Rethinking the history of photography canon: A study on subjectivity

The development and the changes in the technical process of capturing the appearances on a surface, namely the process of 'how' they are captured has always been an important area of research in and through the course of history of photography. But the question of identifying which things to be captured as 'images' and why they are captured in such a way has also been equally significant. History of photography has been enriched by the photographers, who bring their different ways of seeing and diverse approaches into the world of photography, and by their photographs, which challenge the history of images by way of changing and transforming the narrative in photography. This study aims to take a step towards breaking the patterns, which have been presented as pre-established and imposed throughout the history of photography; in that way, new possibilities of evaluation and reading can become accessible. This thesis proposes a different reading of the history of photography by stepping outside the traditional approaches, which have preserved their validity despite their gradual decline, and focusing on the transformations brought about by the 'subjectivity' of photography. When we look at the 170 years of photography, from 1839, the year photography as a new invention was officially registered to Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre by the French Academy of Sciences, to today, photography has always been considered doubtlessly as one of the most important technological revolutions of the 19th century. But there is another context, perhaps even more important than the former, in which we can locate photography: photography as a history of subjectivity. In this study, the approaches that take photographs as 'unbiased' and 'objective inscriptions', and photographers as 'smart observers who prefer not to interfere' will be re-evaluated in the light of the transformations that they underwent. The pre-condition of a new reading is to put forth questions that challenge the canonic readings accepted as universally valid, hence making the ground of evaluation shaky and slippery. The major purpose of this study is, to open us to new questions raised by different deconstructions resulted by different horizons of reading. The process of personalization is the main axis of this study. It began in the 1930's as photography completes its technical development. In the 20th century the emphasis on the process of subjectivity gets even stronger and it becomes even more manifest. The elements that make up history are always within one another. They constantly interact with each other; they transform and reconstruct the people, societies, and economic, cultural and imaginative structures. Such a process that constantly renews itself is also observable in the history of photography. The works and the projects that consist of photographs of societies, countries and the world we live in, reproduce the differences in their scales, hence nourishes the spirit to think and see differently. This spirit requires freedom and autonomy as the precondition that will turn a discipline into art. In the 1900s photography gained its existence, which had been cast under the shadow of the art of painting for more than fifty years. As it emancipated itself from the currents such as Pictorialism, Naturalism, Straight Photography, the transition from imitation to originality, from sameness to difference, from uniformity to uniqueness prepared firmly the process of personalization in photography. After the transformations that occurred in the last quarter of the 20th century, with its own institutions of education, its galleries, its biennials, festivals and exhibitions, photography finally confirmed its well-deserved position as an independent discipline in the history of art. During this process, the evaluations of photographs and photographers regarding their continents, countries, particular movements and groups have been given up and the approach claiming that every different kind of photography can form an independent tradition has been appropriated. Thus a new perspective has been opened which will enable the taste of photography to grow infinitely and spread widely. Throughout the 19th century and the beginning of 20th century in which photography carried on its technical development, in the modernist works of the prominent representatives of Straight Photography, such as Immogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Paul Strand and in New-Objectivity, which emerged right after Straight Photography, the patiently awaited magical 'balanced' moment of the real(ity) was formed by perfect compositions. In the works of Eugène Atget, Wegee, Lisette Model who did not belong to any movement, and in the photographs of Ed Van Der Elsken, Christer Strömholm, Diane Arbus, Lee Freidlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Anders Petersen, Antione D'gata, Nan Goldin, personal documentary approach and the in-between moments which aim to manifest the imbalance are important. The photographic reality begins to be subjective, in Susan Sontag's words, as "the thing gets to be identified in time not as that which really happened, but as that which I really perceived." That which is real, that which lies in everyone's eyes is in fact hidden. It manifests itself only in the sight of 'that' photographer, in 'that' particular way, it get isolated i from the rest of the life by 'that' particular way of framing, and meets with the audience as a completely new story. It is because nowadays the photographer is no longer the person who observes the world and the external things surrounding him, then documents them 'objectively' on light-sensitive film or as a digital image; the photographer now sees the world through the reflection of the outside world upon him/her, hence s/he photographs in a 'subjective' way in which s/he questions and tries to understand the world. The photographer does so not just to be different, but because s/he is already different as an individual (just like all of us) and chooses to express the world s/he forms with his/her own subjectivity construction. Sontag claims that "every thing the camera captures is a manifestation." Ever since the invention of photography, this manifestation has developed under the influence of many different methods, approaches, perceptions, criticisms and movements. But seeing is a personal act. Lisette Model, Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, three leading names of the 20th century photography will be examined in the fourth chapter as the photographers who nourish and sharpen the act seeing by their personalities and enrich the transformation of photography, which is called subjectivity. This study that intends to reread the history of photography in a new context of 'subjectivity' will be concluded in the fifth conclusion chapter. In that chapter, the traces of transformations occurred throughout the history of photography, with their destructive but also creative implications and their proliferating aspects will be discussed in parallel with the photographers' way of making 'their own photographs.' Key words: History of Photography, Movements in Photography: Straight Photography, New-Objectivism, History of Art, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Photography and Subjectivity, Freedom and Autonomy in Art, Photography as a Discipline of Art