Archive
Style: Photographs and Illustrations for
U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890
by Robin
Kelsey
University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 2007
286 pp., illus. 89 b/w. Trade, $49.95;
£29.95
ISBN: 0-520-24935-6.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of
Leuven
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
Many books and authors have challenged
the privilege of art historical research
in the field of photography studies. Many
of them, however, have been doing so by
posing between brackets the specific artistic
dimensions of the photographs and photographers
studies, replacing it by technical or
sociological concerns and perspectives.
Robin Kelsey’s book is a magnificent
exception to this tendency, for it does
not split but intertwines a large set
of views on historical photography without
diminishing the artistic accomplishments
of the corpus. Kelsey’s achievement
is all the more admirable since the author
is working on a long-time occupied ground:
the US survey photography of the second
half of the 19th century (the
terminus a quo, 1850, refers of
course to the first uses of photography
in this type of exploration; the terminus
ad quem is motivated by the beginning
of the easy to handle cameras, which drove
professional photographers out of business).
In our dominant perceptions of this type
of images, there is an almost absolute
gap between what Kelsey calls the extremes
of "archive" and "style".
Archive: the impersonal constitution of
repetitive and strictly controlled collections
of images, where no place whatsoever is
left to the personal touch of the photographer,
who is less an artist than an employee.
Style: the attempt of some exceptional
individuals —O’Sullivan and
Watkins, for instance— to give form
and expression to a personal, highly individual
and subjective work that exceeds in all
regards the archival straightjacket. Kelsey
makes a totally different claim. Rather
than stressing the unproductive antagonism
of style and archive, he takes as his
starting point the creative and artistic
possibilities of the survey work and its
often mechanic and bureaucratic conditions—
to generate innovative and original practices
as a result of the creative clash between
on the one hand the rules of the archive
—i.e., in the sense coined by Foucault,
as the rules what can be said and what
cannot— and on the other hand the
individual profile and desires of the
visual artist —who resists the archive
as much as he undergoes it.
This approach, which at the same time
reduces and underlines the importance
of the individual subject, is transformed
by Kelsey in an over-all reading method
that is both very simple (thanks to the
sharpness of its basic concepts) and extremely
sophisticated (thanks to the wealth of
the historical information that is provided
and the cleverness of its interpretation).
Although Archive Style makes only
spare use of heavy metadiscursive or metatheoretical
artillery, the work of scholars such as
Allan Sekula or Jacques Derrida, for instance,
is exemplarily used to foreground a type
of reading that manages in changing many
stereotypical views of 19th
century US survey photography. Moreover,
Kelsey has a strong commitment to lesser
known, if not totally overlooked authors,
which makes his intellectual enterprise
even more exciting (two of his three case
studies concern "minor" artists,
the draughtsman Arthur Scott and the "virtual
nobody" called C.C. Jones).
The three graphic artists studied by Kelsey
correspond to the three major periods
in illustrative techniques of 19th
Century US survey programs in the second
half of the 19th Century. Schott
represents the mode of engravings (not
after photographs, but after sketches
and drawings) just before the systematic
use of photography. O’Sullivan has
become the canonical example of photographically
illustrated albums of the West. Jones’s
works can be seen as representative for
the decade that made professional photographers
almost useless for field work and that
forced them to shift towards dull indoor
reproduction jobs). The choice of these
three artists enables Kelsey also to cover
the major geographic areas of the survey
program and to examine the dramatic evolutions
within this type of work. Scott, who worked
to document the newly fixed border with
Mexico, was confronted with the difficulty
of having to adapt the old models of the
topographic view to the new demands of
the US administration, which considered
promotion and legitimation crucial dimensions
of the new style that had to be invented
more or less on the spot. O’Sullivan,
who accompanied half-military, half-capitalistic
expeditions to the West, had to reconcile
a wide range of expectations, while simultaneously
having to combine various functions within
the expeditionary team in which he did
not only serve as a photographer-veteran
of the Civil War. Jones, who made one
brief but very important trip to the South,
produced a visual archive of the Charleston
earthquake, and his images present a strange
mix of scientific and social, political,
as well as ideological components.
Most importantly, Kelsey studies in very
close detail the audience and circulation
of the archives produced by Scott, O’Sullivan,
and Jones. Their images were used for
local (Washington DC) and national circulation,
in the former case for lobbying activities,
in the latter case for goodwill and promotional
activities, and both types of use and
reuse were hotly debated topics. Many
representatives and tax-payers resisted
the cost of the (often aesthetical but
scientifically debatable) images that
accompanied the reports published by the
national printer, for instance. Yet it
was precisely the harshness of this situation
—with many conflicting demands of
the commissioners, the difficult reconciliation
of old and new techniques and models,
the social distance at which the artists
were kept by most of the leading officials,
the economic insecurity of short-term
contracts in an exile country— that
made each of these three artists invent
totally new ways of picturing the national
territory. Kelsey does not analyze these
innovations from a merely formal, proto-
or pre-formalist perspective, but by asking
questions such as: Which images were available
as models at that time? Which images did
the administration want or prefer? Why
did the authors nevertheless produce something
else? And why were these images finally
accepted?
In all these cases, Kelsey pays great
attention to the cultural as well as to
the social dimension of the artists’
work. From the cultural point of view,
he emphasizes the fundamental openness
of the archive. The survey brought forward
new situations, for which the administration
had not yet found the models to be followed
or obeyed, and the official desire for
"positive" pictures —clearly
visible in the fact that so few of the
commissioned images were actually used
(or used only in modified or censored
forms) — was so vague to that there
was room for personal input. From the
social point of view, the author focuses
on the political unbalance between those
(WASP and wealthy) who were in charge
of the expeditions and those (often from
other ethnical and religious background,
and not always well educated) experienced
during the field-work. Yet this unbalance
was both cause of hardship and of new
opportunities for the immigrants.
I can only call Robin Kelsey’s book
a watershed publication. It revolutionizes
many theoretical ideas on the notions
of style, archive, or subject. At the
same time, it succeeds in articulating
an approach that allows for a return of
the individual without downsizing the
role of the discursive and historical
constraints in image-making and image-taking.
Archive Style contains numerous
stimulating reinterpretations of the corpus
of survey photography but also of that
of the distinctive artists and photographers.
One can, therefore, only hope that this
book will open new ground for reading
the clash of the subjective and the objective
in photography and, more generally speaking,
in art history and cultural history.
