Hybrid Photography

- Blurb -

With the advent of photography, images became the object of scholarly research in a new way. The collective singular term photography encapsulated a peculiar hybridity from the very beginning, deriving from a variety of manual and visual techniques that were transferred to the medium. Traditional forms of portrayal remained part of it, just as much as technical innovation that stoked expectations of hitherto unimagined images and insights. Hence, since its origins with N. Niepce, W. H. F Talbot and L. J. M Daguerre, photography has exploited other reproductive techniques or has been judged by their standards, for example through the use of typographic media, materials and processes or comparing the system of grey scale reproduction to that of graphic reproduction. Against this background, the supposedly easy-to-define, technological reproduction method that is photography turns out to be surprisingly heterogenous in the way it is concretely practised, both with regard to the production processes of the different techniques and the appearance of pictures generated in this fashion, and finally the circulation and use of these images as media of discovery and proof. This realisation demonstrates that in photography, the individual details of the technical process are just as important as the respective use of the pictures. The ability ascribed to photography to represent reality regardless of the inadequacies of the human hand turns out to be empirically dubious. For the establishment of an understanding of photography as a hybrid, in which the photographic is not an ontological core that was changed, contaminated or, in the worst case, falsified by non-photographic practices. That photography is a hybrid is, in fact, regarded as its necessary condition- at least in its scientific use in chains of representation or montage. Hence, the authors of the volume examine the thesis that significance constitutes itself from the scientific use of photography, when assigned to a certain context.