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Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction
A provocative exploration of photography’s relationship to capitalism, from leading theorists of visual culture.
Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays collected here investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism’s violence—and if so, how?
Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource extraction and capital accumulation, from 1492 to the postcolonial; the camera’s potential to make visible critical understandings of capitalist production and society, especially economies of class and desire; and the ways the camera and the image can be used to build cultural and political counterpublics from which a democratic struggle against capitalism might emerge.
With essays by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Siobhan Angus, Kajri Jain, Walter Benn Michaels, T. J. Clark, John Paul Ricco, Blake Stimson, Chris Stolarski, Tong Lam and Jacob Emery.
Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays collected here investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism’s violence—and if so, how?
Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource extraction and capital accumulation, from 1492 to the postcolonial; the camera’s potential to make visible critical understandings of capitalist production and society, especially economies of class and desire; and the ways the camera and the image can be used to build cultural and political counterpublics from which a democratic struggle against capitalism might emerge.
With essays by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Siobhan Angus, Kajri Jain, Walter Benn Michaels, T. J. Clark, John Paul Ricco, Blake Stimson, Chris Stolarski, Tong Lam and Jacob Emery.
- GenresPhotographyArt
320 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 29, 2024
I was thinking of doing a kind of summary of the chapters here - this is an edited collection, and so multiple authors - but if you want that you could just as easily read the introduction. This book tackles the questions between capitalism and photography through (sorry) many lenses. And Marx sits beside many of these authors as they write, since there was a time when photography was understood to be, potentially, an instrument for building a new society. There is even a chapter here where how photography was used in the pre-Stalinist era and then under Stalin changed in character, I guess from seeking to destabilise stereotypical understandings of what human nature might be, to providing a new vision of human potential, to another mode of bureaucratic enforced sameness. Since Marxism sees social relations as being formed on the basis of social productive forces, when new productive forces come into being, it is assumed that they will have more in common with higher forms of social relations than lower ones. And so, Lenin could say socialism is electricity and the Soviets - since steam was the technology that gave birth to capitalism, electricity would do the same for socialism.
Photography is an interesting case. As the book says in the introduction, photography was invented between Adam Smith writing The Wealth of Nations and Marx and Engels writing the Manifesto. A lot of this book shows that photography has not really proven to be an enemy of capitalism. In fact, quite the opposite. The photographic image, not unlike the tableaux in the arcades of Paris fashion shops, are idealised worlds of desire. One of the authors here points out, in one of the best chapters in the book, focused on cigarettes as a kind of perfect capitalist product, that noticing the underlying irony of such images is intentional, but makes no difference to the pricking of our desire. I would go further. That noticing the irony, ‘do they really think I am stupid enough to think that if I drink Coke I’ll get the girl?’ works as a kind of false inoculation against the image’s actual power. I suspect you don’t need to have had a one-night-stand to know that in the vast Venn diagram of life, reason, desire, logic and regret might intersect, but they hardly overlap. “All this the world well knows, but none know well, to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”
Marx talks of the fetish nature of the commodity. By this he means that to understand commodities, and capitalist society, you need to see commodities in ways that the society itself forces you to not notice. That is, you need to see commodities as exchange values, rather than use values. But it is almost impossible to see commodities outside of their use, or more generally, outside of their fetishised nature. In one of the chapters here there is a long discussion on how images are made, and therefore the exploitation that is hidden in the fetishised image. This was true with the first images that required silver - and so, the exploitation of miners was a pre-condition of being able to take images in the first place. Here, the use value of the photograph totally obscures the costs associated with its production. This is, as the author makes clear, still true today, where iPhones require rare earths often mined in exploitative ways that have barely changed since the age of the dark, satanic mills. And yet, capitalism hides this relationship so that there is not a trace of the exploited African child in the selfie with food porn we post to social media.
