This photography and performance bibliography isn’t a reading list, it’s a goddamn intervention into how we fool ourselves about what it means to witness anything at all. Call it a photography theory bibliography if you need the institutional fig leaf, but this documenting performance bibliography is here to gut the lie of neutral observation.Azoulay opens the whole thing up with this radical proposition that photography isn’t some neutral tech-magic trick but a contract, a civil pact between everyone involved: the photographer, the photographed, the viewer, the whole apparatus. You think you’re just looking at pictures? Wrong. You’re implicated, complicit, responsible. Butler’s three entries hammer this home, speech acts, torture, war, outrage, showing how photography as performance doesn’t just represent violence, it performs it, circulates it, makes it politically operational in ways that should scare the shit out of you.
And Schneider and Taylor? They’re arguing that the real action isn’t in the frozen frame but in the doing, the performing, the embodied memory that a photograph can only ever fail to capture completely. The archive versus the repertoire, one’s the dead storage of colonial knowledge, the other’s the living transmission of what actually happened in bodies and spaces. This is where documentation stops being about preserving and starts being about continuing.
Then McLuhan and Peters drop in to remind you that the medium isn’t just the message, it’s the entire circulatory system through which meaning bleeds out and mutates. Kember and Zylinska push this further, mediation isn’t something that happens to life, it’s how life persists, evolves, refuses fixity. Ritchin’s looking at the digital rupture, what happens after photography eats itself and becomes something else entirely.
The procedural turn, Daston, Galison, Burgin, Bolton, these cats understood that before the image is an image, it’s a series of choices, apparatuses, institutional frameworks. Objectivity isn’t discovered, it’s constructed through elaborate performances of neutrality. Every photograph is already an argument about what counts as evidence, what deserves to be seen, who gets to decide, in this case… me.
Chouliaraki and Sontag bring the ethical hammer down: what does it do to us, this constant diet of suffering at a distance? Sontag’s skeptical of easy empathy, Scarry’s tracking how pain unmakes language and world simultaneously, and Hariman and Lucaites show how certain images become civic totems we use to tell ourselves who we are.
But Barthes, always Barthes, he’s the ghost at this feast, insisting on the punctum, that personal wound, the thing in the photograph that pierces you specifically. Berger’s right there with him, politicizing vision without losing the poetry.
This whole bibliography is asking: what if seeing isn’t passive?
What if every image is a demand, and we’ve been dodging the call?
Azoulay, Ariella, Rela Mazali, and Ruvik Danieli. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Print.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Photography, War, Outrage.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 822-827. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.6 (2007): 951-966. Print.
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Print.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Print.
Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Print.
Burnett, Ron. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. “The Image of Objectivity.” Representations 40 (1992): 81-128. Print.
Burgin, Victor. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, 1982. Print.
Bolton, Richard. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Print.
Alvarado, Manuel, Edward Buscombe, and Richard Collins. Representation and Photography: A Screen Education Reader. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Burnett, David, Robert Pledge, and Jacques Menasche. 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2009. Print.
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: SAGE Publications, 2006. Print.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2002, pp. 82-98. Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.
Hariman, Robert, and John L. Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.
Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Print.
Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Print.
Strauss, David L., and John Berger. Politica Della Fotografia. Milano: Postmedia Books, 2007. Print.