic analysis of Sherman’s
own sense of self, or at least of one being forced
upon her as a result of continual media exposure
during her formative years.PHOTOGRAPHIC THEORY