Much of what Marx has to say about how capitalism changes the production process involves every aspect of that process becoming increasingly simplified. Highly skilled workers are expensive, and so capitalism revolutionises the division of labour so that each step in any production process requires less and less skill to perform. The history of producing images has certainly been reflective of that law. To draw or paint requires levels of skill that are orders of magnitude over producing a photographic image. But that is not the only difference. Years ago I went to a lecture where they showed drawings of Rome that had been done a few centuries ago and then compared the drawings to photographs of the same buildings taken today. Sometimes buildings from various parts of Rome had been drawn together, as if literally on the same street, although they were sometimes miles apart. Other times a building would have more or fewer windows that the actual building had. We expect drawings to represent what is drawn, but literal representation wasn’t nearly as much of a requirement as it is today. Photography was originally ‘sold’ as something that provided evidence, seeing is believing, but after all the trouble Kate has gotten into recently with her edited family photos, we now both believe and don’t believe at the same time.
But the photographic image is always one where we always look at what it is that we are taking the image of, something it is not possible to do with painting or drawing, which always involve a looking away to the image being created and back again to the object being drawn. The ethics of the objectification of the person being photographed is also significantly different to that of someone being drawn. Ethics we barely think of until we transgress them.
Editing a photo has become the new labour associated with image production. Much of what once needed to be staged, can now be crafted after the event. Less studium, and punctum edited out entirely, against Barthes understanding of photography. The image is essential in creating desire and so its force as a revolutionary tool has been greatly swamped by the hunger of capitalism to revolutionise images in much the same way that it revolutionises the production process. Lines of flight get captured - as I said to my daughter this morning, images of socialist heroes like Che Guevara end up on t-shirts sown together by the children of the socialist revolution in Vietnam to be warn ironically by left-leaning advertising executives on holiday in Bali.
The power of images to disorientate, to get us to think anew is also hampered by the need for images to tell a story - or rather, for images to be explained from within a narrative. They don’t get to ‘tell their 1000 words’ until a few hundred words explains what it is I’m looking at. And the problem isn’t just one of still photography - when I watched the collapse of the Baltimore bridge for the first time the other day I was certain it was computer generated. So much so I had to go looking for a news site I could trust to confirm what I had just witnessed.
I’ve recently become obsessed with the war in Gaza, even though that is not an accurate description of what is occurring there. I’ve increasingly been referring to it as the slaughter in Gaza. And here is the other problem with images. I can read about what is occurring there every day - but I never look at the images if I can avoid it. I can read about Aaron Bushnell setting himself alight in response to the horrors of Gaza, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at a single image from it. Perhaps images are better at disorienting us - but I’m much more likely to feel I need to protect myself from them than I am from words.
I’ve referred to more chapters of this book than I intended to. This is a quick read and an interesting read. And well worth the read too.
Photography is an interesting case. As the book says in the introduction, photography was invented between Adam Smith writing The Wealth of Nations and Marx and Engels writing the Manifesto. A lot of this book shows that photography has not really proven to be an enemy of capitalism. In fact, quite the opposite. The photographic image, not unlike the tableaux in the arcades of Paris fashion shops, are idealised worlds of desire. One of the authors here points out, in one of the best chapters in the book, focused on cigarettes as a kind of perfect capitalist product, that noticing the underlying irony of such images is intentional, but makes no difference to the pricking of our desire. I would go further. That noticing the irony, ‘do they really think I am stupid enough to think that if I drink Coke I’ll get the girl?’ works as a kind of false inoculation against the image’s actual power. I suspect you don’t need to have had a one-night-stand to know that in the vast Venn diagram of life, reason, desire, logic and regret might intersect, but they hardly overlap. “All this the world well knows, but none know well, to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”
Marx talks of the fetish nature of the commodity. By this he means that to understand commodities, and capitalist society, you need to see commodities in ways that the society itself forces you to not notice. That is, you need to see commodities as exchange values, rather than use values. But it is almost impossible to see commodities outside of their use, or more generally, outside of their fetishised nature. In one of the chapters here there is a long discussion on how images are made, and therefore the exploitation that is hidden in the fetishised image. This was true with the first images that required silver - and so, the exploitation of miners was a pre-condition of being able to take images in the first place. Here, the use value of the photograph totally obscures the costs associated with its production. This is, as the author makes clear, still true today, where iPhones require rare earths often mined in exploitative ways that have barely changed since the age of the dark, satanic mills. And yet, capitalism hides this relationship so that there is not a trace of the exploited African child in the selfie with food porn we post to social media.
