Dag Petersson

Histories of photography usually begin with a story about how people in the 19th century struggled to come to terms with the new medium and the strange images it produced. Once the historical narrative gets underway, however, the original consternation appears to have settled into photographic genres, technologies, practices and leading photographers.

I wanted to write the history of the original bewilderment, arguing that it probably never entirely dissipated. I believed that in part, at least, the issue was a matter of ideas clashing unacceptably. In philosophy, this clash had just been laid to rest with Hegel's idealism. The experience of photography, however, emerged as an aesthetic monster that exposed an intrinsic weakness at the heart of his reasoning. 

Walter Benjamin understood how to write history on the basis of ambiguity and misunderstandings, and he taught me how fundamental epistemic principles of the 19th century, such as historical progress, industrial reason, and the correlation between experience and reality, were equally borne and betrayed the photographic image.  

Jacob A. Riis is considered one of the founding fathers of social documentary photography. Born in Ribe, Denmark, he emigrated to the US in 1871 and were to have an extraordinary career in journalism and political agitation. With his richly illustrated books, journal contributions and lecture tours, he challenged and transformed the popular image of what life among the poor immigrants in the New York tenements was really like. 

How could his stories and images have such a broad appeal and be so consequential? In this book I show that established narratives rely on highly dubious assumptions and often run counter to historical fact. Arguing that a different theoretical approach provides a far more simple and straightforward answer, the book develops for the first time a consistent and comprehensive view of Riis' political message but also an explanation for its success. 

The book offers a conceptual contribution to the historiography of visual culture. Expanding on Foucauldian genealogy, I establish the essentials of Discourse Mutation Theory and prove its worth against historical evidence. Stressing the word/image relationship as co-constitutive of the reporter's truth effect and beyond that media affordance, readership context, and normative inconsistencies between cultural ecologies, this book argues that Riis tampered with American conditions of truthfulness and sentiment as only an immigrant could do. This theory strengthens the hypothesis that an early apprenticeship in Copenhagen provided him with possibilities of 'misunderstanding' the American philanthropy in way that proved to be extraordinarily fortuitous.

Together with the Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr, we developed in this book a visual and conceptual contribution to photography theory that we call photographic space. 

Photographic space is a notion that makes possible a new aesthetic of photography. Developed from the phenomenological image theories of Georg Gadamer and Gottfried Boehm, the theory builds upon the authors' intimate understanding of the craft of photographic image making. Essential to the theoretical position is the idea that photography makes things visible otherwise, that whereas human sensation (for example vision) may be limited, perception is malleable and responsive to alterations in visibility. Photographic space is what makes things visible in alternative ways. It is defined by what a given situated complex of mechanical, artistic and lumious conditions can afford in conjunction with one another.