Trigger

The current trend for ‘visual storytelling’, for instance, treats the camera as a neutral tool that’s ontologically separate from the people and circumstances it’s used to represent. Surely cameras and persons are distinct things? Not according to Barad, who makes some paradigm-shifting claims about the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena. Technologies, she writes, aren’t distinct entities with fixed exterior boundaries – nor, for that matter, are human subjects – and representations aren’t created by human agents using technologies to communicate their ideas. Instead, meaning emerges performatively, the outcome of practices involving diverse human and non-human agencies. Camera; photographer; subject; social, political, and historical contexts – all of these are implicated in a material–discursive photographic ‘apparatus’ that is unique to every photographic encounter. None of these components, she argues, have discrete identities before the encounter takes place: instead, meanings, properties, boundaries – and, significantly, exclusions – are all enacted within, and products of, the encounter itself. In other words, the line between photography as advocacy and photography as techne – or, for that matter, any of the divisions that characterise photographic discourse – is neither inherent nor immovable. As someone who worries occasionally that my fascination with photographic technology could be seen as a way of sidestepping politics, this is transformative.