Photographic Histories, Actualities, Potentialities: Amateur Photography as Photographic Historiography

This essay enters into a brief dialogue with the work of some scholars who mapped out the historiography of photography with a view to assessing whether its history could be explained comprehensibly and exist within a demarcated scholarly territory of its own. I reopen this question to consider how current investigations that consider the histories of amateur photographic practices may reframe the broader study of photographic history. Bypassing the theoretically driven, exclusive museological and social histories of photography, the study of amateur photographic practices, I argue, redefines the scope of photographic history in relation to empirical information about the employment, deployment and understanding of photography by those who have the power to control neither its technological development nor its institutional uses.