Photography's Materialities is a significant publication, bringing together scholars working in discrete fields of photographic analysis as well as researchers outside art history and media disciplines who draw on photographic sources. The diverse chapters are concerned with photographs' engagement with the broader worlds of their creation and consumption. To this end, Bruno Latours "actor-network theory," which considers technologies' activated uses within systems of trade and knowledge exchange, has inspired all contributors.Maura Coughlin's, Jacob W. Lewis's, and Mary Marchard's chapters examine the intersections between photographic processes and content. Coughlin interrogates the organic and thematic links between Paul Geniaux's c. 1900 gelatin-silver photographs of northern French salt fields and salt's role as a key ingredient in their printing process. Lewis picks up on the synergy between photographic subject and material, examining Charles Negre's photogravure prints used to illustrate Voyage d'exploration a la mer Morte (1874). Lewis compares how the petroleum derivative bitumen has a discrete presence in the photogravure process while also being concealed in the landscape around the Dead Sea. Marchard analyzes photographic processes through the manipulation of camera technologies rather than raw materials. She ponders the evolution of French homicide crime scene photography, where the camera was positioned at an extreme height to communicate a sense of disembodied, objective sight. Marchard assesses the influence of domestic homicide photography on the fiction of American writer Edith Wharton, rewardingly showing the influence of camera technologies' panoptic vision in and beyond the imagining of police work.
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