This week is Photo Week. Time for Kennislink to take a look at the scientific kitchen of photography. Is it actually there? Maartje van den Heuvel, curator of photography at Leiden University, explains what is and isn't scientific about photos and why.
To get straight to the point:there is nothing scientific about photography in itself, according to Van den Heuvel. “Just like text itself is not scientific. But photography is a good research tool, a source of information. In the past there have been many discussions about the scientific nature of photography. Today, the prevailing view is that photography is a medium for documenting phenomena.”
In the scientific world, opinions about a theoretical canon and methodologies for photography are divided and the discussions about this are mainly conducted abroad. But in the meantime, photos are indeed being used within science and on an increasingly large scale. You can think of photography as a research instrument. Photos are used as a resource for scientific information, for example the X-ray or photographing the excavation site in archaeology.
In addition, there is research into photography as a medium of art or communication in the press and magazines. Studies examining the latter, such as art history, study photographs as objects. And more and more disciplines are emerging that use or study photography, such as media sciences, philosophy, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, the natural sciences and of course the history sciences.
Photography and history
Visual material is becoming increasingly important in historical research. The history sciences distinguish three types of research into photography:1) Research into photography as 'power in the past', in which the social function of photography is central. 2) The study of the history of photography (in which the overview works are mainly written by photographers). 3) The photo as a source:what is in a photo, what does it tell us and what does it mean?
As a source of research, the photo is gaining ground in science. More and more photo collections are being digitized and made available for research. Not only databases of archives, but also websites such as The Memory of the Netherlands and the Dutch Photo Society refer to a wealth of photographic research material. “Very important here is metadata, says Van den Heuvel. “No photo is informative in itself:context and information must be included. What do we see, what is it about? It is therefore very important that this associated information is properly collected, stored and made accessible.”
The process of meaning making is very important for historical research. Central to this is why photos are taken as they look and how the photos are used in history. There is even a separate branch within science that deals with these kinds of questions, namely Visual Culture Studies . This discipline assumes that all visual is a constructed reality and examines this from different cultural angles, including photography.
New disciplines
The added value of visual information for science is the addition to textual information. Photos provide a completely different kind of information than text and photography is therefore increasingly used as a new form of scientific research. Examples of studies in which photographs are an important means of information extraction are visual anthropology and visual sociology. Without photography, these kinds of studies would not exist.
Despite the greater interest from science in photography, Van den Heuvel believes that things can still be improved:“Photography as a historical source is not yet managed and preserved well enough. At research institutes there are still withering photos that are accessible to few. Or there is no money to digitize them. That money will only come if the demand from science to study these photos continues to increase.
Quite a few collections can now be found online, but nothing has happened yet with more than half of the collections within universities and research institutes. In addition, we do not have a central image bank or portal in the Netherlands to familiarize yourself with scientific photo collections, while this is possible for text sources.”
Van den Heuvel believes that it is difficult for researchers to find their way to the Dutch photo collections. “They mainly use collections that can already be found online or rely on previously published material. The real slog in original photo collections happens too little! Take the example of art history. In the Anglo-Saxon language area, every little bit of the history of photography is examined. We adopt that information, but research in our own country is lagging behind.
For example, the group of British photographers of the 19th century, who came to call themselves The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring and use and promote photography as an art form, has been covered by several wonderful exhibitions and books. In the Netherlands you also had these kinds of movements around 1900, including in Haarlem. One article was published about this and the research material is gathering dust.”
Scientific research behind exhibitions
Leiden University has the oldest and largest museum photo collection in the country, which provides a complete overview of the origin and development of photography. Leiden is also the first university in the Netherlands to award a doctorate in photography, namely to Ingeborg Leijerzapf in 1996. The 1990s was the time when (scientific) attention to photography began to grow. Since then, four photography museums have been established (the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, the Fotomuseum in The Hague and Huis Marseille and FOAM in Amsterdam) and they organize many beautiful exhibitions, usually about a single photographer or a photographer's project.
Van den Heuvel:“Certainly beautiful exhibitions and it is also the task of museums to show new work that has not been shown before. However, scientific research into the themes, backgrounds, connections with social phenomena and other visual expressions at home and abroad is often lacking. This is in most cases not the basis of these exhibitions. The exhibitions that are based on scientific research are usually taken from abroad. And that's a shame. In this way, opportunities remain in our own country for research into photography.”
The Amsterdam City Archives currently holds an exhibition about portraits from 1913-1969 by the Amsterdam photo studio Merkelbach. Van den Heuvel:“For this exhibition, curator and author/editor Anneke van Veen conducted special research:how this photo studio functioned, how people looked at portraits, what the photos have caused. A very thorough investigation into a relatively sharply delineated subject of one portrait studio. Even the glass plates have been studied to learn more about the photographer's working method and its implications.”
Five researchers from different fields, including Van den Heuvel, elaborated on sub-topics of the research, such as Merkelbach's fashion, theater and film photography.
Researcher wanted? Looking for a scientist in the field of Dutch photography and media culture? They have their own network called Depth of Field. Their scientific publications can be found in the open access journal Depth of Field.