Much of what Marx has to say about how capitalism changes the production process involves every aspect of that process becoming increasingly simplified. Highly skilled workers are expensive, and so capitalism revolutionises the division of labour so that each step in any production process requires less and less skill to perform. The history of producing images has certainly been reflective of that law. To draw or paint requires levels of skill that are orders of magnitude over producing a photographic image. But that is not the only difference. Years ago I went to a lecture where they showed drawings of Rome that had been done a few centuries ago and then compared the drawings to photographs of the same buildings taken today. Sometimes buildings from various parts of Rome had been drawn together, as if literally on the same street, although they were sometimes miles apart. Other times a building would have more or fewer windows that the actual building had. We expect drawings to represent what is drawn, but literal representation wasn’t nearly as much of a requirement as it is today. Photography was originally ‘sold’ as something that provided evidence, seeing is believing, but after all the trouble Kate has gotten into recently with her edited family photos, we now both believe and don’t believe at the same time.
But the photographic image is always one where we always look at what it is that we are taking the image of, something it is not possible to do with painting or drawing, which always involve a looking away to the image being created and back again to the object being drawn. The ethics of the objectification of the person being photographed is also significantly different to that of someone being drawn. Ethics we barely think of until we transgress them.
Editing a photo has become the new labour associated with image production. Much of what once needed to be staged, can now be crafted after the event. Less studium, and punctum edited out entirely, against Barthes understanding of photography. The image is essential in creating desire and so its force as a revolutionary tool has been greatly swamped by the hunger of capitalism to revolutionise images in much the same way that it revolutionises the production process. Lines of flight get captured - as I said to my daughter this morning, images of socialist heroes like Che Guevara end up on t-shirts sown together by the children of the socialist revolution in Vietnam to be warn ironically by left-leaning advertising executives on holiday in Bali.
The power of images to disorientate, to get us to think anew is also hampered by the need for images to tell a story - or rather, for images to be explained from within a narrative. They don’t get to ‘tell their 1000 words’ until a few hundred words explains what it is I’m looking at. And the problem isn’t just one of still photography - when I watched the collapse of the Baltimore bridge for the first time the other day I was certain it was computer generated. So much so I had to go looking for a news site I could trust to confirm what I had just witnessed.
I’ve recently become obsessed with the war in Gaza, even though that is not an accurate description of what is occurring there. I’ve increasingly been referring to it as the slaughter in Gaza. And here is the other problem with images. I can read about what is occurring there every day - but I never look at the images if I can avoid it. I can read about Aaron Bushnell setting himself alight in response to the horrors of Gaza, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at a single image from it. Perhaps images are better at disorienting us - but I’m much more likely to feel I need to protect myself from them than I am from words.
I’ve referred to more chapters of this book than I intended to. This is a quick read and an interesting read. And well worth the read too.
August 19, 2022
An important, but meandering, contribution to critical visual studies.
December 16, 2021
The first 8 chapters would have got 1 star and filed in badly written academic word salad, but I did enjoy the chapters on Soviet photography and China. In fact, most of it was a bit of a chore which nearly ended up in dnf, so I'm glad I persisted to the end. The other chapters each had a reasonably interesting idea that could have been easily explained in a short paragraph.
January 20, 2022
Many interesting thoughts, but in some sections marred by unnecessarily convoluted writing and shallow economic understanding.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews